September 12, 2011 issue, completed August 6, 2012

Inevitably, this issue commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, with personal stories about where people were when they hit and how they were affected, as well as rather depressing essays on the state of America now, 10 years later. Maybe it's because I don't live in America, but I couldn't be bothered to read them - to someone looking in at the country from the outside, many of America's problems seem kind of obvious. Also, I found the whole commemoration of 9/11 lacking in its ability to re-create the feeling we all felt when it happened. I guess it was one of the first world disasters that I lived through and that impacted me the way world wars might have affected those in older generations. Though I was far from New York and watched it all unfold on TV, I will never forget that day. It was the day I learned what it meant to be so awed by something so great and terrible that you fall to your knees. You read about people falling on their knees in religious material, including the Bible, but in this jaded age, it takes a lot to actually make it happen. But it happened to me as I fell in front of the TV when I saw the South Tower fall. That night, a bunch of friends and I gathered in a bar (we could do that then, in our lives before children) and tried to make sense of what we had witnessed. The next morning, I cried. The feeling was a kind of mourning, a mourning for an innocence and openness and trust that our society had forever lost that day. Although time has diluted the feeling, it is still there, most notably when we fly, but really in any public situation. We wondered that night whether it was not selfish and cruel to bring children into a world like this. However, many times since I have said to myself, perhaps it is selfish and cruel not to, because if we do not create good future citizens to make the world a better place, the bad ones (and the mediocre ones) will make it a worse one.

There was a book review of "The Art of Fielding" by Chad Harbach which, in and of itself, would not have been notable or have piqued my interest about the book (it involves baseball, and I have not cared about baseball since the Blue Jays last won the World Series in 1993), were it not for a fascinating read I enjoyed in the October 2011 Vanity Fair. That article told the story of how that book came to be, from a broke young author who wrote it over 10 years to his getting an agent and eventually a publisher. The book review seemed to confirm the mania surrounding the release and the enthusiasm the VF story writer (a friend of Harbach's) has for the book. I'll be picking it up to read this fall. Part of my other, tangentially related, project to read more books. 

September 5, 2011 issue, completed August 4, 2012

I really like the cover illustration of this issue - it has a real end-of-summer, back-to-reality feel. That is not to say that I am ready to go back to reality! I am making great strides on my New Yorker project while on vacation. Amazing what time one can find when all the day-to-day obligations of life are cast aside. This issue was somewhat philosophical and at times, hard to digest; the article on Tim Ferriss was rather straightforward, and I had read a little about his "4-Hour Workweek" online. I think the gist of the book is not that you work 4 hours a week, it's that you are your own boss and the master of your own time. Certainly a very appealing proposition. I tried to wrap my head around the article about Derek Parfit, but only partially succeeded. The main thing I came away with was how far away from my own existence the idea of making a life of ideas and theories about humanity and morality was from the options I thought were before me when I grew up. I hope that when my children are teenagers I can expose them to all kinds of potential careers so that they are best able to make the choice that is right for them. The idea of becoming a philosopher just never occurred to me. Not that I'm saying I would be any good at it, just that I would have liked to consider the option, and decide against it.

August 29, 2011 issue, completed August 3, 2012

This issue included the first story I remember seeing about the conflict in Syria. Given the horrific state of affairs there now, and how little I understand about the reasons why we and the UN are not in there extracting the corrupt regime like a bad tooth, I am glad to have this first, rather cursory article and hope to read more over the coming months so that I can learn more about the parties involved in what is going on over there. The article about Rin-Tin-Tin was informative and heartwarming, and I greatly enjoyed reading about Dickens Camp and learning more about the life of Dickens. When I am caught up on my New Yorkers I think I will read some Dickens. I haven't read enough to form my own opinion of him, but most things I read say that he was a master, perhaps on a level with Shakespeare. Worth a deeper read, for sure.

Just in case I'm creating the impression that I love everything that I read in the New Yorker, I'll state for the record that I found the fiction story really annoying and boring. Twice as long as it needed to be. Also, I skipped over the Clarence Thomas thing - don't really have much interest in him.

August 15 & 22, 2011 issue, completed August 2, 2012

This issue got everyone talking about the prospect of eating insects. General consensus: never gonna happen. Now, keep in mind that most of my current party of companions wouldn't eat shrimp or lobster, much less grubs, but still. I eat all shellfish and still, with what I like to think of as an open mind, I couldn't imagine eating bugs. The article suggests that it's perhaps because we're squeamish about eating legs, eyes, guts -- but I know that that's not necessarily it in my case. In Japan I ate tiny fish that from a distance resembled bean sprouts, but turned out to have tiny black eyes that I mistook for pepper at first. And yet I ate them. Why? Because they were fish, and because they were dead. I think the idea of the squirming, live insect is the first hurdle to acceptance. Certainly the one time in Japan when I saw a live shrimp scooped out of a tank with a net and beheaded in front of me to become squirming, spastic sushi (this is a delicacy called "dancing fish,") my fascination was tempered with a certain disgust. When I hear of grubs, larvae, worms and the like, they are always squirming, living. However, if I am being honest, even if they are dead there are certain things - the texture of the crunch of their shells, their guts - that will be off-putting. With flies, their association with rotting flesh will never be overcome.

Other great articles in here included the exploration of how Neanderthal man was different - and perhaps not so different - from us, and the discussion of atheism. My personal religion comes from "The Sweet Smell of Success." "There is a Brotherhood of Man:" we are all connected by how we behave toward each other, and we are a bit like the Borg, in that our greater well-being as a species on this earth is predicated on how we treat each other. Treat each other badly, and we all suffer. Treat each other with respect, and with regard for morals, and we are all better off. The existence of a higher being is neither implied nor denied. Just no way to know if He or She is really there or not. All we can know is, we are here, and there are seven billion of us, and wow, that is something.



August 8, 2011 issue, completed August 2, 2012

The most gripping article in this issue for me was the account of the SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, which was so well-written in terms of suspense and excitement that I could not put it down. It seemed to me that an elite squad on the ground was the obvious solution to how to get him - that an air raid would be useless and would probably result in loss of innocent lives, and that doing nothing would have been equally useless. The whole mission came off as something that had been supported and mandated by a leader (Obama) who saw the best of the options presented to him and then had the privilege of actually watching in real time as it was carried out. These elite squads are trained over and over for exactly this sort of mission, which begs the question, why don't we use it more? Why wasn't it used in Libya for example, and, assuming that war were to be officially declared with Syria, there too? The soldiers seemed much braver and their methods more justified than in other missions, such as air strikes. The only people who died in this mission were bad guys or their wives (not exactly innocent bystanders). The article also made me think more of the less-than-happy so-called alliance between the US and Pakistan. An article I read recently by the much-missed Christopher Hitchens spelled out the hypocrisy and duplicitousness of Pakistan's relations with the US in great detail as well. With friends like them, who needs enemies?

I also really enjoyed the discussion of biographies of Oscar Wilde, and learning more about him. And I must confess, I attempted to read the review of the two poetry books but came away from the experienced more confused than ever about how to "read" poetry. It just never seems to make any sense to me. And the article about Lucretius was also interesting. How many times was that ancient work almost lost to the whims of history? And what other great works from his era were condemned to oblivion - or, more tantalizing to imagine, lie hidden somewhere, still waiting to be rediscovered in modern times?