When I was twelveish, a friend
of my mom’s brought us a thick stack of back issues of the New Yorker. This was kind of a weird thing to happen in
small-town Kentucky. But it
happened. And, as a twelve-year-old, I
mostly just read the cartoons and then flipped to the next issue.
Today, as a working adult with a
self-paid subscription to the New Yorker, I still read mostly the
cartoons. But I also read Shouts &
Murmurs, Talk of the Town, the movie reviews, and many of the interviews and
feature articles, and while I feel I’ve outgrown many magazines that I enjoyed
in my high school and college years, the New Yorker never gets stale. It’s.
Just. Always. Good.
Take, for instance: this week’s
Talk of the Town featured a piece on Michael Shannon, the actor from Lexington,
KY who is currently doing some work on Broadway and who you may have seen in a
few Hollywood flicks. The article was
split, kind of, in two parts: Take One, in which Shannon takes the reporter
down to the local grocery store in Red Hook and talks about his life lately;
and Take Two, in which they revisit the grocery after Hurricane Sandy has
ravaged the place. There’s destruction
all around, naturally. But you see it
through the eyes of a semi-famous actor, a guy who knows the grocery’s security
guard by name, a guy who seems to take a sort of blue-collar approach to the
lofty work of film and stage.
Here’s the pure genius of the
piece: it’s not about the hurricane, and yet it so obviously is. By now you can’t talk about the heartbreak
and loss and tragedy of Sandy, because you’ll lose your impatient, easily
distracted audience of People Who Were Not Affected and Therefore Care Very
Little About the Hurricane. But what you
can do is offer a glimpse into an actor’s life—an idea that came to you, the
reporter, maybe in September, before anyone knew anything—and use it to
demonstrate what life is like, now, really, in places like Red Hook. Back in September, you thought, hey, this
Michael Shannon is interesting, he’s got some stuff going on, let’s do a bit on
him. Then the storm hit. And you thought, there’s no way I can do the
piece I was going to do. So you talk to
your editor. You call Shannon back. You say, I’ve got this idea. And he goes for it. And now you have a tiny little masterpiece,
that maybe won’t seem like a masterpiece to everyone, but you know it’s good
and you’re going to be secretly smug about it forever.
That’s what I thought, anyway.
Or, you could say that the New
Yorker is wonderful simply because of sentences like this one, buried in an
article about the TED conference:
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