When a friend sent us news that legendary New Yorker cartoonist George Booth had died, we realized that his work has provided joy, comfort, and uplift throughout our entire adult life. In a single drawing, he managed to convey the wild complexity of ordinary lives through the simplest of details, embedded with a deeply life-affirming message.
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Tabula Rasa, The New Yorker’s series by the great John McPhee features “the saved-up, bypassed, intended pieces of writing.” McPhee’s spare, vivid descriptions reminded me of the essential lesson legendary photographer Lisette Model taught her students, most notably Diane Arbus.
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I was delighted to discover that watching a Merce Cunningham dance first thing in the morning had a similar effect on my brain and mood as reading poetry, resonating throughout the day in unexpected ways.
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It’s curious that about the same time Thomas Thwaites was figuring out how to be a goat — finding human personhood stressful and narcissistic — Charles Foster was trying his own experiments “becoming” various animals, including a badger, an otter, a fox, a deer and a swift. Both had come to existential crossroads.
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The cover by the great George Booth of the New Yorker’s Christmas issue nails the frenzied feeling of the holidays. Even Santa doesn’t have it together: all hell is breaking loose at the North Pole. Ian Frazier’s yearly poem Greetings, Friends puts it all into perspective. Check out this lovely bit:
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In a recent New Yorker, we found ourselves moved and boggled by the poem Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong, as though its language were working on us like a painting or a subtle medicine. We looked up the poet Ocean Vuong. His bio reads: Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently resides in New York City. He thinks you’re…
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Varieties of Disturbance, a recent New York Profile about actress Claire Danes yields many intriguing and illuminating ideas about the processes involved in her famously “volcanic performances” (of late, most notably in Homeland). Among them, Dane’s passing mention of her occasional practice of walking in circles to get “out of her head”. If I have…
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Speak of the devil! Christoph Niemann created this brilliant cover for the new New Yorker’s Innovator’s Issue. At the New Yorker blog, Niemann has again illustrated his process , which AGAIN involves nixxing an idea, only to have it come back at him in a completely unexpected way. We GET and love that the brilliant…
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When the wise, inventive, not-terribly-technological Christoph Niemann tried to create an app, it became pretty “interesting. He documented the process in the New Yorker recently and in doing so, a wonderful distillation of the creative process and struggle: I explored countless (but crucial) dead ends, and it all came down to the most important struggle…
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When we saw the cover of this week’s New Yorker, we laughed out loud. THAT’S US!! we thought. We may be making a Pollack-esque painting inadvertently on the side of the house, but we’re DEFINITELY out of control and off balance. We’re juggling too much while trying to hold up our pants and keep from…
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When our friend Andrea Raisfeld sent us a compelling scan from Malcolm Gladwell’s piece Creation Myth in the May 16th issue of The New Yorker, we went online to find the story and explore its ideas more fully. In the process, the post we intended to write about the creative process turned into a post…
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This week’s New Yorker, with heart-breaking cover by Christoph Niemann also has illuminating (and heartbreaking) coverage about Japan.
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