Triumphs of the New Yorker: May 6, 2013 issue
Every week I read The New Yorker in full (pretty much). Here are my recommendations* for the latest issue:
Living-Room Leopards by Ariel Levy (Reporting & Essays)Â is a tight, tricky feature on cat breeders who are obsessed with creating house-tamed felines that look like leopards and tigers--and have breed names like "toygers." Levy dives right in to the uncomfortable tensions at work here, describing breeders who've bankrupted themselves, destroyed their relationships, and run afoul of the law in an effort to manipulate genetics in ways that value aesthetics over animal welfare. The piece is chock-full of weird and disturbing angles; these breeders want animals that look wild but don't act wild, they recognize that actually cross-breeding housecats with tigers is impossible despite clearly fantasizing about it, and they often seem willfully ignorant of the moral and legal implications of their activities. Levy manages to refrain from eviscerating her subjects; she lets them do it for her, while acknowledging that some of the animals she meets on the way are beautiful. I could quote huge sections of this piece, but I'll simply share one of Levy's many fascinating and disturbing bits of trivia: "The penis of an unneutered cat has barbs all over it, like the treads you drive over when you return a rental car." Subscribers only, but there's a preview here.
OTHERS (in order of recommendation):
The El Dorado Machine by Douglas Preston (Reporting & Essays) is an  entry in the well-trod genre of the trek to the Amazon in search of lost cities. But Preston is a great nonfiction writer and makes the search for Honduras's fabled "White City" engrossing. He gives a great overview of how lidar sensors, which use lasers to pierce through even the densest jungle foliage to image the ground beneath, are turning what used to require decades of surveying into the work of a few weeks. Still, it's a race to deploy the technology before illegal logging destroys the evidence of countless lost civilizations in Central and South America. Preston's piece is an engrossing adventure in the rainforest, and while it's reminiscent of previous reporting, it's a great example of the form--and the most up-to-date. Subscribers only, but there's a preview here.
Honest Honus by Reeves Wiedeman (Talk of the Town)Â is a fun, short piece about the most valuable baseball card in existence. That card depicts Honus Wagner, shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and auctioneer Ken Goldin recently sold one for $2.1 million. But the real focus here is Goldin's insights on the psychology of valuing what, by his own admission, is "a cardboard picture, with no inherent value." Subscribers only, but there's a preview here.
Pole Dancer by Nick Paumgarten (Talk of the Town)Â is a short piece about Frederik Paulsen, billionaire pharmaceutical magnate and world explorer. Instead of relaxing in Switzerland with his money, 62-year-old Paulsen prefers to do things like haul sleds of supplies to the South Pole. He's visited all seven of the other poles, too. As the article states: "Eight poles: who knew? Well, there are four in the north and four in the south: geographic, geomagnetic, magnetic, and least accessible-ic--that is, farthest from land, in the Arctic, and from the sea, in Antarctica." Everything I like is subscribers-only this issue! Anyway, a preview is here.
Bring Up the Bodies by Nicholas Schmidle (Reporting & Essays)Â is a long, very well-reported piece that I have mixed feelings about. Schmidle is determined to establish the truth behind rumors that Kosovars, during the late '90s conflict against Slobodan Milosevic, engaged in organ trafficking. Schmidle reports on a horror-movie-esque yellow house, complete with mysterious medical waste in its backyard, where hundreds of Serbian prisoners were purportedly murdered for their organs, which were then shipped to Istanbul and elsewhere for "transplant tourism." He relates one man's incredible testimony of witnessing and participating in harvesting a heart, with the victim screaming as his chest was cracked open. But the account is too incredible; Schmidle successfully discredits it, and keeps going, through deep reporting that questions whether any organ harvesting ever happened at all. We're left with an article that lays out the difficulty of reconstructing the truth beyond reported war crimes, but it's hard not to feel dissatisfied with the lack of answers and confused by the many names and facts Schmidle throws around. What does linger are depictions of various U.S. and international officials with strong convictions on complex but deeply important moral distinctions, e.g. while Serbians committed the majority of the war crimes in Yugoslavia, "scale is not exculpatory." Full story is here.
Oddball by Ben McGrath (Reporting & Essays)Â is a profile of R.A. Dickey, now a pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays, erstwhile pitcher for the Mets. I don't know much about baseball, but this is still an entertaining if not especially deep look at Dickey, who loves reading as much as his profession. The article manages to depict him as a genuinely swell, hardworking guy without devolving into hagiography. Enlivening moments include a fascinatingly candid conversation with his wife and the weird fact that Dickey is missing a major ligament in his right elbow, limiting his arm's motion but perhaps improving his abilities as a pitcher. Subscribers only, but there's a preview here.
*Caveat: I'm not the smartest guy in the room, so if I'm not listing something here--like Jonathan Lethem's short story about a Jewish family in Brooklyn in the middle of the 20th century--it's just because it didn't hit me quite right, but what the hell do I know? You should probably still give it a try.
