Notes on this week’s issue:
1. Jon Lee Anderson’s “The Cuba Play” is one of 2016’s most absorbing reporting pieces. It tells the story of Obama’s Cuba project, beginning with a
remarkable scene – Obama on stage at La Cerveceria, on Havana Harbor, speaking
directly to the Cuban people about entrepreneurship – then cutting to
Anderson’s interview with Obama (“A few weeks later, in the Oval Office, I
asked Obama about the reaction”), then moving into a remarkable reconstruction
of the string of events leading to the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations,
including the famous handshake between Obama and Raúl Castro at Nelson
Mendela’s funeral (“Castro wore an expression of flustered delight”), secret
negotiations in Ottawa, the transfer of a vial of sperm of a Cuban spy, and a
covert letter from Pope Francis to Obama. Anderson has discussed some of these
events before in his “News Desk” posts on newyorker.com. But in “The Cuba
Play,” he masterfully draws it all together, combining it with fascinating
quotations from his personal interviews with Obama and other key players. If
you consider the opening with Cuba one of Obama's major accomplishments, as I do, you’ll surely appreciate Anderson’s great “The Cuba
Play.”
2. I relish
descriptions of scent. There are two dandies in this week’s issue: Jiayang
Fan’s “Just then, the chocolate fondue arrived, halting the conversation with
its exhalation of cinnamon and coconut” (“Tables For Two: Ladybird”), and Ian
Frazier’s “He ordered a decaf espresso and asked the waiter to top it off with
Sambuca. A smell of licorice rose” (“Don’t Tread On Me”).
3. I’m not crazy about pop music, but Hua Hsu’s “Word of Mouth,” on Bon Iver’s digitally manipulated sound, impinged my consciousness
with this inspired line: “Speech synthesizers often make a song sound as though
someone were running a leaky fluorescent highlighter across its lyrics.”
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