August 28, 2017 Issue

This week’s New Yorker is loaded with good things to read and think about. First and foremost – Ian Frazier’s terrific “Drive Time,” a personal history piece on the pleasure he gets from driving in New York City. “For me,” he says, “the dreamy part of metro-driving happens when the traffic is light and every highway on my phone’s congestion map glows green.” But often the traffic isn’t light. He reports that he was recently involved in a seven-car pileup on the Garden State Parkway. His detailed account of that experience is one of the highlights of the piece. My favorite part is his description of an early-morning drive he takes from his New Jersey home, across the George Washington Bridge, into the Bronx (“The slanted early-morning sun amid the pillars colors the sides of bread trucks moving slowly on their deliveries”), across the Harlem River on the Madison Avenue Bridge, into Manhattan on the F.D.R. Drive (“cruising by the high-rises and the hospitals of the Upper East Side and under the tower of the United Nations”), across the Brooklyn Bridge (“maybe the most glorious bridge in the world, its cables radiating from their junction points at the top of its towers like beams of light”), into Brooklyn, up the ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, onto the Belt Parkway to J.F.K. Airport, then, via the Belt Parkway, back to Brooklyn, up the ramp to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, across the bridge, onto the Staten Island Expressway, then across the Goethals Bridge and onto the New Jersey Turnpike, at which point, Frazier writes,

Here is the best part of the route, because when the landing patterns at Newark Airport are configured in a certain way the planes coming in fly parallel to the turnpike and directly above it. If everything is in synch, I can be motoring up the highway among lanes of cars and trucks (the turnpike is busy at any hour) with the freight-train tracks on the right and all the earthbound vectors lining up as an incoming jet roars overhead, outdistances everybody, diverges to the left, and sets down on a shimmery runway. The music on the radio can be helpful here; I’ve found that a big, anthemic prog-rock song makes a good accompaniment. Every tristate-area driver should experience this cool convergence once in a while.

After that, Frazier takes the I-78 west, Garden State Parkway north to Exit 151, then west on Watchung Avenue, south on Grove Street, and he’s home—“five boroughs, four major bridges, two airports, two states, and back in time for breakfast.”

Quite a trip! I enjoyed it immensely.

Other absorbing pieces in this week’s issue: Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Content of No Content” (“If Amazon has its way, even artisanal cheese will soon be delivered by drone”); Nick Paumgarten’s “Singer of Secrets” (“Now she seemed slight, fine-boned, almost translucent—it was hard to imagine her surviving a sea of forearms, iPhones, and gropey hands”); Louis Menand’s “The Stone Guest” (“Crews is an attractively uncluttered stylist, and he has an amazing story to tell, but his criticism of Freud is relentless to the point of monomania”); and James Wood’s “Entanglement Theory” (“Øyehaug’s text enacts what Barthes theorizes, exalting an ‘object’ that is itself just a sentence—while also registering some brief flash of consciousness, some small explosion of longing, that, like Anna Bae’s discovery in Rimbaud’s biography, seems true to our own experience of passionate reading: jouissance, to be precise”).