Like many people, I tend to suspect the prolific, mostly because I tend to not be. But almost everything Ben McGrath writes for Talk of the Town is like a Mrs. Prindable apple: juicy, sweet, modestly extravagant, and just tart and nutty enough to satisfy. His TOT (if anyone knows the in-house abbreviation, please send--it might just be "Talk") this week about rebuilding the A/C line is full of sound information just until it isn't, when it becomes an investigation into the ethereal--my kind of Talk of the Town. Robert Benchley pieces have just this kind of daffy, utterly confident meandering. Seven hundred words or so is a good platform for a serious editorial, sure, and it's hard not to love terse, sword-point portraits of Cracker Jack prize experts or very small controversies. But this is my favorite: McGrath's expansiveness within the form, like a hippo blues dancing in a wading pool.

Dept. of Prediction: Three to Five [New Yorker]

Categories: NYer, Issue, McGrath, Benchley