Emdashes contributing editor and Squib Reporter Martin Schneider files a welcome post from afar.

Emily has been careful to signal my absence from our weekly Pick of the Issue posts due to my spending a few weeks in a rural Alpine outpost in Austria. Unsurprisingly, its remoteness precludes any possibility of receiving new issues of The New Yorker, so the last issue I received before leaving was the issue of July 9/16. I return on August 17.

That’s about six weeks altogether (the dates don’t match up, but trust me, it is)—a long stretch to be separated from the grist for this particular mill, but I had resigned myself to it. My connectivity combines extreme slowness and great expense, making proper perusal of even the online contents impractical; with a pang, I’ve watched the Picks of the Issue come and go.

Then a friend passed through for the weekend, a journalist in Vienna who’s a voracious consumer of fine American periodicals. On Sunday, he placed a small pile of printed matter on my table, indicating that I could take them or consign them to the Kachelofen.

In that pile were the two most recent issues of The New Yorker: July 28 and August 6.

And I can testify that absence really does make the heart grow fonder. —Martin Schneider