In which the staff of Emdashes reviews the high points and discusses the particulars of the previous week’s issue (or, occasionally, another edition).
Jean-Claude Floc’h is a discovery I attribute to The Complete New Yorker, so it was a treat to see his drawing of an old-timey golfer on page 24. My admiration for Floc’h suggests that I am bigger fan of the ligne claire style than I even realize.
I enjoyed Nick Paumgarten’s excellent look at the Mannahatta Project, which answers all of the questions a reader could expect to have at the outset, and then some. Loved his description of New Yorkers as having “a kind of a superheated parochial self-regard.” I applaud Paumgarten’s desire and ability to come up with outsize formulations; it made the article more of a magnificent flower.
“The Insufferable Gaucho” is Roberto Bolaño’s cunning satire on the mythos that has developed around the pampas. The story feels like the Chilean author’s private joke on neighboring (rabbit-infested?) Argentina—the two countries, it is said, do not get along. I was so taken by Christian Northeast‘s striking illustration for the story that I tore that page out of the magazine and hung it on an unoccupied nail on the wall of my spare Alpine cabin. —Martin Schneider