In the New Yorker...

[Front-Ranger]

It's in the latest issue--October 14.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Thanks. I haven't received that one yet.

[Front-Ranger]

I dispatched the Oct. 14th issue rather quickly so I went back and picked up the Oct. 7 issue. There is good news buried in the article on LA food and wellness culture if you are not a fan of Hannah Goldfield. She asides that she has moved there! Hopefully that means she won't be writing as much in the magazine. I find her writing irritating; she inserts herself overmuch in the articles. Her sentences are convoluted and over-decorated with lots of punctuation (or could this be an over-zealous editor's work?).

Her research on the history of wellness eating in LA has glaring gaps...she doesn't mention Trader Joe's, Baba Ram Dass or Richard Simmons. She leans heavily on Erewhon but it was an East Coast thing.

Other questions from the article: what's with the dissing of seed oils all of a sudden? Why are writers using the word vibrant so much? Or the word eschew?

[Front-Ranger]

The new issue has a somewhat desperate tone to it. I found a respite in the article on bird communication.

[Front-Ranger]

"Pecking Order" has that word that Sonja used, onomatopoetic, to classify bird sounds into tweets, chirrups, rreeyous, seeewssooos, and dabs. There are also songs. I loved the part about how the mother bird sings to the eggs, teaching them a unique begging call that they use upon hatching. Humans also do this. The article mentions that French babies' cries are distinct from German babies' cries.

Even more amazing, the parents' songs are learned by the chicks so that when they grow up and look for a mate, they can tell birds of the same species apart from family members.                   

I'm now about to read "Prison Diaries" the memoirs of Alexei Navalny. I hope it will help me make sense of the tragic loss.                       

[Front-Ranger]

After reading the nine-page memoir, I feel that my entire year's subscription is worth it, just to read this one article. Navalny was clear-eyed about his martyrdom, but he was also open-hearted, hopeful, positive, funny, and introspective. Yes, I did come away with a clear idea about why he chose to go his tragic way. I hope there will be more to his memoir.

[Front-Ranger]

Heard that the novel Patriot is 900-some pages. So there is more. Much more.

In the November 4 issue, I did something unusual for me. I read the fiction first. How can one pass up a story by Yukio Mishima? "From the Wilderness", however, doesn't seem like fiction at all but more like an incident that happened to the author in his home. Does it seem like fiction to you?

[Jeff Wrangler]

After reading the nine-page memoir, I feel that my entire year's subscription is worth it, just to read this one article. Navalny was clear-eyed about his martyrdom, but he was also open-hearted, hopeful, positive, funny, and introspective. Yes, I did come away with a clear idea about why he chose to go his tragic way. I hope there will be more to his memoir.

I gave up on it. I found it boring. 

[Front-Ranger]

I can see where the writings of a man who spent so much time in solitary confinement could be seen as boring. In my case, I was constantly thinking how the same thing could happen here in the US, to leaders I respect, even, maybe, to me.

I'm now reading "The Big Deal" by Nicholas Lemann. It's interesting to contrast the photo of Pete Buttigieg with that of J.D. Vance earlier in the issue. The Vance portrait captures his oily swarthiness perfectly, while the Buttigieg one shows him in a small-town diner in an immaculate white shirt and crewcut.

The article is quite long but it goes back to Roosevelt in covering the U.S. economy. I got quite a new perspective on economic history, especially during the Biden Administration, where some of the most significant changes have been made since the Great Depression. But, I have a question. I thought the latest wave of inflation happened because after the pandemic, people didn't want to go back to work until they could be paid a fair wage. Wages went up and the higher cost of goods and services was passed along to buyers (I don't like to call us consumers). But the article seems to indicate that the relief payments from the government flooded the markets and caused prices to rise, more like price gouging. Which is correct?

[serious crayons]

I thought the latest wave of inflation happened because after the pandemic, people didn't want to go back to work until they could be paid a fair wage. Wages went up and the higher cost of goods and services was passed along to buyers (I don't like to call us consumers). But the article seems to indicate that the relief payments from the government flooded the markets and caused prices to rise, more like price gouging. Which is correct?

In numerous conversations I've had about the recent inflation and its causes, what I've found is that government stimulus checks initially caused prices to rise, but after that money was spent, oil and grocery companies turned record profits, suggesting gouging for which people would blame Biden. Lately some chains have publicized price decreases, like they're doing some big favor for consumers, whereas actually I think it was because they realized consumers were starting to catch onto their tricks.

I hadn't heard the theory surrounding what was then known as the Great Resignation. Maybe that caused wages to go up, too; it's certainly true that wages have risen higher than inflation. I always wondered how people could afford to just quit. The only article I ever saw on the subject, in the Washington Post, said they filed for Social Security, but obviously not everybody can do that.