by Zoë Pollock
Longreads, Alexis Madrigal, and Neiman Story Boards are trying to nail it down. Radhika Jones remembers André Aciman's exploration of "Shadow Cities":
Straus Park becomes, for Aciman, a place of all kinds of remembering. Its peculiar situation at the intersection of 106th Street, Broadway and West End Avenue affords him phantom glimpses of other cities, other selves – so much so that this “tiny, grubby park” slowly begins to seem like the hub of the universe. And it turns out that Aciman is wrong in jumping to terrible conclusions about it. It is being not destroyed, but restored. In writing about it, Aciman realizes that the city it has restored to him is not Paris or Rome, as he had thought, but a deeper shadow city, the one most essential to his wandering self. This is the revelation that makes “Shadow Cities” such a strong piece, an essay in the true sense of the word, an attempt through writing and reason to figure something out – something important, something lasting. … [I]t wasn’t Straus Park that I cared about after I read Aciman’s essay – that wasn’t the point – but the idea of Straus Park, that unassuming little place within a place you love that helps you organize your thoughts about all the other places you’ve loved and the person you were when you loved them.
My nomination: Kenneth Tynan profile of Tom Stoppard from The New Yorker in 1977 (paywalled here). Disarmingly good.
The Dish 