The Oct. 20 New Yorker features a dog on the cover, about to do a cannonball into a pile of leaves, and more stories inside than I have read in a single issue in a long time. There is an entertaining appreciation by Anthony Lane of the half-forgotten poet Violet Ranney Lang and a typically thorough (i.e. long) profile of Zohran Mamdani. I even read the fiction, a quiet but strangely compelling story about a friendship between two writers. The two things I usually enjoy, “Shouts & Murmurs” and “Takes” – in which a current writer pays homage to a classic from the past – I found unmemorable. The article that really interested me was the review of the new biography of Peter Matthiessen. Best known for The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen held his novels in higher esteem. “Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet,” he's quoted as telling the Paris Review. “It can be elegant and very beautiful but it can never be sculpture.”
CBS’s announcement a few months back that it was going to terminate The Late Show was seen by many commentators as the beginning of the end for late night talk shows. They had lost their relevance, it was argued, and they were losing money for their networks.
Now Jimmy Kimmel, the host of ABC’s late night talk show, has been suspended for comments he made after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and it has ignited debates about free speech and a meddling, autocratic government. Much of the media – social and legacy – has been focused on the remarks of a late night talk show host, his being cancelled because of them, and the ramifications of his dismissal. Which would seem to argue against the idea of the institution’s irrelevance.
Saturday afternoon we drove to Coral Gables to see “Checkpoint Zoo” at the Coral Gables Art Cinema. The theater was sold out for the documentary, which tells the story of how a small band of volunteers rescued over 4,000 animals from the Feldman Eco Park outside Kharkiv after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Much of the film consists of videos made by the volunteers as they worked to save the animals, and includes shots of them taking shelter during bombardments. There is also footage of explosions in the city, apartment buildings being ripped apart. Nothing I had seen on the news captured so vividly the horror of the war.
And yet this ragtag band of young men spent the first few months of it, often cheerfully, capturing and transporting llamas, kangaroos, moose, orangutans, bears, and lions to the Kharkiv Zoo (which was not as close to the front as Eco Park was) and to the home of Oleksandr Feldman, whose love for the animals was unsurpassed. (Later we see the businessman’s depleted wine cellar, as he sold all his old bottles – as well as his art collection – to buy food to feed his menagerie.) After posting online about the park’s predicament, the group received some food and medicines from abroad, and there is an amazing scene of the veterinarian among the volunteers calmly, and successfully, delivering tranquilizers to lions and tigers through a blow gun. “I play the trumpet,” he tells a colleague nonchalantly.
Later, one of the volunteers says: “There are smart decisions. And there are right decisions.” Clearly, risking his life to save some animals fit only into the second category.
After the film, Ron Magill of Zoo Miami led a Q&A with the director Joshua Zeman. Before he asked any questions, he spoke with even more enthusiasm than usual, and with great awe, of the work of the Ukrainian volunteers. The tranquilizing scene, for instance, blew him away. At the zoo, he said, they weigh every animal to know exactly how much anesthesia to give it; at Eco Park, they were just guessing. And they got it right! “Except for that one leopard.”
He recalled the scene of the volunteer walking hand-in-hand with an orangutan. That looked like a lovely moment, Magill said, but a juvenile orangutan can rip your arm off. Clearly, he said, the animals realized that the people were helping them.
In the film, one of the volunteers says: “Humans are humans and animals are animals. But sometimes humans are like animals and animals are like humans.”
Last month we were watching two shows: “Too Much” and “Outrageous.” The latter show finished, ending what was for me one of the most pleasant journeys in television: from Lena Dunham’s London to Nancy Mitford’s.
Speaking of journeys, we're off to Canada for a few days. The plan was to avoid the heat and now I hope we won't be enveloped in smoke. Back here on the 25th.
I've been adamant that AI will never replace travel writers, but then yesterday I read this sentence in a Tribune News Service story in the Miami Herald: "I visited some churches and cathedrals, of which Portugal has many."
“This is one of the great sports stories of 2025,” the announcer gushed after the 18-year-old Canadian Victoria Mboko upset Naomi Osaka to win the National Bank Open in Montreal last night. Then, rather than letting its viewers enjoy the moment – the crowd’s embrace of its new star, the on-court interview, the joyous trophy presentation – Tennis Channel switched to the men’s final being played in Toronto (which was not concluding but in the middle of an unmemorable first set). So we got to watch one of the year’s great sports stories but we didn’t get to bask in its afterglow – we didn’t get to hear the words of the winner. The ceremony, for some of us, is just as important as the play it celebrates.