One of my best freelancers when I was at the Sun-Sentinel was a woman named Pamela Petro, who has now published three books, with a fourth one coming out next year. Recently, she’s expanded her repertoire to include comics, one of which is currently on the website of The American Scholar. It’s occurred to me that, were I still at the paper, I could put out an issue of the Travel section containing nothing but Pam’s comics and my cartoons. I would make history before getting fired.
The career of Harold Evans, who died Wednesday at the age of 92, was so rich and distinguished that his role as founding editor of Condé Nast Traveler got little ink in his obituaries.
The magazine debuted in 1987, when travel writing was entering the last years of its heyday. It took as its motto “Truth in Travel” and declared that its writers would not accept free trips. This principled approach sparked a conversation throughout the industry, causing a number of publications – including the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, where I became the travel editor two years later – to change their policies.
In addition to ethics, Evans ushered in – or more accurately prolonged the periodical life of – fine writing about place. He came from a country with a long tradition in the genre, and he got some of the more celebrated contemporary writers as contributors. Condé Nast Traveler wasn’t Granta – which discovered new voices like Jonathan Raban, Colin Thubron, Isabel Hilton, Ryszard Kapuściński – but it was a vast improvement over Travel + Leisure.
After Evans’ departure, the magazine became enamored of the good life (i.e., a prisoner to advertising), and the fresh reporting and colorful writing gave way to service-oriented articles. Instead of enlightening people about the world it told them where they could go for vacation. Two years ago, the international and U.S. editions merged, creating an Anglo-American consumer magazine for status-conscious tourists. But in the beginning, Condé Nast Traveler was that rare thing: an intelligent, sophisticated, unpredictable glossy.
The other night we watched the last episode of Shtisel, and my sadness at its conclusion was similar to the feeling I had when The Sopranos ended.
A show about an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem would seem to have little in common with one about a Mafia family in New Jersey. But both took place inside sharply defined, mysterious/secretive societies far from the mainstream. And the triumph of both shows is that they found the universal in the individual. The tagline for Shtisel is that it “reckons with love, loss, and the doldrums of daily life,” which is exactly what The Sopranos did (with the occasional whack thrown in). A few months back Shira Haas, the actress who plays Ruchami, told the New York Times that she was watching The Sopranos for the first time and finding it riveting. Steve Van Zandt would probably have the same reaction if he watched Shtisel.
One of my pandemic pleasures has been finding excellent shows to stream that nobody has told me about. Shtisel, which gets little buzz, is the best TV series I’ve seen in years. The other night I stumbled upon The Vertical Line, an Italian “comedy” set in a hospital’s oncology ward. It is droll and poignant and much more realistic (no great feat) than American medical shows. Occasionally the voice of the main character – who is awaiting surgery to remove a tumor – takes on the narration, making astute observations on life in a hospital. At one point he muses on the classless society of patients, who are all equal, “all wretches.”
Watching the show I wondered why I hadn’t heard about it, while I frequently see raves for Schitt’s Creek (which recently received 15 Emmy nominations). I watched two episodes and found the humor broad and farcical and weakened by the fact that the premise is so implausible. The Canadians construct an inherently funny situation (which is relatively easy to do) while the Italians find humor in, well, not everyday life (which is hard enough) but in life and death (a formidable challenge). And for the most part, they succeed.
One of the answers to my question, of course, is the barrier of subtitles. (The other is a distaste for the foreign.) But I would rather “read” one episode of The Vertical Line than watch a season of Grey’s Anatomy. No, you don’t get the interpersonal dramas, but – much better – you get insights into the human condition.
At 7:45 this morning WLRN ran an interview they recorded with me last week about my cartoons. Twenty-three minutes later I got a mass email from the station requesting support. The subject hed read: "You are our BFF today."
No, no, no, I thought. You are my BFF today.