Smooth pages, sticky ideas

by Anton Zuiker on August 24, 2025

The Aug. 25, 2025 issue of the New Yorker was delivered to the mailbox yesterday, but I only retrieved it this afternoon, just before Erin and I were to go to an early dinner at próximo, a newish tapas restaurant on Franklin Street. I had an hour before we were to leave for our impromptu date, so I sat on the side porch under the fan, and started to read the magazine.

Looking at the table of contents, I thought I’d first read the Takes piece by Adam Gopnik, about Joseph Mitchell’s classic observances of the eccentric Joe Gould. Instead, I turned deeper in the pages to read the feature, by Paige Williams, about the new UNC football coach, Bill Belichick. Mitchell was from North Carolina, and I smiled at the cleverness of the New Yorker editors for putting the pieces in the same issue. I only realize now that the cleverness comes from the parallelism of Gould and Belichick, two characters profiled in the magazine’s pages.

Williams piece about Belichick, college athletics and N.I.L., and the UNC environment is quite good.

… Franklin Street, the backbone of Chapel Hill’s historic core, where one need only step over a low stone wall to be on campus. U.N.C., the oldest public university in the United States, opened in 1795, predating the town that grew up around it. Chapel Hill, which is closer to Virginia than to South Carolina, sits midway between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, in forests so dense that, this time of year, one can lose sight of the horizon amid a disorienting spectrum of sun-soaked green.

Having spent a few hours today clearing piles of dead branches beneath the tall oaks and pines around our house, I appreciated this description of the dense forest. And after a delicious meal at próximo, Erin and I walked to our car parked on Franklin Street next to the low stone wall Williams describes. We had parked just a few feet past the historical marker explaining the 1795 founding of the university.

In the car, Erin said she wanted to stop in to talk with her sister, who lives down the gravel road. (They have less trees on their property, and so can have a proper garden for vegetables and flowers.) I needed to get back to my desk, to write this post, because I wanted to describe the sensation in my fingertips as I held the magazine in that first hour of reading. The paper had felt so clean, so smooth, so silky. Opening a new issue of any magazine, but especially the New Yorker, is always a joy for me. Partly this is because my first jobs were for magazines, so my body remembers the writing, the late-night story designs and proofreading, the press checks and the boxes of each issue delivered to the office.

As I read about Belichick, I was aware of the narrative flow of the article and how I was responding, emotionally and curiously, to this subject so close by, and at the same time I was observing the sensation of touching the pages. I know that in the days ahead, as I read more of this issue, some of the facts and the stories inside will stick in my brain—see my own take on a classic New Yorker piece, in my post A return to El Mozote as the pages get sticky, creased, and dirty as I take the issue from my backpack to the lunch table or outside bench. Now I’m holding the Aug. 11, 2025 issue, it’s cover curling in one corner and loose from one of the staples, the piece inside about perfectionism one that helped me see how self-oriented perfectionism often contributed to my procrastinating on finishing my magazine assignments.

Next post:

Go to HOME