No, these aren’t newspaper stories. But I submit the following two passages as standards toward which to strive as we try to explain the world. They both appeared in The New Yorker. The first, from “Struts and Frets” by Burkhard Bilger (May 14, 2007), is about how a guitar works. The second, from “The Bakeoff” by Malcolm Gladwell (September 5, 2005) is about the magic formula of a good cookie. Both seem like simple subjects, but read carefully. There’s some real insight here. This sort of reporting is harder than it looks, and it’s the kind we should do more often:
1. A guitar isn’t an especially hard instrument to build — “Try a harpsichord,” Parker said — but it leaves little room for error. The mechanism is simple: six strings, stretched taut across an open chamber, vibrate when struck. This sets the top moving, amplifying the vibrations, turning the guitar into a pump that pushes sound waves out through the sound hole. The strings along make almost no sound, so everything depends on the wood’s resonance. There’s no bow to keep the notes from dying, no mouthpiece or bellows to sustain them. The player makes the smallest of gestures — “You whack the string and that’s it,” Parker said — and hopes the guitar will turn them into music. To resonate well, the wood has to be thin. To withstand the strings’ tension, it has to be strong. Things don’t always work out. Even if the neck doesn’t bend, the bridge doesn’t pop off, the strings don’t buzz, the guitar may respond poorly to playing. Its wood may vibrate well only at certain frequencies, so some strings sound weaker than others. It may have dead spots or “wolf tones” that sound muffled or unpleasant. In some guitars, the neck and body, top and bottom, produce sound waves that are out of phase: their peaks and troughs flatten one another when they collide. In others, the sound builds up, wave on wave. “A good guitar is in agreement with itself,” Parker said.
To resonate well, the wood has to be thin. To withstand the strings’ tension, it has to be strong. Things don’t always work out. Even if the neck doesn’t bend, the bridge doesn’t pop off, the strings don’t buzz, the guitar may respond poorly to playing. Its wood may vibrate well only at certain frequencies, so some strings sound weaker than others. It may have dead spots or “wolf tones” that sound muffled or unpleasant. In some guitars, the neck and body, top and bottom, produce sound waves that are out of phase: their peaks and troughs flatten one another when they collide. In others, the sound builds up, wave on wave. “A good guitar is in agreement with itself,” Parker said.
2. As everyone at the table knew, a healthful, good-tasting cookie is something of a contradiction. A cookie represents the combination of three unhealthful ingredients—sugar, white flour, and shortening. The sugar adds sweetness, bulk, and texture: along with baking powder, it produces the tiny cell structures that make baked goods light and fluffy. The fat helps carry the flavor. If you want a big hit of vanilla, or that chocolate taste that really blooms in the nasal cavities, you need fat. It also keeps the strands of gluten in the flour from getting too tightly bound together, so that the cookie stays chewable. The flour, of course, gives the batter its structure, and, with the sugar, provides the base for the browning reaction that occurs during baking. You could replace the standard white flour with wheat flour, which is higher in fibre, but fibre adds grittiness. Over the years, there have been many attempts to resolve these contradictions — from Snackwells and diet Oreos to the dry, grainy hockey pucks that pass for cookies in health-food stores — but in every case flavor or fluffiness or tenderness has been compromised.
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Anyone else have a good example of this kind of writing? Maybe it’s something you’ve done yourself. Let’s take a look.
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