Like many people, I tend to suspect the prolific, mostly because I tend to not be. But almost everything Ben McGrath writes for Talk of the Town is like a Mrs. Prindable apple: juicy, sweet, modestly extravagant, and just tart and nutty enough to satisfy. His TOT (if anyone knows the in-house abbreviation, please send–it might just be “Talk”) this week about rebuilding the A/C line is full of sound information just until it isn’t, when it becomes an investigation into the ethereal–my kind of Talk of the Town. Robert Benchley pieces have just this kind of daffy, utterly confident meandering. Seven hundred words or so is a good platform for a serious editorial, sure, and it’s hard not to love terse, sword-point portraits of Cracker Jack prize experts or very small controversies. But this is my favorite: McGrath’s expansiveness within the form, like a hippo blues dancing in a wading pool.
Dept. of Prediction: Three to Five [New Yorker]