I know it's only about 9:30 on the East Coast. But whether you are a Yankees fan or a Yankees hater, whether you think "annunciatory" is a word, whether you've enjoyed Ian Frazier's Radiolab find about Tic Tac Toe or his amazing New Yorker history of trans-Siberian van trips or a million other things, you may love this sentence of his, a recent lede:

"On a dark winter evening when Yankee Stadium is all lit up, it radiates an annunciatory glow, as if an amazing idea had just occurred to it."

"Horse Piano," by Anna McDonald, resolves well but is so strange.

I'm working on catching on my New Yorker issues. What else is new?

But I like, when editors put pieces of content together in a magazine, when they fit moods. The grace notes work for no one but the reader who has, for some span of pages, given over himself or herself to the mood, perhaps after finding a personal and shared connection to it.

On one page of the December 12 issue, we read about Jon Gruden:

Gruden wakes up early, at three-seventeen (an arbitrary alarm-clock setting that stuck), and on a recent Thursday morning he arrived at the F.F.C.A. at around three-forty-five, pulling his white Mercedes into the empty lot. He wanted to learn everything he could about the New England Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs, who were playing in the following Monday’s game. Gruden spent the morning examining “melts,” video compilations that allow him to view every play from just about every angle.

He is fit and reflexively physical, with a habit, common to coaches, of accentuating his statements with pokes, taps, and gentle shoves. But he has trained himself to sit still for hours, holding a professional-grade remote control called a Cowboy clicker, watching plays forward and backward, at full speed and in slow motion. He works in silence, except for his own occasional remarks. Every week, as he gets to know the two teams, he quickly comes to view their achievements and blunders as his own. “That wasn’t very good,” he murmured, after one uninspired Chiefs sequence. “That wasn’t our best effort. Wonder what happened.” Then he hit rewind and watched the play again.

The next page, as the Gruden pieces continues, we get a poem called "The New Song" by W.S. Merwin. He begins, "For some time I thought there was time / and that there would always be time / for what I had a mind to do." The poem starts sadly, acknowledges the time passing in repetition, but manages to find a pleasure in the onrushing reality.

If life is the Cowboy clicker, at least you love football. At least you love, as Merwin does, the song of a waking thrush. In the winter, when the mornings are harder, the Cowboy clicker requires more of an answer.

One of my favorite New Yorker writers is Aleksandar Hemon. He finds a balance between detail and emotion few others do. In the December 5 issue of the magazine (yet another famous Cooper Conde comeback is underway), Hemon writes "Mapping Home." The piece at first appears to be a story about Sarajevo, but it shifts into a story about Sarajevo and Chicago and about broader personal eras. You could replace the cities with your lovers and friends. But you wouldn't want to replace them entirely, as places and people catch up in each other so tightly.

The story ends up the magazine's most evocative in a while, for me at least. Strong emotion on a subway platform is surprising but welcome. The piece is behind a mag paywall here but generously retyped here.

An excerpt:

In my ambulatory expeditions, I became acquainted with Chicago, but I did not yet know the city. The need to know it in my body, to locate myself in the world, had not been satisfied. I did not know how to live in Chicago, how to communicate with it in the urban language I had acquired at home. The American city was organized in a fundamentally different way from Sarajevo. (A few years later, I would find a Bellow quotation that perfectly encapsulated my feeling about the city at the time: "Chicago was nowhere. It had no setting. It was something released into American space.")

In the Sarajevo I knew, you possessed a personal infrastructure: your kafana, your barber, your butcher, the landmarks of your life (the spot where you fell and broke your arm playing soccer, the comer where you waited to meet the first of the many loves of your life, the bench where you first kissed her); the streets where people would forever know and recognize you, the space that identified you. Because anonymity was well nigh impossible and privacy literally incomprehensible (there is no word for "privacy" in Bosnian), your fellow Sarajevans knew you as well as you knew them. If you somehow vanished, your fellow citizens could have reconstructed you from their collective memory and the gossip that had accrued over years. Your sense of who you were, your deepest identity, was determined by your position in a human network, whose physical corollary was the architecture of the city.

Chicago, on the other hand, was built not for people to come together but for them to be safely apart. Size, power, and the need for privacy seemed to be the dominant elements of its architecture. Vast as it was, Chicago ignored the distinctions between freedom and isolation, between independence and selfishness, between privacy and loneliness. In this city, I had no human network within which to place myself. My displacement was metaphysical to precisely the same extent to which it was physical. But I couldn't live nowhere. I wanted from Chicago what I had got from Sarajevo: a geography of the soul.

Yes, one can have a favorite phrase origin of the month. It happens.

New Yorker on a top Charleston chef: "The setup seems to mirro the oldest divide in Southern culture: between slave cabin and big house, pot likker and plantation sideboard — between eating low on the hog (meaning pigs' feet) and high on the hog (meaning tenderloin)."

Hog phrases, my friends. Who knew? Not me.

The story on the whole made me want to run home and make cheese grits. I was riding the Metro to work at the time, so I waited. But at the day's end, there were cheese grits in my kitchen and so many of them.

My favorite magazine has been on a warmer streak this fall, it feels like. Take the October 17 issue. In the back of the book, literary critic James Wood assembles one of the best paragraphs of the season:

… Hollinghurst works quietly, like a poet, goading all the words in his sentences — nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs — into a stealthy equality. I mean something like this, from his novel “The Line of Beauty” (2004): “Above the trees and rooftops the dingy glare of the London sky faded upwards into weak violet heights.” We can suddenly see the twilit sky of a big city afresh, and the literary genius is obviously centered in the unexpected strength of the adjective “weak,” which brings alive the diminishing strata of the urban night sky, overpowered by the bright lights on the ground. The effect is paradoxical, because we usually associate heights not with weakness but with power or command. And the poetry lies not just in what the sentence paints but in how it sounds: there is something mysteriously lovely about the rhythm of “weak violet heights,” and the way the two adjectives turn into a plural noun that is really just another adjective; the sentence does indeed seem to drift away into the far distance.

Yup.

Elsewhere in the issue, there's a quote from a Henry James character: "We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

In still another part, movie director Andrew Stanton says: "I've always felt you unearth story, like you're on an archaeological dig. Stories tell you what they are — you don't have a say in what bones you're going to get, and when. You just have to have the intestinal fortitude to acknowledge, Oh, my stegosaurus is actually a T. rex."

But my favorite part of the issue (and you can buy it here) is:

One of my favorite reads early this fall was Peter Hessler's "Dr. Don: The life of a small-town druggist" in The New Yorker. I posted a link on Facebook but didn't mention anything here. Then I kept talking about the story to people, and they kept talking to me about it. So, a post.

Hessler sneaked up on me. I had always enjoyed his long reads in the magazine, but I hadn't connected them or realized his body of writing. Then he won a MacArthur genius grant, and a new friend at the ONA conference got to talking about him when we all went out for dinner.

Last, this "Dr. Don" article arrived in an issue and became a rare free read on the New Yorker site. (It's possible I don't have the chronology exactly right here, but you can sense the chain of events.) I was sold.

My favorite passage at first was an early sequence when the druggist effortlessly greets, counsels and treats his customers, all of whom he knows by name. But friend Becky pointed to this one, a small interlude that took on greater meaning and power as you looked back on it.

Jenks grew up in Salt Lake City, but he has spent most of his working life in small towns. “Maybe I can describe it this way,” he says. “I like to play chess. I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That’s sort of like living in a small town. It’s a simpler game, but it’s played to a higher level.” Jenks says that he is forced to have “a working relationship” with local methamphetamine users, treating their ailments in confidence. He explains that small towns might have a reputation for being closed-minded, but actually residents often learn to be nonjudgmental, because contact is so intense. “Someday I might be on the side of the road, and the person who pulls me out is going to be a meth user,” Jenks says. “The circle is much tighter.” He believes there is less gossip than one would assume, simply because so much is already known.

I'm currently torn between that one and what follows here, the story's opening paragraph. It is just about perfect, and it hooks you deeply.

In the southwestern corner of Colorado, where the Uncompahgre Plateau descends through spruce forest and scrubland toward the Utah border, there is a region of more than four thousand square miles which has no hospitals, no department stores, and only one pharmacy. The pharmacist is Don Colcord, who lives in the town of Nucla. More than a century ago, Nucla was founded by idealists who hoped their community would become the “center of Socialistic government for the world.” But these days it feels like the edge of the earth. Highway 97 dead-ends at the top of Main Street; the population is around seven hundred and falling. The nearest traffic light is an hour and a half away. When old ranching couples drive their pickups into Nucla, the wives leave the passenger’s side empty and sit in the middle of the front seat, close enough to touch their husbands. It’s as if something about the landscape — those endless hills, that vacant sky — makes a person appreciate the intimacy of a Ford F-150 cab.

Go read the rest of the story.

Philosophy's never been my thing, mostly because I'm not good at it.

What I took away from Intro to Philosophy at Northwestern was the Allegory of the Cave, how much philosophy majors liked to blather and how Zooey Deschanel — in our class study group before she dropped out to pursue acting full-time — was cute and smart and unobtainable.

But every once in a while, when an explanation happens well enough, or maybe when I'm in a clear enough mind to grasp meaning, I do like the field. "How to be Good," about Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit, 68, meets that requirement. The best lines come in summary near the end:

He sees that we have the ability to make the future much better than the past, or much worse, and he knows that he will not live to discover which turns out to be the case. He knows that the way we act toward future generations will be partly determined by our beliefs about what matters in life, and whether we believe that anything matters at all. This is why he continues to try to desperately to prove that there is such a thing as moral truth.

Jeff's wedding is near, very near — groomsman tux on my closet door, rehearsal dinner tomorrow night (or, at this late hour, tonight) — so I enjoyed this recent New Yorker passage (abstract) I ran across today.

In what is probably Simenon's most poignant book, "Maigret's Memoirs" (1851), our hero remembers a time when he was an apprentice policeman, on a bike. A friend invites him to a party given by some government people. He goes, but he feels awkward and ill-dressed. At one point, he is standing next to a full plate of petits fours. He reaches out for one, then, without thinking, another and another. Eventually, he looks down and sees, to his mortification, that he has eaten every last one of the little cakes. Furthermore, other guests have noticed and are staring at him in disbelief. At that moment, a girl in a blue dress comes up to him with another plate of petits fours. Would he like one? she asks, and advises him that the ones with the candied fruit on top are the best. This is the niece of the hosts, and what she is saying is that Maigret should have all the cake he wants. Her name is Louise, but she is almost never called that again, because she is soon Mme. Maigret.

New Yorker listings, recently: "Cirque de Legume. Pablo Ibarluzea directs this play, involving two clowns and a box of vegetables."