John McPhee says writers should “earn their images,” that the work of writing is to see precisely, not decorate vaguely. The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail and Aleppo After the Fall, respectively by Dan Barry and Robert Worth, are exactly doing that, stripping big, exhausted subjects (sex work, war) of abstraction by shrinking them to human scale.
Barry’s story starts mid-fall: a woman, SiSi, plunging from a fourth-floor balcony in Queens. It’s the kind of scene that could’ve been tabloid, but Barry slows it down. He rewinds time, reconstructing her world with the rotisserie chicken from Kissena Boulevard, the WeChat calls to her brother, the cat figurine waving beside the door. Every detail insists that she existed, that she occupied a specific corner of New York. In McPhee’s terms, Barry builds a frame of reference sturdy enough to hold empathy, without borrowed drama or moralizing, just the patient mapping of one life against the system that erased it.
Worth’s Aleppo After the Fall is very similar in this sense. Where Barry writes about a woman in a city too alive to notice her, Worth writes about a man in a city emptied of everything. Abu Sami, who stayed through the siege of Aleppo, has survived four years alone drinking boiled rainwater, reading Freud by candlelight, tending a grapevine. He’s both utterly ordinary and mythic. Through him, Worth reveals a nation’s ruin without ever saying so directly. The politics—Russia, Assad, the rebels—blur at the edges, while the clarity is limited to Abu Sami’s courtyard, in the sunlight filtering through shrapnel holes.
Both pieces follow McPhee’s idea that the writer’s loyalty is to the observed world, not to the headline. Barry’s Queens and Worth’s Aleppo couldn’t be further apart, but both are written from the same position, a few steps back.
