{"id":543,"date":"2025-11-11T11:00:18","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T16:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/?p=543"},"modified":"2025-11-11T11:00:18","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T16:00:18","slug":"week-10-reading-response-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/migration-reporting2025\/week-10-reading-response-8\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 10 Reading Response"},"content":{"rendered":"

John McPhee says writers should \u201cearn their images,\u201d that the work of writing is to see precisely, not decorate vaguely. <\/span>The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Aleppo After the Fall<\/span><\/i>, 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Barry\u2019s story starts mid-fall: a woman, SiSi, plunging from a fourth-floor balcony in Queens. It\u2019s the kind of scene that could\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Worth\u2019s <\/span>Aleppo After the Fall<\/span><\/i> 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\u2019s both utterly ordinary and mythic. Through him, Worth reveals a nation\u2019s ruin without ever saying so directly. The politics\u2014Russia, Assad, the rebels\u2014blur at the edges, while the clarity is limited to Abu Sami\u2019s courtyard, in the sunlight filtering through shrapnel holes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Both pieces follow McPhee\u2019s idea that the writer\u2019s loyalty is to the observed world, not to the headline. Barry\u2019s Queens and Worth\u2019s Aleppo couldn\u2019t be further apart, but both are written from the same position, a few steps back.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John McPhee says writers should \u201cearn their images,\u201d 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<\/p>\n

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