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Alexandra Schwartz on Joan Acocella's "The Frog and the Crocodile"

The New Yorker

October 20, 2025

When I am stuck on a sentence or trying to wrestle an idea into shape, I turn to Joan Acocella.

- By Alexandra Schwartz

Alexandra Schwartz on Joan Acocella's "The Frog and the Crocodile"

As a critic, I admire the sophistication of her thought; as a reader, I love the funny, unpretentious plainness of her language. Criticism can be gruelling to write—all that explication! all that judgment!—but it should be a pleasure to read. This may be one reason that Acocella, who got a Ph.D. in comparative literature, left academia for magazines, arriving at The New Yorker in 1992, at the start of Tina Brown’s tenure as editor. It may explain, too, why one of my favorite Acocella pieces is “The Frog and the Crocodile,” which takes pleasure, and the practical and moral complications it creates, as its subject.

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