July 21, 2014 Issue

Ben McGrath’s “Big Air,” in this week’s issue, an account of the 2014 Austin X Games, fizzes in the same delightful way that his sparkling piece on the 2012 London Olympics (“Medals and Marketing,” The New Yorker, August 13 & 20, 2012), did. McGrath’s writing effervesces in direct proportion to the amount of exotic lingo generated by his subjects. The X Games is a cornucopia of action-sports argot (“BMX dirt mounds,” “the megaramp,” “Stadium Super Trucks,” “Big Air events,” “freestyle motocross”). McGrath revels in it. His avidity produces sentences that are, in their offbeat specificity, simply delicious. Take this line, for example:

Big Air events, for skateboarding and BMX, respectively, filled the prime-time slots on Friday and Saturday nights, bringing dope clouds to the hillside overlooking the megaramp.

Or this one:

I watched an Evil Genius pick up his backpack and head abruptly for the exit, so I followed him, catching him just in time to see him put on a pair of Ray-Bans with camouflaged frames, good for blending in with the fans arriving for Super Trucks.

“Big Air” brims with amazing, quasi-surreal word combos beautifully capturing both the allure and the “ad-hoc scruffiness” of X Games culture. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: A special shout-out to Sue Song for her wonderful “Heart,” particularly its inspired closing stanza: “Forgive those years I left you / pounding your Morse of grief, alone – / knocking against my sternum, / wondering if I was even there.”

July 7 & 14, 2014 Issue

Héctor Tobar’s “Sixty-Nine Days,” in this week’s issue, impressively applies a spare aesthetic to describe a complex event – the sixty-nine day ordeal of thirty-three miners trapped deep inside the collapsed San José Mine. Tobar’s style is rich in simplicity. Using short, plain, point-and-shoot sentences, he delivers us directly into the miners’ hot, black, blasted, seemingly doomed reality – the sound of rock splitting (“When he lowered the window, he was assaulted by a deafening noise: the rumble of many simultaneous explosions, the sound of rock splitting”), the miners’ oily water supply (“When they shone their weakening lamps on the water, they could see a black-orange film and drops of motor oil”), their hunger (“They could not defecate, and the emptiness in their stomachs felt like a fist pushing downward”). Tobar’s art is in his details, e.g., the miners make a fire “the size of two cupped hands”; one miner watches another miner “pick up a discarded can of tuna and wipe the inside with his finger and lick it again and again”; one miner’s legs and feet are swollen, “and to keep him off the muddy floor, other miners built a bed from wooden pallets, and he lay there for hours, staring at the ceiling.” One of my favorite passages in “Sixty-Nine Days” is the description of the “picnic” at Level 135:

Sometimes Acuña turned the camera and captured the light from one of the vehicles, but mostly the image was of a black space filled with Sepúlveda’s voice: “We’re going to show that we are Chileans of the heart. And we’re going to have a delicious soup today.” Sepúlveda served each man with a metal cup that clanked against the bottom of the air-filter cover, pouring the hot, murky liquid into plastic cups.

That clank of the metal cup “against the bottom of the air-filter cover” is inspired! Tobar is a master plain-stylist.

Mid-Year Top Ten (2014)

July is here - time for my annual Mid-Year Top Ten. I like making this list. It helps me take stock of my New Yorker reading experience. Valley fever, Barack Obama, a nautical nightmare, nuclear fusion, Muslim Brotherhood court cases, Berlin techno, horseshoe crabs, Stonehenge, life aboard an aircraft carrier, extreme cavers, Soylent, Ukraine, William S. Burroughs, archeophonists, emotional memory – these are just some of the fascinating subjects covered so far this year. The payoff has been immense reading pleasure. From a rich mid-year harvest, here are the pieces I’ve most enjoyed.

Fact Pieces

1. Ian Frazier’s “Blue Bloods” (April 14, 2014)

2. Tad Friend’s “Thicker Than Water” (February 10, 2014)

3. Burkhard Bilger’s “In Deep” (April 21, 2014)   

4. Raffi Khatchadourian’s “A Star in a Bottle” (March 3, 2014)

5. Nick Paumgarten’s “Berlin Nights” (March 24, 2014)

6. Lizzie Widdicombe’s “The End of Food” (May 12, 2014)

7. David Remnick’s “Going the Distance” (January 27, 2014)

8. Laura Miller’s “Romancing the Stones” (April 21, 2014)

9. Peter Hessler’s “Revolution On Trial” (March 10, 2014)

10. Keith Gessen’s “Waiting for War” (May 12, 2014)

Critical Pieces

1. Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Outlaw” (February 3, 2014)

2. James Wood’s “The World As We Know It” (May 19, 2014)

3. James Wood’s “The Punished Land” (June 23, 2013)

4. Dan Chiasson’s “Mother Tongue” (June 2, 2014)

5. Christine Smallwood’s “Ghosts in the Stacks” (June 9 & 16, 2014)

6. Jill Lepore’s “Away From My Desk” (May 12, 2014)

7. Joanna Biggs’s “We” (January 27, 2014)

8. Alex Ross’s “Blockbuster” (June 23, 2014)

9. Anthony Lane’s “Road Trips” (May 12, 2014)

10. Judith Thurman’s “Dressing Up” (May 5, 2014)

Best Talk Story

Sophie Brickman’s “Say Cheese” (January 6, 2014)

Best Short Story

Roddy Doyle, “Box Sets” (April 14, 2014)

Best Poem

Justin Quinn’s “Recession Song” (April 28, 2014)

Best Blog Post

Casey N. Cep’s “A Thousand Words: Writing From Photographs” (February 26, 2014)

Best Cover

Bruce McCall, “Polar Bears on Fifth Avenue” (January 13, 2014)

Best Issue

April 21, 2014 (The Journeys Issue), containing three enormously enjoyable pieces – Laura Miller’s “Romancing the Stones,” Geoff Dyer’s “Shipmates” (which just missed making my Top Ten), and Burkhard Bilger’s “In Deep”

Best Illustration

Riccardo Vecchio’s wallpaper-and-naked-old-ladies illustration for Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s “The Fugitive” (May 12, 2014) (see above artwork)

Best Photograph

Grant Cornett’s portrait of Jason Mleczko, illustrating Tad Friend’s brilliant “Thicker Than Water” (February 1o, 2014)

Best Sentence

If you feel like eating a carrot-and-black-trumpet-mushroom salad with your second tequila cocktail, you’re in luck, and perhaps it’s the right call—the windows frame an obnoxiously bright Equinox gym, where Lululemoners reading Us Weekly on the elliptical pedal through the night in silent rebuke. - Amelia Lester, “Bar Tab: Wallflower” (March 31, 2014)

Best Paragraph

The third huge wave came early and from a new angle, surging toward their port stern. With no time to turn into it, Jason shouted, “Hold on!,” and pinned the throttle to outrun it. But at the Shallow Spot there was no deeper water to escape to. The wave caught them from behind and lifted them until they were surfing its face. They hung there for five seconds – their port gunwale tilting overhead, the Yamaha outboard whirring in the air – as if time were taking a breath. Jason still believed that they’d shoot the barrel and make it out. Then the starboard gunwale hit sand, and with fantastic power the wave lifted the boat and hurled it onto the sandbar upside down. All that was visible of Jabb from above was a strip of maroon-painted hull. – Tad Friend, “Thicker Than Water” (February 10, 2014)

Best Description

Armed with an ant’s perspective and a technology titan’s resources, Myhrvold captures the swirling magma of a blueberry’s interior and the translucent reptilian juice sacs of a grapefruit. – Sophie Brickman, “Say Cheese” (January 6, 2014)

Most Memorable Image

When I climbed up on the riprap wall, I saw throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks. The carnage stretched into the distance and had a major-battlefield air, reminiscent of the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg. Some of the horseshoe crabs seemed to be moving feebly. The ones on the road had evidently managed to make it past the rocks. – Ian Frazier, “Blue Bloods” (April 14, 2014)

Most Inspired Detail

When the other bird-watchers called back, the ring tones were birdcalls. – Ian Frazier, “Blue Bloods” (April 14, 2014)

Credit: The above artwork is Riccardo Vecchio’s illustration for Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s “The Fugitive” (The New Yorker, May 12, 2014).

June 30, 2014 Issue

I traversed the pages of this week’s issue feeling mostly boredom. I couldn’t care less about what’s next for xx. Ditto re living the Fitbit life. Ditto re Ted Cruz. Nathan Heller’s profile of Richard Linklater is mildly interesting, but I missed the subjectivity that characterized his wonderful “Semi-Charmed Life” (The New Yorker, January 14, 2013). I didn’t read “The Pink House” (I’m allergic to fiction). I didn’t read Hilton Als’s piece (I’m allergic to theatre, too). Caleb Crain on Stephen Crane - what a tedious slog! That leaves Anthony Lane’s review of Clint Eastwood’s Jersey Boys. Lane’s tonic, blunt verdict – “Jersey Boys is a mess” – made me smile. It perfectly matched my mood.