July 23, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. David S. Allee’s radiant “Naumburg Orchestral Concerts” night shot for “Goings On About Town” is transfixing. And what makes it transfixing is that raccoon sitting in a tree fork, looking at Allee as he takes the picture. Allee is a superb photographer. I admired his “Domino Sugar Factory” series immensely: see Jessie Wender, “Inside the Domino Sugar Factory,” newyorker.com, May 19, 2014.

David S. Allee, "Naumburg Orchestral Concerts" (2018)

2. And let’s give a huzzah for Neima Jahromi’s excellent “Bar Tab: Gilligan’s at Soho Grand,” containing this sparkling line: “On a recent afternoon, the nautical-jungle atmosphere was buoyed by a waitress in a blue-and-white Breton shirt, who issued a muted Tarzan yell as she strode by with a bottle of brut.”

  

3. “Talk of the Town” ’s new illustrator, João Fazenda, debuts this week with three images, including a dandy double portrait of Catherine O’Hara and Martin Short. It’s too early to say whether Fazenda is as good as Tom Bachtell. Bachtell is a master. He illustrated “Talk” for over twenty years. I’m going to miss him.

João Fazenda, "Catherine O'Hara and Martin Short" (2018)

4. The passage in Sam Wasson’s Talk story “Yes, And” in which Eugene Levy impersonates a “lugubrious rabbi” and says, “What a place to lose a cow,” made me laugh. The whole piece is terrific. It’s spurred my interest in Wasson’s writing. I think I’ll take a look at his Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. (2011).

5. I found David Remnick’s “Left Wing of the Possible” a refreshing change from the magazine’s usual Trump-bashing. Yes, the bastard deserves it. But it’s also important to spotlight politicians who offer a positive alternative to him. That’s what Remnick does in his absorbing piece, profiling twenty-eight-year-old democratic socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, Remnick says, is “almost certain to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.” In the Democratic primary, she soundly defeated the incumbent, Joseph Crowley, on a platform of “Medicare for all, a tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee, and criminal-justice reform.” I like the cut of her jib. I hope she wins.

6. I’ve previously commented on the connection between “journey” and “journalism.” They both share the same sematic root, “jour,” which is French for “day” – a day’s travel, the record of a day’s experience. But the connection is more than just sematic. The best journalism, for me, involves travel – an excursion of some sort. Such a piece is Jiayang Fan’s “Delivering Modernity,” a report on how Chinese tech companies like JD.com are transforming rural China. Fan visits a JD depot in Xinhuang, in the far west of Hunan Province.  She accompanies a JD courier as he makes deliveries to nearby villages (“We got stuck behind a truckload of squealing pigs whose rickety pen threatened to spill them onto our windshield”), visits a restaurant in Xinhuang (“I asked the proprietor, an aproned woman in her forties, if there was a menu, and she nodded, moving to the back of the room, past baskets of unwashed leafy vegetables. She yanked open a refrigerator door to display plastic containers of pig intestines, ears, and other offal. A pig’s head rolled slightly on the bottom shelf”), visits JD headquarters in Beijing (“Outside, in the parking lot, the company tests its fleet of self-driving cars”), talks with JD’s founder and C.E.O., Liu Qiangdong (“Fashion is among the company’s fastest-growing areas, and when Liu extended his hand I glimpsed a watch by Audemars Piguet, which recently partnered with JD to launch its first online boutique”), watches a drone arrive at a JD landing pad (“As it drew closer, the first thing I could make out was a red box under the belly of the drone. A minute later, I saw three spinning propellers, which seemed improbably small for the size of their load, like the wings of a bumblebee”), visits a training center for drone pilots (“The screens displayed animations of quadcopters that looked vaguely drunk as they wove through the sky toward landing pads”), and accompanies a “white-glove courier” on his rounds (“Shang makes his deliveries in a small electric car painted with bursts of JD red”). Drones, squealing pigs, expensive watches, self-driving cars, white-glove couriers – just some of the ingredients of Fan’s absorbing piece. I enjoyed it enormously. 

7. John Lanchester is a brilliant critical writer. I enjoy reading his arguments. In his “Doesn’t Add Up,” he takes on three recent economics books, contending that they “overreach,” i.e., extend their theories further than they usefully go. For example, he says of Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, “There is something thrilling about the intellectual audacity of thinking that you can explain ninety per cent of behavior in a society with one mental tool.” I relish Lanchester’s succinctness (e.g., “Our motives are often not what they seem: true. This explains everything: not true”). “Doesn’t Add Up” shows him in bracingly sharp form. 

Mark Ulriksen - "New Yorker" Cover Artist Extraordinaire

Mark Ulriksen, "Strike Zone" (2017)

Mark Ulriksen has created some of The New Yorker’s greatest covers – where great means bold, beautiful, cool, kinetic, witty, original, color-drenched. San Francisco’s Modernism gallery is currently showing twenty of his paintings and works on paper, including the terrific “Strike Zone,” my choice for 2017’s Best Cover of the Year (see here).  

Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman

Wayne Thiebaud, "Nine Jelly Apples" (1964)

A special shout-out to Johanna Fateman for her “Goings On About Town: Art: Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman” (The New Yorker, July 9 & 16, 2018), which begins, “Oil paint lends itself to Thiebaud’s canvases like buttercream to cake, and his works on paper are every bit as delectable.” That’s a great opener, perfectly evoking the thick luscious texture of Thiebaud’s iconic cakes, pies, and ice-cream cones. He’s the creator of at least eight New Yorker “Food Issue” covers, including the superb “Food Bowls” for the September 5, 2005 issue – my choice for the best single New Yorker of the last twenty years. It contains, among other gems, Judith Thurman’s “Night Kitchens,” John Seabrook’s “Renaissance Pears,” and Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men.” 

   

Fateman’s note tells of a new exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, titled “Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman,” exploring Thiebaud’s works on paper, from quick sketches to pastels, watercolors, and charcoal drawings. Some of these items are on display at the Morgan’s website, including the deliciously colored “Nine Jelly Apples” (1964) shown above.  

July 9 & 16, 2018 Issue

Four excellent “Talk of the Town” stories in this week’s issue: Nicolas Niarchos’s “Cartography”; Anna Russell’s “Leafy Greens”; Betsy Morais’ “Debrief”; and Lauren Collins’s “Invitation.”

Nicolas Niarchos’s “Cartography” is about a guy named David Goren who’s obsessed with pirate radio stations. Niarchos immediately snares my attention with the sort of found detail I relish: 

With one hand, he tuned an FM dial connected to a directional antenna. With the other, he jotted frequencies onto a notepad advertising Ortho Tri-Cyclen. (“That’s my wife’s,” he said. “She’s a nurse-practitioner.”)

Only certain writers notice stuff like that. It may not be much, just a notepad advertising a contraceptive, but it catches Niarchos’s eye. He must’ve asked Goren about it, or Goren noticed him noticing it – hence Goren’s explanation in parenthesis.

The notepad isn’t mentioned again. Niarchos goes on to describe Goren tuning in various pirate radio stations. We listen in as a Caribbean religious pirate hails a man in Toronto: “ ‘Good evening, Mr. Junior,’ a man’s voice said, addressing a listener. ‘Mr. Junior up there in Toronto, Canada.’ ”

In Anna Russell’s “Leafy Greens,” chef Alex Guarnaschelli visits Farm.One, Manhattan’s largest hydroponic farm, located “deep underground beneath the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary and the Michelin-starred restaurant Atera.” Guided by the farm’s creator, Rob Laing, Guarnaschelli tastes some of the plants – anise hyssop, micro-dill, mizuna, mint flower, bronze-fennel fronds. My favourite passage is a description of her encounter with a row of marigolds:

A row of marigolds caught her eye. “The taste of a marigold is one I deeply associate with my first tomato,” she said. She recalled how her grandmother would plant marigolds next to tomatoes because they keep the bugs away.

Laing was collecting a sample from a top shelf. “We’ve seen more people using it for desserts,” he said. “Like with chocolate, even.”

“Oh, that’s so fucking Swedish,” Guarnaschelli said. 

That last line made me laugh, although it’s hard to say why – maybe the emphasis on “Swedish,” maybe its profane gusto. Whatever the reason, it’s a terrific line. Russell captures it perfectly. She has a great ear. 

In Betsy Morais’ “Debrief,” Eugene Thacker, a philosopher who teaches a course on pessimism, meets up with a few of his former students at a Williamsburg bookstore. Morais writes,

A sign on the front door said, “Come on in,” but the store’s grate was pulled down. “Uh-oh,” said Aaron Newman, who recently completed his master’s degree in liberal studies. It had been raining, and there was still mist in the air. Rachelle Rahmé, another recent graduate, said, “I love this kind of weather.” Soon, the sun peeked out, the shopkeeper arrived, and the group was ushered into a pleasant back yard. Thacker, who is from the Seattle area, told them that he takes comfort in a gloomy sky: “It’s contemplative.”

I like the easy-going atmosphere of this piece. For a bunch of pessimists, Thacker and his group seem almost cheerful. Morais catches this paradoxically positive vibe in her final paragraph:

If pessimism is about futility, what’s the point of writing about it? Thacker’s not sure, but he thinks that there’s something interesting about “undertaking the practice anyway.” He added, “Maybe it means next time around, the only students who get A’s are the ones who don’t turn in a paper.” The alums laughed. Humor can be helpful to pessimists. “I went through a phase of watching a lot of standup comedy,” Thacker said. “I love George Carlin. He takes no political side. Everyone deserves our spite.”

Lauren Collins is the veteran in this quartet, with a number of Talk classics to her credit, including, “Sideline” (June 19, 2017), “Dog’s Dinner” (February 8 & 15, 2016), and “Bird’s-Eye View” (July 6, 2015). Her “Invitation,” in this week’s issue, tells the story of a French count who tracked down descendants of an American army doctor who bivouacked at his family’s estate in 1944. The count’s name is Aymeric de Rougé, “the proprietor of Baronville—a twenty-four-hundred-acre estate, an hour southwest of Paris”; the army doctor’s name is Frank Inserra, who “had been particularly kind to de Rougé’s father, Bertrand.” Inserra died in 1990. The nub of this absorbing piece is a Skype conversation between de Rouge and Inserra’s son, Francis, in Rockville, Maryland, and Inserra's daughter, Donna, in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Collins writes,

On a recent Wednesday, Aymeric de Rougé was at Baronville, where he manages ventures related to the estate, including a line of champagne. He sat in front of a laptop in the dining room, beneath a huge chandelier.

“O.K., I have you blasted through the speakers,” he said to Francis and his sister Donna. De Rougé had invited them to visit Baronville, but for now they were Skyping.

My favourite part of “Invitation” is the conclusion, when de Rouge uses his computer to show Francis and Donna the room he’s in:

Toward the end of the conversation, Donna, tearing up, said that it had made her feel as if her father were a little closer. Then Francis addressed the Count. “I have to tell you,” he said, “I’m looking at your house—”

“ ‘House’ doesn’t seem like the right word,” Donna said.

De Rougé lifted his laptop so that the Inserras could get a better look at the room’s pistachio-colored moldings. Then he turned around so they could see all the way down the gallery—a two-hundred-and-thirty-foot view.

“Oh, my heavens,” Donna said. “Can you imagine what that would’ve been like for Dad?”

It’s an inspired ending to a touching story, which Collins beautifully tells in a mere 933 well-chosen words.

Michelle Dean on Pauline Kael: Not Sharp

Michelle Dean’s Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (2018) contains at least nine questionable statements about Pauline Kael:

1. Dean describes Kael’s writing as “consistently inconsistent, tending to passionate riffs, insisting that the only principle worth defending was pleasure.” This makes Kael sound almost irrational – more expressive than logical. It underrates the “thinking” in her criticism. Kael’s thinking process often took the form of argument. She was an exhilaratingly powerful arguer. Many of her best pieces are arguments. In “Circles and Squares,” she argues against the auteur theory. In “Bonnie and Clyde,” she argues in favor of movie violence. In “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” she argues against “high culture.” In “Raising Kane,” she argues against the widespread view that Citizen Kane is the sole creation of Orson Welles. These pieces are as intellectual in their light as they are passionate in their heat, and they insist on a lot more than just pleasure. 

2. Dean says, “In ‘Trash, Art, and the Movies,’ Kael argues at length for erotics in the place of hermeneutics. As ever, she is interested in reaction, not aesthetics.” I’m not sure what’s being said here. Kael argued for erotics, but not in “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” The movies discussed in that great essay – “Wild in the Streets,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “Petulia,” “The Graduate” – aren’t especially erotic. Kael’s strongest argument for movie eroticism is her brilliant “Tango.” And in that piece, she doesn’t argue for it “in the place of hermeneutics.” If by “hermeneutics,” Dean means interpretation, she’s wrong to say that Kael argued for its replacement. Interpretation was one of her main critical tools. She was a superb interpreter: see, for example, her construal of the dark-and-light contrast in The Godfather (“The contrast is integral to the Catholic background of the characters: innocence versus knowledge – knowledge in this sense being the same as guilt”). And to say that Kael isn’t interested in aesthetics is crazy. No critic was more responsive to the look of a film – it’s light, color, texture, pattern, and design – than she was. Recall her description of the colors in Last Tango in Paris: “The colors in this movie are late-afternoon orange-beige-browns and pink – the pink of flesh drained of blood, corpse pink.” Or how about this inspired bit from her “Movieland – The Bums’ Paradise,” a review of Robert Altman’s The Long Good-Bye: “When Nina van Pallandt thrashes in the ocean at night, her pale-orange butterfly sleeves rising above the surf, the movie becomes a rhapsody on romance and death.” There you have aesthetics and hermeneutics in the same sentence. 

3. Dean says, “Sontag had written that there was a kind of pleasure in analysis, in the taking apart and putting back together of things, something that Kael could never abide.” This misrepresents Kael’s critical approach. She was a phenomenal analyst. She had a vast mental storehouse of movie associations. Her great strength was looking at a movie and noticing subtle echoes of other movies. For example, in “Bonnie and Clyde,” she wrote,

The showpiece sequence, Bonnie’s visit to her mother (which is a bit reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart’s confrontation with his mother, Marjorie Main, in the movie version of “Dead End”), aims for an effect of alienation, but that effect is confused by all the other things attempted in the sequence: the poetic echoes of childhood (which also echo the child sliding down the hill in “Jules and Jim”) and a general attempt to create a frieze from our past—a poetry of poverty. Penn isn’t quite up to it, though he is at least good enough to communicate what he is trying to do, and it is an attempt that one can respect. In 1939, John Ford attempted a similar poetic evocation of the legendary American past in “Young Mr. Lincoln;” this kind of evocation, by getting at how we feel about the past, moves us far more than attempts at historical re-creation. When Ford’s Western evocations fail, they become languorous; when they succeed, they are the West of our dreams, and his Lincoln, the man so humane and so smart that he can outwit the unjust and save the innocent, is the Lincoln of our dreams, as the Depression of “Bonnie and Clyde” is the Depression of our dreams—the nation in a kind of trance, as in a dim memory. In this sense, the effect of blur is justified, is “right.” Our memories have become hazy; this is what the Depression has faded into. But we are too conscious of the technical means used to achieve this blur, of the attempt at poetry. We are aware that the filtered effects already include our responses, and it’s too easy; the lines are good enough so that the stylization wouldn’t have been necessary if the scene had been played right. A simple frozen frame might have been more appropriate.

There’s more analysis packed into that one passage than most critics provide in an entire review. Its intelligence has at least three registers: it notices the poetic effect of Bonnie’s-visit-with-her-mother sequence; it compares that effect with John Ford’s similar “poetic evocation” in Young Mr. Lincoln; and it criticizes the effect for being too stylized. 

4. Dean says, “In fact, for the rest of her life she [Kael] never again wrote anything like “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” eschewing these kinds of broader essays for the most part.” I can’t let this go by without pointing out that, in addition to her weekly New Yorker reviews, Kael wrote at least eight superb essays for the magazine: “Raising Kane,” “Numbing the Audience,” “On the Future of Movies,” “Notes on Heart and Mind,” “The Man From Dream City,” “Notes on Evolving Heroes, Morals, Audiences,” “Fear of Movies,” and “Why Are Movies So Bad?” – all of which came after “Trash, Art, and the Movies.”

5. Dean calls Kael’s “Raising Kane” a “career disaster.” Really? Kael’s great essay stirred controversy. In it, she argued Citizen Kane isn’t the one-man show that many people (including its director, Orson Welles) believe it to be. She was criticized for failing to provide Welles’s viewpoint, particularly on the issue of the authorship of the script, which Kael attributed solely to Herman J. Mankiewicz. But the controversy didn’t hurt her in the least. The New Yorker didn’t fire her. She kept right on writing. Her career continued to rise. Two years after “Raising Kane,” she won a National Book Award for Deeper into Movies. 

6. Dean says, “She [Kael] attributes much of the film’s [Citizen Kane’s] genius not to the much-laureled Welles, but rather to the relatively forgotten screenplay writer, Herman Mankiewicz.” This isn’t true. Kael argued that Mankiewizc was the sole author of the script and the creator of the movie’s central character, the newspaper baron Charles Foster Kane. But she was very clear on who was responsible for the film’s “magic.” She wrote, “Though Mankiewicz provided the basic apparatus for it, that magical exuberance which fused the whole scandalous enterprise was Welles’.” And to underscore the point, she further says, “Citizen Kane is a film made by a very young man of enormous spirit; he took the Mankiewicz material and he played with it, he turned it into a magic show.”

7. Dean says of Kael’s “Raising Kane,” “Kael was not a reporter or researcher by trade. She didn’t have the kind of systematic mind it required. So there were holes.” This is another of Dean’s condescending remarks on Kael’s intelligence. The only “hole” in “Raising Kane” that Dean reports is Kael’s failure to consult Welles, never mind that his position on the question of who wrote Citizen Kane’s script was well known. As far as he was concerned, the script was his and Mankiewicz’s jointly. Dean uncritically adopts Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Kane Mutiny” as the correct version of the facts, notwithstanding that it’s based almost entirely on Welles’s self-serving testimony. She says, “Bogdanovich landed the attack that truly stuck it to Kael.” A few paragraphs later, she says it again: “It stuck to her.” Is this true? No, not according to Kael’s biographer, Brian Kellow: “ ‘The Kane Mutiny’ did surprisingly little damage to Pauline’s reputation” (Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, 2011). 

8. Regarding Renata Adler’s hatchet job, “The Perils of Pauline,” Dean says, “She [Adler] had clearly declared war on Kael. And she made a decent case.” Adler’s essay reviews Kael’s 1980 collection, When the Lights Go Down, calling it “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” Adler’s technique of “counting the number of words and turning them back on a subject to make them look foolish” impresses Dean. She says, “Against Kael, who had so much copy available to analyze – all of it written in the structure of movie reviews – it was devastating.” But what Dean doesn’t comment on is Adler’s use of exaggeration. For example, Adler says of Kael,

She has, in principle, four things she likes: frissons of horror; physical violence depicted in explicit detail; sex scenes, so long as they have an ingredient of cruelty and involve partners who know each other either casually or under perverse circumstances; and fantasies of invasion by, or subjugation of or by, apes, pods, teens, bodysnatchers, and extraterrestrials. Whether or not one shares these predilections—and whether they are in fact more than four, or only one—they do not really lend themselves to critical discussion. It turns out, however, that Ms. Kael does think of them as critical positions, and regards it as an act of courage, of moral courage, to subscribe to them. The reason one cannot simply dismiss them as de gustibus, or even as harmless aberration, is that they have become inseparable from the repertory of devices of which Ms. Kael’s writing now, almost wall to wall, consists.

I remember my reaction when I first read that: Only four things Kael likes? Come on! Adler’s gross simplification of Kael’s movie taste is easy to refute. Think of Kael’s praise of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (“a beautiful pipe dream of a movie – a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been”). Think of her praise of Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (“You experience the elation of using your mind – of evaluating the material, and perceiving how it’s all developing, while you’re storing it up”). Think of her love of Jean Renoir’s work (“At his greatest, Jean Renoir expresses the beauty in our common humanity – the desires and hopes, the absurdities and follies, that we all, to one degree or another, share”). Think of her love of thirties screwball comedy (“Love became slightly surreal; it became stylized – lovers talked back to each other, and fast”). Kael’s catalogue of movie love is endless, and completely unrelated to Adler’s nasty little list. This is typical of everything Adler’s scabrous essay alleges against Kael. It is, line by line, and without interruption, a grotesque distortion of Kael’s work. David Denby, in his Do the Movies Have a Future? (2012), calls it a “notoriously wrongheaded piece.” Dean’s treatment of it as a “decent case” is a major flaw in her book.

9. Dean says, “Adler’s words about Kael’s work would appear in every obituary when Kael died in 2001.” Well, there’s at least one obituary in which they don’t appear – David Denby’s tribute in the September 17, 2001, New Yorker. Denby says of Kael’s New Yorker writing, “In both abundance and quality, it was a performance very likely without equal in the history of American journalism.” 

July 2, 2018 Issue

What’s it like to undergo a brain scan while being burned, poked, prodded, and electrically shocked? Nicola Twilley’s absorbing “Seeing Pain,” in this week’s issue, tells us, and a marvellous bit of medical technology springs to life:

During the next couple of hours, I had needles repeatedly stuck into my ankle and the fleshy part of my calf. A hot-water bottle applied to my capsaicin patch inflicted the perceptual equivalent of a third-degree burn, after which a cooling pack placed on the same spot brought tear-inducing relief. Each time Tracey and her team prepared to observe a new slice of my brain, the machine beeped, and a small screen in front of my face flashed the word “Ready” in white lettering on a black background. After each assault, I was asked to rate my pain on a scale of 0 to 10.

Pain is notoriously indescribable. Twilley’s piece is about a neuroscientist, Irene Tracey, who uses a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to produce “blob maps.” Twilley writes, “Watching a succession of fiery-orange jellyfish flaring up in my skull, she had seen my pain wax and wane, its outlines shifting as mild discomfort became nearly unbearable agony.”

Twilley’s prose is clear and concrete. I relish her descriptions:

As the cryogenic units responsible for cooling the machine’s superconducting magnet clicked on and off in a syncopated rhythm, the imaging technician warned me that, once he slid me inside, I might feel dizzy, see flashing lights, or experience a metallic taste in my mouth. 

Near the end of her piece, she writes,

Over the phone, Segerdahl talked me through my scans. “That map is actually really difficult to make sense of,” he said. “Your brain is really, really, really lit up—there’s just a lot going on.” But then he showed me a sequence of images that had been processed in such a way that the color coding appeared only in regions that had elevated blood flow while I endured the prolonged pain of the capsaicin cream. The characteristic pattern of pain began to emerge, and Segerdahl recited the names of the active regions like old friends.

That last sentence is inspired. Strange to say, even though it’s about pain, I enjoyed “Seeing Pain” immensely. 

Mid-Year Top Ten (2018)

Janne Iivonen, illustration for Ian Frazier's "The Maraschino Mogul"

It’s time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

Reporting

1. Ian Frazier, “The Maraschino Mogul,” April 23, 2018 (“As summer progressed, to add a further touch of the apocalyptic, bees returning at the end of the day to hives in Red Hook began to glow an incandescent red. Some local beekeepers found the sight of red bees flying in the sunset strangely beautiful. All of them had noticed that their honey was turning red, too”).

2. David Grann, “The White Darkness,” February 12 & 19, 2018 (“It was hard to breathe, and each time he exhaled the moisture froze on his face: a chandelier of crystals hung from his beard; his eyebrows were encased like preserved specimens; his eyelashes cracked when he blinked”).

3. Michael Chabon, “The Recipe for Life,” February 5, 2018 (“And then, equally unbidden, comes a thought: This is how it will be when he is gone. I will be lying on a bed somewhere, watching ‘Citizen Kane,’ or ‘A Night at the Opera,’ or ‘The Man with the X-Ray Eyes,’ or some other film that became beloved to me through my father’s own loving intervention, and, even though he won’t be there anymore, I will still be watching it with him. I will hear his voice then the way I am hearing it now, in my head, this instrument that was tuned to my father’s signal long ago, angled to catch the flow of his information, his opinions, all the million great and minor things he knows”). 

4. Nick Paumgarten, “Getting a Shot,” January 29, 2018 (“With thirty minutes until count, they re-racked for one try. Anderson got his fake beating, and off it went, bodies flying all over the place, well past the call of ‘cut.’ Sample opened his eyes wide: ‘That one looked a little real.’ The offenders, sweaty and ebullient, collected their pizzas and filed out, under guard”).

5. Zadie Smith, “Through the Portal,” May 7, 2018 (“Paragraphs could be written on Lawson’s curtains alone: cheap curtains, net curtains, curtains taped up—or else hanging from shower rings—curtains torn, faded, thin, permeable. Curtains, like doors, are an attempt to mark off space from the outside world: they create a home for the family, a sanctuary for a people, or they may simply describe the borders of a private realm. In these photographs, though, borders are fragile, penetrable, thin as gauze. And yet everywhere there is impregnable defiance—and aspiration. There is ‘kinship in free fall’ ”).

6. Ian Frazier, “Airborne,” February 5, 2018 (“Soldering equipment, extension cords, boxes upon boxes of batteries in various states of freshness, quad motors, control consoles, F.P.V. goggles with the name Fat Shark (the main goggle manufacturer) prominently displayed, quads of many sizes—down to the pocket-size minis that the pilots use to make insect-eye-view videos of their living room and kitchen, flying the little drones between chair legs and couch sections and around the peanut-butter jar on the counter—such a profusion of gear gave the basement a sorcerer’s-workshop richness”).

7. John McPhee, “Direct Eye Contact,” March 5, 2018 (“In a storm, a big oak in mast, up a slope from my cabin there, fell not long ago. Its trunk broke freakishly—about twenty feet up—and the crown bent all the way over and spread the upper branches like a broom upon the ground. In the branches were a number of thousands of acorns. The next morning, there was enough bear shit around that oak to fertilize the Philadelphia Flower Show”).

8. Siddhartha Mukherjee, “Bodies at Rest and in Motion,” January 8, 2018 (“And soon all his physiological systems entered into cascading failure, coming undone in such rapid succession that you could imagine them pinging as they broke, like so many rubber bands. Ping:renal failure. Ping:severe arrhythmia. Ping:pneumonia and respiratory failure. Urinary-tract infection, sepsis, heart failure. Ping, ping, ping”).

9. Jiayang Fan, “The Spreading Vine,” March 12, 2018 (“The bootleg wine was warm, and, when I raised my cup, I could see thick sediment dancing inside. The security guard had mentioned that the wine hadn’t yet been filtered, but Liu and Fatty didn’t seem bothered. We took a sip, and Fatty’s mouth puckered. The wine was harsh, sweet but astringent, and the taste seemed to register in the esophagus as much as in the mouth. As the men drained their cups, Liu reflected that at least it hadn’t cost them anything”).

10. Rebecca Mead, “Meal Ticket,” June 18, 2018 (“The centerpiece of the farm is a spacious hjallur, inside which were hanging the remains of the summer harvest: a few dozen joints of gently greening lamb, looking less like the wares in a butcher’s shop than like shards of granite patterned delicately with lichen”).

The Critics

1. Anthony Lane, “Unusual Suspects,” April 2, 2018 [“There is a lovely photograph of James Mason and Eva Marie Saint on the set of ‘North by Northwest’ (1959). They are clad for the auction scene; he wears a pale-gray suit, and her dress is rich in roses. He holds her lightly by the arm, smiling, as she stands behind the camera on which the sequence will be filmed. And what a formidable beast that camera is: as big as a motorbike but far less streamlined, bearing on its broad flank the legend ‘VistaVision’—the wide-screen format in which Hitchcock also shot ‘To Catch a Thief’ (1955), ‘The Man who Knew Too Much’ (1956), and ‘Vertigo’ (1958). James Wong Howe, a king among cinematographers, used VistaVision on ‘The Rose Tattoo’ (1955), and there’s a portrait of him with a similar camera, which towers above him on its wheeled crane, and which he holds by a cable, as if leading a velociraptor through Jurassic Park. Howe, like Hitchcock, knew that the cumbersome effort was worthwhile, for the result would be a rolling expanse of fine-grained images, filling the audience’s gaze. Such beauty could be summoned by the beast”].

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” February 5, 2018 (“Each photograph shoulders aside its neighbors and stops you dead: a glittering nocturnal view of a West Side high-rise above a soulfully trusting Italian donkey, a naked young man and an expanse of unquiet Hudson River waters, William S. Burroughs being typically saturnine and a young man placidly sucking on his own big toe, a suavely pensive older man and a pair of high heels found amid trash in Newark, a dead seagull on a beach and a Hujar self-portrait. The works have in common less a visual vocabulary than a uniform intensity and practically a smell, as of smoldering electrical wires”).

3. Dan Chiasson, “Anybody There?,” April 23, 2018 (“On Giphy, you can find many iconic images from ‘2001’ looping endlessly in seconds-long increments—a jarring compression that couldn’t be more at odds with the languid eternity Kubrick sought to capture”).

4. James Wood, “Long Road Ahead,” April 16, 2018 (“Kempowski is doing nothing more than showing us that most people quite reasonably think of themselves first. Chocolate is just the novelistic detail that beautifully concentrates this truth”).

5. Peter Schjeldahl, “Brotherhood,” February 12 & 19, 2018 (“Spend time with them, half an hour minimum. Their glories bloom slowly, as you register the formal decisions that practically spring the figures from their surfaces into the room with you, and as you ponder, if you will, the stories that they plumb”).

6. Thomas Mallon, “Shots in the Dark,” May 28, 2018 (“With flashbulbs, and even their riskier, flash-powder antecedent, he was able to own and preserve the instant when—Fiat lux!—he spun the world a hundred and eighty degrees”).

7. Lidija Haas, “The Disbelieved,” June 4 & 11, 2018 (“Pain and disease are what they are—they resist meaning and the narratives that make it”).

8. Andrew Marantz, “Friends in High Places,” January 15, 2018 [“In the Fox News studio, the fresh tweets were displayed in bold type on a thirty-foot-wide screen, Trump’s larger-than-life Twitter avatar peering, Rushmore-like, into the middle distance. (Presumably, the real Trump, in the Presidential bedroom, peered back, an elderly youth gazing into a shallow pool)”].

9. Thomas Mallon, “House Style,” February 5, 2018 (“The difficulty is not that the phrase ‘census-slashing deformity’ is irreverent but that it’s a distraction, a squawking bird perched on the cenotaph. The style becomes more than the matter”).

10. Peter Schjeldahl, “Points of View,” January 1, 2018 (“The provocation and the artistry of ‘Thérèse Dreaming,’ the artist’s licentiousness and his genius, don’t balance. They claw at each other. The picture seethes with prurience. And—not ‘but’—it is beautiful. Balthus sticks us with a moral conundrum, because he can”).

Talk of the Town

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Angel in Hastings,” April 23, 2018 [“The contrast between the back seat’s spacious, buttery interior and the driver’s livery (T-shirt, worn jeans, jean jacket) is sharp enough to make you wonder if the car is stolen”].

2. Anna Russell, “Caffeinated,” March 19, 2018 (“Around the corner, at La Colombe, Specht grabbed two lids from behind the counter while a clerk’s back was turned. ‘They have the Viora lid,’ Harpman said. ‘This is the one Wired thinks is the best.’ It has a thin rim and a recessed space for the nose”).

3. Anna Russell, “Close Shave,” February 5, 2018 (“Ralph dropped a hot towel onto his face, and Lithgow’s voice grew muffled. ‘Intermission,’ he mumbled”).

4. Ian Frazier, “Audience Participation,” March 19, 2018 (“Every spring the tents appear, the circus vehicles crowd one another bumper to fender, and sometimes a smell of elephant perks up Division Street”).

5. David Owen, “Bits and Bobs,” January 15, 2018 (“ ‘To me, the most haunting things are the shoes,’ Nagle said. ‘You see wear on the leather, so you know people wore them.’ Some of the shoes emerge sole first from the bank; some lie half-buried in sand. There are virtually no sneakers. There are adjustable metal roller skates, the kind that children strapped to their shoes, and there are tangled clusters of nylon stockings, some of them so full of sand that they resemble enormous white sausages”).

6. Adam Gopnik, “Glimpsing Lincoln,” March 5, 2018 (“But, in these 1861 sketches, we see Nast’s mastery of the living thing, the face seized from life, which gives tensile strength to his more elaborate tableaux”).

7. Rebecca Mead, “Old Shoe,” March 5, 2018 (“The men discussed the shoes that Day-Lewis was having made to wear as Woodcock—gorgeous, gleaming things, worn over socks of ecclesiastical purple—and Day-Lewis asked Glasgow about his life”). 

8. Anthony Lane, “Two Sisters,” April 9, 2018 (“That is the setting for “Howards End,” Forster’s famous novel about culture, property, gaping class distinctions, and the narrative importance of umbrellas”).

9. Lauren Collins, “Peachy,” May 14, 2018 (“Beneath her hedonism, there is a liquid-heavy undercurrent of longing”).

10. Rand Richards Cooper, “Hot Type,” January 8, 2018 (“Mailer and Minton, Second World War veterans a year apart in age, shared a pugnacious streak. ‘Check this out,’ Minton said, pulling down a copy of ‘The Deer Park,’ inscribed by its author. ‘To Ernest Hemingway,’ it read. ‘I am deeply curious to know what you think of this—but if you do not answer, or if you answer with the kind of crap you use to answer unprofessional writers, sycophants, brown-noses, etc, then fuck you, and I will never attempt to communicate with you again’ ”).

Goings On About Town

1. Elizabeth Barber, “Bar Tab: Ophelia,” April 23, 2018 [“At the bar, the twosome ordered again (pink prosecco poured sybaritically over sherry and Campari), beneath a taxidermic bird—an albino pheasant, clarified the bar staff, after a brief conference. The pair took in this deceased fowl, and observed, through the cathedral-like windows, the coy, unforthcoming façades of Midtown East. The effect was to make them feel as if they were in a birdcage, doomed to contemplate unreachable possibilities they should know better than to want”].

2. Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Anyway Café,” April 30, 2018 [“Behind the blond-wood bar at Anyway Café, the bartender is whittling a horseradish root, slicing off long pale strips with a little knife. They are bound for one of the large jars of vodka behind her, which are infusing, slowly, with ingredients including black currants, beets, honey, and ginger. These fierce spirits are mixed into the bar’s signature Martinis: Katherine the Great (pomegranate vodka, black-pepper vodka, rosewater), Madam Padam (blueberry vodka, champagne). Best and strangest of all is the borscht Martini—beet vodka and dill vodka, sprinkled with Himalayan pink salt and crushed herbs, a pungent, tangy punch in a frosty glass. It’s easy to down one after another, licking the salt from the rim”].

3. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Simon & the Whale,” April 2, 2018 (“I’d eat the crusty roasted-barley black bread—which has all the nutty, caramelized appeal of burnt toast without the bitterness, and a delightful hint of anise—every day”).

4. Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Cocoa Bar,” February 12 & 19, 2018 (“Down a quiet street on the Lower East Side, warm amber light spills onto the sidewalk, and the smell of chocolate drifts into the cold air”).

5. “Art: Lee Krasner,” January 8, 2018 (“In the center of a brown storm of brushstrokes spattered with creamy blotches, titled “Fecundity,” several curving black lines evoke the expansive feeling of gracefully opening arms”).

6. Wei Tchou, “Bar Tab: 29B Teahouse,” February 26, 2018 (“With eyes closed, one might mistake a flute of the honey-hued jasmine variety for a very dry prosecco, save for the intense floral perfume that lingers after each sip”). 

7. Jeanie Riess, “Bar Tab: Montero Bar and Grill,” March 12, 2018 (“Orange buoys dangled from the ceiling, and a pool table floated like a small island in the back room.”) 

8. Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: The Narrows,” January 22, 2018 [“As for the house drinks, the Pilar (mezcal, Cappelletti, Cocchi Americano) is a pure amber color in a globe-shaped glass, and splutter-inducingly smoky; the Babushka, a simple concoction of ginger, lime, and vodka, offers enough succor to allow the possibility of returning to the bitter cold of the street, where a lone bicycle lies in a snowdrift, buried up to its chain”].

9. “Night Life: James Chance and the Contortions,” March 19, 2018 (“Blending the free-jazz horn theatrics of Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler with wet, muted funk and showman shrieks (“Contort yourself five times!”), Chance and his group put their stamp on a fringe style that felt at once chicly nostalgic and switchblade sharp”).

10. Richard Brody, “Movies: Fig Leaves,” May 21, 2018 (“Though the film is silent, Hawks’s epigrammatic rapidity is already in evidence—the characters talk non-stop with such lively, pointed grace that viewers might swear they hear the intertitles spoken”).

Best Poem: Lucie Brock-Broido’s “Giraffe,” March 26, 2018 (“In another life, he was from Somalia / Where he spent hours watching clouds / In shapes of feral acrobats tipping along their tightropes / Spun of camels’ hair and jute”). 

Best newyorker.com post: Alexandra Schwartz’s “Agnès Varda Is Still Going Places,” March 4, 2018 (“Varda, as the film’s title implies, is a gleaner, too. She loves the burnt edges of cinema, finding treasures in images or ideas that other directors might reject”). 

Best Issue: April 23, 2018 (Travel & Food Issue), containing, among other delectable items, Ian Frazier’s “The Maraschino Mogul,” Dan Chiasson’s “Anybody There?,” Nick Paumgarten’s “Water and the Wall,” and Burkhard Bilger’s “Bean Freaks.”

Best Cover: Maira Kalman’s “Full Bloom” (March 19, 2018).

Best Illustration: Bendik Kaltenborn, “Fox & Friends,” for Andrew Marantz, “Friends in High Places” (January 15, 2018).

Best Photograph: George Steinmetz, “Rio Grande,” for Nick Paumgarten’s “Water and the Wall” (April 23, 2018).

Best Cartoon: Roz Chast, “Two-Hour Nostalgia” (March 26, 2018).

Best Sentence: “I both like and dislike ‘Thérèse Dreaming’ (1938), the Balthus painting that thousands of people have petitioned the Metropolitan Museum to remove from view because it brazens the artist’s letch for pubescent girls—which he always haughtily denied, but come on!” [Peter Schjeldahl, “Points of View,” January 1, 2018]

Best Paragraph: 

In “Living Room” (2015), taken in Brownsville, Brooklyn, all the scars are visible: the taped-up curtain, the boxes and laundry, the piled-up DVDs, that damn metal radiator. At its center pose a queen and her consort. He’s on a chair, topless, while she stands unclothed behind him. They are physically beautiful—he in his early twenties, she perhaps a little older—and seem to have about them that potent mix of mutual ownership and dependence, mutual dominance and submission, that has existed between queens and their male kin from time immemorial. But this is only speculation. The couple keep their counsel. Despite being on display, like objects, and partially exposed—like their ancestors on the auction block—they maintain a fierce privacy, bordered on all sides. They are exposed but well defended: salon-fresh hair, with the edges perfect; a flash of gold in her ear; his best bluejeans; her nails on point. Self-mastery in the midst of chaos. And the way they look at you! A gaze so intense that it’s the viewer who ends up feeling naked. [Zadie Smith, “Through the Portal,” May 7, 2018]

Best Detail: “The bean that caught Keller’s eye was a greenish-yellow thing with a red-rimmed eye, like a soybean with a hangover.” [Burkhard Bilger, “Bean Freaks,” April 23, 2018] 

Best Description:

Inspired, it would seem, by natural wonders—bacteria, asteroids, deep-sea flora—and the history of biomorphic abstraction, Moyer’s paintings are at once delirious and methodical, an imbrication of stains and pours, gestural blobs, and veins of glitter-rich sediment. Hard-edged shapes (sometimes rendered with clever drop shadows) lend structure to watery layers. In “Sassafras and Magma,” the matte-black silhouette of a cartoonish plant is a graphic foil to the background’s lava-lamp depths. In the candy-colored “Jolly Hydra: Unexplainably Juicy,” dripping curtains of yellow and fuchsia begin to dissolve the geometry of the composition’s serpentine arches. [“Goings On About Town: Art: Carrie Moyer,” March 5, 2018]

Best Question: “The Everything Bagel Babka looks more like a popover—but who are we to say what babka is supposed to look like?” [Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: MeMe’s Diner,” February 12 & 19, 2018]

Best “Bar Tab” Drink Description: The Monk Fashion – First, Scotch is combined with Chartreuse; then the mixture is sprayed with a peaty tincture and placed under a bell jar, which a bartender proceeds to pump full of wood smoke. It evokes the feeling of sprawling in front of an open fire, joyful with charred goodness. [Nicolas Niarchos, “Bar Tab: The Honeywell,” April 16, 2018]

Seven Memorable Lines:

1. The opportunity to see a warthog playing the harp doesn’t come along nearly as often as it should. [Anthony Lane, “Imaginary Kingdoms,” February 26, 2018]

2. One of the women found that her hand, smothered in deconstructed marshmallows, stuck unappealingly to her wineglass. [Elizabeth Barber, “Bar Tab: Camp,” May 14, 2018]

3. The traction system of social life is good at getting us going, and keeping us on the road, but it fails when we hit the figurative black ice—death—as eventually we all do. [John Seabrook, “Six Skittles,” April 9, 2018]

4. There’s something forlorn about the last run of a river trip, when you know it ends in a shuttle van rather than at a camp. [Nick Paumgarten, “Water and the Wall,” April 23, 2018] 

5. As a parent, I find that I spend a good amount of time talking about things that don’t interest me, like My Little Pony, or when we’re next having pasta, or death. [Rivka Galchen, “Mum’s the Word,” June 4 & 11, 2018]

6. “Let the Sunshine In” is said to be loosely based on Roland Barthes’s ‘A Lover’s Discourse’—very loosely, I would argue, in the same way that ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ was based on a branch of Home Depot. [Anthony Lane, “Cavalcade,” May 7, 2018]

7. He creates visual curios that look like art while dispensing with art’s pesky demands on thought, feeling, and perception. His works are aesthetic cryptocurrency. There are worse things in the world. [Peter Schjeldahl, “Art: Damien Hirst,” June 25, 2018]