2019 Year in Review

Leo Espinosa's illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "Unlike Any Other"

Three words sum up this year’s New Yorker: Paumgarten, Paumgarten, and Paumgarten. He had quite a run, producing three superb reporting pieces (“The Descent of Man,” “Unlike Any Other,” “The Message of Measles”) and a wonderful “Personal History” essay (“The Symptoms”). Here’s a sample from “The Descent of Man”:

My own “Holy shit, I’m in Kitzbühel” moment came on a Tuesday in January, earlier this year, after I stepped off the train at the base of the Hahnenkamm gondola. It was dusk. The town was still relatively quiet, in the absence of the eighty or so thousand fans who were expected to invade that weekend for the annual series of Alpine races and debauches. I glanced up and saw for the first time, shadow-blue and telephoto close, the final section of the Streif, where the racers, after soaring off a jump, come hauling across a steep, bumpy, fallaway traverse—legs burning, skis thrashing—and into the final plunge, the Zielschuss, reaching speeds of almost ninety miles an hour. I had been watching the race on television for decades, whenever and wherever I could find it, with a heart-in-throat intensity of devotion that embarrasses me, and this last hellbent stretch was always the emotional climax, the site of either life-threatening crackups or ecstatic finishes, amid the drunken, swaying throngs. And here it was, the empty stage, the star of the show. The course was marked off with blue food dye, which, in flat light, helps the skiers see the contours in the snow. Viewed in person, from below, the traverse looked narrower and steeper than it did on TV. From the angle of the course workers’ stance, as they tended to the slope in crampons, you’d have guessed that they were ice climbing. I walked up on the snow to the finish area. If the Streif was an idol, I was close enough to ask for an autograph.

  

Another writer who had a great year: Alexandra Schwartz. Her “Bounty Hunters,” an account of her experience working at the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, is one of my favorites. In addition, she wrote a marvellous profile of Miriam Toews ("Benefit of the Doubt") and several excellent critical pieces, including “Painted Love,” on the life of Picasso’s muse, Françoise Gilot, and “ ‘While I Live, I Remember’: Agnès Varda’s Way of Seeing.” Here’s an excerpt from her brilliant “Bounty Hunters”:

You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart.

The best piece of the year, for me, was Anne Boyer’s essay on cancer treatment, “The Undying.” What an extraordinary work! It fuses unmistakable, idiosyncratic, personal style with radical, original observation. Here’s a sample:

We are supposed to be legible as patients while navigating hospitals and getting treatment, and illegible as our actual, sick selves while going to work and taking care of others. Our actual selves must now wear the false heroics of disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery and smiling after it, too. We are supposed to be feisty, sexy, snarky women, or girls, or ladies, or whatever. Also, as the T-shirts for sale on Amazon suggest, we are always supposed to be able to tell cancer that “you messed with the wrong bitch!” In my case, however, cancer messed with the right bitch.

A special shout-out to Peter Schjeldahl – the magazine’s pre-eminent pleasure-giver, and one of my heroes. In addition to publishing one of this year’s most delectable books (Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light), he produced yet another run of marvellous exhibition reviews, including “Enigma Variations” (on Dana Schutz and Richard Deacon), “Modernism for All” (on Joan Miró), “Exposed” (on Garry Winogrand and Jeff Wall), “Not Waving” (on the Whitney Biennial), “Of Nature” (on Thomas Cole and Brice Marden), “Skin Deep” (on Pierre-Auguste Renoir), and “Heavy” (on Richard Serra) – all suffused with his love of textures, shapes, lines, light, and color. And then his terrific personal essay, “77 Sunset Me,” appeared earlier this month and blew me away. Here’s a taste:

I’m not in physical pain as I write, though I tire quickly and nap often. I have been receiving, every three weeks, an immunotherapy infusion—not chemo, and not a cure—which, at the outset, the doctor said had a thirty-five-per-cent chance of slowing the disease. (At those odds in Vegas, you’re broke within an hour, but in baseball you’re a cinch for the Hall of Fame.) A recent scan shows marked improvement, likely extending my prospect of survival. But I have to wonder if, whatever betides, I can stay upbeat in spirit. A thing about dying is that you can’t consult anyone who has done it. No rehearsals. No mulligans.

My highlight reel could go on and on. Instead, over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I loved most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another splendid year. I’d be lost without you. New Yorker without end, amen!