Best of 2019: Talk

João Fazenda's illustration for Adam Gopnik's "If You Listen"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Talk of the Town” stories of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Adam Gopnik, “If You Listen,” August 19, 2019 (“The vessels, placed on pedestals of different heights, are configured out of musical order, to emphasize their range and varied provenances. Beer walked among them. ‘This boat sings a G,’ he said, pointing at a Chinese dragon-boat vase. ‘This earthenware temple by William Wyman, from 1977, that’s a beautiful F, and this very early portrait bust by Gaston Lachaise is our A-flat’ ”).

2. Mark Singer, “Man vs. Mouse,” January 7, 2019 (“He arranged ‘a Maginot Line of glue traps’ and set out a pizza box with a mouse-size hole and, inside, pieces of mozzarella and pepperoni surrounded by glue traps. This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out”).

3. Paige Williams, “Boxes,” July 1, 2019 (“Schiffman plucked a Nikon from her backpack and started shooting—moody light at the bedroom windows, a bouquet of bodega roses”).

4. Ian Frazier, “Cookout,” September 30, 2019 (“Cicadas in the trees did their impersonations of various electrical appliances, hydrangea bushes in the yard burst into even more elaborate bloom, and the incoming sunlight, at a rate of a thousand watts per square metre, transformed into culinary heat, seemed to hum”).

5. Rachel Felder, “Avocado Al Dente,” October 28, 2019 (“Miguel Gonzalez wakes up just after 4 A. M. on most weekdays with one thing on his mind: avocados”).

6. Nicholas Schmidle, “The Anti-Perfect,” September 16, 2019 (“ ‘It’s too early for you,’ she scolded one empty can, its ball bearing rattling around inside it”).

7. Patricia Marx, “Viewing Party,” April 1, 2019 (“There, among the chintz furniture and cucumber sandwiches that could have come over on the Mayflower, was ‘1076 Madison,’ an exhibition of Cynthia Talmadge’s paintings depicting the Campbell building. The art works were displayed on easels that on other occasions had supported wreaths, photo collages, and, in one case, a deceased’s cherished dartboard”).

8. Mark Singer, “ ‘The Anti-“Godot,' " April 15, 2019 ("Lean and nimble, he has dark brown hair that aimed in various opposing directions, a horseshoe mustache, a graying goatee, and scruffy extra-in-a-saloon-scene cheeks”).

9. Ben McGrath, “Boom,” January 28, 2019 (“The best place to watch the Tappan Zee Bridge blow up, this past Tuesday, seemed to be slightly north of Lyndhurst, the old Jay Gould estate, in Tarrytown”).

10. Patricia Marx, “New Shade,” January 14, 2019 (“It was a clear morning—the sky was a shade of blue that resembled Benjamin Moore’s Icing on the Cake”).