Best of 2020: newyorker.com

Photo by Deanna Dikeman, from Erin Orbey's "A Photographer's Parents Wave Farewell"

Here are my favourite newyorker.com posts of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Eren Orbey’s “A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell,” March 4, 2020 (“Each image reiterates the quiet loyalty of her parents’ tradition. They recede into the warm glow of the garage on rainy evenings and laugh under the eaves in better weather. In summer, they blow kisses from the driveway. In winter, they wear scarves and stand behind snowbanks. Inevitably, they age”).

2. Emma Cline’s “Mike Mandel’s Selfies from the Seventies,” October 12, 2020 (“When Mandel pressed the timer, placing himself among the lives of strangers, it was the photographic equivalent of a toss of the coins in I Ching: you ask the universe to reveal itself; you await the universe’s answer”).

3. Helen Rosner’s “What We’re Buying for the Quarantine,” March 18, 2020 (photographs by Dina Litovsky).

Photo by Dina Litovsky, from Helen Rosner's "What We"re Buying for the Quarantine"

4. Rachel Syme’s “The Queen’s Gambit Is the Most Satisfying Show on Television,” November 13, 2020 (“But for me the glamour of the series is another of its quiet subversions. In life and on screen, chess is considered the domain of hoary men in moth-eaten cardigans, playing in smoky gymnasia that reek of stale coffee. ‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ instead, finds an unlikely synergy between the heady interiority of chess and the sensual realm of style”).

5. Andy Friedman’s “The Return of Kathleen Edwards,” August 8, 2020.

Illustration by Andy Friedman, from his "The Return of Kathleen Edwards"

6. Charlotte Mendelson’s “Sunflowers, with Love and Hate,” October 7, 2020 (“My sunflowers, grown from seed and standing proud among my dumpy black-currant bushes and rampaging mint, do rather dominate my garden”).

7. Maeve Dunigan’s “Poems Edgar Allan Poe Wrote While Lost In a Corn Maze,” October 30, 2020 (“Melancholy is the man / Who enters corn without a plan”).

8. Charles McGrath’s “Remembering Daniel Menaker, A Lighthearted Champion of His Writers,” October 29, 2020 (“Dan cared passionately about his writers. He defended them against what he thought was The New Yorker’s overly rigid house style, and sometimes preserved their eccentricities just for their own sake”).

9. Johanna Fateman's "The Photographer Who Set Out to Watch Herself Age," December 16, 2020 ("The shutter's cable release is like a part of her always in hand, its dark tail trailing out of the frame").

10. Chris Wiley’s “A Photographer and an Inmate Exchange Ways of Seeing,” December 13, 2020 (“At the heart of Soth and Cabrera’s connection is art: art as a container of meaning, a honing steel for the sensibilities, a lodestar for living”).