2021 in Review

Illustration from newyorker.com

Begin with a drink. I’ll have one of those Mumbai Mules that Hannah Goldfield mentions in her excellent “Tables For Two: Bollywood Kitchen” (March 1, 2021): “vodka, ginger beer, and fresh lime juice, punched up with ground coriander and cumin and shaken over ice.” Mm, fucking delicious! Okay, let’s roll! 

First highlight: John Seabrook’s “Zero-Proof Therapy.” What a piece! It’s about Seabrook’s “raging non-alcoholism,” and his discovery of a great zero-alcoholic beer called Run Wild. It begins in the bar of the Atlantic Brewing Company, Stratford, Connecticut:

Behind the bar, Bill Shufelt, a thirty-eight-year-old former hedge-fund trader, who co-founded Athletic in 2017, drew me a pint of Two Trellises, one of the company’s seasonal N.A. brews—a hazy I.P.A. that he and the other co-founder, John Walker, Athletic’s forty-one-year-old head brewer, were test-batching. I had not raised a pint drawn from a keg since I quit drinking alcohol, exactly one thousand eight hundred and eighty-eight days earlier. The glass seemed to fit my palm like a key.

That “The glass seemed to fit my palm like a key” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – a perfect blend of the personal and the reportorial. I enjoyed it enormously. 

Highlight #2: John McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2.” Great to see the Master still producing at age ninety. This piece is a beauty, containing, among other arresting items, the story of how McPhee became a New Yorker writer. If you’re an aspiring writer racked by self-doubt, you should read this piece. In McPhee’s words, it’s a “chronicle of rejection as a curable disease.” It begins, improbably, with a seventeenth century Dutch ship called the Tyger, and ends in the office of William Shawn. Other ingredients: sand hogs, basketball, the Twin Towers, the Tower of London, Jackie Gleason, Bill Bradley, and lunch with the legendary Esquire editor, Harold Hayes. How does it all connect? You’ll have to read it and see. It’s quite a story!    

Speaking of greats, Janet Malcolm died this year, age eighty-six. She’s one of my lodestars. I love her unique blend of sharp-eyed journalism and sharp-tongued criticism. Many of her pieces are in my personal anthology of great New Yorker writing, including “Depth of Field,” “Performance Artist,” “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” and her extraordinary “The Silent Woman.” I’ll miss her. 

Highlight #3 is the wonderful art criticism of Peter Schjeldahl; seventeen splendid pieces this year. Among my favorites: “Movements of One” (“Morandi drains our seeing of complacency. He occults the obvious”); “Home Goods” (“Ordinary things in the world interested Chardin. That doesn’t sound rare, but, oh, it is”); and “A Trip to the Fair” (“He created this work in the dark with slathered silver nitrate, silver oxide, silver iodide, and silver bromide. Exposed to light, the strokes resolved into a filmy gestural cadenza: quietly ferocious, if such is imaginable, like superimposed eddies in a whipping windstorm”).

And while we’re at it, let’s give a huzzah for my favorite section of the magazine – “Goings On About Town” – a weekly smorgasbord of delectable mini-reviews of, among other things, art shows, movies, music, and restaurants. I devour it! For me, the most challenging “Top Ten” list is always “Best of GOAT”; there's so much to choose from, it’s tough boiling it down.

Other highlights: Rivka Galchen’s “Better Than a Balloon,” Gary Shteyngart’s “My Gentile Region,” Ann Patchett’s “Flight Plan,” Heidi Julavits’s “The Fire Geyser,” and Ed Caesar’s “Only Disconnect” – all crazy good! 

But that’s enough for now. Over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I enjoyed most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another glorious year of reading bliss.