December 20, 2021 Issue

Two excellent Talk stories in this week’s issue :

1. Ben McGrath’s “On the Waterfront,” a mini-profile of canoeist Neal Moore:

Moore was inspired to plot a twenty-two-month, seventy-five-hundred-mile journey that will conclude any day now, weather permitting, with a loop around the Statue of Liberty: twenty-two rivers, from the Columbia, near Astoria, Oregon, to the Hudson, with some portaging—or “schlepping,” as Moore likes to call it—over the Continental Divide and alongside the Erie Canal. 

Moore’s journey was inspired by the disappearance of fellow-canoeist Dick Conant. McGrath wrote memorably about Conant in his brilliant “The Wayfarer” (December 14, 20215), one of the best New Yorker reporting pieces of the past ten years. 

2.  Richard Preston’s “Hot Tub Drum Machine,” a wonderful account of the creation of an amazing set of steel drums. Here’s a sample:

After the drum cooled, Dunleavy said, he refined the notes, hitting the steel with an assortment of small hammers while he watched waveforms pulse on the display screen of a strobe tuner. He flipped the drum over frequently, hitting the bubbles alternately from the top and from the bottom: “ ‘I’m gonna get that note,’ you say to yourself.” Once in a while, Dunleavy climbed into the hot tub and soaked his aching deltoids. (“The hot tub is my secret weapon,” he explained.) It took him two weeks of obsessive hammering and regular hot-tub dips to bring thirty-eight chromatic notes to life from the bottoms of two hazmat barrels.

That last line is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of the best Talk stories of the year.