Best of 2022: The Critics

Illustration by Toma Vagner, from Anthony Lane's "Living for the City"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out,” May 16, 2022 (“Gorgeous? Oh, yeah.” | “Swift strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so, as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery, blue water and sky, and orangish flesh”);

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “All Together Now,” April 11, 2022 (“Red Abstract / fragment” (1968-69) is a lyrical verse text typewritten on a brushy red ground and scribbled with restive cross-outs, revisions, and notes. Its meanings dance at the edge of comprehension, but with infectious improvisatory rhythms.” | “Where art is concerned, death need be no more than an inconvenience, and, as in the case of Pritchard, being all but invisible may turn out to have been merely a speed bump”);

3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Scaling Up,” June 13, 2022 [“The distinguishing test, for me, is scale, irrespective of size: all a work’s elements and qualities (even including negative space) must be snugged into its framing edges to consolidate a specific, integral object—present to us, making us present to itself—rather than a more or less diverting handmade picture.” | “Inexhaustibly surprising smears, blotches, fugitive lines, and incomplete patterns feel less applied than turned loose, to tell enigmatic stories of their own”);

4. Peter Schjeldahl, “Dutch Magus,” October 3, 2022 [“Janssen’s expert citations of parallels in music for Mondrian’s art are a treat and a revelation for a musical doofus like me. Janssen likens the artist’s frequent motif, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, of paired horizontal black bands to the bass line running under the saxophone cadenzas of Armstrong’s group and others. (Thereby alerted, I see and spectrally hear it.) If, in Janssen’s telling, one dynamic recurs throughout Mondrian’s aesthetic adventuring, it is rhythm, incipient even in his youthful renderings from nature. Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral. Thought, if any was needed, followed touch”];

5. Peter Schjeldahl, “Stilled Life,” October 10, 2022 (“Then there are the still-lifes of remarkably unremarkable windowsill miscellanies: some random fruit and bits of studio gear transfigured by a happenstance of daylight”); 

6. James Wood, “By the Collar," April 11, 2022 (“These public events have the irresistible tang of the actual, and around them O’Toole—who has had a substantial career as a journalist, a political commentator, and a drama critic—beautifully tells the private story of his childhood and youth. But because the events really happened, because they are part of Ireland’s shameful, sometimes surreal postwar history, they also have the brutishly obstructive quality of fact, often to be pushed against, fought with, triumphed over, or, in O’Toole’s preferred mode of engagement, analyzed into whimpering submission. His great gift is his extremely intelligent, mortally relentless critical examination, and here he studies nothing less than the past and the present of his own nation”);

7. Anthony Lane, “Living for the City,” February 14 & 21, 2022 (“ 'The Worst Person in the World' strikes me as believable, beautiful, roving, annoying, and frequently good for a laugh. Like most of Trier’s work, it also takes you aback with its sadness, which hangs around, after the story is over, like the smoke from a snuffed candle”);

8. Alex Ross, “Moonlight,” January 31, 2022 (“Chopin’s Nocturne No. 7, in C-sharp minor, begins with a low, ashen sound: a prowling arpeggio in the left hand, consisting only of C-sharps and G-sharps. It’s a hollowed-out harmony, in limbo between major and minor. Three bars in, the right hand enters on E, seemingly establishing minor, but a move to E-sharp clouds the issue, pointing toward major. Although the ambiguity dissipates in the measures that follow, a nimbus of uncertainty persists. Something even eerier happens in the tenth bar. The melody abruptly halts on the leading tone of B-sharp while the left hand gets stuck in another barren pattern—this one incorporating the notes D, A, and C-sharp. It’s almost like a glitch, a frozen screen. Then comes a moment of wistful clarity: an immaculate phrase descends an octave, with a courtly little turn on the fourth step of the scale. It is heard only once more before it disappears. I always yearn in vain for the tune’s return: a sweetly murmuring coda doesn’t quite make up for its absence. Ultimate beauty always passes too quickly”);

9. Merve Emre, "Getting to Yes," February 14 & 21, 2022 ("From these two sentences, a whole history of literature beckons - a sudden blooming of forms and genres, authors and periods, languages and nations. Why is 'dressingown,' like 'scrotumtightening,' a single retracting word, as if English were steadying itself to transform into German?");

 10. James Wood, "The Numbers Game," December 19, 2022 ("There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCarthy’s prose—roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them"). 

Best of 2022: Photos

Mila Teshaieva, Bridge Over Irpin River (2022)

Here are my favorite New Yorker photos of 2022:

1. Mila Teshaieva's photo for Keith Gessen's "How the War in Ukraine Might End," September 29, 2022 (see above);

2. Dina Litovsky's photo for Helen Rosner's "We Watch the News and We're Crying" (March 8, 2022);

3. James Nachtwey's photo for his "A Harrowed Land" (May 9, 2022);

4. Mark Neville's photo for his "Days of War" (March 7, 2022);

5. Peter Fisher's photo for "Goings On About Town" (August 8, 2022);

6. Jérôme Sessini's photo for Masha Gessen's "The Devastation of Kharkiv" (March 22, 2022);

7. Philip Montgomery's photo for his "Blade Runners" (November 28, 2022);

8. Paul S. Amundsen's photo for Rebecca Mead's "Norwegian Wood" (April 25 & May 2, 2022);

9. Daniel Berehulak's photo for Luke Mogelson's "Everyone Is a Target" (August 1, 2022);

10. Eric Helgas's photo for Shauna Lyon's "Tables For Two: El Quijote" (June 6, 2022).

Best of 2022: newyorker.com

Photo by Curran Hatleberg, from Joy Williams's "Curran Hatleberg's Florida, Past and Future"

Here are my favourite newyorker.com posts of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Joy Williams, “Curran Hatleberg’s Florida, Past and Future,” August 5, 2022 ("There was stasis; there was silence. Something happened, and then it was as if nothing had transpired after all. Photographs, by their very nature, can capture this frightening, fulsome dichotomy, and the best photographers can capture it again and again. This is Hatleberg’s talent. His images only appear to be forthright, to lack interiority. The depths are all on the surface. The depths have risen to the surface. The photographs testify not so much to “time’s relentless melt” (Susan Sontag’s phrase) as to time’s immutability, containing at once both future and past. Within each moment rests the aftermath." | "There is beer, and there are bees bearding the faces of men; there is a peeling painted sign offering honey, but there is no honey." | "The photo is beautifully composed—the youth’s slim torso, the light on his face, the young woman’s crisp and haughty profile—but what curiously engages us is the pine-tree air freshener on the rearview mirror." | "The standing water in these photographs is its own signifier. The water reflected in Hatleberg’s eye, in the world he is chronicling, is slack, slick with torpor. It lies on the compacted soil of the junk yard and the cement steps of homes. Its oily sheen coats the alleys and the marshes. Only once does it appear fresh, alive, sustaining the figure borne on the river at peace, as if in a dear dream");

2. Naomi Fry, “The Humans of Daniel Arnold’s New York,” January 29, 2022 ("The photographer Daniel Arnold is eerily adept at capturing perfect moments in his pictures, although “perfect,” in his case, doesn’t mean glossy or unblemished. Arnold’s work often traffics in the quotidian and the flawed, the discordant and the mottled; to him, perfection means locating beauty in what might otherwise be overlooked." | "These figures are not conventionally lovely, and yet Arnold is able to make striking images out of scenes that would otherwise fleet by, unnoticed." | "Each portrait is marked by its own seamless if precariously achieved internal logic: the pate of the old man is ringed by oddly spiky strands of white hair, which glint in the sun like a ghostly halo; the jeweller in the window is observed, as if he were an outsized mannequin, by a bystander outside the shop, and the store’s name—Shine Jewelry—seems to echo the purpose of the cleaning fluid at the man’s side; the puffy lips of the woman on her phone clash visually with the lowered lids of her heavily made-up eyes, making her face a sculptural contrast of protrusion and recession." | "It didn’t take long for him to hone his signature style: street portraits whose often-humble subjects are portrayed with a startling formal prowess." | "Arnold chronicles the interstitial weirdness of the city and the people in it, who are often too caught up in the busy stream of existence to pause and reflect on their lives");

3. Alice Driver, “The Impersonal Intimacy of Mexico’s Commuter Buses,” February 18, 2020 ("We begin the journey in a field, looking from afar at two empty buses, their blue-lit interiors glowing against the backdrop of a starless sky. When Cartagena boards his bus, we find ourselves peering out the window at other commuters, who appear trapped under the harsh glare of headlights while they wait for the bus to stop. In these predawn images, the vehicle’s lights cast an artificial lustre over passing people and cars, transforming oranges stacked in a truck bed into a mass of glowing orbs. The photographer shifts his gaze inside, and we’re now nestled among the passengers, like the fruit in the truck." | "As the city emerges, the passengers, stuck in traffic, look out at mobile billboards on the sides of other buses. The advertisements feature light-skinned women selling clothing, shoes, and feminine products. When the sun rises through the window, it feels banal, almost like another billboard");

4. Vince Aletti, “Alec Soth’s Obsessive Ode to Image-Making,” February 1, 2022, ("Soth has often invited us into his process, but, perhaps because it involves obsession, 'A Pound of Pictures' is more revealing than his earlier books. Working on it, he writes, reminded him of when he “first fell in love with photography. The camera was an excuse to wander and dig. | But, once the funeral train idea was put aside, Soth said in the course of a recent walk-through at Sean Kelly, he felt that he could 'liberate' himself simply by “paying attention to what I see”);

5. Kevin Dettmar, "What Drive My Car Reveals On Second Viewing," March 23, 2022 ("Sometimes these intertextual echoes simply provide grace notes. Early in the film, Kafuku is diagnosed with glaucoma in his left eye and prescribed eye drops to reduce the ocular pressure. The first time we see him use them, he’s been driving around Tokyo, staying away from his home, avoiding the talk that his wife has requested—and which he fears will signal the end of, or at least a cataclysmic change in, their relationship. In the parked car, his cassette tape plays, and Chekhov’s Sonya, voiced by his wife Oto, is in the midst of her closing monologue: 'And when our last hour comes we’ll go quietly. And in the great beyond we’ll say to Him that we suffered, that we cried, that life was hard.' And there’s Kafuku, with tears of prescription eye drops rolling down his cheek");

6. Joshua Yaffa, “War Comes to Kyiv,” February 26, 2022 ("It is clear that Russia’s invasion has little to do with the unresolved war in the Donbass, which had been seen as an obvious pretext, and is instead focussed on regime change. To remove Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and install a pliant, pro-Russia replacement, however, requires taking the capital." | "We pulled up to an apartment block on Lobanovskyi Prospect, a wide boulevard in the city’s southwest. At 8 a.m., a missile strike had torn through the building’s right side, leaving a three-story gash in its façade. Chunks of concrete and iron swayed in the breeze; every now and then, a piece of rubble crashed noisily onto the asphalt below. Glass dusted the street for blocks." | "We came to an overpass not far from the zoo, where Ukrainian soldiers had apparently repelled an attempt by Russian forces to infiltrate an advance force and weapons supply deep into the city. It was, by any measure, a terrible scene. Two burned-out shells of military vehicles stood prone in the street, with burn marks and shards of metal and glass trailing for half a mile. Twisted remains of explosive shells dotted the road. On the pavement, I saw pieces of what I thought might be flesh but tried not to pay too much attention");

7. Keith Gessen, “The One Place in Lviv Where the War Was Never Far Away,” March 29, 2022 ("In Lviv, on the western edge of Ukraine, most of the time the war felt very far away. Its shadow appeared, fleetingly, in the beautiful old cavernous Greek Catholic churches throughout the city, where people filled the pews and wept, and the priests, who perform the Byzantine liturgy in Ukrainian, called for God to protect the nation from its enemies; and in the basements and hallways and underground parking garages where people sheltered during the frequent air-raid sirens, most often at night; and in the old city after 8 p.m., when the curfew was approaching and all the many small restaurants and cafés closed; and in the many schools and nonprofits that had been turned into shelters for the people fleeing the bombing in the east of the country; but, still, most of the time, during the fourth week of the war, people in Lviv followed the bloodshed in the same way that everyone else in the world did: on television." | "At the station, the trains kept coming and people kept spilling out of them: dislocated, terrified, traumatized. | Every hour, a train arrived in the station from the east and disgorged a large group of women and children. It was only women and children, because men were not allowed out of the country, and, anyway, most of the men had chosen to stay home to fight. The names of the places that families were fleeing—Sumy, Kramatorsk, Kharkiv—created a kind of map of the worst fighting, delayed by a couple days, because that’s how long it took them to arrive");

8. Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege of Chernihiv,” April 15, 2022 ("On March 3rd, Russian aircraft streaked overhead and dropped at least eight bombs that slammed into a group of apartment buildings on Viacheslava Chornovola Street, in the center of town. A line of people had formed at a pharmacy nearby—with medicine in short supply, the news of an open pharmacy had led dozens to run over as quickly as they could. Those standing outside were left a gruesome pile of flesh and limbs and ash. Cement walls crumbled into pieces; window glass shattered into a mist that left people cut and bloodied in their apartments. Whole floors collapsed, crushing those underneath. Forty-seven people were killed, making the bombing among the most deadly single attacks of the entire war." | "It was a gray, drizzling morning when I pulled up to the site of the attack. What was once the pharmacy was now a burnt-out shell of red brick. One building had taken a direct hit, leaving an entire wall ripped open, with apartments inside exposed like a doll house. I passed the charred hulls of half a dozen cars, and walked into a courtyard. A giant crater, perhaps ten feet across and more than six feet deep, appeared, as if someone had taken a giant ice-cream scoop to the earth. International investigators, including those from Amnesty International, concluded that the Russian Air Force used FAB-500 bombs in the attack—unguided, Soviet-era munitions that each weigh more than a thousand pounds").

9. Luke Mogelson, “Collecting Bodies in Bucha,” April 6, 2022 ("At the end of Havryliuk’s street, a number of corpses had been severely burned beside a garbage pile. It was hard to say how many there were—charred legs and torsos were severed and scattered—but one victim appeared to be a woman, another a child or an adolescent. Orphaned cats and dogs sniffed around the parts. Several people reported that Russians had brought the bodies on a tank, dumped them, and lit them on fire." | "The relentless fighting in Bucha had hindered Matiuk and his team from conducting their work, and he told me that, since the Russian retreat, they had picked up about three hundred corpses. He estimated that at least a hundred had had their hands tied behind their back. When I asked him where in town he’d encountered such cases, he replied, 'Everywhere' ");

10. Keith Gessen, “How the War in Ukraine Might End,” September 29, 2022 (" 'For a war to end,' Goemans said, 'the minimum demands of at least one of the sides must change.' This is the first rule of war termination. And we have not yet reached a point where war aims have changed enough for a peace deal to be possible. | He saw a future in which Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire and then gradually turned itself into a “military hedgehog,” a prickly country that no one would want to invade").

Best of 2022: Illustrations

Patrick Leger, End of the Road (2022)

Here are my favorite New Yorker illustrations of 2022:

1. Patrick Leger's illustration for Ian Parker's "End of the Road," November 14, 2022 (see above);

2. Nada Hayek's illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "Five O'Clock Everywhere" (March 28, 2022);

3. Josh Cochran's illustration for Andrea K. Scott's "Fall Art Preview" (August 15, 2022);

4. Sergiy Maidukov's illustration for his "Postcard from Kyiv" (January 31, 2022);

5. Toma Vagner's illustration for Anthony Lane's "Living for the City" (February 14 & 21, 2022);

6. Wesley Allsbrook's illustration for Elizabeth Kolbert's "A Vast Experiment" (November 28, 2022);

7. Carnovsky's illustration for Rivka Galchen's "Change of Heart" (February 28, 2022);

8. Bill Bragg's illustration for Merve Emre's "Getting to Yes" (February 14 & 21, 2022);

9. Klauss Kremmerz's illustration for Jill Lepore's "Moving Right Along" (July 25, 2022);

10. Adam Carvalho's illustration for Anthony Lane's "Restless" (April 18, 2022).

Best of 2022: Talk

Illustration by João Fazenda, from Laura Preston's "Pipe Dreams"

Here are my favourite “Talk of the Town” pieces of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Laura Preston, "Pipe Dreams," August 22, 2022 (("Duddy, who has a head of white hair and the slow, smooth baritone of a radio broadcaster, was tapping away at the Stentor Sesquialtera rank, then blowing air through the pipes to see how they sang."| "He pries open the lips with a sculptor’s spatula and taps the toe with a tiny hammer. He uses a headlamp to peer down long pipes, and shoves a jeweller’s ring gauge up the toe hole. All the rest is in the ear."| "The sixty-four-foot Diaphone-Dulzian rank is made from enough sugar pine to build a house, and it produces a quintuple low C, a subharmonic tone that sounds like a chopper circling the building");

2. Laura Preston, “Incidental Masterpieces,” April 4, 2022 ("Among the possible masterpieces being prepared for sale at the Found Object Show were a fragment of a birdhouse; a tar bucket; an electrified toilet seat; a piece of wire from a fence made woolly by escaping sheep; a handmade massage device; a braille bingo board; a pouch of nineteenth-century cheese; a hunk of Styrofoam that looked like nineteenth-century cheese; a street sign reading 'Alone Ave.'; a false beard made of real golden hair; a pile of rubber pocket watches; a pork salesman’s pig-shaped suitcase; a magician’s trick ball; a washing-machine agitator shaped like human hands; a hundred-year-old brick impressed with an animal’s footprint; a forgotten softball grown furry with moss; a copper diving helmet that imploded under immense pressure; and a chicken farmer’s handmade wooden shoes, designed to leave spurious bobcat tracks around coops");

3. Adam Iscoe, “Loyalists,” September 19, 2022 ["2:12 p.m. One exchange: Elena Saldana, an apron-clad woman behind the shop’s counter who has worked at the shop for twenty-five years, said, 'What can I get you?' A bespectacled Brit named Harry King, who has been a hairdresser for celebrities and common people in London and New York, replied, 'A tissue.' Two almost-laughs. One Scotch egg bought by King. 'I haven’t had one in years,' he said. 'I’ll sit and have a little cry eating it watching the telly before I go to the gym.' | 2:15 p.m. More than two dozen white roses, hydrangeas, sweet peas, and orchids; lots of Union Jack bunting; a few commemorative plates; and one framed photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, all placed in the store window—pushing aside a few dozen jars of Haywards Traditional Onions (flavor: Medium & Tangy), Heinz Sandwich Spread (original), Baxters Sliced Beetroot (“suitable for vegans”), Batchelors Bigga Marrowfat peas ('No. 1 in UK'), and Marmite. Not pushed aside: one urn holding Archie’s ashes"];

4. Nick Paumgarten and Sarah Larson, “We Want the Cup,” May 23, 2022 ("One suture on the bowl’s lip was the result of its being dropped last year by a Tampa grinder named Pat Maroon") ;

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Night Off," November 7, 2022 (“The hockey: someone had got the Gizz a box at Madison Square Garden, for a Rangers-Sharks game. That night, about twenty of them—band, crew, assorted friends—came in hot. In the second period, the jumbotron caught them mugging for the camera, a melee of mustaches. Later, back in Brooklyn, the festivities went deep. A cry from the stage in Queens the following eve: ‘New York City, you fucked us up last night!’ The band’s set felt like a retaliation”); 

6. Adam Iscoe, “Incognito,” October 10, 2022 (“The bassist for the band Khruangbin, Laura Lee, who uses the showbiz moniker Leezy, stepped outside her apartment in Brooklyn. Her pink nails matched her eyeshadow and the roses on her flowered shirt, which she wore with cleanish white Converses, Levi’s, and a fifteen-ninety-nine black wig that she didn’t buy on Amazon”); 

7. Joshua Yaffa, “Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter,” March 14, 2022 ("After ten, the lights in the station dimmed. People packed up their food and rolled out sleeping bags, the white glow of phone screens casting flickering shadows on the walls of the train car. I crawled into my folded-up blanket, and felt the cold floor beneath me. The muffled rumble of nearby snores felt almost reassuring, a reminder of all the humanity gathered so tightly together. A woman offered me a pillow");

8. David Remnick, “Postscript: Peter Schjeldahl,” October 31, 2022 (“He was someone who, after being lost for a time, knew some things about survival. We met more than twenty years ago. I was looking to hire a full-time art critic. I’d read him for years in the Village Voice. And a voice is what he always had: distinct, clear, funny. A poet’s voice—epigrammatic, nothing wasted”); 

9. Dan Greene, “Stunted Growth,” December 5, 2022 (“He’d brought along his fiancée, the production designer and stylist Lux Wright, and their latte-colored service dog, Wendy, who’d walked in docilely on a gray Ultimate Fighting Championship collar and leash”);

10. David Remnick, “First and Last,” September 12, 2022 (“Gorbachev, of course, made mistakes, serious ones. He tried, for too long, to reconcile irreconcilable ideas and power bases. He failed to reform the K.G.B., which led a coup against him, in August, 1991. And so on. Yet he possessed both the idealism and the political skill to generate something in the world that is, at this dark historical moment of global illiberalism and malevolence, exceedingly rare: a sense of decency and promise. Here was someone raised in a totalitarian system who came to believe in democracy, the rule of law, and the peaceful and orderly transfer of power. Imagine. The hope is that, around the world, his example will prevail”).

Best of 2022: GOAT

Photo by Kenyon Anderson, from Jiayang Fan's "Tables For Two: Gugu Room"

Here are my favourite “Goings On About Town” notes of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: All’ Antico Vinaio,” April 25 & May 2, 2022 (“Towering stacks of schiacciata emerged from the basement at regular intervals, shiny with olive oil and sparkling with coarse salt, releasing clouds of steam from a dense landscape of air bubbles as the loaves were sliced horizontally, ends slivered off and passed to patiently waiting customers”); 

2. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Kate Millett,” February 28, 2022 (“The quasi-functional sculptures—tables, chairs, cabinets, a bed—are anthropomorphized domestic objects, in which found elements combine with others that were hand-carved or upholstered by the artist. Millett’s not quite figures are at once goofy and strange. Fluted or cabriole legs alternate with puppet-like limbs; a slatted chair back, painted bright red, is inset with a pair of blue eyes; a china cabinet is topped by a smooth wooden head. In ‘Blue-Eyed Marble Box,’ from 1965, an undercurrent of perversity surfaces: a Queen Anne coffee table forms the base of a blocky centauride, whose rectangular torso is pierced by rolling-pin finial nipples”); 

3. Richard Brody, “Movies: Show People,” August 8, 2022 (“Winking cameos abound: Davies takes a second role, as herself; Vidor plays himself, too; Charlie Chaplin, slight and exquisite, brings a Shakespearean grace to his self-portrayal as a humble moviegoer; and a long tracking shot of stars at a studio banquet table plays like a cinematic death row, displaying such luminaries as Renée Adorée, William S. Hart, and Mae Murray, just before they were swept away in waves of sound”);

4. Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: Rosella,” January 31, 2022 (“For dessert, you can have that American favorite, carrot cake, here on the verge of savory, fortified with sunchoke miso and garnished with candied orange peel and marigold flowers. The cake is scooped into a bowl, its sides smeared with a generous whoosh of scrumptious white frosting. The star ingredient? The cult favorite Ben’s cream cheese, from Rockland County, just up the road”);

5. Andrea K. Scott, “At the Galleries: 'Court, Epic, Spirit,' ” February 28, 2022 (“Ask for a magnifying glass at the front desk, the better to lose yourself in the details: a pearl-and-gold piercing in an elephant’s ear at the coronation of Rama; a peacock in a tree overlooking a gang of drug-addled sadhus; the gray-flecked beard of 'A Man of Commanding Presence.' There are decorative flourishes, too, including a tall cotton panel intricately printed with flora and fauna in crimson and green, used to line what must have been a magnificent tent, pitched for royalty on the Coromandel Coast in the mid-seventeenth century—glampers, take note”);

6. Rachel Syme, “On Television: ‘The Resort,’ ” August 1, 2022 [“ ‘The Resort,’ a splashy new streaming offering from Peacock and the creator Andy Siara (‘Palm Springs’), feels like a slushy beach drink made in a blender using parts of other recent shows: take a dash of ‘White Lotus’ (for the tropical hotel setting), add a shake of ‘Nine Perfect Strangers’ (for the air of campy, unhinged mystery among the palm trees), and top it off with the likes of ‘The Flight Attendant’ or ‘The Afterparty’ (for their good old-fashioned, soapy murder mysteries). But just because this show is a piña colada of frothy ideas doesn’t mean it isn’t satisfying. The charm-oozing stars Cristin Milioti and William Jackson Harper play a couple on vacation in Mexico who become unwittingly embroiled in solving a crime that took place there years before. The cast is chock-full of shimmery character actors—Skyler Gisondo, Debby Ryan, Nick Offerman, Ben Sinclair, Becky Ann Baker, Dylan Baker—and the twists and turns are tense enough to keep you glued to the screen on a sweltering day. Think ‘Romancing the Stone’ meets a bottle of S.P.F. 50—this is made for high-summer bingeing”];

7. Vince Aletti, “In the Museums: ‘William Klein: YES,’ ” August 29, 2022 (“Klein’s best pictures are cinematic character studies, with every face and every figure singular, animated, and vividly present for his camera—a gaggle of kids with baseball cards and bubble blowers, a sidewalk full of distracted businessmen, a dapper young man sprinting through Harlem”);

8. Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: Gugu Room,” September 12, 2022 (“The most persuasive dishes unapologetically layer richness upon richness.” |”Around the room, skewers of meat were being delivered at a fast pace, some rapturously waved into the frames of gleeful selfies”);

9. Michaelangelo Matos, “Music: The Black Dog: ‘Brutal Minimalism,’ ” February 14 & 21, 2022 (“The grainy, gray-toned percussion, redolent of cracked concrete walls, and the low-mixed chimes, like faraway train signals, add to the verisimilitude. Even when the beats come forward, they amplify the background details”);

10. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Queens Lanka,” August 1, 2022 (“A plate of “rice and curry,” one recent afternoon, included four varieties of the latter—made with yellow dal, or split peas; batons of beetroot, almost chocolate-like in their melty richness; jackfruit; and pineapple—in addition to a tantalizing tangle of sticky-sweet deep-fried sprats, and a version of a traditional relish called gotu kola sambol, with finely chopped kale, red onion, and tomato.” | “A lush, enormous banana leaf was folded carefully around a tightly packed pie chart of delights, over rice: slippery, soft curried cashews; dark, crispy snips of zippy batu moju, or fried-eggplant pickle; seeni sambol, a relish of supple tamarind-and-chili-glazed shallots; a fluffy curried-mackerel-and-potato fritter”).

2022 in Review

Illustration by Seb Agresti, from John McPhee's "Tabula Rasa 3"

Begin with a drink. In tribute to the brave people of Ukraine, I’ll have one of those borscht Martinis that Talia Lavin wrote about a few years ago: “Best and strangest of all is the borscht Martini—beet vodka and dill vodka, sprinkled with Himalayan pink salt and crushed herbs, a pungent, tangy punch in a frosty glass. It’s easy to down one after another, licking the salt from the rim” (“Bar Tab: Anyway Café,” April 30, 2018). Mm, that hits the spot! Slava Ukraini! 

The top story of 2022 was Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. The New Yorker covered it superbly, publishing at least a dozen pieces, including Masha Gessen’s “The Devastation of Kharkiv, Ukraine” (March 22, 2022), Jane Ferguson's "A Search for Survival Outside Kyiv" (March 15, 2022), Keith Gessen’s “The One Place in Lviv Where the War Was Never Far Away” (March 29, 2022), Joshua Yaffa’s “The Siege of Chernihiv” (April 15, 2022), Luke Mogelson’s “Collecting Bodies in Bucha” (April 6, 2022), and David Kortava’s “In the Filtration Camps,” October 10, 2022. I devoured them. If I had to recommend just one, it would be Luke Mogelson’s brilliant “The Wound-Dressers” (May 9, 2022). Here’s a sample:

To prevent the Russians from penetrating Kyiv, the Ukrainians had destroyed the main bridge over the fast-moving Irpin River. Several buildings on the south side of the river had been hit by Russian shells, which had also killed some fleeing civilians. To the north, explosions sounded and smoke filled the sky above another nearby suburb, Bucha. Russian forces had stalled there, and waves of residents were now arriving—abandoning their vehicles at the edge of the caved-in bridge, clambering down a high embankment, and crossing the icy currents on a treacherous walkway composed of pallets and scrap lumber. Passenger buses idled, ready to bring displaced Ukrainians to downtown Kyiv. People advanced single file, lugging bags and suitcases; some hugged dogs, cats, or babies to their chests. Elderly men and women with canes and walkers staggered haltingly over the rickety planks.

For me, the #1 literary story of the year was the loss of Peter Schjeldahl. He died October 21, 2022, age eighty. He’s one of this blog’s touchstones. Click on his name in the “Labels” section, and you’ll find 138 references to his writing. Schjeldahl spun his special brand of magic right to the end. Here’s an excerpt from his wonderful “Dutch Magus” (October 3, 2022), a delectable review of Hans Janssen’s Piet Mondrian: A Life:

Janssen’s expert citations of parallels in music for Mondrian’s art are a treat and a revelation for a musical doofus like me. Janssen likens the artist’s frequent motif, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, of paired horizontal black bands to the bass line running under the saxophone cadenzas of Armstrong’s group and others. (Thereby alerted, I see and spectrally hear it.) If, in Janssen’s telling, one dynamic recurs throughout Mondrian’s aesthetic adventuring, it is rhythm, incipient even in his youthful renderings from nature. Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral. Thought, if any was needed, followed touch.

That “Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral” is inspired! 

Another highlight this year was the appearance of Volume 3 of John McPhee’s on-going personal history “Tabula Rasa.” These pieces are ingenious assemblages of time and space – memories interwoven with story ideas that McPhee never got around to developing. For example, in Volume 3, there’s a wonderful section called “Citrus, Booze, and Ah Bing” that begins with how he came to write his 1967 classic, Oranges, segues to a fascinating account of a 2004 road trip he took in central Kentucky, checking out distilleries (“Driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries is a good way of getting to know the state, and it beats the hell out of horses”), and ends with a visit to an Okanagan Bing cherry orchard (“Dessicated. Lovely. Irrigation-green. Trees punctuated with deep-red dots”). If you relish McPhee’s writing, as I do, you’re sure to enjoy this latest “Tabula Rasa” instalment. 

One of my favourite New Yorker writers, Rivka Galchen, had a great year, producing three marvellous pieces – “Change of Heart” (February 22, 2022), “Who Will Fight With Me?” (October 3, 2022), and “Sound Affects” (October 17, 2022). “Who Will Fight With Me?” is a fond remembrance of her father. Here’s an excerpt:

It would have been difficult for him if he had been vain, because he didn’t buy any of his own clothes, or really anything, not even postage stamps. Whenever there were clearance sales at the Dillard’s at the Sooner Fashion Mall, my mom and I would page through the folded button-up shirts, each in its cardboard sleeve, the way other kids must have flipped through LPs at record stores. We were looking for the rare and magical neck size of 17.5. If we found it, we bought it, regardless of the pattern. Button-ups were the only kind of shirts he wore, apart from the Hanes undershirts he wore beneath them. Even when he went jogging, he wore these button-ups, which would become soaked through with sweat. He thought it was amusing when I called him a sweatbomb, though I was, alas, aware that it was a term I had not invented. He appeared to think highly of almost anything I and my brother said or did.

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 notes on, among other things, art, movies, music, and restaurants. Here, for example, is Richard Brody on King Vidor’s 1928 silent film Show People:

Winking cameos abound: Davies takes a second role, as herself; Vidor plays himself, too; Charlie Chaplin, slight and exquisite, brings a Shakespearean grace to his self-portrayal as a humble moviegoer; and a long tracking shot of stars at a studio banquet table plays like a cinematic death row, displaying such luminaries as Renée Adorée, William S. Hart, and Mae Murray, just before they were swept away in waves of sound.

Other highlights: Five book reviews by my favourite literary critic James Wood, including his recent "The Numbers Game" (December 19, 2022); two wonderful pieces by Joy Williams (“Mine Field,” July 11 & 18, 2022, and “Curran Hatleberg’s Florida, Past and Future,” August 5, 2022); Hannah Goldfield’s sublime “Tables For Two”; and Laura Preston’s delightful “Talk of the Town” stories “Incidental Masterpieces” (April 4, 2022) and “Pipe Dreams” (August 22, 2022). 

Any disappointments? The only one I can think of is the absence of Dan Chiasson. He hasn’t appeared in the magazine since May 31, 2021. Not sure if he quit or was fired or is just taking a break. But I miss his subtle close readings.

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. 

December 26, 2022 Issue

A long time ago, I tried reading Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. I didn’t make it very far. I found myself put off by the use of “fug” for “fuck.” What kind of war novelist shrinks from using the ultimate war word? "Fug" isn't real. It seems prudish. It smacks of censorship. It's a major false note marring the book's attempt to represent war as it actually is. It's not as if "fuck" had never appeared in print before. Henry Miller used it in Tropic of Cancer in 1934. That's fourteen years before Mailer's book. Now I see there's a new edition of The Naked and the Dead, published by Library of America. David Denby reviews it in this week’s issue. Is “fug” out and “fuck” in? Denby doesn’t say. He does mention that "The coarseness of the soldiers’ thoughts and speech shocked some readers in 1948, though now it seems to us the way men in combat have always talked." Men in combat don't say "fug." Maybe the book has been coarsened, and Denby assumes it was always this way? Otherwise I don't understand what the hell he's talking about.

But don't get me wrong. Some of Mailer's writing I love. His boxing pieces are splendid! Recall the brilliant climax of The Fight (1975):

Vertigo took George Foreman and revolved him. Still bowing from the waist in this uncomprehending position, eyes on Muhammad Ali all the way, he started to tumble and topple and fall even as he did not wish to go down. His mind was held with magnets high as his championship and his body was seeking the ground. He went over like a six-foot sixty-year-old butler who has just heard tragic news, yes, fell over all of a long collapsing two seconds, down came the Champion in sections and Ali revolved with him in a close circle, hand primed to hit him one more time, and never the need, a wholly intimate escort to the floor.

December 19, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is James Wood’s superb “The Numbers Game,” a review of Cormac McCarthy’s two new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. The opening paragraph is quintessential Wood, an analysis of McCarthy’s style:

There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCarthy’s prose—roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them. McCarthy in afflatus mode is magnificent, vatic, wasteful, hammy. The words stagger around their meanings, intoxicated by the grandiloquence of their gesturing: “God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest.” McCarthy’s deflatus mode is a rival rhetoric of mute exhaustion, as if all words, hungover from the intoxication, can hold on only to habit and familiar things: “He made himself a sandwich and spread some mustard over it and he poured a glass of milk.” “He put his toothbrush back in his shavingkit and got a towel out of his bag and went down to the bathroom and showered in one of the steel stalls and shaved and brushed his teeth and came back and put on a fresh shirt.”

Wood identifies a third McCarthy style:

The third style holds in beautiful balance the oracular and the ordinary. In “The Road,” a lean poetry captures many ruinous beauties—for instance, the way that ash, a “soft black talc,” blows through the abandoned streets “like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor.” This third style has, in truth, always existed in McCarthy’s novels, though sometimes it appeared to lead a slightly fugitive life. Amid all the gory sublimities of “Blood Meridian” (1985), one could still find something as lovely and precise as “the dry white rocks of the dead river floor round and smooth as arcane eggs,” or a description of yellow-eyed wolves “that trotted neat of foot.” In “Suttree,” published six years before the overheated “Blood Meridian,” this third style was easier to find, the writer frequently abjuring the large, imprecise adverb for the smaller, exact one—“When he put his hand up her dress her legs fell open bonelessly”—or the perfect little final noun: “while honeysuckle bloomed in the creek gut.”

Wood says this third style is often The Passenger and Stella Maris’s “dominant rhetoric.” He assesses other aspects of these books, as well, e.g., their “mathematical mysticism” and “bitter metaphysics.” But it’s his stylistic analysis that I relish.  

On the Horizon: Best of 2022

Illustration by Min Heo

It’s time to start making my “Best of 2022” lists. Each year at this point, I like to pause, look back, and take stock of my New Yorker reading. I find listing is a good way to do it. I’m not going to reveal my pick for best reporting piece just yet. But I’ll give you a hint. It features a place called the Bar & Chill. That’s it, no more clues. As it is, I’ve probably given it away. Besides, the year isn’t over. There are two more New Yorkers still to come. Who knows what delightful surprises they might contain. 

December 12, 2022 Issue

This week’s issue contains an excellent Richard Brody capsule review of Janicza Bravo’s brilliant Zola (2021). Brody refers to the movie’s “exquisite stylization.” For a detailed description of that stylization, check out Namwali Serpell’s “ ‘She’s Capital!’ ” (The New York Review of Books, July 21, 2022). Serpell writes,

Zola is at its best when it lets this archetypal plot lie and plays with its filmic form instead. Its aesthetic, like other films produced by A24, has an air of gentrified graffiti, a palette like a neon bruise. But Bravo beautifully contains the sun-shot pastels of Florida in the manner of a David Hockney painting, and the film deftly references its origins on social media. With a camera-shutter sound, the screen freezes into a snapshot that shrinks into a corner, like on an iPhone; with a cha-ching of change, hearts flash or rise up the screen, like in an Instagram Live; with clickety-clicks and emoji bursts, texts are typed into being; the date and time appear at the top of the screen in a thin white font, then vanish—both with a click; and we occasionally hear the Twitter whistle, as the screenplay explains, “to pay homage when a line in the script is identical to one of @_zolarmoon’s tweets.”

That “palette like a neon bruise” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! Serpell’s “ ‘She’s Capital!’ ” is my choice for best critical essay of 2022. 

The End of "Bookforum"

The New York Times reports that Bookforum is ceasing publication: see “Bookforum Is Closing, Leaving Ever Fewer Publications Devoted to Books” (December 12, 2022). This is sad news. I’ve been a Bookforum subscriber for almost a decade. Christine Smallwood, Sasha Frere-Jones, Christian Lorentzen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Joanna Biggs, Frank Guan, Lauren Oyler, Gene Seymour, Alex Abramovich, Laura Kipnis, Prudence Peiffer, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Minna Zallman Proctor, Albert Moblio – just some of the many brilliant, lively, provocative critics who regularly appeared in its pages. I’m going to miss them.  

December 5, 2022 Issue

I see in this week’s issue there’s a show of Betty Woodman ceramic sculptures at the David Kordansky Gallery in Manhattan: see Johanna Fateman, “Art: Betty Woodman.” Woodman is one of my favorite artists. Her vases are among the glories of modern art. I first read about her in a piece by Peter Schjeldahl, called “Decoration Myths” (The New Yorker, May 15, 2006), a review of Woodman’s retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum. He said of her, “At the age of seventy-six, she is beyond original, all the way to sui generis.” He described the colour of one of her works, a vase titled “Portugal,” as "an indigo like an organ chord, at once rumbling and clarion. It’s only décor, but what décor!” The Kordansky exhibition features an abundance of Woodman’s works. You can see many of them at davidkordanskygallery.com.

Betty Woodman, Seashore (1998)

On Joachim Trier's "The Worst Person in the World"

What to make of the long sequence in Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2021), in which Julie is the only person who moves, while everyone else is frozen in a still? To me, it’s a way of showing the obsessive nature of romantic love. Julie and Eivind are so absorbed in each other, it’s as if the rest of the world doesn’t register. They see only each other. All else is oblivion. 

Anthony Lane, in his excellent review of The Worst Person in the World (“Living for the City,” The New Yorker, February 14 & 21, 2022), puts it this way:

Or what about the instant at which the surrounding world—humans, vehicles, dogs, the flow of coffee from a pot—freezes in mid-action, allowing Julie, the solitary mover, to run through the motionless streets toward Eivind, whom she badly needs to embrace? How better to illustrate the ecstatic indifference with which, in the throes of a silly love, we obscure everything that is not our object of desire?

Nothing Fictional About It (Contra Merve Emre)

John McPhee (Photo by Yolanda Whitman)

The critic Merve Emre argues that the “I” of the personal essay is a fiction and that individual subjectivity is an illusion: see her recent “The Illusion of the First Person” (The New York Review of Books, November 3, 2022). She makes a similar point in her absorbing “The Act of Persuasion” (The New York Review of Books, April 21, 2022), a review of Elizabeth Hardwick’s work:

In her essays, Hardwick reproved and indulged the temptation to fictionalize. How could she help it? Between the person and the page lies the prism of fiction, always. No genre can avoid it. Even criticism, if it is to speak of the lives and works of the dead, must bring the dead to life—the words of the past distilled in the words of the present. 

Well, the writers I admire most (e.g., John McPhee, Ian Frazier, Edward Hoagland) write in the first person major. They’re subjective to the bone. They write about what they want to write about, and say what they want to say. They get their words as close as they can to the solidity, the materiality of the world they’re noticing. There’s no “prism of fiction.” There is the prism of sensibility. We see the world refracted through the prism of who they are. That’s the secret of their art. There’s nothing fictional about it.