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”).