2023 Year in Review

Photo by David Guttenfelder, from Luke Mogelson's "Trapped in the Trenches")

I always like to start these things with a drink. What’ll it be this year? Hannah Goldfield, in her wonderful “Tables For Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023), mentions “stealing sips of a friend’s orange-blossom Negroni, a cold and viscous concoction that lingered on my tongue and in my memory (I can taste it now!), the intoxicating, floral perfume of the orange-blossom water achieving thrilling alchemy with the herbal gin, bitter Aperol, and sweet vermouth.” Yes, I’ll have one of those, please. Okay, let’s roll. 

Highlight #1: Two pieces by Luke Mogelson – “Trapped in the Trenches” (January 2 & 9, 2023) and “Underworld” (May 29, 2023) – evoke the Ukraine War with a specificity that puts us squarely there: 

In the grainy, green world of the phosphor screen, the stars gleamed like bioluminescent plankton. Herring and Rambo moved deliberately between the black silhouettes of trees, many of which had been splintered and contorted by artillery. I was looking at a tilled field to our left when a shimmering tail arced overhead, collided with another streaking light, and radiantly detonated. Herring said that it was a Russian missile intercepted by an anti-aircraft weapon. [“Trapped in the Trenches]

Highlight #2: Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Talk to Me” (September 11, 2023), an account of her visit with a team of scientists attempting to use artificial intelligence to speak with sperm whales. In an unforgettable scene, she witnesses the birth of a baby sperm whale:

Suddenly, someone yelled out, “Red!” A burst of scarlet spread through the water, like a great banner unfurling. No one knew what was going on. Had the pilot whales stealthily attacked? Was one of the whales in the group injured? The crowding increased until the whales were practically on top of one another.

Then a new head appeared among them. “Holy fucking shit!” Gruber exclaimed.

“Oh, my God!” Gero cried. He ran to the front of the boat, clutching his hair in amazement. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” The head belonged to a newborn calf, which was about twelve feet long and weighed maybe a ton. In all his years of studying sperm whales, Gero had never watched one being born. He wasn’t sure anyone ever had.

Highlight #3: Burkhard Bilger’s “Crossover Artist” (April 3, 2023), a profile of neuroscientist/musician David Sulzer that brims with inspired passages, including this beauty: 

A modicum of noise is essential to any instrument’s sound, it turns out. Reeds rasp, bows grind, voices growl, and strings shimmer with overtones. In West Africa, musicians attach gourds to their xylophones and harps to rattle along as they play. Music, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure.

Highlight #4: Hannah Goldfield’s new “On and Off the Menu” column in the magazine’s “Critics” section. Goldfield is one of my favorite writers. It’s great to see her get more space for her delectable food writing. Here’s a sample from her “Upper Crust” (October 27, 2023):

For anything else, you’ll find me at Modern. Not long ago, my husband and I and our two small children met my parents there for lunch. It was the first visit for my kids, and cramming together into a familiar, dimly lit booth felt like passing down a primal ritual. New Haven is not a slice town; you get a whole pie and savor it sitting down. My father pointed out a server who he guessed had been working there almost as long as he’d been a regular, at least thirty years. I burned the roof of my mouth on my first bite, then tried to soothe it with gulps from an icy pitcher of Foxon Park white birch beer, a sweet, slightly earthy local soda you’ll find at any New Haven pizzeria. After a few slices, my hands were covered in soot.

Highlight #5: Helen Rosner’s “Tables For Two” columns. Rosner is a ravishing describer. Her “Tables For Two: Sailor” (December 4, 2023) is one of my favorite pieces of the year. Here’s a taste:

Slicing into the sphere of wrapped radicchio leaves, I discovered an interior of fragrant rice studded with firm, creamy borlotti beans. Taking a bite of this mixture, bathed in a wine sauce—which was rich and emulsified and, I learned later, vegan—was like sinking into a quicksand of warmth and flavor. The leaves of the radicchio imparted a lingering hint of bitterness, a scalpel through the savory roundness of everything else. This is the dish, I thought to myself—the dish of the restaurant, perhaps the dish of the year.

Other top picks of the year:

Rebecca Mead, “Dutch Treat,” February 27, 2023 (“Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream”);

Jill Lepore, “Pay Dirt,” March 20, 2023 (“There are more than two hundred mail-order seed companies in the United States, and, if you’ve ever ordered from any of them, chances are that your mail has been swollen with catalogues, their covers of radicchio red, marigold yellow, and zinnia pink peeking out from beneath the annual drab-gray crop of tax documents and the daily, dreary drizzle of bills, solicitations, and credit-card offers”).

Lauren Collins, “Pins and Needles,” March 27, 2023 (“You could hear his ski-parka opera coats rustling through the narrow corridors. There were murmurs of appreciation for a trapezoidal satin T-shirt that Demna said took three months to make, and for a clementine-colored day suit with edges that looked like they could draw blood, shown with a slick black fruit-bowl hat”);

Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Thomas Wågström’s Pictures of the Living and the Lifeless,” April 26, 2023 (“All photographs are about transience. This lies in the very nature of photography, since everything in the world is continually changing, and what a photo depicts vanishes the next instant, or becomes something else. One could say that all photography is about loss. But one could also say the opposite: photographs salvage something from time, as from a burning house”);

Jackson Arn, “Early Bloomer,” May 8, 2023 (“With O’Keeffe’s works on paper, however, scrutiny is like oxygen. These are images so dense with detail that the poster treatment would ruin them. ‘No. 12 Special’ (1916) is like a glossary of the footprints that charcoal can leave on paper: thin, slashing lines; plump, leisurely ones; smears pressed into the grain of the page with a rag or a fingertip. No matter how carefully you study these grace notes, you never forget the melodious whole: a bouquet of spirals dragging their tails behind them, refusing to be decoded”);

Adam Gopnik, “Postscript: Bruce McCall,” May 15, 2023 (“In what used to be called a ‘biting’ vein, he blended a wild surrealist sensibility—founded on an impeccable illustrator’s technique, always manifesting visions, dreams, impossibilities in scrupulous hyper-realism—with a sharp, sometimes caustic tone, beautifully underlit by melancholia”); 

Burkhard Bilger, “Soul Survivors,” June 5, 2023 (“His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter”);

Ed Caesar, “Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom,” June 14, 2023 (“I wonder why, then, on hearing the news of his death last night, I found myself momentarily overcome. Perhaps because I met McCarthy first in a peculiarly receptive period, and perhaps because the provenance of my relationship with his writing leads me back through the decades of my own life. And perhaps because, looking again in the old books, I find so much pleasure in the authority of his voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished”);

Robert Sullivan, “Not a Shark,” July 31, 2023 (“A waft of trash came up from under the pier, and a gaggle of high schoolers walked out onto the pier to take pictures of the orange sky. ‘It’s the end of the world,’ one of them shouted—then he spotted WasteShark. ‘Wait, are you guys monitoring something?’ ”);

Sam Knight, “Hive Mind,” August 28, 2023 (“I touched the glass. The hive thrummed. The smell of honey rolled across the pasture”);

Rachel Syme, “The Suitor,” September 25, 2023 (“She glided down the center aisle, wearing a beaded, sheer white garment that looked like a tuxedo jacket whose hem was melting to the floor. Two men in swim caps carried the train of the dress. From far away, the piece shimmered as if made of shaved ice”);

Nick Rudick, “Watching the Southern Tip of Manhattan Change, for Forty Years,” September 30, 2023 (“Mensch includes a vista of the cheese grater, here cutting a lonely path into the sky far above more modest buildings, jutting upward from the city like the handle of a sledgehammer”); 

Ben McGrath, “Dystopian Slime,” October 9, 2023 (“A stray horn, a searchlight upwind, a marine radio hissing intermittently about bridge traffic: sometimes, amid this dystopian sublime, it was difficult to distinguish the choreography from the merely urban”);

John McPhee, “Under the Carpet Bag” (October 16, 2023 (“And now, in 1964, at Camp Don Bosco, in Missouri, I was walking up a dirt road with Bill Bradley and Ed Macauley. The road consisted of deep parallel ruts with a grassy hump in the middle. Bradley was in one rut, Macauley in the other, and I was up on the hump between them. I am smaller than most people—about as small as Andrew Carnegie, James Madison, Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Actually, I was five feet seven at my zenith and have lately condensed. The hump was a good foot higher than the ruts. Nonetheless, the three of us in outline formed the letter M”);

Amanda Petrusich, “Horny on Main,” October 23, 2003 (“My favorite track on the new album is 'How to Stay with You.' It’s got a wiggly, nineteen-seventies feel, with a skronky keyboard line and unexpected bits of saxophone. Sivan’s voice is a little deeper here, with a hint of night-after grit”);

Zachary Fine, “The Man Who Changed Portraiture,” November 3, 2023 (“The linen cuff on van der Mersch’s right hand is done in four touches, max. Even when you’re standing ten feet back from the canvas, you can peel off individual brushstrokes with your eyes. They’re just floating there, like little spears of light”);

James Wood, “Trysts Tropiques,” November 13, 2023 (“Eng can write with lyrical generosity and beautiful tact: moths are seen at night ‘flaking around the lamps’; elsewhere, also at nighttime, ‘a weak spill of light drew me to the sitting room.’ Shadowy emotions are delicately figured: ‘His eyes, so blue and penetrating, were dusked by some emotion I could not decipher.’ Lesley’s account of her affair with Arthur has a lovely, drifting, dreamlike quality—the adulterers almost afloat on their new passion, watched over by the hanging painted doors of Arthur’s house on Armenian Street”);

Rachel Aviv, “Personal Statement,” November 27, 2023 (“She seemed uniquely incurious when I read her lines from her journal”);

Ed Caesar, "Speed," December 25, 2023 ("We did a warmup lap in Sports Mode—or Baby Mode, as Roys called it—hitting 155 m.p.h. Then he switched to something called F5 Mode. Before the final, short straightaway, he asked me if I was ready. When he hit the accelerator, it was like being strapped to a surface-to-air missile. Each gear change provoked the car to ever more noise and aggression. We hit 170 m.p.h., then braked to make the final turn. I stifled the urge to scream, but not to curse").

And now, with my last few drops of that superb Negroni, I want to propose a toast: Here’s to the greatest magazine in the world! New Yorker without end, amen! 

Credits: (1) Illustration by Sophy Hollington, from Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Talk to Me”; (2) Photo by Cole Wilson, from Hannah Goldfield’s “Upper Crust”; (3) Illustration by Nolan Pelletier, from Jill Lepore’s “Pay Dirt”; (4) Georgia O’Keeffe, “Untitled (Abstraction/Portrait of Paul Strand” (1917); (5) Photo by Alice Zoo, from Sam Knight’s “Hive Mind”; (6) Illustration by Roche Cruchon, from Amanda Petrusich’s “Horny on Main.”