2024 Year in Review

Let’s begin with a drink, shall we? How about one of those 1884 Martinis that Gary Shteyngart writes about in his “A Martini Tour of New York City” (April 24, 2024). What a dazzling piece! Great subject, exquisite style. Definitely my favorite piece of 2024. Here’s Shteyngart’s description of the 1884 Martini:

This beast is premade with two types of gin—Boatyard Double Gin, from Northern Ireland, and the New York Distilling Company’s Perry’s Tot Navy Strength Gin—which clocks in at a ridiculous 114 proof. This dangerous concoction is then fat-washed with Spanish Arbequina olive oil, after which it is frozen and the olive oil’s fat removed, while vermouth, lemon liqueur, a house-made vetiver tincture, and a few dashes of lemon-pepper bitters are added. A lemon peel is then showily expressed over the glass tableside and a very briny Gordal olive and a cocktail-onion skewer are plopped in.

Yes, I’ll have one of those, please. Mm, that is beastly! Okay, let’s roll!

Highlight #1: The 2024 Food Issue. This digital-only issue is crammed with delectable writing, including Shteyngart’s brilliant “Martini tour” piece, Adam Iscoe’s “No Reservations,” Helen Rosner’s “Padma Lakshimi’s Funny Side,” Jiayang Fan’s “Another Chinatown,” Patricia Marx’s “Spoiler Alert,” and Hannah Goldfield’s “Holey Grail.” I love sensuous writing. The 2024 Food Issue is pure nirvana. Here’s a sample:

It was easy to see how a Courage bagel could offend, if not enrage, a New York purist. It brings to mind a rustic, crusty baguette: the exterior is dark, craggy, and heavily blistered; the crumb is a little stretchy with a lot of air holes. (Courage bagels are leavened with sourdough starter, rather than commercial yeast.) If you were to scoop it, another move for which a bagel aficionado might make a citizen’s arrest—stay safe out there!—you’d be left with mostly crust. This makes it especially suited to Courage’s main offering: photogenic open-faced sandwiches. Bagel halves are topped with various combinations of cream cheese, jewel-like slices of tomato, thin coins of cucumber, smoked salmon, roe, or sardines, then painstakingly finished with salt, freshly cracked pepper, a drizzle of olive oil, fronds of dill. A Courage bagel is a Los Angeles bagel, ready for its closeup. [Hannah Goldfield, “Holey Grail”]

Highlight #2: Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault” (April 15, 2024). Mogelson is a superb war reporter. In this riveting piece, he tells about his recent experience embedding with Ukraine’s 1st Separate Assault Battalion in Tabaivka, a settlement in north-eastern Ukraine, less than ten miles from the front line. 

Here’s an excerpt:

For the rest of the day, a steady stream of small groups of Russian infantrymen—between two and six soldiers each—walked to Tabaivka from the east. Few made it across the three-hundred-yard gap. The snow had relented, and Boyko easily stalked the groups with the surveillance drone. Perun bounded between the panel and the radio, shouting himself hoarse, calculating azimuths, and correcting the aim of his stormers, snipers, and machine gunners. It was madness: Russians kept marching down the same paths, to the same spots where their comrades had just died. One 1st Battalion machine gunner later told me he had fired his weapon so much that it had kept him warm in his frigid dugout. He couldn’t see the men he was killing. But since they kept reappearing in certain places, he memorized different branches below which he could point his barrel to hit specific coördinates up to a mile away.

Highlight #3: Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (January 22, 2024), a meditation on becoming a parent and ending a marriage – both experiences tightly interwoven. The piece brims with thisness – “blue mesh hospital underwear,” “garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers,” “zipped pajamas with little dangling feet,” “diapers patterned with drawings of scrambled eggs and bacon.” Jamison is a superb describer – direct, specific, concrete. For example:

In April, I took the baby on a book tour. She was three months old. My mother came with us. Four weeks, eighteen cities. We stood at curbside baggage stands in Boston, Las Vegas, Cedar Rapids, San Francisco, Albuquerque, with our ridiculous caravan of suitcases, our bulky car seat, our portable crib. The baby in her travel stroller. The unbuckled carrier hanging loose from my waist like a second skin. Everywhere we went, I brought a handheld noise machine called a shusher. It was orange and white, and it calmed my baby down better than my own voice.

There are dozens of other quotable passages. The whole piece is quotable – a masterpiece of personal history writing. 

Highlight #4: Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two.” This column is a constant source of reading pleasure. I look forward to it every week. There are two versions of it – the short version that appears in the print edition, and the longer version that is published on newyorker.com. I love comparing them. Among my favorite Rosner pieces this year are “Old John’s Diner” (“The lemon-meringue pie is unimpeachable, with a buttery crumb crust and pucker-tart yellow curd under a snowcap of floaty, marshmallow-like meringue”), “Le B.” (“The desserts are quite lovely, including butter-drenched crêpes Suzette, theatrically flambéed tableside, and an obscenely silky chocolate sorbet that conjures licking frosting straight from the bowl”), and “Misipasta” (“The lights are just dim enough to soothe, the tidy menu of cocktails and bitter Italian sodas ready to offer a bit of relief. The air smells like Parmigiano and butter, the sound system is playing the Pointer Sisters”).   

Highlight #5: After a six-year absence, the triumphant return of “Bar Tab.” My favorite New Yorker column is back! See, for example, Jiayang Fan, “Bar Tab: Another Country,” August 5, 2024 (“Disoriented, the pair perused the menu, he choosing C’mon Dad Gimme the Car, a tequila-forward, lip-tickling strawberry-and-jalapeño cocktail named for a Violent Femmes song, she opting for I May Destroy You, a smoky mezcal-and-Aperol number inspired by the HBO show”); Rachel Syme, “Bar Tab: So & So’s," October 14, 2024 (“One twist on a Martini features blood-red beet juice”); Ray Lipstein, “Bar Tab: “Kelly’s Tavern,” October 28, 2024 (“Here, an upside-down shot glass at your place signifies that someone has, with a timeless, Tony Soprano bravura, paid for the next of what you’re drinking”). 

Other top picks of the year:

Eric Lach, “Trash, Trash Revolution,” April 15, 2024 (“Some of the trash bags have burst open, but others are curiously intact, and you can still make out a few pieces of furniture that never got a chance to be fully digested”).

D. T. Max, “Design for Living,” May 6, 2024 (“He happily spends hours poring over blueprints, dividing former fields of cubicles into small but clever residences and reconceiving onetime copy-machine nooks as mini laundry rooms or skinny kitchens”). 

John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Vol. 4,” May 20, 2024 (“I work with words, I am paid by the word, I majored in English, and today I major in Wordle”).

William Finnegan, “The Long Ride,” June 10, 2024 (“Dropping in to the heaviest waves, he would fade and stall, casually timing his bottom turn to set up the deepest possible barrel. He would disappear into the roaring darkness, then reappear, usually, going very fast, with that little grin”).

Ian Parker, “His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” June 17, 2024 (“Inside, I was surprised by the loudness of the surf—even in the dim vestibule where the aluminum Ando statue used to stand. In an empty house with no windows, the sound of the ocean filled every room. Underfoot, the original tiles had been hammered out, and so had the cables and pipes that were once embedded beneath. The floor was now rough concrete, covered in cavities and trenches, like a road that had been chewed up by a milling machine ahead of a resurfacing”).

Paige Williams, “Ghosts on the Water,” June 24, 2024 (“The men were wearing waders, hoodies, and yellow rubber gloves up to their elbows. One of them flicked on a powerful flashlight. From the bridge, I watched them traverse an inhospitable stretch of beach and climb the jagged riprap, moving toward the bridge piling where their fyke net was tethered”). 

Ian Frazier, “Paradise Bronx,” July 22, 2024 (“In another few blocks, on my right, I passed the small but excellent Bronx Museum of the Arts, where I’ve seen shows of graffiti art of the seventies and Gordon Matta-Clark’s chainsaw-cutout sections from floors and ceilings of abandoned Bronx apartment buildings—that crazy turquoise-blue kitchen linoleum!”).

Nick Paumgarten, “Dead Reckoning,” July 29, 2024 (“It’s all tightly choreographed, but the music still feels alive, improvised, viney. A not-unpropulsive jam scored a vista of the desert at night, a gesture toward the group’s 1978 trip to Egypt: a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree view of the Great Pyramids under a lunar eclipse, bats winging in the shadows of the Sphinx. Then, to the delight of the Mayerheads, a wanky “Sugaree,” under a shower of scarlet begonias”).

Ben Taub, “The Dark Time,” September 16, 2024 (“Arakali approached the stratotanker from behind and from slightly below. The tanker filled the P-8’s cockpit windows—four huge jet engines, spanning my peripheral vision. Arakali leaned over the controls and craned his neck upward. His hands shook wildly, compensating for forces that I could not see; in relation to the stratotanker, the P-8 seemed perfectly still. A young woman, lying prone in the stratotanker’s tail, stared back at him, her face framed by a small triangular window, as she guided a fuel line into the top of the P-8. There was a rush of liquid above us—two tons per minute. Then the line detached, and Arakali descended over the Barents Sea”).

Anna Wiener, “Joy Ride,” September 23, 2024 (“Still, before I left, Petersen sent me around the block on a grape-purple Platypus. I cruised past the auto-body shops and a restaurant puffing anise-scented air. The Platypus was agile, and sturdy as a parade float”).

Rachel Syme, “Sniff Test,” September 23, 2024 (“The resulting perfume did not smell edible or organic; it evoked something air-gapped and untouched by human sweat, like a new Porsche that happens to be filled with cotton candy”). 

Elizabeth Kolbert, “When the Ice Melts,” October 14, 2024 (“The boardwalk curled east and then ascended a rocky ridge. From the ridgetop, there was a view directly onto the ice jam: a floating mountain range with slopes of pure white. The reflections of the icebergs quavered in the water, which was blue to the edge of purple. The smaller bergs were the size of a house; the bigger ones, I figured, were the size of Grand Central Terminal”).

Rivka Galchen, “Pecking Order,” October 21, 2024 (“We heard the “tea kettle tea kettle” call of a Carolina wren; it sounded like a game of marbles to me. We saw a warbling vireo, a Cape May warbler, a blackpoll warbler, and a black-and-white warbler—birds so small that it was difficult to fathom how far some of them had travelled to be there. We heard little chips that sounded like a window being cleaned; a crickety decrescendo that was not made by crickets; a sound like a trill running into a wall; a high-pitched three-fast-one-slow, like a child playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony”).

Rebecca Mead, “Color Instinct,” November 18, 2024 (“Nestled in the corner of one couch is a plush panda bear, apparently well loved, its fur tinged with a rogue splash of citrine paint”).

Paige Williams, “Wild Side,” December 2, 2024 (“In the living room, Fadden found bear scat, a foot in diameter. In the kitchen, he found Miller dead. Her naked body was gashed with claw marks; her left arm and most of her right leg had been eaten down to the bone. The security bars on the window hung by a single bolt. The cabinets were destroyed. In the bedroom, Fadden saw paw prints and soil, and, on the bed, feces and urine. Miller’s laptop was still plugged in and open. Fadden wrote in his report that she appeared to have been dragged off her bed after she was already dead”).

Rivka Galchen, "Leg Work," December 16, 2024 ("According to a description of what would become known as the Ewing amputation, the surgeon makes a 'stairstep incision' over the shin using a scalpel. The relevant part of the limb is 'exsanguinated.' A flap of skin is peeled back to expose the leg muscles. Care is to be taken, the account notes, to isolate the saphenous vein and a nearby nerve. This is only the beginning of what is simultaneously a delicate, gruesome, and revolutionary surgical procedure; one of the required tools is a bone saw").

Anthony Lane, “Stirring Stuff,” December 23, 2024 (“You melt a bit of butter, sauté some chopped onion, add rice, stir it around, add wine, stir, then add hot stock, ladle by ladle, while you stir and stir again. Remove the pan from the heat. Throw in grated Parmesan and more butter. Stir. Wait. Serve. Eat. Feel your immortal soul being warmed and suffused with pleasures both rare and immeasurable. Lick the spoon. Wash the pan. Done”). 

Rachel Aviv, "You Won't Get Free of It," December 30, 2024 & January 6, 2025 ("Trauma tends to lead to a kind of unknowing repetition, and, in the second half of her life, Alice reënacted the dynamic with her mother, in new form: she had to trade reality for fiction, her daughter for art"). 

Best “Talk of the Town”

Nick Paumgarten, “Misty in Manhattan,” February 26, 2024 (“Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it”).

Ben McGrath, “Where’s My Car?,” March 4, 2024 (“In 2005, Goswick sliced his suit going through the windshield of a car that went off the old Tappan Zee Bridge”).

Ian Frazier, “Uncaged Birds,” March 4, 2024 [“Once the performance started, the cloud, which you soon forgot about, and others like it (all products, probably, of an offstage cloud-making machine), vividly captured beams of light from above the stage that came down in vertical shafts, suggesting interrogation lamps, the columns of a courthouse, or the bars of a prison cell”].

Robert Sullivan, “Find a Grave,” April 8, 2024 (“Instruments came out of the car, Morrow starting off with a reel called ‘Sligo Maid.’ Suddenly, his fiddle popped its tuning peg. ‘That’s Coleman!’ Kelly said”).

Adam Iscoe, “Catamaran,” July 1, 2024 (“The vessel, known as Energy Observer, resembled a sperm whale that had been wrapped in roughly ten thousand photovoltaic cells”).

Robert Sullivan, “From Philly to Venice,” July 1, 2024 (“The Arkestra practiced and eventually toured the world, the row house filling with gig posters, its plaster walls soaking up decades of music from a band that, under Sun Ra’s leadership, had set out on a course of inter-dimensional travel, using chords and time signatures and equations rather than rocket fuel”).

Ben McGrath, “Clean Your Pipes,” November 25, 2024 (“To a novice eye, the only clear indication that all this labor was in the service of a musical instrument was the triple-decker keyboard sitting on a table, next to some bubble wrap, on the second floor”)

Best of “The Critics”

Jackson Arn, “Tone Control,” January 29, 2024 (“I enjoy her paintings most when she makes an unlikely pair of colors scrape against each other and then smooths things over with a third. In “Greener Lean” (1978), the odd couple are a thick, too sugary green and a sickly yellow, and the deus ex machina is a drizzle of red in the lower right, which gives the yellow a little life and the green a little nuance”).

Alex Ross, “Twin Feats,” April 1, 2024 (“The rapid-fire sotto-voce chords that launch the Scherzo went off with purring finesse; the coda of the first movement became an exuberant one-man stampede. Just as impressive was Levit’s ability to sustain tension across spare textures, as at the desolate end of the Funeral March. Acoustical mirages beguiled the ears: in the trio of the Scherzo, brassy E-flat-major triads evoked a trio of hunting horns”).

James Wood, “A Life More Ordinary,” April 8, 2024 (“Kumar’s details have the vitality of invention and the resonance of the real, as if echoing with actual family history”).

Jackson Arn, “Warp Speed,” April 22 & 29, 2024 (“Patterns unfold horizontally, but every so often a twisted pair of vertical threads (it’s called a leno weave) slashes its way out of the grid”).

Amanda Petrusich, “Age of Anxiety,” May 27, 2024 (“ ‘Lunch’ is a weird, pulsing track, vigorous and horny. It’s also my favorite song on the new album, in part because Eilish sounds incredibly free, which is to say, she sounds like herself”).

Alex Ross, “Thoroughly Modern,” June 3, 2024 (“At the end of the initial passage comes a solitary, exposed C: Wang rendered it with a sudden coldness, signalling the transition to the minor. Such nuances of articulation are essential to persuasive Chopin playing. The oasis of C major returns just before the coda, this time reduced to five pianissimo chords. Wang struck the first of these with a dry, plain tone; then her touch softened, so that the chords subsided into a somnolent haze. After a split-second pause, the coda exploded with concussive force”).

Hannah Goldfield, “Desert Island,” June 3, 2024 (“Inside, Villiatora serves what he calls ‘Hawaii street food’: a refined spin on a Korean-inspired plate lunch, featuring a strip of tender galbi and a meat jun, griddled golden and crisp; a spectacular fried chicken thigh shellacked in a chili-pepper-guava glaze that tastes strikingly of the juicy fruit. A dozen yards away, on the casino floor, animated bison stampede across the screens of digital slot machines, a game called Buffalo Ascension promising gold”).

Kathryn Schulz, “Casting a Line,” July 8 & 15, 2024 (“Like every brilliant author, Maclean simultaneously seems inexplicable and demands explication—some attempt to answer the questions raised by his prose. One of those questions is practical, a matter of craft: How does he do this? But another is ontological: What kind of man could make this work?”).

Maggie Doherty, “Duty Dancing,” September 9, 2024 (“Consider the first lines of ‘Churning Day’: ‘A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast, / hardened gradually on top of the four crocks.’ Each consonant cracks like a peppercorn between the teeth. These are poems you taste”).

Parul Sehgal, “The Mystery of Pain,” September 16, 2024 (“Commas are inserted casually, idiosyncratically. The language is softer, mussed, exploratory. Pain makes a mockery of control; the armor of high style is loosened”).

Jackson Arn, “Eyes Wide Shut,” September 23, 2024 (“The scene is only a few firm details away from abstraction, a Rorschach test tilted sideways—not a thing plus its echo but an unbroken flat-deep surface. If it is still an impression of a lost moment, there is something newly sturdy mixed in; each brushstroke declares, I’m still here”).

Jackson Arn, “It Takes a Village,” October 14, 2024 (“Circular handle joins with square container, apples form pert rows of three and four, individual finds perfection in collective. And look at the stems! Each points straight to Heaven, with no sign of rupture from the tree”).

Casey Cep, “Touch Wood,” December 9, 2024 (“The ‘Mack Chairs’ look, improbably, like industrial flowers: backs standing like stamens, legs curving like tendrils, seats resting on metal cruciforms as bright as tropical petals”).

Best Poem

Robert Hass, “A Sunset,” September 9, 2024 (“In the dark / I thought of a radiant ordinariness / That burned, that burned and burned”).

Best Cover

Hudson Christie, “The 2024 Food Issue”

Best Photo

Landon Nordeman’s photo for Gary Shteyngart’s "A Martini Tour of New York City" (April 24, 2024) 

Best Illustration

Bianca Bagnarelli’s illustration for Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best newyorker.com Post

Nathan Heller, “Helen Vendler’s Generous Mind,” April 30, 2024 (“What she had was an almost tactile understanding of the ancient practice of creating poems as art, and—running her hands like a dressmaker along the back of their stitching, watching the way they draped and moved and caught the light—she could see not only what poets did but how they did it”).

Best Paragraph

In restaurants all across the country, I shoved food into my mouth above her fuzzy head as she slept in her carrier beneath my chin. The receipts were headed to my publisher, and I was determined to eat everything: trumpet mushrooms slick with pepper jam, gnocchi gritty with crumbs of corn bread that fell onto her little closed eyes, her head tipped back against my chest. I was flustered and feral, my teeth flecked with pesto and furred with sugar. Then I pulled down my shirt and gave these meals to her. In Los Angeles, I nursed in the attic office above a bookstore lobby. In Portland, I nursed among cardboard boxes in a stockroom. In Cambridge, I nursed in a basement kitchenette beneath the public library. – Leslie Jamison, “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best Sentence

Austria’s Truman vodka is shot into flaming orbit by an inventive liquor made by Empirical, the Danish distillery, and named after Stephen King’s pyrokinetic character Charlene McGee, which presents on the tongue as a flavorful burst of smoked juniper, hence the feeling that a draw of nicotine and tar can’t be far. – Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City” (April 24, 2024)

Best Detail

Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it. – Nick Paumgarten, “Misty in Manhattan” (February 26, 2024)

Thank you, New Yorker, for another great year of reading pleasure.

Credits: (1) Photo by Landon Nordeman, from Gary Shteyngart’s “A Martini Tour of New York City”; (2) Photo by Maxim Dondyuk, from Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault”; (3) Photo by Adam Whyte, from Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Old John’s Diner”; (4) Photo by Dina Litovsky, from Eric Lach’s “Trash, Trash Revolution”; (5) Photo by Michelle Groskopf, from Nick Paumgarten’s “Dead Reckoning”; (6) Photo by Alice Mann, from Rebecca Mead’s “Color Instinct”; (7) Illustration by João Fazenda, from Robert Sullivan's "From Philly to Venice"; Illustration by Tianqi Chen, from Alex Ross’s “Thoroughly Modern.”