2025 Year in Review

Let’s begin with a drink, shall we? How about one of those espresso Martinis with a creamy glug of banana liqueur that Rachel Syme wrote about in her wonderful “Bar Tab: Monsieur” (April 7, 2025). Mm, that hits the spot. Okay, let’s roll!

Highlight #1: The magnificent 100th Anniversary Issue (February 17 & 24, 2025), loaded with delectable writing, including Jill Lepore’s “War of Words,” Nick Paumgarten’s “Helicopter Parents,” Burkhard Bilger’s “Stepping Out,” and Jackson Arn’s “Royal Flush.” 

Highlight #2: The splendid “Takes” series, in which New Yorker contributors revisited notable works from the magazine’s archive. I loved Stephen Colbert’s piece on Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale.” Sample: “From Hollywood to the Hasty Pudding, we waft like smoke from an unfiltered Pall Mall through Carson’s worlds, most of which are gone.”

Highlight #3: Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” columns – every last ravishing one of them. I devoured them all, licking my lips, craving more. Here’s a taste:

Another salad of chewy-crisp pork jowl and sliced melon is zingy with garlic and pickle-tart. The round sweetness of squid, fried in a light-as-air batter, is magnified by intensely floral curry leaves and a salty snowfall of shaved cured egg yolk. A bone-in pork chop, thick as a dictionary, tender as can be, and drowning in a luscious mess of charred tomatoes marinated in a sugar-lime-fish-sauce concoction, features every shade of sour and sweet. [“Tables for Two: Bong,” September 29, 2025]

Highlight #4: Nathan Blum’s extraordinary short story “Outcomes” (November 3, 2025). I’m not sentimental, but this piece moved me to tears. It’s about two students at a college in Maine – a freshman who grew up nearby and a senior from New York City – who meet and form a connection. The freshman’s name is Nolan Everett and the senior’s is Heidi Lane. They meet at the climbing wall in the college rec center. Nolan works there as a belayer. Heidi registers to use the climbing wall. She’s never climbed before. Nolan teaches her. The relationship evolves. The ending is heartbreaking. This is the best short story to appear in The New Yorker since Maile Meloy’s brilliant “Travis, B.” (October 28, 2002). 

Highlight #5: The appearance of another great “Tabula Rasa” piece by my hero, John McPhee. In this one, he says, among other interesting things, “I attribute my antiquity to dark-chocolate almond bark.”  

Other top picks of the year (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

Ian Frazier’s “Pigeon Toes,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“On the ironing board, which is set at a convenient height, she cuts up old loaves that she gets for free from a nearby bakery, and then she tosses the bread cubes onto the granite paving blocks of the plaza. Pigeons appear almost instantly, pecking so avidly that dozens of individual bread cubes go flying into the air above the mass of birds like popping popcorn”).

Nick Paumgarten’s “Guitar Heroes,” May 26, 2025 (“‘Are you ready?’ Margouleff asked at the warehouse. He unlocked a door, and immediately a thick, corky scent hit me, the emanation of hundreds of aging guitars—the great variety of hardwoods, the glue and paint and lacquer, the oxidation of strings and coils, the leather straps and handles, and the sarcophagal musk of the cases themselves”). 

Paige Williams’ “Still Life,” June 9, 2025 (“It was nine-thirty in the morning and so windy that miniature flags on graves were horizontal. The gravediggers were preparing for a funeral at two. Four neon-orange stakes marked off a rectangle in front of a headstone. The stone was inscribed with the name of a woman buried at nine feet; her husband was coming in at seven”).

Alexandra Schwartz’s “Going Viral,” September 1 & 8, 2025 (“Across genres, her calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with quick wit and cheerful perversity, pressing the reader close to her comic, confiding ‘I’”).

D. T. Max’s “The Behemoth,” September 22, 2025 (“The tower was a cone that narrowed to a point as it ascended. At the center of its circular base was a glimmering white hyperboloid, a gigantic stone object that looked like a cooling tower at a nuclear power plant. The hyperboloid had no top or bottom—it was a skylight that opened onto the nave below. Through this aperture, sunlight could filter all the way down to the church floor”).

Anthony Lane’s “Cinema Paradiso,” September 29, 2025 (“In a courtyard strung with lights, at a late-night showing of  ’A Santanotte, a Neapolitan film from 1922, I kept glancing away from the fervid melodrama to admire the projector behind me: a steampunk dream, built in Milan in the nineteen-thirties, which appeared to be made from a trash can, half a dozen alarm clocks, and two bicycle wheels. It emitted a bright plume of smoke, as if miniature furnaces were being stoked within”).

Rivka Galchen’s “The Heat of the Moment,” November 24, 2025 ("In the summer of 2022, a rig set up not far from Cornell’s School of Veterinary Medicine drilled for sixty-five days through layers of shale, limestone, and sandstone, passing beyond the geologic time of the dinosaurs to a crystalline basement dating to the Proterozoic eon, more than five hundred million years ago").

Alex Ross’s “Written in Stone,” December 1, 2025 (“One evening, I leaned on a fence as the sun went down, the horizon glowing orange against a cobalt sky. A whitish mist stole in from the lochs, encircling a nearby house until only its roof and chimneys remained. Spectral shapes caught my eye: sheep were trimming the grass around the site. When they detected my presence, they streamed away en masse, fading into the fog, which matched their coats. The stones loomed as black silhouettes. I felt a sweet shiver of the uncanny”).

Best Cover

Richard McGuire’s “Zooming In” for the April 14, 2025 “Innovation & Tech” issue.

Best “Talk of the Town”

Ben McGrath’s “Dumpster Diving,” September 15, 2025 (“Their attention turned to a giant cherry-colored armoire that had belonged to a professor now on sabbatical in Malaysia. How to get it to Bay Ridge? Ching had an idea. He could have it trucked with the weekly deliveries to Tandon, which is in downtown Brooklyn. ‘Then, there is a wonderful Home Depot probably less than a mile away,’ he said. ‘You can rent a U-Haul for nineteen dollars, and it’s good for ninety minutes. So, if you time it just right, early in the morning . . .’”).

Robert Sullivan’s “Manhattan’s Springs,” September 22, 2025 (“On a recent summer day, Greenberg moved through the Bronx with the brisk authority of a biker who has little time for automobiles, methodically checking the map on his phone, pulling copies of Smith’s photos from his backpack, watching for construction sheds. ‘The city will take the photos down, and so will landlords, but they seem to last longest on these sheds,’ he said”).

Nick Paumgarten’s “Big Pink,” October 6, 2025 (“At the head of the quarry, ospreys had built a nest high atop an abandoned derrick bedangled like a maypole with rusty cables”).

Jane Bua’s “Shedding,” October 13, 2025 (“At 8 p.m., the band slunk onstage, the house lights cut out, and Puth trotted up in a baggy Elastica T-shirt. He parked at the fake Rhodes, and the set began. At every keys solo and drum rip, he put on a goofy grin or a quasi-sexual stank face”).

Bruce Handy's “Shadow Boxing,” December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026 ("Five plate-glass windows offer a view into a re-creation of the cluttered basement studio in which the twentieth-century American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell once cobbled together the “shadow boxes” that he is best known for").

Best Illustration

David Plunkert's illustration for Daniel Immerwahr's "Check This Out" (January 27, 2025).

Best of “The Critics”

Justin Chang’s “Mean Time,” January 13, 2025 (“Woe betide anyone who bumps into Pansy on the street, but to watch her onscreen produces a kind of bruised exhilaration; her viciousness has an awesome life force. At a certain point, I began wondering whether Pansy would be best served not by counselling or antidepressants but by a few pints and an open mike”).

Daniel Immerwahr’s “Check This Out,” January 27, 2025 (“Even the supposedly attention-pulverizing TikTok deserves another look. Hayes, who works in TV, treats TikTok wholly as something to watch—an algorithmically individualized idiot box. But TikTok is participatory: more than half its U.S. adult users have posted videos. Where the platform excels is not in slick content but in amateur enthusiasm, which often takes the form of trends with endless variations. To join in, TikTokers spend hours preparing elaborate dance moves, costume changes, makeup looks, lip synchs, trick shots, pranks, and trompe-l’oeil camera maneuvers”).

Jackson Arn’s, “Royal Flush," February 17 & 24, 2025 (“In many of the cases from ‘Seeing Red’ where red does dominate, the work in question comes off as an affront, crossing some chromatic line—look at Warhol’s “Red Lenin” or STIK’s “Liberty (Red)” and feel the wet raspberry splatter you”). Arn’s sudden departure from The New Yorker this year saddened me. I will miss him. 

Adam Gopnik’s “Fresh Paint,” April 14, 2025 (“Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open”).

Louis Menand’s “Strong Opinions,” June 2, 2025 (“And the rumpled, rubber-faced manner, the popping eyes, the languorous drawl, the charmingly wicked grin he flashed when he thought he had scored a kill—Buckley was a show unto himself”).

Anthony Lane’s “Easy Music,” July 7 & 14, 2025 (“Has anyone listened more intently than Leonard to the infinite bandwidths of spoken English? So sharp are his ears, when pricked up, that somebody, way back in the Leonard genealogy, must have made out with a lynx”).

James Wood’s “Escape Route,” July 21, 2025 (“Dyer’s rise is solitary, freakish, and shadowed always by the chance that it might never have happened”).

Dan Chiasson, “Sense and Sensibility,” August 11, 2025 (“Schuyler worked in two primary verse modes, ostensibly opposites: we could call them blips and loop-the-loops. The blips are short, ribbonlike lyrics, trimmed to the moment, their sharp enjambments inspired by the Renaissance-era poet Robert Herrick; the loop-the-loops follow long Proustian arcs in margin-busting lines reminiscent of Walt Whitman”).

Hannah Goldfield’s “Take Me Back," September 15, 2025 (“Many of the most beloved food venders sell a single, time-honored classic: bubbling-hot, batter-fried cheese curds, as sparkly as nuggets of gold, from a stall called the Mouth Trap; the Corn Roast’s deeply burnished cobs, dunked in melted butter; crispy, wispy sweet-onion rings at Danielson’s & Daughters”).

Maggie Doherty's “Rambling Man,” October 20, 2025 (“Illuminated by Richardson’s biography, “The Snow Leopard” becomes an even more intriguing object. It is both a record of a man’s failings and a book written to avoid confronting them”).

James Wood’s “Last Harvest,” November 10, 2025 (“These investigations are meticulous, tender, palpable: buildings and radios, cars and first kisses, songs and streets are all made newly alive in memory”).

Hannah Goldfield's “Still Rising,” December 15, 2025 ("From a small tray of sheer pira—Afghan milk fudge, made with cardamom and orange-blossom water—he used a cookie cutter to extract glossy circles to fit into a Danish-like pastry, between layers of a vanilla pastry cream and diplomat cream. The texture of the finished product was delightfully riotous, shards of crisp golden crumb collapsing into the pleasingly claggy fudge and luscious custard").

Best Photo

Malike Sidibe’s portrait of Lorna Simpson for Julian Lucas’s “Now You See Her” (May 12 & 19, 2025)

Best of “Goings On”

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: L&L Hawaiian Barbecue,” March 3, 2025 (“Get a musubi or two, which is marvellous, the squishy pillow of rice, the ineffable Spamminess of Spam, the sweet smear of teriyaki”).

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: La Tête d’Or,” March 31, 2025 (“A well-prepared steak is goddam delicious”).

Rachel Syme’s “Local Gems: Fountain Pen Hospital,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“The store’s longtime head salesman is a fountain-pen savant. I recently went hunting for a wet-writing flexible nib and, within a few moments, he produced from the back room a glossy black Parker Lucky 2½ from the nineteen-twenties. ‘This, this, is the pen for you,’ he said. He was right”).

Marella Gayla’s “Bar Tab: Liar, Liar,” May 26, 2025 (“There was a looser scene on a weeknight, when a round of frosty Martinis, a sampling of cloudy, tart orange wines, and a peppery bottle of red, shared with two colleagues, seemed less like a life-style statement and more like a bold recommitment to the very act of living”).

Helen Rosner’s “Three Ice-Cream Sundaes for the Start of Summer,” June 16, 2025 (“The dark, slithery-hot chocolate sauce has a bittersweet edge that makes the whole thing feel dimensional and a little bit electric”).

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Bong,” September 29, 2025 [“Mama Kim’s namesake lobster (listed with the minimal description ‘IYKYK’) is a magnificent mountain of crustacean legs and claws, the pieces stir-fried with oodles of slivered ginger and a sweet-spicy herbaceous paste, made by Mama Kim, that clings, slurpably, to the meat and drips juicily onto a pile of rice below”].

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Chateau Royale,” October 27, 2025 (“I recommend ending your meal with a splash of Champagne poured from a silver ewer over a garnet-hued sphere of cassis sorbet – a thrilling riff on a Kir Royale, providing a bit of fizz and lightness at last”).

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: I’m Donut ?,” December 1, 2025 (“The somewhat controversial scrambled-egg doughnut features a sugary original doughnut piped full of soft curds and a squirt of a sweet-savory tomato mayonnaise—a bold and bizarre breakfast manifesto that refuses to be definitively sweet or definitively savory. I loved it unreservedly, though I imagine I might be in the minority”).

Best Poem

Arthur Sze’s “Mushroom Hunting at the Ski Basin,” March 24, 2025 (“Driving up the ski-basin road, I spot purple asters / and know it is time”).

Best “Shouts & Murmurs”

Josh Lieb’s “Bagels, Ranked,” April 21, 2025 [“Dances with, rather than fights against, the cream cheese and the lox. (Or whitefish, if that’s your thing. I don’t judge)”].

Best newyorker.com Posts

Joshua Yaffa’s “At the Edge of Life and Death in Ukraine,” August 2, 2025 (“Van Wessel captures how something can be at once utterly horrible, an emotional devastation for which no one is prepared, and also grimly routine”).

Helen Rosner’s “Three Plays on the Pancake,” August 3, 2025 (“Like the version made famous at Golden Diner (which Herrera has credited as an inspiration), these are true, literal pancakes: made not on a griddle but in individual cast-iron pans, which define the pancake’s shape, constraining its boundaries and creating a distinct crispiness to the outsides that plays in beautiful counterpoint to the soft, almost meltingly creamy insides. A serving of two pancakes arrives under a brutalist slab of butter so substantial that I thought, at first, it was a thick slice of cheese”).

Best Sentence

Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open. – Adam Gopnik, “Fresh Paint” (April 14, 2025)

Best Paragraph

The medal ceremony that night was a surreal sight: more than three thousand band members crowded onto the field in candy-striped rows. Bourbon County ended up placing second in its class—a triumph under the circumstances—just behind another Kentucky band, from Murray High School. But my favorite moment was earlier in the evening. Deep beneath the stands, in the vast tunnels and rehearsal rooms around the field, half a dozen bands were warming up—drumming, stretching, tossing rifles, and playing arpeggios as they waited for their turn to perform. Walking from room to room, I passed wooden ships, Victorian cages, and giant Day-Glo flowers in the hall. A trio of Elmer Fudds was hunched in conversation over here, two orange bunnies giggling in a corner over there. Some strays from the “Menagerie” show came wandering down the hall, past a pair of water sprites from Broken Arrow and a few butterfly girls from Cypress, Texas. It was like the world’s biggest costume party. – Burkhard Bilger, “Stepping Out” (February 17 & 24, 2025)

Best Description 

The birds wheeled over the aviary while Fritz circled. Komme, komme, Waldi: the song receded as the microlight got farther away and then swelled as it neared. This rise and fall, its approaching and distancing, was at once a cheer, a prayer, and a lament, and it induced in me—and, I somehow believed, in everyone else, too—a kind of heartache, like the longing for loved ones or the pain of their aging away. The microlight’s distant motor echoing off the hangar’s corrugated shell sounded like a deranged string section. An old sailboat was propped against the tin. Swallows darted around, feeding on the flies. A commercial jet passed soundlessly overhead. – Nick Paumgarten, “Helicopter Parents” (February 17 & 24, 2025)

Best Detail

Its main entrance, at Twenty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, is marked by an imposing brownstone Gothic Revival structure, the Arch, where a pandemonium of monk parakeets has long kept an elaborate nest. – Paige Williams, “Still Life” (June 9, 2025)

And now here’s to you Burkhard Bilger for your dazzling, vibrant, exhilarating “Stepping Out” – my #1 Pick of the Year! 

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

Credits: (1) The New Yorker (100th Anniversary Issue, February 17 & 24, 2025); (2) Mathieu Larone’s illustration for Nathan Blum’s “Outcomes” (November 3, 2025); (3) Photo by Hannah Whitaker for Nick Paumgarten’s “Guitar Heroes” (May 26, 2025); (4) Photo by Matteo de Mayda for Anthony Lane’s “Cinema Paradiso” (September 29, 2025); (5) The New Yorker, April 14, 2025); João Fazenda’s illustration for Robert Sullivan’s “Manhattan Springs” (September 22, 2025); (6) David Plunkert's illustration for Daniel Immerwahr's "Check This Out" (January 27, 2025); (7) James McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland (1871-74); (8) Photo illustration by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin for Hannah Goldfield’s “Take Me Back” (September 15, 2025); (9) Malike Sidibe’s photo portrait of Lorna Simpson for Julian Lucas’s “Now You See Her” (May 12 & 19, 2025); (10) Lanna Apisukh’s photo for Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Bong” (September 29, 2025); (11) Luci Gutiérrez’s illustration for Josh Lieb’s “Bagels, Ranked” (April 21, 2025); (12) Brian Finke’s photo for Burkhard Bilger’s “Stepping Out” (February 17 & 24, 2025); (13) Mathias Depardon’s photo for Nick Paumgarten’s “Helicopter Parents” (February 17 & 24, 2025). 

3 Great Thematic Travelogues: Robert Macfarlane's "The Old Ways"

This is the first in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll begin with a review of The Old Ways. 

Macfarlane is a landscape writer; this book is a landscape book – one of the best. Its subject is old paths. Macfarlane says, “Paths and their markers have long worked on me like lures: drawing my sight up and on and over. The eye is enticed by a path, and the mind’s eye also.” In The Old Ways, he travels sixteen ancient paths located in England, Scotland, Spain, Tibet, and Palestine, logging his impressions as he goes. He’s a superb describer. One aspect of his writing I want to highlight here is his art of description.

The book is beautifully structured: sixteen chapters, each one chronicling a particular journey. For example, Chapter 3, titled “Chalk,” is an account of his walk along one of England’s oldest chalk paths – the Icknield Way. Here’s a sample:

I slept that night in a Neolithic dormitory on a seabed of chalk. I found my sleeping place just west of a medieval village called Pirton, through the centre of which the Way passed. I left Pirton at about nine o’clock by a wide and high-edged path that was obviously of old use, its sides grown with dog-rose, yarrow, cherry plums and damsons. I’d developed the rolling hip-sway of a sailor on shore leave, brought about by fatigue and sore joints. The evening air was hot, still; the eastern sky inky blue, orange in the west. The chalk of the path gathered the late light to itself, glowing whitely in the twilight. Pale trumpets of bindweed jumped forward to the eye. In the verge lay the part-eaten corpse of a blackbird, its scaly legs severed from its body and placed neatly alongside one another, like a knife and fork after a meal.

In Chapter 7, titled “Peat,” he walks a Hebridean footpath known as Manus’s Stones. On this journey, he finds two beehive shielings, sleeps in one and has his breakfast in the other one. He writes,

From inside, the simple but exquisite architecture of the shieling was more apparent. It was constructed of gneiss slabs that had neatly overlapped to create the corbelling. Turf had then been laid on top to act as a windbreak, insulation and mortar: a living roof that grew together and bound the gneiss in place.

In Chapter 12, called “Ice,” he joins his friend John Miceler on an expedition to Minya Konka, the highest mountain in Sichuan province, China. They follow the trails that once connected the tea-growing regions of Sichuan with Nepal and Tibet, and then the pilgrimage routes – some of them 700 years old – that converge on the peak. Here’s his description of one stage of the journey:

The morning’s ascent, on a subtle path up through sparkling oak and pine woods, was among the finest forest hours I have ever spent. Sunlight, sifted by foliage, cross-hatched the path. The lower head of the valley was lost in haze. Another unidentifiable snow range rose above it. We might have been walking through a Chinese scroll painting. The understory of the forest was thickened with rhododendron, whose leaves shone bronze where the full light caught them. Up through the trees we went, crossing iced streams and passing through tunnels of leaning oaks, following a leaf-and-dirt path. Cairns marked its route, some with niches filled with flower heads, leaves and feathers. 

Most of Macfarlane’s travels are done on foot. But there are exceptions. For example, in Chapter 5 (“Water – South”), he and Ian Stephen sail a century-old cockle-shell called Broad Bay, exploring the ancient sea road from Stornoway to the Shiant Islands in the Minch, east of Harris in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland:

We pursued our long and lonely tacks, like cross-stitches made over the direct line of the sea road, zigzagging south through the Minch towards the Shiants. Inland was the grey-green Lewis coastline, with its sumping sea lochs and high headlands. Eastward, on the mainland, sun fell full on the Torridon Hills, gilding them such that I could discern peaks I’d known underfoot – Beinn Eighe, Beinn Alligin, Liathach – and whose paths I could remember well. Shifts in light changed the sea’s substance. Clouds pulling over and the sea a sheeny steel; sunshine falling and the sea a clean malachite green.

In Chapter 13 (“Snow”), Macfarlane and his friend David Quentin traverse the Wiltshire section of the Ridgeway, one of England’s oldest paths, by means of cross-country skiing: 

Low light, saturating the landscape with a dull glow that never thickened to a shine but still drew blues from the long-lying snow. Where the chalk showed, it was the yellow of polar-bear fur or an old man’s knees. I found it all bleakly beautiful: the air battened down, the light at its slant. It felt both absurd and wonderful to be moving on skis over this ancient path.

My favorite part of The Old Ways is Chapter 4, titled “Silt.” It’s Macfarlane’s account of his walk along an extraordinary off-shore path called the Broomway, allegedly the deadliest path in Britain and “certainly the unearthliest path I have ever walked,” Macfarlane says. It leaves the land at a place called Wakering Stairs, in Essex, and then heads due east, straight out to sea. Several hundred yards offshore, it curls northeast and runs for around three miles, still offshore, before cutting back to make landfall at Fisherman’s Head. Macfarlane is again accompanied by his friend David Quentin. In one of the book’s finest passages, Macfarlane writes,

Out and on we walked, barefoot over and into the mirror-world. I glanced back at the coast. The air was grainy and flickering, like an old newsreel. The sea wall had hazed out to a thin black strip. Structures of unknown purpose – a white-beamed gantry, a low-slung barracks – showed on the shoreline. Every few hundred yards, I dropped a white cockle shell. The light had modified again, from nacreous to granular to dense. Sound travelled oddly. The muted pop-popping of gunfire was smudgy, but the call of a cuckoo from somewhere on the treeless shore rang sharply to us. A pale sun glared through the mist, its white eye multiplying in pools and ripples.

Macfarlane’s sense of light is exquisite: “The light had modified again, from nacreous to granular to dense.” “Low light, saturating the landscape with a dull glow that never thickened to a shine but still drew blues from the long-lying snow.” “Light pearled on barley.” “The chalk of the path gathered the late light to itself, glowing whitely in the twilight.” “A scorching band of low white light to seaward; a thin magnesium burn-line.” “Light quibbling on the swell.” “Clouds pulling over and the sea a sheeny steel; sunshine falling and the sea a clean malachite green.” “The sun gold in the sky, pouring down its heatless light; hard snow, high albedo.” “Sunlight, sifted by foliage, cross-hatched the path.” “Sunlight curled and pooled on the shell of a blue-black beetle dragging and bumping itself towards the monastery.” 

The book abounds with vibrant, interesting people – pathfinders, wayfarers, old-way walkers past and present: Edward Thomas, old-way walker extraordinaire, “the guiding spirit of this book”; Broomway walker Patrick Arnold; Macfarlane’s friend David Quentin, who accompanies Macfarlane on four of his walks; Ian Stephen, the savvy Stornoway sailor who guides Macfarlane on his seaway excursions; Finlay MacLeod, “a keen celebrant of the Outer Hebridean landscape”; Anne Campbell, mapper of the Bragar moorland; the Hebridean artist Steve Dilworth, whose Geocrab workshop is one of the highlights of the book; Macfarlane’s grandfather Edward Peck, “who had helped high country and wild places to cast their strong spells over me”; Nan Shephard, prose poet of the Highland landscape; Raja Shehadeh, who guides Macfarlane on two walks in occupied Palestine; Miguel Angel Blanco, creator of the amazing Library of the Forest, located in his Madrid basement; Jon Miceler, Tibetologist and mountaineer, who invites Macfarlane to join him on an expedition to Minya Konka; Eric Ravilious, English landscape painter and “path-obsessive.”   

The most interesting and vibrant “character” of all is Macfarlane himself. His keen, active, perceptive, responsive “I” is present on almost every page: “I slept that night in a Neolithic dormitory on a seabed of chalk.” “I climbed to the top of Eilean an Taighe and followed its southeastern cliff-edges.” “Down on the storm beach, as dusk approached, I spent an hour building a small domed and chambered cairn out of dolerite, for the pleasure of the act of construction.” “I walked on south-east all that day towards the Isle of Harris, following shieling path, croft path, drover’s road and green way, stitching a route together.” “I placed my handful of bog myrtle, azalea, juniper and dried heather on a natural ortholith of granite, and set then alight: a brief flare of orange in the dusk, a beacon-fire at the pass.” “I slipped off my rucksack, socks and shoes, left them all in the shadow of the first peak, and set off to investigate the ridge and scramble its rocks.” “I approached Segovia across baking plains.” “I passed dew ponds and tumuli, and a big field mushroom lying upside-down on its cap, its black gills like the charred pages of a book.” 

I’ve been quoting extensively, perhaps excessively. But I can’t resist. This book is as layered and loaded as a honeycomb. So many great passages! Here’s one more. This one is from Chapter 7 (“Peat”):

The sun set over the Atlantic. The water a sea-silver that scorched the eye, and within the burn of the sea’s metal the hard black back of an island, resilient in the fire, and through it all the sound of gull-cry and wave-suck, the sense of rock rough underhand, machair finely lined as needlepoint, and about the brinks other aspects of the moment of record: the iodine tang of seaweed, and a sense of peninsularity – of the land both sloping away and fading out at its edges.  

Each chapter can be read as a stand-alone essay. But they’re all linked. They flow chronologically one to the next, beginning and ending on the chalk. They’re also linked by the spirit of Edward Thomas, who is the book’s presiding deity. “He ghosted my journeys and urged me on,” Macfarlane says. The penultimate chapter, “Ghost,” is an inspired re-creation of what Thomas was doing and thinking during the days leading up to his death at the Battle of Arras, April 9, 1917.

I want to go back to that first passage I quoted from The Old Ways: “Paths and their markers have long worked on me like lures: drawing my sight up and on and over. The eye is enticed by a path, and the mind’s eye also.” What does Macfarlane mean when he says “and the mind’s eye also”? I think he’s referring to his imagination. He not only vividly describes the paths as they are; he imagines how they used to be and who used to walk them. Two examples: (1) Macfarlane sleeping outdoors at a place on the chalk downs called Chanctonbury Ring: “After I’d eaten, I lay down to sleep, placed an ear to the turf and imagined the depths of history the soil held – Neolithic, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Roman, Augustan, down through all of which the beech roots quested”; (2) Macfarlane tracking the tracks of a 5000-year-old man near Liverpool, feeling a co-presence – “the prehistoric and the present matching up such that it is unclear who walks in whose tracks.” 

In future posts, I’ll delve more deeply into this great book, exploring its structure, action, description, and meaning. But first I want to introduce the other two books in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Roger Deakin’s brilliant Waterlog. 

December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Richard Brody, in “Goings On,” reviews Jim Jarmusch’s new movie Father Mother Sister Brother. I’m a fan of Jarmusch’s minimalist style. Brody calls this new film “an unusually plainspoken entry in the Jarmusch cinematic universe.” I think I’ll check it out.

2. Sheldon Pearce, in “Goings On,” praises Bill Charlap and Dee Dee Bridgewater’s new album Elemental. He says, “The music is charming and jaunty, its looseness and zest owed to an alchemical balance between these two performers.” Charlap is one of my heroes. Pearce calls him “an impressionist pianist,” but he’s much more than that. His invention and technique are phenomenal. He’s an amazing improviser. He’s a genius! On the other hand, my taste for Bridgewater’s singing is still developing. At times, I find her delivery halting and discordant. I credit Pearce for noting this album. Anything by Charlap is worth listening to.

3. Remember Babbo? I do. I’ve never eaten there, but as a result of reading Bill Buford’s two brilliant “Babbo” pieces – “The Secret of Excess” (August 19 & 26, 2002) and “The Pasta Station” (September 6, 2004) – I feel I know it intimately. That Babbo is gone. Its wild, ingenious co-owner and chef, Mario Batali, is gone, too. But, as Helen Rosner tells us in this week’s “Tables for Two,” there’s a new Babbo with a new chef – Mark Ladner. Rosner is not impressed. “Can you have Batali minus Batali?” she asks. Her answer is no. She says,

On my first visit to the original Babbo—God, it must have been twenty years ago—I remember being stunned at my first bite of the beef-cheek ravioli. (“Of all the pasta dishes—indeed, of all the dishes—on the menu, this is probably the one most associated with Babbo,” Batali writes of the recipe, in “The Babbo Cookbook” from 2002.) I froze. I think I stopped chewing. I was astounded that a mouthful of food could be so forceful and so silken at once. I wish I could say that I felt the same way about the version at the new Babbo. Some of the disappointment, I’m sure, had to do with the difficulty of measuring up to memory, but it was also right there on the plate. On one evening, the filling was oddly crumbly and dry, and on another the ravioli’s thick chicken-liver ragú—a striking departure from the light, buttery emulsion that dressed Batali’s original—was broken and greasy.

Rosner’s verdict may seem harsh. But that’s what I like about her. She doesn’t pull her punches. 

4. Bruce Handy’s “Talk” story “Shadow Boxing” tells about the re-creation of Joseph Cornell’s Utopia Parkway studio in a Gagosian gallery in Paris. Handy writes,

With the exhibit opening in just a few days, a team of eight workers was beavering away inside the gallery, moving stacks of old magazines, rearranging tchotchkes on shelves, applying a patina of grunge to new jars and boxes to make them look as if they’d been sitting in a cellar since the Eisenhower Administration. The gallery’s normally pristine white walls had been painted to resemble water-stained cinder blocks. A professional set decorator had added fake cobwebs to the corners. (Fine steel wool does the trick.) One could almost smell the mustiness.

Cornell is one of my favorite artists. I enjoyed this piece immensely.

5. A special shout-out to Lawrence Wright for his delightful “Takes” tribute to A. J. Liebling. Wright says, 

For my generation, Liebling still loomed as a model of incisive journalism with a personal voice. He was scholarly and highly literate while also at home with hat-check girls and the bookies at the racetrack. He barbecued the reactionary intellectuals of his era, but portrayed ordinary people with warmth.

I totally agree. Liebling is one of The New Yorker greats. 

December 22, 2025 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Dawn Chan’s absorbing “Portraits of Everyday Life in Greenland.” It’s an appreciation of the work of thirty-six-year-old Greenlandic photographer Inuuteq Storch. I relish photography writing. This piece is excellent. Chan writes,

The stark Greenlandic landscape is a persistent presence in Storch’s photos, and low, horizontal sunlight is everywhere. In one of Storch’s pictures, an old man on a wooden porch angles his face up toward the sun. In another, a knockout image featuring two children resting on their backs, sunlight blazes with an almost divisive intent, turning one child’s eyeglasses opaque with its glare while leaving his friend’s face in shadow. Looking at Storch’s work, my mind went to Emily Dickinson’s musings on a “certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons.” But Dickinson was observing her world at a latitude of forty-two degrees. Sunlight means something else entirely in photos made above or near the Arctic Circle, where noon could strike in darkness, depending on the season, and where golden hour might be a nearly constant affair. 

I like Chan’s emphasis on light (“and low, horizontal sunlight is everywhere”). Of the seventeen Storch pictures featured in Chan’s piece, my favorite shows a seemingly mundane slice of Arctic landscape (rock, tundra, apartment buildings) at a moment when the sun’s rays turn it to gold, and throw long, black shadows across its textured surface. The gold-black contrast is ravishing!

Photo by Inuuteq Storch

A Remarkable Coincidence

This is just a quick note on a strange literary coincidence that happened today. This morning, in preparation for posting my first note in my new series “3 Great Thematic Travelogues,” I was rereading chapter 10 of Robert Macfarlane’s brilliant The Old Ways (2012), one of the three books that I’ll be studying in the series. The chapter, titled “Limestone,” is an account of two hikes that Macfarlane takes with his friend Raja Shehadeh in the Ramallah region of Palestine. After I finished reading the chapter, I opened my laptop and visited The New York Times website, as I do most mornings, to see what's going on in the world. Scanning the headlines, I encountered this: “Raja Shehadeh Believes Israelis and Palestinians Can Still Find Peace.” My eyes narrowed. Could this be the same Raja Shehadeh that I’d just read about in Macfarlane’s book? I opened the piece and read it. Yes! It’s the same fascinating man. I see more than ever why Macfarlane admires him. The writer of the piece, David Marchese, describes Shehadeh as “a thinker with a long and stubbornly optimistic view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Marchese notes that Shehadeh is also a major writer: “Shehadeh’s 2007 book, Palestinian Walks: Forays Into a Vanishing Landscape, won Britain’s Orwell Prize for political writing. Here in the United States, his book We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award.” The Times piece deepens my appreciation of Shehadeh's character and my understanding of Macfarlane’s account of his Palestinian walks with him.

Credit: The above portrait of Raja Shehadeh, by Philip Montgomery, is from The New York Times.  

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #9 Peter Hessler's "Walking the Wall"

Illustration based on photo from esquireme.com

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is Peter Hessler’s great “Walking the Wall” (May 21, 2007).

What’s it like to walk on the Great Wall of China? This piece tells us. The time is 2005. Hessler lives in Beijing. Here’s his opening paragraph:

When the weather is good, or when I’m tired of having seven million neighbors, I drive north from downtown Beijing. It takes an hour and a half to reach Sancha, a quiet village where I rent a farmhouse. The road dead-ends at the village, but a footpath continues into the mountains. The trail forks twice, climbs for a steep mile through a forest of walnut and oak, and terminates at the Great Wall of China.

I love that passage – so matter of fact, yet so exotic. It smacks of adventure. The next paragraph is equally good:

Once, I packed a tent, hiked up from the village, and walked eastward atop the wall for two days without seeing another person. Tourists rarely visit this area, where the wall is perched high along a ridgeline, magnificent in its isolation. The structure is made of stone, brick, and mortar; there are crenellations and archer slits, and guard towers that rise more than twenty feet high. 

Hiking the wall one day, Hessler finds a fragment of a marble tablet. He can make out some of the words, but the writing is in classical Chinese, which he’s never studied. Also, the surface of the tablet is badly scarred. Curious about the tablet’s meaning, Hessler turns to his friend David Spindler, who is a scholar of the Great Wall. Hessler writes,

On a cold December morning, Spindler and I set off to find the marble tablet. In the city, everything about his appearance had seemed chosen to avoid attention. But in the mountains he wore a red-checked wool hunting shirt, a floppy white Tilley safari hat, high-end La Sportiva mountaineering boots, and large elk-leather gloves designed for utility-line workers by J. Edwards of Chicago. He looked like a scarecrow of specialty gear—some limbs equipped for hard labor, others for intense recreation. Over the years, Spindler had determined that this was precisely the right ensemble for the Great Wall, where thorns and branches are common. For a face mask, he’d cut a leg off a pair of sweatpants, scissored a round hole, and pulled it over his head. (“It covers your neck.”) He wore polyurethane-coated L. L. Bean hunting trousers that had been reinforced by his neighborhood tailor. Denim patches covered the pants, like a friendship quilt linking Freeport and Beijing.

They find the smashed tablet. Spindler recognizes it immediately as a piece of tablet that dated to 1614. He even finds the place in the wall where it belongs. Hessler writes, 

Spindler took a tape measure to the fragment, calculated the space between lines, and quickly computed the original dimensions. Slowly, he walked back along the wall, looking for a place where it could have been mounted. He measured an empty brick-bordered ledge: perfect fit. For this small section of the wall, he now knew the basic story of two construction campaigns in the sixteen-tens. Before leaving, we returned the fragment to the spot where I had found it.

Hessler tells about two other hikes that he and Spindler take on the wall. There’s one that starts near the remote village of Shuitou:

The harvest was nearly finished, and the wind rustled stalks of corn that stood dead in the fields. Beyond the village, we climbed a steep section of wall, where thousands of Mongols had attacked in 1555. Spindler said that the typical Chinese defense relied on crude cannons, arrows, cudgels, and even rocks. “There were regulations about how many stones you were supposed to have, and how you were supposed to bring them to the second floor of the tower if there was an attack,” he said. Later, he pointed out a circle of loose stones that had been carefully arranged atop the wall. Four and a half centuries later, they were still waiting for the next attack.

This hike involves bushwacking. Hessler writes,

In the afternoon, we bushwhacked. On his hikes, Spindler sometimes followed game trails, and often he walked atop wall sections, where the brush is less dense. But occasionally there was no option other than to pursue a ridge straight through the brambles. He called this “hiking like a Mongol,” and I hated it. I hated the thorns, and I hated the bad footing. I hated how my clothes got torn, and I hated the superiority of Spindler’s bizarre wall regalia. I hated how branches that were chest-high for him hit me in the face. Mostly, I hated the Mongols for hiking this way.

Hessler’s description of bushwacking produces one of his best lines: “When we reached the ruins of an old stone fort atop a ridge, it felt as if we had emerged from a long swim underwater.”

The other hike that Hessler does with Spindler starts in the Miyun district of northeast Beijing. Hessler’s account of this excursion forms the climax of his piece. He writes,

Although I had never liked the bushwhacking, during the past year I had come to appreciate the distinctive rhythm of the trips. Every journey had it all: good trails, bad trails, hellish thorns, spectacular views. No matter the landscape, I could always see Spindler up ahead, his white hat bobbing above the thickets.

On the way down, we found a dead roe deer in a trap. The loop snare had caught the animal around the neck; it must have strangled itself. Just beyond that, we reached a long section of wall where most ramparts had crumbled away. As I walked atop the structure, my boot got caught in a hole. I tripped and fell down a short ledge, pitching head first toward a ten-foot drop. Somehow—things happened very fast—I threw myself down against the wall. I slammed to a stop with my head peering over the edge.

“Nice save,” Spindler said, after he had rushed over. I rose slowly, and tried to walk, and knew that my left knee was badly hurt. But we were miles from help, and the temperature was well below freezing; the only option was to keep moving.

During the descent, I leaned on Spindler whenever possible. It took three hours, and I remember every minute. The next morning, I went to the hospital for X-rays. The doctor told me that I’d broken my kneecap and I’d be on crutches for six weeks; and that was the last time I walked on the Great Wall of China.

“Walking the Wall” is a vivid chronicle of hiking on one of the most ancient military structures in the world – the Great Wall of China. I first read it 2007, when it appeared in The New Yorker. I’ve never forgotten it. 

On the Horizon: 2025 Year in Review

It’s time to start composing my “2025 Year in Review.” 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 #1 pick just yet. But I’ll give you a hint. It features a marching-band show called "Mondriesque." 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 15, 2025 Issue

I relish specificity. Hannah Goldfield’s delectable “All Rise,” in this week’s issue, is loaded with it. Her subject is bread, particularly a classic Afghan flatbread called naan-e panjayi. She visits the Afghan bakery Diljān, in Brooklyn Heights, where naan-e panjayi is made. She talks with Diljān’s baker Bryan Ford. She writes,

Using a smaller, circular version of the naan-e panjayi, Ford began to assemble a matryoshka doll of carbs, stuffing the bread with a Jamaican-style patty that was in turn stuffed with a spiced potato mixture typically found inside bolani (a deep-fried Afghan flatbread), plus spoonfuls of green chutney and white sauce. It was a clever homage to the iconic beef-patty-on-coco-bread sandwich, popular in the Caribbean neighborhoods of the North Bronx, and beloved by all three Diljān co-founders. 

My favorite part of “All Rise” is Goldfield’s sensuous description of an ingenious Afghan-inflected confection created by Ford:

From a small tray of sheer pira—Afghan milk fudge, made with cardamom and orange-blossom water—he used a cookie cutter to extract glossy circles to fit into a Danish-like pastry, between layers of a vanilla pastry cream and diplomat cream. The texture of the finished product was delightfully riotous, shards of crisp golden crumb collapsing into the pleasingly claggy fudge and luscious custard.

Mm, I’ll have one of those, please. 

Inspired Sentence 6

I had slept beautifully, rolled up in the rugs on the floor of my bare room, stars shining in on me through the black window, and I looked forward eagerly to whatever might happen next.

That’s from Philip Glazebrook’s great Journey to Kars (1984) – one of my all-time favorite books. I’m currently rereading it. It’s an account of Glazebrook’s 1980 trip through the old Serbian and Greek provinces and islands, through the ruined cities of Asia Minor as far as Turkey’s eastern frontier with Russia at the fortress of Kars, then back by Trebizond, Istanbul and the Balkan capitals. In the sentence quoted above, he’s looking back on his stay in an ancient Anatolian village. The room he rented there, actually just a hut, “had a collection of worn-out rugs and old clothes heaped against its bare walls, an earthen floor, and a door with so large a gap under it that cats and even chickens merely ducked their heads to follow us in.” 

I love the positivity of this sentence. Glazebrook doesn’t complain about his rough accommodations. Quite the opposite. He says he “slept beautifully, rolled up in the rugs on the floor of my bare room, stars shining in on me through the black window.” That “rolled up in the rugs” makes me smile. That, for me, is the inspired bit. I also love the “and I looked forward eagerly to whatever might happen next.” That’s the spirit of a true traveller. 

On the Horizon: "3 Great Thematic Travelogues"

I enjoyed doing “3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place” so much that I’ve decided to keep it going. For my new series, I’ve chosen three brilliant thematic travelogues – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013). Each is a collection of travel essays threaded with a theme – walking (The Old Ways), swimming (Waterlog), drinking (The Wet and the Dry). The books are beautifully written. I want to study them in detail. A new series then – “3 Great Thematic Travelogues” – starting January 1, 2026.

December 8, 2025 Issue

Jorie Graham, in this week’s issue, interprets Elizabeth Bishop’s great “At the Fishhouses.” She notes, as many readers before her have noted, the poem’s spellbinding shift in register: "The poem has moved from the conversational, the anecdotal, to the divinatory." Seamus Heaney called it "a big leap." But Graham adds something new when she says, 

The final word, “flown,” seems to glide etymologically right off the watery “flowing,” before morphing, as if by miracle—the miracle of language—into the action of a bird. The vision lifts away. Was it a visitation? An annunciation? But it is gone. And we are back in our strange solitude, our individuality—in history.

The vision lifts away – this is interesting. I’ve read and reread this transfixing poem many times. I’ve read many commentaries on it: see my recent “Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’: Five Interpretations.” It never occurred to me that “flown” means the vision departs, flies away. I always thought it referred to Bishop’s idea of knowledge. Consider the poem’s last six lines:

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

In other words, we know what is now happening (“flowing”) and we know what has passed away (“flown”). But I’m open to Graham’s take on it. The idea of Bishop’s harbor epiphany suddenly flaring and then vanishing appeals to me. 

The Netflix Documentary "The New Yorker at 100" Is Excellent!

The documentary “The New Yorker at 100” is currently streaming on Netflix. I watched it last night. It’s excellent. It artfully interweaves key publishing moments in the magazine’s vast history – John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind” – with segments on what the current staff is up to, including production of the magnificent “100th Anniversary Issue” (February 17 & 24, 2025). As an avid New Yorker fan, I was thrilled to get a look inside the magazine’s offices and see the editorial process in action. I enjoyed the whole thing immensely. Highly recommended.