10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #2 Geoff Dyer's "Poles Apart"

Photo by George Steinmetz, from Geoff Dyer's "Poles Apart"

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 Geoff Dyer’s superb “Poles Apart” (April 18, 2011). 

In this great piece, Dyer tells about his visit to two remote land-art sites – Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” near Quemado, New Mexico, and Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake, Utah. He structures his piece in two parts with an “Intermission” in between, consisting of four brief notes. 

The first part, titled “New Mexico,” describes Dyer’s “Lightning Field” experience. He’s at the site with his wife Rebecca, plus four others – Steve, Anne, Ethan, and Cristina. Here’s the first paragraph:

We came to a place that seemed like nothing much: a homesteader’s cabin and a windmill, in the middle of a vast nowhere. The windmill must have been turning, because the wind was sprinting across the plateau. The sky was not just clear or blue. It was as if we’d ended up in a future where there was no atmosphere, no sky—nothing to insulate earth from cosmos. Scrub extended into the distance and in the distance were mountains, but even the things that were near were far off. The land was camouflage-colored, the dust reddish brown. Near the cabin but still quite distant, almost invisible, were sticks stuck randomly in the ground—some in the far distance as opposed to the near distance, but none in the very far distance, where we could not have seen them even if they had been there.

I find that an appealingly weird beginning – almost as if Dyer is pretending to be an alien from outer space, trying to make sense of this strange place where he’s landed. He’s divested himself of all preconceptions, all prior knowledge. “We came to a place that seemed like nothing much: a homesteader’s cabin and a windmill, in the middle of a vast nowhere.” Seemed – key word. What are those sticks stuck in the ground? Dyer’s next paragraph brings us closer:

The air was thin, cold; the sun was hot on our faces. When the wind subsided, as it did every few minutes, it was still and quiet. As we walked toward the sticks, it became clear that there were more of them than we’d realized, though it was difficult to say how many, because many were hard to see and some were not seeable at all, and it is probably only in retrospect, once we understood that their being invisible was part of their function, that we knew they were there. The sticks, it became evident, once we got close to them, were not sticks but poles: polished steel, shining in the sun, three times my height, and as sharply pointed as javelins. They were two inches in diameter and cold to the touch. If they had been wooden sticks, they could have been stuck there thousands of years ago, but because they were stainless steel they were obviously of more recent provenance. Hundreds of years from now they would still gleam like the promise of a future.

What are these poles? What’s their purpose? Do they have meaning? Where are we? Dyer still hasn’t named the place. He and his companions convene at the cabin:

I was the last man in and could see the other members of our expedition sitting on the wooden porch in wooden rockers and on wooden benches, getting drunk on champagne, watching me walk toward them. It was the kind of hut you see people inhabiting in photographs from the nineteen-thirties by Walker Evans. What had seemed noble but squalid then seemed idyllic now, a boutique hotel, practically, especially with the champagne and laughter.

There’s that word “seemed” again. I love the infusion of champagne and laughter into the narrative. It comes as a relief. These guys are human! The reference to Walker Evans made me smile. Dyer is a fan of his work (see his brilliant The Ongoing Moment), and so am I. 

In the evening, Dyer continues to observe the poles. He writes,

As the sun began to drop toward the horizon, the poles sprouted shadows and the tips sparkled as if stars were perched on them. There were so many competing perspectives that they complicated each other and cancelled each other out. The poles were still slender, but they’d acquired bulk, solidity. There were far more of them than we had thought, and it became obvious that they were not scattered randomly but had been planted in rows. If you positioned yourself next to one and looked past it, you could see a dozen more, glowing, like a fence that let everything through—everything being the sunlight and the wind. The sun was sinking fast and everything began to change. The silver poles glowed goldly. There was a clear demarcation now between the area where there were poles and the area where there were none, even though the poles were arranged so sparsely as to have made the distinction imperceptible at first.

For the first time, Dyer mentions religion: “There was a sense—all the more palpable in such a remote and empty place—of something gathering. Absence had given way to presence. We were in the midst of what may once have been considered a variety of religious experience.”

The next two paragraphs are among my favorites of the piece:

The sky blackened after only a few minutes and we retreated indoors. We ate quesadillas and drank dark wine and looked at the flames of the pellet-burning stove as if it were a television. The vastness outside made the interior of the cabin seem the coziest place on earth, like an igloo.

Later, we went outside again, into the huge night. The poles were gone, but we knew they were there. The sky was nothing but a dome of stars. We were no strangers to the firmament, but none of us had seen anything like this. The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away. The constellations were complicated by passenger jets, blinking planes, flashing satellites. It was like rush hour in the era of interplanetary travel. The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight.

That “The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away” is inspired. The last line – “The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight” – is among the most beautiful that Dyer has ever written.

Next morning, at sunrise, “the tips of the poles began to twinkle.” And then, as the sun emerged into view, “the poles stood stark and golden, even more sharply defined than they had been the evening before.” Dyer considers their meaning:

Places like Stonehenge had been designed with the solstice in mind, may even have been celestial calendars, attempting to synch man’s experience on earth with the heavens. None of that was relevant here. The placement of poles referred to nothing other than itself. Thousands of years of study would confirm that there was no intended relation between the poles and the equinox, the transit of Venus, or lunar eclipses. What was here was entirely man-made and appealed only to man.

I relish that last line. Dyer is grappling with the meaning of the place. At this point, he drops the “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees” approach and names the place he’s experiencing:

We were—as many of you will have guessed by now—near Quemado, New Mexico, at “The Lightning Field,” by Walter De Maria (completed in 1977). The answer prompts another question—why the subterfuge of inconceivable ignorance?—which can best be answered with further questions. Most visitors who come to see De Maria’s masterpiece these days know roughly what they are in for. But what if we came to “The Lightning Field” and had to try to work it out for ourselves, with no art-historical backup? Asked about the consequences of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai is said to have replied, “It’s too soon to tell.” That’s the response that comes to mind when pondering the significance of the great land-art projects of the late nineteen-sixties and seventies.

The key word here, for me, at least, is “response.” Dyer is trying to get at how he responds to “The Lightening Field.” He’s working through his responses:

There’s a lot of space, but, even as a figure of speech, there’s no room for God. “The Lightning Field” offers an intensity of experience that for a long time could be articulated only—or most conveniently—within the language of religion. Nothing about “The Lightning Field” prompts one to genuflect. Rigorously atheistic, geometrically neutral, it takes the faith and the vaulting promise of modernism into the wilderness. Part of the experience of coming here is the attempt to understand and articulate these responses.

Near the end of the “New Mexico” segment, Dyer describes how he and his companions accessed the “Lightning Field” site:

You leave your cars at Quemado and are taken up, in a van, at two-thirty in the afternoon. The drive takes half an hour, so you arrive at the least impressive time of the day. As we approached, a groan of disappointment swept through our party: we didn’t know exactly what we were expecting, but we expected more. And then you get it, but gradually, in an experience of space that unfolds over time. A narrative is at work.

“An experience of space that unfolds over time” is an excellent description of Dyer’s response to “The Lightning Field.” His writing enacts it. 

The next section of “Poles Apart” is called “Intermission.” It consists of four brief notes on landscape. In Note 1, Dyer remembers an area in a recreation park called the Hump, where he played when he was a kid. He says, “It was the first place in my personal landscape that had special significance.”

In Note 2, he considers how certain places in the landscape “develop a special quality.” He offers the example of a piece of land that becomes a fertility site, how it eventually falls into disuse and ruin, and how, even as a ruin, it retains “what D. H. Lawrence called ‘nodality.’ ” This idea of nodality appears again in the piece’s third section on the “Spiral Jetty.” 

In Note 3, Dyer remembers a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he saw a painting by Elihu Vedder called “The Questioner of the Sphinx” (1863), showing “a dark-skinned traveller crouched by the head of a sphinx that emerges from the sand in which it has been submerged for centuries.” Dyer describes it as “an early depiction of the post-apocalyptic world: one could easily imagine that it’s not the head of the sphinx poking above the sand but the torch of the Statue of Liberty, “Planet of the Apes” style.” He says, “We study the painting closely: a depiction of the effort to work out what certain marks on the landscape mean; what they are trying to tell us; what we go to them for.” 

Note 4 tells about D. H. Lawrence’s experience of New Mexico – “ ‘the greatest experience from the outside world’ that he had ever had.” Note 4 functions as a segue to Part 2 of “Poles Apart” – “Utah.” Dyer writes,

In the American West you can travel hundreds of miles and calculate your arrival time almost to the minute. We turned up for our rendezvous in Quemado at two o’clock on the dot. From Quemado, we drove four hundred and sixty miles to Zion, Utah, and got there exactly in time for our dinner reservation at eight-thirty. Our itinerary was as precise as De Maria’s measuring.

From Zion, we were going to drive north to the “Spiral Jetty.”

Part 2 differs conceptually from Part 1. In Part 1, Dyer’s focus is on the experience of “The Lightning Field.” The journey to the site is secondary and is covered in a few lines near the end of the piece. In contrast, Part 2 is a road trip that ends at “Spiral Jetty.” Dyer writes,

We drove north—Rebecca and I—toward Salt Lake City. No need for a compass. Everything screamed north: the gray-and-white mountains looming Canadianly in the distance, the weather deteriorating by the hour. Opting for directness instead of scenery, we barrelled up the featureless expanse of I-15. Most of what there was to see was traffic-related: gas-station logos, trucks the size of freight trains, snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder. Then Salt Lake City, doing its level best to come and meet us before we got anywhere near it—and reluctant to say goodbye even when we were well beyond. 

That “snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder” is inspired! I read it fifteen years ago when the piece appeared in The New Yorker. It’s stayed with me ever since. Every time I see a piece of tire on the road, I think of Dyer’s vivid phrase – “snakeskin shreds of tire.” 

They spend the night in Ogden, Utah. Dyer rereads Lawrence’s essay on Taos, New Mexico. He quotes a passage which begins “Taos pueblo still retains its old nodality.” Dyer comments, “Like Vedder’s painting, this bit of writing—analytical, hypnotic, profound—tells us much about the power that some places exert. In their different ways, both De Maria and Smithson were attempting to create nodality.”

The next day, Dyer and Rebecca continue their pilgrimage to “Spiral Jetty.” Dyer writes,

We had been given enigmatically precise directions on how to find the “Spiral Jetty”—“Another .5 miles should bring you to a fence but no cattle guard and no gate”—only to find that the route was discreetly signposted. The gravel road was corrugated, washboarded. We jolted and rattled at fifteen miles an hour, past calves the size of big dogs, and cows the size of cows, all of them black and resigned-looking. The sky slumped over a landscape that gave constant reminders of Britain, that Dartmoor feeling of worn-down ancientness. Seagulls, too. Wordsworth might have had this place in mind when he coined the phrase “visionary dreariness.” Suddenly, there was a single brown cow and, to the south, in a gap between low, dull hills, a pale glow. Light bouncing off the salt flats? That was where we were headed.

We drove more and more slowly as the potholes and trenches increased in width, depth, and frequency. The road continued to deteriorate until it finally gave up any claims to being a road. We left the cocoon of the car and began walking. There’d been no signs for a while, but there were, allegedly, three things to look out for as markers: an abandoned trailer, an old Dodge truck, and—interestingly—an amphibious landing craft. No sign of any of them. But that glow we’d noticed earlier? It wasn’t just the reflection on the lake; the sky itself was brightening. To our left, the lake looked congealed, like a dead ocean on a used-up planet. There was a faint smell of sulfur. It was the kind of location that might have been scouted for the closing scenes of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” where the shining sea turns out to be just a further extent of desolation. Protruding from the lake’s edge were the remains of some kind of enterprise, long since aborted. Was that the “Spiral Jetty”? If it was, then it was in far worse shape than we’d anticipated, not exactly a spiral and barely a jetty at all. I remembered that there had recently been a certain amount of debate on this score: whether to try to preserve the jetty, to raise it up and stop it from disappearing again, or just to leave it to its own devices, to gracefully decay and commend itself to the shallow-looking deep. But, no, it couldn’t be that far gone. We kept walking in that state of foiled uncertainty: had we already had the experience we were eagerly anticipating?

No. Because there it was, a ring of black rocks—not white, and far smaller than expected, but exuding unmistakable “Spiral Jetty”-ness.

I’m tempted to keep quoting. I think I will. This is an eminently quotable piece:

We walked toward the circles of stone and could see that these circles were actually part of an unbroken spiral. We were no longer coming to the “Spiral Jetty.” We were at the “Spiral Jetty,” waiting for the uplift, the feeling of arrival—not just in the getting-there sense but in the way Lawrence experienced it at Taos Pueblo. And it sort of happened. The weather had been quietly improving. The sky, in places, had turned from lead to zinc. Patches of blue appeared. And now, for the first time that day, the sun came out. There were shadows, light, a slow release of color.

We clambered down to the jetty—there was no path—through a slope of black rocks, where someone had fly-tipped an exhausted mattress. The jetty extended in a long straight spur before bending inward. The water was plaster-colored, slightly pink, changing color as it was enfolded by the spiral, at its whitest in the middle of the coil.

Dyer’s response to “Spiral Jetty” is fascinating. He says,

Compared with Angkor and the Pyramids, the jetty has aged at the rate of housing projects put up in a hurry. It had existed for only forty years and already it looked ancient. Which, actually, is the best thing about it. It’s fast-tracked to become a contemporary incarnation of Vedder’s sphinx. “The Lightning Field” looks perpetually sci-fi; in next to no time the “Spiral Jetty” had acquired the bleak gravity, the elemental aura, of prehistory. 

He invokes Lawrence’s notion of nodality:

The sky continued to open up. With the sound of birds and lapping water, it was lovely now—in a subdued, melancholy sort of way. It felt desolate, but this was not a place of abandoned meaning. It had retained—or generated—its own dismal nodality.

“Poles Apart” shows Dyer extracting meaning from two great works of land art – Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field” and Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty.” It’s one of his best essays. 

Postscript: “Poles Apart” is included in Dyer’s excellent 2016 collection White Sands. Part 1 “New Mexico” is titled “Space in Time”; Part 2 “Utah” is titled “Time in Space.”

Nunavut Day

Arctic Bay, 2006 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Today is Nunavut Day, a public holiday celebrated every July 9 in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. It marks the anniversary of the 1993 passage of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. The day celebrates Inuit self-determination, culture, and tradition.  

Lorna and I lived in Iqaluit, Nunavut, for nine years (2000 – 2009). They were among the best years of our lives – so different from what we’d experienced previously, living in Prince Edward Island. I took countless pictures while we were there – not only of Iqaluit, but of many of the other Nunavut communities that I had the privilege of visiting in my work with Qikiqtani Inuit Association. 

Here’s a half dozen of my favorite Nunavut photos – my way of paying tribute to this magnificent land and the great people who live there. 

Sylvia Grinnell River, 2007 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Kimmirut, 2007 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Iqaluit, 2008 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Rankin Inlet, 2006 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Hall Beach, 2005 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Arctic Bay, 2006 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Tables for Two Tango: BOOM!

Photo by David Williams, from Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: Zauo"

Hannah Goldfield and Helen Rosner are essentially positive critics. They love writing about great restaurants. They rarely write about bad ones. But when they do, look out! They pull no punches. It’s fun to see them in vinegary mode. How do they express distaste? We shall see. Today, I’ll consider two of their most acid reviews – Goldfield’s “Zauo” (November 26, 2018) and Rosner’s “La Boca” (November 9, 2025). 

What do I mean by “acid”? Try this zinger: “Muddy-tasting flounder sashimi had a texture that might be best described as ‘rigor mortis.’ ” That’s from Goldfield’s review of Zauo, a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan, where diners catch their own fish from indoor tanks before having a chef prepare it on the spot. She writes, 

No matter how you feel about eating fish, eating at Zauo is a disaster. Where to begin? The endearing Japanese ritual of restaurant staff emphatically greeting all customers feels perverted here: every time someone catches a fish, employees are required to cheer, chant, and strike a taiko drum, resulting in an endless dystopian cacophony.

She catches a rainbow trout (“I grimaced as it flopped around, taking its last breaths, in the net used to scoop it out of the water”). The kitchen prepares it. Here’s her description of the result:

Did it have “a simple flavor with a touch of sweetness”? It was hard to say after half of it had been simmered in soy sauce to a bony mush, the other half grilled in salt until chewy and served with its head still on, propped up with a wooden stake like a Big Mouth Billy Bass about to sing. 

Goldfield’s concluding paragraph makes me smile:

Not even the supplementary appetizers and sides offered solace: edamame was slimy and saltless; a pile of seaweed salad arrived, for some reason, atop a bed of droopy green lettuce. If Zauo has one redeeming quality, besides a cheerful and accommodating staff, it’s the bathrooms. There are water tanks here, too—atop beautiful Toto toilets, with blissfully heated seats.

The staff and the toilet seats – these are Zauo’s only redeeming features. 

The tagline of Helen Rosner’s “La Boca” review is “The Argentinean chef Francis Mallmann is notorious for his love of cooking over open flames. With his New York début, he fizzles out.” How does he fizzle out? Rosner tells us:

Maybe it’s the lack of heat: La Boca is beautiful, and expensive, and charismatic, but it is also very bad. I ate there on three occasions, marvelling each time at the gulf between the appealing scene in the dining room, which offers live music at dinnertime and floods of sunlight during lunch, and the astonishing insipidity of what was on my plate. Virtually every dish was a disappointment, sometimes disconcertingly so. Empanadas, an essential avatar of Argentinean cuisine, arrive filled either with bland, greasy ground beef studded with slippery hunks of hard-boiled eggs, or with an oregano-infused Vermont cheddar that congeals almost immediately into a waxy blob. Their appeal is marginally lifted by an accompanying llajua sauce, which I know as a fiery, chile-based Bolivian salsa fresca, but which here seems to consist of grated tomatoes—just grated tomatoes, with hardly any salt.

“Virtually every dish was a disappointment, sometimes disconcertingly so.” That’s an abnormally negative comment for Rosner to make. She usually finds something to praise. But not at La Boca. Here’s her next paragraph:

If you’d like a steak—this is an Argentinean restaurant, after all—the options reflect Mallmann’s characteristic preoccupation with scale. There is, for instance, a thirty-two-ounce rib eye for two hundred and thirty-five dollars, and something called the Tower, which a server hyped up as a dramatic vertical assembly of beef-tenderloin slices interleaved with crispy smashed potatoes. Upon arrival, it was the anticlimax of the year, the meat mushy and flavorless, the potatoes so thin as to be nearly translucent, with the chewy toughness of a dehydrated banana peel. And what a tower—three inches high, more broad than tall, slumping glumly in a puddle of oddly oily jus. The menu’s centerpiece is the parrillada, a traditional Argentinean mixed-grill platter, here featuring a carnivorous quartet of lamb chops, branzino fillets, giant prawns, and a plump New York strip served on the grates of a grand, urn-shaped tabletop grill (unlit, purely for the vibes). It’s a nice steak—a solidly nice one. I was so surprised, and relieved, to at last find something at La Boca that was straightforwardly unobjectionable, that I started to laugh, and then nearly aspirated my bite of meat and choked to death, though I can’t fault the restaurant for that. What I can fault it for is the fact that I had requested the meat medium rare—I’d had a pleasant little exchange about it with our server, who shared happily that that’s how the chef prefers it as well—but it arrived medium well. The rest of the parrillada was fine: the lamb chops tender, the branzino crisp-skinned, the prawns gigantic. Despite their technically precise preparation, everything in the array is grossly underseasoned, though the dish does come with a tiny cup of chimichurri, peculiarly un-garlicky and unsalty, and two tiled lines of Mallmann’s famous “domino potatoes.”

Rosner knows something about Mallmann’s domino potatoes. “I’ve cooked these potatoes before,” she says. “The potatoes’ unique shape is achieved by hacking the sides off each one to make a tight-cornered rectangular brick, then slicing it thinly and pressing down to fan the pieces out like Ricky Jay spreading a deck of cards. The potatoes are baked in oodles of clarified butter, until the outsides are golden, the corners of each thin slice crisping and curling, the interiors silken.” But that’s not what she’s served at La Boca. She writes, 

The version served at La Boca—which is available as a stand-alone side dish, as well, with a pouf of arugula—was barely recognizable as the same dish. The slices of potato were thick and pallid; instead of crisp they were sticky with their own starch. Another side dish that Mallmann is famous for—humitas, an Andean preparation of fresh sweet corn slow-cooked with milk—is served in a metal ramekin, which might be why it had the tinny undertones of creamed corn straight from the can. Does the great chef know what’s going on here? Does he like it?

“Mushy and flavorless,” “chewy toughness,” “grossly underseasoned,” “thick and pallid” – these are annihilating descriptions. And that last bit about the corn dish tasting like it came “straight from the can” is the coup de grâce. Rosner obliterates La Boca. And she’s not done:

Every single dish I tried was under-salted—a common complaint, it seems, as I noticed, on my final visit, that saltshakers had been set out on every table. Squat little silver sentries that clashed with the room’s motif of gold, they seemed like quiet admissions of defeat.

Bottom line: “I don’t want to go back to La Boca, and I can’t in good conscience recommend that anyone else eat there.” 

Goldfield and Rosner aren’t by nature harsh critics. They seek pleasure and love describing it. They prefer tossing bouquets to lobbing grenades. But on the rare occasion when they do the latter – BOOM! 

Homage to Hoagland: "Tiger Bright"

This is the third post in my series “Homage to Hoagland,” in which I consider seven of Edward Hoagland’s best essays – one per month – and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is “Tiger Bright” (included in Hoagland’s 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River).

Hoagland loved circuses. He worked in one for a few months in the spring of 1951, when he was eighteen. The experience made a lasting impression: see “Calliope Times” (The New Yorker, May 22, 2000; chapter 3 of his 2001 memoir Compass Points). In “Tiger Bright,” he writes about circus tigers and their trainers. The trainer he most admires is Gunther Gebel-Williams, “who constitutes a circus all by himself.” Hoagland calls him “the best animal trainer alive.” 

Hoagland’s descriptions of Gunther’s tiger act are extraordinary. For example:

Gunther’s tigers are mostly males, because a male, though surly and slow, is bigger – “more tiger,” as he says, measuring with his arms. They smell like rye bread smeared with Roquefort cheese. He chants and sings like Glenn Gould as he works with them, swinging back and forth, drawing murmuring rumbles and air-blast roars. Tigers growl softly but roar far more explosively than lions do. He spreads his arms wide so the animals have both of them to keep track of, as well as watching his face; it’s like having two assistants in the ring. He holds his whips in one hand, butt and lash reversed, and pets tiger chins with the other, grinning like a lapsed angel, a satyr – it’s a lean V face, the flat planes cut for mischief and glee, or a big-eyed lemur’s, a tree-dweller’s face. Singing and chattering, he composes their ladylike lunges into a fluttering of stripes, touching his forehead with his fingers in a Hindu salute to acknowledge applause, and kneels theatrically while the tigers sit. Throwing sawdust on their turds so that he won’t slip, he pitches his whip like a jokester, his crucifix bouncing on his bare chest, his eyes big and round, organizing them into a jungle trot. They look bulky as bulls, but when he bats them they rise into a pussy pose, paws up. “Ziva!” he calls, running to one, mimicking the twitch of her white cheeks and black mouth, and stroking her rump. “Hubblebay!” he says, and they all revolve. The band accelerates into a keynote of victory.

And:

Maybe the loveliest moment is when Gunther simply has them walk: not a feat many trainers would consider exciting or could even achieve by the adversary technique. Two leave their pedestals and promenade as they might alongside a water hole. He induces another pair to join them – but counterposed – the two pairs passing in the center of the cage. Then he gets the other four to join in, crisscrossing as in Chinese checkers before lining up in formation like the spokes of a wheel. Round and round they slink, keeping abreast, looking up at him, delaying behind the band to exercise their claws (tigers never “march”).

And this beauty – my favorite of the piece:

Bidding this group good-bye, he welcomes a middle-aged, equable tiger, redder than most, and fluffing and scratching it, introduces two elephants, an African with tusks and an Indian one without. The Indian voices its aversion in squeals, the African is indifferent to the tiger, having perhaps inherited know feelings about it one way or the other. The tiger springs to the howdah that each of them carries, down to the ground and up again, then leaps between them, back and forth, finally mounting a platform near the roof of the cage, and jumps again onto the African’s back. Gunther directs all this choreography only by words, sitting at his ease on the ring curbing and watching. The elephants and tiger mount three pedestals and rotate quietly as he talks to them; he tugs on the African’s tusks and feeds it a loaf of Italian bread. The band plays traditional Spartan brass, the tiger mounts the African elephant again, and so does Gunther, his face in a Pan-like grin. He sits on the tiger, and leaning over, tugs its tufted chin, rubs his eyes and lips, and has it roar elegantly into his face. Then he and the tiger drop down to the ground, the elephants leave the cage, and he fondles the cat, tickling its black lips and its orange rump. Then he sits lightly astride its hips and rides it across the stage at a lumbering gallop, a sight not often seen.

Wow! Wow! Wow! A tour de force of evocative writing! Hoagland unfurls detail after amazing detail. The explosive roars. The fluttering stripes. Gunther’s crucifix “bouncing on his bare chest.” He even tells us what the big cats smell like: “They smell like rye bread smeared with Roquefort cheese.” Hoagland is an inspired describer. “Tiger Bright” exemplifies his art magnificently.

Mid-Year Top Ten 2026

Time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

Best Reporting and Essays

1. Ed Caesar, “The Stunt Pilot,” June 1, 2026 ("Once the plane passed the highway, Slipkan gave Gusak the order to shoot. The plane was slightly less than nine hundred feet away from the drone. Gusak squeezed the trigger, and the cabin of the Antonov filled with the drilling sound of automatic-weapon fire and the smoky-sweet smell of spent rounds").

2. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Volume Six,” April 27, 2026 ("You want Aisle 7, north side, top shelf, Pennington Quality Market, or wherever you get your I.G.A. cherries. The larger the jar, the larger the cherry, in generally discernible fractions, so you want the sixteen-ouncer. I.G.A., of course, is the Independent Grocers Alliance, and this is your vox-pop cherry, your socialist cherry, but politics is not why you drown it in bourbon").

3. Michael Schulman, “Deepfaking Orson Welles,” February 9, 2026 ("Then, there was what Saatchi called the 'happiness' problem: left to its own guided intuition, the A.I. technology often makes characters look cheerier, especially women. Saatchi played an A.I. clip of sullen Aunt Fanny, in the grim final scene, inappropriately smirking in her rocking chair. 'In terms of subtle despair, it has absolutely no idea what to do,' he said. 'That’s part of why having the actor is really important' ”).

4. Lauren Collins, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” May 4, 2026 ("Finally, he drove to the spot where we’d looked on the first day. 'It was the very last place I could go,' he said. He walked until he saw our footprints and then pushed a little farther. About half a mile on, he spotted a champagne bottle, green and clear, with a perfect little cigarette of a scroll inside—the real thing, at last").

5. Rebecca Mead, “The Landscape Artist,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("The environment was Goldsworthy’s true studio. He makes art using natural materials—stacked stones, interlaced leaves, threaded wool—that might take hours to create and then only moments to evanesce").

6. Nicola Twilley, “Pour One Out,” January 12, 2026 ("We established that I am prone to overthinking, that I’m not a huge fan of the earthy and acidic notes that are considered the hallmark of the region’s flagship varietal, and that the only sample I’d willingly purchase was a blend of one-quarter smoke-tainted wine and three-quarters not. According to my checklist, it tasted like tobacco, black pepper, and dark fruit, with a slight herbaceous note and a bitter finish").

7. Ian Frazier, “The Ice Curtain,” January 26, 2026 ("While walking around Nome, I came upon and tried to make sense of the city’s former hospital building, which sprawls in an indeterminate shape and contains the offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles, a car-repair garage, a pawnshop, the Nome courthouse, and the labyrinthine workshops of Rolland Trowbridge, an enterprising man who bought the building and damaged his knee crawling around in its crannies as he rehabbed it for its present uses").

8. Paige Williams, “Call of the Wild,” January 19, 2026 ("He ate daylilies, violet greens, chickweed, shepherd’s purse, greenbrier tips, sheep sorrel, thistle stalks. He learned how to make bamboo-pokeweed spring rolls, persimmon ice cream, spicebush muffins, dandelion jelly, pan-fried groundnuts, watercress soup, acorn cookies, roast squirrel glazed with honey and balsamic vinegar. If a wild hog came onto his property, he killed, butchered, and ate it, then freeze-dried the leftovers. He dried stalks of goldenrod and mint on racks").

9. Julian Lucas, “Urban Legend,” June 29, 2026 ("What’s a novel but a big score of details burgled from the world? And what’s a novelist but a fence, furnishing imaginary scenes with choice pieces of reality while obscuring their provenance?").

10. Jon Lee Anderson, “Is Cuba Next?,” March 30, 2026 ("A military band played a patriotic tune, and the marchers began to make their way through the city, bearing torches and chanting old revolutionary slogans: 'Socialism or Death,' 'I Am Fidel.' As they sang and shouted about honor, sacrifice, and the fatherland, they seemed like adherents of a religion in which the rewards are realized only in the hereafter").

Best Cover

Barry Blitt, Split Screen (February 16 & 23, 2026)

Best of “The Critics”

1. James Wood, “Visiting Hours,” May 11 & 18, 2026 ("Sylvie systematically deconstructs Suzanna’s world. You don’t have to visit your mother, she says. But I do have to, Suzanna replies. 'According to who?' Sylvie asks. 'You don’t even have to go to school.' Fed on moral scraps, the child must find her own meaning on which to subsist").

2. Alex Ross, “Crisis Mode,” May 25, 2026 ("Instruments and voices accumulate into immense, sustained, saturating dissonances, with a snare drum cutting through the tear-gas haze. Characteristically, Czernowin’s control of timbre, texture, and structure yields a kind of cataclysmic grandeur. Then, at the very end, she kicks away the frame of art and makes things blunt. Singer and her doppelgänger plead together: 'Don’t take my child away / Don’t take my child / Don’t / No.' The final syllables accelerate into a blur, whereupon a ritual of wailing erupts. A composer writes to the limits of her art, and steps into the real").

3. Zachary Fine, “Let It Bleed,” January 12, 2026 ("From one perspective, the shape is an island seen from above. From others, it’s a half-finished paint job, a blast hole, or an ocular stain. The choice is yours: you can survey it cartographically, insist on its flatness or depth, or be reduced to your own eyeball").

4. Hannah Goldfield, “Daily Bread,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("We spend our lives in a cycle of having eaten and then needing to do it again; how we feed ourselves reflects our relationship to money, time, pleasure, place. If the food diary pushes its practitioners toward solipsism, or toward showing off, its popularity also evinces something encouraging: a curiosity about how other people live, the texture of their days").

5. Hilton Als, “The Seer,” March 9, 2026 ("When I was younger and didn’t “get” Atget, I thought of his images as silent, with no action, no story. But now I can see that they are full of story—the story of time and its passage. My visits to the I.C.P. convinced me that Atget knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to make an epic record of time and place").

6. Zachary Fine, “The Doctor Is In,” March 23, 2026 (Schiele could have placed Graff next to an operating table, like Rembrandt’s Dr. Nicolaes Tulp or Eakins’s Dr. Samuel Gross. He could have given him the dignity of Goya’s Dr. Arrieta, or made him look dashing, like Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi, with his crimson robe and Turkish slippers. Instead, Schiele strips Graff of a stethoscope and examination room, and reduces the background to platelets of white. Who would know that Graff was a talented doctor, or a hearty and athletic man who liked the outdoors and played the cello, or that he had two divorces on the horizon? His body, with its mottled face and hands, is the only wisp of narrative.)

7. Zachary Fine, “Back to the Future,” April 13, 2026 (The centerpiece of the expansion, which was led by the architects Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, in collaboration with the firm Cooper Robertson, is an atrium that snaps right onto the side of the flagship building. I can’t say it was worth the renovation’s eighty-two-million-dollar price tag, but the space is brilliantly subtle. It works like a snorkel for the museum, giving it a new column of air for the vertical flow of traffic to the galleries, which have basically doubled in size.

8. Anthony Lane, “Seeing and Believing,” April 20, 2026 (My favorite sentence in Graham-Dixon’s book has him probing the nitty-gritty of Vermeer’s roofs: “It is possible that he ground actual red terracotta tiles in with his pigments and oil to get the required result.”)

 9. Justin Chang, “Art of the Steal,” April 13, 2026 (Once Lori enters Julian’s home, the film springs to life. So does Soderbergh’s camera, which begins sniffing and roving about the space like a dog unleashed.)

10. Zachary Fine, “Monster Mash,” February 16 & 23, 2026 (But the film persuades with its frightening beauty: the shimmering flesh-colored rocks, the throbbing soundtrack, the smoothness of the creature’s skin. It’s all too human, but not.)

Best Illustration

Bill Rebholz's illustration for Rachel Symes' "On and Off the Avenue: A Total Flop"

Best of “Goings On”

1. Taran Dugal, “Bar Tab: Ornithology,” January 12, 2026 ("Sometime during the coda, the guests’ cocktails arrived. The Autumn in New York, a tangy, gin-heavy blend of lemon and crème de violette, was just fine, and not quite worth its sixteen-dollar price tag").

2. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Cove,” January 26, 2026 ("An oyster is poached in chamomile oil and served with wisps of creamy chestnut. A carrot is roasted to marshmallow sweetness, tempura-fried, and wrapped in charred sweet leaves of caraflex cabbage, then draped in uni and drizzled with spiced quince syrup. Like much of what’s on McGarry’s menu, it has a lot going on, but it doesn’t feel busy or chaotic; McGarry layers ingredients and flavors like washes of watercolor").

3. Jillian Steinhauer, “Art: Louise Bourgeois’s ‘Art Can Still Enthrall,’ ” February 2, 2026 ("The display, although understated, highlights the rhythms of Bourgeois’s obsessive repetitions, and pleasure comes in the form of details, such as in an untitled piece in which a pair of marble eggs hides in a stack of weathered crates").

4. Dan Stahl, “Bar Tab: Haswell Green’s,” February 9, 2026 ("Several pages of beverage options include ninety varieties of whiskey, plus wine, beer, cider, and custom cocktails like the mezcal-forward P.Y.T., which, well—imagine a drinkable cigarette").

5. Hilton Als, “Photo Booth: William Eggleston’s Lonely South,” February 9, 2026 ("The real stunner when it comes to showing us community is Eggleston’s 1972 image of a young Black woman, sitting in a church pew with other women of color, turning to look over her shoulder at the camera. The woman’s hair is straightened—“correct”—and she is thin; she wears a sleeveless, wine-colored dress, and the long fingers of her left hand rest on her left shoulder, partly hiding her mouth. It’s a powerful evocation of the psychology of beauty in the American South. Is she covering her mouth because she’s been made to see her lips as too big? Does she straighten her hair because the “natural” look has caught on only in big cities, where women have more freedom to express themselves, or is she simply trying to align herself with the older women she is sitting with, to be one with them? By looking at the white man behind the camera, is she doing something forbidden? We’ll never know. And it’s those many mysteries, rooted in the real and the possible, that continue to make photography in general, and Eggleston’s in particular, so fascinating").

6. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: The Eighty-Six,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("I was, for my sins, dining with a vegetarian, and twenty ounces felt too ambitious to tackle alone, so I went instead for the New York strip, served bone-in. The exterior, salted and peppered, crackled from a hard sear; the inside was tender pink from edge to edge. The sauces I’d ordered alongside were hardly necessary: an eggy, vinegar-tart béarnaise, and a wiggly, wobbly gelée-adjacent steak sauce made with veal demi-glace. I dipped my fries into them, at least, and enjoyed a whole phalanx of steak-house sides: garlicky spinach; butter-laden mashed potatoes; a strikingly photogenic creamed-corn potpie with a swirly croissant top; snappy green and yellow long beans, dressed in a sharp lemon vinaigrette that sliced through the density of the rest of the food").

7. Rachel Syme, “On and Off the Avenue: Spring in the Trenches,” April 13, 2026 ("We aren’t watching chicks hatch or witnessing the miracle of foaling or plucking clumps of wild ramps from the earth. Instead, we continue traipsing through concrete, burdened with utter confusion about what, exactly, to wear: spring is a time of meteorological fakeouts; one day it will be balmy, the next frigid. Or, mornings are crisp and call for bundling up, but dress in too many layers and you’ll overheat by noon. Rain, April’s rude house guest, visits erratically and unannounced").

8. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Dean’s,” June 8, 2026 ("The restaurant rewards the diner who understands that, at this kind of proudly jolie-laide establishment, there’s a secret code: the more vividly horrid-sounding a dish, the more glorious it will be. The boiled ham, for instance, is heaven: two thin slices of meat, pink as tongues, with a parsley bechamel dotted with tiny, tender favas, and a mass of rough-mashed potatoes that seemed to be nearly half butter, salted just to the ecstatic edge of overmuch"). 

Best Poem

Rosanna Warren, “Coots,” March 30, 2026 (It would snow soon, / we walked fast, night was spreading its cloak, / the western skyline sparkled its broken glass, / and the birds in their tuxedos tightened their rings / so the water rippled glossily / out around them, catching glints).

Best “Talk of the Town”

1. Julian Lucas, “A Real Gas,” January 26, 2026 ("She was sanding down an L-shaped knob for a client in the Hamptons, who’d hired her to modernize his nineteen-thirties Magic Chef. Behind her was an Aladdin’s cave of more than a hundred and fifty venerable gas ranges, some with polished chrome fixtures and others nearly rusted through. There were Chambers, Garlands, Crowns, and a hulking, buttercup-yellow Roper that resembled a muscle car. In a world going electric, the Stove Lady keeps their flames alive: 'Nobody—not nobody, anywhere—does what I do' ").

2. Ben McGrath, “Ice Capades,” March 2, 2026 ("The fourth running of the Van Nostrand, when it finally transpired, after two days of postponement, featured three boats from the Shrewsbury club and three from New York. All, per the rules, were so-called 'A' boats: restored antiques, wooden, with gaffed rigs. From a squinting distance, they resembled Hudson River sloops. Up close, they were more like giant crosses atop machetes. The wind was a fluky northwesterly, gusty at the starting gun, such that a couple of blades levitated briefly, as if launching into flight. Then came the lulls, and a reminder that sailing, even on sherbert, can be a “hurry up and wait” kind of sport. Dan Lawrence’s son, Luke, piloting Ariel, which once belonged to the Roosevelts’ neighbor Archie Rogers, took the first heat, and then the second, obviating the need for a third. No team scores needed this time. The New Yorkers had won, and the cup was going home to Newburgh after a hundred and thirty-five years").

3. Sarah Larson, “Big Time,” March 16, 2026 ("At a Gagosian gallery in Chelsea the other day, the master rigger Joe Vilardi, a gray-haired Long Islander in a hoodie that said 'Budco Enterprises,' surveyed the final steps of the installation of Michael Heizer’s new exhibition, 'Negative Sculpture.' The show features 'Convoluted Line A' and 'Convoluted Line B' (2024), two eighty-seven-and-a-half-foot curved steel troughs that wend through the gallery’s floor like a figure skater’s tracks on ice").

4. Henry Alford, “Special Deliveries,” April 6, 2026 ("At 10:44 a.m., after docking near West Thirty-ninth Street, a thousand and fifty-six feet above trucks stuck in traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, the package was assigned to a Dutch X biker named C Jay Jaime, a Brooklyn-born, thirty-four-year-old father of three, who would be riding around town on a special pedal-assist e-bike that came equipped with a windshield, a roof, and an attached trailer. Jaime, who had on a yellow reflective vest and a helmet, held up his phone near his supervisor’s and, courtesy of the FarEye app, instantly received the coördinates for the packages—a total of forty-five—he’d be delivering. “This should take about six hours,” he said. The Sephora box would be his nineteenth of the day. He removed the parcel from its Kevlar tote and placed it on a shelf in the trailer. The D.O.T. estimates that two cargo bikes can do the work of a van or a box truck. Moreover, the trim little contraption cut a wholesome figure reminiscent of a Richard Scarry book—as if a courtesy tram birthed a tiny Zamboni").

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Fanboy,” June 15, 2026 ["He was sitting in a corner of Old Rabbit Club, a bar on MacDougal Street, drinking a non-alcoholic beer. He had on a Waylon Jennings T-shirt under a red plaid shirt, and an MF Doom baseball cap that contained a cascade of curly hair that Vile has a tendency to hide behind. A beer-menu lamplight suggested that the color of his Chuck Taylors was lavender. He was hanging out late (a) to make the trip down the turnpike at midnight (“Musicians know, it’s an easy shot late at night—it’s like teleportation”) and (b) to catch another band’s gig at Le Poisson Rouge"].

6. Ian Frazier, “ICE Prison Watch,” June 22, 2026 (Doremus Avenue and the warehouses and tank farms and truck lots and junk yards along it are not far from the Passaic River. This is swampy Jersey, as opposed to hilly Jersey. Next to the prison visitors’ parking lot, a small catchment pond holds runoff. The lawn around the pond had been mowed without anybody picking up the trash beforehand. Two Canada geese and six gangly brown-suède goslings walked among the refuse, while in the near distance the truck horns and the protesters’ chants rose up. The geese had been there off and on for days.)

Best Photo

Ian Loring Shiver's photo for Helen Rosner's "New York's Finest Sandwich"

Best of newyorker.com

1. Helen Rosner, “New York’s Finest Sandwich,” March 22, 2026 ("What I find most wondrous about the Vegitalian is that it’s not a vegetarian sandwich that happens to be good. It’s not a concession to dietary preference, or a consolation prize. It is, in every sense, a more considered sandwich than the typical monument to meat; every ingredient is load-bearing, each element thought through and assigned a job. The result is a sandwich that illuminates, a sandwich that delights, a sandwich that redefines the Italian combo as a structure, a set of relationships, a formula that admits many solutions. The meat never figures, and you never miss it; all you miss, when the sandwich is gone, is the sandwich itself").

2. Samanth Subramanian, “Sohrab Hura’s Frozen Vision of Kashmir,” May 2, 2026 ("What does “Snow” testify to? Possibly to a way of life that not only survives many kinds of precarity—cruel weather, scanty income, a despotic army—but that even molds itself to them. I kept returning to an image of the side of a house with unfinished red brick walls and a corrugated metal roof. Quilts and blankets burst out of its upper windows, perhaps to be aired or perhaps as plugs to keep out the winter wind. It’s a sight so unexpected that it feels faintly comic, until you clock just how many blankets there are—and how bitterly cold it must be in that house at night. The day is bright, and the distant peaks are carpeted in green, but there’s still a berm of snow on the road by the house, as if to warn that the winter will never entirely leave this land").

3. Max Norman, “August Sander’s Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World,” May 21, 2026 (Despite his claims to universality, Sander thought with his eye, which was attracted to abnormal bodies, unforgettable faces, unkempt free thinkers, and all sorts of people the Nazis would soon label “unerwünscht,” or undesirable.)

4. Taran Dugal, “How Raghu Rai Captured and India in Transition,” May 23, 2026 ("My favorite shot from the book is “Monsoon Downpour in Delhi,” from 1984, which shows a bull pulling a load in the heavy rain, its driver balancing barefoot atop a wooden cart. To his left is a black car with a bulky, rounded frame, glimmering in the deluge. One look at the image and I remembered the Delhi monsoons from my childhood summers—the intolerable humidity, the legions of darkened clouds gathering on the horizon, followed by stentorian thunder and relentless, life-affirming rain. The photo functioned as a window into the past, but it reminded me, too, of the future").

5. Hilton Als, “The Expansive Joy of Mao Ishikawa,” May 30, 2026 ("The photographs in 'A Port Town Elegy' are strong images about being trapped and exercising masculinity. But who takes the poor’s power or demand for power seriously? Ishikawa doesn’t sentimentalize these guys; she lets them get in her face (and, by extension, her frame), she pays attention to them, and imagine how rare that is in their world!").

6. Naaman Zhou, “How City Kids Used to Play on the Streets of New York,” June 6, 2026 ("Earlier, I’d asked Cooper what her favorite picture was in the series. It was one she’d taken of a go-kart race down an abandoned stretch of the West Side Elevated Highway. Two groups of kids are screeching down the road. Other boys are sitting on the guardrail, or strolling and watching from a distance. It’s otherwise empty—just the kids and the road. Like almost all of Cooper’s photos, the scene is fleeting, a remnant of a New York that no longer exists. That highway was demolished, and, though Cooper saved one of the go-karts, and exhibited it at the Museum of the City of New York, she wasn’t able to keep it. In the seventies, when Cooper took these photos, she already knew that what she was seeing was temporary. 'I would drive around Alphabet City, and I would see these things,' she said. 'But they might last for a couple of hours. If I saw it one day, generally, it wouldn’t be there the next' ").

7. Naomi Fry, “The Delicious Anticipation – and, Yes, Release – of ‘Heated Rivalry,’ ” January 10, 2026 ("To try to tell if someone likes you—if someone might even want to have sex with you and, if so, when, and what that encounter might be like, and, once it’s over, when and how it might be repeated—can be one of life’s greatest pleasures").

8. Alex Ross, “What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann,” March 14, 2026 ("What, exactly, was the root of Sontag’s 'shame' over the encounter with Mann, if her semi-fictional story reflected her real-life attitude?").

9. Rebecca Mead, “David Hockney’s Hidden Depths,” June 16, 2026 ("His 'pool paintings,' including 'A Bigger Splash,' remain his most iconic works, despite the fact that he made only a dozen or so of them. They capture a kind of carefree milieu that manages to be suggestively hedonistic while being almost Edenic in the loving treatment of male nudity").

10. Zach Helfand, “How to Canoe to the World Cup in New Jersey,” June 16, 2026 (“The Hackensack appeared behind the parking lot, surprisingly broad and sparkly. Phragmites reeds lined the water, and the American Dream mall loomed over the far bank. It didn’t smell too bad. Except for the cars roaring overhead on a nearby bridge, a continuation of Route 3, it was pretty peaceful”).

Best Sentence

Over and over, I ran those films on our family projector, watching Pepper Constable (6'1", 191) go off-tackle, shucking Yalies, Harvards, on his way to the end zone. - John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Volume Six” (April 27, 2026) 

Best Paragraph

Once the plane passed the highway, Slipkan gave Gusak the order to shoot. The plane was slightly less than nine hundred feet away from the drone. Gusak squeezed the trigger, and the cabin of the Antonov filled with the drilling sound of automatic-weapon fire and the smoky-sweet smell of spent rounds. A stream of orange tracers rained from the minigun. After a few bursts of gunfire, a small plume of black smoke tailed out behind the Shahed, and it began losing altitude. The crew expected it to explode, but it glided into a field beneath the Antonov without detonating—a surprise for a farmer the next morning. Inside the plane, there was no jubilation. After the successful kill, Gusak spent a few minutes tidying up his work station, collecting round casings into a burlap bag. - Ed Caesar, “The Stunt Pilot” (June 1, 2026) 

Best Detail

Two Canada geese and six gangly brown-suède goslings walked among the refuse, while in the near distance the truck horns and the protesters’ chants rose up. - Ian Frazier, "ICE Prison Watch" (June 22, 2026)

Best Description

Every other detail of the Vegitalian likewise replaces an element that the meats provided in the original. Arugula, in lieu of more traditional iceberg lettuce, adds peppery bite. Pecorino, rather than Parmigiano, provides funk. In addition to mozzarella (salty, springy) there is a very nontraditional layer of Swiss cheese, lending a gently savory note. Rather than a conventional splash of red-wine vinegar, the Vegitalian gets a hefty smear of Court Street Grocers’ signature “hoagie spread,” a piquant relish of kalamata and green olives plus a briny, giardiniera-style mix of cauliflower, carrots, peppers, and other pickly things. There’s also a smear of mayo—Italian-combo sacrilege, in some sandwich circles, though I’ve always felt that it boosts the lusciousness of this sort of sandwich. The bread is a soft-crumbed, crackly-crusted seeded roll, with faintly salty pockets of air. - Helen Rosner, "New York’s Finest Sandwich" (March 22, 2026)

Best Drink

The Calcutta Cutie – “a pear-and-chai-infused vodka—sweet, refreshing, and just bitter enough” (Taran Dugal, “Bar Tab: Ornithology,” January 12, 2026).

June 29, 2026 Issue

Colson Whitehead is primarily known for his novels. I realize that. He’s won two Pulitzers for them, so why not? But to me, he’s the writer of the brilliant The Colossus of New York (2003) – a vivid, lyrical, ruminative portrait of New York City. It’s one of my favorite books. I call it a portrait. But it’s actually unclassifiable. Its subtitle is “A City in Thirteen Parts.” That’s a pretty good capsule of the book’s essence.

Reading Julian Lucas’s absorbing profile of Whitehead in this week’s New Yorker, I was curious to see if he mentions Colossus. I didn’t have to wait long. Eight paragraphs in, Lucas writes, “More than twenty years ago, he described New York as a city that ‘multiplies when you’re not looking.’ ” Lucas doesn’t say so, but that’s a quote from Colossus: 

The New York City you live in is not my New York City; how could it be. This place multiplies when you’re not looking. We move over here, we move over there. Over a life-time, that adds up to a lot of neighborhoods, the motley construction material of your jerry-built metropolis.

Later in his piece, Lucas refers to the book expressly:

He pivoted to a book of essays, drawing its title, “The Colossus of New York” (2003), from one of the sci-fi monsters of his childhood movie nights. They’re playful, intimate sketches, each sentence an errant transmission from the city’s collective consciousness. In the essay “Port Authority,” Whitehead eavesdrops on the dreams of eager new arrivals; in “Morning,” on the unspoken indignities of the daily commute. “You are a New Yorker when what was there is more real and solid than what is here now,” he writes in the introduction. Later, he adds, “New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.”

Lucas goes on to say of Colossus, “The slim volume marked the beginning of a transformation, though several years passed before it ramified.”

Lucas concludes his illuminating piece with another quote from Colossus. He writes,

What’s a novel but a big score of details burgled from the world? And what’s a novelist but a fence, furnishing imaginary scenes with choice pieces of reality while obscuring their provenance? Over the years, it becomes clear that he does what he does not just for the money, or even for the thrill, but because it makes him part of the churn, a safe for the secrets of a city so quick to change that, as Whitehead writes in “Colossus,” “we can never make proper goodbyes.”

Lucas gives The Colossus of New York its due. I laud him for doing so.  

3 Great Thematic Travelogues: People

This is the seventh 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 focus on their sense of people.

“Above all, this is a book about people and place,” says Macfarlane, in the “Author’s Note” at the beginning of The Old Ways. The people who figure most centrally in his narrative embody the paths and seaways he travels – people like Ian Stephen, Finlay MacLeod, Anne Campbell, Steve Dilworth, Rajah Shehadeh, Miguel Angel Blanco, Jon Miceler. They guide Macfarlane. Stephen accompanies him on two voyages, one to the Shiants, the other to Sula Sgeir. MacLeod and Campbell help him find Manus’s way. Dilworth takes him on a pilgrimage to a sacred rock on the Isle of Harris. Shehadeh guides his walks in Palestine. Blanco walks with him through the Fuenfría valley. Miceler leads him on an expedition to Minya Konka.

They’re all wonderful guides. How does Macfarlane evoke them? At least three ways. Firstly, he describes their physical appearance. Here, for example, is his portrait of Ian Stephen:

Ian in appearance: curly silver hair, a shallow white stubble, two thin silver earrings in his left ear, too fine to be piratical. Ian in manner: sharp, fox-like, generous, mischievous. Ian in voice: lilting, Gaelic-inflected. Ian in stature: small, almost boyish. He has an air of youthfulness to him, seems younger than me, though he’s more than twenty years my senior. His physique, like his language, is compact and wiry, capable of reach and strength. Physically, he’s whipped-tight, made of hawser and halyard wire, but his character is full of flex. He passes in and out of moods of intense concentration, whose endings are marked by a quick grin, a register shift, an agile impiety. He doesn’t take well to fools or frauds. The first time we met I felt gauged, appraised, quickly read. Eyes moved up and down me. I had the same sense of apprehension as when stepping through an airport scanner. Then – clear. Green light. No improper goods. Nothing falsely hidden. A test passed, for the time being at least.

Secondly, he describes where and how they live. Here, for example, is his depiction of the kitchen of Steve and Joan Dilworth’s house in the Hebridean village of Geocrab:

Within a few minutes of arriving I was at the kitchen table with a coffee in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other, telling Steve and Joan about the night in the beehive shielings and the discovery of Manus’s path. A stuffed guillemot regarded me quizzically from on top of a wall-mounted speaker. On a three-foot-deep southern windowsill sat what looked like the bronze skull of a praying mantis, two feet long and with bulging eyes. Stacked under the window were dozens of empty bird’s-egg display cases: dark pine, glass-topped, segmented by fine wooden partitions, with cotton-wood nests ready to receive each blown dead egg, and copperplated name cards to identify the species: Sardinian Goldfinch. Greenshank. Red-Billed Tern.

And here, unforgettably, is Steve’s workshop:

On a chest freezer sat a human skull, the cheekbones of which had been partially built up with plaster and resin, but the nose of which was unreconstructed: just a blade of cartilage cutting out from the face. On a shelf was a wooden owl, with a glistening rope or cord of metal protruding from its open mouth. From a rafter, dangling from its meat hook, was the Hanging Figure.

Two of the walls were lined with workbenches. Barrels stood about as tables and desks. Every surface was cluttered with objects. Conical flasks, bell jars, retorts, syringes – the glassware of an apothecary or mad inventor. Cork-stoppered phials, film cannisters. I found a jar containing an inch or so of a red unguent, which appeared to glow from within. I picked it up and rotated it so that I could read the sticker: SEAL OIL. The oil slunk around the jar’s base, leaving a ruby tideline on the glass. 

There were pots filled with feathers, mostly tail and wing, and separated roughly by species. On the benches were the tools of the job: clamps, pliers, calipers, gauntlets. A springy curl of minke baleen, a foot-long, black and polished. The cochlea of a grey whale. 

At waist level on a bench in the workshop was a basket filled with horns, teeth, bones and beaks from unidentifiable creatures. Unicorns? Hippogriffs? Dragons? I lifted the basket, and underneath it was a shallow crate containing perhaps fifty hollow sand dollars, little pods of white with their cryptic dot-markings. Nestled among them was an armadillo’s shell, orangey in colour and delicately articulated, covered in pale wire-like hairs. I picked it out and held it. It sat like a bubble on my palm.

The third way Macfarlane evokes his people is by showing them interacting with the landscapes they know and love so intimately. Here, for example, is his description of Finlay MacLeod interpreting certain topographical features of the Isle of Lewis:

One of the reasons I enjoy being with Finlay is his ability to read landscapes back into being, and to hold multiple eras of history in plain sight simultaneously. To each feature and place name he can attach a story – geological, folkloric, historical, gossipy. He moves easily between different knowledge systems and historical eras, in awareness of their discrepancies but stimulated by their overlaps and rhymes. Scatters of stones are summoned up and reconstituted in his descriptions into living crofts. He took me to a green knoll in Baile na Cille in mid-Lewis, and recalled for me the scene in 1827 when a Reverend Dr. Macdonald had gathered 7,000 people around the knoll for a mass conversion to Calvinism. A crag-and-tail outcrop of gneiss in the moor drew him back into the Holocene and an explanation of how, after the glaciers had retreated from the Western Isles around 12,000 years ago, the peat began to deepen in the lees of the exposed rock-backs. To Finlay, geography and history are consubstantial. Placeless events are inconceivable, in that everything that happens must happen somewhere, and so history issues from geography in the same way that water issues from a spring: unpredictably but site-specifically.

Roger Deakin’s Waterlog features dozens of people. For example:

Sid Merry, who takes Deakin eel fishing on the Great Ouse (“Sid is a wiry, weather-beaten man of medium build who knows the Great Ouse better than anyone”);

Ernie Hall, a dart player in the Three Tuns at Welney, who tells Deakin about the times after work on hot days he and his friends “used to dive off the bridge there into the muddy Hundred Foot Drain, swim down on the ebb-tide to the Crown, three miles away, sink three pints while the tide turned, then swim back up on the rising tide to Bank Farm, where he lived”);

Deakin’s old swimming companion Dudley, who accompanies him on swim at Holkham beach (“Miles from anywhere, we came upon a waterhole that was especially long and deep, and splashed about in it like two desert travellers in an oasis”);

Deakin’s cousin Adrian, who accompanies him on a swim in a tarn in the Rhinog Mountains of Wales (“We stripped off and leapt in. It took our breath away. The pool was three or four feet deep with just enough room to swim, as in a treadmill, against the current. Every second was an eternity. Neither of us stayed in for longer than a minute but sprang out on the knife-edge between aching and glowing”);

Judith, Deakin’s host at the weir in the village of Fladbury on the River Avon (“We dived off an old stone landing-stage into sixteen-foot-deep clear water above the weir and recklessly breaststroked a few hundred yards upstream as far as a bridge”);

Deakin’s friend John, who accompanies him on a swim in a bathing place in Dartmoor where the River Dart is joined by an unusually cold moorland torrent (“My friend John and I, wearing masks, snorkels and flippers, dropped straight into deep water off some rocks and swam against the current up into the pool. What we saw there astonished us both. About ten feet down in the clear water, dappled with sunlight, lay dozens of salmon, many of them well over two feet long. They turned and nosed off languidly upstream at our approach, disappearing into the clear green bubbling river, or amongst the shadows of underwater rocks”);

Madeleine, a painter, whom Deakin meets when the two of them are swimming in Penzance’s Jubilee Bathing Pool (“Madeleine asserted confidently that swimming is better than sex, and that it is an invaluable inspiration to her painting. There was no arguing with that. Her comment was curiously in tune with the sensuous nature of these original lidos”).

Deakin’s friend Brian, who uses his boat to shield Deakin from the view of the coastguard as he swims across the mouth of the Fowey River from Polruan to Fowey and back (“Brian and his children, Holly and Joe, chatted away as we went, and I eased into a steady breaststroke, keeping to the seaward side of the boat, out of sight of the harbourmaster’s office”);

Deakin’s friend Gary, who accompanies him on a swim in a natural rock pool at Treyarnon, in Constantine Bay (“Gary and I went in too, and the retriever, called Moll, we discovered, swam over to greet us. She looked magnificent in the water and moved with instinctive grace, snout just clear of the surface, tail out as a rudder”);

Stephen Rees, who tells Deakin a story about being bitten by a pike (“Almost immediately he felt ‘a bash’ in his right arm, which was trailing in the fast water. He told me he thought for a moment he had hit it on a sunken branch. Then he looked down and recognized the head of a pike holding on to his forearm and saw the flash of its body as it spun away”);

Gavin Edwards, an Aysgarth potholer, whom Deakin encounters at Bernie’s Caving Café in Ingleton, and who tells Deakin about the existence of a wild gorge (“a deep gash in the limestone filled with white water dropping steeply for two hundred feet”) called Hell Gill, which Deakin decides to swim;

Deakin’s friends Caroline, Ruth, and Neil, who row Deakin across the loch at Ardpatrick, Argyll (“The plan was to row across from the ferry cottage to the quay on the opposite shore. I would then swim back, escorted by the boat”), and who, the following afternoon, accompany him on a swim “in 360 feet of turquoise water in a sheer-sided quarry on Belnahua”);

Denis, who takes Deakin in his boat to Gillingham Strand on the River Medway, and then escorts him on his swim across the river to Hoo Salt Marsh Island and the Folly Fort (“Sometimes Denis rowed ahead of me, sometimes to one side, and sometimes behind. Both of us had settled into the zen of rhythm by now”);

Steve, an artist camping on Hoo Salt Marsh Island, who gives Deakin a tour of Folly Fort (“Steve’s canvases were propped up around the walls or hung from a washing line like dried cod. They were a kind of collaboration between the man and the river. When we had finished our lunch and I had changed, we set off over the marsh to explore the island and see some of his work in progress”);

Somerset farmer Peter Hansford, who shows Deakin his cider shed (“Mr. Hansford drew off some of the dark nectar out of a tap in one of the barrels, and offered us a half-pint each. It was viscous, cool and sharp, then the taste of the fruit came through. It was probably vicious too, but I liked it and was soon on a second glass”);

Deakin’s friend Lucy, who invites him to swim in the outdoor pool on the grounds of her posh London flat (“I can think of no greater luxury than swimming outdoors at night in gently mulled water when there’s a chill in the air. It is like being tucked up in bed on a frosty night with the window ajar”);

Deakin’s friend Michael, who arranges Deakin’s admission to the indoor swimming pool of the Royal Automobile Club in London (“The long, green pool was a magnificent high-ceilinged Byzantine affair, all turquoise mosaic pillars and wide terrazzo floors. The pool was edged with marble and a fine spray of water played on the surface at the shallow end. The pillars sparkled with a serpentine brilliance and there was a Roman opulence to the place”); 

Deakin’s friends Lucy, Madeleine, Tim, and Meg, amongst others, who join Deakin at the Hidden Hut, in Walberswicki, Suffolk, to celebrate his journey’s end with a Christmas Day swim in the North Sea (“Once fully immersed and striking out for deeper water, I experienced the intoxication of the fiery cold, and found myself splashing about and even body-surfing with manic energy”).

Macfarlane and Deakin have many friends and companions and appear to enjoy their company. I’m not sure the same can be said of Lawrence Osborne. In his The Wet and the Dry, he says repeatedly that he wants to be alone: “I am resolutely solitary at the hotel bar at ten past six, and the international riffraff have not yet descended upon its stools”; “I am alone, I think to myself, on my little lake of slightly gelatinous vodka. I am alone, and no one can touch me. I am haraam”; “But usually, as I say, I am alone, and it is this quality of aloneness that is most special. The solitude of the bar is so absolute, so gutting that you wonder why Edward Hopper didn’t paint it more often”; “Crudely but also subtly, the bottle facilitates this solitude, and the drinker knows it all too well”; “It was a place to savor life’s inevitable solitude and uncertainty”; “ ‘The bar,’ as Luis Buñuel once wrote, ‘is an exercise in solitude’ ”; “Some places are intended as a withdrawal, a penance. Places where one is doomed to be alone with the self”; “And as I sip my vodka martini in the Bristol at midnight, alone but for a bowl of salted peanuts ...”; “Back in Cairo, I spent some days alone at the Windsor, venturing nightly down to the decaying bar and its atrophied antlers and drinking cold glasses of disgusting Omar Khayyam with plates of hummus.”

Nevertheless, people do figure in Osborne’s book. There’s the Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt, with whom Osborne has lunch:

The windows were open, and we could smell the snow. On the table was a bottle of Chateau Kefraya, the wine that Jumblatt invests in. As I was seated next to him, he politely poured me a glass. The politics died down, and he seemed genuinely curious to hear what a drinker would think of his production.

There’s Osborne’s family: his father (“He liked his pint rather than his dram”); his mother (“She was a woman who had wandered almost by accident into a life she had not quite intended for herself”); his great-uncle John O’Kane (“Here was a male gorgon who stormed around the world on ‘business’ liquoring himself at a thousand bars, ‘that drunken Irish loafer,’ as my father called him, who didn’t care about gathering moss as he rolled like a stone through his ramshackle life”).

There’s Osborne’s Italian girlfriend Elena, “in all her blonde and oddly Nordic magnificence.” I like this line: “Elena crawled on top of me and said, ‘Drink or amore? Which one first?’ Amore, then, but soon after drink.”

There’s Isphanyar Bhandara, owner of the Murree Brewery in Rawalpindi. Osborne visits his office:

In wall cases stood rows of Murree products: Kinoo Orange Vodka, Citrus and Strawberry Gin, Vat No. 1 Whisky, clear rum, and beers. There were also the fruit juices and fruit malts that Murree sells to Muslims, foremost among them a thing called Bigg Apple. When Isphanyer spoke rapidly on the phone, his Urdu was mixed with urgently crisp English words: “maximize,” “incentivize,” “target,” and then “look after him!” From time to time he paused to sweep a deodorant stick into his arm pits and laughed a little nervously. He was handsome, quick, and on edge.

There’s master distiller John Campbell, who gives Osborne a tour of the Laphroaig distillery on the Isle of Islay:

We went up to the cement-floored malting room, where Laphroaig’s barley is rolled out and dried. Malting is the process of flushing barley three times with water to make it germinate over a period of fifty-two hours. The husks are then dried three times as well. Laphroaig is one of only five distilleries in Scotland that “floor malts” by hand – that is, they expose the grain to natural air by opening and closing windows. Enzymes pour through the tiny acrospire at the barley husk’s core, and at its tip an embryo begins to emerge. Campbell split one and showed it to me, adding that this means the barley is getting ready to produce sugars. But before this germination actually occurs, there’s an intermediate step: the husks are shoveled into a kiln room for the process known as peating. A peat fire belches a perfumed smoke into the kiln for fifteen hours and saturates the dried-out barley with its aromas.

There’s Osborne’s friend Sébastien de Courtois, a French scholar of Islam, who takes Osborne to the Nurettin Cerrahi Tekkesi, a little-known dervish school of the seventeenth-century saint Cerrahi Halveti, where they witness an extraordinary ceremony:

A series of circles had formed, the men holding hands. They turned slowly clockwise, their heads still turning to left and right, dipping, the bodies bending slightly to the right as they uttered the same words. In the salon, the old men seated on the sofas made the same motions with their heads, their eyes closed. They were inducted into the same trance. The sema, the ceremony. Drummers had appeared, in white turbans. At the center of the circle stood a single dervish in his tall camel-hair sikke hat symbolizing the tombstone of his ego. He was younger than the leaders conducting the chants, the mustache carefully trimmed.

The chanting ebbed and flowed, changed rhythm and speed. The men began to sweat and half-dance as they turned. Something had clicked between them, and they were now fused into a single whole. The man in the sikke began to rotate in the center of the space. His arms wide, dressed in white, he spun like a sycamore seed falling: an expression of pure intoxication.

And there are the two Lebanese winemakers Labib Kallas and Andre Hajj Thomas, who give Osborne a tour of their vineyards located some thirty miles north of Cairo:

We walked across the vineyards in cool winter sun. Vines to the horizon in every direction. The two men stopped here and there to watch the workers pruning, intervening to correct their technique. The intricate technical details of viticulture are so alien here that they have to be supervised with constant attention. The two men sometimes sleep out in the vineyards in order to do it around the clock, and over time the field hands have adapted to these peculiar demands. Yet over this whole enterprise, with its initial investment of $2 million, there hangs the inevitable uncertainty of making an alcoholic product in a country that is retreating from its secular inheritance. 

Those are just some of the people in The Wet and the Dry. And don’t forget the bartenders: Time Out’s Johnny Khouris (“Beirut’s most famous bartender”) and the Windsor’s Marco (“An ancient and venerable bar must have a barman exuding those qualities. The Windsor has Marco”), to name two.  

All three of these great books throng with people. I’ve identified a number of them. But, so far, I haven’t mentioned the protagonists – the authors themselves. Their “I”s are on almost every page. Can these works be read as self-portraits? That’s the subject of my next post in this series.