“Journey” and “journalism” share a linguistic root. I often
think of this when I read The New Yorker. Each of its fact pieces is a
sort of journey, or at least a visit. This year, the magazine took me on some
amazing armchair trips: to Delaware Bay to see horseshoe crabs (Ian Frazier,
“Blue Bloods); to Oaxaca, Mexico, to explore one of the deepest caves in the
world (Burkhard Bilger, “In Deep”); to
the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique, in the south of France, to view ITER,
“the most complex machine ever built” (“Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Star in a
Bottle”); to the Cairo Police Academy to see the trial of twenty-one Muslim
Brotherhood leaders (Peter Hessler, “Revolution On Trial”); to Berlin’s
Berghain, “the most famous techno club in the world” (Nick Paumgarten, “Berlin
Nights”); to a café in Kiev, as Russian tanks mass on Ukraine’s northern and
eastern borders (Keith Gessen, “Waiting For War”); to Aspen, Colorado, to view
the construction of the Shigeru Ban-designed Aspen Art Museum (Dana Goodyear,
“Paper Palaces”); to the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles to visit the
Soylent headquarters (Lizzie Widdicombe, “The End of Food”); to a convention
center in Villa Park, a western suburb of Chicago, to attend a conference of
fast-food workers (William Finnegan, “Dignity”); to the Ebola wards of the
Kenema Government Hospital, Sierra Leone (Richard Preston, “The Ebola Wars”);
to Washington State University’s Bread Lab, in Mount Vernon, to gain a better understanding of the role of gluten in our diet (Michael Specter,
“Against the Grain”); and many more.
I’ll soon be compiling my “Best of 2014” list. Expect to see
at least a few of the above-mentioned “travel” pieces on it.
Credit: The above artwork is by Istvan Banyai; it appears in the March 24, 2014 issue of The New Yorker as an illustration for Nick Paumgarten’s “Berlin Nights.”
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