Best of 2018: Reporting

Janne Iivonen, illustration for Ian Frazier's "The Maraschino Mogul"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ian Frazier, “The Maraschino Mogul,” April 23, 2018 (“As summer progressed, to add a further touch of the apocalyptic, bees returning at the end of the day to hives in Red Hook began to glow an incandescent red. Some local beekeepers found the sight of red bees flying in the sunset strangely beautiful. All of them had noticed that their honey was turning red, too”).

2. Nicholas Schmidle, “Rocket Man,” August 20, 2018 (“Ten seconds into the burn, SpaceShipTwo was supersonic. Stucky began trimming the h-stabs, steadily increasing the vehicle’s pitch until it reached sixty-eight degrees. He and Mackay were travelling at Mach 1.8—about twice as fast as a Tomahawk cruise missile. Outside the vehicle, the light was draining from the sky, turning it a deep, muddy blue”).

3. Raffi Khatchadourian, “Degrees of Freedom,” November 26, 2018 (“Then, suddenly, the injector was triggered. The sound of valves opening and closing filled the operating theatre, along with the rush of compressed air through the injector, the noise a lightning-quick mechanical breath, culminating in a metallic clink. In an instant, the ninety-six electrodes were in, like a soccer cleat going into soft earth”).

4. David Grann, “The White Darkness,” February 12 & 19, 2018 (“It was hard to breathe, and each time he exhaled the moisture froze on his face: a chandelier of crystals hung from his beard; his eyebrows were encased like preserved specimens; his eyelashes cracked when he blinked”).

5. Zadie Smith, "Through the Portal," May 7, 2018 (“Yet what is a goddess doing here, before these thin net curtains? What relation can she possibly have to that cheap metal radiator, the chipped baseboards, the wonky plastic blinds?”).

6. John McPhee, “Direct Eye Contact,” March 5, 2018 (“In a storm, a big oak in mast, up a slope from my cabin there, fell not long ago. Its trunk broke freakishly—about twenty feet up—and the crown bent all the way over and spread the upper branches like a broom upon the ground. In the branches were a number of thousands of acorns. The next morning, there was enough bear shit around that oak to fertilize the Philadelphia Flower Show”).

7. Rebecca Mead, “Meal Ticket,” June 18, 2018 (“The aged lamb on my plate looked like shreds of an automobile tire, and it tasted like something I wouldn’t be able to wash out of my hair for a week”).

  

8. Nick Paumgarten, “Getting a Shot,” January 29, 2018 (“With thirty minutes until count, they re-racked for one try. Anderson got his fake beating, and off it went, bodies flying all over the place, well past the call of ‘cut.’ Sample opened his eyes wide: ‘That one looked a little real.’ The offenders, sweaty and ebullient, collected their pizzas and filed out, under guard”).

9. Jiayang Fan, “The Spreading Vine,” March 12, 2018 (“The bootleg wine was warm, and, when I raised my cup, I could see thick sediment dancing inside. The security guard had mentioned that the wine hadn’t yet been filtered, but Liu and Fatty didn’t seem bothered. We took a sip, and Fatty’s mouth puckered. The wine was harsh, sweet but astringent, and the taste seemed to register in the esophagus as much as in the mouth. As the men drained their cups, Liu reflected that at least it hadn’t cost them anything”).

10. Janet Malcolm, “Six Glimpses of the Past,” October 29, 2018 (“I see some resemblance to myself in pictures of him. That’s all I can say about Oskar. If I had known I was going to write about him, I would have asked my mother questions. But now I am like a reporter with an empty notebook. Oskar is out of reach”).

Best of 2018: The Critics

Chris Gash, illustration for Alexandra Schwartz's "Margin of Error"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “No Escape,” November 19, 2018 (“Speaking of color, a room in which many of Warhol’s multihued “Flowers” of the sixties adorn his chartreuse-and-cerise “Cow Wallpaper,” from the same period, is like a chromatic car wash. You emerge with your optic nerve cleansed, buffed, and sparkling”).

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” February 5, 2018 (“Each photograph shoulders aside its neighbors and stops you dead: a glittering nocturnal view of a West Side high-rise above a soulfully trusting Italian donkey, a naked young man and an expanse of unquiet Hudson River waters, William S. Burroughs being typically saturnine and a young man placidly sucking on his own big toe, a suavely pensive older man and a pair of high heels found amid trash in Newark, a dead seagull on a beach and a Hujar self-portrait. The works have in common less a visual vocabulary than a uniform intensity and practically a smell, as of smoldering electrical wires”).

3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Performance,” October 1, 2018 (“A frontal, tumultuous scrum of two big cats, three horses, and five Arabian hunters threatens to burst from the canvas. Claws, hooves, teeth, and scimitars contend. Primary colors blaze. Black resounds. It’s a dazzling picture, but Delacroix’s open competition with Rubens, who was denied a riposte by virtue of being two centuries deceased, gives it the air of an elephantine bagatelle”).

4. Anthony Lane, “Unusual Suspects,” April 2, 2018 [“James Wong Howe, a king among cinematographers, used VistaVision on ‘The Rose Tattoo’ (1955), and there’s a portrait of him with a similar camera, which towers above him on its wheeled crane, and which he holds by a cable, as if leading a velociraptor through Jurassic Park”].

5. James Wood, “Departure Lounge,” October 1, 2018 (“There is the utopian theory of mobility and endless curiosity, and there is our daily reality, which is composed of a billion familiar details, most of them indescribable—the rooms we sit in, and the dimmer rooms we were once raised in; the streets we live on, and the old streets we grew up on, which truly exist now only in our heads. There is the desirable horizon, but there is also the furrowed field, which we know so well and which has made us who we are”).

6. Dan Chiasson, “Anybody There?,” April 23, 2018 (“On Giphy, you can find many iconic images from ‘2001’ looping endlessly in seconds-long increments—a jarring compression that couldn’t be more at odds with the languid eternity Kubrick sought to capture”).

7. Lidija Haas, “The Disbelieved,” June 4 & 11, 2018 (“She warns that ‘nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.’ This idea implies an injunction against interpretation and against narrative shaping that’s all but impossible for a writer on the subject to obey”).

8. Thomas Mallon, “Shots in the Dark,” May 28, 2018 (“With flashbulbs, and even their riskier, flash-powder antecedent, he was able to own and preserve the instant when—Fiat lux!—he spun the world a hundred and eighty degrees”).

9. Andrew Marantz, “Friends in High Places,” January 8, 2018 [“In the Fox News studio, the fresh tweets were displayed in bold type on a thirty-foot-wide screen, Trump’s larger-than-life Twitter avatar peering, Rushmore-like, into the middle distance. (Presumably, the real Trump, in the Presidential bedroom, peered back, an elderly youth gazing into a shallow pool)”].

10. Alexandra Schwartz, “Margin of Error,” October 29, 2018 (“His John, by turns petty, aggressive, and self-pitying, looms a head above Radcliffe’s Jim, pouring whiskey and slinging insults, plus the occasional fist, as the younger man stands his ground, piously pelting him with inaccuracy after inaccuracy”).

Best of 2018: newyorker.com

Sarah Mazzetti, illustration for Calvin Trillin's "Nearby and Familiar: A Strategy for Picking Restaurants"

Here are my favorite newyorker.com pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Alexandra Schwartz, “Agnès Varda Is Still Going Places,” March 4, 2018 (“Varda, as the film’s title implies, is a gleaner, too. She loves the burnt edges of cinema, finding treasures in images or ideas that other directors might reject”).

2. Richard Brody, “How Garry Winogrand Transformed Street Photography,” September 15, 2018 (Winogrand didn’t take time tweaking and twiddling the camera’s rings and dials, and, above all, he didn’t take time to compose his images. When he flung his Leica to his eye, he didn’t study framing through the lens but composed instantaneously, impulsively, improvisationally, as if he were making a kind of pictorial jazz, or what Jean-Luc Godard called ‘the definitive by chance’ ”).

3. Doreen St. Félix, “Deana Lawson’s Hyper-Staged Portraits of Black Love,” March 12, 2018 (“Flickers of the couple’s personality are awakened and then drowned out by the eye that posed these subjects just so”).

4. Doreen St. Félix, “The Eerie Anonymity of a Show of African-American Portraiture at the Met,” July 19, 2018 (“The images are corralled into common memory, a process that risks degrading the subjects’ vital and specific personhood”).

5. Doreen St. Félix, “The Photographer Who Captured How Whiteness Works in the American South,” December 1, 2018 (“Looking at the stiffened old black couple standing on opposite ends of their doorway, emanating all the vitality of a Victorian corpse portrait, I wonder what alchemical effect Fox Solomon has on her black subjects in their black spaces. It’s one that seems to be built not on trust but on more candid, and more revealing, forces: secrecy and distance. The saxophonist clutches his instrument and glares, judgy, wary. Fox Solomon’s scenes telegraph the well-earned feelings of prejudice that blacks had toward photography and its threatening ability to reduce them to totems”).

6. Calvin Trillin, “Nearby and Familiar: A Strategy For Picking Restaurants,” November 21, 2018 (“I had dinner at Casamento’s, on Magazine Street, where patrons consume astounding oyster loaves in an all-tile space that gives some the impression that they are eating in a drained swimming pool”).

7. Elizabeth Barber, "What Brooklyn Sees in Buffalo," March 31, 2018 (“ ‘It seems to me like one of those forgotten cities of New York State,’ a red-lipped lawyer said as she smoked in the cold sun outside the Bell House, the venue for the event”). 

8. Hannah Goldfield, “How To Eat Candy Like a Swede,” May 17, 2018 (“I plucked up, instead, a plain old sweet licorice pipe, and let it dangle from the corner of my lip as I chewed, pulling it up with my teeth until it disappeared”).

9. Charlotte Mendelson, “The Wonderful Insanity of Collecting Abandoned Treasures on the Street,” November 12, 2018 [“That’s the driveway where someone once discarded an entire wormery: four stories of perforated plastic through which my compost worms now romp happily among apple peelings. Isn’t that the house where they left a climatically challenged hibiscus plant in a plastic bag? (Yes, and I killed it. What’s your point?)”].

10. Amanda Petrusich, “The Bracing Sorrow of Sufjan Stevens’s Oscars Performance,” March 5, 2018 (“The Oscars telecast is a preposterous event, but occasionally something extraordinary happens: a brief, pure moment”). 

Best of 2018: Photos

Lauren Lancaster, "Diana Tandia" (2018)

Here are my favorite New Yorker photographs of 2018:

1. Lauren Lancaster, “Diana Tandia,” for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Berber Street Food” (October 29, 2018).

2. David S. Allee, “Naumburg Orchestral Concerts,” for “Goings On About Town” (July 23, 2018).

3. Davide Monteleone, “Su Xiaolan,” for “Portfolio: A New Silk Road” (January 8, 2018).

4. Dan Winters, “SpaceShip Two,” for Nicholas Schmidle’s “Rocket Man” (August 20, 2018).

5. George Steinmetz, “Rio Grande River,” for Nick Paumgarten’s ”Water and the Wall” (April 23, 2018).

6. Zora J. Murff, “Clarissa Glenn and Ben Baker,” for Jennifer Gonnerman’s “Framed” (May 28, 2018).

 

7. Krista Schlueter, “David Hockney,” for Françoise Mouly’s “David Hockney’s ‘The Road’ ” (newyorker.com, April 16, 2018).

8. William Mebane, “Nasim Alikhani,” for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Sofreh” (September 24, 2018).

9. Gillian Laub, “Alex Katz,” for Calvin Tomkins’ “Painterly Virtues” (August 27, 2018).

10. Dolly Faibyshev, “Le Sia,” for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Le Sia” (June 4 & 11, 2018).

11. Kevin Cooley, "The Woolsey Fire, Near Los Angeles, Seen from the West Hills," for Bill McKibben's "Life on a Shrinking Planet" (November 26, 2018).



12. Cait Opperman, "Habibi," for "Goings On About Town" (January 15, 2018)

Best of 2018: Talk

João Fazenda, illustration for Michael Schulman's "Grasshopper"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Talk of the Town” pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Michael Schulman, “Grasshopper,” October 15, 2018 [“He took a breath. ‘Moving along: you also serve a beef-tartare tostada?’ (Correct.) ‘And that has some fried grasshopper on it?’ (Actually, the insect is toasted over a wood fire, Bazdarich said. Radcliffe, his pencil trembling, scribbled ‘toasted’ ”)].

2. Anna Russell, “Leafy Greens,” July 9 & 16, 2018 [“Hydroponics are a slippery slope. You might find yourself, one Sunday morning, at a Santa Monica farmers’ market, loitering among the apples, say. You come across a bunch of papalo, a leafy herb native to central Mexico, and toss it in your mouth (your tastes are expansive; a papalo leaf is nothing to you) and wham!: a brand-new flavor. Suddenly, you’re up at all hours, watching vertical-farming videos on YouTube, ordering seed packets from eBay, buying rhizomes—rhizomes!—and worrying about spider mites. You get some fennel crowns and a pouch of parasitic wasps, and you’re on your way”].

3. Anna Russell, “Reunion,” September 17, 2018 (“Once, he arrived to find cello parts scattered around the room, attended to by different experts, like an intensive-care unit”).

4. Anna Russell, “Caffeinated,” March 19, 2018 (“In Think Coffee, a man in a blazer, holding two hot drinks, waited while the pair examined the dimples on the compostable lids. ‘Decaf, cream, and black—that’s all,’ Specht said”).

5. Anna Russell, “Close Shave,” February 5, 2018 (“Ralph applied shaving cream and started to make short, silent strokes with a straight razor. A fan rattled; outside, a bus pulled away from the curb”).

6. Amy Goldwasser, “Wet Ink,” November 12, 2018 [“After finishing uptown, a few hours later, they went to Maffia’s apartment, to make ink. One batch was pure pokeberry juice (vivid magenta). Another included five varieties of acorn boiled with rust from various sources—nuts and bolts, wire, brackets—and a drop of gum arabic. It came out a complicated silver-gray”].

7. Nick Paumgarten, “Angel in Hastings,” April 23, 2018 [“The contrast between the back seat’s spacious, buttery interior and the driver’s livery (T-shirt, worn jeans, jean jacket) is sharp enough to make you wonder if the car is stolen”].

8. Sam Wasson, “Yes, And,” July 23, 2018 (“Levy furrowed his eyebrows and did an impression of a lugubrious rabbi. ‘What a place to lose a cow,’ he said”).

9. Lauren Collins, “Invitation,” July 9 & 16, 2018 (“De Rougé lifted his laptop so that the Inserras could get a better look at the room’s pistachio-colored moldings. Then he turned around so they could see all the way down the gallery—a two-hundred-and-thirty-foot view”).

10. Nicolas Niarchos, “Cartography,” July 9 & 16, 2018 (“He swivelled the antenna, and the music turned into a burst of Creole”).

Best of 2018: Illustrations

Bendik Kaltenborn, illustration for Andrew Marantz's "Friends in High Places"

Here are my favorite New Yorker illustrations of 2018:

1. Bendik Kaltenborn, illustration for Andrew Marantz’s “Friends in High Places” (January 9, 2018).

2. Chris Gash, illustration for Alexandra Schwartz’s “Margin of Error” (October 29, 2018).

3. Icinori, illustration for Andrea K. Scott’s “Goings On About Town: In the Museums” (July 2, 2018).

4. Jeff Östberg, illustration for Anthony Lane’s “Extralegal Actions” (September 17, 2018)

5. Tom Bachtell, illustration for Anna Russell’s “Leafy Greens” (July 9 & 16, 2018).

6. João Fazenda, illustration for Michael Schulman’s “Grasshopper” (October 15, 2018).

7. Jorge Colombo, illustration for Neima Jahromi’s “Bar Tab: Marie’s Crisis” (May 7, 2018).

8. Roman Muradov, illustration for Russell Platt’s “Goings On About Town: Rites of Spring” (April 2, 2018).

9. Paul Rogers, illustration for Anthony Lane’s “Courting Disaster” (January 15, 2018).

10. Richard McGuire, illustration for Alex Ross’s “The Sounds of Music” (August 27, 2018).

11. Ariel Davis, illustration for Steve Smith's "Goings On About Town: Gesamtkunstwerk" (October 22, 2018)



12. Ben Kirchner, illustration for Ian Frazier's "Airborne" (February 5, 2018)

Best of 2018: GOAT

Jorge Colombo, "Ophelia" (2018)

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Goings On About Town” pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Elizabeth Barber, “Bar Tab: Ophelia,” April 23, 2018 [“At the bar, the twosome ordered again (pink prosecco poured sybaritically over sherry and Campari), beneath a taxidermic bird—an albino pheasant, clarified the bar staff, after a brief conference. The pair took in this deceased fowl, and observed, through the cathedral-like windows, the coy, unforthcoming façades of Midtown East. The effect was to make them feel as if they were in a birdcage, doomed to contemplate unreachable possibilities they should know better than to want”].

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Art: Dike Blair,” November 26, 2018 (“A pink cocktail luxuriates in a stemmed glass, never mind the somewhat gawky foreshortening of the tabletop that it shares with a cloth napkin and a bowl of nuts. Spatters of paint on a cement floor get a kick out of suggesting a frontal abstract painting, while still knowing perfectly well what they are. A yellow line and the shadow of a car bumper on a parking lot, water in a swimming pool, a torn-open FedEx envelope near a window fan, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, and a nodding tulip in a vase on a nighttime windowsill become unwilled memories—the almost, but not quite, meaningless retention of the small, sticky epiphanies that bind us to life”).

3. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Miznon,” April 30, 2018 (“It seems almost unfair to compare Miznon pita to any other pita. Miznon pita is plush, Miznon pita is pillowy—I would happily take a nap on a stack of Miznon pita. It’s as stretchy and pliant as Neapolitan pizza dough, its surface similarly taut and golden brown, glistening ever so slightly with oil. It cradles whatever you stuff it with as supportively as a hammock, efficiently absorbing the flavors of herb-flecked ground-lamb kebab, roasted mushrooms, or spicy fish stew”).

4. David Kortava, “Bar Tab: Mehanata,” August 6 & 13, 2018 (“After downing four shots each, the financier and his associates egressed the cage, divested themselves of their ideologically laden attire, and stumbled over to some stripper poles, where they permitted themselves to dance, clumsily and with inane delight, to ‘Celebration,’ by Kool & the Gang. Nearby, a graffiti portrait of Karl Marx had no choice but to take in the scene”).

5. Richard Brody, “Movies: Fig Leaves,” May 21, 2018 (“Though the film is silent, Hawks’s epigrammatic rapidity is already in evidence—the characters talk non-stop with such lively, pointed grace that viewers might swear they hear the intertitles spoken”).

6. Doreen St. Félix, “Art: ‘African American Portraits,’ ” August 20, 2018 (“But there is a depthless artificiality to the stock scenery, which makes the sitters seem as if they have been dropped into a placeless limbo. An altering occurs when an institution puts relics of real and recent life behind glass, making them into art objects. The images are corralled into common memory, a process that risks degrading the subjects’ vital and specific stories”).

7. Andrea K. Scott, “Art: Lee Krasner,” October 29, 2018 (“Linear geometries partner with biomorphic curves in a dominant palette of red, yellow, and blue. Zinging orange and chartreuse have guest-starring turns, and Léger-like black lines maintain order”).

8. Talia Lavin, "Bar Tab: Anyway Café," April 30, 2018 [“Behind the blond-wood bar at Anyway Café, the bartender is whittling a horseradish root, slicing off long pale strips with a little knife. They are bound for one of the large jars of vodka behind her, which are infusing, slowly, with ingredients including black currants, beets, honey, and ginger. These fierce spirits are mixed into the bar’s signature Martinis: Katherine the Great (pomegranate vodka, black-pepper vodka, rosewater), Madam Padam (blueberry vodka, champagne). Best and strangest of all is the borscht Martini—beet vodka and dill vodka, sprinkled with Himalayan pink salt and crushed herbs, a pungent, tangy punch in a frosty glass. It’s easy to down one after another, licking the salt from the rim”]. 

9. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman,” July 9 & 16, 2018 (“Oil paint lends itself to Thiebaud’s canvases like buttercream to cake, and his works on paper are every bit as delectable”).

10. Neima Jahromi, “Bar Tab: Gilligan’s at Soho Grand,” July 23, 2018 (“On a recent afternoon, the nautical-jungle atmosphere was buoyed by a waitress in a blue-and-white Breton shirt, who issued a muted Tarzan yell as she strode by with a bottle of brut”).