Mid-Year Top Ten (2018)

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

It’s 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):

Reporting

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. 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”).

3. Michael Chabon, “The Recipe for Life,” February 5, 2018 (“And then, equally unbidden, comes a thought: This is how it will be when he is gone. I will be lying on a bed somewhere, watching ‘Citizen Kane,’ or ‘A Night at the Opera,’ or ‘The Man with the X-Ray Eyes,’ or some other film that became beloved to me through my father’s own loving intervention, and, even though he won’t be there anymore, I will still be watching it with him. I will hear his voice then the way I am hearing it now, in my head, this instrument that was tuned to my father’s signal long ago, angled to catch the flow of his information, his opinions, all the million great and minor things he knows”). 

4. 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”).

5. Zadie Smith, “Through the Portal,” May 7, 2018 (“Paragraphs could be written on Lawson’s curtains alone: cheap curtains, net curtains, curtains taped up—or else hanging from shower rings—curtains torn, faded, thin, permeable. Curtains, like doors, are an attempt to mark off space from the outside world: they create a home for the family, a sanctuary for a people, or they may simply describe the borders of a private realm. In these photographs, though, borders are fragile, penetrable, thin as gauze. And yet everywhere there is impregnable defiance—and aspiration. There is ‘kinship in free fall’ ”).

6. Ian Frazier, “Airborne,” February 5, 2018 (“Soldering equipment, extension cords, boxes upon boxes of batteries in various states of freshness, quad motors, control consoles, F.P.V. goggles with the name Fat Shark (the main goggle manufacturer) prominently displayed, quads of many sizes—down to the pocket-size minis that the pilots use to make insect-eye-view videos of their living room and kitchen, flying the little drones between chair legs and couch sections and around the peanut-butter jar on the counter—such a profusion of gear gave the basement a sorcerer’s-workshop richness”).

7. 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”).

8. Siddhartha Mukherjee, “Bodies at Rest and in Motion,” January 8, 2018 (“And soon all his physiological systems entered into cascading failure, coming undone in such rapid succession that you could imagine them pinging as they broke, like so many rubber bands. Ping:renal failure. Ping:severe arrhythmia. Ping:pneumonia and respiratory failure. Urinary-tract infection, sepsis, heart failure. Ping, ping, ping”).

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. Rebecca Mead, “Meal Ticket,” June 18, 2018 (“The centerpiece of the farm is a spacious hjallur, inside which were hanging the remains of the summer harvest: a few dozen joints of gently greening lamb, looking less like the wares in a butcher’s shop than like shards of granite patterned delicately with lichen”).

The Critics

1. Anthony Lane, “Unusual Suspects,” April 2, 2018 [“There is a lovely photograph of James Mason and Eva Marie Saint on the set of ‘North by Northwest’ (1959). They are clad for the auction scene; he wears a pale-gray suit, and her dress is rich in roses. He holds her lightly by the arm, smiling, as she stands behind the camera on which the sequence will be filmed. And what a formidable beast that camera is: as big as a motorbike but far less streamlined, bearing on its broad flank the legend ‘VistaVision’—the wide-screen format in which Hitchcock also shot ‘To Catch a Thief’ (1955), ‘The Man who Knew Too Much’ (1956), and ‘Vertigo’ (1958). 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. Howe, like Hitchcock, knew that the cumbersome effort was worthwhile, for the result would be a rolling expanse of fine-grained images, filling the audience’s gaze. Such beauty could be summoned by the beast”].

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. 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”).

4. James Wood, “Long Road Ahead,” April 16, 2018 (“Kempowski is doing nothing more than showing us that most people quite reasonably think of themselves first. Chocolate is just the novelistic detail that beautifully concentrates this truth”).

5. Peter Schjeldahl, “Brotherhood,” February 12 & 19, 2018 (“Spend time with them, half an hour minimum. Their glories bloom slowly, as you register the formal decisions that practically spring the figures from their surfaces into the room with you, and as you ponder, if you will, the stories that they plumb”).

6. 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”).

7. Lidija Haas, “The Disbelieved,” June 4 & 11, 2018 (“Pain and disease are what they are—they resist meaning and the narratives that make it”).

8. Andrew Marantz, “Friends in High Places,” January 15, 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)”].

9. Thomas Mallon, “House Style,” February 5, 2018 (“The difficulty is not that the phrase ‘census-slashing deformity’ is irreverent but that it’s a distraction, a squawking bird perched on the cenotaph. The style becomes more than the matter”).

10. Peter Schjeldahl, “Points of View,” January 1, 2018 (“The provocation and the artistry of ‘Thérèse Dreaming,’ the artist’s licentiousness and his genius, don’t balance. They claw at each other. The picture seethes with prurience. And—not ‘but’—it is beautiful. Balthus sticks us with a moral conundrum, because he can”).

Talk of the Town

1. 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”].

2. Anna Russell, “Caffeinated,” March 19, 2018 (“Around the corner, at La Colombe, Specht grabbed two lids from behind the counter while a clerk’s back was turned. ‘They have the Viora lid,’ Harpman said. ‘This is the one Wired thinks is the best.’ It has a thin rim and a recessed space for the nose”).

3. Anna Russell, “Close Shave,” February 5, 2018 (“Ralph dropped a hot towel onto his face, and Lithgow’s voice grew muffled. ‘Intermission,’ he mumbled”).

4. Ian Frazier, “Audience Participation,” March 19, 2018 (“Every spring the tents appear, the circus vehicles crowd one another bumper to fender, and sometimes a smell of elephant perks up Division Street”).

5. David Owen, “Bits and Bobs,” January 15, 2018 (“ ‘To me, the most haunting things are the shoes,’ Nagle said. ‘You see wear on the leather, so you know people wore them.’ Some of the shoes emerge sole first from the bank; some lie half-buried in sand. There are virtually no sneakers. There are adjustable metal roller skates, the kind that children strapped to their shoes, and there are tangled clusters of nylon stockings, some of them so full of sand that they resemble enormous white sausages”).

6. Adam Gopnik, “Glimpsing Lincoln,” March 5, 2018 (“But, in these 1861 sketches, we see Nast’s mastery of the living thing, the face seized from life, which gives tensile strength to his more elaborate tableaux”).

7. Rebecca Mead, “Old Shoe,” March 5, 2018 (“The men discussed the shoes that Day-Lewis was having made to wear as Woodcock—gorgeous, gleaming things, worn over socks of ecclesiastical purple—and Day-Lewis asked Glasgow about his life”). 

8. Anthony Lane, “Two Sisters,” April 9, 2018 (“That is the setting for “Howards End,” Forster’s famous novel about culture, property, gaping class distinctions, and the narrative importance of umbrellas”).

9. Lauren Collins, “Peachy,” May 14, 2018 (“Beneath her hedonism, there is a liquid-heavy undercurrent of longing”).

10. Rand Richards Cooper, “Hot Type,” January 8, 2018 (“Mailer and Minton, Second World War veterans a year apart in age, shared a pugnacious streak. ‘Check this out,’ Minton said, pulling down a copy of ‘The Deer Park,’ inscribed by its author. ‘To Ernest Hemingway,’ it read. ‘I am deeply curious to know what you think of this—but if you do not answer, or if you answer with the kind of crap you use to answer unprofessional writers, sycophants, brown-noses, etc, then fuck you, and I will never attempt to communicate with you again’ ”).

Goings On About Town

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. 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”].

3. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Simon & the Whale,” April 2, 2018 (“I’d eat the crusty roasted-barley black bread—which has all the nutty, caramelized appeal of burnt toast without the bitterness, and a delightful hint of anise—every day”).

4. Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Cocoa Bar,” February 12 & 19, 2018 (“Down a quiet street on the Lower East Side, warm amber light spills onto the sidewalk, and the smell of chocolate drifts into the cold air”).

5. “Art: Lee Krasner,” January 8, 2018 (“In the center of a brown storm of brushstrokes spattered with creamy blotches, titled “Fecundity,” several curving black lines evoke the expansive feeling of gracefully opening arms”).

6. Wei Tchou, “Bar Tab: 29B Teahouse,” February 26, 2018 (“With eyes closed, one might mistake a flute of the honey-hued jasmine variety for a very dry prosecco, save for the intense floral perfume that lingers after each sip”). 

7. Jeanie Riess, “Bar Tab: Montero Bar and Grill,” March 12, 2018 (“Orange buoys dangled from the ceiling, and a pool table floated like a small island in the back room.”) 

8. Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: The Narrows,” January 22, 2018 [“As for the house drinks, the Pilar (mezcal, Cappelletti, Cocchi Americano) is a pure amber color in a globe-shaped glass, and splutter-inducingly smoky; the Babushka, a simple concoction of ginger, lime, and vodka, offers enough succor to allow the possibility of returning to the bitter cold of the street, where a lone bicycle lies in a snowdrift, buried up to its chain”].

9. “Night Life: James Chance and the Contortions,” March 19, 2018 (“Blending the free-jazz horn theatrics of Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler with wet, muted funk and showman shrieks (“Contort yourself five times!”), Chance and his group put their stamp on a fringe style that felt at once chicly nostalgic and switchblade sharp”).

10. 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”).

Best Poem: Lucie Brock-Broido’s “Giraffe,” March 26, 2018 (“In another life, he was from Somalia / Where he spent hours watching clouds / In shapes of feral acrobats tipping along their tightropes / Spun of camels’ hair and jute”). 

Best newyorker.com post: Alexandra Schwartz’s “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”). 

Best Issue: April 23, 2018 (Travel & Food Issue), containing, among other delectable items, Ian Frazier’s “The Maraschino Mogul,” Dan Chiasson’s “Anybody There?,” Nick Paumgarten’s “Water and the Wall,” and Burkhard Bilger’s “Bean Freaks.”

Best Cover: Maira Kalman’s “Full Bloom” (March 19, 2018).

Best Illustration: Bendik Kaltenborn, “Fox & Friends,” for Andrew Marantz, “Friends in High Places” (January 15, 2018).

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

Best Cartoon: Roz Chast, “Two-Hour Nostalgia” (March 26, 2018).

Best Sentence: “I both like and dislike ‘Thérèse Dreaming’ (1938), the Balthus painting that thousands of people have petitioned the Metropolitan Museum to remove from view because it brazens the artist’s letch for pubescent girls—which he always haughtily denied, but come on!” [Peter Schjeldahl, “Points of View,” January 1, 2018]

Best Paragraph: 

In “Living Room” (2015), taken in Brownsville, Brooklyn, all the scars are visible: the taped-up curtain, the boxes and laundry, the piled-up DVDs, that damn metal radiator. At its center pose a queen and her consort. He’s on a chair, topless, while she stands unclothed behind him. They are physically beautiful—he in his early twenties, she perhaps a little older—and seem to have about them that potent mix of mutual ownership and dependence, mutual dominance and submission, that has existed between queens and their male kin from time immemorial. But this is only speculation. The couple keep their counsel. Despite being on display, like objects, and partially exposed—like their ancestors on the auction block—they maintain a fierce privacy, bordered on all sides. They are exposed but well defended: salon-fresh hair, with the edges perfect; a flash of gold in her ear; his best bluejeans; her nails on point. Self-mastery in the midst of chaos. And the way they look at you! A gaze so intense that it’s the viewer who ends up feeling naked. [Zadie Smith, “Through the Portal,” May 7, 2018]

Best Detail: “The bean that caught Keller’s eye was a greenish-yellow thing with a red-rimmed eye, like a soybean with a hangover.” [Burkhard Bilger, “Bean Freaks,” April 23, 2018] 

Best Description:

Inspired, it would seem, by natural wonders—bacteria, asteroids, deep-sea flora—and the history of biomorphic abstraction, Moyer’s paintings are at once delirious and methodical, an imbrication of stains and pours, gestural blobs, and veins of glitter-rich sediment. Hard-edged shapes (sometimes rendered with clever drop shadows) lend structure to watery layers. In “Sassafras and Magma,” the matte-black silhouette of a cartoonish plant is a graphic foil to the background’s lava-lamp depths. In the candy-colored “Jolly Hydra: Unexplainably Juicy,” dripping curtains of yellow and fuchsia begin to dissolve the geometry of the composition’s serpentine arches. [“Goings On About Town: Art: Carrie Moyer,” March 5, 2018]

Best Question: “The Everything Bagel Babka looks more like a popover—but who are we to say what babka is supposed to look like?” [Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: MeMe’s Diner,” February 12 & 19, 2018]

Best “Bar Tab” Drink Description: The Monk Fashion – First, Scotch is combined with Chartreuse; then the mixture is sprayed with a peaty tincture and placed under a bell jar, which a bartender proceeds to pump full of wood smoke. It evokes the feeling of sprawling in front of an open fire, joyful with charred goodness. [Nicolas Niarchos, “Bar Tab: The Honeywell,” April 16, 2018]

Seven Memorable Lines:

1. The opportunity to see a warthog playing the harp doesn’t come along nearly as often as it should. [Anthony Lane, “Imaginary Kingdoms,” February 26, 2018]

2. One of the women found that her hand, smothered in deconstructed marshmallows, stuck unappealingly to her wineglass. [Elizabeth Barber, “Bar Tab: Camp,” May 14, 2018]

3. The traction system of social life is good at getting us going, and keeping us on the road, but it fails when we hit the figurative black ice—death—as eventually we all do. [John Seabrook, “Six Skittles,” April 9, 2018]

4. There’s something forlorn about the last run of a river trip, when you know it ends in a shuttle van rather than at a camp. [Nick Paumgarten, “Water and the Wall,” April 23, 2018] 

5. As a parent, I find that I spend a good amount of time talking about things that don’t interest me, like My Little Pony, or when we’re next having pasta, or death. [Rivka Galchen, “Mum’s the Word,” June 4 & 11, 2018]

6. “Let the Sunshine In” is said to be loosely based on Roland Barthes’s ‘A Lover’s Discourse’—very loosely, I would argue, in the same way that ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ was based on a branch of Home Depot. [Anthony Lane, “Cavalcade,” May 7, 2018]

7. He creates visual curios that look like art while dispensing with art’s pesky demands on thought, feeling, and perception. His works are aesthetic cryptocurrency. There are worse things in the world. [Peter Schjeldahl, “Art: Damien Hirst,” June 25, 2018]