Mid-Year Top Ten (2019)

Katy Grannan, illustration for Ian Frazier's "Pumper's Corner"

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, “Pumper’s Corner,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (“As Rachael walked me through each well, I appreciated the Rube Goldberg-ness of it all. No two were the same. “The guys out here like to say that a well is like a woman, because each one needs to be handled differently,” Rachael said. She had been to these wells often, and sort of whispered each one, the way she would a horse. She put her hands on pipes, felt for hot spots, peered into gauges, cocked an ear for wrong sounds. She had me listen at a pipe where rising gas from a mile down hissed and echoed—all O.K. there”).

2. Burkhard Bilger, “Extreme Range,” February 11, 2019 (“The voices were growing louder, circling the silo one by one with the choir close behind. Wells lifted his head to the cloud of voices rising and swirling toward the ceiling, then stretched out his arms as they joined in a great, ragged chord. When they fell silent, I could hear the tapping of rain on the roof outside. Then a last voice sang out—Shaw’s quiet mezzo, wafting up like a fleck of ash above a flame”).

3. Nick Paumgarten, “The Descent of Man,” April 29, 2019 (“I glanced up and saw for the first time, shadow-blue and telephoto close, the final section of the Streif, where the racers, after soaring off a jump, come hauling across a steep, bumpy, fallaway traverse—legs burning, skis thrashing—and into the final plunge, the Zielschuss, reaching speeds of almost ninety miles an hour”).

4. James Lasdun, “Glow,” April 29, 2019 (“A crack appeared in the clouds directly above us. It widened, showing a sprinkling of stars and then the entire Big Dipper. There was a stirring among the photographers: their cameras had started detecting things. After a moment, an oblique greenish bar like the one I’d seen the night before became visible. It grew brighter and denser, then contracted into an oval of emerald light. People chattered excitedly. I was about to warn them not to get too carried away when a streak of brilliant green shot out of the oval, at high speed, and zoomed over our tipped-back heads, corkscrewing across the sky. I almost toppled over while following its trajectory. The green light formed several tentacles, which twisted and writhed together and looped in circles. Astonishment was proclaimed in a half-dozen languages. The circles dropped needles of piercing brightness that travelled, in tandem, around the sky, as if tracing the undulations of a celestial shower curtain”).

5. Douglas Preston, “The Day the Earth Died,” April 8, 2019 (When we arrived, DePalma’s site lay open in front of us: a desolate hump of gray, cracked earth, about the size of two soccer fields. It looked as if a piece of the moon had dropped there. One side of the deposit was cut through by a sandy wash, or dry streambed; the other ended in a low escarpment. The dig was a three-foot-deep rectangular hole, sixty feet long by forty feet wide. A couple of two-by-fours, along with various digging tools and some metal pipe for taking core samples, leaned against the far side of the hole. As we strolled around the site, I noticed on DePalma’s belt a long fixed-blade knife and a sheathed bayonet—a Second World War relic that his uncle gave him when he was twelve, he said”)

6. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Under Water,” April 1, 2019 (“Flying at an altitude of two thousand feet, I could make out the houses and farms and refineries that fill the strips, though not the people who live or work in them. Beyond was open water or patchy marsh. In many spots, the patches were crisscrossed with channels. Presumably, these had been dug when the land was firmer, to get at the oil underneath. In some places, I could see the outlines of what were once fields and are now rectilinear lakes. Great white clouds, billowing above the plane, were mirrored in the black pools below”).

7. Rivka Galchen, “The Eighth Continent,” May 6, 2019 (“When a Masten rocket takes off, it has a delicate appearance. One of the newer ones, the Xodiac, looks like two golden balloons mounted on a metal skeleton. A kite tail of fire shoots out as the Xodiac launches straight up; at its apex, it has the ability to tilt and float down at an angle, as casually as a leaf. When Xodiac nears its designated landing spot, it abruptly slows, aligns, seems to hesitate, lands. It’s eerie—at that moment, the rocket seems sentient, intentional”).

8. Joshua Rothman, “What Lies Beneath,” March 25, 2019 (“Sacks bent down and selected another strip of linen. Using his brush, he glued it to the wooden shingle, half obscuring its red eyes. The fabric flowed vertically down the canvas. Leaning in, he used his fingers to adjust its path, creating ridges and folds so that it would be open to oxygen. Then, from a nearby worktable, he retrieved a box of kitchen matches. He struck one of them and set fire to the linen. The flames rippled upward, serpentine. He watched them climb, then, after a few seconds, used his brush to snuff them out. Some of the linen was gone. We stood looking at the materials, colored by smoke, now joined by a scar”).

9. John Seabrook, “Machine Hands,” April 15, 2019 (“It was only at the very end of the eight-second window that the Pitzer wheel dropped down and—in a blur of motion that recalled Doctor Octopus, the Spider-Man villain, attacking one of his victims—the claws grabbed and picked the ripe berries in a fraction of a second, pop-pop-pop, and deposited them, apparently unbruised, on a shelf at the top of the machine’s chassis. Then the robots moved on to the next plant in that row”).

10. Rebecca Mead, “The Perfect Paint,” March 18, 2019 (“When I was visiting, a batch of Hague Blue was being stirred to completion. The enormous vat of paint shimmered like a luxurious pool in a Turkish hammam, and I almost wanted to climb in”).

Personal History

1. Anne Boyer, “The Undying,” April 15, 2019 (“I try to be the best-dressed person in the infusion room. I wrap myself up in thrift-store luxury and pin it together with a large gold brooch in the shape of a horseshoe. The nurses always praise the way I dress. I need that. Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins”).

2. Robert A. Caro, “Turn Every Page,” January 28, 2019 (“There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself. I loved going through those files, making them yield their secrets to me”).

3. James Marcus, “Blood Relations,” March 11, 2019 (“I peeled a yellow leaf away from the stone. It occurred to me that, as I got older, the beautiful, booming abstractions were becoming real. When I was young, eternity was too big to grasp. The years were elongated, shining, countless. But my father, I now understood, was gone forever”).

4. Kathryn Schulz, “The Stack,” March 25, 2019 (“My father, by contrast, loved books ravenously. His always had a devoured look to them: scribbled on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with coffee, Scotch, pistachio dust, and bits of the brightly colored shells of peanut M&M’s”).

5. Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Hereafter, Faraway,” June 10 & 17, 2019 (“Then his camera captures us from behind, me clinging to my mother’s hand as we walk toward a rendezvous with our future selves”). 

The Critics 

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “Not Waving,” May 27, 2019 (“I was lucky to catch a rehearsal of a performance work by Brendan Fernandes that will take place at scheduled but infrequent times: five ballet dancers in black leotards strike varying poses on an arrangement of skeletal frameworks in black-painted wood. That was dreamy”).

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Exposed,” May 13, 2019 (“You see the comprehensive capture of scenes on the wing. If the camera tilts, it’s not for arty effect but to squeeze in the relevant details of, say, a group of women bustling forward between a beggar in a wheelchair and a small group of people standing or sitting at a curb—three rhythms in flashing counterpoint”).

3. James Wood, “Escape Velocity,” April 1, 2019 (“Hempel, like some practical genius of the forest, can make living structures out of what look like mere bric-a-brac, leavings, residue”).

4. James Wood, “Contents Under Pressure,” January 14, 2019 (“Gunaratne’s powers of observation are so acute and extractive that he can trust his material to generate its own human significance”).

5. Dan Chiasson, “A Still Small Poem,” April 8, 2019 (“His forms vary depending upon what his senses perceive: jagged and tense around a mountain lion, long and languid next to a butterfly”).

6. Alex Ross, “The Concerto Challenge,” March 25, 2019 (“The first movement follows the rudiments of sonata form, with the scampering opening material set against a slinky cantabile second theme that has a whiff of old Hollywood about it, as if Bette Davis were sipping a Scotch with the blinds drawn”).

7. Anthony Lane, “Adrift,” February 4, 2019 (“But the noir is beige at the edges, and the sex is hopelessly brisk and coy; if Baker wanted it steamy, he should have put the kettle on to boil”).

8.  Anthony Lane, “Awkward Ages,” May 27, 2019 (“It’s a sumptuous performance from Burke, whom I’ve seen on TV playing the nefarious Dolokhov, in the BBC’s “War and Peace,” and onstage as the agonized pastor in Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm,” and who gives off an aroma of loucheness as if it were expensive cologne”).

9. Sarah Larson, “Home on the Range,” February 4, 2019 (“The plot whirls along, heading inevitably toward collaborative writing, drunken mayhem, brandished golf clubs, existential crises, flying toast”).

10. Lauren Oyler, “Sex Ed,” April 1, 2019 (“These sentiments, which sever intellect from feeling or mind from body, are decidedly not Dworkinesque, and the ease with which we’ve pulled out what is useful or prophetic about her work suggests that we’re still not reading her writing the way she would read it: closely, actively”). 

Talk of the Town

1. Mark Singer, “Man vs. Mouse,” January 7, 2019 (“He arranged “a Maginot Line of glue traps” and set out a pizza box with a mouse-size hole and, inside, pieces of mozzarella and pepperoni surrounded by glue traps. This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out”).

2. Patricia Marx, “New Shade,” January 14, 2019 (“It was a clear morning—the sky was a shade of blue that resembled Benjamin Moore’s Icing on the Cake”).

3. Ben McGrath, “Boom,” January 28, 2019 (“The best place to watch the Tappan Zee Bridge blow up, this past Tuesday, seemed to be slightly north of Lyndhurst, the old Jay Gould estate, in Tarrytown”).

4. Patricia Marx, “Viewing Party,” April 1, 2019 (“There, among the chintz furniture and cucumber sandwiches that could have come over on the Mayflower, was “1076 Madison,” an exhibition of Cynthia Talmadge’s paintings depicting the Campbell building. The art works were displayed on easels that on other occasions had supported wreaths, photo collages, and, in one case, a deceased’s cherished dartboard”).

5. Mark Singer, “The Anti-‘Godot,’ ” April 15, 2019 (“Lean and nimble, he has dark brown hair that aimed in various opposing directions, a horseshoe mustache, a graying goatee, and scruffy extra-in-a-saloon-scene cheeks”).

Goings On About Town

1. Andrea K. Scott, “Art: ‘Maya Lin,’ ” January 14, 2019 (“As the marbles shimmer along the floor, then flow up the walls and across the ceiling, they become dotted lines on a sheet of paper, a map in the midst of being folded”).

2. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Barca,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (“The broth in her zuppa di pesce, a Sicilian-style fish stew abundant with mussels, clams, shrimp, black sea bass, Castelvetrano olives, and fregola, a pearl-shaped pasta, is so appealingly redolent of Pernod that I couldn’t resist sipping the last dregs straight from the lidded crock after my spoon had been cleared”).

3. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Heidi Bucher,” May 20, 2019 (“Among the nine stunning pieces in this exhibition, which have yellowed and become more scab-like with age, is a drooping mold of one of that building’s windows, its slightly bowed shutters suggesting the wings of an enormous insect”).

4. Briana Younger, “Night Life: Ari Lennox,” June 3, 2019 (“Her love-struck tales are consistently gorgeous, but it's when she weaves in the mundane details—a new apartment, watching "Adventure Time," shopping at Target—that the silken muscle of her voice makes itself most evident, a reminder that there is soul to be found in even the most prosaic life events, that just having breath can be worth singing about”).

5. Richard Brody, “Movies: Under the Silver Lake,” April 29, 2019 (“A zine traces long-ago Hollywood scandals; a friend finds the secrets of the world on the back of a cereal box; clips and names of classic movies and video games hint at vast secret connections; a popular band fronts a cult; and a reclusive old songwriter claims to be behind all modern culture and its labyrinthine conspiracies”).

6. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: O:n°,” April 15, 2019 (“Servers, wearing chic indigo smocks, operate as carefully as cat burglars, slipping inconspicuous timers in and out of their pockets as they glide around the room”).

7. Peter Schjeldahl, “At the Galleries: Matvey Levenstein,” March 4, 2019 (“Layered grays, orange-flavored sepia, and the odd palely simmering pink or blue constitute—or conjure, or exhale—spectral woods, clouds, a snow-covered ancient graveyard, and a storm at sea”).

8. Michaelangelo Matos, “Night Life: Wata Igarashi,” May 20, 2019 (“As synth patterns shape-shift in slow motion and crisp percussion slumps into slurping timbres, his mixes find the sounds' edges melting into one another”).

9. Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: Szechuan Mountain House,” June 3, 2019 (On a recent Tuesday, two Gen X-ers and one millennial, all Sichuan natives, sat down under silk lanterns and poured themselves jasmine tea from a cast-iron pot into bone-china cups so fine they resembled the pearly inside of seashells.

10. Richard Brody, “Movies: Enthusiasm,” March 18, 2019 (“He films with a wild, expressive energy, panning rapidly to follow the swinging clapper of a bell and depicting electric wires as ecstatic striations of the sky”).

newyorker.com

1. Chris Wiley, “How Larry Sultan Made His Father a Metaphor for Dashed American Dreams,” April 7, 2019 (“In the picture that came out of that poolside photo shoot, we see that behind the elder Sultan is a rolling expanse of tightly cut grass soaking up the water from an automated sprinkler system, which passes for rain in those parts—a landscape on life support. His father is tan, but he is also old, his body clearly heading toward its twilight, and he looks somewhat melancholy—despairing, even—as if the empty pool in front of him were a reservoir of regrets”).

2. Chris Wiley, “Lee Friedlander’s Intimate Portraits of His Wife, Through Sixty Years of Marriage,” January 11, 2019 (“Looking at these pictures, it is impossible not to feel the palpable tug of time’s undertow, its inexorable movement toward we-know-not-what. This is underscored in the show by a handful of purposeful echoes. Here, a young Lee with his uncanny, icy eyes and lolling forelock is nestled close to Maria, her face a vision of benign tolerance; there, on a windswept Oregon beach, Lee cranes his head away from his camera awkwardly to nuzzle in adoration against Maria, who is elegance personified, and now thirty years older. Here is photography’s ultimate irony: it can freeze time, but never stop it”).

3. Alexandra Schwartz,“ ‘While I Live, I Remember’: Agnès Varda’s Way of Seeing,” March 30, 2019 (Her films, which celebrate the art of the foraged and the found, can be like associative essays, or like poems).

4. Lauren Collins, “On the Roof of Notre Dame, Before It Burned,” April 15, 2019 (“The omniscient of the Internet told us not to fret, that cathedrals had been built and burned before. But Parisians watched with the supplicant helplessness of the ages, singing hymns on their knees as the firefighters battled to save the north belfry on the second day of Holy Week”).

5. Charlotte Mendelson, “Seeds, The Gateway Drug to Gardening,” April 23, 2019 (“To the unafflicted, seeds may seem like nondescript black dots, distinguishing themselves only once they’ve blossomed. But look closely and you’ll see that they are quietly astonishing in their variety, particularly when they’re patiently waiting in the dried remains of last year’s flowers: the papery discs of hollyhock, neatly arranged in doughnut rings; glossy nigella specks in spiky spheres; the fat succulence of apples; the pony flank of chestnut; speckled borlotti or elma beans, black and white like baby killer whales; poppies like salt shakers; and calendula, my favorite, an explosion of prickly crescents, dry brown springs tight with life”).

Favorite Short Story

Han Ong, “Javi,” June 10 & 17, 2019 (“Hard to credit that the figure in front of him is a woman. The silhouette is huge and partly obscured by the screen door. He, on the other hand, is in plain sun, right in the middle of the gravel path—hesitant to go any closer—all of the New Mexico sky on top of him”).

Favorite Poem

Daniel Halpern, “Catch,” April 15, 2019 (“the sound of the ball popping the leather / in the silence below the summer Valley trees, / an occasional pale-colored car sliding // past us, unnoticed / down Vesper”).

Favorite Issue

April 29, 2019 (“The Travel Issue”), containing Lauren Collins’s “Kitchen Companion,” James Lasdun’s “Glow,” and Nick Paumgarten’s “The Descent of Man” – all excellent.

Favorite Cover

Malika Favre, “Summer Hours” (May 27, 2019)

Favorite Illustration

Sergiy Maidukov, illustration for Alex Ross’s “The Concerto Challenge” (March 25, 2019)

Favorite Photograph

Immo Klink, illustration for Nick Paumgarten’s “The Descent of Man” (April 29, 2019)

Favorite Sentence

Listening to Bone, Wells realized that his story was etched into the very sound of his voice: a slow, dehydrated drawl, thick with Southern heat and vocal fry, the indolence of small towns and the drag-footed pace of a heart slowed by heroin. – Burkhard Bilger, “Extreme Range” (February 11, 2019)

Favorite Paragraph

My cancer was not just a set of sensations or lessons in interpretation or a problem for art, although it was all of these things. My cancer was a captive fear that I would die and leave my daughter in a hard world with no resources, a fear, too, that I had devoted my life to writing and sacrificed all I had and never come to its reward. It was a terror that all I’d ever written would sit data-mined but not read in Google’s servers until even Google’s servers were made of dust, and in the meantime I would become that unspeaking thing, a dead person, leaving too soon everyone and everything I loved the most. – Anne Boyer, “The Undying” (April 15, 2019)

Favorite Detail

When she came out of her house, she was brushing her teeth. The arrival of a stranger at her door at nine-thirty in the morning did not faze her, and she continued to brush for a few minutes as we talked. – Ian Frazier, “Pumper’s Corner” (February 18 & 25, 2019)

Favorite Description

But my favorite dish might be the karsod, another soup. With a putty-pale sheet of lightly oiled dough stretched over the top of the bowl, it resembles an uncooked potpie, a broadcast of blandness. To pierce the surface and access the piping hot broth inside is to be reminded that mild does not necessarily equate to boring. In a version with lamb, the simple, slightly gummy pastry and the clear, fragrant liquid, dotted sparingly with scallion, cilantro, and translucent coins of potato, provide an optimal canvas for the gently gamy flavor of the simmered meat—as humble yet surprising as the restaurant itself. – Hannah Goldfield, "Tables for Two: Lhasa Fresh Food" (May 20, 2019)

Seven Memorable Lines

1. At a certain point, I found myself trapped in a vortex of flashbulbs, loden, jawlines, and boobs. – Nick Paumgarten, “The Descent of Man” (April 29, 2019)

2. He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass. – Douglas Preston, “The Day the Earth Died” (April 8, 2019)

3. Humans are producing no-analogue climates, no-analogue ecosystems, a whole no-analogue future. – Elizabeth Kolbert, “Under Water” (April 1, 2019)

4. Andria was wearing a three-piece suit, accented by a scarlet pin that glowed like a pomegranate seed. – Lauren Collins, “Kitchen Companion” (April 29, 2019)

5. Also, as the T-shirts for sale on Amazon suggest, we are always supposed to be able to tell cancer that “you messed with the wrong bitch!” In my case, however, cancer messed with the right bitch. – Anne Boyer, “The Undying” (April 15, 2019)

6. There would be no closure, no healing. I would simply adjust myself to a new and severely depleted reality. The world would come to an end, as it always does, one world at a time. – James Marcus, “Blood Relations” (March 11, 2019)

7. “You’re no more than a hooker,” she says, and Baker retorts, quick as anything, “A hooker who can’t afford hooks.” Zing! Who said the age of wit was over? – Anthony Lane, “Adrift” (February 4, 2019)