Best of 2019: newyorker.com

Nancy Liang's illustration for James Marcus's "A Dark Ride"

Here are my favorite newyorker.com pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Shock of Robert Frank’s The Americans,” September 10, 2019 [“Frank had exalted photographic form by shattering it against the stone of the wonderful and (oh, yeah) horrible real”].

2. Alexandra Schwartz’s “ ‘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”).

3. Chris Wiley's “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”).

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. James Marcus's “A Dark Ride,” October 29, 2019 (“Nat held my hand and we exited the meticulously groomed reality, with its 1,838-foot-long channel and four hundred thousand gold pieces of eight, all of them fake”).

6. Charlotte Mendelson’s “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”).

7. Chris Wiley's “Jack Davison’s Throwback to a Golden Age of Editorial Portraiture,” July 21, 2019 ("A hovering dot painted on an alley wall appears transformed into a luminous moon, propped up by a rusted wire trellis and cradled by a shadow hand, and a wild-eyed dog, all Tic Tac white teeth and blurred fur, is a living incarnation of our rapacious anxieties”).

8. Richard Brody's “Watching The Irishman on Netflix Is the Best Way to See It,” December 2, 2019 (“The movie’s silent gazes—whether the fearful silence that protects criminals whose retaliation would be devastating, or the loyal silence of criminals protecting each other, or the symbolic silence of criminals communicating with each other—are sublime to observe, and they’re the mark of Cain”).

9. Peter Hessler’s “My House in Cairo,” May 7, 2019 (“In Egypt, time is accordion-like. Certain moments seem to last forever, but then everything is compressed and an era disappears in a flash”).

10. Charlotte Mendelson’s “The Stunning Grounds, and Tragic History, of the Lost Gardens of Heligan,” August 2, 2019 (“Now any ignorant city-dweller can nod knowledgeably at the charcoal burner and beehives, admire the Technicolor banks of dahlias in the cutting garden, and covet—in my case, quite violently—the brass watering cans and elaborate glasshouses, with their beaver-tail glazing and delicious levers”).