Best of 2019: Reporting

Ilya Milstein's illustration for Alexandra Schwartz's "Bounty Hunters"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Alexandra Schwartz’s “Bounty Hunters,” November 25, 2019 (“You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart”).

2. Ian Frazier’s “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”).

3. Nick Paumgarten’s “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. Burkhard Bilger’s “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”).

5. Nicola Twilley, “Trailblazers,” August 26, 2019 (“The lit cannister of fuel I was holding, known as a drip torch, had a long, looped neck that emitted a jaunty quiff of flame”).

6. James Lasdun’s “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”).

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”).

8. Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Under Water,” April 1, 2019 (“On the model, the spillway gates were represented by small strips of brass attached to copper wires. Because they hadn’t worked properly in previous trials, an engineer was watching over them from a folding chair. He looked like a latter-day Gulliver, bent over a drowning Lilliput. He, too, I noticed, had wet socks”).

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

10. John Seabrook’s “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”).