Best of the Decade: Second Thoughts

Photo by George Steinmetz, from Lauren Collins's "Angle of Vision"

Well, I’m midway in my “Best of the Decade” series and I’m having second thoughts about it. I now think it was folly to attempt it. There are just too many great pieces to choose from. Boiling the selection down to twelve has been agony. I’ve had to be absolutely ruthless. Many wonderful pieces have been excluded.

I’m going to continue with the series. But when I’m finished, I intend to provide an alternate list of twelve more pieces – all of which are deserving of “Best of Decade” status. That won’t do justice to all the New Yorker pieces I cherish, but at least it will help mitigate the severity of the selection process.

As for the list I’m currently working on, here are the six picks I’ve made so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

7. Lauren Collins’s “Angle of Vision” (“In dreams—mine, at least—flying is like swimming. But the air was crisp and thin, not viscous, as I’d imagined it. I didn’t have to make my way through it; it made its way through me. Being upright in the air feels like being upside down on the ground. My spine stretched. I felt like I’d be an inch taller when I touched down. In twenty seconds, my feet thudded into the valley floor”);

8.  Joseph Mitchell’s “Street Life” (“Another thing I like to do is to get on a subway train picked at random and stay on it for a while and go upstairs to the street and get on the first bus that shows up going in any direction and sit on the cross seat in back beside a window and ride along and look out the window at the people and at the flowing backdrop of buildings. There is no better vantage point from which to look at the common, ordinary city—not the lofty, noble silvery vertical city but the vast, spread-out, sooty-gray and sooty-brown and sooty-red and sooty-pink horizontal city, the snarled-up and smoldering city, the old, polluted, betrayed, and sure-to-be-torn-down-any-time-now city”); 

9. Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (“During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered”);

10. Robert A. Caro’s “The Transition” (“Whirling in his seat, Youngblood shouted—in a ‘voice I had never heard him ever use,’ Lady Bird recalled—‘Get down! Get down!’ and, grabbing Johnson’s right shoulder, yanked him roughly down toward the floor in the center of the car, as he almost leaped over the front seat, and threw his body over the Vice-President, shouting again, ‘Get down! Get down!’ ”);

11. Elif Batuman’s “The Memory Kitchen” (“Near the beekeeper’s table, a farmer was selling live turkeys. There were seven or eight of them sitting on a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury”);

12. Tad Friend’s “Thicker Than Water” (“The wave caught them from behind and lifted them until they were surfing its face. They hung there for five seconds—their port gunwale tilting overhead, the Yamaha outboard whirring in the air—as if time were taking a breath. Jason still believed that they’d shoot the barrel and make it out. Then the starboard gunwale hit sand, and with fantastic power the wave lifted the boat and hurled it onto the sandbar upside down. All that was visible of Jabb from above was a strip of maroon-painted hull”).