MId-Year Top Ten 2020

Photo by Paolo Pellegrin, from Ben Taub's "Five Oceans, Five Deeps"

Time for my “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. This year I’ve added a special category, “Responses to the Pandemic,” to include the magazine’s many excellent pandemic pieces. There’ll be overlap, but that’s okay. Let’s roll!

Reporting

1. Ben Taub, “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” May 18, 2020 (“Vescovo switched off the lights and turned off the thrusters. He hovered in silence, a foot off the sediment bottom, drifting gently on a current, nearly thirty-six thousand feet below the surface”).

2. Luke Mogelson, “The Uprising,” June 22, 2020 (“Barricades around the four surrounding blocks impeded traffic and law enforcement. The sidewalk outside the Cup Foods grocery store—where an employee had called the police after suspecting George Floyd of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill—was buried under bouquets, mementos, and homemade cards. Activists delivered speeches between the gas pumps at a filling station; messages in chalk—‘fight back,’ ‘stay woke’—covered the street”).

3. The New Yorker, “April 15, 2020,” May 4, 2020 (“The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere. The whole city had become a waiting room”).

4. Bill Buford, “Good Bread," April 13, 2020 (“By nine, a line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people and from music being played at high volume. Everyone shouted to be heard—the cacophonous hustle, oven doors banging, people waving and trying to get noticed, too-hot-to-touch baguettes arriving in baskets, money changing hands”).

5. Alex Ross, “The Bristlecones Speak,” January 20, 2020 (“It looked as though it had been blown over in a storm, but tufts of green needles emerged from a branch on one side. A vein of live bark snaked around the dead trunk and disappeared into the ground. It was like a vine growing on a ruin, except that the ruin was itself”).

6. Jonathan Blitzer, “Juan Sanabria,” April 20, 2020 (“He’d been among the first fatalities. ‘Was he the eleventh person who died? I was trying to figure out if he was the tenth or the eleventh,’ Comerford told me. ‘That made this whole thing very real. Before, the deaths were just statistics. Knowing that one of them was Juan, it gave the thing a face’ ”).

7. Rebecca Mead, “Going for the Cold,” January 27, 2020 (“Turning back, I suddenly realized just how far from the dock I’d come. I didn’t feel weak, or even particularly cold, but I pulsed with existential dread. I was conscious of not knowing how deep the black water below me was. There was nothing to hang on to, and only my own arms and legs to keep me afloat. Nobody was nearby. This would be a really stupid way to go, I thought, then reflected that this was probably the precise thought many people had just before suffering the consequences of an unwise, irrevocable decision”).

8. Nick Paumgarten, “The Altitude Sickness,” March 2, 2020 (“The resort grounds were a bustle of hyperactive, impossibly hale young creatures on holiday. Climbers—the men shirtless, the women in bikini tops—rigged up ropes and slacklines and did pullups and bouldering maneuvers off the villas’ eaves. Such lats, such tats. I kept my shirt on, and cracked a Medalla Light”).

9. Peter Hessler, “Life on Lockdown,” March 30, 2020 (“Anybody who arrived at the main gate was greeted by an infrared temperature gun to the forehead. The gun was wielded by a government-assigned volunteer in a white hazmat suit, and, behind him, a turnstile led to a thick plastic mat soaked with a bleach solution. A sign read “Shoe Sole Disinfecting Area,” and there was always a trail of wet prints leading away from the mat, like a footbath at a public swimming pool”).

10. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Independent People,” June 8 & 15, 2020 (“That evening, the weather was clear and cool—by New York standards, too cool to eat outside, by Reykjavík standards balmy. The outdoor cafés were crowded. Restaurants had been asked to arrange their tables to keep groups two metres apart, but some diners, I noticed, had pushed the tables closer together. Everyone was talking and laughing, masklessly. The scene was completely ordinary, which is to say now exotic—just people meeting up with friends for dinner. For a traveller these days, this might be an even better draw, I thought, than glaciers or whale-watching”).

Responses to the Pandemic

Jorge Colombo's illustration for "Dispatches from a Pandemic"

1. The New Yorker, “April 15, 2020,” May 4, 2020 (“If you got close enough to the buildings, you could hear various things attached to them humming. Hundreds of yards away, the waves were coming in quietly. As the sun came up, dully brightening the morning, it revealed that the day was ordinary and out of the ordinary at the same time. Figures appeared far apart on the boardwalk, each one alone, each making a different exercise motion. One was using a jump rope, another had two small dumbbells, and another a piece of pipe. Many wore masks. On the horizon to the left lay the narrow sand spit of the Rockaways, a stratum of pale-brown beach below a gray-green line of bushes and trees. To the right loomed the grayish point of Sandy Hook, in New Jersey. In between, a small boat motored slowly by, its wake as white as a bridal train. The ordinary-extraordinary day settled in and locked itself into place. The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere. The whole city had become a waiting room”).

2. Vinson Cunningham, “Eightyish,” April 13, 2020 (“Later that afternoon, I think, although it might have been the next day, I walked with my wife down Flatbush Avenue, toward her mom’s house, where we’d pick up some packages and wave hello. It’s normally a twenty-five-­minute walk, but now it seemed interminable. Walking outside these days requires too much geometry, too much spatial intel­ligence. Older men, apparently untroubled by the dictates of distancing, were seated, as they always are, at folding tables and on the hoods of sedans. They played cards, made jokes, drank from Styrofoam cups, blasted music. I toggled swiftly between annoyance at how they clogged the sidewalk, concern for their health, and then—probably foremost—envy at what looked like a good time. We took sweeping, parabolic detours around their tight huddles, sometimes slipping between parked cars and walking in the street. One persistent, petty worry is how much of a dweeb I feel like when I’m thinking about infectious disease”).

3. Ian Frazier, “Still Open,” April 6, 2020 (“Early on a recent morning, the sun came down the city’s canyons, hitting the white blooms of the pear trees behind the church. Construction workers walked west from the subway stops and kept going, to the under-construction buildings bordering the Hudson River, and soon the cranes started swinging against the blue sky and the elevators on tracks outside the buildings’ steel frameworks were going up and down. By eight o’clock, most of the staff had shown up, and some were preparing that day’s entrée—baked ham with sweet potato. Seagulls shrieked as they swirled overhead toward the river. First in line, by the church gate, a man in two hooded coats sat with his back against the fence, knees up, reading the News. White vans and box trucks pulled to the curb on Ninth Avenue and unloaded crates of broccoli and olive oil. Christopher Molinari, the head chef and culinary manager, said, “When all the restaurants started closing, some sent us their leftover supplies, and we’re still improvising menus from what we got. The food-service situation in the city changed so fast, some of the potatoes they sent us were already peeled”).

4. Ian Frazier, “Bringing in the Comfort,” April 13, 2020 (The Navy hospital ship Comfort went under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge at about nine-twenty last Monday morning. Trucks on the bridge blew long blasts of welcome on their horns. The ship appeared suddenly in the overcast day as if out of nowhere; the medical-clinic white of her hull and superstructure blended in with the sea and the sky. In Von Briesen Park, on Staten Island, ship-watchers had set up cameras on tripods six feet or more apart on a bluff overlooking the Narrows. The MarineTraffic mobile app told them what time the ship would arrive. Four McAllister tugboats awaited the Comfort just north of the bridge, their bows pointing toward her. As she passed, they swung around and escorted her in. Another tug, carrying film crews, veered among a wider entourage of police and Coast Guard boats, and private craft practicing police-enforced nautical distancing, all under a small, hovering flock of helicopters”).

5. Jonathan Blitzer, “Juan Sanabria,” April 20, 2020 (“Walkiris was crying, and pleaded to be allowed inside. Dr. K. held her firmly by the arms, and told her to close her eyes. ‘I want you to visualize a conversation I’m going to have right now with your father,’ the doctor told her. ‘Imagine I’m walking into his room as his doctor, and asking him if he would feel comfortable with you coming in to see him. I’m telling him about the risks to you and your family if you went in there. What would he say? Would he want you to say goodbye to his spirit in there, or out here?’ Walkiris told me later that, in that moment, the doctor may have saved her life”).

6. Geoff Dyer, “Home Alone Together,” April 13, 2020 (“We moved on, put the car in Park, and scrutinized the kit’s simple instructions as if our lives depended on them. My wife swabbed her mouth and sealed the test stick in a tube—not as simple as it sounds: the stick was too long and had to be broken on the edge of the tube, but it was yoga-ishly bendy rather than brittle—before sealing the tube in a plastic bag, which she then sealed in a bubble-wrap bag before returning it to the box. We crawled forward, broke the seal on the window, and tossed the box into a blue bin indicated by a final hazmat-suited sentinel, who waved us on. We drove out past the huge and patient cemetery. All the time in the world, it seemed, resided there. The sky was its usual expectant blue”).

7. Peter Schjeldahl, “Out of Time,” April 13, 2020 (“Here’s a prediction of our experience when we are again free to wander museums: Everything in them will be other than what we remember. The objects won’t have altered, but we will have, in some ratio of good and ill. The casualties of the coronavirus will accompany us spectrally. Until, inevitably, we begin to forget, for a while we will have been reminded of our oneness throughout the world and across time with all the living and the dead”).

8. Peter Hessler, “Life on Lockdown,” March 30, 2020 (“Anybody who arrived at the main gate was greeted by an infrared temperature gun to the forehead. The gun was wielded by a government-assigned volunteer in a white hazmat suit, and, behind him, a turnstile led to a thick plastic mat soaked with a bleach solution. A sign read “Shoe Sole Disinfecting Area,” and there was always a trail of wet prints leading away from the mat, like a footbath at a public swimming pool”).

9. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Independent People,” June 8 & 15, 2020 (“That evening, the weather was clear and cool—by New York standards, too cool to eat outside, by Reykjavík standards balmy. The outdoor cafés were crowded. Restaurants had been asked to arrange their tables to keep groups two metres apart, but some diners, I noticed, had pushed the tables closer together. Everyone was talking and laughing, masklessly. The scene was completely ordinary, which is to say now exotic—just people meeting up with friends for dinner. For a traveller these days, this might be an even better draw, I thought, than glaciers or whale-watching”).

10. Adam Gopnik, “Abundance of Caution,” March 30, 2020 (“In Grand Central Terminal, what some call “the tile telephone”—the whispering gallery in front of the Oyster Bar, under the beautiful basket weave of arches—has never been so clear. The noise of the station is usually so intense that the tiled ceiling turns mute. Now, for the first time in forever, the abatement in the roar and press of people allows couples’ murmured endearments, spoken into one corner, to race up through the solid Guastavino tile and carry all the way over to the diagonally facing corner”).

Best Critical Piece

Anthony Lane, “Folies à Deux,” June 1, 2020 (“In one respect, “The Trip to Greece” is unlike any of its predecessors. Rather than saying to yourself, ‘Mmm, those shrimp look good,’ you now think, ‘These guys are dining in restaurants—you know, those old pre-pandemic joints. With other non-family members sitting nearby!’ To see Coogan and Brydon being waited upon by unmasked servers, who carry the plates with bare hands, is to yearn for the touchstones of a mythical past. As one kindly waitress inquires, in a lull between courses, ‘Do you want to continue?’ Yes, if we can. Forever”).

Best Personal History Piece

Seb Agresti's illustration for John McPhee's "Tabula Rasa"

John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa,” January 13, 2020 (“When I was in my prime, I planned to write about a dairy farm in Indiana with twenty-five thousand cows. Now, taking my cue from George Bush, Thornton Wilder, and countless others who stayed hale doing old-person projects, I am writing about not writing about the dairy farm with twenty-­five thousand cows. Not to mention Open Doctors, golf-course architects who alter existing courses to make them fit for upcoming U.S. Opens and the present game—lengthening holes, moving greens, rethinking bunkers. Robert Trent Jones was the first Open Doctor, and his son Rees is the most prominent incumbent. Fine idea for a piece, but for me, over time, a hole in zero. So I decided to describe many such saved-up, bypassed, intended pieces of writing as an old-man project of my own”).

Best Talk Story

Ian Frazier, “Still Open,” April 6, 2020 (“By ten-fifteen, the line stretched to Twenty-eighth Street, around the corner, and down the long block between Ninth Avenue and Eighth. A soup-kitchen employee in a jacket of high-visibility green was walking along the line and urging those waiting to maintain spaces of six feet between one another. They complied, reluctantly, but somehow the line kept re-compressing itself. A strange, almost taxicab-less version of traffic went by on Ninth—delivery trucks, police tow trucks, police cars, home-health-care-worker vans, almost empty buses. Now and then a dog-walker, masked or swathed in a scarf, passed. The dogs, unconcerned, were enjoying the sunny day. At ten-thirty, lunch service started. The guests (as the soup kitchen refers to them) were admitted to the serving station one at a time, like travellers in airport security. Opening their lunch sacks, they began to eat standing on the sidewalk or leaning against the Citi Bike stands, or they crossed to the courtyard of a public building across the street and sat on benches by a statue of a soldier in the First World War”).

Best GOAT Piece

Juan Bernabeau's illustration for Brian Seibert's "Argentine Dance"

Brian Seibert, “Argentine Dance,” February 10, 2020 (“The men of Che Malambo charge like a stampede and dance like cowboys—the Argentine kind. Malambo, a centuries-old gaucho style, is competitive and macho. Heads and torsos ride haughtily over legs that buck, twist, and beat out rhythms, often ostentatiously on the rims of boots. Drums slung over shoulders sometimes take up the beat, as do boleadoras, weights attached to ropes that are thrown to ensnare cattle on the run. These tools, swung like lassos or jump ropes or yo-yos, are visually spectacular musical instruments, whipping the air and striking the ground. Imagine a stage full of those whirring implements, some held between teeth, and you get a sense of why the roars of this troupe of twelve sexy, sweaty guys, directed by the French choreographer Gilles Brinas, are usually answered by whoops”).

Best Short Story

Katherine Dunn, “The Resident Poet,” May 11, 2020 (“Draw deeply on the cigar, expand the nostrils to take in oxygen, reach slowly over the side of the tub to flick ash into the toilet”).

Best Poem

Gerald Stern, “Warbler,” January 6, 2020 (“And like all birds / they sing when they’re buried, / in this case in the freezer, / a cold graveyard, / two cartons of ice cream, / one vanilla, one dulce de leche, / to remember him by”).

Best newyorker.com Post

Deanna Dikeman, "Leaving and Waving 7/1991"

Eren Orbey, “A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell,” March 4, 2020 (“Each image reiterates the quiet loyalty of her parents’ tradition. They recede into the warm glow of the garage on rainy evenings and laugh under the eaves in better weather. In summer, they blow kisses from the driveway. In winter, they wear scarves and stand behind snowbanks. Inevitably, they age”). 

Best Illustration

Leo Espinosa's illustration for Bill Buford's "Good Bread"

Leo Espinosa’s illustration for Bill Buford’s “Good Bread” (April 13, 2020).

Best Photo

Joseph Michael Lopez, "2:53 P.M., West Farms, the Bronx"

Joseph Michael Lopez’s “2:53 P.M., West Farms, the Bronx” for “April 15, 2020: A Coronavirus Chronicle” (newyorker.com, April 27, 2020)

Best Video

Still from Sam Youkilis's "10:13 A.M., Tribeca"

Sam Youkilis’s “10:13 A.M., Tribeca” for "April 15, 2020: A Coronavirus Chronicle” (newyorker.com, April 27, 2020)

Best Cover

Christoph Mueller, "Shelter in Place" (May 11, 2020)

Best Issue

April 13, 2020, containing Geoff Dyer’s “Home Alone Together,” Bill Buford’s “Good Bread,” and “Dispatches from a Pandemic: Twelve Writers on Life in the Time of COVID-19” – all excellent.

Best Sentence

Now, as snow blew sideways in the darkness and the wind, he threw a grappling hook over the South Sandwich Trench and caught a lander thrashing in the waves. – Ben Taub, “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” (May 18, 2020)

Best Paragraph

Bob drove fast, he talked fast, he parked badly. The first stop was L’Harmonie des Vins, on the Presqu’île, a wine bar with food (“But good food,” Bob said). Two owners were in the back, busy preparing for the lunch service but delighted by the sight of their bread guy, even though he came by every day at exactly this time. I was introduced, Bob’s new student, quick-quick, bag drop, kisses, out. Next: La Quintessence, a new restaurant (“Really good food,” Bob said, pumping his fist), husband and wife, one prep cook, frantic, but spontaneous smiles, the introduction, the bag drop, kisses, out. We crossed the Rhône, rolled up onto a sidewalk, and rushed out, Bob with one sack of bread, me with another, trying to keep up: Les Oliviers (“Exceptional food”—a double pump—“Michelin-listed but not pretentious”), young chef, tough-guy shoulders, an affectionate face, bag drop, high-fives, out. – Bill Buford, “Good Bread” (April 13, 2020)

Best Description

Leo’s version comes in a fluted glass tumbler that showcases its appealingly messy striations, as spoonable as pudding. Vanilla angel-food sheet cake is soaked in espresso and a soft spike of rum and amaro. The finished trifle is showered in delicate curls of Askinosie chocolate, and each creamy bite bears an unmistakable vein of salt. – Hananh Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Leo" (February 10, 2020)

Best Detail

Most submarines go down several hundred metres, then across; this one was designed to sink like a stone. It was the shape of a bulging briefcase, with a protruding bulb at the bottom. This was the pressure hull—a titanium sphere, five feet in diameter, which was sealed off from the rest of the submersible and housed the pilot and all his controls. Under the passenger seat was a tuna-fish sandwich, the pilot’s lunch. He gazed out of one of the viewports, into the blue. It would take nearly four hours to reach the bottom. [My emphasis] – Ben Taub, “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” (May 18, 2020)

Seven Memorable Lines

1. Avalanche country is like bear country. The threat hardly ever comes, but it defines the place, and lends it its grandeur. – James Somers, “Cold War” (March 23, 2020)

2. Musically, the master of this combination was Miles Davis, and so, on the rare occasions that she ventures from her bed, I express my affection in suitably Davisian style: “Keep your distance, motherfucker.”– Geoff Dyer, “Home Alone Together” (April 13, 2020)

3. So sue me: I sometimes find President Trump’s voice reassuring. – Lorrie Moore, “The Nurses Office” (April 13, 2020)

4. Once you’ve seen a Hopper, it stays seen, lodged in your mind’s eye. – Peter Schjeldahl, “Apart” (June 8 & 15, 2020)

5. I don’t mean to downsize the women or their role in all this, but—Mrs. Hall, Mrs. Hambling—they didn’t know a Focke-Wulf 200 from a white-throated sparrow. – John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa” (January 13, 2020)

6. He sneaks whispery formal nuances into works whose predominant effect may be as subtle as that of a steel garbage can being kicked downstairs. – Peter Schjeldahl, “Target Practice” (February 17 & 24, 2020)

7. “Look,” I say. “You are a two-bit shit and I am a two-bit shit. Let’s not compound the stink by speaking to each other anymore.” – Katherine Dunn, “The Resident Poet” (May 11, 2020)