Best of the Decade: Alternate List

Photo by Marcin Gala, from Burkhard Bilger's "In Deep"

I had fun doing “Best of the Decade.” But skimming the crème de la crème off ten years’ worth of New Yorker reporting pieces wasn’t easy. Narrowing the list to just twelve was agony. I was forced to discard many wonderful articles, including some personal favorites. To atone for my ruthless selection process, I’ve decided to compile a second list – twelve more excellent pieces that could easily have made the first list, if there’d been room. Here are my picks, with a choice quotation from each in brackets:

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Deadhead,” November 26, 2012 (“In the pavilion, the tapers had set up a cityscape of microphone stands, like minarets, and through them there was the sight of Jerry Garcia, fat and hunched, virtually immobile in a haze of his own cigarette smoke”). 

2. Burkhard Bilger, “In Deep,” April 21, 2014 (“One passage led back to the beginning of the sump, another to the loop behind them, a third to a dead end they’d explored earlier. That left one unexplored passage. It took them up a short corridor, along a rising slope of terraced mustard-colored flowstone, and into a small domed chamber. There was an air bell at the top about the size of a car trunk, so they swam up and took off their helmets and neoprene hoods to talk. They seemed to be at a dead end. They were cold, tired, and disoriented, and their air ration had nearly run out. There was no choice but to head back”). 

3. Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover,” August 29, 2016 (“I walked into the site, through smooth gray-brown gravel mounds, serene and raked as Zen gardens, graded to the angle of repose, so that no rocks slide. Like blast shields, the mounds blocked the view; their shapes, which can be seen in whole only from the air, form a coded alphabet of charm stone, dog bone, cross, and adze. A ramp sloped up to the east, to the top of a bulwark, against which leaned massive ceramic stelae”).

4. William Finnegan, “Silver or Lead,” May 31, 2010 (“To check out La Familia’s claim to be driving cristal addiction from Michoacán, I went to Zamora, a midsized city in the northwestern corner of the state. La Familia was doing some vivid social messaging there. Two days before my arrival, and some weeks earlier, groups of flagellants had appeared on the roads around Zamora—men with their shirts pulled up or off and their backs whipped raw. The men chanted and carried placards denouncing themselves as thieves and rapists. Some of the placards were signed ‘La Familia’ ”).

5. Aleksandar Hemon, “Mapping Home,” December 5, 2011 (“I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the odor of hard life and sewage—during the siege, people had often taken shelter from the shelling in their basements”).

6. Peter Schjeldahl, “The Flip Side,” November 29, 2010 (“But nothing that we know of anticipated the eloquence of van Eyck’s glazes, which pool like liquid radiance across his pictures’ smooth surfaces, trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and effulgences of brilliant color”).

7. Geoff Dyer, “Poles Apart,” April 18, 2011 (“The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away. The constellations were complicated by passenger jets, blinking planes, flashing satellites. It was like rush hour in the era of interplanetary travel. The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight”).

8. Alexandra Schwartz, “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”).

9. Dexter Filkins, “Atonement,” October 29 & November 5, 2012 (“Lobello might not have felt that he needed to apologize, but he was haunted by what had happened, traumatized, maybe even ruined. He wanted to know that the survivors understood why he had done what he had, even if it was not entirely defensible. And he wanted them to know that he felt their suffering in his own. Lobello did not quite say it, but when I left his apartment I felt that what he was really looking for was absolution”).

10. Rebecca Mead, “Sole Cycle,” March 23, 2015 (“Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped”).

11. Gabrielle Hamilton, “The Lamb Roast,” January 17, 2011 (“Then the sun started to set and we lit the paper-bag luminarias, and the lambs were crisp-skinned and sticky, and the root beer was frigid, and it caught, like an emotion, in the back of my throat”).

12. Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running,” July 11 & 18, 2016 (“A birthday cake appeared, and then—a hallucinatory moment—another Icelandic actress sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ in a perfect impression of Marilyn singing it to J.F.K., sexy sibilant by erotic syllable: ‘Happy biiirthday, Misstah Prez-uh-dent . . .’ The crowd cheered in pleasure and recognition. We live on one planet, indivisible”).