Best of 2020: Reporting Pieces

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

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ben Taub’s “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” May 18, 2020 (“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”).

2. “April 15, 2020,” May 4, 2020 (“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”).

3. Alex Ross’s “The Bristlecones Speak,” January 20, 2020 (“Spears of dead wood jut into the air. The trunk is a marbled hulk stripped of bark, like driftwood thrown from a vanished ocean. A ribbon of live bark runs up one side, funnelling water and nutrients to clumps of green needles high above”).

4. Bill Buford’s “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. Burkhard Bilger’s “Building the Impossible,” November 30, 2020 (“Unlike the slide, which bullies through the apartment like a giant intestine, the staircase seems to crystallize the spaces it’s in. Built of white nanoglass—an opaque and extremely hard synthetic stone—it twists up through the building in precisely organized shards, offering sudden glimpses through the rooms unfolding around it”).

6. Vinson Cunningham’s “Eightyish,” April 13, 2020 (“Outside, I imagine that each stranger’s head is crowned by a saint’s halo of fatal droplets, waiting to surf on one of my breaths into my body and cut through my lungs like a spray of glass”).

7. Jonathan Blitzer’s “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’”).

8. Elizabeth Kolbert’s “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”).

9. Luke Mogelson’s “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”).

10. Dana Goodyear’s “From the Ground Up,” October 12, 2020 (“The walls are made from elongated quartzite bricks, with gray-scale variations reminiscent of the larchwood slats of his atelier. Open seams in the ceiling allow sunlight to enter in ghostly lines—some defining an alternative volume within the space, others fanning out like an annunciation. A brass spout funnels water from the source, St. Petersquelle, into a brass basin with cups attached by chains. In one secluded pool, swimming around a corner reveals a chamber where the human voice harmonizes with the room so that humming creates a glorious Gregorian echo”).