Mid-Year Top Ten 2021

Julian Master's photo for Nick Paumgarten's "It's No Picnic"

It’s time for my annual “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):

Best Reporting Piece

Nick Paumgarten, “It’s No Picnic,” March 1, 2021 (“At Hamido, the evening was mild, and the curve was still more or less flat; happy to be around people other than our families, we sat at a large table on the sidewalk, in the open air, sharing platters of bran-grilled orate, grilled octopus, fried sardines, baba ghanoush, and beers of our own bringing. Was all of this reckless? Probably”).

Best Personal History Piece

John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2,” April 19, 2021 (“I did not know Charlie Howard well, and the impact of his death stopped there. Not so with Julian, whose future has remained beside me through all my extending past. That is to say, where would he have been, and doing what, when? From time to time across the decades, I have thought of writing something, tracing parallel to mine the life he would have lived, might have lived. A chronology, a chronicle, a lost C.V. But such, of course, from the first imagined day, is fiction. Actually, I have to try not to think about him, because I see those arms reaching forward, grasping nothing”).

Best Cover

Mark Ulriksen, “Hoop Dreams in New York” (May 10, 2021).

Best Critical Piece

Peter Schjeldahl, “Home Goods,” February 15 & 22, 2021 [“My first Frick crush, some fifty-plus years ago, was Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville (1845), the lady in blue satin who raises a finger to a pulse point on her throat as if her beauty were a self-charging battery”].

Best “Talk of the Town” Story

Adam Iscoe, “Back at It,” March 15, 2021 (“Quintana, a five-year veteran of the concession stand, wandered behind the candy counter. He found a thirty-five-pound bag of popcorn kernels in a storage closet. ‘At one point during the pandemic, I bought popcorn, just to try to relive the experience,’ he said, as he poured buttery salt powder along with the kernels into a popcorn machine. ‘It wasn’t the same.’ A minute later: pop-pop-pop. ‘Yeah, this is it,’ he said. Pop-pop-pop. ‘This is movie-theatre popcorn!’ ”).

Best Illustration

Andrea Ventura, “Tom Stoppard,” for Anthony Lane’s “O Lucky Man!” (March 1, 2021).

Best “Goings On About Town” Review

Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Dame,” January 25, 2021 (“Tucked beside them, in their charming paper boat, was a wedge of lemon; the faint perfume of malt vinegar hovered in the air”).

Best newyorker.com Post

Rachel Syme, “Fashion Was Back at the 2021 Oscars,” April 26, 2021 (“Amanda Seyfried’s epic, voluminous Armani Privé tulle trumpet gown was the bright red of a heavily syruped cherry snow cone”).

Best Sentence

Microtonal tunings, electronic processing, and rough string attacks engender ferocious climaxes. – Alex Ross, “Wind Songs” (March 1, 2021)

Best Paragraph

I know the neighborhood so well—know the old Hartford Courant building, the countless vape shops, the Hamed Fabric, with its clearance sale, the Money Change/Weed World/NY Gift & Luggage, and Daytona Trimming, with its boas—on account of the carrying, and then the strollering, and then the very slow walking, and then the normal-paced walking of these same streets year and again with this child of mine. When she was a baby, the only way to reliably get her to fall asleep was to push her round and round these blocks in her stroller. Amid the honking, shouting, and backfiring, and the music coming from the Wakamba bar, her eyes would close, then stay closed. – Rivka Galchen, “Better Than a Balloon” (February 15 & 22, 2021)

Best Photo

Jerome Strauss, “Cherry Blossoms,” for “Above & Beyond” (April 19, 2021)

Best Detail

Esposito’s has a take-a-number ticket dispenser. The slips of paper come out like interlocking Escher frog tiles. – Rivka Galchen, “Better Than a Balloon” (February 15 & 22, 2021)

Best Description

Frilly segments of baby bok choy are wilted in hot water until tender but still crunchy, then covered in steamed pickled garlic, fried garlic, and the house “brown sauce,” made from mushrooms, rice wine, and soy sauce. Skinny, slick florets of gai lan, or Chinese broccoli—which Lee describes as “kind of like if broccoli rabe and asparagus had a baby”—twist themselves around fat, nubby rice rolls tossed in charred scallions and black vinegar. Longevity noodles—coated in a blend of roasted garlic, shallots, chili, ginger, and fermented black beans—are strewn with both bok choy sum (a flowering bok-choy variety) and sweet, delicate pea leaves. – Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Fat Choy and Spicy Moon” (March 22, 2021)

Seven Memorable Lines

1. As a mot juste for “The Progress of Love,” I nominate “silly.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “Home Goods” (February 15 & 22, 2021)

2. The British nude is as real as the British breakfast. – Adam Gopnik, “The Human Clay “ (February 8, 2021)

3. In vain, I searched the eyes of passing scooterists for some inter-modal camaraderie, but I found only a shared sheepishness. – John Seabrook, “Scooter City” (April 26 & May 3, 2021)

4. Morandi drains our seeing of complacency. He occults the obvious. – Peter Schjeldahl, “Movements of One” (February 1, 2021)

5. For her fond biographer, Frankenthaler’s art delights the eye, as it was designed to, and that’s enough. Enough? It’s everything. – Adam Gopnik, “Fluid Dynamics” (April 12, 2021)

6. The cage matches of Eros and Mammon that are fairs leave me dyspeptic, even as I avail myself of a generously supplied V.I.P. pass because wouldn’t you? – Peter Schjeldahl, “A Trip to the Fair” (May 24, 2021)

7. Nothing goes well in a piece of writing until it is in its final stages or done. – John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2” (April 19, 2021)