2025 Year in Review

Let’s begin with a drink, shall we? How about one of those espresso Martinis with a creamy glug of banana liqueur that Rachel Syme wrote about in her wonderful “Bar Tab: Monsieur” (April 7, 2025). Mm, that hits the spot. Okay, let’s roll!

Highlight #1: The magnificent 100th Anniversary Issue (February 17 & 24, 2025), loaded with delectable writing, including Jill Lepore’s “War of Words,” Nick Paumgarten’s “Helicopter Parents,” Burkhard Bilger’s “Stepping Out,” and Jackson Arn’s “Royal Flush.” 

Highlight #2: The splendid “Takes” series, in which New Yorker contributors revisited notable works from the magazine’s archive. I loved Stephen Colbert’s piece on Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale.” Sample: “From Hollywood to the Hasty Pudding, we waft like smoke from an unfiltered Pall Mall through Carson’s worlds, most of which are gone.”

Highlight #3: Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” columns – every last ravishing one of them. I devoured them all, licking my lips, craving more. Here’s a taste:

Another salad of chewy-crisp pork jowl and sliced melon is zingy with garlic and pickle-tart. The round sweetness of squid, fried in a light-as-air batter, is magnified by intensely floral curry leaves and a salty snowfall of shaved cured egg yolk. A bone-in pork chop, thick as a dictionary, tender as can be, and drowning in a luscious mess of charred tomatoes marinated in a sugar-lime-fish-sauce concoction, features every shade of sour and sweet. [“Tables for Two: Bong,” September 29, 2025]

Highlight #4: Nathan Blum’s extraordinary short story “Outcomes” (November 3, 2025). I’m not sentimental, but this piece moved me to tears. It’s about two students at a college in Maine – a freshman who grew up nearby and a senior from New York City – who meet and form a connection. The freshman’s name is Nolan Everett and the senior’s is Heidi Lane. They meet at the climbing wall in the college rec center. Nolan works there as a belayer. Heidi registers to use the climbing wall. She’s never climbed before. Nolan teaches her. The relationship evolves. The ending is heartbreaking. This is the best short story to appear in The New Yorker since Maile Meloy’s brilliant “Travis, B.” (October 28, 2002). 

Highlight #5: The appearance of another great “Tabula Rasa” piece by my hero, John McPhee. In this one, he says, among other interesting things, “I attribute my antiquity to dark-chocolate almond bark.”  

Other top picks of the year (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

Ian Frazier’s “Pigeon Toes,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“On the ironing board, which is set at a convenient height, she cuts up old loaves that she gets for free from a nearby bakery, and then she tosses the bread cubes onto the granite paving blocks of the plaza. Pigeons appear almost instantly, pecking so avidly that dozens of individual bread cubes go flying into the air above the mass of birds like popping popcorn”).

Nick Paumgarten’s “Guitar Heroes,” May 26, 2025 (“‘Are you ready?’ Margouleff asked at the warehouse. He unlocked a door, and immediately a thick, corky scent hit me, the emanation of hundreds of aging guitars—the great variety of hardwoods, the glue and paint and lacquer, the oxidation of strings and coils, the leather straps and handles, and the sarcophagal musk of the cases themselves”). 

Paige Williams’ “Still Life,” June 9, 2025 (“It was nine-thirty in the morning and so windy that miniature flags on graves were horizontal. The gravediggers were preparing for a funeral at two. Four neon-orange stakes marked off a rectangle in front of a headstone. The stone was inscribed with the name of a woman buried at nine feet; her husband was coming in at seven”).

Alexandra Schwartz’s “Going Viral,” September 1 & 8, 2025 (“Across genres, her calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with quick wit and cheerful perversity, pressing the reader close to her comic, confiding ‘I’”).

D. T. Max’s “The Behemoth,” September 22, 2025 (“The tower was a cone that narrowed to a point as it ascended. At the center of its circular base was a glimmering white hyperboloid, a gigantic stone object that looked like a cooling tower at a nuclear power plant. The hyperboloid had no top or bottom—it was a skylight that opened onto the nave below. Through this aperture, sunlight could filter all the way down to the church floor”).

Anthony Lane’s “Cinema Paradiso,” September 29, 2025 (“In a courtyard strung with lights, at a late-night showing of  ’A Santanotte, a Neapolitan film from 1922, I kept glancing away from the fervid melodrama to admire the projector behind me: a steampunk dream, built in Milan in the nineteen-thirties, which appeared to be made from a trash can, half a dozen alarm clocks, and two bicycle wheels. It emitted a bright plume of smoke, as if miniature furnaces were being stoked within”).

Rivka Galchen’s “The Heat of the Moment,” November 24, 2025 ("In the summer of 2022, a rig set up not far from Cornell’s School of Veterinary Medicine drilled for sixty-five days through layers of shale, limestone, and sandstone, passing beyond the geologic time of the dinosaurs to a crystalline basement dating to the Proterozoic eon, more than five hundred million years ago").

Alex Ross’s “Written in Stone,” December 1, 2025 (“One evening, I leaned on a fence as the sun went down, the horizon glowing orange against a cobalt sky. A whitish mist stole in from the lochs, encircling a nearby house until only its roof and chimneys remained. Spectral shapes caught my eye: sheep were trimming the grass around the site. When they detected my presence, they streamed away en masse, fading into the fog, which matched their coats. The stones loomed as black silhouettes. I felt a sweet shiver of the uncanny”).

Best Cover

Richard McGuire’s “Zooming In” for the April 14, 2025 “Innovation & Tech” issue.

Best “Talk of the Town”

Ben McGrath’s “Dumpster Diving,” September 15, 2025 (“Their attention turned to a giant cherry-colored armoire that had belonged to a professor now on sabbatical in Malaysia. How to get it to Bay Ridge? Ching had an idea. He could have it trucked with the weekly deliveries to Tandon, which is in downtown Brooklyn. ‘Then, there is a wonderful Home Depot probably less than a mile away,’ he said. ‘You can rent a U-Haul for nineteen dollars, and it’s good for ninety minutes. So, if you time it just right, early in the morning . . .’”).

Robert Sullivan’s “Manhattan’s Springs,” September 22, 2025 (“On a recent summer day, Greenberg moved through the Bronx with the brisk authority of a biker who has little time for automobiles, methodically checking the map on his phone, pulling copies of Smith’s photos from his backpack, watching for construction sheds. ‘The city will take the photos down, and so will landlords, but they seem to last longest on these sheds,’ he said”).

Nick Paumgarten’s “Big Pink,” October 6, 2025 (“At the head of the quarry, ospreys had built a nest high atop an abandoned derrick bedangled like a maypole with rusty cables”).

Jane Bua’s “Shedding,” October 13, 2025 (“At 8 p.m., the band slunk onstage, the house lights cut out, and Puth trotted up in a baggy Elastica T-shirt. He parked at the fake Rhodes, and the set began. At every keys solo and drum rip, he put on a goofy grin or a quasi-sexual stank face”).

Bruce Handy's “Shadow Boxing,” December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026 ("Five plate-glass windows offer a view into a re-creation of the cluttered basement studio in which the twentieth-century American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell once cobbled together the “shadow boxes” that he is best known for").

Best Illustration

David Plunkert's illustration for Daniel Immerwahr's "Check This Out" (January 27, 2025).

Best of “The Critics”

Justin Chang’s “Mean Time,” January 13, 2025 (“Woe betide anyone who bumps into Pansy on the street, but to watch her onscreen produces a kind of bruised exhilaration; her viciousness has an awesome life force. At a certain point, I began wondering whether Pansy would be best served not by counselling or antidepressants but by a few pints and an open mike”).

Daniel Immerwahr’s “Check This Out,” January 27, 2025 (“Even the supposedly attention-pulverizing TikTok deserves another look. Hayes, who works in TV, treats TikTok wholly as something to watch—an algorithmically individualized idiot box. But TikTok is participatory: more than half its U.S. adult users have posted videos. Where the platform excels is not in slick content but in amateur enthusiasm, which often takes the form of trends with endless variations. To join in, TikTokers spend hours preparing elaborate dance moves, costume changes, makeup looks, lip synchs, trick shots, pranks, and trompe-l’oeil camera maneuvers”).

Jackson Arn’s, “Royal Flush," February 17 & 24, 2025 (“In many of the cases from ‘Seeing Red’ where red does dominate, the work in question comes off as an affront, crossing some chromatic line—look at Warhol’s “Red Lenin” or STIK’s “Liberty (Red)” and feel the wet raspberry splatter you”). Arn’s sudden departure from The New Yorker this year saddened me. I will miss him. 

Adam Gopnik’s “Fresh Paint,” April 14, 2025 (“Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open”).

Louis Menand’s “Strong Opinions,” June 2, 2025 (“And the rumpled, rubber-faced manner, the popping eyes, the languorous drawl, the charmingly wicked grin he flashed when he thought he had scored a kill—Buckley was a show unto himself”).

Anthony Lane’s “Easy Music,” July 7 & 14, 2025 (“Has anyone listened more intently than Leonard to the infinite bandwidths of spoken English? So sharp are his ears, when pricked up, that somebody, way back in the Leonard genealogy, must have made out with a lynx”).

James Wood’s “Escape Route,” July 21, 2025 (“Dyer’s rise is solitary, freakish, and shadowed always by the chance that it might never have happened”).

Dan Chiasson, “Sense and Sensibility,” August 11, 2025 (“Schuyler worked in two primary verse modes, ostensibly opposites: we could call them blips and loop-the-loops. The blips are short, ribbonlike lyrics, trimmed to the moment, their sharp enjambments inspired by the Renaissance-era poet Robert Herrick; the loop-the-loops follow long Proustian arcs in margin-busting lines reminiscent of Walt Whitman”).

Hannah Goldfield’s “Take Me Back," September 15, 2025 (“Many of the most beloved food venders sell a single, time-honored classic: bubbling-hot, batter-fried cheese curds, as sparkly as nuggets of gold, from a stall called the Mouth Trap; the Corn Roast’s deeply burnished cobs, dunked in melted butter; crispy, wispy sweet-onion rings at Danielson’s & Daughters”).

Maggie Doherty's “Rambling Man,” October 20, 2025 (“Illuminated by Richardson’s biography, “The Snow Leopard” becomes an even more intriguing object. It is both a record of a man’s failings and a book written to avoid confronting them”).

James Wood’s “Last Harvest,” November 10, 2025 (“These investigations are meticulous, tender, palpable: buildings and radios, cars and first kisses, songs and streets are all made newly alive in memory”).

Hannah Goldfield's “Still Rising,” December 15, 2025 ("From a small tray of sheer pira—Afghan milk fudge, made with cardamom and orange-blossom water—he used a cookie cutter to extract glossy circles to fit into a Danish-like pastry, between layers of a vanilla pastry cream and diplomat cream. The texture of the finished product was delightfully riotous, shards of crisp golden crumb collapsing into the pleasingly claggy fudge and luscious custard").

Best Photo

Malike Sidibe’s portrait of Lorna Simpson for Julian Lucas’s “Now You See Her” (May 12 & 19, 2025)

Best of “Goings On”

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: L&L Hawaiian Barbecue,” March 3, 2025 (“Get a musubi or two, which is marvellous, the squishy pillow of rice, the ineffable Spamminess of Spam, the sweet smear of teriyaki”).

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: La Tête d’Or,” March 31, 2025 (“A well-prepared steak is goddam delicious”).

Rachel Syme’s “Local Gems: Fountain Pen Hospital,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“The store’s longtime head salesman is a fountain-pen savant. I recently went hunting for a wet-writing flexible nib and, within a few moments, he produced from the back room a glossy black Parker Lucky 2½ from the nineteen-twenties. ‘This, this, is the pen for you,’ he said. He was right”).

Marella Gayla’s “Bar Tab: Liar, Liar,” May 26, 2025 (“There was a looser scene on a weeknight, when a round of frosty Martinis, a sampling of cloudy, tart orange wines, and a peppery bottle of red, shared with two colleagues, seemed less like a life-style statement and more like a bold recommitment to the very act of living”).

Helen Rosner’s “Three Ice-Cream Sundaes for the Start of Summer,” June 16, 2025 (“The dark, slithery-hot chocolate sauce has a bittersweet edge that makes the whole thing feel dimensional and a little bit electric”).

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Bong,” September 29, 2025 [“Mama Kim’s namesake lobster (listed with the minimal description ‘IYKYK’) is a magnificent mountain of crustacean legs and claws, the pieces stir-fried with oodles of slivered ginger and a sweet-spicy herbaceous paste, made by Mama Kim, that clings, slurpably, to the meat and drips juicily onto a pile of rice below”].

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Chateau Royale,” October 27, 2025 (“I recommend ending your meal with a splash of Champagne poured from a silver ewer over a garnet-hued sphere of cassis sorbet – a thrilling riff on a Kir Royale, providing a bit of fizz and lightness at last”).

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: I’m Donut ?,” December 1, 2025 (“The somewhat controversial scrambled-egg doughnut features a sugary original doughnut piped full of soft curds and a squirt of a sweet-savory tomato mayonnaise—a bold and bizarre breakfast manifesto that refuses to be definitively sweet or definitively savory. I loved it unreservedly, though I imagine I might be in the minority”).

Best Poem

Arthur Sze’s “Mushroom Hunting at the Ski Basin,” March 24, 2025 (“Driving up the ski-basin road, I spot purple asters / and know it is time”).

Best “Shouts & Murmurs”

Josh Lieb’s “Bagels, Ranked,” April 21, 2025 [“Dances with, rather than fights against, the cream cheese and the lox. (Or whitefish, if that’s your thing. I don’t judge)”].

Best newyorker.com Posts

Joshua Yaffa’s “At the Edge of Life and Death in Ukraine,” August 2, 2025 (“Van Wessel captures how something can be at once utterly horrible, an emotional devastation for which no one is prepared, and also grimly routine”).

Helen Rosner’s “Three Plays on the Pancake,” August 3, 2025 (“Like the version made famous at Golden Diner (which Herrera has credited as an inspiration), these are true, literal pancakes: made not on a griddle but in individual cast-iron pans, which define the pancake’s shape, constraining its boundaries and creating a distinct crispiness to the outsides that plays in beautiful counterpoint to the soft, almost meltingly creamy insides. A serving of two pancakes arrives under a brutalist slab of butter so substantial that I thought, at first, it was a thick slice of cheese”).

Best Sentence

Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open. – Adam Gopnik, “Fresh Paint” (April 14, 2025)

Best Paragraph

The medal ceremony that night was a surreal sight: more than three thousand band members crowded onto the field in candy-striped rows. Bourbon County ended up placing second in its class—a triumph under the circumstances—just behind another Kentucky band, from Murray High School. But my favorite moment was earlier in the evening. Deep beneath the stands, in the vast tunnels and rehearsal rooms around the field, half a dozen bands were warming up—drumming, stretching, tossing rifles, and playing arpeggios as they waited for their turn to perform. Walking from room to room, I passed wooden ships, Victorian cages, and giant Day-Glo flowers in the hall. A trio of Elmer Fudds was hunched in conversation over here, two orange bunnies giggling in a corner over there. Some strays from the “Menagerie” show came wandering down the hall, past a pair of water sprites from Broken Arrow and a few butterfly girls from Cypress, Texas. It was like the world’s biggest costume party. – Burkhard Bilger, “Stepping Out” (February 17 & 24, 2025)

Best Description 

The birds wheeled over the aviary while Fritz circled. Komme, komme, Waldi: the song receded as the microlight got farther away and then swelled as it neared. This rise and fall, its approaching and distancing, was at once a cheer, a prayer, and a lament, and it induced in me—and, I somehow believed, in everyone else, too—a kind of heartache, like the longing for loved ones or the pain of their aging away. The microlight’s distant motor echoing off the hangar’s corrugated shell sounded like a deranged string section. An old sailboat was propped against the tin. Swallows darted around, feeding on the flies. A commercial jet passed soundlessly overhead. – Nick Paumgarten, “Helicopter Parents” (February 17 & 24, 2025)

Best Detail

Its main entrance, at Twenty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, is marked by an imposing brownstone Gothic Revival structure, the Arch, where a pandemonium of monk parakeets has long kept an elaborate nest. – Paige Williams, “Still Life” (June 9, 2025)

And now here’s to you Burkhard Bilger for your dazzling, vibrant, exhilarating “Stepping Out” – my #1 Pick of the Year! 

Thank you, New Yorker, for another marvelous year of reading pleasure.

Credits: (1) The New Yorker (100th Anniversary Issue, February 17 & 24, 2025); (2) Mathieu Larone’s illustration for Nathan Blum’s “Outcomes” (November 3, 2025); (3) Photo by Hannah Whitaker for Nick Paumgarten’s “Guitar Heroes” (May 26, 2025); (4) Photo by Matteo de Mayda for Anthony Lane’s “Cinema Paradiso” (September 29, 2025); (5) The New Yorker, April 14, 2025); João Fazenda’s illustration for Robert Sullivan’s “Manhattan Springs” (September 22, 2025); (6) David Plunkert's illustration for Daniel Immerwahr's "Check This Out" (January 27, 2025); (7) James McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland (1871-74); (8) Photo illustration by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin for Hannah Goldfield’s “Take Me Back” (September 15, 2025); (9) Malike Sidibe’s photo portrait of Lorna Simpson for Julian Lucas’s “Now You See Her” (May 12 & 19, 2025); (10) Lanna Apisukh’s photo for Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Bong” (September 29, 2025); (11) Luci Gutiérrez’s illustration for Josh Lieb’s “Bagels, Ranked” (April 21, 2025); (12) Brian Finke’s photo for Burkhard Bilger’s “Stepping Out” (February 17 & 24, 2025); (13) Mathias Depardon’s photo for Nick Paumgarten’s “Helicopter Parents” (February 17 & 24, 2025).