Best Reporting and Essays
1. Ed Caesar, “The Stunt Pilot,” June 1, 2026 ("Once the plane passed the highway, Slipkan gave Gusak the order to shoot. The plane was slightly less than nine hundred feet away from the drone. Gusak squeezed the trigger, and the cabin of the Antonov filled with the drilling sound of automatic-weapon fire and the smoky-sweet smell of spent rounds").
2. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Volume Six,” April 27, 2026 ("You want Aisle 7, north side, top shelf, Pennington Quality Market, or wherever you get your I.G.A. cherries. The larger the jar, the larger the cherry, in generally discernible fractions, so you want the sixteen-ouncer. I.G.A., of course, is the Independent Grocers Alliance, and this is your vox-pop cherry, your socialist cherry, but politics is not why you drown it in bourbon").
3. Michael Schulman, “Deepfaking Orson Welles,” February 9, 2026 ("Then, there was what Saatchi called the 'happiness' problem: left to its own guided intuition, the A.I. technology often makes characters look cheerier, especially women. Saatchi played an A.I. clip of sullen Aunt Fanny, in the grim final scene, inappropriately smirking in her rocking chair. 'In terms of subtle despair, it has absolutely no idea what to do,' he said. 'That’s part of why having the actor is really important' ”).
4. Lauren Collins, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” May 4, 2026 ("Finally, he drove to the spot where we’d looked on the first day. 'It was the very last place I could go,' he said. He walked until he saw our footprints and then pushed a little farther. About half a mile on, he spotted a champagne bottle, green and clear, with a perfect little cigarette of a scroll inside—the real thing, at last").
5. Rebecca Mead, “The Landscape Artist,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("The environment was Goldsworthy’s true studio. He makes art using natural materials—stacked stones, interlaced leaves, threaded wool—that might take hours to create and then only moments to evanesce").
6. Nicola Twilley, “Pour One Out,” January 12, 2026 ("We established that I am prone to overthinking, that I’m not a huge fan of the earthy and acidic notes that are considered the hallmark of the region’s flagship varietal, and that the only sample I’d willingly purchase was a blend of one-quarter smoke-tainted wine and three-quarters not. According to my checklist, it tasted like tobacco, black pepper, and dark fruit, with a slight herbaceous note and a bitter finish").
7. Ian Frazier, “The Ice Curtain,” January 26, 2026 ("While walking around Nome, I came upon and tried to make sense of the city’s former hospital building, which sprawls in an indeterminate shape and contains the offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles, a car-repair garage, a pawnshop, the Nome courthouse, and the labyrinthine workshops of Rolland Trowbridge, an enterprising man who bought the building and damaged his knee crawling around in its crannies as he rehabbed it for its present uses").
8. Paige Williams, “Call of the Wild,” January 19, 2026 ("He ate daylilies, violet greens, chickweed, shepherd’s purse, greenbrier tips, sheep sorrel, thistle stalks. He learned how to make bamboo-pokeweed spring rolls, persimmon ice cream, spicebush muffins, dandelion jelly, pan-fried groundnuts, watercress soup, acorn cookies, roast squirrel glazed with honey and balsamic vinegar. If a wild hog came onto his property, he killed, butchered, and ate it, then freeze-dried the leftovers. He dried stalks of goldenrod and mint on racks").
9. Julian Lucas, “Urban Legend,” June 29, 2026 ("What’s a novel but a big score of details burgled from the world? And what’s a novelist but a fence, furnishing imaginary scenes with choice pieces of reality while obscuring their provenance?").
10. Jon Lee Anderson, “Is Cuba Next?,” March 30, 2026 ("A military band played a patriotic tune, and the marchers began to make their way through the city, bearing torches and chanting old revolutionary slogans: 'Socialism or Death,' 'I Am Fidel.' As they sang and shouted about honor, sacrifice, and the fatherland, they seemed like adherents of a religion in which the rewards are realized only in the hereafter").
Best Cover
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| Barry Blitt, Split Screen (February 16 & 23, 2026) |
Best of “The Critics”
1. James Wood, “Visiting Hours,” May 11 & 18, 2026 ("Sylvie systematically deconstructs Suzanna’s world. You don’t have to visit your mother, she says. But I do have to, Suzanna replies. 'According to who?” Sylvie asks. “You don’t even have to go to school.' Fed on moral scraps, the child must find her own meaning on which to subsist").
2. Alex Ross, “Crisis Mode,” May 25, 2026 ("Instruments and voices accumulate into immense, sustained, saturating dissonances, with a snare drum cutting through the tear-gas haze. Characteristically, Czernowin’s control of timbre, texture, and structure yields a kind of cataclysmic grandeur. Then, at the very end, she kicks away the frame of art and makes things blunt. Singer and her doppelgänger plead together: 'Don’t take my child away / Don’t take my child / Don’t / No.' The final syllables accelerate into a blur, whereupon a ritual of wailing erupts. A composer writes to the limits of her art, and steps into the real").
3. Zachary Fine, “Let It Bleed,” January 12, 2026 ("From one perspective, the shape is an island seen from above. From others, it’s a half-finished paint job, a blast hole, or an ocular stain. The choice is yours: you can survey it cartographically, insist on its flatness or depth, or be reduced to your own eyeball").
4. Hannah Goldfield, “Daily Bread,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("We spend our lives in a cycle of having eaten and then needing to do it again; how we feed ourselves reflects our relationship to money, time, pleasure, place. If the food diary pushes its practitioners toward solipsism, or toward showing off, its popularity also evinces something encouraging: a curiosity about how other people live, the texture of their days").
5. Hilton Als, “The Seer,” March 9, 2026 ("When I was younger and didn’t “get” Atget, I thought of his images as silent, with no action, no story. But now I can see that they are full of story—the story of time and its passage. My visits to the I.C.P. convinced me that Atget knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to make an epic record of time and place").
6. Zachary Fine, “The Doctor Is In,” March 23, 2026 (Schiele could have placed Graff next to an operating table, like Rembrandt’s Dr. Nicolaes Tulp or Eakins’s Dr. Samuel Gross. He could have given him the dignity of Goya’s Dr. Arrieta, or made him look dashing, like Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi, with his crimson robe and Turkish slippers. Instead, Schiele strips Graff of a stethoscope and examination room, and reduces the background to platelets of white. Who would know that Graff was a talented doctor, or a hearty and athletic man who liked the outdoors and played the cello, or that he had two divorces on the horizon? His body, with its mottled face and hands, is the only wisp of narrative.)
7. Zachary Fine, “Back to the Future,” April 13, 2026 (The centerpiece of the expansion, which was led by the architects Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, in collaboration with the firm Cooper Robertson, is an atrium that snaps right onto the side of the flagship building. I can’t say it was worth the renovation’s eighty-two-million-dollar price tag, but the space is brilliantly subtle. It works like a snorkel for the museum, giving it a new column of air for the vertical flow of traffic to the galleries, which have basically doubled in size.
8. Anthony Lane, “Seeing and Believing,” April 20, 2026 (My favorite sentence in Graham-Dixon’s book has him probing the nitty-gritty of Vermeer’s roofs: “It is possible that he ground actual red terracotta tiles in with his pigments and oil to get the required result.”)
9. Justin Chang, “Art of the Steal,” April 13, 2026 (Once Lori enters Julian’s home, the film springs to life. So does Soderbergh’s camera, which begins sniffing and roving about the space like a dog unleashed.)
10. Zachary Fine, “Monster Mash,” February 16 & 23, 2026 (But the film persuades with its frightening beauty: the shimmering flesh-colored rocks, the throbbing soundtrack, the smoothness of the creature’s skin. It’s all too human, but not.)
Best Illustration
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| Bill Rebholz's illustration for Rachel Symes' "On and Off the Avenue: A Total Flop" |
Best of “Goings On”
1. Taran Dugal, “Bar Tab: Ornithology,” January 12, 2026 ("Sometime during the coda, the guests’ cocktails arrived. The Autumn in New York, a tangy, gin-heavy blend of lemon and crème de violette, was just fine, and not quite worth its sixteen-dollar price tag").
2. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Cove,” January 26, 2026 ("An oyster is poached in chamomile oil and served with wisps of creamy chestnut. A carrot is roasted to marshmallow sweetness, tempura-fried, and wrapped in charred sweet leaves of caraflex cabbage, then draped in uni and drizzled with spiced quince syrup. Like much of what’s on McGarry’s menu, it has a lot going on, but it doesn’t feel busy or chaotic; McGarry layers ingredients and flavors like washes of watercolor").
3. Jillian Steinhauer, “Art: Louise Bourgeois’s ‘Art Can Still Enthrall,’ ” February 2, 2026 ("The display, although understated, highlights the rhythms of Bourgeois’s obsessive repetitions, and pleasure comes in the form of details, such as in an untitled piece in which a pair of marble eggs hides in a stack of weathered crates").
4. Dan Stahl, “Bar Tab: Haswell Green’s,” February 9, 2026 ("Several pages of beverage options include ninety varieties of whiskey, plus wine, beer, cider, and custom cocktails like the mezcal-forward P.Y.T., which, well—imagine a drinkable cigarette").
5. Hilton Als, “Photo Booth: William Eggleston’s Lonely South,” February 9, 2026 ("The real stunner when it comes to showing us community is Eggleston’s 1972 image of a young Black woman, sitting in a church pew with other women of color, turning to look over her shoulder at the camera. The woman’s hair is straightened—“correct”—and she is thin; she wears a sleeveless, wine-colored dress, and the long fingers of her left hand rest on her left shoulder, partly hiding her mouth. It’s a powerful evocation of the psychology of beauty in the American South. Is she covering her mouth because she’s been made to see her lips as too big? Does she straighten her hair because the “natural” look has caught on only in big cities, where women have more freedom to express themselves, or is she simply trying to align herself with the older women she is sitting with, to be one with them? By looking at the white man behind the camera, is she doing something forbidden? We’ll never know. And it’s those many mysteries, rooted in the real and the possible, that continue to make photography in general, and Eggleston’s in particular, so fascinating").
6. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: The Eighty-Six,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("I was, for my sins, dining with a vegetarian, and twenty ounces felt too ambitious to tackle alone, so I went instead for the New York strip, served bone-in. The exterior, salted and peppered, crackled from a hard sear; the inside was tender pink from edge to edge. The sauces I’d ordered alongside were hardly necessary: an eggy, vinegar-tart béarnaise, and a wiggly, wobbly gelée-adjacent steak sauce made with veal demi-glace. I dipped my fries into them, at least, and enjoyed a whole phalanx of steak-house sides: garlicky spinach; butter-laden mashed potatoes; a strikingly photogenic creamed-corn potpie with a swirly croissant top; snappy green and yellow long beans, dressed in a sharp lemon vinaigrette that sliced through the density of the rest of the food").
7. Rachel Syme, “On and Off the Avenue: Spring in the Trenches,” April 13, 2026 ("We aren’t watching chicks hatch or witnessing the miracle of foaling or plucking clumps of wild ramps from the earth. Instead, we continue traipsing through concrete, burdened with utter confusion about what, exactly, to wear: spring is a time of meteorological fakeouts; one day it will be balmy, the next frigid. Or, mornings are crisp and call for bundling up, but dress in too many layers and you’ll overheat by noon. Rain, April’s rude house guest, visits erratically and unannounced").
8. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Dean’s,” June 8, 2026 ("The restaurant rewards the diner who understands that, at this kind of proudly jolie-laide establishment, there’s a secret code: the more vividly horrid-sounding a dish, the more glorious it will be. The boiled ham, for instance, is heaven: two thin slices of meat, pink as tongues, with a parsley bechamel dotted with tiny, tender favas, and a mass of rough-mashed potatoes that seemed to be nearly half butter, salted just to the ecstatic edge of overmuch").
Best Poem
Rosanna Warren, “Coots,” March 30, 2026 (It would snow soon, / we walked fast, night was spreading its cloak, / the western skyline sparkled its broken glass, / and the birds in their tuxedos tightened their rings / so the water rippled glossily / out around them, catching glints).
Best “Talk of the Town”
1. Julian Lucas, “A Real Gas,” January 26, 2026 ("She was sanding down an L-shaped knob for a client in the Hamptons, who’d hired her to modernize his nineteen-thirties Magic Chef. Behind her was an Aladdin’s cave of more than a hundred and fifty venerable gas ranges, some with polished chrome fixtures and others nearly rusted through. There were Chambers, Garlands, Crowns, and a hulking, buttercup-yellow Roper that resembled a muscle car. In a world going electric, the Stove Lady keeps their flames alive: 'Nobody—not nobody, anywhere—does what I do' ").
2. Ben McGrath, “Ice Capades,” March 2, 2026 ("The fourth running of the Van Nostrand, when it finally transpired, after two days of postponement, featured three boats from the Shrewsbury club and three from New York. All, per the rules, were so-called 'A' boats: restored antiques, wooden, with gaffed rigs. From a squinting distance, they resembled Hudson River sloops. Up close, they were more like giant crosses atop machetes. The wind was a fluky northwesterly, gusty at the starting gun, such that a couple of blades levitated briefly, as if launching into flight. Then came the lulls, and a reminder that sailing, even on sherbert, can be a “hurry up and wait” kind of sport. Dan Lawrence’s son, Luke, piloting Ariel, which once belonged to the Roosevelts’ neighbor Archie Rogers, took the first heat, and then the second, obviating the need for a third. No team scores needed this time. The New Yorkers had won, and the cup was going home to Newburgh after a hundred and thirty-five years").
3. Sarah Larson, “Big Time,” March 16, 2026 ("At a Gagosian gallery in Chelsea the other day, the master rigger Joe Vilardi, a gray-haired Long Islander in a hoodie that said 'Budco Enterprises,' surveyed the final steps of the installation of Michael Heizer’s new exhibition, 'Negative Sculpture.' The show features 'Convoluted Line A' and 'Convoluted Line B' (2024), two eighty-seven-and-a-half-foot curved steel troughs that wend through the gallery’s floor like a figure skater’s tracks on ice").
4. Henry Alford, “Special Deliveries,” April 6, 2026 ("At 10:44 a.m., after docking near West Thirty-ninth Street, a thousand and fifty-six feet above trucks stuck in traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, the package was assigned to a Dutch X biker named C Jay Jaime, a Brooklyn-born, thirty-four-year-old father of three, who would be riding around town on a special pedal-assist e-bike that came equipped with a windshield, a roof, and an attached trailer. Jaime, who had on a yellow reflective vest and a helmet, held up his phone near his supervisor’s and, courtesy of the FarEye app, instantly received the coördinates for the packages—a total of forty-five—he’d be delivering. “This should take about six hours,” he said. The Sephora box would be his nineteenth of the day. He removed the parcel from its Kevlar tote and placed it on a shelf in the trailer. The D.O.T. estimates that two cargo bikes can do the work of a van or a box truck. Moreover, the trim little contraption cut a wholesome figure reminiscent of a Richard Scarry book—as if a courtesy tram birthed a tiny Zamboni").
5. Nick Paumgarten, “Fanboy,” June 15, 2026 ["He was sitting in a corner of Old Rabbit Club, a bar on MacDougal Street, drinking a non-alcoholic beer. He had on a Waylon Jennings T-shirt under a red plaid shirt, and an MF Doom baseball cap that contained a cascade of curly hair that Vile has a tendency to hide behind. A beer-menu lamplight suggested that the color of his Chuck Taylors was lavender. He was hanging out late (a) to make the trip down the turnpike at midnight (“Musicians know, it’s an easy shot late at night—it’s like teleportation”) and (b) to catch another band’s gig at Le Poisson Rouge"].
6. Ian Frazier, “ICE Prison Watch,” June 22, 2026 (Doremus Avenue and the warehouses and tank farms and truck lots and junk yards along it are not far from the Passaic River. This is swampy Jersey, as opposed to hilly Jersey. Next to the prison visitors’ parking lot, a small catchment pond holds runoff. The lawn around the pond had been mowed without anybody picking up the trash beforehand. Two Canada geese and six gangly brown-suède goslings walked among the refuse, while in the near distance the truck horns and the protesters’ chants rose up. The geese had been there off and on for days.)
Best Photo
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| Ian Loring Shiver's photo for Helen Rosner's "New York's Finest Sandwich" |
Best of newyorker.com
1. Helen Rosner, “New York’s Finest Sandwich,” March 22, 2026 ("What I find most wondrous about the Vegitalian is that it’s not a vegetarian sandwich that happens to be good. It’s not a concession to dietary preference, or a consolation prize. It is, in every sense, a more considered sandwich than the typical monument to meat; every ingredient is load-bearing, each element thought through and assigned a job. The result is a sandwich that illuminates, a sandwich that delights, a sandwich that redefines the Italian combo as a structure, a set of relationships, a formula that admits many solutions. The meat never figures, and you never miss it; all you miss, when the sandwich is gone, is the sandwich itself").
2. Samanth Subramanian, “Sohrab Hura’s Frozen Vision of Kashmir,” May 2, 2026 ("What does “Snow” testify to? Possibly to a way of life that not only survives many kinds of precarity—cruel weather, scanty income, a despotic army—but that even molds itself to them. I kept returning to an image of the side of a house with unfinished red brick walls and a corrugated metal roof. Quilts and blankets burst out of its upper windows, perhaps to be aired or perhaps as plugs to keep out the winter wind. It’s a sight so unexpected that it feels faintly comic, until you clock just how many blankets there are—and how bitterly cold it must be in that house at night. The day is bright, and the distant peaks are carpeted in green, but there’s still a berm of snow on the road by the house, as if to warn that the winter will never entirely leave this land").
3. Max Norman, “August Sander’s Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World,” May 21, 2026 (Despite his claims to universality, Sander thought with his eye, which was attracted to abnormal bodies, unforgettable faces, unkempt free thinkers, and all sorts of people the Nazis would soon label “unerwünscht,” or undesirable.)
4. Taran Dugal, “How Raghu Rai Captured and India in Transition,” May 23, 2026 ("My favorite shot from the book is “Monsoon Downpour in Delhi,” from 1984, which shows a bull pulling a load in the heavy rain, its driver balancing barefoot atop a wooden cart. To his left is a black car with a bulky, rounded frame, glimmering in the deluge. One look at the image and I remembered the Delhi monsoons from my childhood summers—the intolerable humidity, the legions of darkened clouds gathering on the horizon, followed by stentorian thunder and relentless, life-affirming rain. The photo functioned as a window into the past, but it reminded me, too, of the future").
5. Hilton Als, “The Expansive Joy of Mao Ishikawa,” May 30, 2026 ("The photographs in 'A Port Town Elegy' are strong images about being trapped and exercising masculinity. But who takes the poor’s power or demand for power seriously? Ishikawa doesn’t sentimentalize these guys; she lets them get in her face (and, by extension, her frame), she pays attention to them, and imagine how rare that is in their world!").
6. Naaman Zhou, “How City Kids Used to Play on the Streets of New York,” June 6, 2026 ("Earlier, I’d asked Cooper what her favorite picture was in the series. It was one she’d taken of a go-kart race down an abandoned stretch of the West Side Elevated Highway. Two groups of kids are screeching down the road. Other boys are sitting on the guardrail, or strolling and watching from a distance. It’s otherwise empty—just the kids and the road. Like almost all of Cooper’s photos, the scene is fleeting, a remnant of a New York that no longer exists. That highway was demolished, and, though Cooper saved one of the go-karts, and exhibited it at the Museum of the City of New York, she wasn’t able to keep it. In the seventies, when Cooper took these photos, she already knew that what she was seeing was temporary. 'I would drive around Alphabet City, and I would see these things,' she said. 'But they might last for a couple of hours. If I saw it one day, generally, it wouldn’t be there the next' ").
7. Naomi Fry, “The Delicious Anticipation – and, Yes, Release – of ‘Heated Rivalry,’ ” January 10, 2026 ("To try to tell if someone likes you—if someone might even want to have sex with you and, if so, when, and what that encounter might be like, and, once it’s over, when and how it might be repeated—can be one of life’s greatest pleasures").
8. Alex Ross, “What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann,” March 14, 2026 ("What, exactly, was the root of Sontag’s 'shame' over the encounter with Mann, if her semi-fictional story reflected her real-life attitude?").
9. Rebecca Mead, “David Hockney’s Hidden Depths,” June 16, 2026 ("His 'pool paintings,' including 'A Bigger Splash,' remain his most iconic works, despite the fact that he made only a dozen or so of them. They capture a kind of carefree milieu that manages to be suggestively hedonistic while being almost Edenic in the loving treatment of male nudity").
10. Zach Helfand, “How to Canoe to the World Cup in New Jersey,” June 16, 2026 (“The Hackensack appeared behind the parking lot, surprisingly broad and sparkly. Phragmites reeds lined the water, and the American Dream mall loomed over the far bank. It didn’t smell too bad. Except for the cars roaring overhead on a nearby bridge, a continuation of Route 3, it was pretty peaceful”).
Best Sentence
Over and over, I ran those films on our family projector, watching Pepper Constable (6'1", 191) go off-tackle, shucking Yalies, Harvards, on his way to the end zone. - John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Volume Six” (April 27, 2026)
Best Paragraph
Once the plane passed the highway, Slipkan gave Gusak the order to shoot. The plane was slightly less than nine hundred feet away from the drone. Gusak squeezed the trigger, and the cabin of the Antonov filled with the drilling sound of automatic-weapon fire and the smoky-sweet smell of spent rounds. A stream of orange tracers rained from the minigun. After a few bursts of gunfire, a small plume of black smoke tailed out behind the Shahed, and it began losing altitude. The crew expected it to explode, but it glided into a field beneath the Antonov without detonating—a surprise for a farmer the next morning. Inside the plane, there was no jubilation. After the successful kill, Gusak spent a few minutes tidying up his work station, collecting round casings into a burlap bag. - Ed Caesar, “The Stunt Pilot” (June 1, 2026)
Best Detail
Two Canada geese and six gangly brown-suède goslings walked among the refuse, while in the near distance the truck horns and the protesters’ chants rose up. - Ian Frazier, "ICE Prison Watch" (June 22, 2026)
Best Description
Every other detail of the Vegitalian likewise replaces an element that the meats provided in the original. Arugula, in lieu of more traditional iceberg lettuce, adds peppery bite. Pecorino, rather than Parmigiano, provides funk. In addition to mozzarella (salty, springy) there is a very nontraditional layer of Swiss cheese, lending a gently savory note. Rather than a conventional splash of red-wine vinegar, the Vegitalian gets a hefty smear of Court Street Grocers’ signature “hoagie spread,” a piquant relish of kalamata and green olives plus a briny, giardiniera-style mix of cauliflower, carrots, peppers, and other pickly things. There’s also a smear of mayo—Italian-combo sacrilege, in some sandwich circles, though I’ve always felt that it boosts the lusciousness of this sort of sandwich. The bread is a soft-crumbed, crackly-crusted seeded roll, with faintly salty pockets of air. - Helen Rosner, "New York’s Finest Sandwich" (March 22, 2026)
Best Drink
The Calcutta Cutie – “a pear-and-chai-infused vodka—sweet, refreshing, and just bitter enough” (Taran Dugal, “Bar Tab: Ornithology,” January 12, 2026).
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