October 5, 2026, Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. It contains five excellent pieces: Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Ugly Baby”; Ryan Gellis’s “Bar Tab: Mash Inn”; Nick Paumgarten’s “Ice Ages”; Anthony Lane’s “Borderlands”; and Peter Hessler’s “Danger Drive.”

Rosner, in her piece, visits the Thai restaurant Ugly Baby in Williamsburg. She loved it. She calls it “a place of unbearable sensory chaos.” She says,

I dived right into the deep end, ordering without fear: a soft stir-fry of ground pork belly, umami-charged with shrimp paste and garnished with slivers of tomato-red hot peppers, whose heat crackled and blossomed against a caramel sweetness in the sauce. A salad of whole strawberries and bird’s-eye chilies, in a glaze-like dressing of sugar and fish sauce, was uncannily dessert-like—Would I like this on ice cream? I kept wondering—and yet certainly not a dessert, with all its thunderous layers of sourness and fishy-breathed complexity. I wished that I was in a quieter room when I took a bite of the pad ped, a dry curry of hanger steak and slippery tripe: it was rich and deep as nighttime, with a holy-basil brightness swaddled in some of the most violent heat I’ve ever experienced.

Gellis’s piece tells about his recent visit to a beer bar in South Slope called Mash Inn that was formerly a laundromat. Gellis says, “Inside, people were still dealing in suds, albeit of a different kind.” He has a few beers, including a “Cultivar: Cascade, from Wayward Lane Brewing, a hazy pale ale whose tiny bubbles effervesced so vigorously as to mist the upper lip” and “a wild ale by the name of Arietta, from Fox Farm Brewery, floral and largely flat, had a pleasing barnyard funk.” He also drinks something called a “Subglitch sour” – great name, but he doesn’t describe it other than to say that he and “the malt maestros” he’s drinking with rechristened it “Jolly Rancher light.” When Gellis leaves the bar, he stops at the outside window (“its sliding partition reminiscent of a Mister Softee’s”) and buys another drink. He concludes, “A growler of stout makes for pleasant company on the walk home.”

Paumgarten’s “Ice Ages” is a “Personal History” piece about his life in minor hockey – first as a kid and then as a father. It’s a vivid meditation on hockey and parenting. Here’s a sample:

It wasn’t long before Oli joined a travel-hockey program. Day One was at a rink in a mall up the pike, in New Rochelle. This was mini-mites, five- and six-year-olds, mostly, the smallest of the small. We drove up at daybreak, Oli in back, still in a booster seat. When we got to the rink and he started dressing, I could see the trepidation and doubt in his eyes. Older kids strutted around in their pads. Their dads made a caffeinated ruckus. I tried, in Oli’s presence, to convert the boisterousness and swagger of the others into cheerfulness, but I could sense that he knew I was forcing a mood. This never worked with him. Something gave way, some dismay set off by the jersey he was given or the number he’d chosen or the bravado of the other children or the merrymaking of the parents or the nervous exhilaration of his dad—those first-day heebie-jeebies, one’s own memory of which persists deep in the bones. He refused to go on the ice, and he wept. My moonfaced boy, wrecked somehow by a disconnect between what he’d wanted and what this was, dug in. Other dads sidled up and tried to coax and reassure him, but, if I couldn’t, they didn’t stand a chance. We sat awhile. Limbo. My heart ached for the boy, yet the task at hand was to get him onto the ice and into the program. The striving, the striving. He sat on a bench, his tiny legs not even reaching the floor. I left him alone for a while and stood at the glass watching the session, my soul a twist of sympathy, frustration, embarrassment, and even something like fear—that he might be too sensitive for this world, too soft—and the realization that I might feel this way about sensitivity, about the proper mettle in a boy, made me ashamed, too, so the brain, the self-justifying cortex, whichever lobe that is, got to work formulating arguments on behalf of my impatience and stipulations, to override the shame. 

There are wonderful descriptions of minor hockey reality. This one, for example:

Before practice, as the Zamboni made its rounds, the boys piled up behind the door to the ice, jostling for position. After a moment—the sanctified fermata of waiting for the new layer of water to freeze—a coach unlatched the door and they tumbled onto the ice, not one remaining on his skates. The pads, the helmets, the sticks, the bounded ring: it was all a pretext for roughhousing. No one discouraged it.

And this:

My participation, as driver, dad, coach, manager, crank, and fan, sucked the strength out of me, like going overboard in a wintry sea. The rank refrigerated air, the burnt coffee, the Tastykakes, the cross-chop of excitement and stress and boredom and disgruntlement. By Monday, I was saturated by it all, sallow and hoarse.

My favorite scene takes place in Paumgarten’s apartment. His five-year-old son Oli suits up for hockey for the first time:

In the apartment, I helped him tug on gear and tighten straps with the brisk tenderness of a veterinarian tending to a sedated pet. His excitement, visible behind the lattice of the face mask, was intoxicating, the pride of a novitiate. The extent to which even this kind of innocent dress-up is a means of indoctrination—the knottiness of this early gender programming—is leavened or perhaps obscured by its adorableness. He bumped around the house, proud and almost delirious with his transformation, and with the cognizance that he might be pleasing his father. The armor both emboldened him and somehow sapped him of strength, as though the plastic exoskeleton had drawn starch from his bones. After a few minutes, he lay on the floor with arms out and legs splayed, and looked up at the ceiling, daydreaming of who knows what. Every frozen pond has one, a distrait child squinting into the sky, making angels of the ice shavings. Here, in the one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment, was ours.

That “Every frozen pond has one, a distrait child squinting into the sky, making angels of the ice shavings” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of Paumgarten’s best.

Anthony Lane’s “Borderlands” is a profile of the Polish film director Pawel Pawlikowski. Lane not only sketches Pawlikowski’s personal history, he talks with him, has lunch with him, and meets him in Sarajevo to visit a location that figures centrally in Pawlikowski’s documentary Serbian Epics (1992). For me, the best part of Lane’s piece is his review of Pawlikowski’s films, including Ida (2013) – one of my favorite movies: see my “Minimal Realism in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida” (August 6, 2014). How did Pawlikowski create that minimal realism? What was his approach? Lane provides an insight. He writes,

Ida’s stillness is shared by the whole film, which seems more confidently rooted than anything in Pawlikowski’s previous endeavors. “For the first time, I was really on firm ground with what I wanted,” he said. He was back on home turf, in Poland, with a narrow budget, discarding inessentials. “When you limit the elements and actors and locations and props, then you can drill in,” he told me. “Limit yourself, and that frees you up.” Objects become loaded with intent; a skull is unearthed and bundled inside a silk scarf. Pawlikowski describes all this as “a big breakthrough,” though it sounds more like an epiphany. “I also had this moment of rejection of cinema, you know? I said, ‘Fuck cinema.’ ” Part of the rejecting was what he calls “this radical decision not to move the camera, and to frame things in a very amateurish way, with a lot of headroom.” The aim was “to make things happen within the shot.”

Lane’s stimulating piece kindled my interest in seeing Pawlikowski’s latest film Fatherland. 

Peter Hessler’s “Danger Drive” has a terrific subject – a highway that has made lists of both the most dangerous and the most appealing roads in America. It’s called the Million Dollar Highway. Hessler describes it in his opening paragraph:

In the valley where I live, along a quiet stretch of the Uncompahgre River, in southwestern Colorado, there is only one paved road, and, like most people around here, I don’t drive it south without a good reason. In that direction, the road—U.S. Highway 550—passes through the small mountain town of Ouray, and then it climbs more than two thousand feet in the span of six miles. This section of the two-lane road has been carved directly into the red-quartzite cliffs of the Uncompahgre Gorge, and almost none of it has a shoulder; in some places, the highway is only twenty-three feet wide. The speed limit is twenty-five miles an hour, and one way to identify locals is that they often drive faster than that. This is because they worry about what can happen above the road. Rockfalls are common, and so are avalanches. 

Hessler tells about the highway’s history and the many accidents and fatalities that have occurred on it. The piece is beautifully structured. One accident in particular draws Hessler’s close attention – a Honda Civic that inexplicably stops, reverses, and backs off the road, plunging three hundred and twenty feet to the bottom of a gorge. Here’s his description of what happened:

Last year, early on the morning of August 5th, a tourist from Oregon named Adam Hynes was approaching one of the most treacherous sections of the gorge when he looked ahead and saw a silver Honda Civic moving in reverse. Hynes found it strange that somebody would be driving backward in such a spot, but then his view was obscured as he went around a sharp bend. By the time Hynes came out of the turn, the Honda was gone.

Hynes dropped a pin on his phone. There was no signal, so he continued down the highway until he was able to call 911. Then he circled back and parked at a pullout not far from the pin. The gorge was so precipitous that Hynes couldn’t see the bottom, but he had a DJI Mavic 3 drone. He set the machine aloft, and its camera captured the Honda, which had fallen three hundred and twenty feet—about the height of a thirty-story building. The silver vehicle lay upside down in the Uncompahgre River, crumpled like an aluminum can.

Hessler’s account of this accident and the ensuing rescue of one of the car’s occupants, a ten-year-old girl named Rachelle, is riveting. It’s amazing what he does to pursue the story. He climbs down into the gorge and crosses it on a rope known as a Tyrolean traverse to get to a ledge that affords a good view of the Honda crash site. He also drives the Million Dollar Highway on his way to visit Rachelle at her home in Bloomfield, New Mexico. 

“Danger Drive” is a superb piece of literary journalism. I enjoyed it immensely.