July 1, 2024 Issue

This week’s “Talk of the Town” contains an interesting story by Adam Iscoe called "Catamaran." It tells about a hundred-foot-long former racing catamaran from France, retrofitted with solar panels and a hydrogen fuel cell, docked near Wall Street. Iscoe writes,

The vessel, known as Energy Observer, resembled a sperm whale that had been wrapped in roughly ten thousand photovoltaic cells. She made a two-week pit stop during a seven-year, around-the-world voyage, gathering some fresh vegetables, before setting sail again, at dawn.

The craft is battery-powered. Iscoe says,

Just about everything on the vessel—two electric engines, a washing machine, the Starlink satellite hookup, a seawater desalinator, two refrigerators, several MacBooks, a G.P.S. navigation system, lights—is powered by four lithium-ion batteries, which are recharged by a couple of thousand square feet of solar panels, and a hundred and thirty-seven pounds of hydrogen gas. The gas, which is produced using seawater, is stored in eight pressurized tanks.

Iscoe talks with some of the crew and learns how the vessel works:

In the hulls, seawater is desalinized and purified, before an electrolyzer splits H2O into hydrogen and oxygen. After that, the hydrogen gas is converted into electricity, via a custom-built Toyota fuel cell—a version of the technology inside the company’s hydrogen-powered sedan, which emits water vapor instead of exhaust.

Wow! What marvellous green technology! More ships like Energy Observer, please. 

April 2024 Food Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. It’s the 2024 Food Issue, a digital-only issue about the culinary world. What a feast! Adam Iscoe’s “No Reservations,” Helen Rosner’s “Padma Lakshmi’s Funny Side,” Jiayang Fan’s “Another Chinatown,” Patricia Marx’s “Spoiler Alert,” Hannah Goldfield's "Holey Grail" – all excellent! But, for me, the highlight is Gary Shteyngart’s delightful “Shaken and Stirred.” Why? Because it’s sheerly, purely, unimpeachably hedonistic. Shteyngart goes on a Martini tour of some of New York City’s grandest bars, and he does it in the company of some very witty drinkers. Here he’s at the Lobby Bar, in Hotel Chelsea, with his friend Amor Towles:

The Lobby Bar is sumptuous, with a bar top that accommodates a Parthenon’s worth of marble, and banquettes that are cozy and velvety. Amor came properly dressed in a vest for the occasion, while I had hastened off the Amtrak in my country garb. The Dukes Martini was assembled tableside—the ingredients presented on a foldout stand—by a young server skilled in the pouring arts. When it comes to the purist’s dry Martini, there are two things to remember. First, there is a mantra that Amor himself has coined: “Crisp, clear, and cold.” The Lobby Bar follows these directives by freezing the glasses, as well as the gin or vodka. The second is the “vermouth rinse.” In this maneuver, the composition I usually turn to for a dry Martini—one part vermouth to five parts gin—is almost entirely done away with. The vermouth is conscripted only to coat a rather enormous glass and is then tossed away before the gin or vodka, which has been primed with a dash of salt-water solution, is poured. (I have been told that at the original Dukes the vermouth was ignominiously tossed onto the carpet, whereas at the Chelsea it is merely splashed into a tiny glass of olives, perhaps later to be lapped up by an alcoholic dog.) Notably, no ice or shakers are used and the alcohol is neither shaken nor stirred, creating a ninety-five-per-cent undiluted Martini, which, at this volume, functions as a kind of uncontrolled insanity.

I read that and immediately found myself thirsting for a Martini.

Shteyngart and Towles begin drinking. Shteyngart writes,

The first Martini, essentially a vermouth-coated container for what I eyeballed to be two and a half to three shots of juniper-noted, grapefruit-evoking Tanqueray No. Ten gin, immediately put us in a mood. The mood was a good one. I cannot remember whether it was Amor or I who said “I’m feeling very chummy.” Perhaps we both said it. The Dukes Martini came with an array of garnishes, of which I found the lemon peel most conducive to the juniper crispness of the Tanqueray.

Then they each have a Dukes Martini with Ketel One vodka. After that they order shrimp cocktails and split a B.L.T. sandwich to fortify themselves for their third drink, an 1884 Martini. Shteyngart describes it superbly:

This beast is premade with two types of gin—Boatyard Double Gin, from Northern Ireland, and the New York Distilling Company’s Perry’s Tot Navy Strength Gin—which clocks in at a ridiculous 114 proof. This dangerous concoction is then fat-washed with Spanish Arbequina olive oil, after which it is frozen and the olive oil’s fat removed, while vermouth, lemon liqueur, a house-made vetiver tincture, and a few dashes of lemon-pepper bitters are added. A lemon peel is then showily expressed over the glass tableside and a very briny Gordal olive and a cocktail-onion skewer are plopped in. Although more sizable quantities of vermouth and other pollutants are at play than in the classic Dukes Martini, the over-proofed gin does a lot of the talking and one is soon very convincingly drunk.

The Chelsea is just the first stop on this sybaritic binge. Another night Shteyngart goes to the Gotham Restaurant with his friend J. Smith-Cameron. She likes the place because of the bartender, a guy named Billy. They each have a Vesper (“a drink that de-Balkanizes the conflict between vodka and gin by combining both, with a splash of Lillet Blanc serving as the Holy Spirit”). This is followed by two Gibsons. Then Billy mixes them a Martinez. Shteyngart writes,

The cocktails are related, but after the crisp minimalism of a Gibson, the Martinez is akin to encountering a violent early hominid in a downtown bar. Sweet vermouth and maraschino are conscripted alongside the usual gin. Billy uses Carpano sweet vermouth, which, to my palate, provides hints of bitterness instead of overwhelming sweetness. It went down as easy as a Martinez can, and J. and I were now thoroughly drunk. Gotham’s kitchen was closed, so we headed across the street to get burgers at the Strip House to buffer our stomachs. When we left, an hour later, Billy had also crossed the street to get a drink at the bar. There he was, with his sleeves still rolled up, saying goodbye to the evening.

That “It went down as easy as a Martinez can, and J. and I were now thoroughly drunk” made me laugh.

Another night, Shteyngart goes to Tigre, on Rivington Street, on the Lower East Side, with his friend Adam Platty. Shteyngart writes,

Tigre is one of the most beautiful bars of recent vintage that I have seen. Windowless, it glows like a jewel box, and the striking semicircle of the bar is not unlike that of the U.N. Security Council, though studded with booze. Platty remarked that “all these bartenders look like Jesus,” and our handsome open-shirted server so resembled the Lord that I couldn’t help but hum, “Oh, come, let us adore him,” under my breath. The highlight of Tigre’s Martini menu is the vodka-based Cigarette, which Platty immediately qualified as “smoky as fuck.” “It’s old-fashioned, like if you smoked a cigarette while having a Martini,” Jesus told us, which is absolutely on point. Austria’s Truman vodka is shot into flaming orbit by an inventive liquor made by Empirical, the Danish distillery, and named after Stephen King’s pyrokinetic character Charlene McGee, which presents on the tongue as a flavorful burst of smoked juniper, hence the feeling that a draw of nicotine and tar can’t be far.

That last sentence is inspired, combining words (“Truman vodka,” “flaming orbit,” Empirical,” “Stephen King,” “pyrokinetic,” “Charlene McGee,” “smoked juniper,” “nicotine and tar”) I’m sure have never been combined before. Reading Shteyngart’s piece. I started to feel tipsy. I wasn’t drinking, but it felt like I was. I was getting drunk on his Martini-drenched prose. 

Shteyngart attends other bars as well: Sunken Harbor Club (Immortal Martini); Dante (Dante Martini); Temple Bar (Plymouth Martini); Bemelman’s Bar (Tanqueray Ten); Le Rock (Au Poivre, Super Sec, L’Alaska, In and Out). It’s quite a Martini marathon! I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Another source of pleasure in Shteyngart's piece are the jazzy, glamorous photos by Landon Nordeman. They enhance the text magnificently.

Photo by Landon Nordeman, from Gary Shteyngart's "Shaken and Stirred"

Best of 2022: Talk

Illustration by João Fazenda, from Laura Preston's "Pipe Dreams"

Here are my favourite “Talk of the Town” pieces of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Laura Preston, "Pipe Dreams," August 22, 2022 (("Duddy, who has a head of white hair and the slow, smooth baritone of a radio broadcaster, was tapping away at the Stentor Sesquialtera rank, then blowing air through the pipes to see how they sang."| "He pries open the lips with a sculptor’s spatula and taps the toe with a tiny hammer. He uses a headlamp to peer down long pipes, and shoves a jeweller’s ring gauge up the toe hole. All the rest is in the ear."| "The sixty-four-foot Diaphone-Dulzian rank is made from enough sugar pine to build a house, and it produces a quintuple low C, a subharmonic tone that sounds like a chopper circling the building");

2. Laura Preston, “Incidental Masterpieces,” April 4, 2022 ("Among the possible masterpieces being prepared for sale at the Found Object Show were a fragment of a birdhouse; a tar bucket; an electrified toilet seat; a piece of wire from a fence made woolly by escaping sheep; a handmade massage device; a braille bingo board; a pouch of nineteenth-century cheese; a hunk of Styrofoam that looked like nineteenth-century cheese; a street sign reading 'Alone Ave.'; a false beard made of real golden hair; a pile of rubber pocket watches; a pork salesman’s pig-shaped suitcase; a magician’s trick ball; a washing-machine agitator shaped like human hands; a hundred-year-old brick impressed with an animal’s footprint; a forgotten softball grown furry with moss; a copper diving helmet that imploded under immense pressure; and a chicken farmer’s handmade wooden shoes, designed to leave spurious bobcat tracks around coops");

3. Adam Iscoe, “Loyalists,” September 19, 2022 ["2:12 p.m. One exchange: Elena Saldana, an apron-clad woman behind the shop’s counter who has worked at the shop for twenty-five years, said, 'What can I get you?' A bespectacled Brit named Harry King, who has been a hairdresser for celebrities and common people in London and New York, replied, 'A tissue.' Two almost-laughs. One Scotch egg bought by King. 'I haven’t had one in years,' he said. 'I’ll sit and have a little cry eating it watching the telly before I go to the gym.' | 2:15 p.m. More than two dozen white roses, hydrangeas, sweet peas, and orchids; lots of Union Jack bunting; a few commemorative plates; and one framed photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, all placed in the store window—pushing aside a few dozen jars of Haywards Traditional Onions (flavor: Medium & Tangy), Heinz Sandwich Spread (original), Baxters Sliced Beetroot (“suitable for vegans”), Batchelors Bigga Marrowfat peas ('No. 1 in UK'), and Marmite. Not pushed aside: one urn holding Archie’s ashes"];

4. Nick Paumgarten and Sarah Larson, “We Want the Cup,” May 23, 2022 ("One suture on the bowl’s lip was the result of its being dropped last year by a Tampa grinder named Pat Maroon") ;

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Night Off," November 7, 2022 (“The hockey: someone had got the Gizz a box at Madison Square Garden, for a Rangers-Sharks game. That night, about twenty of them—band, crew, assorted friends—came in hot. In the second period, the jumbotron caught them mugging for the camera, a melee of mustaches. Later, back in Brooklyn, the festivities went deep. A cry from the stage in Queens the following eve: ‘New York City, you fucked us up last night!’ The band’s set felt like a retaliation”); 

6. Adam Iscoe, “Incognito,” October 10, 2022 (“The bassist for the band Khruangbin, Laura Lee, who uses the showbiz moniker Leezy, stepped outside her apartment in Brooklyn. Her pink nails matched her eyeshadow and the roses on her flowered shirt, which she wore with cleanish white Converses, Levi’s, and a fifteen-ninety-nine black wig that she didn’t buy on Amazon”); 

7. Joshua Yaffa, “Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter,” March 14, 2022 ("After ten, the lights in the station dimmed. People packed up their food and rolled out sleeping bags, the white glow of phone screens casting flickering shadows on the walls of the train car. I crawled into my folded-up blanket, and felt the cold floor beneath me. The muffled rumble of nearby snores felt almost reassuring, a reminder of all the humanity gathered so tightly together. A woman offered me a pillow");

8. David Remnick, “Postscript: Peter Schjeldahl,” October 31, 2022 (“He was someone who, after being lost for a time, knew some things about survival. We met more than twenty years ago. I was looking to hire a full-time art critic. I’d read him for years in the Village Voice. And a voice is what he always had: distinct, clear, funny. A poet’s voice—epigrammatic, nothing wasted”); 

9. Dan Greene, “Stunted Growth,” December 5, 2022 (“He’d brought along his fiancée, the production designer and stylist Lux Wright, and their latte-colored service dog, Wendy, who’d walked in docilely on a gray Ultimate Fighting Championship collar and leash”);

10. David Remnick, “First and Last,” September 12, 2022 (“Gorbachev, of course, made mistakes, serious ones. He tried, for too long, to reconcile irreconcilable ideas and power bases. He failed to reform the K.G.B., which led a coup against him, in August, 1991. And so on. Yet he possessed both the idealism and the political skill to generate something in the world that is, at this dark historical moment of global illiberalism and malevolence, exceedingly rare: a sense of decency and promise. Here was someone raised in a totalitarian system who came to believe in democracy, the rule of law, and the peaceful and orderly transfer of power. Imagine. The hope is that, around the world, his example will prevail”).

September 19, 2022 Issue

Delightful “Talk” story in this week’s issue – Adam Iscoe’s "Loyalists." It’s a series of moments in the day of a British specialty store, Myers of Keswick, in the West Village. But it’s not just any day; it’s September 8, the day Queen Elizabeth II died. In the course of making their purchases, customers comment on the Queen’s passing. Example:

2:12 p.m. One exchange: Elena Saldana, an apron-clad woman behind the shop’s counter who has worked at the shop for twenty-five years, said, “What can I get you?” A bespectacled Brit named Harry King, who has been a hairdresser for celebrities and common people in London and New York, replied, “A tissue.” Two almost-laughs. One Scotch egg bought by King. “I haven’t had one in years,” he said. “I’ll sit and have a little cry eating it watching the telly before I go to the gym.”

I like the way Iscoe structures this piece. Each paragraph is like a logbook entry. My favourite passage catalogues the contents of the store’s window display:

2:15 p.m. More than two dozen white roses, hydrangeas, sweet peas, and orchids; lots of Union Jack bunting; a few commemorative plates; and one framed photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, all placed in the store window—pushing aside a few dozen jars of Haywards Traditional Onions (flavor: Medium & Tangy), Heinz Sandwich Spread (original), Baxters Sliced Beetroot (“suitable for vegans”), Batchelors Bigga Marrowfat peas (“No. 1 in UK”), and Marmite. Not pushed aside: one urn holding Archie’s ashes.

Iscoe is a superb “Talk” writer. “Loyalists” is one of his best. 

Best of 2021: Talk

Illustration by João Fazenda, from Nick Paumgarten's "Bear Cash"

Here are my favourite “Talk of the Town” stories of 2021 (with a choice quote from each in brackets): 

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Lemonland,” August 2, 2021 (“Perhaps you have detected a lemony-fresh scent or a proliferation of odd citrus-inflected selfies in your feeds. Or you might even have found yourself in a plasticine sanctuary of tangerine lemons and Teletubby trees, a contrived oasis where the lemons are yellow and the sky is always blue. Citrovia. Is this a haven on an otherwise soon-to-be-uninhabitable planet? Or another sign of the end?”).

2. 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!’ ”).

3. Robert Sullivan, “A Two-Hour Tour,” July 5, 2021 (“A quick investigation of the island’s flora and fauna turned up razor clams; moon snails; lots of oyster shells without oysters; mussels, buried just beneath the surface of the island (seemingly held in place by large rocks, a possible geologic key to the island’s tenacity); a red-beard sponge, or Microciona prolifera; and, on the edge of the lee side, green seaweed that had colonized the inside of an automobile tire, a green harbor within a harbour”).

4. Richard Preston, “Hot Tub Drum Machine,” December 20, 2021 (“It took him two weeks of obsessive hammering and regular hot-tub dips to bring thirty-eight chromatic notes to life from the bottoms of two hazmat barrels”).

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Bear Cash,” November 8, 2021 (“Last week, the foundation released a true jackalope, the ‘otoro of this tuna,’ as Bell put it: ‘Johnny Cash at the Carousel Ballroom, April 24, 1968.’ At that time, the Carousel, operated by the Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and others, was a psychedelic dance hall and, effectively, Bear’s sonic laboratory. Whoever passed through got journaled, and dosed”).

6. Adam Iscoe, “The Smell Test,” March 1, 2021 (“A fireball danced on the Jumbotron, and a man holding a big cardboard cutout of Baby Yoda bellowed with something like joy”).

7. David Owen, “Birdlife,” September 20, 2021 [“Late one afternoon this summer, Wolf took a walk in what’s now her principal birding “patch,” the transformed East River piers that constitute Brooklyn Bridge Park. (She and her boyfriend, who is also both a software developer and a birder, live near Red Hook, not far from Pier 6.) ‘I call this the Dark Forest,’ she said, on a shaded path that was maybe two hundred yards from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. ‘There’s a black-crowned night heron that often hangs out here, in this sumac—and there it is.’ A large, hunched bird with a long bill was perched on a branch, camouflaged by foliage. A young man and woman stopped, and the man asked Wolf what she was looking at. ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘How did you even see that?’ ”).

8. Henry Alford, “Cocoon,” January 25, 2021 [“After studying a 2017 cover of Elle that featured Solange Knowles in one of Kamali’s fire-engine-red sleeping-bag coats, he turned his bag inside out (to avoid emblazoning his chest with the jumbo ‘Sportneer’ logo), and cinched it with a red scarf, creating a Michelin Man look in draped dove-gray polyester”].

9. Danyoung Kim, “Splash,” December 6, 2021 (“First stop was North Cove Marina, at Brookfield Place, in the financial district—a mile as the crow flies, two minutes and fifty seconds as the jet skis. No need for coffee on this commute. The Hudson slapping your face will suffice”).

10. Rachel Syme, “Sing Out!,” July 26, 2021 (“The conversation had turned to body glitter. Gardner had some smeared on her cheeks, in a shade called Adult Film”).

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) 

March 15, 2021 Issue

Art is where you find it. Adam Iscoe finds it in the most unlikely places. In “Under the Hood” (January 25, 2021), he visits a tow-impound yard (“Three balding men from Staten Island reviewed a list of Vehicle Identification Numbers neatly written on a sheet of notebook paper; a tow-truck driver explained the difference between numerators and denominators to his daughter; a South Brooklyn scrap-yard boss kibbitzed with his competition, a younger man from the Bronx. A guy sitting on the curb, repairing his sneakers with rubber cement, eavesdropped”). In “The Smell Test” (March 1, 2021), he observes a K-9 inspection (“Nearby, a woman wearing spandex leggings and a ripped jean jacket shouted, ‘Yay! I don’t have COVID,’ and a wobbly man, who smelled of Bud Light, said, ‘I think this is dumb as fuck, and you can quote me on that’ ”). 

Now, in “Back at It,” in this week’s issue, Iscoe describes the reopening of a movie theatre (“An employee with long green and blue fingernails yawned into her elbow”). The piece ends terrifically with the popping of thirty-five pounds of popcorn:

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!”

I enjoy Iscoe’s work immensely. 

March 1, 2021 Issue

This week’s issue is a cornucopia of great reading. Zach Helfand’s “Vaccine Yenta,” Adam Iscoe’s “The Smell Test,” Dana Goodyear’s “Viewfinder,” Nick Paumgarten’s “It’s No Picnic,” Alex Ross’s “Wind Songs,” Peter Schjeldahl’s “Mastering Sorrow” – all terrific. So let’s have a contest. Here’s a choice passage from each. Which one’s the most inspired?

1. Later that afternoon, at a vaccination center in a gymnasium in the Bronx, Helen Mack—seventy-six, hand-sewn mask (four-ply), Ruvkun bookee, nervous but sufficiently prayed for—didn’t look when the needle went in. “It’s over?” she said. “I didn’t even feel it! Thank the Lord! It’s over!” [Zach Helfand, “Vaccine Yenta”]

2. A fireball danced on the Jumbotron, and a man holding a big cardboard cutout of Baby Yoda bellowed with something like joy. [Adam Iscoe, “The Smell Test”]

3. Her conveyance is Vanguard, a careworn white van, its headlights searching out a new future, everything bungee-corded down. [Dana Goodyear, “Viewfinder”]

4. 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. But we are nothing if not weak. [Nick Paumgarten, “It’s No Picnic”]

5. Microtonal tunings, electronic processing, and rough string attacks engender ferocious climaxes. [Alex Ross, “Wind Songs”]

6. Rapid clips from Black history and daily life, ranging from violent scenes of the civil-rights movement to children dancing, possess specific, incantatory powers. Their quantity overloads comprehension—so many summoned memories and reconnected associations, cascading. The experience is like a psychoanalytic unpacking, at warp speed, of a national unconscious regarding race. [Peter Schjeldahl, “Mastering Sorrow”]

And the winner is … Alex Ross’s “Microtonal tunings, electronic processing, and rough string attacks engender ferocious climaxes.” I have a weakness for zero-article constructions. Ross’s is a beauty.