May 25, 2026 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that caught my attention is Alex Ross’s “Crisis Mode.” It’s a review of the contemporary-music festival Witten Days for New Chamber Music that takes place each spring in Germany’s Ruhr Valley. Ross says he attended Witten primarily to hear new and recent works by Chaya Czernowin, “a composer I would follow anywhere.” I’d never heard of her. I’d never heard of Witten, either. And I’m not a fan of chamber music. But I am a fan of Ross’s writing. “Crisis Mode” contains some brilliant passages, especially the final two paragraphs in which Ross considers Czernowin’s “No! A Lament for the Innocent.” He writes,

For the most part, “No!” inhabits an abstract soundscape, though an intensely fraught one. 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. 

I vote that one of the best music descriptions of the year. The last line is inspired – as fine an accolade as any artist could hope to receive. 

Susan Sontag's "Pilgrimage" - Fact, Fiction, or Faction? (Part II)

Illustration by Aldo Jarillo, from Alex Ross's "What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann?"

A few years ago, I posted a note here asking if Susan Sontag’s “Pilgrimage” is fact, fiction, or faction. The question arose as a result of Erin Overbey including Sontag’s piece in her anthology of New Yorker personal essays called "Sunday Reading: Personal Reflections" (December 19, 2021). In my post, I noted that “Pilgrimage” originally appeared in The New Yorker as fiction, and that it’s also included in Sontag’s posthumous collection Debriefing: Collected Stories (2017). The editor of that book, Benjamin Taylor, in his Foreword, refers to the contents as short stories. He says, “Craving more uncertainty than the essay allowed for, Sontag turned from time to time to a form in which one need only persevere, making up one’s mind about nothing: the infinitely flexible, ever-amenable short story.”

Now there’s another opinion to be considered. Alex Ross, in his recent “What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann?" (March 14, 2026) describes “Pilgrimage” as “semi-fictional.” According to Ross, Sontag’s meeting with Mann did take place, but not exactly the way she said it did in “Pilgrimage.” For one thing, at the actual meeting, there were two people accompanying Sontag, not one, as she says in the story. For another, the person she airbrushed from the piece, Gene Marum, was the person who cold-called Mann and requested the interview. It appears that Sontag’s “Pilgrimage" is that unreliable hybrid called faction.  

December 1, 2025 Issue

The two pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: I’m Donut ?” and Alex Ross’s “Written in Stone.” Rosner’s piece is a review of the new Times Square doughnut shop called I’m Donut ?. Her description of the store’s doughnuts is delectable. Here’s a sample:

There are chocolate and matcha variants, their subtle flavors baked into the dough. Then there are filled doughnuts, whose puffy centers are pumped with flavored creams, all of them vivid and none too sweet: custard, more matcha, fragrant sake gelée with Chantilly, airy peanut-butter cream swirled with tart Concord-grape jelly. There are some New York-exclusive flavors, like a ring doughnut glazed in neon-pink strawberry icing, freckled with bits of freeze-dried berry that crackle and melt on the tongue, or a chocolate variety with a caramel-espresso cream filling that was unexpectedly, thrillingly bitter and complex. 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.

Mm, I’ll have one of those chocolate ones with the caramel-espresso cream filling, please.

Ross’s “Written in Stone” is a paean to the Orkney Islands. He says, “Orkney is one of those places where the veil over the distant past seems to lift.” He visits various Neolithic ruins: the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar, the tomb at Maeshowe. His favorite site is Stenness. He writes,

During a recent visit to Orkney, I kept returning to Stenness, at all hours and in all weather. On drizzly days, with skies hanging low, the stones resemble ladders to nowhere. In bright sun, hidden colors emerge: streaks of blue against gray; white and green spatters of lichen; yellowish stains indicating the presence of limonite, an iron ore. Pockmarks and brittle edges show the abrading action of millennia of wind and rain. I watched as tourists approached the stones and hesitantly touched them, as if afraid. When I put my own hands on the rock, I felt no obvious emanations, though I did not feel nothing. 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.

I love that description of the sheep, “streaming away en masse, fading into the fog, which matched their coats.” “Written in Stone” is a wonderful tour of Neolithic Orkney. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Mid-Year Top Ten 2024

Photo by Landon Nordeman, from Gary Shteyngart's "A Martini Tour of New York City"

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):

1. Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City,” April 24, 2024 (“The highlight of Tigre’s Martini menu is the vodka-based Cigarette, which Platty immediately qualified as ‘smoky as fuck’ ”). 

2. Luke Mogelson, “The Assault,” April 15, 2024 (“In the operations center, Perun yelled into the radio, ‘No! Don’t cross in front of the entrance!’ But Wolf couldn’t hear him. He kept walking until he reached the open door. For several long seconds, everyone in the operations center watched as he stood there, motionless. Then he crumpled”). 

3. Leslie Jamison, “A New Life,” January 22, 2024 (“The baby and I arrived at our sublet with garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet. At a certain point, I’d run out of suitcases”).

4. William Finnegan, “The Long Ride,” June 10, 2024 ("Dropping in to the heaviest waves, he would fade and stall, casually timing his bottom turn to set up the deepest possible barrel. He would disappear into the roaring darkness, then reappear, usually, going very fast, with that little grin").

5. Alex Ross, “Thoroughly Modern,” June 3, 2024 (“Wang lingered over the passage with unaffected tenderness, giving just a twinge of emphasis to its bittersweet chromaticism”).

6. D. T. Max, “Design for Living,” May 6, 2024 (“He happily spends hours poring over blueprints, dividing former fields of cubicles into small but clever residences and reconceiving onetime copy-machine nooks as mini laundry rooms or skinny kitchens”).

7. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Vol. 4,” May 20, 2024 (“I work with words, I am paid by the word, I majored in English, and today I major in Wordle”).

8. Eric Lach, “Trash, Trash Revolution,” April 15, 2024 (“Some of the trash bags have burst open, but others are curiously intact, and you can still make out a few pieces of furniture that never got a chance to be fully digested”).

9. Ian Parker, "His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy," June 17, 2024 ("In an empty house with no windows, the sound of the ocean filled every room. Underfoot, the original tiles had been hammered out, and so had the cables and pipes that were once embedded beneath. The floor was now rough concrete, covered in cavities and trenches, like a road that had been chewed up by a milling machine ahead of a resurfacing"). 

10. Paige Williams, "Ghosts on the Water," June 24, 2024 ("The pour revealed sea lice, krill, a needlefish, and a bunch of twitchy sticklebacks, as silver as store-bought fishing lures—bycatch, all of which gets returned to the river. Cupping the net from the bottom, the patriarch teased the few glass eels into view and plucked them out, the way you’d pick lint off a sweater").

Best Cover

Klaas Verplancke, “On the Grid” (March 25, 2024)

Best "Talk of the Town" Story

Robert Sullivan, “Find a Grave,” April 8, 2024 (“Instruments came out of the car, Morrow starting off with a reel called ‘Sligo Maid.’ Suddenly, his fiddle popped its tuning peg. ‘That’s Coleman!’ Kelly said”).

Best Illustration

Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli, for Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best "Goings On" Note

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Le B,” March 4, 2024 (“Nearly every dish incorporates luxury ingredients, though they generally show up as supporting players: foie-gras drippings in a creamy onion dip, or an earthy whiff of white truffle in a garlic-cream soup. At times, this can feel a bit like opulence theatre, rather than actual opulence—a black-truffle-flecked gelée, draped over a devilled egg en chemise, tasted like nothing much at all, least of all truffles—but when it works, my God, it works”).

Best Photo

Photo by Bobby Beasley, for David Means’ “Chance the Cat” (January 22, 2024)

Best newyorker.com Post

Nathan Heller, “Helen Vendler’s Generous Mind,” April 30, 2024 (“What she had was an almost tactile understanding of the ancient practice of creating poems as art, and—running her hands like a dressmaker along the back of their stitching, watching the way they draped and moved and caught the light—she could see not only what poets did but how they did it”).

Best Sentence

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. – Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City” (April 24, 2024)

Best Paragraph

In restaurants all across the country, I shoved food into my mouth above her fuzzy head as she slept in her carrier beneath my chin. The receipts were headed to my publisher, and I was determined to eat everything: trumpet mushrooms slick with pepper jam, gnocchi gritty with crumbs of corn bread that fell onto her little closed eyes, her head tipped back against my chest. I was flustered and feral, my teeth flecked with pesto and furred with sugar. Then I pulled down my shirt and gave these meals to her. In Los Angeles, I nursed in the attic office above a bookstore lobby. In Portland, I nursed among cardboard boxes in a stockroom. In Cambridge, I nursed in a basement kitchenette beneath the public library. – Leslie Jamison, “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best Detail

Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it. – Nick Paumgarten, “Misty in Manhattan” (February 26, 2024)

Best Description

Of course I got the soup. Plenty of ink has already been spilled over the titillating Soup No. 5, a small tureen of thick brown broth, heavily spiced with sibot (a smoky-tangy blend of Chinese herbs), in which float bits of bull testicles and penis. A bowl is salty and savory, warming and rich; the soup is traditionally consumed as a hangover cure, perhaps owing to the virility of its star ingredients. (One is spongy, the other chewy; I won’t spoil which is which.) I’m not sure if I’d order it on a return visit, though—I’ll save room, instead, for grilled morsels of pork jowl brushed with glossy-sweet barbecue sauce made with banana ketchup, or sticky skewers of eel glazed in lemon-lime soda and ginger. The K.F.C. (Kanto fried chicken), little popcorn nuggets of tender dark meat, arrives with a bowl of dipping sauce that’s so fiery hot, so puckery with fish sauce, that it made me feel wildly alive. – Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Naks” (February 5, 2024)

June 3, 2024 Issue

Notes on this week's issue:

1. Jackson Arn, in his absorbing “The Perfectionist,” writes,

Nearly as revelatory is the show’s collection of Brancusi’s photographs, many documenting his work, though what they reveal is still an open question. His friend Man Ray scorned them. Peter Campbell, the longtime art critic for the London Review of Books, thought them more enduring works than the sculptures themselves.

Brancusi a photographer? I didn’t know that. Arn’s reference to Campbell sent me looking for his article. I found it in the July 20, 1995 London Review of Books. It’s titled “Inconstancy.” Campbell calls Brancusi’s photos of his studio “considerable works of art.” He says that Man Ray was “dismissive of the quality of the pictures but Brancusi was, in fact, a much better photographer, not only of his work, but of himself, than his friend was.” 

What? Brancusi better than Man Ray? I don’t think so. The Centre Pompidou website, where the Brancusi retrospective (the subject of Arn’s review) is on display, shows only two Brancusi photos, neither of them all that remarkable, certainly not in the league of Man Ray’s great “La Révolution Surréaliste” (1930). Or am I missing something? This subject merits further study. 

2. Alex Ross has done it again. He’s seduced me with another of his exquisite music descriptions. In his “Thoroughly Modern,” a review of a recent Yuja Wang recital at Disney Hall, in Los Angeles, he writes,

After intermission came Chopin’s four Ballades—if not the highest summit in the piano repertory, then one of its hairier ascents. Mastering the exuberantly moody First Ballade is one of the age-old tests of conservatory training: on YouTube, you can find Wang giving an excellent, if somewhat studied, performance of it at her Curtis Institute graduation recital. The other three Ballades move beyond the familiar welter of Romantic emotion into zones of volatility and violence. The Second Ballade—which may or may not have been inspired by an Adam Mickiewicz poem about Polish maidens fleeing from Russian soldiers—begins with a pastoral siciliano in F major. Wang lingered over the passage with unaffected tenderness, giving just a twinge of emphasis to its bittersweet chromaticism. It trails off with a series of A’s that, in Wang’s hands, rang like a distant bell in a valley—the prelude to a brutal A-minor assault.

That “Wang lingered over the passage with unaffected tenderness, giving just a twinge of emphasis to its bittersweet chromaticism” is superb. But Ross is just getting started. His description of Wang’s rendition of Chopin’s Fourth Ballade is inspired:

The Fourth Ballade stages a climactic collision of extremes. It begins with seven bucolic bars in C major, which turn out to be a prelude to a mournful F minor. At the end of the initial passage comes a solitary, exposed C: Wang rendered it with a sudden coldness, signalling the transition to the minor. Such nuances of articulation are essential to persuasive Chopin playing. The oasis of C major returns just before the coda, this time reduced to five pianissimo chords. Wang struck the first of these with a dry, plain tone; then her touch softened, so that the chords subsided into a somnolent haze. After a split-second pause, the coda exploded with concussive force. These events didn’t feel plotted in advance: Wang seemed lost in the music, in the best way.

Wow! I’m not a classical music fan. But Ross has a way of melting my resistance. After reading his superb review, I spent the evening blissfully watching YouTube videos of Wang performances. She’s absolutely mesmerizing! I think I'm falling in love with her. 

Apri 1, 2024 Issue

I’m not a fan of classical music. But I love piano. Anytime Alex Ross reviews a piano concert, I pay attention. In this week’s issue, he assesses a recent Carnegie Hall performance by the thirty-seven-year-old German pianist Igor Levit. Here’s what he has to say:

Extreme virtuosity is required to play the “Eroica” transcription, and Levit supplied it. The rapid-fire sotto-voce chords that launch the Scherzo went off with purring finesse; the coda of the first movement became an exuberant one-man stampede. Just as impressive was Levit’s ability to sustain tension across spare textures, as at the desolate end of the Funeral March. Acoustical mirages beguiled the ears: in the trio of the Scherzo, brassy E-flat-major triads evoked a trio of hunting horns. Most of all, Levit demonstrated a comprehensive, from-the-gut understanding of a work that even the most gifted conductors struggle to grasp whole. You felt that you were listening not to a symphony in reduced form but to the greatest of all Beethoven sonatas.

Wow! “Extreme virtuosity,” “purring finesse,” “exuberant one-man stampede,” “comprehensive, from-the-gut understanding” – praise doesn’t get much better than that. I think I’ll have to give Igor Levit a listen. 

Best of 2022: The Critics

Illustration by Toma Vagner, from Anthony Lane's "Living for the City"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out,” May 16, 2022 (“Gorgeous? Oh, yeah.” | “Swift strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so, as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery, blue water and sky, and orangish flesh”);

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “All Together Now,” April 11, 2022 (“Red Abstract / fragment” (1968-69) is a lyrical verse text typewritten on a brushy red ground and scribbled with restive cross-outs, revisions, and notes. Its meanings dance at the edge of comprehension, but with infectious improvisatory rhythms.” | “Where art is concerned, death need be no more than an inconvenience, and, as in the case of Pritchard, being all but invisible may turn out to have been merely a speed bump”);

3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Scaling Up,” June 13, 2022 [“The distinguishing test, for me, is scale, irrespective of size: all a work’s elements and qualities (even including negative space) must be snugged into its framing edges to consolidate a specific, integral object—present to us, making us present to itself—rather than a more or less diverting handmade picture.” | “Inexhaustibly surprising smears, blotches, fugitive lines, and incomplete patterns feel less applied than turned loose, to tell enigmatic stories of their own”);

4. Peter Schjeldahl, “Dutch Magus,” October 3, 2022 [“Janssen’s expert citations of parallels in music for Mondrian’s art are a treat and a revelation for a musical doofus like me. Janssen likens the artist’s frequent motif, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, of paired horizontal black bands to the bass line running under the saxophone cadenzas of Armstrong’s group and others. (Thereby alerted, I see and spectrally hear it.) If, in Janssen’s telling, one dynamic recurs throughout Mondrian’s aesthetic adventuring, it is rhythm, incipient even in his youthful renderings from nature. Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral. Thought, if any was needed, followed touch”];

5. Peter Schjeldahl, “Stilled Life,” October 10, 2022 (“Then there are the still-lifes of remarkably unremarkable windowsill miscellanies: some random fruit and bits of studio gear transfigured by a happenstance of daylight”); 

6. James Wood, “By the Collar," April 11, 2022 (“These public events have the irresistible tang of the actual, and around them O’Toole—who has had a substantial career as a journalist, a political commentator, and a drama critic—beautifully tells the private story of his childhood and youth. But because the events really happened, because they are part of Ireland’s shameful, sometimes surreal postwar history, they also have the brutishly obstructive quality of fact, often to be pushed against, fought with, triumphed over, or, in O’Toole’s preferred mode of engagement, analyzed into whimpering submission. His great gift is his extremely intelligent, mortally relentless critical examination, and here he studies nothing less than the past and the present of his own nation”);

7. Anthony Lane, “Living for the City,” February 14 & 21, 2022 (“ 'The Worst Person in the World' strikes me as believable, beautiful, roving, annoying, and frequently good for a laugh. Like most of Trier’s work, it also takes you aback with its sadness, which hangs around, after the story is over, like the smoke from a snuffed candle”);

8. Alex Ross, “Moonlight,” January 31, 2022 (“Chopin’s Nocturne No. 7, in C-sharp minor, begins with a low, ashen sound: a prowling arpeggio in the left hand, consisting only of C-sharps and G-sharps. It’s a hollowed-out harmony, in limbo between major and minor. Three bars in, the right hand enters on E, seemingly establishing minor, but a move to E-sharp clouds the issue, pointing toward major. Although the ambiguity dissipates in the measures that follow, a nimbus of uncertainty persists. Something even eerier happens in the tenth bar. The melody abruptly halts on the leading tone of B-sharp while the left hand gets stuck in another barren pattern—this one incorporating the notes D, A, and C-sharp. It’s almost like a glitch, a frozen screen. Then comes a moment of wistful clarity: an immaculate phrase descends an octave, with a courtly little turn on the fourth step of the scale. It is heard only once more before it disappears. I always yearn in vain for the tune’s return: a sweetly murmuring coda doesn’t quite make up for its absence. Ultimate beauty always passes too quickly”);

9. Merve Emre, "Getting to Yes," February 14 & 21, 2022 ("From these two sentences, a whole history of literature beckons - a sudden blooming of forms and genres, authors and periods, languages and nations. Why is 'dressingown,' like 'scrotumtightening,' a single retracting word, as if English were steadying itself to transform into German?");

 10. James Wood, "The Numbers Game," December 19, 2022 ("There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCarthy’s prose—roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them"). 

Best of 2021: The Critics

Illustration by Toma Vagner, from Alex Ross's "Grinding Bass"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2021 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “Who’s We?,” October 25, 2021 (Typically snugged into the cellophane wrappers of packs of cigarettes the artist has smoked, they are singly—and all together—exquisite, achieving feats of formal and coloristic lyricism by way of used chewing gum, scraps of fabric, metal fragments, feathers, thread, and very much whatnot. The works convey a homing instinct for beauty in the humblest of materials, and in the most democratic of citizenly activities: walking in the city”).

2. James Wood, “The Accursed,” April 19, 2021 [“Technically, it’s a combination of free indirect style (third-person narration pegged to a specific character) and what might be called unidentified free indirect style (third-person narration pegged to a shadowy narrator, or a vague village chorus)”]. 

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

4. James Wood, “Connect the Dots,” October 4, 2021 (“Every so often, a more subtle observer emerges amid these gapped extremities, a writer interested merely in honoring the world about him, a stylist capable of something as beautiful as ‘the quick, drastic strikes of a bow dashing across the strings of a violin,’ or this taut description of an Idaho winter: Icicles fang the eaves’ ”).

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

6. Alex Ross, “Grinding Bass,” December 13, 2021 ("The music is amorphous, engulfing, gelatinous, ferocious. Some passages evoke a subterranean machine revving up, grinding as it ascends toward the surface; others suggest tiny creatures excavating a cavernous space. Climaxes have a rancid beauty, the beauty of catastrophe and collapse").

7. Nathan Heller, “The Falconer,” February 1, 2021 (“Reducing the world, as on the canvas or the page, is a process of foreclosing on its fullness, choosing this way and not that one, and how you make those choices reveals everything about the person that you are”).

8. Rachel Syme, “On the Nose,” February 1, 2021 (“I knew I loved the smell of violets—their chalky, chocolate undertones. Or I thought I knew. Sitting down at my keyboard, I began to waver. Was it more like talcum powder and linden honey? Or like a Barbie-doll head sprinkled with lemonade?”).

 9. Anthony Lane, “Feel the Power,” July 5, 2021 (“The acting is of a soaring ineptitude; the deeper Diesel emotes, the more he resembles a man who dabbed too much wasabi on his tuna roll”). 

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

December 13, 2021 Issue

I love artful description. There’s a wonderful example of it in Alex Ross’s “Grinding Bass,” in this week’s issue. Reviewing Ash Fure and Lilleth Glimcher’s performance installation “Hive Rise,” at the Geffen Contemporary, in Los Angeles, he writes, 

There are no steady beats, though various kinds of periodicity come into play, including a rat-a-tat flapping noise that Fure elicits by holding a piece of paper over an upturned subwoofer. The music is amorphous, engulfing, gelatinous, ferocious. Some passages evoke a subterranean machine revving up, grinding as it ascends toward the surface; others suggest tiny creatures excavating a cavernous space. Climaxes have a rancid beauty, the beauty of catastrophe and collapse.

Overlaid on the sonic foundation is a theatrical ritual conceived by Glimcher, an interdisciplinary artist and director who has worked in New York, Berlin, and elsewhere. At the Geffen Contemporary, Fure was stationed at one end of the gallery, amid an array of subwoofers. A squad of fourteen black-clad performers circulated through the crowd, vocalizing into bespoke megaphones that had been generated on a 3-D printer. When members of the group were close by, even their slightest whispers had a tactile immediacy, as if they were coming from inside your head. Full-throated cries bounced around the space with thunderous force.

The performers followed an unpredictable, jagged choreography. Sometimes they stood in place, in statuesque clusters; for a while, they were positioned around Fure, on risers. At other times, they whipped their bodies back and forth or moved swiftly from one place to another. The spectators milled about in pursuit of the squad, maneuvering around neoprene sculptural forms that were devised by Xavi Aguirre and stock-a-studio. We had our own choreography—that pandemic-era dance of avoidance we have perfected in crowded supermarket aisles. The mood was one of bliss and angst intermingled.

Bravo! That’s one of the great descriptive passages of the year.

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. 

Best of 2020: Reporting Pieces

Photo by Paolo Pellegrin, from Ben Taub's "Five Oceans, Five Deeps"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ben Taub’s “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” May 18, 2020 (“Most submarines go down several hundred metres, then across; this one was designed to sink like a stone. It was the shape of a bulging briefcase, with a protruding bulb at the bottom. This was the pressure hull—a titanium sphere, five feet in diameter, which was sealed off from the rest of the submersible and housed the pilot and all his controls. Under the passenger seat was a tuna-fish sandwich, the pilot’s lunch. He gazed out of one of the viewports, into the blue. It would take nearly four hours to reach the bottom”).

2. “April 15, 2020,” May 4, 2020 (“As the sun came up, dully brightening the morning, it revealed that the day was ordinary and out of the ordinary at the same time. Figures appeared far apart on the boardwalk, each one alone, each making a different exercise motion. One was using a jump rope, another had two small dumbbells, and another a piece of pipe. Many wore masks. On the horizon to the left lay the narrow sand spit of the Rockaways, a stratum of pale-brown beach below a gray-green line of bushes and trees. To the right loomed the grayish point of Sandy Hook, in New Jersey. In between, a small boat motored slowly by, its wake as white as a bridal train. The ordinary-extraordinary day settled in and locked itself into place. The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere. The whole city had become a waiting room”).

3. Alex Ross’s “The Bristlecones Speak,” January 20, 2020 (“Spears of dead wood jut into the air. The trunk is a marbled hulk stripped of bark, like driftwood thrown from a vanished ocean. A ribbon of live bark runs up one side, funnelling water and nutrients to clumps of green needles high above”).

4. Bill Buford’s “Good Bread," April 13, 2020 (“By nine, a line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people and from music being played at high volume. Everyone shouted to be heard—the cacophonous hustle, oven doors banging, people waving and trying to get noticed, too-hot-to-touch baguettes arriving in baskets, money changing hands”).

5. Burkhard Bilger’s “Building the Impossible,” November 30, 2020 (“Unlike the slide, which bullies through the apartment like a giant intestine, the staircase seems to crystallize the spaces it’s in. Built of white nanoglass—an opaque and extremely hard synthetic stone—it twists up through the building in precisely organized shards, offering sudden glimpses through the rooms unfolding around it”).

6. Vinson Cunningham’s “Eightyish,” April 13, 2020 (“Outside, I imagine that each stranger’s head is crowned by a saint’s halo of fatal droplets, waiting to surf on one of my breaths into my body and cut through my lungs like a spray of glass”).

7. Jonathan Blitzer’s “Juan Sanabria,” April 20, 2020 (“He’d been among the first fatalities. ‘Was he the eleventh person who died? I was trying to figure out if he was the tenth or the eleventh,’ Comerford told me. ‘That made this whole thing very real. Before, the deaths were just statistics. Knowing that one of them was Juan, it gave the thing a face’”).

8. Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Independent People,” June 8 & 15, 2020 (“That evening, the weather was clear and cool—by New York standards, too cool to eat outside, by Reykjavík standards balmy. The outdoor cafés were crowded. Restaurants had been asked to arrange their tables to keep groups two metres apart, but some diners, I noticed, had pushed the tables closer together. Everyone was talking and laughing, masklessly. The scene was completely ordinary, which is to say now exotic—just people meeting up with friends for dinner. For a traveller these days, this might be an even better draw, I thought, than glaciers or whale-watching”).

9. Luke Mogelson’s “The Uprising,” June 22, 2020 (“Barricades around the four surrounding blocks impeded traffic and law enforcement. The sidewalk outside the Cup Foods grocery store—where an employee had called the police after suspecting George Floyd of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill—was buried under bouquets, mementos, and homemade cards. Activists delivered speeches between the gas pumps at a filling station; messages in chalk—“fight back,” “stay woke”—covered the street”).

10. Dana Goodyear’s “From the Ground Up,” October 12, 2020 (“The walls are made from elongated quartzite bricks, with gray-scale variations reminiscent of the larchwood slats of his atelier. Open seams in the ceiling allow sunlight to enter in ghostly lines—some defining an alternative volume within the space, others fanning out like an annunciation. A brass spout funnels water from the source, St. Petersquelle, into a brass basin with cups attached by chains. In one secluded pool, swimming around a corner reveals a chamber where the human voice harmonizes with the room so that humming creates a glorious Gregorian echo”). 

2020 Year in Review

Illustration by Min Heo, from newyorker.com

Let’s begin with a drink. I’ll have one of those Root of All Beers that Hannah Goldfield mentions in her “Tables For Two: The HiHi Room” (January 20, 2020). It “mixes a licorice-and-sarsaparilla witch’s brew with rye, vermouth, and honey.” Take a little sip. Ah, that's fucking wicked! Just what the doctor ordered. 

Okay, down to business. What to make of this year’s run of New Yorkers? Well, there was a hell of lot written about Trump. I skipped most of it. There was a hell of a lot written about the pandemic. I read every word. Best pandemic piece? No contest: “April 15, 2020” (May 4, 2020) – a brilliant mosaic portrait of twenty-four hours in the life of New York City as it struggles to deal with the pandemic, written by twenty-five New Yorker reporters and illustrated (in the online version) by seventeen photographers. Sample: 

As the sun came up, dully brightening the morning, it revealed that the day was ordinary and out of the ordinary at the same time. Figures appeared far apart on the boardwalk, each one alone, each making a different exercise motion. One was using a jump rope, another had two small dumbbells, and another a piece of pipe. Many wore masks. On the horizon to the left lay the narrow sand spit of the Rockaways, a stratum of pale-brown beach below a gray-green line of bushes and trees. To the right loomed the grayish point of Sandy Hook, in New Jersey. In between, a small boat motored slowly by, its wake as white as a bridal train. The ordinary-extraordinary day settled in and locked itself into place. The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere. The whole city had become a waiting room.

  

But great as it is, “April 15, 2020” is not this year’s most memorable piece. That honour belongs to Ben Taub’s extraordinary “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” (May 18, 2020). An account of an exploration team that builds an amazing one-of-a-kind submersible, named the Limiting Factor, and pilots it to the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean trenches, it brims with superb description and arresting details (e.g., “Now, as snow blew sideways in the darkness and the wind, he threw a grappling hook over the South Sandwich Trench and caught a lander thrashing in the waves”). In my review of it, when it first appeared, I said, 

Reading “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” I was in awe of the way Taub put me right there with Vescovo inside the Limiting Factor as he explores the bottom of, first, the Puerto Rico Trench, then the South Sandwich Trench, then the Java Trench, then the Mariana Trench, and, finally, Molloy Hole, in the Arctic. It’s an epic journey. I enjoyed it immensely.

Another piece I enjoyed enormously is Curtis Sittenfeld’s short story “A for Alone” (November 2, 2020), about an artist named Irene who’s doing a project on the so-called Billy Graham/Mike Pence rule that if you’re a married man, you don’t spend time alone with another woman. The project involves inviting men to lunch, asking them to fill out a handwritten questionnaire, and taking a Polaroid photo of them. This project flares into an affair with one of Irene’s interview subjects, a geologist named Jack (“Man No. 6”). 

I devoured this story. It intrigued me; it excited me; and I found myself mirroring off the character Jack. Does the story prove the rule's validity? Maybe, but it also shows it to be, as Jack says, “so depressingly heteronormative.” The piece abounds with wonderful lines. I think my favorite is “She wants his questionnaire to impart some central truth, to give her closure, and, while it’s nice, the niceness pales in comparison with what he said moments after filling it out—‘It’s you specifically’—or the many ardent declarations of devotion in the months that followed.” Sittenfeld’s return to Jack’s questionnaire after the affair suddenly ends is inspired. The whole story is inspired – one of the best I’ve read in a long time.

Other highlights: Bill Buford’s “Good Bread” (April 13, 2020); Alex Ross’s “The Bristlecones Speak” (January 20, 2020); Burkhard Bilger’s “Building the Impossible” (November 30, 2020) – all crazy good! But that’s enough for now. Over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I relished most. Thank you, New Yorker, for helping me get through this insane year. I propose a toast. Here’s to you, New Yorker, you gorgeous creature. I love you. 

First Person Perfect

Photo by Alice Zoo, from Rebecca Mead's "Going for the Cold"

There’s a type of narrative sentence I find irresistible. Example: “One day, I went to Athens and met Joe Corn, a senior wildlife biologist for SCWDS, who has trapped and studied thousands of wild hogs” (Ian Frazier, “Hogs Wild”). Now, that might strike you as fairly mundane. You were probably expecting something with a bit more pizazz. But pizazz is not what this kind of sentence is about. Here’s another one: “Later that day, I crowded, together with what seemed like the entire remaining population of Reykjavik, into Ingólfstorg square to watch the Iceland-Austria match” (Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running”). That’s a shade more exotic than Frazier’s “wild hogs” line, but it still has the three main ingredients I relish: first-person pronoun (“I”), active verb (“crowded”), and specific nouns (“Reykjavik,” “Ingólfstorg square,” “Iceland-Austria match”). Often one or more of the nouns is a place name. As a means of jump-starting an account of an interesting experience, such sentences are unbeatable. I read them and think, Let’s go! Here are a few examples from recent New Yorker pieces:

Not long after sunrise on a gray Halloween morning, I joined the members of the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association for a celebratory swim and breakfast. – Rebecca Mead, “Going for the Cold”

A little after midnight, while Hunter was still in jail, I swung by Thirty-eighth and Chicago, where people were still congregating. – Luke Mogelson, “The Uprising”

On a cool Monday morning in May, I met Fidel at the Church of the Good Shepherd, an austere gray stone building with red doors on the corner of Fourth Avenue and the Bay Ridge Parkway. – Jonathan Blitzer, “Higher Calling”

One crisp, bright morning in February, I walked along a brook just outside the center of Davos, toward the headquarters of the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research. – James Somers, “Cold War”

In November, just before the first snows shut down access to the Whites, I made a final trip to the Schulman Grove. – Alex Ross, “The Bristlecones Speak”

January 20, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Alex Ross’s fascinating “The Bristlecones Speak,” in which he explores his obsession with bristlecone pines – contorted, wraithlike trees that grow on the slopes of the White Mountains in eastern California and live for thousands of years. Ross visits an area of the Whites known as the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. He describes a forty-five-hundred-year-old bristlecone named Methuselah:

Spears of dead wood jut into the air. The trunk is a marbled hulk stripped of bark, like driftwood thrown from a vanished ocean. A ribbon of live bark runs up one side, funnelling water and nutrients to clumps of green needles high above. All told, the tree is an unprepossessing specimen; most people march past it without giving it a second glance. When I sat by the tree for an hour last July, the only visitor who took any notice of it was a dog named Dougie, who briefly sniffed the trunk and then darted away.

Ross visits the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research in Tucson, Arizona (“Inside, researchers have access to a kind of arboreal Library of Congress: a vast collection of tree fragments from around the world, including cross-sections of giant sequoias. The lab is affixing each with a bar code, so that researchers can check out samples”). He tells about dendrochronology, the science of tree-ring dating. He visits the site of a study “comparing bristlecone populations with those of the limber pine, another hardy species that grows at high altitudes,” where he sees a bristlecone that, at first glance, appears to be long dead:

It looked as though it had been blown over in a storm, but tufts of green needles emerged from a branch on one side. A vein of live bark snaked around the dead trunk and disappeared into the ground. It was like a vine growing on a ruin, except that the ruin was itself.

My favourite part of “The Bristlecones Speak” is the final paragraph, a description of what Ross sees (and hears and feels) as he hikes out of the Schulman Grove:

By the time I headed back, night was falling. Light fades fast in the mountains, and I walked the last mile to the parking lot in near-darkness. But then a full moon rose, and the dolomite on neighboring slopes began to glow eerily bright, like phantom drifts of snow. The wind picked up and elicited a low, full whoosh from bristlecone branches, which swung to and fro without creaking or rustling. When the wind stopped, the forest felt like a cavernous but soundproofed space—a silent concert hall, an empty cathedral. The moon lit up the mountains as I drove to the valley below.

That “The wind picked up and elicited a low, full whoosh from bristlecone branches, which swung to and fro without creaking or rustling” is wonderful. The whole piece is wonderful. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Best of 2019: The Critics

Josh Cochran's illustration for Sarah Larson's "Home on the Range"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Not Waving,” May 27, 2019 (“I was lucky to catch a rehearsal of a performance work by Brendan Fernandes that will take place at scheduled but infrequent times: five ballet dancers in black leotards strike varying poses on an arrangement of skeletal frameworks in black-painted wood. That was dreamy”).

2. James Wood, “Contents Under Pressure,” January 14, 2019 (“It’s a sign of how vital the rest of the book feels that a phrase like ‘caustic speech,’ which would be inoffensive enough in many novels, seems here irradiated with fakery”). 

3. Dan Chiasson’s “Freewriting,” October 14, 2019 (“The black bars of redacted text, which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours”).

4. Anthony Lane's “What If?,” July 8 & 15, 2019 (“Boyle, especially in the early scenes, provides acceleration; at the exact moment when Jack, standing at a bus stop, properly understands what the future holds, the camera hurries toward him like an excited kid”).

5. Alex Ross’s  “The Concerto Challenge,” March 25, 2019 (“The first movement follows the rudiments of sonata form, with the scampering opening material set against a slinky cantabile second theme that has a whiff of old Hollywood about it, as if Bette Davis were sipping a Scotch with the blinds drawn”).

6. Sarah Larson’s “Home on the Range,” February 4, 2019 (“The plot whirls along, heading inevitably toward collaborative writing, drunken mayhem, brandished golf clubs, existential crises, flying toast”).

 7. Alexandra Schwartz's “Painted Love,” July 22, 2019 (“She has the memoirist’s prerogative—this is how I remember it—and Picasso’s tyranny and brilliance are hardly in dispute”).

8. Hilton Als’s “Seen and Heard,” September 23, 2019 (“As in the Williams portrait, whiteness—here the whiteness of Horne’s turban, which sits like a beacon at the top of the image—is used to underline the blackness in the photograph, black skin and black as a color that leads to black feeling and thought”).

9. Janet Malcolm’s “The Unholy Practice,” September 23, 2019 (“The best intentions, however, can be broken on the wheel of skillful (or even inept) interviewing. Discretion so quickly turns into indiscretion under the exciting spell of undivided attention”).

10. Thomas Mallon's “Word for Word,” December 16, 2019 (“These changes alchemize a small piece of gold into a small piece of lead. Lowell slackens Hardwick’s prose into poetry, robs it of precision and pith”).

Best of 2017: The Critics

Riccaardo Vecchio, "Bill Knott" (2017)

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2017 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. James Wood, “The Other Side of Silence,” June 5 & 12, 2017 (“What animates his project is the task of saving the dead, retrieving them through representation”).

2. James Wood, “All Over Town,” November 27, 2017 (“In ‘The Waves,’ Woolf returns, at regular intervals, to painterly, almost ritualized descriptions of the sun’s passage, on a single day, from dawn to dusk: wedges of prose like the divisions on a sundial”).

3. Alex Ross, “Tank Music,” July 24, 2017 (“Gusts buffeting the exterior created an apocalyptic bass rumble; lashes of rain sounded like a hundred snare drums”).

4. Peter Schjeldahl, “Full Immersion,” July 31, 2017 (“Cradled in a hammock the other day, I couldn’t imagine anywhere in the world I would rather be, tracking subtle variations in the changing slides: for example, a matchbook first closed, then open, then burning, then, finally, burned”).

5. Dan Chiasson, “The Fugitive,” April 3, 2017 (“He is, at his best, a poet of home-brewed koans, threading his philosophical paradoxes into scenes of slacker glamour”).

6. Claudia Roth Pierpont, “The Island Within,” March 6, 2017 (“Bishop, who complained of the ‘egocentricity’ of a confessional poet like Sexton, found deliverance in gazing steadily outward”).

7. Anthony Lane, “Pretty and Gritty,” March 27, 2017 (“ ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is delectably done; when it’s over, though, and when the spell is snapped, it melts away, like cotton candy on the tongue”).

8. Adam Kirsch, “Pole Apart,” May 29, 2017 (“But, where Eliot often used this kind of moral X-ray vision to express contempt and disgust for the world, Milosz had seen too much death to find skulls profound”).

9. Adam Gopnik, “A New Man,” July 3, 2017 (“The stoical stance and the sensual touch: that was Hemingway’s keynote emotion, and his claim to have learned it from Cézanne looks just”).

10. Leo Robson, “The Mariner’s Prayer,” November 20, 2017 (“If irony exists to suggest that there’s more to things than meets the eye, Conrad further insists that, when we pay close enough attention, the “more” can be endless”).

11. Louis Menand, “The Stone Guest,” August 28, 2017 (“Crews is an attractively uncluttered stylist, and he has an amazing story to tell, but his criticism of Freud is relentless to the point of monomania”).

12. Emily Nussbaum, “Tragedy Plus Time,” January 23, 2017 (“Despite the breeziness of Breitbart’s description, there was in fact a global army of trolls, not unlike the ones shown on ‘South Park,’ who were eagerly ‘shit-posting’ on Trump’s behalf, their harassment an anonymous version of the ‘rat-fucking’ that used to be the province of paid fixers”).