October 20, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Alexandra Schwartz says that Joan Acocella’s “The Frog and the Crocodile” is one of her favorite Acocella pieces. It’s one of mine, too. Schwartz writes, 

Acocella’s essay deals with the improbable five-year affair between the Left Bank philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and the tough-guy Chicago writer Nelson Algren—its title comes from their pet names for each other—and was occasioned by the posthumous publication of Beauvoir’s love letters. Acocella begins with a block quote from one of the letters, a rarely attempted flex that may be the critic’s equivalent of opening a song with the bridge. We hear Beauvoir, unimpeded, as she professes her love and confesses her insecurity: Will Algren hate her if she cannot devote her life to him? Then, where Algren should answer with sweet reassurance, we get Acocella, shining the bright light of truth in our eyes. “He will hate her,” she writes. Talk about cutting to the chase.

That last line made me smile. Acocella was known for “cutting to the chase.” She talked very straight. In “The Frog and the Crocodile” she shows us a Beauvoir who was both offering herself as Algren’s love slave and asserting her independence. Acocella says of her, “From letter to letter, sometimes from paragraph to paragraph, she zigs and zags from submission to dominance.” Acocella’s history of the relationship is fascinating. And, as Schwartz points out, “Acocella doesn’t plead on Beauvoir’s behalf or condemn her. Instead, she reads the work and life in light of each other, and the results illuminate our understanding of both.” 

Schwartz’s tribute to “The Frog and the Crocodile” is excellent. I enjoyed it immensely. 

2. I also enjoyed Maggie Doherty’s “Rambling Man,” a review of Lance Richardson’s True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen. Matthiessen wrote one of my favorite books, The Snow Leopard (1978). It’s not an easy book for me to like. As Doherty says, “The spirit of Zen infuses The Snow Leopard.” For many years, I resisted it for that very reason: too cosmic for my taste. But last year, I gave it another try. It’s an account of a trek that Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller made in 1973 high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. I relish its use of first-person present tense, its chronological, diaristic structure, and, most of all, its magnificent descriptions of those wild, exotic snow mountains. For example:

At each stupa on the canyon points, the prayer stones are lit by fire-colored lichens; in the shine of thorn and old carved stones, the print of leopard and thick scent of juniper, I am filled with longing. I turn to look back at Tsakang, at the precipices and deep shadows of Black Canyon, at the dark mountain that presides over Samling, which I shall never see. Above the snowfields to the west, the Crystal Mountain thrusts bare rock into the blue; to the south is the sinuous black torrent that comes down from Kang La, the Pass of Snows. And there on the low cliff above the rivers, silhouetted on the snow, is the village that its own people call Somdo, white prayer flags flying black on the morning sun.

Doherty, in her piece, says, “It’s tempting to read The Snow Leopard as a work of confessional writing, in which Matthiessen details his weak points as a husband and a father.” I can see where it might be tempting. The book contains several introspective passages in which Matthiessen mourns the death of his wife. But it’s also a thrilling travel adventure. That’s the way I read it. 

September 1 & 8, 2025

Pick of the Issue this week is Alexandra Schwartz’s “Going Viral.” It’s a profile of writer Patricia Lockwood. I’m a fan of Lockwood’s literary criticism. Her “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019), an evisceration of John Updike, is one of my all-time favorite reviews, not because I enjoy seeing Updike shredded, but because Lockwood’s voice in that piece is so brilliantly original and compelling. Schwartz describes Lockwood’s style superbly. She says, “Across genres, her calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with quick wit and cheerful perversity, pressing the reader close to her comic, confiding ‘I.’ ” She also says, in a line that made me smile, that Lockwood “writes with the impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid.” 

Schwartz delves into Lockwood’s personal life – her battle with Covid (“Her memory had crumbled; she could barely read”), her father (“a guitar-shredding, action-movie-obsessed Midwestern Catholic priest”), her “adolescent misery,” her husband (“forty-four, bald and athletic, with the calm, capable demeanor of Mr. Clean’s laid-back little brother”), her Savannah apartment (“The apartment was in a state of dorm-room disorder: dishes scattered on the kitchen island, books stacked on the coffee table and crammed together on trinket-laden shelves”), her fascination with stones and gems ("She owns three different kinds of blowtorches"), her dosing herself with a quadruple espresso every morning before she starts writing, and so on. Do I need to know all this stuff in order to appreciate Lockwood’s writing? No. But it’s all interesting. I like the ending with Lockwood on the beach, flashing her breasts at two men flying overhead in a helicopter. 

Reading Schwartz’s absorbing piece, I thought of the theory recently espoused by the critic Merve Emre that the writer’s “I” is fiction. In “Going Viral,” Schwartz shows a writer who is, in person, every bit as wild, idiosyncratic, and complex as she is on the page. Schwartz authenticates Lockwood's “I.” 

October 4, 2021 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. A special shout-out to Steve Futterman for alerting me to the Bill Charlap Trio’s upcoming album “Street of Dreams.” I love this trio’s work. I have all its albums. Futterman writes, 

The pianist Bill Charlap, united as a working unit with the bassist Peter Washington and the drummer Kenny Washington for nearly a quarter century, has pulled off a very neat hat trick. By blending two unrelated strains of popular piano-trio traditions—the spit-and-polish drive of Oscar Peterson and the probing lyricism of Bill Evans—the Charlap triumvirate has established its own distinct voice, smoothly morphing into the premier mainstream jazz-piano trifecta. [“Goings On About Town: Music: Bill Charlap Trio”]

2. I relish this line in James Wood’s excellent “Connect the Dots”:

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.”

3. Alexandra Schwartz’s absorbing “Tell Me What You Want” contains this wonderful quote from Amia Srinivasan’s essay “The Right to Sex”: 

Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or toward someone we never thought we would lust after, or love.

I know exactly what she means.

Best of 2020: Talk of the Town

Illustration by João Fazenda, from Michael Shulman's "Ruins"

Here are my favorite “Talk of the Town” stories of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ian Frazier’s “Still Open,” April 6, 2020 (“By ten-fifteen, the line stretched to Twenty-eighth Street, around the corner, and down the long block between Ninth Avenue and Eighth. A soup-kitchen employee in a jacket of high-visibility green was walking along the line and urging those waiting to maintain spaces of six feet between one another. They complied, reluctantly, but somehow the line kept re-compressing itself”). 

2. Ian Frazier’s “Bringing in the Comfort,” April 13, 2020 (“The Navy hospital ship Comfort went under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge at about nine-twenty last Monday morning. Trucks on the bridge blew long blasts of welcome on their horns. The ship appeared suddenly in the overcast day as if out of nowhere; the medical-clinic white of her hull and superstructure blended in with the sea and the sky”).

3. Ian Frazier’s “Biting Back,” October 19, 2020 (“From a distance, a vertical view would include the table, covered with a white cloth; a Martini in a Martini glass (yellow dab of lemon peel); a pack of Marlboros; a brushed-chrome Zippo lighter; the seated artist, deliberately unshaved, dressed in a white T-shirt and a gray knit hoodie (unzipped; purchased at a Salvation Army store); the awning of the gallery, which says ‘American Artist, Scott LoBaido’; and, atop all that, on the roof, an unrelated billboard for a personal-injury law firm, with the words ‘Bite Back’ in big letters and a picture of a snarling dog in a spiked collar”).

4. Ian Frazier’s “Ballistic,” November 23, 2020 [“The names of some of the different windows in subway cars are: full-picture windows (the main windows in the middle), half-picture windows (the same as full-picture, except smaller, to leave room for the vents), door windows (oval, self-explanatory), vent windows (long and narrow, ditto), and motorman’s-vision windows.]

5. Nick Paumgarten’s “Old Drug,” March 2, 2020 (“Midtown Manhattan, 5:30 a.m., Huey Lewis riding shotgun”).

6. Nick Paumgarten’s “Pointillism,” March 9, 2020 (“On Central Park West, he pointed out a painted railing and said, “That, I wouldn’t worry about. You’ve got ultraviolet light, wind.” But on the C train he wrapped an elbow around a pole and said, “I look at the world differently than you do. I see surfaces in a pointillistic ¬fashion”).

7. Alexandra Schwartz’s “Lady from Shanghai,” March 9, 2020 (“Outside Wu’s Wonton King, Yan struggled to light some sparklers she had just bought. An elderly passerby stopped to cup his hands around Yan’s, shielding the flame from the elements. ‘He says it’s raining and it’s windy,’ Yan said, when he’d left. ‘There’s a metaphor in here somewhere.’ She produced a party popper from a bag and began to twist. Tiny hundred-dollar bills shot into the air. Yan squealed and took a photo. Then she headed off, shedding miniature Benjamins as she walked. Maybe there was a metaphor in there, too”).

8. Alexandra Schwartz’s “Together Again,” November 23, 2020 (“As an homage to Lawrence’s distinctive palette, she wore a royal-blue jacket and a new blue checked scarf. ‘I usually like earth tones,’ she said. ‘So it was, as they say, bashert’ ”).

9. Michael Shulman’s “Ruins,” May 25, 2020 (“ ‘So you are really into philosophy, just not Greek philosophy,’ Coogan said, not quite impressed. ‘You’re into pistachio philosophy.’ Brydon, pleased with his progress, displayed his bowl of nuts”).

10. Naomi Fry’s “Dread by the Pool,” November 23, 2020 [“Stepping over a trail of ants rushing along a pavement (‘Do you know that some ants can live for up to thirty years? That always makes me feel guilty about killing them’), David headed toward a pond”].

Best of the Decade: Alternate List

Photo by Marcin Gala, from Burkhard Bilger's "In Deep"

I had fun doing “Best of the Decade.” But skimming the crème de la crème off ten years’ worth of New Yorker reporting pieces wasn’t easy. Narrowing the list to just twelve was agony. I was forced to discard many wonderful articles, including some personal favorites. To atone for my ruthless selection process, I’ve decided to compile a second list – twelve more excellent pieces that could easily have made the first list, if there’d been room. Here are my picks, with a choice quotation from each in brackets:

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Deadhead,” November 26, 2012 (“In the pavilion, the tapers had set up a cityscape of microphone stands, like minarets, and through them there was the sight of Jerry Garcia, fat and hunched, virtually immobile in a haze of his own cigarette smoke”). 

2. Burkhard Bilger, “In Deep,” April 21, 2014 (“One passage led back to the beginning of the sump, another to the loop behind them, a third to a dead end they’d explored earlier. That left one unexplored passage. It took them up a short corridor, along a rising slope of terraced mustard-colored flowstone, and into a small domed chamber. There was an air bell at the top about the size of a car trunk, so they swam up and took off their helmets and neoprene hoods to talk. They seemed to be at a dead end. They were cold, tired, and disoriented, and their air ration had nearly run out. There was no choice but to head back”). 

3. Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover,” August 29, 2016 (“I walked into the site, through smooth gray-brown gravel mounds, serene and raked as Zen gardens, graded to the angle of repose, so that no rocks slide. Like blast shields, the mounds blocked the view; their shapes, which can be seen in whole only from the air, form a coded alphabet of charm stone, dog bone, cross, and adze. A ramp sloped up to the east, to the top of a bulwark, against which leaned massive ceramic stelae”).

4. William Finnegan, “Silver or Lead,” May 31, 2010 (“To check out La Familia’s claim to be driving cristal addiction from Michoacán, I went to Zamora, a midsized city in the northwestern corner of the state. La Familia was doing some vivid social messaging there. Two days before my arrival, and some weeks earlier, groups of flagellants had appeared on the roads around Zamora—men with their shirts pulled up or off and their backs whipped raw. The men chanted and carried placards denouncing themselves as thieves and rapists. Some of the placards were signed ‘La Familia’ ”).

5. Aleksandar Hemon, “Mapping Home,” December 5, 2011 (“I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the odor of hard life and sewage—during the siege, people had often taken shelter from the shelling in their basements”).

6. Peter Schjeldahl, “The Flip Side,” November 29, 2010 (“But nothing that we know of anticipated the eloquence of van Eyck’s glazes, which pool like liquid radiance across his pictures’ smooth surfaces, trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and effulgences of brilliant color”).

7. Geoff Dyer, “Poles Apart,” April 18, 2011 (“The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away. The constellations were complicated by passenger jets, blinking planes, flashing satellites. It was like rush hour in the era of interplanetary travel. The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight”).

8. Alexandra Schwartz, “Bounty Hunters,” November 25, 2019 (“You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart”).

9. Dexter Filkins, “Atonement,” October 29 & November 5, 2012 (“Lobello might not have felt that he needed to apologize, but he was haunted by what had happened, traumatized, maybe even ruined. He wanted to know that the survivors understood why he had done what he had, even if it was not entirely defensible. And he wanted them to know that he felt their suffering in his own. Lobello did not quite say it, but when I left his apartment I felt that what he was really looking for was absolution”).

10. Rebecca Mead, “Sole Cycle,” March 23, 2015 (“Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped”).

11. Gabrielle Hamilton, “The Lamb Roast,” January 17, 2011 (“Then the sun started to set and we lit the paper-bag luminarias, and the lambs were crisp-skinned and sticky, and the root beer was frigid, and it caught, like an emotion, in the back of my throat”).

12. Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running,” July 11 & 18, 2016 (“A birthday cake appeared, and then—a hallucinatory moment—another Icelandic actress sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ in a perfect impression of Marilyn singing it to J.F.K., sexy sibilant by erotic syllable: ‘Happy biiirthday, Misstah Prez-uh-dent . . .’ The crowd cheered in pleasure and recognition. We live on one planet, indivisible”).

CBC's Excellent "Who Killed Alberta Williams?"

Alexandra Schwartz, in her “Happy Listening” (The New Yorker, October 5, 2020), says of podcasting, “The power of the medium is immense.” I agree. Recently, I listened to CBC.ca’s “Missing & Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams?,” a spellbinding eight-part podcast investigation that unearths new information and potential suspects in the cold case of a young Indigenous woman murdered in British Columbia in 1989. You’ve likely heard of the term “police procedural”? Well, this podcast is a journalist procedural. Pursuit of the story is part of the narrative. It’s absolutely riveting.

March 9, 2020 Issue

Here are some of the things in this week’s New Yorker that I enjoyed immensely:

1. The delectable description in Johanna Fateman’s “Art: Shannon Cartier Lucy": “The creamily painted, crystalline image of goldfish whose bowl rests, alarmingly, on the lavender flame of a gas stove.”

2. Steve Futterman’s wonderful “Night Life: Andy Statman”: 

An Orthodox Jew walks into the back room of a bar and proceeds to play avant-garde jazz on the clarinet and bluegrass on the mandolin, among much else. Welcome to the manifold musical world of Andy Statman, who, in his frequent visits to this long-standing Park Slope watering hole and music space, proves that New York has always been the place to be if multiculturalism is the air you breathe.

3. News of a new French film that might be worth checking out - Rebecca Zlottowski’s An Easy Girl – described by Richard Brody, in his capsule review of it, as “passionate and finely observed.” 

4. Nick Paumgarten’s excellent Talk story “Pointillism,” a mini-profile of W. Ian Lipkin, “one of the one of the world’s leading infectious-disease epidemiologists,” commenting on the spread of COVID-19:

On Central Park West, he pointed out a painted railing and said, “That, I wouldn’t worry about. You’ve got ultraviolet light, wind.” But on the C train he wrapped an elbow around a pole and said, “I look at the world differently than you do. I see surfaces in a pointillistic ­fashion.” 

5. Alexandra Schwartz’s Talk piece, “Lady from Shanghai,” an encounter with movie director Cathy Yan, the last paragraph of which is superb:

Outside Wu’s Wonton King, Yan struggled to light some sparklers she had just bought. An elderly passerby stopped to cup his hands around Yan’s, shielding the flame from the elements. “He says it’s raining and it’s windy,” Yan said, when he’d left. “There’s a metaphor in here somewhere.” She produced a party popper from a bag and began to twist. Tiny hundred-dollar bills shot into the air. Yan squealed and took a photo. Then she headed off, shedding miniature Benjamins as she walked. Maybe there was a metaphor in there, too.

6. Rivka Galchin’s excellent “Complete Trash,” reporting on South Korea’s progressive approach to waste-processing (“Interspersed among the windrows were truck-size machines that looked like toys: a bright-orange Doppstadt Inventhor ground up trees, an emerald-green Komptech Multistar sorted waste by size, and a white-and-yellow SCARAB turned and aerated the windrows with its inner spokes”). 

7. Vinson Cunningham’s absorbing “Test Case,” an account of his education at a wonderful non-profit school called Prep for Prep and the far-reaching impact it had on his life: 

So Prep recommended me as a tutor for the teen-age son of a black investment banker who was on Prep’s board of directors. The banker paid me directly, by the hour, and I sent him occasional e-mail updates on his son’s progress. We read plays and short stories and articles from the sports pages, and ran through long sets of simple algebra. The kid didn’t like to concentrate; I could relate. One day, I got a call from his stepmother, who was from Chicago. She was supporting a young Illinois senator who was preparing to run for President. His campaign was setting up a fund-raising office in New York, and they’d need an assistant. I knew that I was stumbling into another unmerited adventure.

8. Peter Schjeldahl grappling with the meaning of Donald Judd’s benumbing artworks: “They aren’t about anything. They afford no traction for analysis while making you more or less conscious of your physical relation to them, and to the space that you and they share” (“The Shape of Things”). 

  

9. And Anthony Lane’s description of sex in two new movies, The Burnt Orange Heresy and The Whistler: “vanilla but vigorous, like a frothing milkshake” (“Lying Together”). 

Best of 2019: Reporting

Ilya Milstein's illustration for Alexandra Schwartz's "Bounty Hunters"

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

1. Alexandra Schwartz’s “Bounty Hunters,” November 25, 2019 (“You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart”).

2. Ian Frazier’s “Pumper’s Corner,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (As Rachael walked me through each well, I appreciated the Rube Goldberg-ness of it all. No two were the same. ‘The guys out here like to say that a well is like a woman, because each one needs to be handled differently,’ Rachael said. She had been to these wells often, and sort of whispered each one, the way she would a horse. She put her hands on pipes, felt for hot spots, peered into gauges, cocked an ear for wrong sounds. She had me listen at a pipe where rising gas from a mile down hissed and echoed—all O.K. there”).

3. Nick Paumgarten’s “The Descent of Man,” April 29, 2019 (“I glanced up and saw for the first time, shadow-blue and telephoto close, the final section of the Streif, where the racers, after soaring off a jump, come hauling across a steep, bumpy, fallaway traverse—legs burning, skis thrashing—and into the final plunge, the Zielschuss, reaching speeds of almost ninety miles an hour”).

4. Burkhard Bilger’s “Extreme Range,” February 11, 2019 (“The voices were growing louder, circling the silo one by one with the choir close behind. Wells lifted his head to the cloud of voices rising and swirling toward the ceiling, then stretched out his arms as they joined in a great, ragged chord. When they fell silent, I could hear the tapping of rain on the roof outside. Then a last voice sang out—Shaw’s quiet mezzo, wafting up like a fleck of ash above a flame”).

5. Nicola Twilley, “Trailblazers,” August 26, 2019 (“The lit cannister of fuel I was holding, known as a drip torch, had a long, looped neck that emitted a jaunty quiff of flame”).

6. James Lasdun’s “Glow,” April 29, 2019 (“A crack appeared in the clouds directly above us. It widened, showing a sprinkling of stars and then the entire Big Dipper. There was a stirring among the photographers: their cameras had started detecting things. After a moment, an oblique greenish bar like the one I’d seen the night before became visible. It grew brighter and denser, then contracted into an oval of emerald light. People chattered excitedly. I was about to warn them not to get too carried away when a streak of brilliant green shot out of the oval, at high speed, and zoomed over our tipped-back heads, corkscrewing across the sky. I almost toppled over while following its trajectory. The green light formed several tentacles, which twisted and writhed together and looped in circles. Astonishment was proclaimed in a half-dozen languages. The circles dropped needles of piercing brightness that travelled, in tandem, around the sky, as if tracing the undulations of a celestial shower curtain”).

7. Rivka Galchen, “The Eighth Continent,” May 6, 2019 (When a Masten rocket takes off, it has a delicate appearance. One of the newer ones, the Xodiac, looks like two golden balloons mounted on a metal skeleton. A kite tail of fire shoots out as the Xodiac launches straight up; at its apex, it has the ability to tilt and float down at an angle, as casually as a leaf”).

8. Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Under Water,” April 1, 2019 (“On the model, the spillway gates were represented by small strips of brass attached to copper wires. Because they hadn’t worked properly in previous trials, an engineer was watching over them from a folding chair. He looked like a latter-day Gulliver, bent over a drowning Lilliput. He, too, I noticed, had wet socks”).

9. Douglas Preston’s “The Day the Earth Died,” April 8, 2019 (“He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass”).

10. John Seabrook’s “Machine Hands,” April 15, 2019 (“It was only at the very end of the eight-second window that the Pitzer wheel dropped down and—in a blur of motion that recalled Doctor Octopus, the Spider-Man villain, attacking one of his victims—the claws grabbed and picked the ripe berries in a fraction of a second, pop-pop-pop, and deposited them, apparently unbruised, on a shelf at the top of the machine’s chassis. Then the robots moved on to the next plant in that row”).

Best of 2019: newyorker.com

Nancy Liang's illustration for James Marcus's "A Dark Ride"

Here are my favorite newyorker.com pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Shock of Robert Frank’s The Americans,” September 10, 2019 [“Frank had exalted photographic form by shattering it against the stone of the wonderful and (oh, yeah) horrible real”].

2. Alexandra Schwartz’s “ ‘While I Live, I Remember’: Agnès Varda’s Way of Seeing,” March 30, 2019 (“Her films, which celebrate the art of the foraged and the found, can be like associative essays, or like poems”).

3. Chris Wiley's “How Larry Sultan Made His Father a Metaphor for Dashed American Dreams,” April 7, 2019 (“In the picture that came out of that poolside photo shoot, we see that behind the elder Sultan is a rolling expanse of tightly cut grass soaking up the water from an automated sprinkler system, which passes for rain in those parts—a landscape on life support. His father is tan, but he is also old, his body clearly heading toward its twilight, and he looks somewhat melancholy—despairing, even—as if the empty pool in front of him were a reservoir of regrets”).

4. Lauren Collins’ “On the Roof of Notre Dame, Before It Burned,” April 15, 2019 (“The omniscient of the Internet told us not to fret, that cathedrals had been built and burned before. But Parisians watched with the supplicant helplessness of the ages, singing hymns on their knees as the firefighters battled to save the north belfry on the second day of Holy Week”).

5. James Marcus's “A Dark Ride,” October 29, 2019 (“Nat held my hand and we exited the meticulously groomed reality, with its 1,838-foot-long channel and four hundred thousand gold pieces of eight, all of them fake”).

6. Charlotte Mendelson’s “Seeds, The Gateway Drug to Gardening,” April 23, 2019 ("To the unafflicted, seeds may seem like nondescript black dots, distinguishing themselves only once they’ve blossomed. But look closely and you’ll see that they are quietly astonishing in their variety, particularly when they’re patiently waiting in the dried remains of last year’s flowers: the papery discs of hollyhock, neatly arranged in doughnut rings; glossy nigella specks in spiky spheres; the fat succulence of apples; the pony flank of chestnut; speckled borlotti or elma beans, black and white like baby killer whales; poppies like salt shakers; and calendula, my favorite, an explosion of prickly crescents, dry brown springs tight with life”).

7. Chris Wiley's “Jack Davison’s Throwback to a Golden Age of Editorial Portraiture,” July 21, 2019 ("A hovering dot painted on an alley wall appears transformed into a luminous moon, propped up by a rusted wire trellis and cradled by a shadow hand, and a wild-eyed dog, all Tic Tac white teeth and blurred fur, is a living incarnation of our rapacious anxieties”).

8. Richard Brody's “Watching The Irishman on Netflix Is the Best Way to See It,” December 2, 2019 (“The movie’s silent gazes—whether the fearful silence that protects criminals whose retaliation would be devastating, or the loyal silence of criminals protecting each other, or the symbolic silence of criminals communicating with each other—are sublime to observe, and they’re the mark of Cain”).

9. Peter Hessler’s “My House in Cairo,” May 7, 2019 (“In Egypt, time is accordion-like. Certain moments seem to last forever, but then everything is compressed and an era disappears in a flash”).

10. Charlotte Mendelson’s “The Stunning Grounds, and Tragic History, of the Lost Gardens of Heligan,” August 2, 2019 (“Now any ignorant city-dweller can nod knowledgeably at the charcoal burner and beehives, admire the Technicolor banks of dahlias in the cutting garden, and covet—in my case, quite violently—the brass watering cans and elaborate glasshouses, with their beaver-tail glazing and delicious levers”).

2019 Year in Review

Leo Espinosa's illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "Unlike Any Other"

Three words sum up this year’s New Yorker: Paumgarten, Paumgarten, and Paumgarten. He had quite a run, producing three superb reporting pieces (“The Descent of Man,” “Unlike Any Other,” “The Message of Measles”) and a wonderful “Personal History” essay (“The Symptoms”). Here’s a sample from “The Descent of Man”:

My own “Holy shit, I’m in Kitzbühel” moment came on a Tuesday in January, earlier this year, after I stepped off the train at the base of the Hahnenkamm gondola. It was dusk. The town was still relatively quiet, in the absence of the eighty or so thousand fans who were expected to invade that weekend for the annual series of Alpine races and debauches. I glanced up and saw for the first time, shadow-blue and telephoto close, the final section of the Streif, where the racers, after soaring off a jump, come hauling across a steep, bumpy, fallaway traverse—legs burning, skis thrashing—and into the final plunge, the Zielschuss, reaching speeds of almost ninety miles an hour. I had been watching the race on television for decades, whenever and wherever I could find it, with a heart-in-throat intensity of devotion that embarrasses me, and this last hellbent stretch was always the emotional climax, the site of either life-threatening crackups or ecstatic finishes, amid the drunken, swaying throngs. And here it was, the empty stage, the star of the show. The course was marked off with blue food dye, which, in flat light, helps the skiers see the contours in the snow. Viewed in person, from below, the traverse looked narrower and steeper than it did on TV. From the angle of the course workers’ stance, as they tended to the slope in crampons, you’d have guessed that they were ice climbing. I walked up on the snow to the finish area. If the Streif was an idol, I was close enough to ask for an autograph.

  

Another writer who had a great year: Alexandra Schwartz. Her “Bounty Hunters,” an account of her experience working at the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, is one of my favorites. In addition, she wrote a marvellous profile of Miriam Toews ("Benefit of the Doubt") and several excellent critical pieces, including “Painted Love,” on the life of Picasso’s muse, Françoise Gilot, and “ ‘While I Live, I Remember’: Agnès Varda’s Way of Seeing.” Here’s an excerpt from her brilliant “Bounty Hunters”:

You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart.

The best piece of the year, for me, was Anne Boyer’s essay on cancer treatment, “The Undying.” What an extraordinary work! It fuses unmistakable, idiosyncratic, personal style with radical, original observation. Here’s a sample:

We are supposed to be legible as patients while navigating hospitals and getting treatment, and illegible as our actual, sick selves while going to work and taking care of others. Our actual selves must now wear the false heroics of disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery and smiling after it, too. We are supposed to be feisty, sexy, snarky women, or girls, or ladies, or whatever. Also, as the T-shirts for sale on Amazon suggest, we are always supposed to be able to tell cancer that “you messed with the wrong bitch!” In my case, however, cancer messed with the right bitch.

A special shout-out to Peter Schjeldahl – the magazine’s pre-eminent pleasure-giver, and one of my heroes. In addition to publishing one of this year’s most delectable books (Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light), he produced yet another run of marvellous exhibition reviews, including “Enigma Variations” (on Dana Schutz and Richard Deacon), “Modernism for All” (on Joan Miró), “Exposed” (on Garry Winogrand and Jeff Wall), “Not Waving” (on the Whitney Biennial), “Of Nature” (on Thomas Cole and Brice Marden), “Skin Deep” (on Pierre-Auguste Renoir), and “Heavy” (on Richard Serra) – all suffused with his love of textures, shapes, lines, light, and color. And then his terrific personal essay, “77 Sunset Me,” appeared earlier this month and blew me away. Here’s a taste:

I’m not in physical pain as I write, though I tire quickly and nap often. I have been receiving, every three weeks, an immunotherapy infusion—not chemo, and not a cure—which, at the outset, the doctor said had a thirty-five-per-cent chance of slowing the disease. (At those odds in Vegas, you’re broke within an hour, but in baseball you’re a cinch for the Hall of Fame.) A recent scan shows marked improvement, likely extending my prospect of survival. But I have to wonder if, whatever betides, I can stay upbeat in spirit. A thing about dying is that you can’t consult anyone who has done it. No rehearsals. No mulligans.

My highlight reel could go on and on. Instead, over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I loved most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another splendid year. I’d be lost without you. New Yorker without end, amen! 

Susan Orlean's "All Mixed Up"

Alexandra Schwartz’s recent “Bounty Hunters” (The New Yorker, November 25, 2019), an account of her experience working at Park Slope Food Co-op, in Brooklyn, reminded me of another great “grocery store” piece – Susan Orlean’s “All Mixed Up” (The New Yorker, June 22, 1992; included in Orlean’s 2004 My Kind of Place). It’s about Sunshine Market, a grocery store in Jackson Heights, Queens. Orlean wonderfully captures the complexity of “grocery store” reality. Here, for example, is her description of the start of a delivery day:

One Monday morning, I got to the market at seven forty-five – fifteen minutes before opening time. There were already trucks from Polaner/B&G Pickles, Ingegneri & Son, Pepsi-Cola, Damascus Bakery, and Star Soap and Prayer Candle parked out front. The B&G driver, Wally Wadsworth, had started his morning at B&G’s warehouse in Roseland, New Jersey, and was delivering sweet gherkin midgets and kosher dills. Jimmy Penny, the Ingegneri driver, had come from a warehouse in the Bronx with fifty cases of assorted groceries. Ronnie Chamberlain and Chris Laluz had started in Long Island and had Pepsi liters. Jim Hazar had come from the Damascus Bakery in Brooklyn, with fresh pita bread. Manny Ziegelman, of Star Soap and Prayer Candle, had also come from Brooklyn. This particular morning, he had a mixed case of Miraculous Mother, Lucky Buddha, and Fast Luck prayer candles for Sunshine Market in his truck. 

Orlean talks to Sunshine Market’s owner, Herb Spitzer (“Herb is now sixty years old. He is a medium-size man with a smooth, pinkish, egg-shaped face and a scramble of graying hair. He has a soothing, precise manner, which suggests benevolence and intelligence and absolutely no patience for goofing around”). She visits Herb in his office above the trash compactor at the back of the store (“The trash compactor runs, off and on, all day long. Conversations in the office that begin in a normal speaking tone often shift in a shout at some point”). She talks to the store’s manager, Toney Murphy (“Toney knows everything. Toney even knows some things he doesn’t know, like Spanish”). She attends the store’s tenth birthday party in Herb’s office (“There were eight people clustered in the corner of the office: Ashima, Marta, Rose Mary, Jerry, Robert, Toney, and Richard and Bill, who had taken a break from carving a side of beef”). She talks to Jerry Goldberg, the store’s produce manager (“He has huge hands, with fingers as gnarled as parsnips. It is quite a sight to wander back to his worktable and catch him hacking at the lettuce heads, cutting off the ugly leaves and tossing them away. A few heads into it, he’s ankle deep in greenery”). She visits the butchers and wrappers in the cutting room:

Lack of sentimentality may actually be an advantage when you’re spending eight hours a day around carcasses. Once, Bill, who is the meat manager, was telling me what I thought was going to be a sweet story about a little old lady who approached him one Thanksgiving for advice on cooking her bird. His summation: “I said to her, ‘Hey, lady, you’re seventy-two bleeping years old. I’m sure this isn’t your first turkey.’ ”

“All Mixed Up” is a triumph of close observation and detailed description. Revisiting it twenty-seven years after it first appeared, I enjoyed it immensely. 

November 25, 2019 Issue

I can’t believe I’ve just read an entire article about baby food. Well, actually I can believe it, because the article is by Burkhard Bilger, one of my favorite writers. But when I saw that his subject was baby food, I inwardly groaned. Baby food? Come on! Then I read the first sentence – “In a laboratory in Denver, on a decommissioned U.S. Army base, a baby sits in a high chair with two electrodes attached to his chest” – and then the next one, and the next one, and just kept going right to the end. I was hooked. The piece, called “Open Wide,” begins at that Denver lab (“Building 500, as this facility was formerly known, has the looming hulk of an Egyptian temple: it was once the largest man-made structure in Colorado”) and ends, surprisingly, delightfully, in an apartment of a Congolese woman in Portland, Maine. In between, it takes us to: a suburban kitchen in Scarsdale, New York; the taste-testing center for the Gerber Products Company; the laboratories of the U.S. Army’s Combat Feeding Directorate in Natick, Massachusetts; and an African farm stand in Maine. 

The piece is like a themed wunderkammern, stuffed with all kinds of interesting sentences: 

Beets are kale’s dark twin in the baby-food family. Something about their loamy sweetness, the taste of iron and manganese that seeps through them like runoff from a rusty pipe, turns children off.

Babies are creatures of fashion. They may not know what fashion is, but they’re under our control, so we dress them as we like and feed them what we want. Their diets distill our anxieties.

If you want to see the future of baby food, look in a foxhole. 

Like the other tube foods they’d developed—tortilla soup, Key-lime pie, polenta with cheese and bacon—these were dishes meant to do more than nourish. They were designed to trigger sense memories: to call to mind a kitchen in Iowa, as a pilot circled the Syrian desert at seventy thousand feet.

Rachel’s lenga-lenga was like no baby food I’d ever seen. It was full of onions and garlic and bitter green pepper. It had mashed eggplant and leeks that could give a baby gas. It was salty from the bouillon—the rest of the family would be eating it, too—and far from sweet. By the time it was done cooking, it was a thick green porridge, pungent with smoked fish and sulfurous plants. It made kale look like Christmas candy. And yet, when Rachel brought a bowl of it over to Soraya on the couch, she bounced up and down and clapped her hands.

And of course, Bilger being Bilger, there’s a catfish (“She watched as her mother threw a head of garlic and some yellow onions into her cart, then picked out an especially fearsome-looking dried catfish, black from smoke”). 

“Open Wide” brilliantly explores the “crosscurrents of baby-food research.” I enjoyed it immensely.

Another superb piece in this week’s issue is Alexandra Schwartz’s “Bounty Hunters,” an account of her experience working at the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn. It begins wonderfully:

The sidewalks of north Park Slope must be among the narrowest and most uneven in Brooklyn. They crash against the stoops of landmarked brownstones and split over the roots of oak and sycamore trees, menacing the ankles of pedestrians. Baby strollers compete for space with dogs of all sizes, shoals of high-school students, and shopping carts from the Park Slope Food Co-op. Here comes one now, rattling catastrophically, like Max Roach whaling on the high hat.

I read that and just kept going. Inspired passages sprang to my eyes:

I have the P.L.U. codes for bananas, avocados, and lemons in my fingertips. I know how to tell mustard greens from dandelion, quinces from Asian pears. Sometimes, cruising through a shopper’s load in a blissful state of flow, I fantasize about racing other checkout workers for the title of Fastest Register, though this would surely be deemed “uncoöperative,” the worst of all Co-op sins.

You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart.

September is a cornucopian time, when late-summer and early-fall harvests mingle, the first butternut squash next to the last Sugar Baby watermelons. Chayote from Costa Rica is on the shelves at ninety-one cents a pound. There are Pennsylvania pawpaws (“ripe when fragrant and soft to the touch,” a sign advises), burgundy beans, cactus pears, ground cherries, Key limes. Apples are in: Crispin; Jazz; Zestar!; Ginger Gold; Cox’s Orange Pippin; Hidden Rose, with its modest mottled skin and startled, blushing flesh.

“Bounty Hunters” is one of this year’s best reporting pieces. It might be the best! 

July 22, 2019 Issue

Alexandra Schwartz, in her absorbing “Painted Love,” in this week’s issue, argues against the view that Picasso’s art justified the rotten way he treated the women in his life. She writes, 

Now the popular view is at the opposite pole. Last year, the Australian feminist comedian Hannah Gadsby, in her Netflix special “Nanette,” performed an incendiary bit about Picasso’s treatment of women, quoting some damning lines from Gilot’s memoir and lamenting in particular the case of Marie-Thérèse. (“Picasso fucked an underage girl. That’s it for me, not interested.”) Next to these trampled lives, Gadsby couldn’t care less about the art.

The life or the work? I side with the work. Yes, Picasso trampled women’s lives. He was a monster of ego and appetite, with one redeeming quality: he could paint.