May 27, 2024 Issue

“Dialectical,” “epistemological,” "ontological" – stand aside. A new adjective is being ushered into the critical lexicon: “horny.” The usher is Amanda Petrusich – first in her wonderful “Troye Sivan’s Songs of Desire” (“But then there is the video for ‘Rush,’ the first single from the Australian pop star Troye Sivan’s third LP, ‘Something to Give Each Other’—it is, as they say, horny on main”) – and now, in her superb “Age of Anxiety,” in this week’s issue, where she says of Billie Eilish’s song “Lunch,”

“Lunch” is a weird, pulsing track, vigorous and horny. It’s also my favorite song on the new album, in part because Eilish sounds incredibly free, which is to say, she sounds like herself. 

Petrusich seems incredibly free, too. Her unselfconscious celebration of sexual pleasure is bracing. Her writing enacts the condition it extols. It’s vigorous and horny. 

Best of 2018: newyorker.com

Sarah Mazzetti, illustration for Calvin Trillin's "Nearby and Familiar: A Strategy for Picking Restaurants"

Here are my favorite newyorker.com pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Alexandra Schwartz, “Agnès Varda Is Still Going Places,” March 4, 2018 (“Varda, as the film’s title implies, is a gleaner, too. She loves the burnt edges of cinema, finding treasures in images or ideas that other directors might reject”).

2. Richard Brody, “How Garry Winogrand Transformed Street Photography,” September 15, 2018 (Winogrand didn’t take time tweaking and twiddling the camera’s rings and dials, and, above all, he didn’t take time to compose his images. When he flung his Leica to his eye, he didn’t study framing through the lens but composed instantaneously, impulsively, improvisationally, as if he were making a kind of pictorial jazz, or what Jean-Luc Godard called ‘the definitive by chance’ ”).

3. Doreen St. Félix, “Deana Lawson’s Hyper-Staged Portraits of Black Love,” March 12, 2018 (“Flickers of the couple’s personality are awakened and then drowned out by the eye that posed these subjects just so”).

4. Doreen St. Félix, “The Eerie Anonymity of a Show of African-American Portraiture at the Met,” July 19, 2018 (“The images are corralled into common memory, a process that risks degrading the subjects’ vital and specific personhood”).

5. Doreen St. Félix, “The Photographer Who Captured How Whiteness Works in the American South,” December 1, 2018 (“Looking at the stiffened old black couple standing on opposite ends of their doorway, emanating all the vitality of a Victorian corpse portrait, I wonder what alchemical effect Fox Solomon has on her black subjects in their black spaces. It’s one that seems to be built not on trust but on more candid, and more revealing, forces: secrecy and distance. The saxophonist clutches his instrument and glares, judgy, wary. Fox Solomon’s scenes telegraph the well-earned feelings of prejudice that blacks had toward photography and its threatening ability to reduce them to totems”).

6. Calvin Trillin, “Nearby and Familiar: A Strategy For Picking Restaurants,” November 21, 2018 (“I had dinner at Casamento’s, on Magazine Street, where patrons consume astounding oyster loaves in an all-tile space that gives some the impression that they are eating in a drained swimming pool”).

7. Elizabeth Barber, "What Brooklyn Sees in Buffalo," March 31, 2018 (“ ‘It seems to me like one of those forgotten cities of New York State,’ a red-lipped lawyer said as she smoked in the cold sun outside the Bell House, the venue for the event”). 

8. Hannah Goldfield, “How To Eat Candy Like a Swede,” May 17, 2018 (“I plucked up, instead, a plain old sweet licorice pipe, and let it dangle from the corner of my lip as I chewed, pulling it up with my teeth until it disappeared”).

9. Charlotte Mendelson, “The Wonderful Insanity of Collecting Abandoned Treasures on the Street,” November 12, 2018 [“That’s the driveway where someone once discarded an entire wormery: four stories of perforated plastic through which my compost worms now romp happily among apple peelings. Isn’t that the house where they left a climatically challenged hibiscus plant in a plastic bag? (Yes, and I killed it. What’s your point?)”].

10. Amanda Petrusich, “The Bracing Sorrow of Sufjan Stevens’s Oscars Performance,” March 5, 2018 (“The Oscars telecast is a preposterous event, but occasionally something extraordinary happens: a brief, pure moment”).