March 2, 2026, Issue

Ben McGrath’s wonderful “Talk” story “Ice Capades,” in this week’s issue, tells about his recent visit to Red Bank, New Jersey, to see a legendary iceboat race called the Van Nostrand Challenge. McGrath talks with some of the iceboaters and observes the scene on the frozen Navesink River:

The fourth running of the Van Nostrand, when it finally transpired, after two days of postponement, featured three boats from the Shrewsbury club and three from New York. All, per the rules, were so-called “A” boats: restored antiques, wooden, with gaffed rigs. From a squinting distance, they resembled Hudson River sloops. Up close, they were more like giant crosses atop machetes. The wind was a fluky northwesterly, gusty at the starting gun, such that a couple of blades levitated briefly, as if launching into flight. Then came the lulls, and a reminder that sailing, even on sherbert, can be a “hurry up and wait” kind of sport. Dan Lawrence’s son, Luke, piloting Ariel, which once belonged to the Roosevelts’ neighbor Archie Rogers, took the first heat, and then the second, obviating the need for a third. No team scores needed this time. The New Yorkers had won, and the cup was going home to Newburgh after a hundred and thirty-five years.

Iceboating is a great subject. McGrath captures it marvelously in just 794 well-chosen words. 

September 15, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. No regard for due process – that’s my takeaway from Jonathan Blitzer’s disturbing “Enemies of the State.” It documents the alarming abuse of power of ICE, Border Patrol, and other U.S. officers who are carrying out Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. It’s going to be up to human rights advocates and the courts to stop the abuse. Otherwise, the U.S. is headed the way of Nazi Germany. 

2. I enjoyed Ben McGrath’s Talk story “Dumpster Diving,” especially his description of the plan on how to move the “giant cherry-colored armoire”: 

Their attention turned to a giant cherry-colored armoire that had belonged to a professor now on sabbatical in Malaysia. How to get it to Bay Ridge? Ching had an idea. He could have it trucked with the weekly deliveries to Tandon, which is in downtown Brooklyn. “Then, there is a wonderful Home Depot probably less than a mile away,” he said. “You can rent a U-Haul for nineteen dollars, and it’s good for ninety minutes. So, if you time it just right, early in the morning . . .”

3. Hannah Goldfield’s “Take Me Back,” an account of her visit to this year’s Minnesota State Fair, contains this delicious description:

Many of the most beloved food venders sell a single, time-honored classic: bubbling-hot, batter-fried cheese curds, as sparkly as nuggets of gold, from a stall called the Mouth Trap; the Corn Roast’s deeply burnished cobs, dunked in melted butter; crispy, wispy sweet-onion rings at Danielson’s & Daughters.

November 25, 2024 Issue

I enjoyed Ben McGrath’s “Clean Your Pipes,” in this week’s issue. It’s a “Talk of the Town” story about the renovation of the giant pipe organ in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Basilica. McGrath reports that the organ has been disassembled and trucked to an old tobacco warehouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. McGrath visits the warehouse. He writes,

Inside the warehouse, and in a garage behind it, technicians were working on the organ’s innards: applying alcohol to the oxblood-stained wooden pipes, attending to “witness marks” (dried candle wax, pencil notations) on the bellows, which turned out to have been reconfigured during a prior intervention, in 1902.

He says, “To a novice eye, the only clear indication that all this labor was in the service of a musical instrument was the triple-decker keyboard sitting on a table, next to some bubble wrap, on the second floor.”

McGrath’s piece reminded me of another New Yorker “pipe organ” story – Laura Preston’s wonderful “Pipe Dreams” (August 22, 2022). In that piece, Preston visits Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall to see some of the pipes of the massive Midmer-Losh get “voiced.” She watches Brant Duddy, a ninety-three-year-old master organ technician at work in the voicing room: “He pries open the lips with a sculptor’s spatula and taps the toe with a tiny hammer. He uses a headlamp to peer down long pipes, and shoves a jeweller’s ring gauge up the toe hole. All the rest is in the ear.”

March 4, 2024 Issue

I love these sentences:

1. 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. [Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Le B.”]

2. In 2005, Goswick sliced his suit going through the windshield of a car that went off the old Tappan Zee Bridge. [Ben McGrath, “Where’s My Car?”]

3. Once the performance started, the cloud, which you soon forgot about, and others like it (all products, probably, of an offstage cloud-making machine), vividly captured beams of light from above the stage that came down in vertical shafts, suggesting interrogation lamps, the columns of a courthouse, or the bars of a prison cell. [Ian Frazier, “Uncaged Birds”]

All three are from this week’s New Yorker. Which one’s my favorite? Well, all three are great. And I don’t actually have to choose. But if I did, I’d pick Frazier’s surreal “cloud” description – such a surprising, delightful combination of words: “performance,” “cloud,” “off-stage,” “cloud-making machine,” “beams of light,” “vertical shafts,” “interrogation lamps,” “columns of a courthouse,” “bars of a prison cell.” You’d wonder how their combination makes sense. But it does, in the context of Frazier’s excellent Talk story about an opera for the wrongfully convicted. Bravo, Ian Frazier!

Postscript: I see the magazine has a new film critic – Justin Chang. Is this just for this issue, or is it permanent? Chang’s review of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses” intrigues me, particularly its exotic setting (eastern Anatolia). If I get a chance, I’ll check it out.

2023 Year in Review

Photo by David Guttenfelder, from Luke Mogelson's "Trapped in the Trenches")

I always like to start these things with a drink. What’ll it be this year? Hannah Goldfield, in her wonderful “Tables For Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023), mentions “stealing sips of a friend’s orange-blossom Negroni, a cold and viscous concoction that lingered on my tongue and in my memory (I can taste it now!), the intoxicating, floral perfume of the orange-blossom water achieving thrilling alchemy with the herbal gin, bitter Aperol, and sweet vermouth.” Yes, I’ll have one of those, please. Okay, let’s roll. 

Highlight #1: Two pieces by Luke Mogelson – “Trapped in the Trenches” (January 2 & 9, 2023) and “Underworld” (May 29, 2023) – evoke the Ukraine War with a specificity that puts us squarely there: 

In the grainy, green world of the phosphor screen, the stars gleamed like bioluminescent plankton. Herring and Rambo moved deliberately between the black silhouettes of trees, many of which had been splintered and contorted by artillery. I was looking at a tilled field to our left when a shimmering tail arced overhead, collided with another streaking light, and radiantly detonated. Herring said that it was a Russian missile intercepted by an anti-aircraft weapon. [“Trapped in the Trenches]

Highlight #2: Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Talk to Me” (September 11, 2023), an account of her visit with a team of scientists attempting to use artificial intelligence to speak with sperm whales. In an unforgettable scene, she witnesses the birth of a baby sperm whale:

Suddenly, someone yelled out, “Red!” A burst of scarlet spread through the water, like a great banner unfurling. No one knew what was going on. Had the pilot whales stealthily attacked? Was one of the whales in the group injured? The crowding increased until the whales were practically on top of one another.

Then a new head appeared among them. “Holy fucking shit!” Gruber exclaimed.

“Oh, my God!” Gero cried. He ran to the front of the boat, clutching his hair in amazement. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” The head belonged to a newborn calf, which was about twelve feet long and weighed maybe a ton. In all his years of studying sperm whales, Gero had never watched one being born. He wasn’t sure anyone ever had.

Highlight #3: Burkhard Bilger’s “Crossover Artist” (April 3, 2023), a profile of neuroscientist/musician David Sulzer that brims with inspired passages, including this beauty: 

A modicum of noise is essential to any instrument’s sound, it turns out. Reeds rasp, bows grind, voices growl, and strings shimmer with overtones. In West Africa, musicians attach gourds to their xylophones and harps to rattle along as they play. Music, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure.

Highlight #4: Hannah Goldfield’s new “On and Off the Menu” column in the magazine’s “Critics” section. Goldfield is one of my favorite writers. It’s great to see her get more space for her delectable food writing. Here’s a sample from her “Upper Crust” (October 27, 2023):

For anything else, you’ll find me at Modern. Not long ago, my husband and I and our two small children met my parents there for lunch. It was the first visit for my kids, and cramming together into a familiar, dimly lit booth felt like passing down a primal ritual. New Haven is not a slice town; you get a whole pie and savor it sitting down. My father pointed out a server who he guessed had been working there almost as long as he’d been a regular, at least thirty years. I burned the roof of my mouth on my first bite, then tried to soothe it with gulps from an icy pitcher of Foxon Park white birch beer, a sweet, slightly earthy local soda you’ll find at any New Haven pizzeria. After a few slices, my hands were covered in soot.

Highlight #5: Helen Rosner’s “Tables For Two” columns. Rosner is a ravishing describer. Her “Tables For Two: Sailor” (December 4, 2023) is one of my favorite pieces of the year. Here’s a taste:

Slicing into the sphere of wrapped radicchio leaves, I discovered an interior of fragrant rice studded with firm, creamy borlotti beans. Taking a bite of this mixture, bathed in a wine sauce—which was rich and emulsified and, I learned later, vegan—was like sinking into a quicksand of warmth and flavor. The leaves of the radicchio imparted a lingering hint of bitterness, a scalpel through the savory roundness of everything else. This is the dish, I thought to myself—the dish of the restaurant, perhaps the dish of the year.

Other top picks of the year:

Rebecca Mead, “Dutch Treat,” February 27, 2023 (“Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream”);

Jill Lepore, “Pay Dirt,” March 20, 2023 (“There are more than two hundred mail-order seed companies in the United States, and, if you’ve ever ordered from any of them, chances are that your mail has been swollen with catalogues, their covers of radicchio red, marigold yellow, and zinnia pink peeking out from beneath the annual drab-gray crop of tax documents and the daily, dreary drizzle of bills, solicitations, and credit-card offers”).

Lauren Collins, “Pins and Needles,” March 27, 2023 (“You could hear his ski-parka opera coats rustling through the narrow corridors. There were murmurs of appreciation for a trapezoidal satin T-shirt that Demna said took three months to make, and for a clementine-colored day suit with edges that looked like they could draw blood, shown with a slick black fruit-bowl hat”);

Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Thomas Wågström’s Pictures of the Living and the Lifeless,” April 26, 2023 (“All photographs are about transience. This lies in the very nature of photography, since everything in the world is continually changing, and what a photo depicts vanishes the next instant, or becomes something else. One could say that all photography is about loss. But one could also say the opposite: photographs salvage something from time, as from a burning house”);

Jackson Arn, “Early Bloomer,” May 8, 2023 (“With O’Keeffe’s works on paper, however, scrutiny is like oxygen. These are images so dense with detail that the poster treatment would ruin them. ‘No. 12 Special’ (1916) is like a glossary of the footprints that charcoal can leave on paper: thin, slashing lines; plump, leisurely ones; smears pressed into the grain of the page with a rag or a fingertip. No matter how carefully you study these grace notes, you never forget the melodious whole: a bouquet of spirals dragging their tails behind them, refusing to be decoded”);

Adam Gopnik, “Postscript: Bruce McCall,” May 15, 2023 (“In what used to be called a ‘biting’ vein, he blended a wild surrealist sensibility—founded on an impeccable illustrator’s technique, always manifesting visions, dreams, impossibilities in scrupulous hyper-realism—with a sharp, sometimes caustic tone, beautifully underlit by melancholia”); 

Burkhard Bilger, “Soul Survivors,” June 5, 2023 (“His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter”);

Ed Caesar, “Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom,” June 14, 2023 (“I wonder why, then, on hearing the news of his death last night, I found myself momentarily overcome. Perhaps because I met McCarthy first in a peculiarly receptive period, and perhaps because the provenance of my relationship with his writing leads me back through the decades of my own life. And perhaps because, looking again in the old books, I find so much pleasure in the authority of his voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished”);

Robert Sullivan, “Not a Shark,” July 31, 2023 (“A waft of trash came up from under the pier, and a gaggle of high schoolers walked out onto the pier to take pictures of the orange sky. ‘It’s the end of the world,’ one of them shouted—then he spotted WasteShark. ‘Wait, are you guys monitoring something?’ ”);

Sam Knight, “Hive Mind,” August 28, 2023 (“I touched the glass. The hive thrummed. The smell of honey rolled across the pasture”);

Rachel Syme, “The Suitor,” September 25, 2023 (“She glided down the center aisle, wearing a beaded, sheer white garment that looked like a tuxedo jacket whose hem was melting to the floor. Two men in swim caps carried the train of the dress. From far away, the piece shimmered as if made of shaved ice”);

Nick Rudick, “Watching the Southern Tip of Manhattan Change, for Forty Years,” September 30, 2023 (“Mensch includes a vista of the cheese grater, here cutting a lonely path into the sky far above more modest buildings, jutting upward from the city like the handle of a sledgehammer”); 

Ben McGrath, “Dystopian Slime,” October 9, 2023 (“A stray horn, a searchlight upwind, a marine radio hissing intermittently about bridge traffic: sometimes, amid this dystopian sublime, it was difficult to distinguish the choreography from the merely urban”);

John McPhee, “Under the Carpet Bag” (October 16, 2023 (“And now, in 1964, at Camp Don Bosco, in Missouri, I was walking up a dirt road with Bill Bradley and Ed Macauley. The road consisted of deep parallel ruts with a grassy hump in the middle. Bradley was in one rut, Macauley in the other, and I was up on the hump between them. I am smaller than most people—about as small as Andrew Carnegie, James Madison, Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Actually, I was five feet seven at my zenith and have lately condensed. The hump was a good foot higher than the ruts. Nonetheless, the three of us in outline formed the letter M”);

Amanda Petrusich, “Horny on Main,” October 23, 2003 (“My favorite track on the new album is 'How to Stay with You.' It’s got a wiggly, nineteen-seventies feel, with a skronky keyboard line and unexpected bits of saxophone. Sivan’s voice is a little deeper here, with a hint of night-after grit”);

Zachary Fine, “The Man Who Changed Portraiture,” November 3, 2023 (“The linen cuff on van der Mersch’s right hand is done in four touches, max. Even when you’re standing ten feet back from the canvas, you can peel off individual brushstrokes with your eyes. They’re just floating there, like little spears of light”);

James Wood, “Trysts Tropiques,” November 13, 2023 (“Eng can write with lyrical generosity and beautiful tact: moths are seen at night ‘flaking around the lamps’; elsewhere, also at nighttime, ‘a weak spill of light drew me to the sitting room.’ Shadowy emotions are delicately figured: ‘His eyes, so blue and penetrating, were dusked by some emotion I could not decipher.’ Lesley’s account of her affair with Arthur has a lovely, drifting, dreamlike quality—the adulterers almost afloat on their new passion, watched over by the hanging painted doors of Arthur’s house on Armenian Street”);

Rachel Aviv, “Personal Statement,” November 27, 2023 (“She seemed uniquely incurious when I read her lines from her journal”);

Ed Caesar, "Speed," December 25, 2023 ("We did a warmup lap in Sports Mode—or Baby Mode, as Roys called it—hitting 155 m.p.h. Then he switched to something called F5 Mode. Before the final, short straightaway, he asked me if I was ready. When he hit the accelerator, it was like being strapped to a surface-to-air missile. Each gear change provoked the car to ever more noise and aggression. We hit 170 m.p.h., then braked to make the final turn. I stifled the urge to scream, but not to curse").

And now, with my last few drops of that superb Negroni, I want to propose a toast: Here’s to the greatest magazine in the world! New Yorker without end, amen! 

Credits: (1) Illustration by Sophy Hollington, from Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Talk to Me”; (2) Photo by Cole Wilson, from Hannah Goldfield’s “Upper Crust”; (3) Illustration by Nolan Pelletier, from Jill Lepore’s “Pay Dirt”; (4) Georgia O’Keeffe, “Untitled (Abstraction/Portrait of Paul Strand” (1917); (5) Photo by Alice Zoo, from Sam Knight’s “Hive Mind”; (6) Illustration by Roche Cruchon, from Amanda Petrusich’s “Horny on Main.”

October 9, 2023 Issue

The two pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are Ben McGrath’s “Talk” story “Dystopian Sublime” and Hannah Goldfield’s “Top of the Line.” McGrath’s piece is an account of his attendance at a bizarre opera staged on a barge floating on Newtown Creek in Maspeth, New York City. The creek is grossly polluted. McGrath says of it, “Black mayonnaise is the connoisseur’s name for its sedimentary ooze.” The event is watched by an audience riding in canoes, kayaks, and other types of boats. McGrath writes, “Boating spectators gripped one another’s gunwales to hold position against the southerly breeze. A skein of geese passed overhead in eerie synchronicity with the end of a scene like fighter pilots after “The Star-Spangled Banner.” My favorite line in the piece is this beauty: “A stray horn, a searchlight upwind, a marine radio hissing intermittently about bridge traffic: sometimes, amid this dystopian sublime, it was difficult to distinguish the choreography from the merely urban.”

Goldfield’s “Top of the Line” is a profile of chef Kwame Onwuachi. She tells about his career – his attendance at the Culinary Institute of America, his competing in “Top Chef,” his ownership of the successful restaurant Tatiana, in Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, and so on. But, for me, the piece really comes alive in its last part when Goldfield describes Onwuachi in Tatiana’s kitchen, making a corn-bread pudding:

He bloomed curry powder in butter in a pot on the stove, then crumbled in the corn bread and added heavy cream and oat milk. When it had cooked down into a smooth, thick paste, he tasted it. “Fucking great!” he declared. “That’s fun.” Instead of crème fraîche, he decided to top it with the white sauce that he makes for his halal-cart-inspired shawarma chicken. In the finished dish, the gentle heat of the curry and the sweetness of the warm pudding were offset by the cool, tangy white sauce and a salty plink of caviar at the end of each bite.

That last sentence is superb!

Interesting Emendations: Ben McGrath's "Riverman"

I’ve just finished reading Ben McGrath’s Riverman (2022). What an extraordinary reconstruction of a remarkable life! It’s a moving portrait of a strange voyager, solo canoeist Dick Conant, who, over the course of twenty years, paddled thousands of miles of American rivers, and then in 2014 disappeared near the Outer Banks of North Carolina. McGrath first wrote about Conant in a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” story called “Southbound” (September 22, 2014). Then, after Conant went missing, McGrath wrote a much longer profile of him, “The Wayfarer” (The New Yorker, December 14, 2015) - one of the best New Yorker pieces of the last twenty years, in my opinion: (see my “Best of the Decade #6: Ben McGrath’s ‘The Wayfarer,’ ” July 1, 2020). But McGrath wasn’t done. Conant’s story so obsessed him, he wrote Riverman - a book-length account of Conant’s life and travels. 

Riverman deserves a detailed review. But I’m not ready to do that just yet. I want to go back and read it again, this time more slowly, paying attention to its intricate structure. What I’ll do today is focus on one of my favourite passages in the New Yorker piece and compare it with the version in the book.

Here’s the passage:

While preparing to leave town, Conant discovered that one of his backpacks, containing months’ worth of reserve medication, had been stolen. Trying not to panic, he paddled on, toward Trenton. A few of the bridges over the canal were so low that he had to lean back and retract his chin, sliding underneath, as though into an MRI scanner, while cars rolled overhead. Then, eight or nine miles north of the city, he encountered some differences between the canal as it flowed and the map in his mind, formed from advance Google satellite scouting. He spied a corrugated culvert pipe, off to the left, through which water was leaking down into a creek—the Assunpink Creek, he presumed—and he decided to have a little fun, paddling into the rusty chute. Down he went, into the dark, gaining speed as he bumped along for thirty or forty feet. He was briefly airborne before splashing out at the bottom and taking on about a gallon of water, a small price for the experience of canoeing “like a ski jumper!,” as he put it. The canal runoff provided the creek with some helpful momentum, and for the next several hours he negotiated snags and shoals and descended minor rapids, all while looking for a plausibly private campsite. 

Comparing this passage with the book version, I see five changes: 

1. In the first sentence, “stolen” is now “stolen or misplaced.”

2. In the fourth sentence, “he encountered some differences between the canal as it flowed and the map in his mind, formed from advance Google satellite scouting” is now “he encountered some differences between the canal as it flowed and the map in his mind.”

3. In the fifth sentence, “the Assunpink Creek, he presumed” is now “the Assunpink Creek, he presumed, recalling his reading, in Austin, about the Second Battle of Trenton.”

4. In the sixth sentence, “as he bumped along for thirty or forty feet” is now “as he bumped along for thirty feet.”

5. In the seventh sentence, “canoeing ‘like a ski jumper!,’ as he put it” is now “canoeing ‘like a ski jumper!’ as he put it” (the comma is deleted).

None of these changes are major. But, to me, they’re fascinating. They show the fine-tuning that goes into a great piece of writing. I was relieved to see that the third sentence - one of the most inspired lines in the piece - is unchanged. It’s so beautiful, I want to quote it again: “A few of the bridges over the canal were so low that he had to lean back and retract his chin, sliding underneath, as though into an MRI scanner, while cars rolled overhead.” 

Two New Yorker Writers Make the Times' "10 Best Books of 2022"

Hooray for two New Yorker writers – Hua Hsu and Rachel Aviv – for making The New York Times’ “The 10 Best Books of 2022”! Hsu is on the list for his memoir Stay True, part of which recently appeared in The New Yorker as “My Dad and Kurt Cobain” (August 22, 2022). Aviv is there for her Strangers To Ourselves, a study of psychological distress, part of which appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker, under the title “The Challenge of Going off Psychiatric Drugs” (April 9, 2019). Congratulations to both writers! 

Postscript: There's another book by a New Yorker writer that I'd put on that list - Ben McGrath's Riverman, based on his brilliant New Yorker piece "The Wayfarer."

December 20, 2021 Issue

Two excellent Talk stories in this week’s issue :

1. Ben McGrath’s “On the Waterfront,” a mini-profile of canoeist Neal Moore:

Moore was inspired to plot a twenty-two-month, seventy-five-hundred-mile journey that will conclude any day now, weather permitting, with a loop around the Statue of Liberty: twenty-two rivers, from the Columbia, near Astoria, Oregon, to the Hudson, with some portaging—or “schlepping,” as Moore likes to call it—over the Continental Divide and alongside the Erie Canal. 

Moore’s journey was inspired by the disappearance of fellow-canoeist Dick Conant. McGrath wrote memorably about Conant in his brilliant “The Wayfarer” (December 14, 20215), one of the best New Yorker reporting pieces of the past ten years. 

2.  Richard Preston’s “Hot Tub Drum Machine,” a wonderful account of the creation of an amazing set of steel drums. Here’s a sample:

After the drum cooled, Dunleavy said, he refined the notes, hitting the steel with an assortment of small hammers while he watched waveforms pulse on the display screen of a strobe tuner. He flipped the drum over frequently, hitting the bubbles alternately from the top and from the bottom: “ ‘I’m gonna get that note,’ you say to yourself.” Once in a while, Dunleavy climbed into the hot tub and soaked his aching deltoids. (“The hot tub is my secret weapon,” he explained.) It took him two weeks of obsessive hammering and regular hot-tub dips to bring thirty-eight chromatic notes to life from the bottoms of two hazmat barrels.

That last line is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of the best Talk stories of the year. 

Best of the Decade: #6 Ben McGrath's "The Wayfarer"

Photo by Victor Schrager, from Ben McGrath's "The Wayfarer"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #6 pick – Ben McGrath’s brilliant “The Wayfarer” (December 14, 2015).

“The Wayfarer” tells the story of a sixty-three-year-old riverine nomad named Dick Conant, who spent his days paddling his Coleman canoe (“packed as if for the apocalypse, with tarps and trash bags and Army-surplus duffels”), voyaging America’s waterways.

McGrath first met Conant on September 1, 2014, on the bank of the Hudson River, at Piedmont, New York. He interviewed him at his campsite and wrote a “Talk of the Town” story about him called "Southbound" that appeared in the September 22, 2014 New Yorker. Three months later, Conant went missing. His canoe was found upside down near the mouth of Big Flatty Creek, on Albemarle Sound, North Carolina.

McGrath describes Conant as follows:

He was sixty-three, and spoke in a mellifluous high timbre that seemed almost childlike. He wore denim bib overalls, a T-shirt, and muddy brown boots, and stood six feet one and weighed three hundred pounds. He had a rust-colored beard, with patches of white, and his face was as red as a boiled lobster shell—a riparian Santa. He laughed with great heaves of his gut. His handshake offered the firmest grip I’ve ever felt.

McGrath endeavours to reconstruct Conant’s life, including his last trip – from Plattsburg, N.Y. to Big Flatty Creek, N.C. He talks to members of Conant's family, to some of Conant’s old friends, and to people Conant encountered on his travels (Conant recorded their names in his journals). For example, he talks to state trooper Edwin Scollon, who provides a remarkable description of his brief encounter with Conant at Willsboro Point, on the shore of Lake Champlain. Here’s an excerpt:

I found Mr. Conant in a bed that he had made upon a pebbled shoreline and under a canopy of cedars. He hadn’t heard me come around the house and I took a moment to size him up. He looked quite comfortable; he had a book propped up on his midsection and all that was left of his dinner was the can that had once contained it. It was readily apparent to me, from all that he had in and about his canoe, that Mr. Conant was making a long trip. If I hadn’t had a job to do, I would have left him alone. He had made this little piece of shoreline his own for the night and even though he was outdoors, I did feel that I was about to disturb his privacy.

McGrath also talks to harbor pilot Dougy Walsh. He, too, had a vivid memory of meeting Conant: “ ‘I was blown away by this guy,’ Walsh recalled. ‘He didn’t have any nautical charts! He was using a road atlas!’ ”

McGrath talks to a resident of Trenton, N.Y., Kevin Jolley. Conant was taking a break from an arduous portage through Trenton, when Jolley encountered him and used his iPhone to video-record a conversation with him. Here’s McGrath’s superb rendering of that conversation:

Scene: Conant, sitting on a street corner, leaning back against a green duffel, boots crossed, maps in his lap, hands knotted over his midsection. He has a Camaro Z28 cap on his head, and a toothbrush and a pen poking out of his breast pockets. The canoe is off to his right, parallel to the curb. A white brick building advertising “Plumbing & Heating Materials” squats in the background. Strewn backpacks and bags, a crate, a blue bucket, a Gatorade bottle: a landlubber’s boating picnic. A man in a motorized wheelchair cruises west, not on the sidewalk but in the street, against the flow of traffic, and doesn’t so much as turn his head to acknowledge the strange voyager.

“Where you headed?” a voice offscreen asks.

“I’m headed down to Florida,” Conant says, laughing.

“What made you stop through Trenton?” another voice asks. “Just the map?”

“Well, no,” Conant says. “I want to get on the Delaware, so I can head down to—there’s a Chesapeake-Delaware Canal that I can take into Chesapeake Bay. Now, Chesapeake Bay’s a large body of water, and I’ll be exposed. But it’s not as large as the Atlantic Ocean.”

The first offscreen voice asks, “Yeah, man, what’s your whole purpose, though?”

Before Conant can finish answering, a black S.U.V. pulls up alongside the curb, looming over the canoeist, and the camera turns away. A woman leans out the window. “Excuse me,” she says. “I’m looking for River View Plaza?”

You can tell from that passage – the Camaro Z28 cap, the toothbrush and pen poking out of Conant’s pockets, the canoe, the backpacks and bags, crate, blue bucket, Gatorade bottle – that McGrath relishes Conant’s details. I do, too.

“The Wayfarer” abounds with wonderfully specific, evocative, vibrant sentences. For example:

Biding his time in Austin, listening to an astronomy radio program on his headphones and scavenging from dumpsters, he thought of himself as a locust, lying in wait, hidden from civilization until his bank account began to grow again.

For a few days at a time, he might not speak to a soul, content with his Western novels and his chores. A circling beaver at dusk. A waning moon over the Green Mountains. Hooded Merganser ducklings at play. And then, suddenly feeling a social tug, he would beach in a river town and make several stops: a grocery, a church, a library, a bar.

After a mile or so, looking through a pair of binoculars I saw the flash of a yellow paddle blade, and there he was, bobbing in the ebb tide, riding so low that he appeared almost to be sitting on the water.

He arranged several sticks of driftwood crosswise, as a makeshift ramp for pulling the boat above the high-water mark. His overalls were draped across the bow, air-drying after a laundry dunking earlier in the morning. He was wearing swimming trunks and a salt- and sweat-stained T-shirt that said “New Orleans French Quarter.” His digital watch, I noticed, was set to Mountain Time. Rummaging around in his cooler, he asked me if I wanted a soda pop, and mentioned that he planned to have some ice water. He gave a few shakes to an old Gatorade bottle that he’d been re-using. “I got peaches,” he said. “You want one?”

And my favourite:

A few of the bridges over the canal were so low that he had to lean back and retract his chin, sliding underneath, as though into an MRI scanner, while cars rolled overhead. 

Reading this great piece, I thought of James Wood’s observation: “To notice is to rescue, to redeem; to save life from itself” (The Nearest Thing to Life). That’s what McGrath does in “The Wayfarer”; he brilliantly notices this solitary, authentic, tragic wanderer and thereby saves him from oblivion. Joseph Mitchell did the same thing in his classic “Joe Gould's Secret” (The New Yorker, September 19 & 26, 1964). I think “The Wayfarer” is destined to be a classic, too. 

Best of 2019: Talk

João Fazenda's illustration for Adam Gopnik's "If You Listen"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Talk of the Town” stories of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Adam Gopnik, “If You Listen,” August 19, 2019 (“The vessels, placed on pedestals of different heights, are configured out of musical order, to emphasize their range and varied provenances. Beer walked among them. ‘This boat sings a G,’ he said, pointing at a Chinese dragon-boat vase. ‘This earthenware temple by William Wyman, from 1977, that’s a beautiful F, and this very early portrait bust by Gaston Lachaise is our A-flat’ ”).

2. Mark Singer, “Man vs. Mouse,” January 7, 2019 (“He arranged ‘a Maginot Line of glue traps’ and set out a pizza box with a mouse-size hole and, inside, pieces of mozzarella and pepperoni surrounded by glue traps. This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out”).

3. Paige Williams, “Boxes,” July 1, 2019 (“Schiffman plucked a Nikon from her backpack and started shooting—moody light at the bedroom windows, a bouquet of bodega roses”).

4. Ian Frazier, “Cookout,” September 30, 2019 (“Cicadas in the trees did their impersonations of various electrical appliances, hydrangea bushes in the yard burst into even more elaborate bloom, and the incoming sunlight, at a rate of a thousand watts per square metre, transformed into culinary heat, seemed to hum”).

5. Rachel Felder, “Avocado Al Dente,” October 28, 2019 (“Miguel Gonzalez wakes up just after 4 A. M. on most weekdays with one thing on his mind: avocados”).

6. Nicholas Schmidle, “The Anti-Perfect,” September 16, 2019 (“ ‘It’s too early for you,’ she scolded one empty can, its ball bearing rattling around inside it”).

7. Patricia Marx, “Viewing Party,” April 1, 2019 (“There, among the chintz furniture and cucumber sandwiches that could have come over on the Mayflower, was ‘1076 Madison,’ an exhibition of Cynthia Talmadge’s paintings depicting the Campbell building. The art works were displayed on easels that on other occasions had supported wreaths, photo collages, and, in one case, a deceased’s cherished dartboard”).

8. Mark Singer, “ ‘The Anti-“Godot,' " April 15, 2019 ("Lean and nimble, he has dark brown hair that aimed in various opposing directions, a horseshoe mustache, a graying goatee, and scruffy extra-in-a-saloon-scene cheeks”).

9. Ben McGrath, “Boom,” January 28, 2019 (“The best place to watch the Tappan Zee Bridge blow up, this past Tuesday, seemed to be slightly north of Lyndhurst, the old Jay Gould estate, in Tarrytown”).

10. Patricia Marx, “New Shade,” January 14, 2019 (“It was a clear morning—the sky was a shade of blue that resembled Benjamin Moore’s Icing on the Cake”).

2017 Year in Review

Vincent Mahé, “The Tank” (2017)

There are highlights aplenty. But before we get started, let’s have a drink – something strong and refreshing. How about a Jonn the Beachcomber? Remember that one? McKenna Stayner described it as “slurpy and delicious, with three types of rum, allspice, grenadine, pineapple, lime, and crushed ice in a goblet the size of a fishbowl, topped with fruit salad and studded with heart-shaped straws” (“Bar Tab: Super Power,” February 27, 2017).  Yes, I’ll have one of those, please.

While we’re on the subject of drinks, I just want to say that this year’s “Bar Tab” and “Tables For Two” columns were terrific – tremendous sources of delicious sensual description. My favorite “Tables For Two” was Becky Cooper’s “Mermaid Spa” (March 6, 2017). It’s so good, I’m going to quote it in full:

The smell of chlorine emanating from the concrete building is the first hint that Mermaid Spa, in Coney Island, isn’t Spa Castle. There are no crystal rooms, no “color therapy” experiences, and, thankfully, no uniforms reminiscent of a totalitarian regime. This is a Ukrainian-Russian community center, a blustery twenty-minute walk from the subway, as traditional as banyas get in New York City, with a clientele that takes its sweating very seriously. There is, happily, also a restaurant, which serves some solid Russian classics.

The dining room, guarded by golden mermaids, is built around a hot tub. There are older men in groups; younger, shiny men in groups; and fit couples throwing back plastic pints of beer. Everyone is wearing towels, and most are in felt hats that, counterintuitively, help with the heat. Claim a table—it’s yours for the day—and head into the sauna. Sweat until you can’t stand it, and escape to the cold shower. Pull the chain and a torrent of ice water rushes over you. Then go to the steam room and get lost in the fog, before plunging into the ice pools. Jump out, gasp for breath, and feel your head pound with shock and relief. Repeat until you’re jelly, and then it’s time to eat.

Many tables stick with giant bottles of water and platters of fresh fruit. But you came for the food, so go for it. The large meat dishes—lamb leg, beef stroganoff, chicken tabaka—are hefty in a way that seems ill-advised in the setting. The hot appetizers are a better idea. The borscht is rich and thick. The garlicky French fries, piled on a sizzling iron skillet, though not exactly what you’d picture eating in a bathing suit, are a banya staple. Even more traditional are the pelmeni, filled with beef, lamb, and veal, and topped with mushroom gravy, which are addictive until they congeal at room temperature. Luckily, the dish is too good to leave for long. The best, though, are the cold appetizers, especially the pickled herring or, if you dare, the salo—raw pig lard, frozen and sliced thin. The procedure is half the fun: Layer it over some brown bread. Salt it. Pick up a raw garlic clove. Salt that. Bite one, then the other. The sharp fire of the raw garlic gives way to the sweetness of the bread, and to the soothing fat as it melts. It’s more bracing than the ice pools.

On the way out, do yourself a favor and stop by the beach, whose winter charm doesn’t get enough credit. The steam rises off your skin. The coastline extends as far as you can see, populated by no one.

That is tremendously alive, and it's the knowing sensual instructions (“Sweat until you can’t stand it,” “Pull the chain,” “Repeat until you’re jelly,” “Salt it,” “Pick up a raw garlic clove,” “Bite one, then the other”) that make it so.

For me, the best fact piece of the year was Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (February 6, 2017), a brilliant, brutal, immersive account of Mogelson’s experience traveling with an Iraqi SWAT team as it fights to liberate Mosul from ISIS occupation. Here’s a sample:

The snipers eventually quit for the night, but they resumed with gusto in the morning. The SWAT-team members who were not stationed on the roof went to the road behind the house. Bullets zinged up the alley leading to the cemetery. Every now and then, the men backed a Humvee into the alley and aimed a few bursts from the Dushka at Al Quds; they also launched grenades from a turret-mounted MK19. The moment the Humvee pulled back behind cover, more bullets hit the house and the houses around it. They kicked up dirt and slapped against walls. They pierced an empty fuel tanker. They shook the branches of a tree and cut down leaves. They ricocheted off power-line poles, ringing them like bells.

“The Avengers of Mosul” is an extraordinary piece of writing, one of the best I’ve read in a long time. I relish the way it unfolds sequentially without flashbacks. I relish its factual style. I relish its focus on the SWAT-team members. Most of all, I relish its details, e.g., a Humvee’s interior (“I crammed into Mezher’s vehicle, sharing a seat with a corporal in a black balaclava. We were wedged in amid ammo boxes, ammo belts, and the feet of another policeman, who stood in the turret behind a Dushka, a Russian heavy machine gun”); a medic’s cigarette ash (“He spoke excellent English, and worked with calm efficiency, often while smoking a cigarette, the ash falling on his patients”); the SWAT team’s deputy commander sitting on the edge of a bed “casually flipping a hand grenade around his finger”; inside a new aid station (“The fake-gold pages of a Koran, draped with a garland of plastic roses, were mounted on the wall, above bags of saline hanging from protruding screws”); the way a soldier puts his foot on a prisoner’s head (“The soldier in the cap twisted his boot back and forth, as if putting out a cigarette”); the ringtone of the Swat-team commander’s phone (“His phone kept ringing: the tone was the theme song from the movie ‘Halloween’ ”); a woman suturing a boy’s face with needle and thread (“It looked as if she’d dipped her hands in a bucket of red paint. I cut the thread and tried to shoo her off. A minute later, while attending to the wounds on the man’s legs, I looked up and saw that she was stitching him again”).

Mogelson’s follow-up piece, “Dark Victory,” (November 6, 2017), on the battle to expel ISIS from Raqqa, is pretty damn good, too. It features stunning color photos by Mauricio Lima, at least two of which will be on my “Best of 2017: Photography” list, which I’ll be posting in the next few days.

Mauricio Lima, "Female Fighters for the Syrian Democratic Forces" (2017)

My favorite New Yorker writer, Ian Frazier, had a great year, producing three excellent pieces: “High-Rise Greens” (January 9, 2017), “Drive Time” (August 28, 2017), and “Clear Passage” (November 13, 2017). “Drive Time,” a personal history piece on the pleasure Frazier gets from driving in New York City, contains a wonderful description of an early-morning drive he takes from his New Jersey home, across the George Washington Bridge, into the Bronx (“The slanted early-morning sun amid the pillars colors the sides of bread trucks moving slowly on their deliveries”), across the Harlem River on the Madison Avenue Bridge, into Manhattan on the F.D.R. Drive (“cruising by the high-rises and the hospitals of the Upper East Side and under the tower of the United Nations”), across the Brooklyn Bridge (“maybe the most glorious bridge in the world, its cables radiating from their junction points at the top of its towers like beams of light”), into Brooklyn, up the ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, onto the Belt Parkway to J.F.K. Airport, then, via the Belt Parkway, back to Brooklyn, up the ramp to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, across the bridge, onto the Staten Island Expressway, then across the Goethals Bridge and onto the New Jersey Turnpike, at which point, Frazier writes,

Here is the best part of the route, because when the landing patterns at Newark Airport are configured in a certain way the planes coming in fly parallel to the turnpike and directly above it. If everything is in synch, I can be motoring up the highway among lanes of cars and trucks (the turnpike is busy at any hour) with the freight-train tracks on the right and all the earthbound vectors lining up as an incoming jet roars overhead, outdistances everybody, diverges to the left, and sets down on a shimmery runway. The music on the radio can be helpful here; I’ve found that a big, anthemic prog-rock song makes a good accompaniment. Every tristate-area driver should experience this cool convergence once in a while.

After that, Frazier takes the I-78 west, Garden State Parkway north to Exit 151, then west on Watchung Avenue, south on Grove Street, and he’s home—“five boroughs, four major bridges, two airports, two states, and back in time for breakfast.”

Quite a trip! I enjoyed it immensely.

Three other reporting pieces that afforded me enormous pleasure: Gary Shteyngart’s “Time Out” (March 20, 2017), Nick Paumgarten’s “Singer of Secrets” (August 28, 2017), and Burkhard Bilger’s “Feathered Glory” (September 25, 2017). It was great to see Bilger back in the magazine after a lengthy absence.

Speaking of absences, where is Ben McGrath? His last New Yorker piece was the extraordinary “The Wayfarer” (December 14, 2015), which was #1 on my “Best of 2015” list. And his superb “The White Wall” (April 22, 2013) was #1 on my “Best of 2013.” I miss his work.

My favorite book reviewer, James Wood, didn’t appear in the magazine until June. I was worried he’d quit or been let go. But when he did finally show up, he delivered a masterpiece – “The Other Side of Silence” (June 5 & 12, 2017), a review of W. G. Sebald’s fiction. It contains a fascinating discussion of the way Sebald uses photographs in his novels. Wood says,

Few writers have used photographs in quite the way Sebald does, scattering them, without captions, throughout the text, so that the reader can’t be sure, exactly, how the writing and the photographs relate to each other, or, indeed, whether the photographs disclose what they purport to.

Brilliantly, Wood connects Sebald’s Austerlitz photos with what he says is Austerlitz’s central theme – retrieval. He writes that the effort of retrieval can be felt “whenever we stare at one of Sebald’s dusky, uncaptioned photographs, and it is not coincidental that photography plays the largest role in the two Sebald books that deal centrally with the Holocaust, The Emigrants and Austerlitz.”  

Referring to Austerlitz, Wood writes,

What does it mean to stare at a photograph of a little boy who is “supposed” to be Jacques Austerlitz, when “Jacques Austerlitz” is nothing more than a fictional character invented by W. G. Sebald? Who is the actual boy who stares at us from the cover of this novel? We will probably never know. It is indeed an eerie photograph, and Sebald makes Austerlitz say of it:

I have studied the photograph many times since, the bare, level field where I am standing, although I cannot think where it was. . . . I examined every detail under a magnifying glass without once finding the slightest clue. And in doing so I always felt the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting in the gray light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him.

The boy does seem to be demanding something from us, and I imagine that this is why, when Sebald came across the photograph, he chose it. Presumably, he found it in a box of old postcards and snapshots, in one of the antique shops he enjoyed rummaging through. In 2011, while working on an introduction to “Austerlitz,” I had a chance to examine the Sebald archive—manuscripts, old photographs, letters, and the like—at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, in Marbach am Neckar, and there I found the postcard that bears the boy’s image. Eager for a “clue,” I turned it over. On the reverse side, there was nothing more than the name of an English town and a price, written in ink: “Stockport: 30p.”

Amazing! The origin of Austerlitz is sourced in the image on this found postcard. In the novel, Jacques Austerlitz is rescued by the Kindertransport; he averts the misfortune lying ahead of him. Of Sebald’s writing, Wood says, “What animates his project is the task of saving the dead, retrieving them through representation.”

Another critical piece from 2017 that sticks in my memory is Alex Ross’s reverberant “Tank Music” (July 24, 2017), in which Ross attends a concert at the Tank in Rangely, Colorado. The Tank is just that – a sixty-five-foot-tall water tank that sound artist Bruce Odland has converted into a performance venue and recording studio. Ross describes the unique sound it makes:

When my eyes had adjusted to the gloom—a few portals in the roof provide shafts of light during the day—I picked up a rubber-coated hammer and banged a pipe. The sound rang on and on: the reverberation in the space lasts up to forty seconds. But it’s not a cathedral-style resonance, which dissipates in space as it travels. Instead, sound seems to hang in the air, at once diffused and enriched. The combination of a parabolic floor, a high concave roof, and cylindrical walls elicits a dense mass of overtones from even a footfall or a cough. I softly hummed a note and heard pure harmonics spiralling around me, as if I had multiplied into several people who could sing.

Ross is inside the Tank listening to the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth perform a piece by Judah Adashi when a storm breaks:

Gusts buffeting the exterior created an apocalyptic bass rumble; lashes of rain sounded like a hundred snare drums. The voices bobbed on the welter of noise, sometimes disappearing into it and sometimes riding above. As Adashi’s music subsided, the storm subsided in turn. In my experience, music has never seemed closer to nature.

That “Gusts buffeting the exterior created an apocalyptic bass rumble; lashes of rain sounded like a hundred snare drums” is very beautiful – one of my favorite sentences of 2017.

One more highlight of 2017: John Kinsella’s unforgettable “Milking the Tiger Snake” (January 9, 2017). Here it is in full:

Fangs through a balloon, an orange balloon

stretched over a jam-jar mouth scrubbed-up

bush standard—fangs dripping what looks

like semen, which is venom, one of the most

deadly, down grooves and splish splash

onto the lens of the distorting glass-bottom

boat we look up into, head of tiger

snake pressed flat with the bushman’s

thumb—his scungy hat that did Vietnam,

a bandolier across his matted chest

chocked with cartridges—pistoleer

who takes out ferals with secretive

patriotic agendas. And we kids watch

him draw the head of the fierce snake,

its black body striped yellow. “It will rear

up like a cobra if cornered, and attack,

attack!” he stresses as another couple

of droplets form and plummet. And when

we say, “Mum joked leave them alone

and they’ll go home,” he retorts, “Typical

bloody woman, first to moan if she’s bit,

first to want a taste of the anti-venom

that comes of my rooting these black

bastards out, milking them dry, down

to the last drop.” Tiger snake’s eyes

peer out crazily targeting the neck

of the old coot with his dirty mouth,

its nicotine garland. He from whom

we learn, who shows us porno

and tells us what’s what. Or tiger snake

out of the wetlands, whip-cracked

by the whip of itself until its back is broke.

My god, that’s a great poem! What makes it great is Kinsella’s use of words I can see (“fangs through a balloon, an orange balloon,” “stretched over a jam-jar mouth,” “fangs dripping what looks / like semen, which is venom,” “down grooves and splish splash / onto the lens of the distorting glass-bottom / boat,” “head of tiger / snake pressed flat with the bushman’s / thumb,” “scungy hat that did Vietnam,” “a bandolier across his matted chest / chocked with cartridges,” “the fierce snake, / its black body striped yellow,” “droplets form and plummet,” “the old coot with his dirty mouth, / its nicotine garland,” “tiger snake / out of the wetlands, whip-cracked / by the whip of itself until its back is broke”). These words jump to life as I read them. And I love the poem’s spontaneity; it has the feel of actual encounter, naked experience, quickly sketched as it’s happening, or immediately afterwards, while the details are still fresh.

And now, with the few drops of Jonn the Beachcomber still left in my goblet, I want to propose a toast: Here’s to the greatest magazine in the world! New Yorker without end, amen!