Best of 2021: Reporting

Illustration by Mark Wang, from John Seabrook's "Zero-Proof Therapy"

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

1. John Seabrook, “Zero-Proof Therapy,” September 27, 2021 (“I swirled the beer and admired the lacery of foam, as the bubbles slid slowly down the side of the glass. I took a deep whiff—the Cascade hops, from the Pacific Northwest, had notes of pineapple and hay. I brought the glass up to my lips, and took a long swallow. A tingle of good cheer seemed to spread through my hand up my right arm and into my chest”).

2. Gary Shteyngart, “My Gentile Region,” October 11, 2021 (“I have always imagined that beyond its pleasurable utility the penis must be an incomprehensible thing to most heterosexual women, like a walrus wearing a cape that shows up every once in a while to perform a quick round of gardening”).

3. Heidi Julavits, “The Fire Geyser,” August 23, 2021 (“The lava near the path reached out with giant panther paws that seemed to demand petting”). 

4. Rivka Galchen, “Better Than a Balloon,” February 15 & 22, 2021 (“And Pacific Trimming had recently remodelled, so that if you walked by on Thirty-ninth Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, even the least crafty among us might be filled with a desire for rickrack, for zippers in thirty-six colors, for shank buttons”).

5. Nick Paumgarten, “It’s No Picnic,” March 1, 2021 (“At Hamido, the evening was mild, and the curve was still more or less flat; happy to be around people other than our families, we sat at a large table on the sidewalk, in the open air, sharing platters of bran-grilled orate, grilled octopus, fried sardines, baba ghanoush, and beers of our own bringing. Was all of this reckless? Probably”).

6. Ed Caesar, “Only Disconnect,” November 29, 2021 (“The men were making Berber tea, which is the color of rust. They seemed delighted to see a stranger, and came out to greet me. Their grooved, hard faces confirmed a lifetime spent outdoors. Next to them, I looked like a newborn. They gave me bread, a tin of sardines, and a glass of the tea, which was as sweet as a candy cane. I happily devoured all of it”).

7. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2,” April 19, 2021 (“Nothing goes well in a piece of writing until it is in its final stages or done”). 

8. Ann Patchett, “Flight Plan,” August 2, 2021 (I saw the headlights against the garage door and went outside in the rain to meet him with my love and my rage and my sick relief.)

9. M. R. O’Connor, “Towering Infernos,” November 15, 2021 (“The temperature was a hundred degrees, and the Air Quality Index was 368—a ‘hazardous’ rating. An opened but undrunk can of Budweiser sat on the patio of an abandoned house, and the milkweed on the side of the road was drenched in psychedelic-pink fire retardant. We took our breaks sitting inside idling trucks, where we could breathe conditioned air instead of toxic smoke”).

10. Lauren Collins, “Kitchen Confessional,” December 20, 2021 ("In Roman’s world, an admission of effort must be offset by an ungiven fuck"). 

Best of 2021: The Critics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best of 2021: Photos

Here are my favorite New Yorker photos of 2021:

1. Jerome Strauss’s photo for “Above & Beyond: The Annual Arrival of Cherry Blossoms,” April 19, 2021 (see above);

2. Amy Lombard's portrait of Jake Paul for Kelefa Sanneh's "Punching Down" (November 8, 2021);

3. Brian Emfinger's photo for Heidi Julavits's "The Fire Geyser" (August 23, 2021);

4. Lakin Ogunbanwo's portrait of El Anatsui for Julian Lucas's “Structure and Flow” (January 18, 2021);

5. Gus Powell's photo for Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: Smashed NYC" (June 7, 2021);

6. Thomas Prior's portrait of Kate Orff for Eric Klinenberg's "Manufacturing Nature" (August 9, 2021);

7. Naila Ruechel's photo for Judith Thurman's "Eye of the Needle" (March 29, 2021);

8. William Mebane's photo for Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: Dame" (January 25, 2021);

9. Sofia Yates's photo for Hannah Goldfield's "Tables For Two: Rolo's" (February 8, 2021);

10. Phyllis Ma's photo for Hannah Goldfield's "Tables For Two: The New Carry-Out Cuisine" (June 21, 2021).

Best of 2021: Talk

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

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

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

2. Adam Iscoe, “Back at It,” March 15, 2021 (“Quintana, a five-year veteran of the concession stand, wandered behind the candy counter. He found a thirty-five-pound bag of popcorn kernels in a storage closet. ‘At one point during the pandemic, I bought popcorn, just to try to relive the experience,’ he said, as he poured buttery salt powder along with the kernels into a popcorn machine. ‘It wasn’t the same.’ A minute later: pop-pop-pop. ‘Yeah, this is it,’ he said. Pop-pop-pop. ‘This is movie-theatre popcorn!’ ”).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best of 2021: Illustrations

Here are my favorite New Yorker illustrations of 2021: 

1. Sam Alden's illustration for Ann Patchett's "Flight Plan," August 2, 2021 (see above);

2. Andrea Ventura's portrait of Tom Stoppard for Anthony Lane's "O Lucky Man!" (March 1, 2021);

3. Javi Aznarez's illustration for Ruth Franklin's "Into the Void" (September 13, 2021);

4. Cristiana Couceiro's illustration for Joshua Yaffa's "Five-Month Plan" (February 8, 2021);

5. Javier Jaén’s illustration for Gary Shteyngart’s “My Gentile Region” (October 11, 2021);

6. Pola Maneli's portrait of Pharoah Sanders for Hua Hsu's "The New Thing" (March 29, 2021);

7. Golden Cosmos’s illustration for Daniel Alarcón’s “The Collapse of Arecibo” (April 5, 2021);

8. Jorge Colombo's illustration for Rivka Galchen's "Better Than a Balloon" (February 15 & 22, 2021);

9. Toma Vagner's illustration for Alex Ross's "Grinding Bass" (December 13, 2021);

10. Cecilia Carstedt's portrait of Adele for Carrie Battan's "Imperfect Union" (December 6, 2021).

Best of 2021: GOAT

Photo by Shawn Michael Jones, from Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: We All Scream for Ice Cream"

Here are my favourite “Goings On About Town” notes of 2021 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: We All Scream for Ice Cream,” August 2, 2021 [“There are pints to take home, too; availing myself of an insulated bag outfitted with ice packs ($7), I toted several on the subway, including Panna Stracciatella, flecked with dark-chocolate shards, and Somebody Scoop Phil, the brainchild of the sitcom producer turned food personality Phil Rosenthal, featuring a lightly salted malted milk-chocolate base, dense with chunks of Twix and candied peanuts, plus swirls of fudge and panna caramel that oozed obscenely when I peeled off the lid”].

2. Richard Brody, “Movies: Despair,” August 2, 2021 ("In the crude and vulgar beauty of a society on the edge of violence, Stoppard’s ping-ponging witticisms freeze in the air with a ballistic grimness").

3. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Fan-Fan Doughnuts and El Newyorkino,” March 15, 2021 ["But it’s the basics I crave: Gerson’s yeasted, brioche-style dough, which contains flour, butter, and eggs and is fried to the color of honey, is a marvel in itself, not much heavier than cotton candy, and is perhaps best coated in an inky slick of Valrhona chocolate or braided and lightly lacquered with the simplest white icing. Chocolate comes in hot-beverage form, too: a rich, velvety Belgian-style mix of melted Guittard (both milk and dark), not so thick that you need a spoon, but thick enough that it’s nice to use one, to more easily consume the doughnut croutons and house-made marshmallow bobbing at the top"].

4. Michaelangelo Matos, “Music: LSDXOXO: ‘Dedicated 2 Disrespect,’ ” May 24, 2021 ("The Berlin-based d.j. and producer LSDXOXO makes spiky, near-iridescent house music, full of distortion-heavy riffs and buzzing percussion that cuts through a room like a silver suit").

5. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Peter Luger Steak House,” March 29, 2021 ["At my table, in the shadow of the historic Williamsburgh Savings Bank building, I ordered another wedge salad (rapture, again) and a burger, a beautiful mass of luscious ground beef whose iodine tang played perfectly off a sweet, salty slice of American cheese, a fat cross-section of raw white onion, and a big, domed sesame bun"].

6. Andrea K. Scott, “At the Galleries: Lee Lozano,” August 2, 2021 ["Lozano blazes through subjects, from the X-ray intensity of charcoal self-portraits, made during her student years, to cartoonish near-Pop (such as the untitled 1961 work pictured here), absurdly priapic gags, and muscular renditions of hardware and tools that strain at the edges of the paper on which they’re drawn, as if to say, Screw this"].

7. Anthony Lane, “Movies: Senna,” ("Asif Kapadia’s 2011 documentary, which should reward the attention even of those who would never dream of watching cars on a track, is filmed as an homage to velocity—it’s stripped of narration, talking heads, and anything else that might threaten to slow it down. What remains is a self-propelling drama, and the abiding image of Senna’s oil-dark eyes, gleaming through the letter box of his helmet").

8. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Becky Kolsrud,” March 8, 2021 ("In another, smaller landscape, bordered by a band of sky blue, a neon-pink skull rests on the curve of a green planet as a lemon moon blares from the corner").

9. David Kortava, “Tables For Two: Bathhouse Kitchen,” December 6, 2021 ("For the lovely butternut-squash salad, Sousa served the squash raw, thinly sliced, and tossed with golden raisins, pecans, onion, tarragon, and blue cheese. It was easily the funkiest dish I’ve ever consumed in a bathrobe").

10. Richard Brody, “What to Stream: Thomasine & Bushrod,” March 8, 2021 ("When, during a shoot-out, Bushrod—in a majestic closeup—reloads his revolver, the whispered click of metal on metal resounds like righteous thunder").

On the Horizon: My "Best of 2021" Lists

Illustration by Min Heo (from The New Yorker)

It’s time to start making my “Best of 2021” lists. Each year at this point, I like to pause, look back, and take stock of my New Yorker reading experience. I find listing is a good way to do it.

I’m not going to reveal my pick for best reporting piece just yet. But I’ll give you a hint. It features a pint of Two Trellises. That’s it, no more clues. As it is, I’ve probably given it away. Besides, the year isn’t over. There are three more New Yorkers still to come. Who knows what delightful surprises they might contain.