Best of 2020: newyorker.com

Photo by Deanna Dikeman, from Erin Orbey's "A Photographer's Parents Wave Farewell"

Here are my favourite newyorker.com posts of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Eren Orbey’s “A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell,” March 4, 2020 (“Each image reiterates the quiet loyalty of her parents’ tradition. They recede into the warm glow of the garage on rainy evenings and laugh under the eaves in better weather. In summer, they blow kisses from the driveway. In winter, they wear scarves and stand behind snowbanks. Inevitably, they age”).

2. Emma Cline’s “Mike Mandel’s Selfies from the Seventies,” October 12, 2020 (“When Mandel pressed the timer, placing himself among the lives of strangers, it was the photographic equivalent of a toss of the coins in I Ching: you ask the universe to reveal itself; you await the universe’s answer”).

3. Helen Rosner’s “What We’re Buying for the Quarantine,” March 18, 2020 (photographs by Dina Litovsky).

Photo by Dina Litovsky, from Helen Rosner's "What We"re Buying for the Quarantine"

4. Rachel Syme’s “The Queen’s Gambit Is the Most Satisfying Show on Television,” November 13, 2020 (“But for me the glamour of the series is another of its quiet subversions. In life and on screen, chess is considered the domain of hoary men in moth-eaten cardigans, playing in smoky gymnasia that reek of stale coffee. ‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ instead, finds an unlikely synergy between the heady interiority of chess and the sensual realm of style”).

5. Andy Friedman’s “The Return of Kathleen Edwards,” August 8, 2020.

Illustration by Andy Friedman, from his "The Return of Kathleen Edwards"

6. Charlotte Mendelson’s “Sunflowers, with Love and Hate,” October 7, 2020 (“My sunflowers, grown from seed and standing proud among my dumpy black-currant bushes and rampaging mint, do rather dominate my garden”).

7. Maeve Dunigan’s “Poems Edgar Allan Poe Wrote While Lost In a Corn Maze,” October 30, 2020 (“Melancholy is the man / Who enters corn without a plan”).

8. Charles McGrath’s “Remembering Daniel Menaker, A Lighthearted Champion of His Writers,” October 29, 2020 (“Dan cared passionately about his writers. He defended them against what he thought was The New Yorker’s overly rigid house style, and sometimes preserved their eccentricities just for their own sake”).

9. Johanna Fateman's "The Photographer Who Set Out to Watch Herself Age," December 16, 2020 ("The shutter's cable release is like a part of her always in hand, its dark tail trailing out of the frame").

10. Chris Wiley’s “A Photographer and an Inmate Exchange Ways of Seeing,” December 13, 2020 (“At the heart of Soth and Cabrera’s connection is art: art as a container of meaning, a honing steel for the sensibilities, a lodestar for living”).

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”).

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”). 

Best of 2017: newyorker.com

Christoph Niemann, "Kosciuszko Bridge" (2017)

Here are my favorite newyorker.com posts of 2017 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ethan Iverson, “Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City,” August 17, 2017 (“Playing with Coltrane, Ellington’s ‘new-style’ arrangement had a mournful raindrop piano part that was dramatic and distinctive. At the Rainbow Grill, Ellington doesn’t play many of the raindrops but goes all out in rhapsodic style: heavy block chords, cascades, even a long left-hand trill underneath pointillistic right-hand stabs”).

2. Richard Brody, “Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places Honors Ordinary People on a Heroic Scale,” October 10, 2017 (““One of the movie’s most powerful sequences slips from the aforementioned goat mural to Varda’s own photograph of a dead goat from the start of her career, in 1954. It leads both to her extended recollection of one of her models, the late Guy Bourdin, himself a photographer, whom she commemorates with a visit to his house, another to the site of one of their photographs, and to an extraordinary, calculatedly ephemeral mural of him by JR that’s washed away with the tides”).

3. Christoph Niemann, “Under the Kosciuszko Bridge,” September 20, 2017 (“It was around noon on a Wednesday morning. The atmosphere was peaceful: half-empty parking lots, fences, warehouses, strange factories, strings of unkempt wires, and the odd traffic cone adding a touch of color”).

4. Philip Gefter, “Sex and Longing in Larry Sultan’s California Suburbs,” April 9, 2017 (“Whenever I walked down the boardwalk and entered his house, I was reminded of the light in his pictures; this is where he honed his precision-cut insight”).

5. Charlotte Mendelson, “In Praise of Autumn’s Rotting Beauty,” November 8, 2017 (“And, at this time of year, when even the most ordinary vine leaf is pink-spotted, when a simple Cox’s Orange Pippin apple is striped and freckled as a Paul Klee landscape, it’s extraordinary that I ever make it down the street”).

6. Jessamyn Hatcher, “The Ardent Followers of A Détache,” August 7, 2017 (“A box of knitwear samples had arrived from a factory in Peru, and Kowalska was trying to figure out whether a pair of wool culottes in UPS brown would work on the runway with shrimp-pink alpaca-lined clogs”).

7. Andrea K. Scott, “Calling All Eye-Rollers: An Undeniable David Hockney Show at the Met,” December 10, 2017 (“But for all his interest in optic technologies—he makes digital drawings on iPads, a selection of which concludes the Met’s show—Hockney’s thoughts always encircle painting. How acrylic can be thinned to soak into canvas and mimic the blue translucence of water, or how it can be brushed onto a surface in undulating cream-and-gray strokes to convey the plushness of a shag rug underfoot. Sensations—visual, tactile, emotional—are the heart of his project”).

8. Morgan Meis, “Charles McGee’s Vibrant Art and the Beauty of Detroit,” July 22, 2017 (“Recently, I spent an afternoon with the artist Charles McGee, at his home in Rosedale Park, a neighborhood in northwest Detroit. I was trying to understand the thinking behind his new mural downtown, titled “Unity,” which is a hundred and eighteen feet high and fifty feet wide, and which, as of May 31st, can be found on the side of a thirteen-story building at 28 West Grand River Avenue”).

9. Benjamin Hedin, “The Radical Criticism of William Gass,” December 8, 2017 (“Works of prose, he insisted, were not mirrors; they did not show us life. He called sentences ‘containers of consciousness,’ and the consciousness he meant was not mine, or yours, or even the author’s. It belonged to the book alone”).

10. Richard Brody, “What to Stream this Weekend: Seaside Frolics,” August 18, 2017 (“Shot by shot, line by line, moment by moment, Varda rescues the vitality and the beauty of the incidental, the haphazard, the easily overlooked—because she fills each detail with the ardent energy of her own exquisite sensibility”).