2020 Year in Review

Illustration by Min Heo, from newyorker.com

Let’s begin with a drink. I’ll have one of those Root of All Beers that Hannah Goldfield mentions in her “Tables For Two: The HiHi Room” (January 20, 2020). It “mixes a licorice-and-sarsaparilla witch’s brew with rye, vermouth, and honey.” Take a little sip. Ah, that's fucking wicked! Just what the doctor ordered. 

Okay, down to business. What to make of this year’s run of New Yorkers? Well, there was a hell of lot written about Trump. I skipped most of it. There was a hell of a lot written about the pandemic. I read every word. Best pandemic piece? No contest: “April 15, 2020” (May 4, 2020) – a brilliant mosaic portrait of twenty-four hours in the life of New York City as it struggles to deal with the pandemic, written by twenty-five New Yorker reporters and illustrated (in the online version) by seventeen photographers. Sample: 

As the sun came up, dully brightening the morning, it revealed that the day was ordinary and out of the ordinary at the same time. Figures appeared far apart on the boardwalk, each one alone, each making a different exercise motion. One was using a jump rope, another had two small dumbbells, and another a piece of pipe. Many wore masks. On the horizon to the left lay the narrow sand spit of the Rockaways, a stratum of pale-brown beach below a gray-green line of bushes and trees. To the right loomed the grayish point of Sandy Hook, in New Jersey. In between, a small boat motored slowly by, its wake as white as a bridal train. The ordinary-extraordinary day settled in and locked itself into place. The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere. The whole city had become a waiting room.

  

But great as it is, “April 15, 2020” is not this year’s most memorable piece. That honour belongs to Ben Taub’s extraordinary “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” (May 18, 2020). An account of an exploration team that builds an amazing one-of-a-kind submersible, named the Limiting Factor, and pilots it to the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean trenches, it brims with superb description and arresting details (e.g., “Now, as snow blew sideways in the darkness and the wind, he threw a grappling hook over the South Sandwich Trench and caught a lander thrashing in the waves”). In my review of it, when it first appeared, I said, 

Reading “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” I was in awe of the way Taub put me right there with Vescovo inside the Limiting Factor as he explores the bottom of, first, the Puerto Rico Trench, then the South Sandwich Trench, then the Java Trench, then the Mariana Trench, and, finally, Molloy Hole, in the Arctic. It’s an epic journey. I enjoyed it immensely.

Another piece I enjoyed enormously is Curtis Sittenfeld’s short story “A for Alone” (November 2, 2020), about an artist named Irene who’s doing a project on the so-called Billy Graham/Mike Pence rule that if you’re a married man, you don’t spend time alone with another woman. The project involves inviting men to lunch, asking them to fill out a handwritten questionnaire, and taking a Polaroid photo of them. This project flares into an affair with one of Irene’s interview subjects, a geologist named Jack (“Man No. 6”). 

I devoured this story. It intrigued me; it excited me; and I found myself mirroring off the character Jack. Does the story prove the rule's validity? Maybe, but it also shows it to be, as Jack says, “so depressingly heteronormative.” The piece abounds with wonderful lines. I think my favorite is “She wants his questionnaire to impart some central truth, to give her closure, and, while it’s nice, the niceness pales in comparison with what he said moments after filling it out—‘It’s you specifically’—or the many ardent declarations of devotion in the months that followed.” Sittenfeld’s return to Jack’s questionnaire after the affair suddenly ends is inspired. The whole story is inspired – one of the best I’ve read in a long time.

Other highlights: Bill Buford’s “Good Bread” (April 13, 2020); Alex Ross’s “The Bristlecones Speak” (January 20, 2020); Burkhard Bilger’s “Building the Impossible” (November 30, 2020) – all crazy good! But that’s enough for now. Over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I relished most. Thank you, New Yorker, for helping me get through this insane year. I propose a toast. Here’s to you, New Yorker, you gorgeous creature. I love you. 

November 2, 2020 Issue

This week’s New Yorker contains an excellent short story – Curtis Sittenfeld’s “A for Alone.” It’s about an artist named Irene who’s doing a project on the so-called Billy Graham/Mike Pence rule that if you’re a married man, you don’t spend time alone with another woman. I confess I wasn't aware of such a rule before I read this story. But after I finished it, I googled the rule, and it turns out it actually exists. That’s one of the things I like about the story. It doesn’t feel invented; it feels quite real, quite plausible. Irene’s project involves inviting men to lunch, asking them to fill out a handwritten questionnaire, and taking a Polaroid photo of them. This project flares into an affair with one of her interview subjects, a geologist named Jack (“Man No. 6”). 

I devoured this story. It intrigued me; it excited me; and I found myself mirroring off the character Jack. Does the story prove the rule's validity? Maybe, but it also shows it to be, as Jack says, “so depressingly heteronormative.” The piece brims with wonderful lines. I think my favorite is “She wants his questionnaire to impart some central truth, to give her closure, and, while it’s nice, the niceness pales in comparison with what he said moments after filling it out—‘It’s you specifically’—or the many ardent declarations of devotion in the months that followed.” Sittenfeld’s return to Jack’s questionnaire after the affair suddenly ends is inspired. The whole story is inspired – one of the best I’ve read in a long time.

Mid-Year Top Ten (2017)

Bendik Kaltenborn, "RJD2"

Time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

Reporting

1. Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul,” February 6, 2017 (“We accelerated into the lead, hurtling down alleys and whipping around corners. I was impressed that the driver could steer at all. The bulletproof windshield, cracked by past rounds, looked like battered ice, and a large photograph of a recently killed SWAT-team member obstructed much of the view”).

2. Gary Shteyngart’s “Time Out,” March 20, 2017 (“I missed out on the culmination of the evening, when all the watches were piled up for an Instagram photo with the hashtag #sexpile, but as I wandered into the autumn night my Nomos beat warmly against my wrist”).

3. Ian Frazier’s “High-Rise Greens,” January 9, 2017 (“Throughout the mini-farm, PVC pipes and wires run here and there, connecting to clamps and switches. The pumps hum, the water gurgles, and the whole thing makes the sound of a courtyard fountain”).

4. Ben Taub’s “We Have No Choice,” April 10, 2017 (“As the rescue boat bobbed next to the larger ship, Nicholas Papachrysostomou, an M.S.F. field coördinator, helped Blessing stand up. She was nauseated and weak. Her feet were pruning; they had been soaking for hours in a puddle at the bottom of the dinghy”).

5. Dexter Filkins’ “Before the Flood,” January 2, 2017 (“The work of maintaining the dam is performed in the “gallery,” a tunnel that runs inside the base, four hundred feet below the top. To get there, you enter through a portal near the river’s edge and walk down a sloping corridor into the center of the dam. The interior is cool and wet and dark. It feels like a mine shaft, deep under the earth. You can sense the water from the reservoir pressing against the walls”).

6. Calvin Tomkins’ “Troubling Pictures,” April 10, 2017 (“Large and medium-sized canvases in varying stages of completion covered most of the wall space in the studio, a long, windowless room that was once an auto-body shop, and the floor was a palimpsest of rags, used paper palettes, brushes, metal tubs filled with defunct tubes of Old Holland oil paint, colored pencils and broken charcoal sticks, cans of solvent, spavined art books, pages torn from magazines, bundled work clothes stiff with paint, paper towels, a prelapsarian boom box, empty Roach Motel cartons, and other debris”).

7. John Seabrook’s “My Father’s Cellar,” January 23, 2017 (“But for me alcohol offered an escape from control, his and everyone else’s. A glass of wine gave me a kind of confidence I didn’t otherwise feel—the confidence to be me”).

8. Kathryn Schulz’s “Losing Streak,” February 13 & 20, 2017  (“Grieving him is like holding one of those homemade tin-can telephones with no tin can on the other end of the string.”)

9. Jake Halpern’s “A New Underground Railway,” March 13, 2017 (“Fernando grabbed his backpack and opened his door; in the blackness, the car’s overhead light seemed glaringly bright. I told him to call me when he made it, or if he felt that he was in serious danger. He nodded goodbye, scurried down the embankment, and disappeared into the brambles”).

10. Fred Kaplan’s “Kind of New,” May 22, 2017 (“She sang with perfect intonation, elastic rhythm, an operatic range from thick lows to silky highs”).

The Critics

1. James Wood’s “The Other Side of Silence,” June 5 & 12, 2017 (“What animates his project is the task of saving the dead, retrieving them through representation”).

2. Dan Chiasson’s “The Fugitive,” April 3, 2017 (“He is, at his best, a poet of home-brewed koans, threading his philosophical paradoxes into scenes of slacker glamour”).

3. Peter Schjeldahl’s “What’s New?,” March 27, 2017 (“Politics percolate in evocations of social class and function, with verisimilitude tipping toward the surreal in, for example, a set that suggests at once a beauty parlor, a medical facility, and a prison”).

4. Adam Kirsch’s “Pole Apart,” May 29, 2017 (“But, where Eliot often used this kind of moral X-ray vision to express contempt and disgust for the world, Milosz had seen too much death to find skulls profound”).

5. Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “The Island Within,” March 6, 2017 (“Of course, any such biographical explanation is a cheat: the reader cannot be expected to supply these facts; the poem means what it means, on its own”).

6. Dan Chiasson’s “The Mania and the Muse,” March 20, 2017 (“This is the critical point about Lowell as a writer: he had been straitjacketed, he had been physically violent, he had been shaken to his fundament with regret, he had been wounded deeply by wounding others. To create a life, along with a body of work that reflected it, was to find and follow the thread inside the maze”).

7. Emily Nussbaum’s “Tragedy Plus Time,” January 23, 2017 (“Despite the breeziness of Breitbart’s description, there was in fact a global army of trolls, not unlike the ones shown on “South Park,” who were eagerly “shit-posting” on Trump’s behalf, their harassment an anonymous version of the “rat-fucking” that used to be the province of paid fixers. Like Trump’s statements, their quasi-comical memeing and name-calling was so destabilizing, flipping between serious and silly, that it warped the boundaries of discourse”).

8. Alex Ross’s “Singing Philosophy,” February 27, 2017 (“Ghostly, twelve-tonish figures in the final bars feel uncertain, provisional, questing”).

9. Anthony Lane’s “Pretty and Gritty,” March 27, 2017 (“ ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is delectably done; when it’s over, though, and when the spell is snapped, it melts away, like cotton candy on the tongue”).

10. Adam Gopnik’s “Mixed Up,” January 16, 2017 (“The illusion of confiding in the reader alone is what essayists play on. You’re my best friend, Montaigne, like every subsequent essayist of his type, implies to his readers.”)

Talk of the Town

1. Nick Paumgarten’s “Bong Show,” May 15, 2017 (“Delicate leaves and lace, tubes within tubes, ghouls embedded inside chambers like ships in bottles”).

2. Robert Sullivan’s “Facing History,” June 19, 2017 (“At Goodfellows, a barbershop on Fourth Avenue, people knew the church but not the tree. ‘In the North? That seems strange,’ a customer said”).

3. Tad Friend’s “Pulverizer,” June 19, 2017 (“The hairs on his forearm stood erect, like little soldiers”).

4. Lauren Collins’s “Sideline,” June 19, 2017 (“He must have been chewing on his cigarette, because it hung from his mouth like a broken limb”).

5. Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Incidents,” June 19, 2017 (“In front of him, a set of stairs led up to a rectangular opening cut into a wall. Beyond the opening was an empty chamber. Lights installed in the walls of the chamber were making it glow different shades—first fuchsia, then baby blue, then electric yellow. Everything outside the chamber also kept changing color, including Turrell”).

Goings On About Town

1. Becky Cooper’s “Tables For Two: Mermaid Spa,” March 6, 2017” (“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”).

2. McKenna Stayner’s “Bar Tab: Super Power,” February 27, 2017 (“Visiting Super Power, with the gentle glow of a blowfish lamp, the fogged windows dripping hypnotically with condensation, and the humid, coconut-scented air, was exactly like being on a cruise, but everyone was wearing wool”).

3. Becky Cooper’s “Tables For Two: Sunday in Brooklyn,” January 23, 2017 (“At some point, someone near you will order the pancakes, and you will turn involuntarily to stare at the stack coated in hazelnut-praline-maple syrup and brown butter. Gesture to your waiter for an order of those. The sauce, the texture of butterscotch, slips down the sides like a slow-motion waterfall. It tastes like melted gelato. The pancakes, slightly undercooked, seem almost naughty”).

4. Nicolas Niarchos’s “Bar Tab: Paul’s Casablanca,” January 16, 2017 (“Instead, Sevigny has gone for a purer form of fun: an enfilade of domed caverns where dancers sway to rock and disco hits flanked by tiled nooks from which clusters of beautiful folk watch the whorling crowd.”)

5. Shauna Lyon’s “Tables For Two: Atla,” June 5 & 12, 2017 (“After the great pea-guacamole controversy of 2015, it takes cojones to add mint to an otherwise innocent, chunky scoop, which arrived, one afternoon, dramatically hidden under an elephant-ear-size purple-corn chip”).

6. Wei Tchou’s “Bar Tab: Diamond Reef,” May 1, 2017 (“Diamond Reef’s frozen take (the Penichillin) employs an age-old principle: anything is more fun when tossed into a slushy machine”).

7. Richard Brody’s “Movies: Who’s Crazy?,” March 13, 2017 (“When love creeps in, the doings turn mock-solemn, as a mystical marriage—a threadbare rite of flung-together outfits and tinfoil décor—plays out like a discothèque exorcism”).

8. Talia Lavin’s “Bar Tab: Fishbowl,” May 29, 2017 (“It causes the wasp-waisted barmaids in strappy green minidresses to grunt audibly as they muddle handfuls of cherries, and scoop ice as if shovelling a driveway”).

9. Matthew Trammell’s “Night Life: Step Out,” June 5 & 12, 2017 (“Rich saxophones and organs stood in for synthesizers, drums jangled and twitched, and vocalists like King Krule gave the beats another sheet of voice”).

10. Joan Acocella’s, “Dance: Alfa Romeo,” June 19, 2017 (“Even when she’s performing small steps, or no steps, you can still feel, across the auditorium, that astonishing engine, humming along like an Alfa Romeo, at the base of her spine”).

Best Short Story: Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Show Don’t Tell,” June 5 & 12, 2017 (“Giving a blow job to a Peaslee, it turned out, wasn’t the best I could do, the closest I could get”). 

Best Poem: John Kinsella’s “Milking the Tiger Snake,” January 9, 2017 (“tiger snake /out of the wetlands, whip-cracked / by the whip of itself until its back is broke”).

Best newyorker.com post: Philip Gefter’s “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”).

Best Issue: January 9, 2017, containing, among other pleasures, Ian Frazier’s “High-Rise Greens,” John Kinsella’s “Milking the Tiger Snake,” and Wei Tchou’s “Bar Tab: Rabbit House.”

Best Cover: Mark Ulriksen’s “Strike Zone” (May 1, 2017)

Best Illustration: Riccardo Vecchio’s “Bill Knott” for Dan Chiasson’s “The Fugitive”(April 3, 2017).

Riccardo Vecchio, "Bill Knott"

Best Photograph: William Mebane’s “Tim Ho Wan” for Jiayang Fan’s “Tables For Two: Tim Ho Wan” (April 17, 2017)

William Mebane, "Tim Ho Wan"

Best Sentence

Everyone is born with a subject, but it is fully expressed only through a commitment to form, and Yiadom-Boakye is as committed to her kaleidoscope of browns as Lucian Freud was to the veiny blues and the bruised, sickly yellows that it was his life’s work to reveal, lurking under all that pink flesh. [Zadie Smith, “A Bird of Few Words,” June 19, 2017]

Best Paragraph

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. [Becky Cooper, “Tables For Two: Mermaid Spa,” March 6, 2017]

Best Detail

But the bar’s smallness works to its advantage, and the place has been created with intense care and an idiosyncratic sensibility: there are warm woods and twinkling Edison bulbs; the bases of the water glasses are tuliped so they spin on their sides precariously but never spill. [Wei Tchou, “Bar Tab: Rabbit House,” January 9, 2017]

Best Description

When I look at the back of a Datograph, one of Lange’s more complicated watches (it features a date as well as a chronograph, a kind of stopwatch), I see a small city of silver and gold gears and wheels, a miniature three-dimensional universe in which everyone is running to catch the next bus. [Gary Shteyngart, “Time Out,” March 20, 2017]

Best Question

While creating the universe, did God have in mind that, at a certain point, a stuffed goat with a car tire around its middle would materialize to round out the scheme? [Peter Schjeldahl, “The Wave of History,” May 29, 2017]

Best Quotation

“On this movie I got down on my knees and prayed before takes, and then just grabbed my balls and tried somehow to be of service.” [Anthony Michael Hall, quoted by Tad Friend in his Talk story “Pulverizer,” June 19, 2017]

Best “Bar Tab” Drink Description: Colin Stokes’s rendering of a John Campbell’s Martini – “smooth, with sumptuous olives” [“Bar Tab: The Campbell,” June 19, 2017]

Seven Memorable Lines:

1. A reporter’s request for an explanation from Secret Service personnel inside Trump Tower proved as fruitful as a visit to the Tomb of the Unknown Complainer. [Mark Singer, “New York Strip,” January 16, 2017]

2. True, she expresses a weakness for vanilla sex, whereas his preference, one suspects, is for Chunky Monkey, but that’s easily fixed. [Anthony Lane, “Movies: Fifty Shades Darker,” March 6, 2017]

3. History isn’t a feather. It’s an albatross. [Jill Lepore, “The History Test,” March 27, 2017]

4. But grief makes reckless cosmologists of us all. [Kathryn Schulz, “Losing Streak,” February 13 & 20, 2017]

5. Soon enough, Elphi will be superseded by some other Instagrammable wonder. [Alex Ross, “Temples of Sound,” May 22, 2017]

6. I sometimes pretend that the ringing in my ears is a sound I play on purpose to mask the ringing in my ears—a Zen-like switcheroo that works better than you might think. [David Owen, “Pardon?,” April 3, 2017]

7. As for her having a face, you can say that again. [Joan Acocella, “Dance: Alfa Romeo,” June 19, 2017]

June 5 & 12, 2017 Issue

Hooray! James Wood is back. He has an excellent piece in this week’s issue. Titled “The Other Side of Silence,” it’s a consideration of W. G. Sebald’s fiction. It focuses on an unlikely topic – Sebald’s comedy. As Wood notes in his piece, comedy isn’t usually associated with Sebald. When I think of Sebald’s novels, I think of death. But in “The Other Side of Silence,” Wood suggests that Sebald’s fiction has “an eccentric playfulness.” He provides several examples, including one from The Emigrants involving a “teas-maid,” which Wood describes as “an ungainly machine, popular at the time, that contained a clock and an electric kettle; it could wake you up with morning tea.” Wood writes, “Sebald approaches this cozy English object with mock-solemn gingerliness, as if he were an anthropologist presenting one of his exhibits.” I’d completely forgotten about this scene. But now that Wood has drawn my attention to it, I can see a mild, eccentric sort of humor in it. The same applies to his other examples of Sebald’s comedy.

I like the way Wood segues from Sebald’s comedy to Sebald’s use of photographs. He says, “The playful side of Sebald’s originality made him a consumingly interesting and unpredictable artificer.” This leads into 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.” I value this observation immensely. For me, it’s one of art’s raisons d'être.

Other highlights in this week’s issue: Matthew Trammell’s “Night Life: Step Out” (“Rich saxophones and organs stood in for synthesizers, drums jangled and twitched, and vocalists like King Krule gave the beats another sheet of voice”); Richard Brody’s “Movies: Mother’s Day” (“The movie’s version of the event continues with Crawford inflicting further cruelties in a state of theatrical, self-dramatizing possession—emphasized by her Kabuki-like mask of cold cream”); Shauna Lyon’s “Tables For Two: Atla” (“After the great pea-guacamole controversy of 2015, it takes cojones to add mint to an otherwise innocent, chunky scoop, which arrived, one afternoon, dramatically hidden under an elephant-ear-size purple-corn chip”); and Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Show Don’t Tell” (“Giving a blow job to a Peaslee, it turned out, wasn’t the best I could do, the closest I could get”). 

Year In Review: One Last Caress

Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn

Readers of this blog may wonder what this year-end flurry of lists – the best of this, the best of that – is all about. I sometimes wonder myself. I think it’s a way for me to prolong the pleasure of these wonderful pieces. The truth is I’m not yet ready to let them go. Yes, I’m looking forward to next year’s run. But I’m also fondly looking back at the many pieces that have afforded me such bliss. In a way, these lists are a last caress before bidding them adieu. But let’s not get too morose. I can always retrieve them from the New Yorker archive any time I want to.

And now I find my listing impulse is not yet exhausted. I want to make one more – a final inventory of 2016 New Yorker reading pleasure. Here goes.

Best Reporting Piece: Dana Goodyear’s “The Earth Mover,” August 29, 2016.

Best Critical Piece: James Wood’s “Scrutiny,” December 12, 2016.

Best “Talk of the Town” Piece: Laura Parker’s “Bee’s Knees,” March 21, 2016.

Best “Goings On About Town” Piece: Nicolas Niarchos’s “Bar Tab: Berlin,” February 8 & 15, 2016.

Best Illustration: Bendik Kaltenborn’s “Thundercat,” for Matthew Trammell’s “Night Life: Rock Bottom,” June 6 & 13, 2016.

Best Photograph: Pari Dukovic’s “Yuja Wang,” for Janet Malcolm’s “The Performance Artist,” September 5, 2016.

Best Short Story: Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Gender Studies,” August 29, 2016 (“Their eyes meet—she’s perhaps three per cent less hammered than she was down in the lobby, though still hammered enough not to worry about her drunkenness wearing off anytime soon—and at first he says nothing. Then, so seriously that his words almost incite in her a genuine emotion, he says, ‘You’re pretty’ ”).

Best Poem: Julie Bruck’s “Blue Heron, Walking,” August 29, 2016 (“these outsized / apprehenders of grasses and stone, snatchers of mouse and vole, / these mindless magnificents that any time now will trail / their risen bird like useless bits of leather”).

Best Blog Post: Lev Mendes’s “Philip Larkin’s Life Behind the Camera” (“Page-Turner,” January 29, 2016) (“Photography, like poetry, may have simply provided him a way of noticing and preserving”).

Best Cover: J. J. Sempé’s “Waves,” for the August 29, 2016, issue.

Best Issue: April 4, 2016 – The Food and Travel Issue, containing “Lauren Collins’s “Come to the Fair,” Dana Goodyear’s “Mezcal Sunrise,” Carolyn Kormann’s “The Tasting-Menu Initiative,” and Dexter Filkins’s “The End of Ice” – all excellent.

Now, a few images from my 2016 New Yorker reading experience, in no particular order, montage-style:

TEN-FOOT-TALL BALD EAGLE: “I went to see a ten-foot-tall American bald eagle, made entirely out of red-white-and-blue Duck Brand duct tape, on display in a parking lot.” [Jill Lepore, “The War and the Roses,” August 8 & 15, 2016]

SURFBOARD WITH SKELETON: “Hanging just above the front door is a yellow surfboard with a skeleton clinging to it, bony limbs locked around the board for better purchase.” [Talia Levin, “Bar Tab: Otto’s Shrunken Head Tiki Bar & Lounge,” December 12, 2016]

SILVER ADIDAS WITH WINGS: “At ground level, herds of strange footwear scurried around: silver Adidas sneakers with wings sprouting from the ankles, fuzzy ones with tails and tiger stripes, high-tops with green Teddy bears for tongues.” [Lizzie Widdicombe, “Barbie Boy,” March 21, 2016]

MERMAID GOWN: “Her appliqués mushroom magically on the slope of a skirt. A mermaid gown that Charles James might have made for Gypsy Rose Lee is crossbred with a Ming vase; a cascade of ruffles evokes the waterfall in a brush-painted landscape.” [Judith Thurman, “The Empire’s New Clothes,” March 21, 2016]

SEBRIGHT CHICKENS: “The Sebrights were crazy-beautiful: proud-looking, with jutting breasts, each of their silver-white feathers edged in black, as though someone had outlined them with a Sharpie.” [Lauren Collins, “Come to the Fair,” April 4, 2016]

FLAME TREES: “Lipstick-red flame trees were in bloom, and the air was filled with the intoxicating smell of gasoline.” [Dana Goodyear, “Mezcal Sunrise,” April 4, 2016]

TEN-FOOT-LONG ICICLES: (“Pressing ourselves against the interior walls and shimmying along the narrow banks of the rushing water, we worked our way into a vaulting palace of ice, where ten-foot-long icicles hung from the ceiling like giant fishhooks. Underneath the roar, you could hear the drip of melting ice.” [Dexter Filkins, “The End of Ice,” April 4, 2016]

SOVIET-ERA TRACTOR: “A Soviet-era tractor, spindly and goggle-eyed, gleamed within the shadows of a stone barn.” [James Lasdun, “Alone in the Alps,” April 11, 2016]

GOLDEN SKELETON ON BLUE HORSE: “Walk downhill along the path that leads away from the Sphinx, and you are confronted by a voluptuous golden skeleton—Death—riding a blue horse over a mirrored green sea, from which disembodied arms stretch up to cling to the world of the living.” [Ariel Levy, “Beautiful Monsters,” April 18, 2016]

CALLERY-PEAR TREE: “Elmore, the pro, then dazzled everybody by extracting a noxious blue plastic drop cloth from a sidewalk callery-pear tree in about half a second.” [Ian Frazier, “The Bag Bill,” May 2, 2016]

SKIN BOAT CONFERENCE TABLE: “At the headquarters, a three-story building near the ocean in Barrow, a whaling skin boat provides the center support for a glass-topped boardroom table.” [Tom Kizzia, “The New Harpoon,” September 12, 2016]

VOLKSWAGON KARMANN GHIA: “a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, its hood and trunk popped open, like an upturned deerstalker cap” [Jill Lepore, “Esmé in Neverland,” November 21, 2016]

DANGLING NECKTIE: “Despite an insistent voice in my head telling me to look away, I continued to observe, bending my head farther down for a closer view. As I did so, I failed to notice that my necktie had slipped down through the slats of the louvred screen and was dangling into the motel room within a few yards of the woman’s head.” [Gay Talese, “The Voyeur’s Motel,” April 11, 2016]

WHALE-LIVER MEMBRANE: “ ‘We believe if you follow these rituals, the animals will always come to us,’ Oomittuk said, as he pulled a drum made of whale-liver membrane from a carrying case.” [Tom Kizzia, "The New Harpoon," Septmber 12, 2016]

ORANGE MASON JAR WITH CREAM CLOUD: “The delicious budino arrives in a small orange Mason jar with a cloud of cream.” [Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: Covina,” July 25, 2016]

PORCELAIN DOLL BEER TAPS: “The taps are porcelain doll heads, which stare like angelic witnesses to the evening’s festivities.” [Becky Cooper, “Bar Tab: Yours Sincerely,” June 6 & 13, 2016]

RICKETY GONDOLA: “Chhota Shigri—six miles long and shaped like a branching piece of ginger—is considered one of the Himalayas’ most accessible glaciers, but our way across was a rickety gondola, an open cage reminiscent of a shopping cart, which runs on a cable over the Chandra. With one of the porters working a pulley, we climbed in and rode across, one by one, while fifty feet below the river rushed through gigantic boulders.” [Dexter Filkins, “The End of Ice,” April 4, 2016]

GOLDEN BANANA PEEL: “A lamp whose base is a golden banana peel suggests a knowing wink.” [GOAT, April 25, 2016]

SCARECROW OWL DECOYS: “Wherever you go, scarecrow owl decoys solemnly watch over you from the shelves above.” [David Kortava, "Bar Tab: The Owl Farm," November 14, 2016]

STAG BLADDERS: “He had just urged an audience of Silesian farmers to fertilize their fields with cow intestines stuffed with chamomile blossoms, and stag bladders filled with yarrow root (stag bladders being ‘almost an image of the cosmos’).” [Burkhard Bilger, “Ghost Stories,” September 12, 2016]

And on that pungent note, I’ll end. Thank you New Yorker for another magnificent year of reading pleasure.

Credit: The above illustration, by Bendik Kaltenborn, is from “Above & Beyond” (The New Yorker, January 25, 2016).