Best of 2018: Reporting

Janne Iivonen, illustration for Ian Frazier's "The Maraschino Mogul"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ian Frazier, “The Maraschino Mogul,” April 23, 2018 (“As summer progressed, to add a further touch of the apocalyptic, bees returning at the end of the day to hives in Red Hook began to glow an incandescent red. Some local beekeepers found the sight of red bees flying in the sunset strangely beautiful. All of them had noticed that their honey was turning red, too”).

2. Nicholas Schmidle, “Rocket Man,” August 20, 2018 (“Ten seconds into the burn, SpaceShipTwo was supersonic. Stucky began trimming the h-stabs, steadily increasing the vehicle’s pitch until it reached sixty-eight degrees. He and Mackay were travelling at Mach 1.8—about twice as fast as a Tomahawk cruise missile. Outside the vehicle, the light was draining from the sky, turning it a deep, muddy blue”).

3. Raffi Khatchadourian, “Degrees of Freedom,” November 26, 2018 (“Then, suddenly, the injector was triggered. The sound of valves opening and closing filled the operating theatre, along with the rush of compressed air through the injector, the noise a lightning-quick mechanical breath, culminating in a metallic clink. In an instant, the ninety-six electrodes were in, like a soccer cleat going into soft earth”).

4. David Grann, “The White Darkness,” February 12 & 19, 2018 (“It was hard to breathe, and each time he exhaled the moisture froze on his face: a chandelier of crystals hung from his beard; his eyebrows were encased like preserved specimens; his eyelashes cracked when he blinked”).

5. Zadie Smith, "Through the Portal," May 7, 2018 (“Yet what is a goddess doing here, before these thin net curtains? What relation can she possibly have to that cheap metal radiator, the chipped baseboards, the wonky plastic blinds?”).

6. John McPhee, “Direct Eye Contact,” March 5, 2018 (“In a storm, a big oak in mast, up a slope from my cabin there, fell not long ago. Its trunk broke freakishly—about twenty feet up—and the crown bent all the way over and spread the upper branches like a broom upon the ground. In the branches were a number of thousands of acorns. The next morning, there was enough bear shit around that oak to fertilize the Philadelphia Flower Show”).

7. Rebecca Mead, “Meal Ticket,” June 18, 2018 (“The aged lamb on my plate looked like shreds of an automobile tire, and it tasted like something I wouldn’t be able to wash out of my hair for a week”).

  

8. Nick Paumgarten, “Getting a Shot,” January 29, 2018 (“With thirty minutes until count, they re-racked for one try. Anderson got his fake beating, and off it went, bodies flying all over the place, well past the call of ‘cut.’ Sample opened his eyes wide: ‘That one looked a little real.’ The offenders, sweaty and ebullient, collected their pizzas and filed out, under guard”).

9. Jiayang Fan, “The Spreading Vine,” March 12, 2018 (“The bootleg wine was warm, and, when I raised my cup, I could see thick sediment dancing inside. The security guard had mentioned that the wine hadn’t yet been filtered, but Liu and Fatty didn’t seem bothered. We took a sip, and Fatty’s mouth puckered. The wine was harsh, sweet but astringent, and the taste seemed to register in the esophagus as much as in the mouth. As the men drained their cups, Liu reflected that at least it hadn’t cost them anything”).

10. Janet Malcolm, “Six Glimpses of the Past,” October 29, 2018 (“I see some resemblance to myself in pictures of him. That’s all I can say about Oskar. If I had known I was going to write about him, I would have asked my mother questions. But now I am like a reporter with an empty notebook. Oskar is out of reach”).

2018 Year in Review

Jorge Colombo, "The Honeywell" (2018)

Behold another fat stack of New Yorkers – forty-eight of them, each a tremendous source of reading pleasure. It’s fascinating to watch the pile grow, starting in January with the first solitary issue. At the beginning of each year, I always wonder whether the magazine will be able to match the quality of its previous year. And each year, it always does. 2018 was no exception. Among the highlights: 

1. The appearance of three of my all-time favorite writers: John McPhee (“Direct Eye Contact,” March 5); Ian Frazier (“Airborne,” February 5; “The Maraschino Mogul,” April 23; “The Day the Great Plains Burned,” November 5); and Janet Malcolm (“Six Glimpses of the Past,” October 29). I treasure their work.

2. Three extraordinary reporting pieces: David Grann’s “The White Darkness” (February 12 & 19); Nicholas Schmidle’s “Rocket Man” (August 20); Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Degrees of Freedom” (November 26).

3. Anna Russell’s wonderful “Talk of the Town” stories, including “Close Shave” (February 5), “Caffeinated” (March 19), “Leafy Greens” (July 9 & 16), and “Reunion” (September 17).

4. Hannah Goldfield’s ravishing “Tables For Two” food descriptions. 

5. All the “Bar Tab” columns, and the wonderful Jorge Colombo artwork that illustrate the newyorker.com versions.

6. Peter Schjeldahl’s brilliant exhibition reviews, and his notes for “Goings On About Town.” Schjeldahl is the magazine’s supreme pleasure-giver. 

I could go on and on. Instead, over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I loved most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another splendid year. I’d be lost without you. New Yorker without end, amen! 

February 12 & 19, 2018 Issue

David Grann’s “The White Darkness,” in this week’s issue, is a riveting account of Henry Worsley’s extraordinary solo attempt to achieve what his hero, Ernest Shackleton, failed to do a century earlier: trek on foot from one side of Antarctica to the other, a journey of more than a thousand miles, passing through the south pole, traversing “what is arguably the most brutal environment in the world.” The key word is “solo.” Grann says,

And, whereas Shackleton had been part of a large expedition, Worsley, who was fifty-five, was crossing alone and unsupported: no food caches had been deposited along the route to help him forestall starvation, and he had to haul all his provisions on a sled, without the assistance of dogs or a sail. Nobody had attempted this feat before.

Grann’s piece is an impressive reconstruction of Worsley’s venture, based mainly on Worsley’s diary and his audio broadcasts (via satellite phone). It puts us squarely there with Worsley on the ice (“It was hard to breathe, and each time he exhaled the moisture froze on his face: a chandelier of crystals hung from his beard; his eyebrows were encased like preserved specimens; his eyelashes cracked when he blinked”), slogging through blizzards (“Trudging uphill, with his head bowed against a fusillade of ice pellets, he moved at less than a mile per hour”), engulfed in obliterating whiteouts (“At times, he could not even discern the tips of his skis through the murk, which, he wrote, was as ‘thick as clotted cream’ ”). Once, in the poor visibility, he nearly falls into a crevasse (“He felt himself slipping into the hole, which was widening around him. He grabbed the edge and clung to it, dangling over an abyss, before he hauled himself up”). Another day, he blindly skis over a ridge:

His head and back and legs slammed against the ice. The sled flipped over twice, dragging him for twenty yards. He lay splattered on the ice, cursing. When he got to his feet, he nervously checked his fuel cannisters. One crack and he would be doomed, but there were none, and, conscious of time slipping away, he untangled his harness and set off again.

The brutal journey takes its toll. Early January, Worsley climbs the Titan Dome. Grann describes his condition:

Yet, as he climbed the Titan Dome, he found the ascent to be “a killer.” He had lost more than forty pounds, and his unwashed clothing hung on him heavily. “Still very weak—legs are stick thin and arms puny,” he noted in his diary. His eyes had sunk into shaded hollows. His fingers were becoming numb. His Achilles tendons were swollen. His hips were battered and scraped from the constantly jerking harness. He had broken his front tooth biting into a frozen protein bar, and told A.L.E. that he looked like a pirate. He was dizzy from the altitude, and he had bleeding hemorrhoids.

Soon afterwards he’s afflicted by stomach pain so bad he starts taking painkillers. Grann writes,

On January 19th, after man-hauling through another storm, Worsley was too tired to give a broadcast, and with his frozen hand he scribbled only a few words in his diary, the writing almost illegible: “Very desperate . . . slipping away . . . stomach . . . took painkillers.” He was incontinent, and repeatedly had to venture outside to squat in the freezing cold. His body seemed to be eating itself.

Keep going or call it quits? What would Shacks do? Never give up, is Worsley’s first thought. And here, at this pivotal moment, is where Grann writes his most inspired passage, shifting into free indirect style, inhabiting Worsley’s perspective:

But maybe that was wrong. Hadn’t Shackleton survived because he had realized that, at a certain point, he had no more moves and turned back? Unlike Scott and others who went to a polar grave, Shackleton reckoned with his own limitations and those of his men. He understood that not everything, least of all the Antarctic, can be conquered. And that within defeat there can still be triumph—the triumph of survival itself.

On January 22, 2016, after seventy-one days and a trek of nearly eight hundred nautical miles, Worsley calls for help. Two days later, in a Punta Arenas hospital, he dies of peritonitis.

“The White Darkness” is an unforgettable story of courage and endurance. Grann tells it magnificently.  

April 4, 2011 Issue

There’s a terrific GOAT blurb in this week’s issue about Karen Kilimnik’s show at 303 Gallery. It’s so good – where goodness means rich, surprising, delicious, nearly abstract - I’m going to quote it in full:

Like no one except Cady Noland – but with sweetness, rather than menace – Kilimnik decisively altered installational art two decades ago, imbuing it with an emotive, storytelling force. Here an early “scatter” piece, “The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers” (1989), is reprised, along with never before seen drawings from the eighties, recent paintings, and some new painting-like photographs (a full moon tangled in branches of nocturnal trees). Photographs, photocopies, props, and velvet drapes – almost entirely of black, white, and gray – elevate fandom for the old Brit spy show to a pitch of soulful delirium. Everything about it is shabby and surprises. The shattery composition amounts to a walk-in-Cubism of achingly various romance.

"The shattery composition amounts to a walk-in-Cubism of achingly various romance" – how fine that is! I wonder who wrote it? My guess is Andrea K. Scott, who writes GOAT’s “Critic’s Notebook” on art. But that “Photographs, photocopies, props, and velvet drapes – almost entirely of black, white, and gray – elevate fandom for the old Brit spy show to a pitch of soulful delirium” is very Schjeldahlesque. The way the verb “elevate” is buried in the middle of the sentence is a hallmark of Schjeldahl’s style. For example, in a piece on Agnes Martin, Schjeldahl writes, “Scored, alternately continuous and broken horizontal lines cut to white gessoed canvas through a white-bordered square mass of tar-black paint” (“Life Work,” The New Yorker, June 7, 2004; included in Schjeldahl’s great 2008 collection Let’s See). So … I think the “Kilimnik” blurb could’ve been written by Schjeldahl. It’s such a delectable piece that it intensified my appreciation of several other GOAT items this week, e.g., the “Joan Mitchell,” which features yet another of those gorgeous “buried verb” sentences - “Counterpoints of piled-up paint and blank surface convey that more is more and that less is heaven.” Now, that just has to be by Schjeldahl, doesn’t it? Either that or his piquant style is rubbing off on GOAT’s writers.

If you’re like me and you enjoy “catalog” sentences – exuberant compendiums of detail that bespeak love of life – you’ll like GOAT’s “Paul Ramirez Jonas” note, which describes the base of an equestrian statue that “doubles as a four-sided bulletin board.” On this board are pinned, “notes, business cards, ticket stubs, money, a dry-cleaning receipt, children’s art, a paper mobile, work-for-hire notices, and the inevitable ephemera of New York: a ‘no menus’ sign and a ‘Dan Smith will teach you guitar’ flyer.” Did I mention that I love lists like this? I devour them. John Updike, in his wonderful essay on Thoreau (in Updike’s 2007 collection Due Considerations), says, “It is the thinginess of Thoreau’s prose that excites us.” It’s the same for me regarding these great GOAT pieces: it’s the thinginess that excites me.

And the excitement continues, because there are at least two more dandy lists in this week’s GOAT: Mike Peed’s inspired “Tables For Two” description of Edi & The Wolf’s interior (“The inside holds what appears to be the hoard of an exuberant and undiscerning band of freegans: old wooden chairs affixed to the walls at curious angles, worn leather boots filled with dead flowers, a forty-foot rope salvaged from a Bed-Stuy belfry strung like crepe paper above the bar”); and a glorious passage in Richard Brody’s mini-review of Yasujiro Ozu’s wonderfully titled 1933 silent film Dragnet Girl – “His gleeful compositions put objects obsessively front and center – a drum kit, a set of dice, a row of Martini glasses, a billiard cue that pokes right at the camera – and presage the deep-focus symphonies of Orson Welles and even the vertiginous enticements of 3-D.” Great writing! I lap it up.

Postscript: Since posting the above, I’ve read Steve Coll’s “The Casbah Coalition” and David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold.” They're both excellent – destined to be classics. I wouldn’t be surprised to see “A Murder Foretold” made into a movie. It’s absolutely gripping.