August 21, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is David Owen’s absorbing “There and Back Again,” a report on the “rapidly evolving but still only semi-visible economic universe known as the reverse supply chain.” Owen tells about attending “a three-day conference, in Las Vegas, conducted by the Reverse Logistics Association, a trade group whose members deal in various ways with product returns, unsold inventories, and other capitalist jetsam.” He sketches the history of refunds, tracing it back to J. C. Penney (“Among his innovations was allowing customers to return anything, no questions asked”). He describes visiting a liquidation business called America’s Remanufacturing Company (A.R.C.), based in Georgia:

We walked through the receiving area, a large, open space that was filled with recent arrivals—tilting piles of household appliances, stacks of yellow bins containing miscellaneous Amazon returns—and stopped in front of a pallet on which half a dozen Husqvarna two-thousand-pounds-per square-inch electric pressure washers, made under a license by Briggs & Stratton, had been stacked and bound with plastic stretch wrap. (A pressure washer is many homeowners’ second-favorite power tool, after their chainsaw. It shoots a stream of water at high velocity, and can be used to clean a roof, blast mold off a wooden deck, or scare away a bear, as a friend of mine did after being surprised by one while scrubbing down the inside of his swimming pool.) As Adamson and I watched, workers sorted units by model and year of manufacture. They checked electrical components and replaced damaged parts with parts they’d salvaged from returns they couldn’t repair. Much of the refurbishing was done on a manufacturing line that A.R.C. bought from a Briggs & Stratton plant, in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, and modified, in part by adding a car-wash-like cleaning system to one end.

The rampant consumerism underlying the reverse supply chain is appalling. But the innovative way the market responds to it is impressive. The reverse supply chain is a great subject. Owen writes about it clearly and engagingly.

November 14, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is David Owen’s absorbing “They Shoot, He Scores,” a profile of the film composer Carter Burwell. Owen takes us into Studio Two at Abbey Road – the Beatles’ old studio – where Burwell is recording his score for Martin McDonagh’s new movie, The Banshees of Inisherin:

On the first day in Studio Two, McDonagh, who had just returned from a holiday in the Lake District, told Burwell, “I’ve been humming all the tunes.” His only instruction to Burwell, he said, had been not to write anything that sounded like Irish pub music—“the easy go-to for a film like this.” Burwell’s score features the harp, an instrument so closely associated with Ireland that its image appears on the country’s coins, but there’s nothing publike about the melodies he came up with for it, which often float on a current of strings, in a way that the harpist himself called “dreamy.” The score also features a synthesized celeste, which Burwell played and recorded himself. A real celeste looks like a shrunken upright piano and sounds like tinkling bells, or a child’s xylophone; it’s the most conspicuous instrument in Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” and in John Williams’s “Harry Potter” scores. What Burwell described to me as the “plicky-plucky sounds” of the harp and the celeste created the fairy-tale effect that he was aiming for.

For me, the most interesting aspects of Owen’s piece are his descriptions of Burwell at work. For example:

Toward the end of the morning, Burwell recorded the music for a scene in which Pádraic’s sister, Siobhán, played by Kerry Condon, is riding to the mainland in an open boat. Pádraic watches from the top of a cliff, and they wave to each other. After the musicians had played the passage once, McDonagh asked Burwell to come up to the control room.

“This is a tricky one, Carter,” he said. “We’ve been working with a version where the music ends on the first wave.” In the version Burwell had just conducted, the music stopped ten seconds later. The difference was small, but it affected the emotional tone of the departure, adding emphasis to a moment that McDonagh preferred dissipate in silence. Starting the music earlier solved that problem but created a synchronization issue—a chord now arrived right before a small group of birds took flight from a pier, prematurely signalling their movement.

“It looks like it’s early by a few frames,” Burwell said. “The music can sometimes happen after the picture, but you can’t have it before.” He said that he would adjust the tempos in his hotel room that night but leave the “ink” unchanged—meaning that new scores wouldn’t have to be printed.

Another example:

On a video monitor in his office, Burwell played me a scene from “Banshees” in which Farrell’s character is driving milk to town in a wagon. There’s music but no dialogue. The melody, consisting mainly of flute, harp, and strings, is slow and understated. “My job is to bring you into this world,” he said. “But, if it starts to seem like it’s about the music, that’s another thing.” He showed me the scene again, with a slightly different score: “This was my first version. It’s very similar, but the chords are more definitively major.” McDonagh had found it “too warm” and “too resolved,” he said. “Martin felt—and I agreed with him—that, at this point in the film, it would be better to keep the over-all tone a little gloomier.”

Reading “They Shoot, He Scores,” I found myself wondering what The Banshees of Inisherin’s score actually sounds like. I went to iTunes and downloaded it. I’m playing it as I write this. It’s delightful. Now I want to see the movie. 

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”).

Echoes and Reverberations

Photo by Thomas Prior, from Eric Klinenberg's "Manufacturing Nature"

One of the pleasures of being a long-time New Yorker reader is noticing the connections. Five recent examples:

1. Eric Klinenberg, in his excellent “Manufacturing Nature” (August 9, 2021), mentions Brooklyn’s Plum Beach: “On a cold day this spring, Orff met me at Plumb Beach, a short, narrow stretch of shoreline at the southern edge of Brooklyn, and a nesting-and-breeding ground for horseshoe crabs.” I read that and immediately thought of Ian Frazier’s “Blue Bloods” (April 14, 2014), a brilliant piece on horseshoe crabs set, among other places, on Plum Beach (“Farther along the beach, Russian fishermen stood beside their belled fishing poles, impassive and unimpressed as only Russians can be. They had lit fires of damp straw to keep the bugs away; the sharp-smelling smoke coiled around”). 

2. In his piece, Klinenberg visits the wetlands that jut out from the mouth of the Mississippi River. This is a landscape that Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about in her memorable “Under Water” (April 1, 2019): “So thick with simulated sediment were the channels of the Bird’s Foot that they looked as if they were filled with ink.”

3. Also in his piece, Klinenberg mentions the federal levees that line the Mississippi. This triggered a remembrance of John McPhee’s great “Atchafalaya” (February 23, 1987), a piece on the construction of the levees by the Corps of Engineers: "Three hundred miles up the Mississippi River from its mouth—many parishes above New Orleans and well north of Baton Rouge—a navigation lock in the Mississippi’s right bank allows ships to drop out of the river."

4. Elizabeth Kolbert, in her absorbing “The Lost Canyon” (August 16, 2021), refers to the Colorado River Compact, a subject covered in David Owen’s superb “Where the River Runs Dry” (May 25, 2015). Owen, in his piece, travels the length of the Colorado, noting the many signs of water crisis ("Hinojosa Huerta explained that the embankment was a levee, built to protect locals from the river—a function almost impossible to imagine, because the channel of the Colorado was a mile to our east, and there was nothing between it and us but desert"). Kolbert focuses on the alarming depletion of Lake Powell, a giant man-made reservoir on the Colorado. Her piece could be considered a companion to Owen’s report.

5. Also in her piece, Kolbert mentions Floyd Dominy, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation in the nineteen sixties and Glen Canyon Dam’s biggest booster. Dominy is one of four men profiled in John McPhee’s masterful “Encounters with the Archdruid” (March 20, 27 & April 3, 1971): "Dominy begins to talk dams. To him, the world is a tessellation of watersheds. When he looks at a globe, he does not see nations so much as he sees rivers, and his imagination runs down the rivers building dams."

So lots of echoes and reverberations! They add an extra layer of meaning to my New Yorker reading experience. 

David Owen's "Where the Water Goes"

One of my favorite books of 2017 is David Owen’s Where the Water Goes, an account of Owen’s exploration of the Colorado River watershed. He drives from the river’s headwaters, in Colorado, to its historical delta in Sonora, Mexico, a three thousand mile trip. Along the way, he stops at farms, resorts, dams, and pumping stations, and talks with scientists, farmers, environmentalists, and various other people connected with the river, including a type known as Water Buffaloes (water experts). The story Owen tells is of a great river that’s so transformed by human usage it’s “more like a fourteen-hundred-mile-long canal.”

Where the Water Goes is a longer, deeper, more detailed version of Owen’s superb New Yorker piece, “Where the River Runs Dry” (May 25, 2015). It contains an abundance of interesting material not even touched on in the magazine article. For example:

1. Almost all of Chapter 6, in which Owen travels the Upper Colorado River Scenic Highway (“It’s one of the most beautiful highways I’ve ever driven on”), tells about a tributary of the Colorado – the Dolores River (“The Dolores has had a surprisingly large impact on western water use – and the reason is salt”), describes a salt-removal facility (the Paradox Valley Unit) on the Dolores, meets with a member of the board of supervisors of Coconino County (“Coconino County is the second-largest county in the United States by area; it’s also one of the driest”), tells about Glen Canyon Dam and the reservoir it created, Lake Powell; he describes the Salt River Project-Navajo Generating Station, a coal-burning electricity plant near the lake’s southern shore, drives across Glen Canyon Dam, and visits Lake Powell Resort (“As I wandered among the houseboats, I was followed, in the water, by two ducks and an enormous carp. All three were apparently accustomed to being fed from the dock”).  

2. Almost all of Chapter 7, in which Owen profiles John Wesley Powell, “a one-armed Civil War veteran and geology professor who led the first two successful boat expeditions through the Grand Canyon, between 1869 and 1872”; he noses around Lonely Dell Ranch, the compound where John Doyle Lee lived in the early 1870s while operating a ferry that crossed the Colorado at “the last place for hundreds of miles where crossing the river on a horse or in a wagon was feasible”; he talks to a the owner of a rafting company that runs guided trips on the Colorado, and tells about a relatively recent development in the ongoing evolution of the Law of the River – RICDs (“recreational in-channel diversions”).

3. Most of Chapter 8, in which Owen visits Hoover Dam and tells about its construction (“The canyon’s walls were prepared by ‘high scalers,’ who used jackhammers to remove loose rocks and outcroppings while dangling hundreds of feet above the riverbed in primitive wooden bosun’s chairs, which looked like children’s swings”; “The sun made the canyon so hot that touching them with bare skin could be agonizing”; “Buried within each new section were separate networks of pipes: one that would later be used to inject portland-cement grout into cracks, joints, and gaps between columns, and one that would be used to cool the concrete as it cured by circulating refrigerated water through it”).

4. Most of Chapter 9, in which Owen visits the Las Vegas Springs Reserve (“People who look closely at the specimen plants in the botanical garden at the Spring Preserve are usually surprised to see that even the cacti are irrigated: there are little black plastic water emitters poking out from the sand and gravel at their bases. This is true not just of the botanical garden but of most of the city’s xeriscapes”), and the Angel Park Golf Club (“When I visited the course, the superintendent took me over to see the reservoir. He splashed his hands near the intake valve to show me there was nothing scary about recycled water, which he said was clean enough for bathing”); he visits Patricia Mulroy, “the principal architect of Nevada’s most innovative efforts to acquire and conserve water,” at the University of Nevada. She provides one of the book’s most powerful quotes:

“There are still those who want to talk about winners and losers,” she told me, “but they don’t understand the interconnected economy of the river. We have plumbed the Colorado to bleed water in all directions. We take water in Wyoming – outside the river’s watershed – and move it to Cheyenne. Come down to Colorado: we move it across the Continental Divide, from the West Slope to the Front Range, into the Kansas-Nebraska basin – outside the watershed of the Colorado. We move it across the Utah desert to the Wasatch Front, to Salt Lake, provo, Orem, and all those agricultural districts – not in the Colorado watershed. In New Mexico, we move it to Albuquerque, which straddles the Rio Grande. In Arizona, we move it across 360 miles of desert, to Phoenix and Tucson and still more agricultural districts. And in California, we move it over hundreds of miles of aqueducts, from Lake Havasu to the coastal cities – not in the Colorado watershed.

All those far-flung places, Mulroy said, nevertheless constitute a single system, which extends far beyond the river itself and adds up to more than a quarter of the economy of the United States. “We may be citizens of a community, and a state, and a country, but we are also citizens of a basin,” she said. “What happens in Denver matters in L.A. What happens in Phoenix matters in Salt Lake. It’s web, and if you cut one strand the whole thing begins to unravel. If you think there can be a winner in something like that, you are nuts. Either we all win, or we all lose. And we certainly don’t have time to go to court.”

We are also citizens of a basin – that, for me, is one of this good book’s important messages. The New Yorker piece makes this point, too, when it says, “Most of the water in the Colorado River originates in snowpack in mountains in the northern part of its watershed, but the biggest consumers of that water are at the river’s other end – in Southern California.”

How Colorado River water gets to L.A. and beyond is one of Where the Water Goes’ main narratives. Pumps are a crucial part of the story. One of my favorite scenes, in both the New Yorker piece and the book, takes place in the enormous Whitsett Pump Plant on Lake Havasu’s western shore. Here’s the book version:

The plant’s main building has a terrazzo floor and Art Deco light fixtures, and it contains nine-thousand-horsepower General Electric pumps, with robin’s-egg-blue housings. “That’s eighteen school buses per pump,” Nash said, as we walked down the line. “Each one could fill an Olympic-size swimming pool in twenty seconds,” Nash said, as we walked down the line. The pumps run so smoothly that when you place a nickel on any of them—as visitors are sometimes encouraged to do—there isn’t enough vibration to make it slide off. They take Colorado River water from the lake and push it through nine enormous pipes, which rise three hundred feet up a steep slope directly behind the plant. From the top of the slope the water flows through a mile-long tunnel to Gene Walsh Reservoir, in the Whipple Mountains. A second pumping station then pushes it higher still, and through a six-mile-long tunnel, to Copper Basin, a bigger reservoir. Nash said, “Then it goes by gravity down to Iron Mountain and Iron lifts it a hundred and forty-four feet; then to Eagle, and Eagle lifts it four hundred and thirty-eight; then to Julian Hinds, and Hinds lifts it four hundred and forty-one.” Nash turned to his daughter. “Am I getting it right so far?” he asked. Altogether, there are five pumping stations, ninety-two miles of tunnels, and a hundred and forty-seven miles of open aqueducts, buried conduits, and siphons. The siphons are minor masterpieces of early-twentieth century hydraulic ingenuity; they carry the water, without mechanical assistance, under desert washes, to protect the aqueduct from inflows of silt during flash floods. “They’re like the P-traps in your house,” Nash said. “The water comes in on one side and daylights slightly lower on the other.”

That “The pumps run so smoothly that when you place a nickel on any of them—as visitors are sometimes encouraged to do—there isn’t enough vibration to make it slide off” creates an arresting image of immense mechanical engineering precision and ingenuity. It’s one of two images that, after I finished reading the book, linger in my memory. The other is of the white “bathtub ring” of mineral deposits on the surrounding bluffs of Lake Mead. It’s briefly mentioned in the magazine piece. But in the book, Owen describes it more vividly:

The lake and the surrounding landscapes are so vast that when you see the bathtub ring from far away you have little sense of the scale. Viewed up close, though, it makes you gulp: the distance from the surface of the water to the top of the white band that day was 130 feet.

Lake Mead’s white bathtub ring is a haunting reminder that all the mechanical ingenuity in the world won’t avail if there’s no water to pump.

April 3, 2017, Issue

For me, the most striking item in this week’s issue is Riccardo Vecchio’s exquisitely drawn and colored portrait of the poet Bill Knott, illustrating Dan Chiasson’s “The Fugitive,” a review of Knott’s I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems. Vecchio is one of The New Yorker’s all-time greats. His portrait of Hank Jones for Gary Giddins’s superb “Autumn in New York” (The New Yorker, June 4, 2007) is my pick for best New Yorker illustration of the Remnick era.

Riccardo Vecchio, "Bill Knott" (2017)

Riccardo Vecchio, "Hank Jones" (2007)

Six sentences in this week’s New Yorker that I enjoyed immensely:

1. The show’s duelling series demonstrate Oehlen’s savvy ability to take the piss out of painting via his non-allegiance to style. [“Goings On About Town: Art: Albert Oehlen”]

2. Davies resurrects footfalls and shadows, the pattern and texture of carpets, the sound of his mother’s singing voice—the inner drama of undramatic things that are lodged in memory for a lifetime. [Richard Brody, “Goings On About Town: Movies: The Long Day Closes”]

3. It’s a pleasure to hear Duterte dip a toe in groovier waters on songs like “Baybee,” a velvety yacht jam that shows just how much pop can be wrung out of bedroom studios. [“Goings On About Town: Night Life: Jay Sam”]

4. Roberta’s mere presence, as she delivers the tarte tatin, a rose of butter-caramel apple slices hugging a hazelnut crust, rescues the experience from the dispassion of the suits—as does François’s wink and pour of gifted Calvados. [Becky Cooper, “Tables For Two: Augustine”]

5. 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?”]

6. He is, at his best, a poet of home-brewed koans, threading his philosophical paradoxes into scenes of slacker glamour. [Dan Chiasson, “The Fugitive”]

July 25, 2016 Issue

Conservation has always been a significant element of New Yorker river writing: see, for example, John McPhee’s classic “The Encircled River,” and David Owen’s recent “Where the River Runs Dry.” But in George Black’s “Purifying the Goddess,” in this week’s issue, “conservation” seems pallid as a description of what’s required to clean up the Ganges. Black reports, “The Ganges absorbs more than a billion gallons of waste each day, three-quarters of it raw sewage and domestic waste and the rest industrial effluent, and is one of the ten most polluted rivers in the world.” This arresting piece contains some of the grossest descriptions of river pollution I’ve ever read. Here, for example, is Black’s depiction of the river at Varanasi:

When I visited, last October, the garbage and the post-monsoon silt lay thick on the ghats, the four-mile stretch of steps and platforms where thousands of pilgrims come each day to take their “holy dip.” The low water at the river’s edge was a clotted soup of dead flowers, plastic bags, feces, and human ashes.

Note that “When I visited last October.” Black’s piece abounds with the kind of authenticating first-person observation and engagement I relish (e.g., “One evening, I climbed a steep flight of steps from the ghats to the tiny Atma Veereshwar Temple, where I met Ravindra Sand, a Saraswat Brahmin priest who is deeply engaged in the religious traditions of Varanasi and the river”).

Black reports that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has embarked on a Ganges cleanup initiative called Namami Gange. Under this program, the Ganges’ surface will be cleaned with “trash-skimming machines and booms,” and “sewage-treatment plants that are already under construction will be completed.” But the Varanasi sewers and the Kampur tanneries remain an “intractable problem.”

“Purifying the Goddess” ends vividly with Black accompanying Navneet Raman, chairman of the Benares Cultural Foundation, as he walks along the Ganges’ east bank, scattering the purple seeds of a tropical almond known locally as “the sewage tree,” “because it can filter heavy metals and other pollutants out of standing water.”

Black’s piece is an excellent addition to The New Yorker’s long line of great river writing.

Postscript: My favorite sentence in this week’s issue is Jiayang Fan’s sensuous “The delicious budino arrives in a small orange Mason jar with a cloud of cream” (“Tables For Two: Covina”).

Best of 2015: Reporting

Here are my favorite fact pieces of 2015 (with a choice quote from each selection in brackets):

1. Ben McGrath, "The Wayfarer," December 14, 2015. (“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.”)

2. Nick Paumgarten, "Life Is Rescues," November 9, 2015. (“I wandered out into the rain and then into the kitchen tent. On a row of plastic hangers someone had hung the team’s bananas. Each hanger held two bunches. I stood looking at this, in admiration and wonder. Iceland.”)

3. Ian Frazier, "Bronx Dreams," December 7, 2015. (“Fifty kids in zombie makeup zombied to ‘Thriller,’ two middle-school actors did the scene in which Othello strangles Desdemona, a girl named Massire Camara recited a poem about the death of her uncle that is now on YouTube, and a stage full of elementary-age students in a step-dance group called the Bengal Tigers, from P.S. 55, did a routine with stomping, clapping, and chanting that bounced the audience out of its seats.”)

4. William Finnegan, "Off Diamond Head," June 1, 2015. (“Hands folded under my chin, I drifted. A bruise-colored cloud hung over Koko Head. A transistor radio twanged on a seawall where a Hawaiian family picnicked on the sand. The sun-warmed shallow water had a strange boiled-vegetable taste. The moment was immense, still, glittering, mundane. I tried to fix each of its parts in memory. I did not consider, even in passing, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it chose.”)

5. Rebecca Mead, "Sole Cycle," March 23, 2015. (“Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped.”)

6. David Owen, "Where the River Runs Dry," May 25, 2015. (“Our pilot, David Kunkel, asked me to retrieve his oxygen bottle from under my seat, and when I handed it to him he gripped the plastic breathing tube with his teeth and opened the valve.”)

7. Dana Goodyear, "A New Leaf," November 2, 2015. (“We waded into the water and put our flippers and masks on. I ducked my head under and gazed. Two years ago, it was rocks and urchins. Now kelp was everywhere, ochre-colored, thirty feet tall, flailing like tube dancers outside a car wash.”)

8. Ian Parker, "The Shape of Things to Come," February 23 & March 2, 2015. (“Ive’s aesthetic is not austere: one could think of the work done here as a reticent man’s idea of exuberance, with rapture expressed in the magnetic click of a power adapter.”)

9. Jill Lepore, "Joe Gould's Teeth," July 27, 2015. (“ ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’ is a defense of invention. Mitchell took something that wasn’t beautiful, the sorry fate of a broken man, and made it beautiful—a fable about art. ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’ is the best story many people have ever read. Its truth is, in a Keatsian sense, its beauty; its beauty, truth.”)

10. Elif Batuman, "The Big Dig," August 31, 2015. (“In a shed nearby, a noisy filtration machine was chugging its way through approximately two thousand sacks of Byzantine and Neolithic dirt.”)

Credit: The above photo, by Victor Schrager, is from Ben McGrath’s "The Wayfarer," The New Yorker, December 14, 2015.

Mid-Year Top Ten 2015

“Aesthetic hierarchies,” James Wood says, in his great The Nearest Thing to Life, “are fluid, personal, eccentric, always subject to revision, and quite possibly a bit incoherent.” Yes, and they’re also fun. I enjoy evaluating The New Yorker. This time each year, I pause, look back over the past six months, and pick my favorite pieces. Here then is my Mid-Year Top Ten 2015.

Reporting

1. David Owen’s “Where the River Runs Dry” (May 25, 2015)

2. Ian Parker’s “The Shape of Things to Come” (February 23 & March 2, 2015)

3. Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Century of Silence” (January 5, 2015)

4. Jill Lepore’s “The Cobweb” (January 26, 2015)

5. Rivka Galchen’s “Weather Underground” (April 13, 2015)

6. Dana Goodyear’s “The Dying Sea” (May 4, 2015)

7. Rebecca Mead’s “Sole Cycle” (March 23, 2015)

8. Luke Mogelson’s “When the Fever Breaks” (January 19, 2015)

9. Jane Kramer’s “The Demolition Man” (June 29, 2015)

10. William Finnegan's “Tears of the Sun” (April 20, 2015)

Criticism

1. James Wood’s “Look Again” (February 23 & March 2, 2015)

2. Dan Chiasson’s “Out of This World” (April 13, 2015)

3. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Moving Pictures” (March 16, 2015)

4. James Wood’s “Circling the Subject” (May 4, 2015

5. Alex Ross’s “Eyes and Ears” (February 9, 2015)

6. Dan Chiasson’s “Beautiful Lies” (March 30, 2015)

7. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Native Soil” (May 25, 2015)

8. James Wood’s “Story of My Life” (June 22, 2015)

9. Dan Chiasson’s “American Snipper” (June 1, 2015)

10. Anthony Lane’s “High Gear” (May 25, 2015)

Talk of the Town

1. Mark Singer’s “All-Nighter” (May 11, 2015)

2. Ian Frazier’s “Russophilia” (February 16, 2015)

3. Lizzie Widdicombe’s “Air Bus” (June 1, 2015)

4. Nick Paumgarten’s “Hut!” (June 22, 2015)

5. Dana Goodyear’s “Life With Father” (June 29, 2015)

6. Sarah Larson’s “Cinephiles” (January 19, 2015)

7. Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Without Audience” (June 1, 2015)

8. John Seabrook’s “Free” (February 2, 2015)

9. Emma Allen’s “Landlord” (June 29, 2015)

10. Alec Wilkinson’s “Hands” (June 29, 2015)

Best Short Story

Louise Erdrich’s “The Flower” (June 29, 2015)

Best Poem

C. K. Williams, “Hog” (February 23, 2015)

Best Blog Post

Jiayang Fan, “Searching for America with General Tso” (“Cultural Comment,” newyorker.com, March 12, 2015)

Best Illustration

Riccardo Vecchio’s illustration for Jane Kramer’s “The Demolition Man” (June 29, 2015) (see above)

Best Photo

Ian Allen’s portrait of Chastity Belt for “Goings On About Town” (May 25, 2015)

Best Cover

Mark Ulriksen’s “Baseball Ballet” (April 27, 2015)

Best Issue

May 25, 2015, containing, among its many pleasures, David Owen’s superb “Where the River Runs Dry,” three first-rate reviews (Anthony Lane’s “High Gear,” James Wood’s “All Her Children,” and Peter Schjeldahl’s “Native Soil”), and Ian Allen’s ravishing, color-drenched “Goings On About Town” photo of the band Chastity Belt.

Best Sentence

Or does it refer to stuff that’s really, really hard to follow, especially when certain brainiacs insist on reading their turgid prose in a monotone that makes us doubt our very existence, because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile? – Mark Singer, “All-Nighter” (May 11, 2015)

Best Paragraph

I went farther into the church, making a list of the things that the people of Diyarbakir had left there. Dried scraps of bread. Automotive carpeting. An old shoe. A fragment of a transistor radio. Corrugated plastic, some of it burned. Where the main altar had been, there was a fire pit; among the ashes, a wrapper for a candy called Coco Fino and empty cans of Efes beer. A rusted wire. Coils of shit. In the inset of a wall, someone had arranged several stones in a neat line. Hundreds of daisies reached upward. And as the sun descended behind the high city walls the smell of grilled meat drifted over from nearby homes, and the sound of children playing began to fill the streets. A ball was kicked and it hit the side of a building and bounced. Some boys clambered over the wall that surrounded the church. Women left their kitchens, and climbed to their roofs to collect carpets that had been put out to air. TVs wired to satellite dishes came on, filling spare rooms with their ethereal glow. All of Diyarbakir, it seemed, except the church, drifted forward in time. Overhead, a flock of common swifts darted and circled among the old stone arches. Their black wings arced like boomerangs as they swooped through the ruins—above the piles of earth, the weeds and the wildflowers, all the trash—and their movements were ceaseless, careless, as if unweighted by anything. – Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Century of Silence” (January 5, 2015)

Best Description

Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped. – Rebecca Mead, “Sole Cycle” (March 23, 2015)

Most Memorable Image

The helicopter made its shuddering descent. Legs shook; sippy cups spilled. Marcy said, “Wow! I love this part!” The pilot yelled, “Touchdown!” – Lizzie Widdicombe, “Air Bus” (June 1, 2015)

Most Inspired Detail

When undone, scarves with modernistic prints sent out gusts of international perfume. – Ian Frazier, “Russophilia” (February 16, 2015)

May 25, 2015 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is David Owen’s masterly "Where the River Runs Dry." I say “masterly” because the piece shows a superb journalist at the top of his form, deploying his formidable descriptive and analytical gifts to depict a great river, the Colorado, in crisis. The Colorado, which supplies water to approximately thirty-six million people, irrigates close to six million acres of farmland, and powers the hydroelectric plants at the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams, is over-used, over-allocated, and environmentally degraded. Owen says, “The Colorado’s flow is so altered and controlled that in some ways the river functions more like a fourteen-hundred-mile-long canal.” The piece comprehends hydrology, geography, climate change, agriculture, environmental science, and law. Yet it’s immensely readable, structured as a road trip (“Not long ago, I travelled as much of the Colorado’s length as can be followed in a car. I began near the headwaters, put three thousand miles on three rental cars, and ended, eventually, in northern Mexico, where the Colorado simply runs out”). Along the way, Owen visits farmers, scientists, environmentalists, a manager of a pumping station, an owner of a marina, a lawyer specializing in water law. They talk about the Colorado in terms of “paper water,” “wet water,” “over-allocation,” “beneficial use,” “prior appropriation,” “the Law of the River,” “acre-foot,” “the non-consumed fraction,” “water-banking strategies,” “spreading basins,” “indirect recharge,” “pulse flow” – language that gets at the stark reality of what this once mighty river has become, not really a river at all, but a “dispersed and brachiating resource-distribution system.” “Where the River Runs Dry” is absorbing, memorable, beautifully composed– one of this year's best pieces.

Postscript: This issue is a loaded, layered honeycomb of succulent writing. In addition to Owen’s superb “Where the River Runs Dry,” there’s James Wood’s "All Her Children" (“This is storytelling, with the blood-pulse of lived gossip, that little run-on final sentence bearing witness to its coursing unstoppability”), Peter Schjeldahl’s "Native Soil" (“Her touch delivers the key drama of her art: living in sensuous and suffering flesh”), Anthony Lane’s "High Gear" (“You could tattoo the entirety of Max’s dialogue onto his biceps”), and Ian Frazier’s "Lack of Center" (“London plane trees leaned toward one another over the streets, vying for the light”). Also, check out Ian Allen’s “Goings On About Town” photo of Chastity Belt – it’s a beauty!

November 3, 2014 Issue

I find the pleasure quotient in this year’s Food Issue noticeably skimpier than in previous years. The prose is still delicious, but it’s used to express anxiety rather than food love. John Lanchester’s “Shut Up and Eat” sets the tone. He writes, “Most of the energy that we put into food, I realized, isn’t about food; it’s about anxiety. Food makes us anxious.” Other pieces in The Food Issue illustrate Lanchester’s point. Michael Specter, in his “Against the Grain,” writes about “gluten anxiety” (“Gluten anxiety has been building for years, but it didn’t become acute until 2011, when a group led by Peter Gibson, a professor of gastroenterology at Monash University and the director of the G.I. unit at the Alfred Hospital, in Melbourne, seemed to provide evidence that gluten was capable of causing illness even in people who did not have celiac disease”). Dana Goodyear, in her “Élite Meat,” says, “More than any other food, meat focuses cultural anxieties.” She goes on:

In the seventies, beef caused heart attacks; in the eighties and afterward it carried mad-cow. Recent decades have brought to light the dark side of industrial agriculture, with its hormone- and antibiotic-intensive confinement-feeding operations, food-safety scares, and torture-porn optics. The social and environmental costs, the moral burden, the threat to individual health—all seem increasingly hard to justify when weighed against a tenderloin.

And when pleasure is expressed, as it is in Adam Gopnik’s “Bakeoff,” it’s never whole-hearted. Gopnik undercuts his sensuous description of the Cronut’s taste (“intensely sweet, interestingly textured, almost unbearably rich in ‘mouth feel’ ”) with the later observation that it “sits right on the edge of being slightly sickening.” David Owen’s excellent “Floating Feasts,” an account of his cruise on the Royal Caribbean’s Oasis, includes a section on Norwalk virus.

And yet, there are pleasures in this anxiety-ridden Food Issue: Jiayang Fan’s “Bar Tab: Drunken Munkey” (“a Bollywood flick plays, the churidar-outfitted waitstaff deliver railroad chicken on placemats mapping British India”); the delightful last paragraph of Gopnik’s “Bakeoff,” in which he imagines Antonin Carême, the early nineteenth century chef, standing in line for a Cronut (“One sees him outside, waiting for hours, furiously scribbling new ideas for pièces montées—perhaps a triumphal procession in pastry, with a temple of Art and Appetite made of pretzel croissants, blessed by Love in the form of three or four crusty Cronut Cupids, smiling down, for novelty’s sake”); the superb noticing of “the milk coming out of a white rubber hose that was un-pinched when you lifted the metal paddle,” in Chang-rae Lee’s “Immovable Feast”; and – my favorite – Rivka Galchen’s wonderful description of the operation of an ice-cream bar vending machine, in her “Medical Meals” (“Mike and I would listen to each coin fall. Then came a whirring sound as the freezer chest opened slowly, like a vampire’s coffin. A robot arm descended, suctioned up glycerides on a wooden stick, then released the treasure into the dispensing slot of the machine. ‘I’m so glad I’m here,’ Mike would say”).

But none of the above is comparable to the double bliss of reading delicious prose describing delectable eats, e.g., Lauren Collins, in the 2012 Food Issue, writing that a bite of Poilâne miche “reverberates in the mouth for a few seconds after you’ve swallowed it, as though the taste buds were strings” (“Bread Winner,” The New Yorker, December 23, 2012). Next year, less anxiety and more food love, please.