Best of 2019: Reporting

Ilya Milstein's illustration for Alexandra Schwartz's "Bounty Hunters"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Alexandra Schwartz’s “Bounty Hunters,” November 25, 2019 (“You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart”).

2. Ian Frazier’s “Pumper’s Corner,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (As Rachael walked me through each well, I appreciated the Rube Goldberg-ness of it all. No two were the same. ‘The guys out here like to say that a well is like a woman, because each one needs to be handled differently,’ Rachael said. She had been to these wells often, and sort of whispered each one, the way she would a horse. She put her hands on pipes, felt for hot spots, peered into gauges, cocked an ear for wrong sounds. She had me listen at a pipe where rising gas from a mile down hissed and echoed—all O.K. there”).

3. Nick Paumgarten’s “The Descent of Man,” April 29, 2019 (“I glanced up and saw for the first time, shadow-blue and telephoto close, the final section of the Streif, where the racers, after soaring off a jump, come hauling across a steep, bumpy, fallaway traverse—legs burning, skis thrashing—and into the final plunge, the Zielschuss, reaching speeds of almost ninety miles an hour”).

4. Burkhard Bilger’s “Extreme Range,” February 11, 2019 (“The voices were growing louder, circling the silo one by one with the choir close behind. Wells lifted his head to the cloud of voices rising and swirling toward the ceiling, then stretched out his arms as they joined in a great, ragged chord. When they fell silent, I could hear the tapping of rain on the roof outside. Then a last voice sang out—Shaw’s quiet mezzo, wafting up like a fleck of ash above a flame”).

5. Nicola Twilley, “Trailblazers,” August 26, 2019 (“The lit cannister of fuel I was holding, known as a drip torch, had a long, looped neck that emitted a jaunty quiff of flame”).

6. James Lasdun’s “Glow,” April 29, 2019 (“A crack appeared in the clouds directly above us. It widened, showing a sprinkling of stars and then the entire Big Dipper. There was a stirring among the photographers: their cameras had started detecting things. After a moment, an oblique greenish bar like the one I’d seen the night before became visible. It grew brighter and denser, then contracted into an oval of emerald light. People chattered excitedly. I was about to warn them not to get too carried away when a streak of brilliant green shot out of the oval, at high speed, and zoomed over our tipped-back heads, corkscrewing across the sky. I almost toppled over while following its trajectory. The green light formed several tentacles, which twisted and writhed together and looped in circles. Astonishment was proclaimed in a half-dozen languages. The circles dropped needles of piercing brightness that travelled, in tandem, around the sky, as if tracing the undulations of a celestial shower curtain”).

7. Rivka Galchen, “The Eighth Continent,” May 6, 2019 (When a Masten rocket takes off, it has a delicate appearance. One of the newer ones, the Xodiac, looks like two golden balloons mounted on a metal skeleton. A kite tail of fire shoots out as the Xodiac launches straight up; at its apex, it has the ability to tilt and float down at an angle, as casually as a leaf”).

8. Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Under Water,” April 1, 2019 (“On the model, the spillway gates were represented by small strips of brass attached to copper wires. Because they hadn’t worked properly in previous trials, an engineer was watching over them from a folding chair. He looked like a latter-day Gulliver, bent over a drowning Lilliput. He, too, I noticed, had wet socks”).

9. Douglas Preston’s “The Day the Earth Died,” April 8, 2019 (“He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass”).

10. John Seabrook’s “Machine Hands,” April 15, 2019 (“It was only at the very end of the eight-second window that the Pitzer wheel dropped down and—in a blur of motion that recalled Doctor Octopus, the Spider-Man villain, attacking one of his victims—the claws grabbed and picked the ripe berries in a fraction of a second, pop-pop-pop, and deposited them, apparently unbruised, on a shelf at the top of the machine’s chassis. Then the robots moved on to the next plant in that row”).

April 8, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Douglas Preston’s absorbing “The Day the Earth Died,” an account of paleontologist Robert DePalma’s discovery of an amazing fossil deposit in the Hell Creek Formation of North Dakota. Preston visits the site:

When we arrived, DePalma’s site lay open in front of us: a desolate hump of gray, cracked earth, about the size of two soccer fields. It looked as if a piece of the moon had dropped there. One side of the deposit was cut through by a sandy wash, or dry streambed; the other ended in a low escarpment. The dig was a three-foot-deep rectangular hole, sixty feet long by forty feet wide. A couple of two-by-fours, along with various digging tools and some metal pipe for taking core samples, leaned against the far side of the hole. 

He describes DePalma digging (“DePalma poked the tip of an X-Acto into the thin laminations of sediment and loosened one dime-size flake at a time; he’d examine it closely, and, if he saw nothing, flick it away”), unearthing a fish fossil (“He chipped away around the paddlefish, exposing a fin bone, then a half-dollar-size patch of fossilized skin with the scales perfectly visible”), and preserving it in plaster (“One by one, he dipped the burlap strips in the plaster and draped them across the top and the sides of the specimen. He added rope handles and plastered them in”). 

He visits DePalma in his lab at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton:

He stood up. “Now I’m going to show you something special,” he said, opening a wooden crate and removing an object that was covered in aluminum foil. He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass.

He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass – how fine that is. It’s my idea of an ideal sentence: specific, evocative, delightful, exotic. 

“The Day the Earth Died” is a Wunderkammern of fascinating items: golden blobs of amber (“Cretaceous flypaper”); the hip bone of a dinosaur “in the ceratopsian family, of which triceratops is the best known member”; a Cretaceous mammal burrow, with the mammal still inside it; a block of stone containing “a sturgeon and a paddlefish, along with dozens of smaller fossils and a single small, perfect crater with a tektite in it”; a fossil forearm belonging to Dakotaraptor; lonsdaleite, a hexagonal form of diamond that is associated with asteroid impacts; “flooded ant nests, with drowned ants still inside and some chambers packed with microtektites”; shark teeth; “the thigh bone of a large sea turtle”; a gigantic ginkgo leaf; “an unhatched egg containing an embryo—a fossil of immense research value”; on and on. I enjoyed it immensely.