February 10, 2025 Issue

I just finished reading Erich Lach’s “Leaning Tower,” in this week’s issue. What a nightmare! It tells about a Manhattan condominium project called 1 Seaport that went horribly wrong. Lach writes,

The building’s contractors had recently completed the tower’s superstructure. The imposing gray mass was at that point among the hundred tallest structures on the city’s skyline, six feet taller than Trump Tower. “The slab edges on the north side of the building are misaligned by up to 8 inches,” the developer disclosed. 1 Seaport was six hundred and seventy feet tall, and leaning.

Just reading Lach’s piece made me anxious. What would it be like to be the owner of this flawed monstrosity? What would it be like to be the builder? Lach reports that at least a quarter of a billion dollars have been spent on the place. Yet it’s been derelict since July, 2020. Lach writes,

When the sun sets, the tower takes on a menacing quality, with its concrete terraces jutting out like spikes on a club. Later at night, when the construction lights are on, it’s possible to imagine that the building is inhabited—that people are up there drinking wine, slipping into the infinity pool, looking down on the city at their feet. Before it started leaning, 1 Seaport was designed to withstand hundreds of years of wind off the harbor. Until someone figures out what to do with it, it’ll hang there, the tallest eyesore on the skyline.

It's an eyesore now. But who knows? It could become an iconic landmark - Manhattan's version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Mid-Year Top Ten 2024

Photo by Landon Nordeman, from Gary Shteyngart's "A Martini Tour of New York City"

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):

1. Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City,” April 24, 2024 (“The highlight of Tigre’s Martini menu is the vodka-based Cigarette, which Platty immediately qualified as ‘smoky as fuck’ ”). 

2. Luke Mogelson, “The Assault,” April 15, 2024 (“In the operations center, Perun yelled into the radio, ‘No! Don’t cross in front of the entrance!’ But Wolf couldn’t hear him. He kept walking until he reached the open door. For several long seconds, everyone in the operations center watched as he stood there, motionless. Then he crumpled”). 

3. Leslie Jamison, “A New Life,” January 22, 2024 (“The baby and I arrived at our sublet with garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet. At a certain point, I’d run out of suitcases”).

4. William Finnegan, “The Long Ride,” June 10, 2024 ("Dropping in to the heaviest waves, he would fade and stall, casually timing his bottom turn to set up the deepest possible barrel. He would disappear into the roaring darkness, then reappear, usually, going very fast, with that little grin").

5. Alex Ross, “Thoroughly Modern,” June 3, 2024 (“Wang lingered over the passage with unaffected tenderness, giving just a twinge of emphasis to its bittersweet chromaticism”).

6. D. T. Max, “Design for Living,” May 6, 2024 (“He happily spends hours poring over blueprints, dividing former fields of cubicles into small but clever residences and reconceiving onetime copy-machine nooks as mini laundry rooms or skinny kitchens”).

7. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Vol. 4,” May 20, 2024 (“I work with words, I am paid by the word, I majored in English, and today I major in Wordle”).

8. Eric Lach, “Trash, Trash Revolution,” April 15, 2024 (“Some of the trash bags have burst open, but others are curiously intact, and you can still make out a few pieces of furniture that never got a chance to be fully digested”).

9. Ian Parker, "His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy," June 17, 2024 ("In an empty house with no windows, the sound of the ocean filled every room. Underfoot, the original tiles had been hammered out, and so had the cables and pipes that were once embedded beneath. The floor was now rough concrete, covered in cavities and trenches, like a road that had been chewed up by a milling machine ahead of a resurfacing"). 

10. Paige Williams, "Ghosts on the Water," June 24, 2024 ("The pour revealed sea lice, krill, a needlefish, and a bunch of twitchy sticklebacks, as silver as store-bought fishing lures—bycatch, all of which gets returned to the river. Cupping the net from the bottom, the patriarch teased the few glass eels into view and plucked them out, the way you’d pick lint off a sweater").

Best Cover

Klaas Verplancke, “On the Grid” (March 25, 2024)

Best "Talk of the Town" Story

Robert Sullivan, “Find a Grave,” April 8, 2024 (“Instruments came out of the car, Morrow starting off with a reel called ‘Sligo Maid.’ Suddenly, his fiddle popped its tuning peg. ‘That’s Coleman!’ Kelly said”).

Best Illustration

Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli, for Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best "Goings On" Note

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Le B,” March 4, 2024 (“Nearly every dish incorporates luxury ingredients, though they generally show up as supporting players: foie-gras drippings in a creamy onion dip, or an earthy whiff of white truffle in a garlic-cream soup. At times, this can feel a bit like opulence theatre, rather than actual opulence—a black-truffle-flecked gelée, draped over a devilled egg en chemise, tasted like nothing much at all, least of all truffles—but when it works, my God, it works”).

Best Photo

Photo by Bobby Beasley, for David Means’ “Chance the Cat” (January 22, 2024)

Best newyorker.com Post

Nathan Heller, “Helen Vendler’s Generous Mind,” April 30, 2024 (“What she had was an almost tactile understanding of the ancient practice of creating poems as art, and—running her hands like a dressmaker along the back of their stitching, watching the way they draped and moved and caught the light—she could see not only what poets did but how they did it”).

Best Sentence

Austria’s Truman vodka is shot into flaming orbit by an inventive liquor made by Empirical, the Danish distillery, and named after Stephen King’s pyrokinetic character Charlene McGee, which presents on the tongue as a flavorful burst of smoked juniper, hence the feeling that a draw of nicotine and tar can’t be far. – Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City” (April 24, 2024)

Best Paragraph

In restaurants all across the country, I shoved food into my mouth above her fuzzy head as she slept in her carrier beneath my chin. The receipts were headed to my publisher, and I was determined to eat everything: trumpet mushrooms slick with pepper jam, gnocchi gritty with crumbs of corn bread that fell onto her little closed eyes, her head tipped back against my chest. I was flustered and feral, my teeth flecked with pesto and furred with sugar. Then I pulled down my shirt and gave these meals to her. In Los Angeles, I nursed in the attic office above a bookstore lobby. In Portland, I nursed among cardboard boxes in a stockroom. In Cambridge, I nursed in a basement kitchenette beneath the public library. – Leslie Jamison, “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best Detail

Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it. – Nick Paumgarten, “Misty in Manhattan” (February 26, 2024)

Best Description

Of course I got the soup. Plenty of ink has already been spilled over the titillating Soup No. 5, a small tureen of thick brown broth, heavily spiced with sibot (a smoky-tangy blend of Chinese herbs), in which float bits of bull testicles and penis. A bowl is salty and savory, warming and rich; the soup is traditionally consumed as a hangover cure, perhaps owing to the virility of its star ingredients. (One is spongy, the other chewy; I won’t spoil which is which.) I’m not sure if I’d order it on a return visit, though—I’ll save room, instead, for grilled morsels of pork jowl brushed with glossy-sweet barbecue sauce made with banana ketchup, or sticky skewers of eel glazed in lemon-lime soda and ginger. The K.F.C. (Kanto fried chicken), little popcorn nuggets of tender dark meat, arrives with a bowl of dipping sauce that’s so fiery hot, so puckery with fish sauce, that it made me feel wildly alive. – Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Naks” (February 5, 2024)

April 15, 2024 Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s New Yorker: Eric Lach’s “Trash, Trash Revolution” and Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault.”

In “Trash, Trash Revolution,” Lach tours the complex world of New York City’s Sanitation Department. He talks with the City’s Sanitation Commissioner, Jessica Tisch. He describes Tisch’s new program: “Bags off the sidewalks. Clean highways. Citywide organic-waste pickup. Beefed-up enforcement of sanitary laws.” He accompanies two sanitation workers on a midnight collection route in the West Village. He visits the Sanitation Department’s garage in South Brooklyn to discuss illegal dumping with the Sanitation Police. In my favorite part, he rides with Tisch on a trash barge to Port Elizabeth. He writes,

One day, I rode with Tisch on a trash barge to Port Elizabeth. Only after we set off did Tisch ask an aide how long the trip to New Jersey would take. A hundred and forty minutes, the aide said. “A hundred and forty minutes?” Tisch yelled, in disbelief. Ed Whitmore, the owner of the tugboat pushing the barge, went to consult the captain, then returned. “Good news,” he said. With the tide moving the way it was, we could make the trip in about an hour. Soon, white spray was shooting off both sides of the barge as the tug chugged through the water, pushing a thousand tons of rotting cargo across the harbor.

“A thousand tons of rotting cargo” – that’s a lot of garbage! And, as Lach points out, it’s only a fraction of what New York City deals with. He reports that each day the City disposes of twenty-four million pounds of waste – “enough to fill more than two dozen Statues of Liberty.” That’s a disgusting amount. There must be ways to reduce it. Lach doesn’t say. I’d welcome another piece by him addressing this issue. 

Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault” tells about his recent experience embedding with Ukraine’s 1st Separate Assault Battalion in Tabaivka, a settlement in north-eastern Ukraine, less than ten miles from the front line. The purpose of the 1st Battalion, as Mogelson explains, is “to rapidly deploy to areas along the front that are in danger of collapse.” It is one of Ukraine’s most skilled fighting units, led by a cunning and audacious commander named Perun (his call sign). 

The heart of this riveting piece is an assault by a team of 1st Battalion members on an underground root cellar in the backyard of a farmhouse where a number of Russian soldiers are staying. Here’s an excerpt:

They needed to hit the cellar entrance. Kyivstar’s companion had left him behind and was walking there alone. His call sign was Wolf. He was a welder from a rural village in western Ukraine who, when the war started, had been working in the Czech Republic, sending money home to his wife and their young son and daughter. He’d been with 1st Battalion for about a month, and this was his first mission. Sever hadn’t intended to bring him to Tabaivka, but Wolf was filling in for the soldier who’d broken his leg when their truck crashed into the crater. At the house, Wolf had struck me as the team’s most timid member, sheepishly observing Sanjek and Noah’s shenanigans. When the stormers were leaving for the operation, Banker had scolded Wolf for guzzling a tall can of energy drink, which would make him have to urinate. In the cargo van, right before Banker shut the door, Wolf had said, “Fuck, I forgot my ballistic glasses. Oh, well, whatever.”

He was now doing something inexplicable. Instead of sneaking up to the cellar entrance, he was approaching it openly—revealing himself to anyone who might be watching from inside. “He was confused,” Kyivstar later told me. “I was yelling at him, trying to get him to come back.” He added, with frustration, “There was no need for him to go ahead by himself like that. It was like he was going there to die.”

In the operations center, Perun yelled into the radio, “No! Don’t cross in front of the entrance!” But Wolf couldn’t hear him. He kept walking until he reached the open door. For several long seconds, everyone in the operations center watched as he stood there, motionless. Then he crumpled.

“They got him,” Perun said, not loudly, and not over the radio.

The root cellar withstands the attack. But in the ensuing siege, many Russian soldiers are killed. Mogelson writes,

For the rest of the day, a steady stream of small groups of Russian infantrymen—between two and six soldiers each—walked to Tabaivka from the east. Few made it across the three-hundred-yard gap. The snow had relented, and Boyko easily stalked the groups with the surveillance drone. Perun bounded between the panel and the radio, shouting himself hoarse, calculating azimuths, and correcting the aim of his stormers, snipers, and machine gunners. It was madness: Russians kept marching down the same paths, to the same spots where their comrades had just died. One 1st Battalion machine gunner later told me he had fired his weapon so much that it had kept him warm in his frigid dugout. He couldn’t see the men he was killing. But since they kept reappearing in certain places, he memorized different branches below which he could point his barrel to hit specific coördinates up to a mile away.

Unlike the machine gunner, those of us in the operations center had a bird’s-eye view of the Russians on the receiving end of the barrages: men running and stumbling as they fled the bullets and the shells, crawling after being shot or hit by shrapnel, hiding behind tree trunks and under bushes. At one point, the monitor displayed six Russians hurrying up a road toward the safety of a dense forest. Two of them were helping along a limping soldier who had his arms draped over their shoulders; two others were dragging an injured or dead soldier across the snow on an improvised toboggan. Perun called in cluster munitions on them: a smoking warhead that scudded down, followed by a dozen impacts all around the group. Another 1st Battalion drone pilot was attacking Russians with F.P.V.s. Footage from one of them captured two infantrymen diving away, too late, in the split second before the F.P.V. detonated and its video feed cut out.

“The Assault” is a tremendous piece of war reportage – another in Mogelson’s extraordinary series of dispatches from the front: see, for example, “Trapped in the Trenches” (January 2 & 9, 2023) and “Underworld” (May 29, 2023). 

Best of 2016: Talk

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Here are my favorite “Talk of the Town” pieces of 2016 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Laura Parker, “Bee’s Knees,” March 21, 2016 (“She dunked the bee in a tiny bottle containing her special blend of ‘bee shampoo’: a few drops of archival soap and deionized water. She held the bottle up to the light and gave it a firm swirl. One of No. 1’s legs fell off. ‘She’s old, she’s tired—she’s falling apart,’ Doering said”).

2. Ian Frazier, “Body Phrases,” August 22, 2016 (“The tactful steps of dancers trying not to disturb were small and beguiling choreographies in themselves. A soft step-step-step-step, head down, with torso bent; then longer quiet strides in the open, toward the elevator up ahead”).

3. Ian Frazier, “Connected,” January 25, 2016 (“By design, the Link has no flat surfaces on which you can leave, say, an almost-empty Pabst bottle in a wrinkled paper bag. These Superman booths still have the little shelf beside the phone and always will. Their small privacy will still vibrate, occasionally, with the old lonesome pay-phone emotions of our former lives. The Links, savvier about human entanglements, will not”).

4. Mark Singer, “Sleight of No Hands,” February 8 & 15, 2016 [“Somehow—Jay’s biography, though it comes as close as any source to explaining the how of how, still leaves a reader at the intersection of belief and disbelief—he did magic (specialty: cups-and-balls), played several instruments (dulcimer, trumpet, flute), trick-shot with pistols, demonstrated exquisite ball control at skittles, danced the hornpipe on his leather-encased stumps, married four times, and sired fourteen children (proof, as Jay noted in Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, of ‘one fully operative appendage’)”]. 

5. Tad Friend, “The Undead,” November 21, 2016 (“ ‘One reason Gabriel was so excited was because he was going to a hotel with her, away from the kids,’ Muldoon said. ‘The Wellington Monument they ride past is by any reckoning a phallic symbol.’ He nudged his wife. ‘You’re on your own with that one,’ Korelitz said”).

6. Tad Friend, “Framing,” September 5, 2016 (“She passed a Caribbean woman who was pushing an old white woman in a wheelchair and bending low to murmur to her charge. The caregiver’s teeth were widely separated, like a baby’s. ‘I love that woman’s teeth!’ Johnson cried. ‘If we weren’t going to get iced coffee I would go find a way to film her.’ As she walked on, she kept turning to look back”).

7. Mark Singer, “Bank Shot,” September 26, 2016 [“When he arrived at Eyebeam, the immediate challenge was to center the logo of American Eagle Savings Bank on the cover of Theories of Business Behavior, by Joseph William McGuire (formerly in the collection of the Cloud County Junior College Library, of Concordia, Kansas)”].

8. Ian Frazier, “Don’t Tread On Me,” October 3, 2016 (“He ordered a decaf espresso and asked the waiter to top it off with Sambuca. A smell of licorice rose”).

9. Tad Friend, “Out of Character,” August 29, 2016 (“Foster, thirty-five, is the character actor’s character actor: his body a grenade, his face the pin”).

10. Eric Lach, “Fire Starter,” January 18, 2016 (“Hickory will make a house smell like a ski lodge. Cherry is prized for the way it crackles and pops in a fireplace”).

Credit: The above illustration, by Tom Bachtell, is from Laura Parker’s “Bee’s Knees” (The New Yorker, March 21, 2016).

Mid-Year Top Ten (2016): Talk & GOAT

Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn

So far, this year’s crop of Talk of the Town stories his yielded only five favorites:

1. Laura Parker, "Bee's Knees," March 21, 2016 (“She dunked the bee in a tiny bottle containing her special blend of ‘bee shampoo’: a few drops of archival soap and deionized water. She held the bottle up to the light and gave it a firm swirl. One of No. 1’s legs fell off. ‘She’s old, she’s tired—she’s falling apart,’ Doering said.”)

2. Ian Frazier, "Connected," January 25, 2016 (“By design, the Link has no flat surfaces on which you can leave, say, an almost-empty Pabst bottle in a wrinkled paper bag. These Superman booths still have the little shelf beside the phone and always will. Their small privacy will still vibrate, occasionally, with the old lonesome pay-phone emotions of our former lives. The Links, savvier about human entanglements, will not.”)

3. Eric Lach, "Fire Starter," January 18, 2016 (“Hickory will make a house smell like a ski lodge. Cherry is prized for the way it crackles and pops in a fireplace.”)

4. Mark Singer, "Sleight of No Hands," February 8 & 15, 2016 [“Somehow—Jay’s biography, though it comes as close as any source to explaining the how of how, still leaves a reader at the intersection of belief and disbelief—he did magic (specialty: cups-and-balls), played several instruments (dulcimer, trumpet, flute), trick-shot with pistols, demonstrated exquisite ball control at skittles, danced the hornpipe on his leather-encased stumps, married four times, and sired fourteen children (proof, as Jay noted in Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, of ‘one fully operative appendage’).”]

5. Lauren Collins, "Dog's Dinner," February 8 & 15, 2016 (“The proprietor of the café—belly, suspenders, glasses on a cord—sidled up to the table.”)

And now here are my “Top Ten” choices from my favorite section of the magazine – Goings On About Town:

1. Becky Cooper, "Yours Sincerely," “Bar Tab,” June 6 & 13, 2016 (“The taps are porcelain doll heads, which stare like angelic witnesses to the evening’s festivities.”)

2. Michael Sragow, "Movies: Sam Peckinpah's The Deadly Companions," April 4, 2016 (“Wills makes a terrific mangy villain; he sweats corruption through his buffalo-fur coat.”)

3. Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: MáLà Project,” May 2, 2016 (“When an adventurous first-timer pointed to the unfamiliar item rooster’s XXX, the handsome Uighur waiter deadpanned, ‘Chicken testicles, ma’am. One order?’ ”)

4. McKenna Stayner, “Bar Tab: Sycamore,” May 2, 2016 (“The crawlers, finishing a hot whiskey cider that tasted like the dregs of an overly honeyed tea, passed through a teensy smokers’ patio and into the booze-soaked main bar, attracted by a glowing yellow counter, its surface like the cracked crust of a crème brûlée.”)

5. “Art: Mark Lyon,” June 6 & 13, 2016 [“Lyon photographs landscapes in upstate New York while standing inside the bays of self-service car washes, boxlike spaces that supply the images with ready-made frames (graced by the occasional hose). The views—gas-station pumps, strip malls, a swatch of unnaturally green lawn—are transformed by Lyon’s keen eye. He works in daylight and darkness alike, regardless of weather, as fog, rain, and falling snow turn the everyday oddly magical.”]

6. Becky Cooper, “Tables For Two: Bar Omar,” June 20, 2016 (“Shatter the shell of blistered sugar into pieces that look like stained glass and try not to smile.”)

7.  Richard Brody, “Movies: Howard Hawkes’s Hatari!,” March 21, 2016 (“A woman-hunting elephant provides a Freudian jolt, set to Henry Mancini’s jaunty music, and Red Buttons is moving as a Brooklyn cabdriver in exile whose heart does a U-turn.”)

8. Peter Schjeldahl, “In the Ink,” April 11, 2016 (“Shapes and atmospheres loom in whites and textured grays from Stygian blackness: sculpted light, with a muscular feel.”)

9. Nicolas Niarchos, “Bar Tab: Berlin,” February 8 & 15, 2016 (“At the bottom of the stairs, in a barrel-vaulted watering hole, long lines of people waited for the bathroom from whence burst ebullient gaggles of young women and a madly coughing guy in a Thrasher hat.”)

10. Matthew Trammell, “Rock Bottom,” June 6 & 13, 2016 (“If Bruner’s lifelong craft as a bassist buries him in the low end, his voice beams goldenrod from a crack in the ceiling.”)

Honorable Mentions: Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two: Lowlife,” January 18, 2016; Jiayang Fan, “Bar Tab: Mother’s Ruin,” January 25, 2016; Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: Llama Inn,” February 8 & 15, 2016; Emma Allen, “Bar Tab: Flowers for All Occasions,” February 22, 2016; Richard Brody, “Movies: Rebel in Disguise,” May 16, 2016; Richard Brody, “Movies: The Day He Arrives,” June 6 & 13, 2016; Jiayang Fan, “Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong,” “Tables For Two,” June 6 & 13, 2016.

Credit: The above illustration, by Bendik Kaltenborn, is from Matthew Trammell's "Rock Bottom" (The New Yorker, June 6 & 13, 2016).