Best of 2017: Reporting

Victor J. Blue, “Captain Basam Attallah Shoots at a Cache of ISIS Explosives” (2017)

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2017 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Luke Mogelson, “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, “Time Out,” March 20, 2017 (“If you want a watch that looks like a Russian oligarch just curled up around your wrist and died, you might be interested in the latest model of Rolex’s Sky-Dweller”).

3. Ian Frazier, “Drive Time,” August 28, 2017 (“For me, the dreamy part of metro-area driving happens when the traffic is light and every highway on my phone’s congestion map glows green”).

4. Ian Frazier, “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”).

5. Ian Frazier, “Clear Passage,” November 13, 2017 (“On an afternoon in early spring, I talked to two painters from Ahern Contractors, in Woodside, New York, who told me that they were painting the bridge pewter-cup gray. It’s a nice shade, and everything that day—bridge, water, clouds, birds, sky—seemed to be a version of it”).

6. Ben Taub, “We Have No Choice,” April 10, 2017 (“The rescue vessel eased alongside the dinghy, and we shuttled migrants back to the Dignity I in groups of around fifteen. 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. Two crew members hoisted her aboard by her shoulders. She stood on the deck with her arms crossed—sobbing, shivering, heaving, praising God”).

7. Danielle Allen, “American Inferno,” July 24, 2017 (“Why did he love her? He loved her because she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He loved her because, of all the men in prison, she had chosen him—and that was a gift of surpassing value. But it was also a gift that came to blind him. When he was finally released from prison, I failed to grasp that he was not yet free”).

8. Evan Osnos, “On the Brink,” September 18, 2017 (“The mentions of war and weaponry were everywhere: on television, on billboards, in the talk of well-rehearsed schoolchildren”).

9. Burkhard Bilger, “Feathered Glory,” September 25, 2017 (“Almost every outfit bore a striking embellishment: a coat of arms, an embroidered badge, a feathered breastplate, tufted sleeves. If you looked closely, you could see patterns in the designs: a heraldic eagle, a pair of rising phoenixes. These were refined, modern designs, yet they had a rude vitality—as if they might peel from the cloth at any moment and take flight”).

10. Nick Paumgarten, “Singer of Secrets,” August 28, 2017 (“Later, when she’d started calling me Uncle Nick or Nicky boy, I’d find myself wondering if this skin-suit episode hadn’t been an elaborate setup, a provocation or even a trap laid by someone known to be in command of her presentation in the world. Or maybe it was just show biz, the same old meat market now refracted through self-aware layers of intention and irony”).

September 18, 2017 Issue

Evan Osnos, in his extraordinary “On the Brink,” in this week’s issue, reports on a trip he made to Pyongyang, North Korea, last month, three days after Trump’s “locked and loaded” tweet. I say “extraordinary” because Osnos’s piece puts us on the ground inside North Korea at the very moment when the U.S. and North Korea appear headed for the unthinkable – nuclear war. It’s the equivalent of having an American reporter in Havana at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. I confess I read “On the Brink” somewhat perversely, hoping not only to gain insight into what Kim Jong Un is really up to (are his threats serious or is he merely posturing?), but also to enjoy a good travel tale. I wasn’t disappointed. In Pyongyang, Osnos stays at the Kobangsan Guest House (“The place had an air of low-cost opulence—chandeliers, rhinestones, and pleather sofas”). He has supper with a Foreign Ministry official in a private hotel dining room (“We were in a private hotel dining room that felt like a surgical theatre: a silent, scrubbed, white-walled room bathed in bright light. Two waitresses in black uniforms served each course: ginkgo soup, black-skin chicken, kimchi, river fish, and vanilla ice cream, along with glasses of beer, red wine, and soju”). In the company of a Foreign Ministry guide, he tours Pyongyang and notes what he sees:

Soviet-era Ladas and ancient city buses ply the streets, while passengers stick their heads out the windows in search of cool air. Buildings are adorned with Korean-language banners hailing the “Juche ideology,” the official state credo, which glorifies self-reliance and loyalty. On an embankment near a major intersection, workers in gray coveralls were installing an enormous red sign that praised the “immortal achievements of the esteemed Supreme Leader, comrade Kim Jong Un, who built the nuclear state of Juche, the leader in rocket power!”

Some women can be seen wearing stilettos and short skirts, though these can be no higher than two inches above the knee, according to Workers’ Party regulations. (Jeans are still practically taboo, because of their association with America.) Now and then, I saw people hunched over cell phones. Since 2013, Pyongyang has had 3G mobile service, but most people have access only to North Korea’s self-contained intranet, which allows them to send e-mail inside the country and to look at some Web sites.

I passed couples whispering on park benches, and a grandmother following a toddler across fresh asphalt. A black Lexus, buffed to a high shine, honked its way through pedestrians. (Officially, most private cars are provided as gifts from the Supreme Leader, but insiders acquire cars by registering them in the names of state enterprises.) We came upon a van fitted with oversized loudspeakers on its roof. Pak said that the message being played was a “warning about American aggression.” He explained, “We have a propaganda unit in every district.” Nobody seemed to be paying much attention.

I relished Osnos’s use of “I”; it’s the glue that holds his extensive report together, enlivening it with personal perspective (e.g., “Outside the Administration, the more people I talked to, the more I heard a strong case for some level of diplomatic contact”).

My takeaway from “On the Brink” is that North Korea is deeply sunk in its own mythology (some would say propaganda), dangerously cut off from reality. In one of Osnos’s most compelling passages, he writes,

Every country valorizes its war record, but North Korea’s mythology—the improbable victory, the divine wisdom of the Kim family, and America’s enduring weakness and hostility—has shaped its conception of the present to a degree that is hard for the rest of the world to understand. In something close to a state religion, North Korea tells its people that their nation may be small, but its unique “single-hearted unity” would crush a beleaguered American military. That’s a volatile notion.

My favorite details in “On the Brink” have nothing to do with nuclear war. Osnos and his guide stop for lunch at a “large blue-and-white boat that doubles as a restaurant, moored on the banks of the Taedong River.” Osnos writes,

The restaurant’s distinguishing charm is that you can catch your own lunch in its tanks. On the way to our table, we passed a man standing on a ladder, holding a net, trying to nab a large fish with long whiskers. We reached a dining room where several tables were occupied by families, whose members ranged in age from a grandfather in a Mao-style suit to a couple of kids chasing each other around the table.

Details like that man with a net, standing on a ladder “trying to nab a large fish with long whiskers,” and those kids “chasing each other around the table” help humanize a people who, in many respects, seem quite other.    

December 16, 2013 Issue

Maybe I’m just in a pre-Christmas funk, but I find this week’s New Yorker remarkably uninspiring. Maybe it’s the price of those spicy Red Snappers at The King Cole that turned me off. Sixty dollars for two of them, according to Shauna Lyon’s “Bar Tab.” Obscene! Or maybe it’s the dull prospect of plowing through two pieces on Washington politics (Evan Osnos’s “Strong Vanilla” and “Ryan Lizza’s “State of Deception”). Do I want to read about Cuvier’s proof of extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Lost World, Part One”) or “The mystery surrounding a copy of Galileo’s pivotal treatise” (Nicholas Schmidle’s “A Very Rare Book”) or what happens when God first unleashes Satan on Job (Joan Acocella’s “Misery”) or Britney Spears’s latest career move (Sasha Frere-Jones’s “Brit Pop”)? No, no, no, and definitely no. I’ve got better things to do, like shovel the snow from in front of the woodshed door. But there’s always a bit of nourishment in every New Yorker, no matter how unpromising its contents may first appear. This week, I found it in David Denby’s marvelous “Grand Scam,” a review of David O. Russell’s American Hustler. In a parenthesis worthy of the Master herself (Hail Kael!), Denby writes, “In a dizzying touch, suits hanging on a garment conveyor whirl past them as they kiss.” Ah, the surreal reality of that garment conveyor! I love it. Thank you, Mr. Denby. With one sentence, you breathe life into a moribund New Yorker.  

October 22, 2012 Issue

Pick of the Issue (POTI) this week is a contest between four pieces: Nick Paumgarten’s “Less Europe,” John Seabrook’s “Grand,” Evan Osnos’s “Boss Rail,” and Peter Schjeldahl’s “Challenging Work.” Paumgarten’s “Less Europe” is a Talk story about a “Euroskeptic” named Nigel Farage. It contains this inspired sentence: “He has a smoker’s marbly laugh and tawny skin, and, as he credibly claims, ‘relatively hollow legs,’ into which, at the reception, he poured a fair amount of gin.” Seabrook’s piece, also a Talk story, is a mini-profile of Iris Dement, “one of the brightest talents in the new alt-country genre.” It describes Dement’s recent visit to Steinway Hall (“Steinway Hall has the ponderous stillness of a funeral home, and the grand pianos are like polished caskets”). Osnos’s piece explores how a high-speed train wreck in Wenzhou, China “became what Hurricane Katrina was to Americans: the iconic failure of government performance.” It’s best part is the penultimate section, wonderfully narrated in the first-person, in which Osnos, accompanied by a tunnel builder named Li Xue, takes us inside a tunnel that Xue is constructing in “the rocky hills of Hebei Province.” Osnos writes,

Li spat into the mud and handed me a hard hat. Inside, the tunnel was cool and dark, about thirty feet high, with a smooth ceiling, faintly lit by work lights along the edges. Li had dug ten tunnels in his life, and this would be the longest – two miles end to end.

Schjeldahl’s “Challenging Work” is a review of a Ai Weiwei retrospective at the Hirshorn Museum, in Washington. Regarding photographs of Ai “dropping a millennia-old Han-dynasty urn, which smashes on the floor,” Schjeldahl says, “The act strikes me as mere vandalism.” I agree. Schjeldahl's bluntness is tonic. And the winner of this week’s POTI is Nick Paumgarten's "Less Europe" for its marvelous “He has a smoker’s marbly laugh and tawny skin, and, as he credibly claims, ‘relatively hollow legs,’ into which, at the reception, he poured a fair amount of gin.” 

August 6, 2012 Issue

Paragraphs may be “the units of composition” (Strunk & White, The Elements of Style), but sentences are the indicia of style. Sanford Schwartz, in his brilliant “Georgia O’Keeffe Writes a Book” (The New Yorker, August 28, 1978), says of Hemingway, “He takes the anonymity out of language, and shows how personal and three-dimensional the use of words can be, how a sentence can have a profile and be as contoured as a carving.” Reading The New Yorker, I’m always on the look out for creative, evocative, stylish sentences – sentences that “have a profile” and are “as contoured as a carving.” I found four in this week’s issue:

Just don’t arrive hungry, and leave any frumpy totes – or friends – behind, and you may enjoy the novelty of a Savage Detective (a mescal Old Fashioned with sherry, maple syrup, and charred pineapple) amidst the buzzy blend of flirting, texting, and social climbing that is Abramcyk’s signature dish. (Ariel Levy, “Tables For Two: Super Linda”)

Siodmak makes performance his subject, with scenes of an orchestra playing Wagner (her ecstacy) and Beethoven (her fate), lovers singing at a piano in a parlor, and a society band at a swank café, where, in a cunning crane shot of a saunter down a staircase – with Kelly’s leonine grace and Durbin’s homely footfalls – he condenses the drama to a thwarted dance. (Richard Brody, “Critic’s Notebook: Screen Fright”)

His black jeans puddle around white sneakers that looked like they were cut from blocks of foam. (Lauren Collins, “The Question Artist”)

When I met Aung Min this spring in Rangoon, he had about him a Brylcreem crispness that evoked an Asian Robert McNamara. (Evan Osnos, “The Burmese Spring”)

Objectivist Takeover?

New Yorker writers divide into two broad categories – Objectivists and Subjectivists. Objectivists write mainly in the third person; they’re loath to say “I.” Subjectivists write mainly in the first person; their pieces read almost like excerpts from their personal journals.

Throughout the magazine’s history, Subjectivism has predominated; I much prefer it. Liebling, Mitchell, Bailey, and Rouché wrote in the first person, as do McPhee, Singer, Frazier, Bilger, Friend, Kolbert, Wilkinson, Remnick, Thurman, Paumgarten, Collins, Batuman, and Mead. But lately, it seems to me, the number of Objectivist pieces appearing in the magazine has been on the rise. Jill Lepore’s “American Chronicles” pieces, Kelefa Sanneh’s “Fish Tales” (March 7, 2011), David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold” (April 4, 2011), Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011), George Packer’s “A Dirty Business” (June 27, 2011), George Packer’s “Coming Apart” (September 12, 2011), Nicholas Schmidle’s “Three Trials for Murder” (November 14, 2011), and Kelefa Sannah’s “Sacred Grounds” (November 21, 2011) are all written in the third person. (Packer and Schmidle may protest the Objectivist charge on the basis of a line or two of first-person perspective buried deep in their otherwise impersonal narratives), but they can’t deny that the gist of their approach is fundamentally Objectivist.) In the magazine’s November 28th issue, all four features are essentially Objectivist: Mattathias Schwartz’s “Pre-Occupied”; Ariel Levy’s “The Renovation”; George Packer’s “No Death, No Taxes”; and Raffi Khatchadourian’s “In The Picture.” I say “essentially” because some of these pieces contain a light sprinkling of “told me” and “said to me” – feeble attempts to mitigate their over-all machined, Objectivist feel and look. The last section of Khatchadourian’s “In The Picture” suddenly turns Subjectivist (“When the video ended, JR had to rush out. He wanted to surprise Nourry by showing her a SoHo rooftop that he had discovered. Two days later, he flew to Edinburgh, and then to Paris, where I caught up with him”), but it’s too little, too late.

I prefer the Subjectivist approach because it’s closest to the most true-to-life form of writing, namely, the journal. A journal tells what happened from the point of view of the writer as he or she actually experienced it. It seems to me that journalism is most effective when it is journal-like. Here are a few examples of quintessential journal-like sentences taken from recent New Yorker articles:

One day, Cagan took me to visit the Aras station, an hour’s drive south-east of Kars, near the Armenian border. (Elif Batuman, “Natural Histories,” October 24, 2011)

Beach trials the next morning were called off owing to rain, so I took a train to Amsterdam and visited the Rijksmuseum. (Ian Frazier, “The March of the Strandbeests,” September 5, 2011)

It was after 6 P.M. when we sat down at Dean’s editing machine, a twelve-thousand-dollar 35-mm. Steenbeck, to look at some rushes. (Emily Eakin, “Celluloid Hero,” October 31, 2011)

One day in July, I watched Grimaud play the pieces on “Resonances,” her current CD, in the Stadhalle, in Bayreuth. (D. T. Max, “Her Way,” November 7, 2011)

At the end of May, when I visited Yusuke Tataki, the worker who was inside Reactor Building No. 4 at the time of the quake, he said that he had passed up offers to go back as a jumper. (Evan Osnos, “The Fallout,” October 17, 2011)

On a recent Saturday, Worsley and I and a few others attempted to whip up the dinner that King George III ate on the evening of February 6, 1789. (Lauren Collins, “The King’s Meal,” November 21, 2011)

Such sentences make pursuit of the story part of the story. They clue the reader in on what the writer is thinking and doing. Most importantly, they help authenticate what’s being described. Objectivist pieces feel and look synthetic. Yes, they’re often magnificently crafted (see, for example, Kelefa Sanneh’s “Sacred Grounds,” The New Yorker, November 21, 2011). But they feel as if they’ve been manufactured (I almost said “made-up”) rather than experienced first-hand.

Fortunately, there are still lots of Subjectivists writing for The New Yorker. But the number of Objectivist pieces appearing in it seems to be on the upswing. The November 28th issue is filled with them. Objectivism appears to be trending at the magazine. I think it should be discouraged.

Credit: The above portrait of Joseph Mitchell is by Al Hirschfeld; it appears in The New Yorker (February 22, 2004), as an illustration for Mark Singer's "Joe Mitchell's Secret."

October 17, 2011 Issue

Pick Of The Issue this week is a tussle between four pieces: Evan Osnos’s report on the Fukushima meltdowns (“The Fallout”); James Wood’s review of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Stranger’s Child (“Sons and Lovers”); Dan Chiasson’s review of Dorothea Tanning’s poetry collection Coming to That (“Late Harvest”); and Peter Schjeldahl’s review of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts show “Degas and the Nude” (“Bare Naked Ladies”). Each is excellent in its own way. Osnos’s piece encompasses a vast amount of information, drawn from an impressive array of sources, artfully arranged in twelve sections. The message I gleaned from it is that the Fukushima disaster was anthropogenic. Osnos says:

The March tsunami was history’s most expensive natural disaster, with losses estimated at three hundred billion dollars. But the Fukushima meltdowns, the world’s worst nuclear accident in twenty-five years, were man-made, the consequences of failures that laid bare how far Japan’s political and technological rigor have drifted from their apex.

James Wood’s “Sons and Lovers” is an amusing examination of some of Hollinghurst’s stylistic tics, such as his repeated use of “levelly,” “narrowly,” and “muddle.” Wood sums up his assessment of Hollinghurst’s novel as follows:

“The Stranger’s Child” is a frustrating book, both a large and a curiously small novel – it trembles for a time on the verge of moving beyond the parochialism of its very familiar literary setting, and is finally happy to fall back into the comfy and known.

Chiasson’s “Late Harvest” contains this inspired observation: “But the poem’s tactical chitchat is Tanning’s fierce way of defying time.”

Schjeldahl, in his “Bare Naked Ladies,” composes several beautifully contoured, sparkling figurations, e.g., “Viewing his work, we breathe the dizzyingly thin air on the snowy peak of the capital ‘A’ in Art”; “The show yields an immersive sense of early modern art as a tidal wave of hot-and-bothered genius.” And it features a line – “His dancers’ perfect arabesques evoke a soundtrack of grunts” – that, in its brilliant connection between form (“perfect arabesques”) and sound (“soundtrack of grunts”), clinches my decision to make “Bare Naked Ladies” this week’s Pick Of The Issue.

April 18, 2011 Issue

This week’s highlight is Geoff Dyer’s New Yorker debut. His “Poles Apart” is deeply pleasurable. I’ve long been a fan of Dyer’s work. His Out of Sheer Rage was a constant companion during my travels in Nunavut in 2006. The italicized sections of his But Beautiful, describing a Duke Ellington/Harry Carney road trip, are, for me, touchstones of what constitute great writing. My favorite sentence in “Poles Apart”? Well, actually, I have two: “There were amazing photographs of the coils of rock in the variously colored water –reddish, pink, pale blue – and there was the Zapruder-inflected footage of its construction, but the jetty had gone the way of Atlantis, sinking beneath the waveless surface of the Salt Lake.” And, “Most of what there was to see was traffic-related: gas-station logos, trucks the size of freight trains, snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder.” That “snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder” is inspired!

Two other notable pieces this week: Evan Osnos’s “The Grand Tour” (“And yet, behind Berlusconi’s opera buffa and the prosperity gospel about Chinese one-party efficiency, my busmates caught unredacted flickers of insight”) and Keith Gessen’s “Nowheresville” (“Strangest of all was the wind howling through the elevator shafts. 'Whooooo,' it said. 'Whoooo-ooo-ooo' ”).

March 28, 2011 Issue

The best thing in this week’s issue is the color-drenched 1941 photo of Helena Rubinstein, wearing a flame-red dress, dripping with jewels, seated in a sumptuous purple armchair. Unfortunately, the article that accompanies the photo – Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Color of Money” – is a dud. Ostensibly a book review, it’s actually another one of Gladwell’s business morality tales. But in this one, the moral Gladwell teases out of a review of Ruth Brandon’s Ugly Beauty is that “Sometimes beauty is just business.” Thank you, Malcolm, for that illuminating aperçu.

Sometimes baseball is just business, too - most of the time, actually. Which is why I took a pass on reading Ben McGrath’s “King of Walks.” Having absolutely no interest in Spanx, I merely skim-read Alexandra Jacob’s “Smooth Moves.” Then I turned expectantly to Lauren Collins’s “Sole Mate.” I loved Collins’s “Angle of Vision” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010). Alas, “Sole Mate” is not nearly as good, and I think I know why. Its subject, the shoe designer Christian Louboutin, does not appear to attract Collins’s admiration the way the paraglider/photographer George Steinmetz does in “Angle of Vision.” There’s nothing in “Sole Mate” that even comes close to matching the inspiration of some of the passages in “Angle of Vision.” This one, for example: “Their parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow, reminded me of horseshoe crabs. In the fading light, the sand turned from the color of paprika to a blood-orange shade and then to an iridescent purple, like eyeshadow, eventually deepening to a chocolaty brown.”

The only other piece in this week’s issue that had potential to be interesting was Evan Osnos’s “Aftershocks.” While it’s gracefully written and contains many absorbing facts about the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan’s northeast coast last month, it fails to put a human face on the victims. Compare it with Jon Lee Anderson’s gritty “Neighbors’ Keeper” (The New Yorker, February 8, 2010), a report on conditions in Haiti six days after it was struck by an earthquake. Anderson places Nadia François, who walks miles from her town in a ravine in search of supplies, at the center of his piece. We see the devastation of the landscape and the suffering of the people at ground level, as Anderson follows François’ desperate quest for aid. Osnos, in his piece, doesn’t get close enough to the trauma. And in fairness to him, there was the risk of radiation exposure if he got too close to the disaster zone. Whatever the reason, his piece feels weirdly detached. I think the problem is that Osnos gives us his Tokyo experience, when what we're expecting is a detailed description of life in the cities and villages hit by the tsunami.

Second Thoughts: I’m feeling guilty. I was too hard on Osnos’s “Aftershocks.” The passage in which Osnos and a friend are driving through Tokyo at night and are stopped at a red light “as an aftershock rippled through the car” is amazing.