Best of 2021: Reporting

Illustration by Mark Wang, from John Seabrook's "Zero-Proof Therapy"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2021 (with a choice quote from each in brackets): 

1. John Seabrook, “Zero-Proof Therapy,” September 27, 2021 (“I swirled the beer and admired the lacery of foam, as the bubbles slid slowly down the side of the glass. I took a deep whiff—the Cascade hops, from the Pacific Northwest, had notes of pineapple and hay. I brought the glass up to my lips, and took a long swallow. A tingle of good cheer seemed to spread through my hand up my right arm and into my chest”).

2. Gary Shteyngart, “My Gentile Region,” October 11, 2021 (“I have always imagined that beyond its pleasurable utility the penis must be an incomprehensible thing to most heterosexual women, like a walrus wearing a cape that shows up every once in a while to perform a quick round of gardening”).

3. Heidi Julavits, “The Fire Geyser,” August 23, 2021 (“The lava near the path reached out with giant panther paws that seemed to demand petting”). 

4. Rivka Galchen, “Better Than a Balloon,” February 15 & 22, 2021 (“And Pacific Trimming had recently remodelled, so that if you walked by on Thirty-ninth Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, even the least crafty among us might be filled with a desire for rickrack, for zippers in thirty-six colors, for shank buttons”).

5. Nick Paumgarten, “It’s No Picnic,” March 1, 2021 (“At Hamido, the evening was mild, and the curve was still more or less flat; happy to be around people other than our families, we sat at a large table on the sidewalk, in the open air, sharing platters of bran-grilled orate, grilled octopus, fried sardines, baba ghanoush, and beers of our own bringing. Was all of this reckless? Probably”).

6. Ed Caesar, “Only Disconnect,” November 29, 2021 (“The men were making Berber tea, which is the color of rust. They seemed delighted to see a stranger, and came out to greet me. Their grooved, hard faces confirmed a lifetime spent outdoors. Next to them, I looked like a newborn. They gave me bread, a tin of sardines, and a glass of the tea, which was as sweet as a candy cane. I happily devoured all of it”).

7. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2,” April 19, 2021 (“Nothing goes well in a piece of writing until it is in its final stages or done”). 

8. Ann Patchett, “Flight Plan,” August 2, 2021 (I saw the headlights against the garage door and went outside in the rain to meet him with my love and my rage and my sick relief.)

9. M. R. O’Connor, “Towering Infernos,” November 15, 2021 (“The temperature was a hundred degrees, and the Air Quality Index was 368—a ‘hazardous’ rating. An opened but undrunk can of Budweiser sat on the patio of an abandoned house, and the milkweed on the side of the road was drenched in psychedelic-pink fire retardant. We took our breaks sitting inside idling trucks, where we could breathe conditioned air instead of toxic smoke”).

10. Lauren Collins, “Kitchen Confessional,” December 20, 2021 ("In Roman’s world, an admission of effort must be offset by an ungiven fuck"). 

2021 Year in Review

Illustration from newyorker.com

Begin with a drink. I’ll have one of those Mumbai Mules that Hannah Goldfield mentions in her excellent “Tables For Two: Bollywood Kitchen” (March 1, 2021): “vodka, ginger beer, and fresh lime juice, punched up with ground coriander and cumin and shaken over ice.” Mm, fucking delicious! Okay, let’s roll! 

First highlight: John Seabrook’s “Zero-Proof Therapy.” What a piece! It’s about Seabrook’s “raging non-alcoholism,” and his discovery of a great zero-alcoholic beer called Run Wild. It begins in the bar of the Atlantic Brewing Company, Stratford, Connecticut:

Behind the bar, Bill Shufelt, a thirty-eight-year-old former hedge-fund trader, who co-founded Athletic in 2017, drew me a pint of Two Trellises, one of the company’s seasonal N.A. brews—a hazy I.P.A. that he and the other co-founder, John Walker, Athletic’s forty-one-year-old head brewer, were test-batching. I had not raised a pint drawn from a keg since I quit drinking alcohol, exactly one thousand eight hundred and eighty-eight days earlier. The glass seemed to fit my palm like a key.

That “The glass seemed to fit my palm like a key” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – a perfect blend of the personal and the reportorial. I enjoyed it enormously. 

Highlight #2: John McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2.” Great to see the Master still producing at age ninety. This piece is a beauty, containing, among other arresting items, the story of how McPhee became a New Yorker writer. If you’re an aspiring writer racked by self-doubt, you should read this piece. In McPhee’s words, it’s a “chronicle of rejection as a curable disease.” It begins, improbably, with a seventeenth century Dutch ship called the Tyger, and ends in the office of William Shawn. Other ingredients: sand hogs, basketball, the Twin Towers, the Tower of London, Jackie Gleason, Bill Bradley, and lunch with the legendary Esquire editor, Harold Hayes. How does it all connect? You’ll have to read it and see. It’s quite a story!    

Speaking of greats, Janet Malcolm died this year, age eighty-six. She’s one of my lodestars. I love her unique blend of sharp-eyed journalism and sharp-tongued criticism. Many of her pieces are in my personal anthology of great New Yorker writing, including “Depth of Field,” “Performance Artist,” “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” and her extraordinary “The Silent Woman.” I’ll miss her. 

Highlight #3 is the wonderful art criticism of Peter Schjeldahl; seventeen splendid pieces this year. Among my favorites: “Movements of One” (“Morandi drains our seeing of complacency. He occults the obvious”); “Home Goods” (“Ordinary things in the world interested Chardin. That doesn’t sound rare, but, oh, it is”); and “A Trip to the Fair” (“He created this work in the dark with slathered silver nitrate, silver oxide, silver iodide, and silver bromide. Exposed to light, the strokes resolved into a filmy gestural cadenza: quietly ferocious, if such is imaginable, like superimposed eddies in a whipping windstorm”).

And while we’re at it, let’s give a huzzah for my favorite section of the magazine – “Goings On About Town” – a weekly smorgasbord of delectable mini-reviews of, among other things, art shows, movies, music, and restaurants. I devour it! For me, the most challenging “Top Ten” list is always “Best of GOAT”; there's so much to choose from, it’s tough boiling it down.

Other highlights: Rivka Galchen’s “Better Than a Balloon,” Gary Shteyngart’s “My Gentile Region,” Ann Patchett’s “Flight Plan,” Heidi Julavits’s “The Fire Geyser,” and Ed Caesar’s “Only Disconnect” – all crazy good! 

But that’s enough for now. Over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I enjoyed most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another glorious year of reading bliss. 

August 23, 2021 Issue

Heidi Julavits’s “The Fire Geyser,” in this weeks issue, has it all: fascinating subject (volcano eruption); exotic setting (Iceland’s Reykjanes Penninsula); personal experience (“I touched the hardened lava. It was the temperature of someone’s lap after a dog or a child has been sitting in it”); vivid description (“The center of the field resembled carbonized oatmeal. The lava near the path reached out with giant panther paws that seemed to demand petting”); arresting details (“There was now a strong and familiar odor. For a New Yorker, the association was immediate: 9/11. The air smelled like cataclysm”). 

It’s an account of Julavits’s trip to the Fagradalsfjall eruption in May of this year. It puts us squarely there at the top of Goggle Hill, looking down at the moving, molten lava fields:

Just beneath me, a bright-orange puddle, streaked with blue, bubbled up in the middle of what had seemed to be an inactive lava field. The puddle steadily grew as the surrounding surface melted away. Then a second puddle opened beside it, widening with the speed of film dissolving in a projector. As the puddles expanded, the heat surged, pushing me back, along with other spectators who’d come to the edge. Gas emanating from the puddles made my lungs constrict, causing light-headedness.

The piece brims with extraordinary description:

Seven or so minutes later, a man announced, in English, “Here it comes!” A notch in the crater’s side brightened as lava surged. Then a fire geyser shot above the crater’s lip, red-orange and slopping. It hung in the air, having apparently negotiated a deal with gravity during its time in the earth’s mantle. The lava gushed over the notch and fed the molten river. Bits of hardened crust floated along the top, resembling shards of black ice. A giant red-orange boulder flew about forty feet into the air, then landed and rolled halfway down the slope. Within seconds, it had seized in place, turning the color of ash.

The crater released an oceanic roar that filled my whole body. Even at a distance, I could feel the intense heat of the fire geyser on my face. If I closed my eyes, I was at the beach on a hot day, and had just emerged from the freezing water and was about to take a nap in the sun.

The lava here had an uneven, ominously scaly appearance, like glitchy dragon skin, and loomed ten feet overhead. It radiated an even heat, as though thrown from a cast-iron stove. This lava was palpably on the move, and it tinkled loudly as its glassy crust shattered. Molten rock, beneath a coating of solidified shards, rolled over itself at the pace of glue, churning the lava field forward and continuing to fill up a valley that, for the moment, still contained it.

“The Fire Geyser” is one of this year’s best pieces. I enjoyed it immensely.