4 Illuminating "Photo Booth" Pieces

Photo by Sohrab Hura

As I’ve mentioned here before, I love photography writing. I relish reading perceptive critics’ attempts to extract meaning from what is an inherently enigmatic medium. Recently, newyorker.com, in its “Photo Booth” department, published four excellent photography reviews: Samanth Subramanian’s  “Sohrab Hura’s Frozen Vision of Kashmir” (May 2, 2026); Max Norman’s “August Sander’s Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World” (May 21, 2026); Taran Dugal’s, “How Raghu Rai Captured an India in Transition” (May 23, 2026); and Hilton Als’, “The Expansive Joy of Mao Ishikawa” (May 30, 2026). I want to consider each of them and note some of their highlights. 

Samanth Subramanian, in “Sohrab Hura’s Frozen Vision of Kashmir,” reviews a new book of Hura’s photos called Snow. Two things about the book strike him immediately: (1) “Each of the hundred and seventy-five photos sits by itself, square and silent, on a white page, without a jot of text to indicate when and where it was taken, or what it depicts”; and (2) “there’s barely any direct sign of the conflict that has, for decades, eaten into the very bones of Kashmir, a territory claimed so ferociously by India and Pakistan that they’ve fought several wars over it, pushing its people into anger, ruin, and, since the nineteen-eighties, armed uprisings against Indian rule.”

Subramanian’s piece functions like an introductory essay to Hura’s book. He tells us that Hura, who lives in Delhi, took these photos beginning in 2015, when he first travelled to Kashmir; that the photos pre-date the wrenching violence inflicted by the Indian state upon Kashmiri society, starting in 2019; and that Hura’s approach to taking these photos was improvisatory. On this last point, Subramanian says,

He’d go to Srinagar or Pahalgam, catch a bus out, disembark in the countryside, and meander back into town through fields and villages. Invariably, people would wonder about this lone outsider on foot and invite him into their homes for tea. Much of “Snow” unfolds in the domestic or pastoral register. Two bowls of rice on a blue carpet, gleaming as they catch the sun from the window. A teen-ager dragging home an orange cooking-gas cylinder with the aid of just a rope. Tomatoes floating in a large, clear puddle. A sheep being shorn, its shearer tossing onto a blue tarp drifts of wool that look no different from the snow on the surrounding ground.

Photo by Sohrab Hura

Subramanian admires these photos not just for their beauty, but for their cold reality. He writes,

The snow is, of course, everywhere. In the Indian psyche, the idea of Kashmir as a winter wonderland has been unshakeable, polished often through Bollywood numbers that interrupt some urban plot to whisk their hero and heroine away to dance and sing on the Himalayan slopes. In some of Hura’s photos, the snow is still beautiful when it swaddles a landscape, Bruegel-like. But mostly the snow is a pervasive, persistent force: stacked so high outside a window that it cuts off the light, enveloping cars, coming down day and night. Even when the snow is absent, winter, its coldhearted parent, makes itself felt in the bare branches of trees and the sere grass in the fields. Kashmir is as much hardship as it is beauty, as much despair as it is resilience.

For me, the best part of Subramanian’s piece is its concluding paragraph:

What does “Snow” testify to? Possibly to a way of life that not only survives many kinds of precarity—cruel weather, scanty income, a despotic army—but that even molds itself to them. I kept returning to an image of the side of a house with unfinished red brick walls and a corrugated metal roof. Quilts and blankets burst out of its upper windows, perhaps to be aired or perhaps as plugs to keep out the winter wind. It’s a sight so unexpected that it feels faintly comic, until you clock just how many blankets there are—and how bitterly cold it must be in that house at night. The day is bright, and the distant peaks are carpeted in green, but there’s still a berm of snow on the road by the house, as if to warn that the winter will never entirely leave this land.

What does “Snow” testify to? – I relish that question. And I relish the way Subramanian finds an answer in one of Hura’s photos.

Max Norman’s “August Sander’s Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World” is a review of Yale University Art Gallery’s exhibition “August Sander’s People of the 20th Century.” This is a show of Sander’s famous series of portraits taken from about 1910 to around 1950 in which he sought, as Norman says, “to make nothing less than a visual catalogue of all the types and professions in Germany.” Norman describes it as Sander’s “largest exhibition yet” – “the images are hung in tall, orderly grids, like a periodic table of the human elements.” I’m familiar with Sander’s work: see my “On August Sander: Dyer v. Lane” (June 21, 2014).  

What’s interesting about Norman’s piece is his observation that while Sander saw people in terms of categories – farmers, tradesmen, artists, professions, and so on – he also noticed difference, singularity, oddness. He says, “Despite his claims to universality, Sander thought with his eye, which was attracted to abnormal bodies, unforgettable faces, unkempt free thinkers, and all sorts of people the Nazis would soon label 'unerwünscht,' or undesirable.” 

I love that “Sander thought with his eye.” It locates Sander’s art not in his classifications, but in his visual acuity. 

Photo by August Sander

I also like the way Norman attempts to see through the poses of Sander’s subjects to their real lives. He says of one portrait:

A farmer and his wife, allegorized as “Propriety and Harmony,” look out at us from hooded eyes like a beat-down Adam and Eve. The man subtly smiles as he rests a hand on his seated wife’s shoulder, but she holds her mouth in a weary slant and clasps a bouquet of flowers, which, along with her black dress, turn this not so much into an aged nuptial portrait as a memento mori. With bracing clarity and a drop of respectful nostalgia, Sander shows us people as they were, rather than as they wanted to be.

Taran Dugal, “How Raghu Rai Captured an India in Transition” is a tribute to Rai, who passed away April 26, 2026, at the age of eighty-three. Dugal reviews Rai’s 2015 book Picturing Time, “a kaleidoscopic compendium of work that spans fifty years and chronicles modern India through its formative decades, as it grappled with newfound statehood and the volatile forces of breakneck modernization.” Dugal says,

Despite the documentary nature of his work, Rai’s practice, as he writes in “Picturing Time,” was rooted in the “divine concept of darshan,” or “a complete awareness” of “the reality of a place, a person, the physical and the inner aura, reflected in its entirety.” He believed that “some situations arise from somewhere to bless you with the unexpected,” and understood that a good photo unfolds like a dream: initially, the lightning-bolt shock of aesthetic confrontation, and later the remembrance—memory-images persisting long after the page is turned, the book put away, the subject of the picture itself long forgotten. 

That’s a little too cosmic for me. But one of the photos used to illustrate Dugal’s piece is inspired. It’s called “Monsoon Downpour in Delhi” (1984). Dugal describes it superbly:

My favorite shot from the book is “Monsoon Downpour in Delhi,” from 1984, which shows a bull pulling a load in the heavy rain, its driver balancing barefoot atop a wooden cart. To his left is a black car with a bulky, rounded frame, glimmering in the deluge. One look at the image and I remembered the Delhi monsoons from my childhood summers—the intolerable humidity, the legions of darkened clouds gathering on the horizon, followed by stentorian thunder and relentless, life-affirming rain. The photo functioned as a window into the past, but it reminded me, too, of the future.

Photo by Raghu Rai

The last piece I want to note in this excellent quartet of “Photo Booth” essays is Hilton Als’ “The Expansive Joy of Mao Ishikawa.” It’s a review of an exhibition of Ishikawa’s photos on view at Alison Bradley Projects, New York, called "Rogue." Als sees photos as essentially mysterious. He says Ishikawa’s pictures are “marked by an expansive joy, one in which the medium plays a part, for sure, but the majority of which comes from her subjects and their willingness to display themselves before her camera, an instrument that mystifies even as it elucidates.”

The show consists of four series of photos: “Red Flower,” “Life in Philly,” “A Port Town Elegy,” and “My Family.” Of the “Red Flower” pictures, Als says,

All are gelatin-silver prints, a format that adds to the shock and the warmth of the flash lighting. In one shot, we see a couple in bed, looking delightedly at the camera, and then, in the next, the same couple facing each other as they kiss. The tenderness of their need is moving. The third image shows some Black men outside what I assume to be a bar. The distance is reportorial—Ishikawa pulls back to show us what this world looks like, at least in part—and what really gets to me are certain details in the picture. It’s a warm night; to the right of the frame, a woman in a long dress stands between two men. The man to her left wears a short-sleeved shirt; her companion on the other side sports a patterned shirt, light-colored pants, and a pair of white shoes. The flash is like another level of heat. But what one fixates on here is how the two men flanking the woman stand protectively close to her. They are not possessive; they simply recognize her smallness, her vulnerability, while Ishikawa recognizes theirs.

That “What really gets to me are certain details in the picture” made me smile in recognition. It's the response of a true photography writer. Recall Roland Barthes: “Certain details may 'prick' me” (Camera Lucida).  

My favorite passage in Als’ review is his description of the “A Port Town Elegy” series. He writes,

The men in “A Port Town Elegy” are day laborers and dockworkers she met through a bar she owned in Naha. The energy in these pictures is different from that in “Red Flower”—more confrontational, infused with male bravado and despair. The subjects are defined by poverty and its limiting power: one gets the sense that they drink to forget themselves, while howling to declare themselves—to the cosmos, to one another, to Ishikawa’s camera. A man dancing alone, barefoot, is a wonderful portrait of unself-conscious desolation and freedom, all at once. The photographs in “A Port Town Elegy” are strong images about being trapped and exercising masculinity. But who takes the poor’s power or demand for power seriously? Ishikawa doesn’t sentimentalize these guys; she lets them get in her face (and, by extension, her frame), she pays attention to them, and imagine how rare that is in their world! 

Ishikawa doesn’t sentimentalize her subjects; she pays attention to them. Her photos are serious acts of attention. 

Photo by Mao Ishikawa

March 9, 2026, Issue

I love photography writing. There’s an interesting piece by Hilton Als in this week’s New Yorker. It’s a review of “Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation” at the International Center of Photography. Als likes the show. He says he’s “grateful for any opportunity to investigate this essentially mysterious work, which pushes you away even as it pulls you in.”

I’m not sure what Als means when he says Atget’s photos “push you away.” Maybe he’s referring to their silence. He writes,

When I was younger and didn’t “get” Atget, I thought of his images as silent, with no action, no story. But now I can see that they are full of story—the story of time and its passage. My visits to the I.C.P. convinced me that Atget knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to make an epic record of time and place.

I like that passage, although I’d alter it slightly. Instead of “full of story,” I’d say “full of time and place.” Atget’s photos are an epic record of time and place. 

Postscript: Another excellent New Yorker piece on Atget’s photography is Anthony Lane’s “A Balzac of the Camera” (April 25, 1994). Lane says, “Atget stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice.” Right there, I think, is the essence of Atget’s brilliant art. 

Eugène Atget, Bourg-la-Reine, ferme Camille Desmoulins (1901)

Hilton Als' "William Eggleston's Lonely South"

William Eggleston, Untitled (1972)

I like the way Hilton Als interprets the above photo by William Eggleston. In his absorbing “Photo Booth: William Eggleston’s Lonely South” (The New Yorker, February 9, 2026), he writes,

The real stunner when it comes to showing us community is Eggleston’s 1972 image of a young Black woman, sitting in a church pew with other women of color, turning to look over her shoulder at the camera. The woman’s hair is straightened—“correct”—and she is thin; she wears a sleeveless, wine-colored dress, and the long fingers of her left hand rest on her left shoulder, partly hiding her mouth. It’s a powerful evocation of the psychology of beauty in the American South. Is she covering her mouth because she’s been made to see her lips as too big? Does she straighten her hair because the “natural” look has caught on only in big cities, where women have more freedom to express themselves, or is she simply trying to align herself with the older women she is sitting with, to be one with them? By looking at the white man behind the camera, is she doing something forbidden? We’ll never know. And it’s those many mysteries, rooted in the real and the possible, that continue to make photography in general, and Eggleston’s in particular, so fascinating.

Rather than read speculative narrative into Eggleston’s image, Als asks questions. He proceeds interrogatively. To me, this is the preferable way to go when dealing with an art as enigmatic as photography.  

November 17, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I enjoyed Hannah Goldfield’s “Takes” tribute to Anthony Bourdain’s “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” She says,

The voice he introduced in “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” is not just brash and ballsy; it reverberates with style and poetry, from its tantalizing opening lines: “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish.”

Yes, I agree. Bourdain’s voice is transfixing. I first encountered it in The New Yorker’s great September 6, 2021 “Food & Drink” archival issue. The essay is called “Hell’s Kitchen.” It originally appeared in the April 17, 2000 New Yorker. What a piece of writing! It's a first-person-present-tense account of a day in Bourdain’s life as chef at the Manhattan restaurant Les Halles. Here's a sample:

It’s noon, and already customers are pouring in. Immediately, I get an order for pork mignon, two boudins, one calf’s liver, and one pheasant, all for one table. The boudins—blood sausages—take the longest, so they have to go in the oven instantly. First, I prick their skins with a cocktail fork so that they don’t explode; then I grab a fistful of caramelized apple sections and throw them into a sauté pan with some butter. I heat butter and oil for the pork in another sauté pan, throw a slab of liver into a pan of flour after salting and peppering it, and in another pan heat some more butter and oil. I take half a pheasant off the bone and place it on a sizzle platter for the oven, then spin around to pour currant sauce into a small saucepan to reduce. Pans ready, I sear the pork, sauté the liver, and slide the pork straight into the oven on another sizzler. I deglaze the pork pan with wine and stock, add sauce and some garlic confit, then put the pan aside; I’ll finish the reducing later. The liver, half-cooked, goes on another sizzler. I sauté some chopped shallots, deglaze the pan with red-wine vinegar, give it a shot of demiglace, season it, and put that aside, too. An order for mussels comes in, followed by one for breast of duck. I heat up a pan for the duck and load up a cold pan with mussels, tomato coulis, garlic, shallots, white wine, and seasoning. It’s getting to be boogie time.

“Prick,” “grab,” “throw,” “heat,” “throw,” “heat,” “take,” “place,” “spin,” “pour,” “sear,” “sauté,” “slide,” “deglaze,” “add,” “sauté,” “deglaze,” “give,” “put,” “heat,” “load” – over twenty action verbs. Bourdain's writing thrillingly enacts the kinetic reality of his Les Halles kitchen.

2. The title of Hilton Als’ piece (the newyorker.com version) caught my eye: “Robert Rauschenberg’s Art of the Real.” I thought to myself, Real? What’s real about it? Rauschenberg’s art isn’t real. It’s about as unreal as you can get. The art of the real is a matter of seeing things as they are. Rauschenberg fails this test. But after reading the piece, I get what Als is saying. He’s referring to Rauschenberg’s use of real materials – real tires, real quilts, real chairs, real bicycles. “Art is more powerful when it incorporates the real,” Als says. Okay, but look what Rauschenberg does with these real things. He combines them, daubs them with paint, and makes them his own. Look at Monogram (1955-59). A stuffed Angora goat girdled with a tire. Als describes it: 

The goat had a goatee, horns, and a long-haired silver torso. Its head and neck were streaked with several colors of paint, as though it had put on makeup while drunk. Not only that—there was a black-and-white rubber tire around its middle.

Als describes his youthful encounter with Monogram as “one of the more destabilizing experiences of my life.” I’m sure it was. Monogram is an unforgettable artwork. But it’s not realism – not even close. Some critics have suggested that it signifies anal sex: see, for example, Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (1981). Leo Steinberg found this interpretation too reductive. He saw the imposition of the tire as “an act of appropriation.” In his great Encounters with Rauschenberg (2000), he wrote,

As the artist would later encircle a car key with paint and a bicycle with neon tubing, so here – to make it his own. The goat alone – even with signature paint on its muzzle – did not look Rauschenbergian enough, until joined with its tire in definitive incongruity. 

Als, in his piece, also refrains from extracting any specific meaning from Monogram. The closest he comes is by asking these questions: 

I thought about “Monogram” ’s layers for years. I knew that goats in mythology were often mischievous, symbols of randiness and disorder—“queer” animals. Was that goat a combination of the real, the queer, and the mythic? Was I?

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram (1955-59)

June 30, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Vince Aletti, in his mini-review of “Constellation,” a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, describes Arbus’s work as “tough, provocative, and brilliantly dark.” I agree. He also says that Arbus “isn’t easy to love.” This is also true. Aletti’s note reminded me of Susan Sontag’s great essay on Arbus – “Freak Show” [The New York Review of Books, November 15, 1973; included in her brilliant On Photography (1977) under the title “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly”]. It contains one of my favorite Sontag sentences: “Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.”

2. Hilton Als’ “Goings On” review of Gagosian Gallery’s “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” is illustrated with a reproduction of de Kooning’s “Suburb in Havana” (1958). It’s one of my favorite de Koonings. I first saw it in a piece by T. J. Clark called “Frank Auerbach’s London” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2015). Clark writes, 

If I’d been able to glimpse a de Kooning landscape from ten years earlier – say, Suburb in Havana from 1958 – lurking under Autumn Morning, I might have been a little less at sea. But the problem would only have shifted ground. I would still have had to sort out why and how de Kooning’s elegant, lavatorial graffiti – his Cuban-blue depth, the lavish decisiveness of his foreground ‘V’ – were turned in the Auerbach into a kind of waterlogged storm-streaked slipperiness. 

"Elegant lavatorial graffiti"? Ouch. Clark has thrown a barb. Is he right? 

3. A shout-out to photographer Heami Lee for her delectable pizza shot in Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Cactus Wren.”

4. And let’s give a huzzah for Alena Skarina’s wonderful, eye-catching illustration for Elizabeth Kolbert’s disconcerting “Seeds of Doubt.”

 

Who Should Succeed Schjeldahl?

Peter Schjeldahl (Photo by Alex Remnick)

Peter Schjeldahl is irreplaceable. Nevertheless, The New Yorker needs to have an art critic. Who are some of the possibilities? I see Hilton Als had an “Art World” piece in last week’s issue. But I'm not sure he’s the right guy for the job. He's too caught up in identity politics. I’d like to see someone in the position whose values are governed more by pleasure than anything else. And I’d like to see someone who writes with an unmistakable, idiosyncratic, formally coherent personal style. Here are some candidates I’d consider if I were picking the magazine’s new art critic: 

1. David Salle 

2. Wayne Koestenbaum

3. Gini Alhadeff

4. Susan Tallman

5. Johanna Fateman

The best living art writer is T. J. Clark. But his thinking might be a shade too metaphysical for the New Yorker job. The perfect choice is Salle: see his brilliant series of art pieces for The New York Review of Books. 

Gazelle Mba's "On Roy DeCarava"

Roy DeCarava, Hallway (1953)

Gazelle Mba’s “On Roy DeCarava" (London Review of Books, April 7, 2022) contains two wonderful descriptions of DeCarava’s work. She says of his Hallway (1953),

In the recent DeCarava retrospective at the David Zwirner gallery, Hallway stood out among the rows of silver gelatin prints. At first glance, it appears as a dense mass of what the curator Zoé Whitley called his ‘infinite palette of grey tonalities’, which take on volume in their shadowiness. It takes a second for your eyes to adjust, and to see the light in the background of the photo. A light that refuses illumination, a light that is no light. The two narrow walls converge into a vanishing point with no discernible horizon. The experience of seeing Hallway up close mimics what I imagine it was like to be there, unmoored, when everyone else had gone to bed. DeCarava seems to say that there is something about this light, this hallway, that won’t let him be, and he tries to draw out its meaning. He was fascinated by walls as an urban motif, walls so thin you can hear the neighbours yelling at their kids, walls that make you feel at home, crumbling walls with broken windows.

That “A light that refuses illumination, a light that is no light” is marvellously fine. Mba also provides an excellent description of DeCarava’s Graduation (1949):

Graduation (1949) shows a girl in white dress and white gloves, flowers pinned to her chest, jewellery about her neck and on her ears, her hair curled and styled to perfection. She is pristine. You sense the care and effort put into her appearance, the hours it took to get her looking this way. Sitting between some auntie’s legs while her hair was combed and pulled until it conformed to the desired style, the fabric for her dress and gloves sourced from the right place or bought new. Maybe the jewellery is an heirloom, reserved for moments like this. You would expect to find her at a ball, awash in bright light, surrounded by other tulled women, the air smelling like shea butter, hairspray and perfume mixed with peach schnapps for the grown-ups.

Instead she is alone in a vacant lot. Behind her is the skeleton of a demolished building, graffiti on the wall to her right, broken objects everywhere. There’s a pile of trash in the foreground, with a crumpled newspaper carrying a headline about South Korea. With the rest of the image in shadow, the girl stands in a square of light, walking forwards, calmly and deliberately, as if moving out of the weight and rubble of history into her own future. DeCarava happened on her by accident, but she knows where she’s going. The photograph seems to capture it all: wars, the state’s abandonment of Black urban centres, a young girl on her way to her graduation. But it doesn’t seek to synthesise these facts: no single one overwhelms or denies the existence of the others. Light and dark, mixed into DeCarava’s grey palette.

Those last two lines are inspired! The whole piece is inspired – a splendid appreciation of DeCarava’s subtle art. 

Postscript: See also Hilton Als’ terrific “Roy DeCarava’s Poetics of Blackness” (The New Yorker, September 23, 2019). 

July 26, 2021 Issue

I’m intrigued by Igshaan Adams’ cloud-like hanging sculptures. There’s a picture of one [“Getuie (Witness) VIII,” 2021] illustrating Hilton Als’ “At the Gallery,” in this week’s issue. Als describes them as “tumbleweeds of wire,” and this strikes me as exactly right, except that wire is just one of their ingredients. Other elements: metal, glass, rubber and stone beads, hoop earrings, chain, car paint, and resin. Several more are on view at caseykaplangallery.com, in its wonderful Igshaan Adams exhibition “Veld Wen.”  

Installation view of Igshaan Adams' "Getuie (Witness) VIII" (2021) and "Nagtreis Op N Vliende (A Night Journey On a Winged Horse)" (2021) (Photo by Jason Wyche) 

Amy Sillman's Gorgeous Blooms

One of the most beautiful online art shows I’ve seen recently is Amy Sillman’s “Twice Removed,” at the Gladstone Gallery, NYC. Hilton Als, in his “Goings On About Town: Art: Amy Sillman” (The New Yorker, October 19, 2020), says of it,

The splendor of Sillman’s new show at the Gladstone gallery lies in its restlessness. Working primarily in oil and acrylic on paper, canvas, and linen, the painter’s fecund imagination finds its expression, first, in a number of abstract images made up of bold dark lines that suggest Sillman’s interest in collage, less in terms of juxtaposing one texture next to another than in drawing, with paint, one image on top of another, the better to give fuller credence to both. These various collisions are very exciting, and come to rest in her paintings of flowers, which convey some of the lush despair and loneliness of van Gogh’s sunflowers and irises but are mostly about the spontaneity that is Sillman’s stock-in-trade: the flowers are the visual manifestation of her blooming mind.

I agree. Sillman’s blooms are delightful. Jason Farago, in his “Amy Sillman’s Breakthrough Moment Is Here" (The New York Times, October 8, 2020), writes,

The great shock of the Gladstone show are the smallest works here: the flowers she painted every morning, all alone in her humble North Fork rental as the virus spread and the temperatures rose. A posy of peonies, their petals rendered as splotches, dense as a bowling ball. A single drooping sunflower, and then a bouquet of them, in a simple jug.

Sillman’s online Gladstone exhibition brims with gorgeous abstracts and floral still lifes. I wish I could own one.

Credit: The above illustration is Amy Sillman's Untitled (2020).

Best of 2019: The Critics

Josh Cochran's illustration for Sarah Larson's "Home on the Range"

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

1. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Not Waving,” May 27, 2019 (“I was lucky to catch a rehearsal of a performance work by Brendan Fernandes that will take place at scheduled but infrequent times: five ballet dancers in black leotards strike varying poses on an arrangement of skeletal frameworks in black-painted wood. That was dreamy”).

2. James Wood, “Contents Under Pressure,” January 14, 2019 (“It’s a sign of how vital the rest of the book feels that a phrase like ‘caustic speech,’ which would be inoffensive enough in many novels, seems here irradiated with fakery”). 

3. Dan Chiasson’s “Freewriting,” October 14, 2019 (“The black bars of redacted text, which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours”).

4. Anthony Lane's “What If?,” July 8 & 15, 2019 (“Boyle, especially in the early scenes, provides acceleration; at the exact moment when Jack, standing at a bus stop, properly understands what the future holds, the camera hurries toward him like an excited kid”).

5. Alex Ross’s  “The Concerto Challenge,” March 25, 2019 (“The first movement follows the rudiments of sonata form, with the scampering opening material set against a slinky cantabile second theme that has a whiff of old Hollywood about it, as if Bette Davis were sipping a Scotch with the blinds drawn”).

6. Sarah Larson’s “Home on the Range,” February 4, 2019 (“The plot whirls along, heading inevitably toward collaborative writing, drunken mayhem, brandished golf clubs, existential crises, flying toast”).

 7. Alexandra Schwartz's “Painted Love,” July 22, 2019 (“She has the memoirist’s prerogative—this is how I remember it—and Picasso’s tyranny and brilliance are hardly in dispute”).

8. Hilton Als’s “Seen and Heard,” September 23, 2019 (“As in the Williams portrait, whiteness—here the whiteness of Horne’s turban, which sits like a beacon at the top of the image—is used to underline the blackness in the photograph, black skin and black as a color that leads to black feeling and thought”).

9. Janet Malcolm’s “The Unholy Practice,” September 23, 2019 (“The best intentions, however, can be broken on the wheel of skillful (or even inept) interviewing. Discretion so quickly turns into indiscretion under the exciting spell of undivided attention”).

10. Thomas Mallon's “Word for Word,” December 16, 2019 (“These changes alchemize a small piece of gold into a small piece of lead. Lowell slackens Hardwick’s prose into poetry, robs it of precision and pith”).

November 26, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Antony Huchette's snowy illustration for “Goings On About Town” ’s “Celebrating the Holidays” is delightful.

Antony Huchette, "Celebrating the Holidays" (2018)

2. Also in GOAT, Steve Futterman’s note on Carol Sloane at Birdland caught my eye, reminding me of Whitney Balliett’s 1987 Sloane profile, in which he describes her singing as “conversation put to music” (“Carol Sloane and Julie Wilson,” The New Yorker, April 6, 1987).

3. Frédéric Bazille’s gorgeous “Young Woman with Peonies” (1870), illustrating Hilton Als’ “At the Galleries: ‘Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet to Matisse to Today’ ” helps offset Janet Malcolm’s startling opinion, expressed in her recent “Six Glimpses of the Past,” that open peonies are “blowsy and ugly.”

Frédéric Bazille, "Young Woman with Peonies" (1870)

4. Peter Schjeldahl’s GOAT note on Dike Blair is a beauty, and is worth quoting in full:

Blair has been painting coolly beautiful little still-lifes of ordinary things in ordinary places for so long that, by now, they seem almost to paint themselves, for their own enjoyment. A pink cocktail luxuriates in a stemmed glass, never mind the somewhat gawky foreshortening of the tabletop that it shares with a cloth napkin and a bowl of nuts. Spatters of paint on a cement floor get a kick out of suggesting a frontal abstract painting, while still knowing perfectly well what they are. A yellow line and the shadow of a car bumper on a parking lot, water in a swimming pool, a torn-open FedEx envelope near a window fan, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, and a nodding tulip in a vase on a nighttime windowsill become unwilled memories—the almost, but not quite, meaningless retention of the small, sticky epiphanies that bind us to life.

5. Richard Brody reprises his brilliant capsule review of Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby” in this week’s “Goings On About Town,” and why not? It’s one of his best pieces. The last line is sublime: 

And Hawks brought to fruition his own universe of hints and symbols to conjure the force that rules the world: she tears his coat, he tears her dress, she steals his clothes, she names him “Bone,” and the mating cries of wild animals disturb the decorum of the dinner table, even as a Freudian psychiatrist in a swanky bar gives viewers an answer key.

6. Raffi Khatchadourian’s absorbing “Degrees of Freedom” tells about an extraordinary neuroscientific experiment in which a paralyzed woman’s brain is directly connected to a robotic arm. Khatchadourian is a superb describer of complex technological devices and procedures. His description of the implanting of the microelectrodes in the woman’s brain is unforgettable. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Then, suddenly, the injector was triggered. The sound of valves opening and closing filled the operating theatre, along with the rush of compressed air through the injector, the noise a lightning-quick mechanical breath, culminating in a metallic clink. In an instant, the ninety-six electrodes were in, like a soccer cleat going into soft earth.

Khatchadourian’s “Degrees of Freedom” is every bit the equal of his great “Transfiguration” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2012). I enjoyed it immensely. 

Best of 2016: Reporting

Photo by Jamie Hawkesworth

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2016 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover,” August 29, 2016 (“He walked over to the kissing point and got down on his knees. He blew some fine dirt from the joint and ran a finger through the dust. His silver cross hung down. The picture was: artist, archeologist, supplicant, looking at an entrance to the underworld”).

2. Tad Friend, “Holding the T,” January 18, 2016 (“I sent him on a long scavenger hunt, then decoyed him in for a backhand drop and flicked it crosscourt into open space. At 9–10, I thumped a series of forehand rails and then whipped a crosscourt by him. Another crosscourt got me a game ball at 12–11, and a backhand volley, a perfect nick at the perfect time, closed it out”).

3. Nick Paumgarten, “The Country Restaurant,” August 29, 2016 (“Baehrel has concocted a canny fulfillment of a particular foodie fantasy: an eccentric hermit wrings strange masterpieces from the woods and his scrabbly back yard. The extreme locavore, pure of spade and larder. The toughest ticket in town. Stir in opacity, inaccessibility, and exclusivity, then powder it with lichen: It’s delicious. You can’t get enough. You can’t even get in”).

4. Janet Malcolm, “The Performance Artist,” September 5, 2016 (“She had come to tame the beast of a piece, this half-naked woman in sadistic high heels. Take that, and that, Beethoven!”).

5. Ian Frazier, “Patina,” September 19, 2016 (“When you have Statue of Liberty green on the brain, you see it all around you, especially on infrastructure. Being aware of the color somehow makes the city’s bindings and conduits and linkages stand out as if they’d been injected with radioactive dye. When you look for the color, the city becomes an electric train set you’re assembling with your eyes”).

6. Hilton Als, “Dark Rooms,” July 4, 2016 (“She had no interest in trying to show who they were under the feathers and the fantasy: she was in love with the bravery of their self-creation, their otherness”).

7. Jonathan Franzen, “The End of the End of the World,” May 23, 2016 (“Although the colony was everywhere smeared with nitric-smelling shit, and the doomed orphan chicks were a piteous sight, I was already glad I’d come”).

8. Jill Lepore, “The War and the Roses,” August 8 & 15, 2016 [“Either they were willing to have Trump speak in their stead (“I am your voice”), the very definition of a dictator, or else they wanted to speak for themselves, because the system was rigged, because the establishment could not be trusted, or because no one, no one, could understand them, their true, particular, Instagram selves”].

9. Carolyn Kormann, “The Tasting-Menu Initiative,” April 4, 2016 (“Carola Quispé, a former Gustu student, aimed the gun into a glass of foamy pink liquid and topped it off with smoke, then added a coca-leaf garnish. ‘It’s made with papa-pinta-boca-infused singani, lime juice, and egg whites, balanced with palo santo syrup,’ she said. It felt like drinking incense”).

10. Elizabeth Kolbert, “A Song of Ice,” October 24, 2016 (“One iceberg reminded me of an airplane hangar, another of the Guggenheim Museum. There was a sphinx, a pagoda, and a battleship; a barn, a silo, and the Sydney Opera House”).

Honorable Mention: Tom Kizzia, “The New Harpoon,” September 12, 2016.

Credit: The above photograph, by Jamie Hawkesworth, is from Dana Goodyear’s “The Earth Mover” (The New Yorker, August 29, 2016).

Contenders for "Top Ten Reporting Pieces" (So Far)

Illustration by Bjorn Lie (from Dana Goodyear's "Mezcal Sunrise")

Well, with only eight weeks left in the year, I want to start considering what my “Top Ten Reporting Pieces” might look like. Here are some of the contenders:

Ben Lerner, “The Custodians” (January 11, 2016)

Tad Friend, “Holding the T” (January 18, 2016)

Andrew O’Hagan, “Imaginary Spaces”  (March 28, 2016)

Dana Goodyear, “Mezcal Sunrise” (April 4, 2016)

Carolyn Kormann, “The Tasting-Menu Initiative” (April 4, 2016)

Dexter Filkins, “The End of Ice” (April 4, 2016)

Ian Frazier, “The Bag Bill” (May 2, 2016)

Lizzie Widdicombe, “Happy Together” (May 16, 2016)

Jonathan Franzen, “The End of the End of the World” (May 23, 2016)

Hilton Als, “Dark Rooms” (July 4, 2016)

Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running” (July 11 & 18, 2016)

Jill Lepore, “The War and the Roses” (August 8 & 15, 2016)

Nick Paumgarten, “The Country Restaurant” (August 29, 2016)

Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover” (August 29, 2016)

Janet Malcolm, “The Performance Artist” (September 5, 2016)

Tom Kizzia, “The New Harpoon” (September 12, 2016)

Ian Parker, “Knives Out” (September 12, 2016)

Burkhard Bilger, “Ghost Stories” (September 12, 2016)

Ian Frazier, “Patina” (September 19, 2016)

Elizabeth Kolbert, “A Song of Ice” (October 24, 2016)

These pieces are listed in the order they appeared in the magazine. Eventually, the list will have to be whittled down to ten – no easy task (they’re all excellent pieces). And I’ve learned from previous years not to decide prematurely. Last year, with about three weeks to go, I was sure Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues” would be my #1 pick. Then Ben McGrath’s extraordinary “The Wayfarer” appeared, in the December 14 issue, and I had to revise my opinion (see here). By the way, where is McGrath? He’s a consistent Top Ten contender. But this year, he’s yet to appear. I miss him.