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)

June 17, 2024 Issue

I have absolutely no interest in what Ye did to his Tadao Ando beach house. Or do I? I dislike Ye (formerly Kanye West) and the vulgar lifestyle he represents. Yet I devoured Ian Parker’s “His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” in one delicious gulp. What hooked me? I confess it was the perverse spectacle of destruction, of seeing a gem of architectural art intentionally smashed with a sledgehammer. Parker writes,

Saxon’s videos include one in which he’s helping topple one of the chimneys. Another shows someone swinging a hammer at a bathroom’s black-and-white marble walls. A third demonstrates how a handsome glass balustrade, the kind you’re almost bound to find in a modern museum, shatters into windshield fragments when you tap its corner with a sledgehammer. In a fourth, Saxon and another man are demolishing the hot tub with two jackhammers. “There was so much rebar in the concrete,” Saxon told me. “It was absolutely brutal.”

Ye, through his agent Saxon, also tore out all the Ando custom wooden cabinetry. Crazy! Parker tries to show that Ye had his own design in mind, that he was pursuing his own particular aesthetic. He says,

Ye revealed to Saxon—although not all at once—that he wanted no kitchen, bathrooms, A.C., windows, light fixtures, or heating. He was intent on cutting off the water and the power (and removing the house’s cable and wiring, which ran through the concrete in plastic tubes). He talked of clarity, simplicity, and a kind of self-reliance. “He wanted everything to be his own doing,” Saxon told me. In one cheerful text from Ye to Saxon, in response to a report of the day’s demolition, he wrote, “Let’s gooooo . . . Simple fresh and cleeeeeean.”

I don’t buy it. It’s like Al Weiwei deliberately dropping his Han dynasty urn. Peter Schjeldahl said of that dubious action,

We’re told in the show’s catalogue that photographs of Ai dropping a millennia-old Han-dynasty urn, which smashes on the floor, “captures the moment when tradition is transformed and challenged by new values.” That likely reads better in Mandarin. The act strikes me as mere vandalism. [“Challenging Work,” The New Yorker, October 22, 2012]

September 12, 2016, Issue

Hooray! Bilger is back! He’s been absent from The New Yorker for almost two years. I’ve missed him. He’s one of the New Yorker greats, in my opinion – right up there with Liebling, Mitchell, McPhee, and Frazier. Now, here he is, with a terrific “Personal History” piece called “Ghost Stories,” set in Germany, in which he participates in a weird form of group therapy known as Familienaufstellung. His participation isn’t just for reporting purposes; it’s personally motivated. He says, “Like the others in the room, I was there to untangle a knot in my mind. I’d come to Germany to research the life of my grandfather Karl Gönner.” Gönner was born in Weil am Rhein, Germany. He fought in the First World War. During World War II, he was sent to Occupied France to work as a schoolteacher in an Alsatian village. He was also a member of the Nazis Party, and eventually became the village’s Ortsgruppenleiter, or Party chief. Bilger writes,

My mother rarely talked about his years in France, but she was well versed in the atrocities committed by men in his position. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Vichy regime. It must have been a torment to her, trying to square what she learned with her memories of her father. How could he have been both the man she knew and the monster history suggested?

Bilger participates in two Familienaufstellungs. His description of the second one produces one of the piece’s most vivid passages:

By the end of the second day, I’d been a brother, a grandfather, Restlessness, and the country of Germany. I’d watched people burst into tears, climb into one another’s laps, and pretend to be God. I’d heard a woman scream that she was bleeding from her vagina and that crows had eaten her baby. At times, the sobs and shouting rose to such a pitch that I worried that the police might come.

Bilger is skeptical about the reliability of Familienaufstellung narratives. He likens the process to “a visit to a psyche under the sober auspices of therapy.” What impresses him is “the careful attention people paid to one another.” He says, “The very act of empathizing so deeply seems to help people understand themselves.”

“Ghost Stories” is different from Bilger’s previous work. It’s more personal. He’s always written in the first person. But here his “I” is very close to his material. I think it’s one of his best pieces.

Three other excellent articles in this week’s issue are: Tom Kizzia’s “The New Harpoon,” Ian Parker’s “Knives Out,” and Dan Chiasson’s “Force of Nature.” In “The New Harpoon,” Kizzia visits the Inupiat community of Point Hope, on the Chukchi Sea in northern Alaska. The piece brims with interesting details (“a whaling skin boat provides the center support for a glass-topped boardroom table”; “a drum made of whale-liver membrane”). Parker’s “Knives Out” profiles The New York Times’ restaurant critic, Pete Wells (“His expressions of enthusiasm often take the form of wariness swept away: Wells found joy in a conga line at Señor Frog’s, in Times Square”). Chiasson’s “Force of Nature” is a review of Alice Oswald’s new poetry collection Falling Awake (“These poems give us the sensation of living alongside the natural world, of being a spectator to the changes that mark our mortality”).

I devoured all these pieces. This week’s New Yorker is one of the year’s best.

Best of 2015: Reporting

Here are my favorite fact pieces of 2015 (with a choice quote from each selection in brackets):

1. Ben McGrath, "The Wayfarer," December 14, 2015. (“A few of the bridges over the canal were so low that he had to lean back and retract his chin, sliding underneath, as though into an MRI scanner, while cars rolled overhead.”)

2. Nick Paumgarten, "Life Is Rescues," November 9, 2015. (“I wandered out into the rain and then into the kitchen tent. On a row of plastic hangers someone had hung the team’s bananas. Each hanger held two bunches. I stood looking at this, in admiration and wonder. Iceland.”)

3. Ian Frazier, "Bronx Dreams," December 7, 2015. (“Fifty kids in zombie makeup zombied to ‘Thriller,’ two middle-school actors did the scene in which Othello strangles Desdemona, a girl named Massire Camara recited a poem about the death of her uncle that is now on YouTube, and a stage full of elementary-age students in a step-dance group called the Bengal Tigers, from P.S. 55, did a routine with stomping, clapping, and chanting that bounced the audience out of its seats.”)

4. William Finnegan, "Off Diamond Head," June 1, 2015. (“Hands folded under my chin, I drifted. A bruise-colored cloud hung over Koko Head. A transistor radio twanged on a seawall where a Hawaiian family picnicked on the sand. The sun-warmed shallow water had a strange boiled-vegetable taste. The moment was immense, still, glittering, mundane. I tried to fix each of its parts in memory. I did not consider, even in passing, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it chose.”)

5. Rebecca Mead, "Sole Cycle," March 23, 2015. (“Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped.”)

6. David Owen, "Where the River Runs Dry," May 25, 2015. (“Our pilot, David Kunkel, asked me to retrieve his oxygen bottle from under my seat, and when I handed it to him he gripped the plastic breathing tube with his teeth and opened the valve.”)

7. Dana Goodyear, "A New Leaf," November 2, 2015. (“We waded into the water and put our flippers and masks on. I ducked my head under and gazed. Two years ago, it was rocks and urchins. Now kelp was everywhere, ochre-colored, thirty feet tall, flailing like tube dancers outside a car wash.”)

8. Ian Parker, "The Shape of Things to Come," February 23 & March 2, 2015. (“Ive’s aesthetic is not austere: one could think of the work done here as a reticent man’s idea of exuberance, with rapture expressed in the magnetic click of a power adapter.”)

9. Jill Lepore, "Joe Gould's Teeth," July 27, 2015. (“ ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’ is a defense of invention. Mitchell took something that wasn’t beautiful, the sorry fate of a broken man, and made it beautiful—a fable about art. ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’ is the best story many people have ever read. Its truth is, in a Keatsian sense, its beauty; its beauty, truth.”)

10. Elif Batuman, "The Big Dig," August 31, 2015. (“In a shed nearby, a noisy filtration machine was chugging its way through approximately two thousand sacks of Byzantine and Neolithic dirt.”)

Credit: The above photo, by Victor Schrager, is from Ben McGrath’s "The Wayfarer," The New Yorker, December 14, 2015.

The Year In Review: Images

Now, a few images from my 2015 New Yorker reading experience, in no particular order, montage-style:

BANANAS: I can still see in my mind’s eye those superbly noticed bunches of bananas hanging on plastic clothes hangers, in the Landsbjörg kitchen tent, at Landmannalaugar campsite, in Nick Paumgarten’s terrific "Life Is Rescues" (November 9, 2015).

KUBANEH IN A FLOWERPOT: One of the year’s most delectable images – Timna’s kubaneh, served steaming hot in a clay flowerpot, “freckled with sesame seeds,” (in Silvia Killingsworth’s wonderful "Tables For Two: Timna" October 26, 2015).

ROSE GOLD APPLE WATCH: I remember the color of the Apple Watch that Jonathan Ive wears, in Ian Parker’s masterful "The Shape of Things to Come" (February 23 & March 2, 2015) – “rose gold, with a band of white rubbery plastic.”

SEALSKIN BOOTS: I love sealskin boots and was delighted to see a pair mentioned in John Seabrook’s Talk story, "Free," February 2, 2015 (“Tagaq, who is thirty-nine and has jet-black hair and a girlish face, had removed her sealskin boots and was sitting barefoot on the floor of the Diker Pavilion, a large oval space on the museum’s ground level”).

RED DUTTON’S TEETH: Dutton, manager and coach of the New York Americans, the first team to play hockey in the old Madison Square Gardens, had teeth that, in Nick Paumgarten’s memorable words, “looked suspiciously like replacements for the set scattered on a frozen pond” ("Amerks," October 5, 2015).

PANTIES: I won’t soon forget those panties at Loosie Rouge, “petite enough to fit the models clustered around the bar, hung like birthday bunting over the liquor bottles” (Becky Cooper, "Bar Tab: Loosie Rouge," August 3, 2015).

JOE GOULD’S TEETH: I think they’re false. They appear as part of a vision that Jill Lepore has at the end of her extraordinary "Joe Gould's Teeth" (July 27, 2015): “I still sometimes picture a door with the word ‘Archive’ etched on smoky glass. I picture it like this: I open the door, sneak inside, and enter an enormous room, cluttered with notebooks stacked on the floor, on shelves, on desks. I reach into my pocket for what I’ve brought. It feels like porcelain. It opens like a clam. And then I back out of that room, as soundlessly as I came, having left behind: Joe Gould’s teeth.” 

FLOYD MAYWEATHER’S EYES: This stuck with me – Kelefa Sanneh’s description of Mayweather’s eyes: “Mayweather’s eyes get bigger when he fights: he seems intensely aware of his own vulnerability, which is precisely what makes him invulnerable” ("The Best Defense," May 25, 2015)

MILK BOTTLE FULL OF GRAVEL: That’s what was on geology professor Todd Halihan’s desk, when Rivka Galchen visited him, as reported in her terrific "Weather Underground" (April 13, 2015). According to Galchen (quoting Halihan), the gravel is from the Arbuckle, a geological formation under Oklahoma.

GLASS OF NEGLIGENCE: Mentioned in Colin Stokes’s wonderful "Bar Tab: Threes Brewing," June 29, 2015 (“Appropriately, first on the list is the terrific Negligence, which blends gin, basil syrup, lemon, and absinthe into what looks like a green juice cleanse, but is much better for you, depending on who you trust. ‘Your mouth might not be able to detect how strong it is, but your liver will,’ a server advised”).

STACKS OF PIZZA BOXES: Only Ian Frazier, with his jeweler’s eye for the overlooked and disregarded, would notice, “In out-of-the-way corners near the refreshment tables, stacks of empty pizza boxes rose to the height of a man” ("Bronx Dreams," December 7, 2015).

FURRY BIRKENSTOCKS: Sensuously described in Rebecca Mead’s delightful "Sole Cycle," March 23, 2015 (“There was a Boston mule made from textured velvet in crimson or gold, inspired by a Persian-lamb coat that Haslbeck had discovered in a flea market. An Arizona sandal had a rose-gold leather foot bed and an upper made from pinkish-peach tweed threaded with iridescent silver. It looked as if it had been cut from the sleeve of a Chanel jacket. Another Arizona sandal, in black leather, had been lined in sapphire-blue shearling”).

STUFFED-SATIN STARS: They were among the contents of Susan Cianciolo’s curio-filled cardboard “kits” that were on show at Bridget Donahue’s gallery last June (see Andrea K. Scott’s marvelous "Boxing Days," June 29, 2015).

OLD WHISKEY BOTTLE FULL OF WATER: This comes from Dana Goodyear’s excellent "A New Leaf" (November 2, 2015). Its main “character,” ocean farmer Bren Smith, drinks water from an old whiskey bottle.

PLAINS INDIAN HEADDRESS: Just one of the more than a hundred and fifty artifacts on display in “The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky,” a wondrous show at the Metropolitan Museum last spring, superbly reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl in his "Moving Pictures," March 6, 2015 (“Beadwork, metal cones, and cotton and silk cloth figure in a headdress from the Eastern Plains, circa 1780, along with local stuffs including bison horns, deer and horse hair, and porcupine quills”).

HOOKAH BEER TOWERS: I love this image; it’s from Jiayang Fan’s brilliant "Bar Tab: Play Lounge," February 16, 2015 [“Hookah beer towers (strawberry, mint, melon) are hailed like cabs on a busy avenue”].

Credit: The above photo (detail) is by Dina Litovsky; it’s used to illustrate Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Timna" (The New Yorker, October 26, 2015).

The Bliss of Precision

Rereading John Updike’s wonderful review-essay "Journeyers" (The New Yorker, March 10, 1980; included in his great 1983 collection Hugging the Shore) the other day, I was struck by his observation that there is “a certain bliss of precision in a sentence like ‘Their tents are frog-shaped, constructed of hides and woven mats of goat and camel hair on a stick frame, the large mouth facing east.’ ” I agree. “Bliss of precision” exactly captures the literary quality I most crave. The New Yorker brims with it. Here are ten recent examples:

1. “The octopus cocktail is an agreeably blunt counterpoint, a lilac-colored soup with the consistency of drinkable yogurt, in which purple and blue corn and charred avocado bob alongside tentacled slices on the right side of chewy” (Amelia Lester, "Tables For Two: Cosme," February 9, 2015).

2. But, if you’ve paid any attention to the hype, the entire endeavor might be a very delicious excuse for dessert: a corn-husk meringue with its own hashtag, possessed of an intensely milky taste from the mousse of mascarpone, cream, and corn purée that spills out like lava from its core (Amelia Lester, "Tabels For Two: Cosme," February 9, 2015).

3. “One evening in Chinatown, a young woman in a Nirvana T-shirt took a break from mixing Hawaiian punches—a juggling act involving eight kinds of liquor, pineapple juice, and grenadine—to pull out a giant laser disk, grab a mic, and perform ‘Santeria,’ by Sublime” (Emma Allen, "Bar Tab: Winnie's," February 9, 2015).

4. “Instead, the music of Gallery 621 is largely one of color: the red of Paul’s tunic, in the Ribera, emerges from a dark background like a tone from silence” (Alex Ross, "Eyes and Ears," February 9, 2015).

5. “Inside the shed, I tried on a watch, and its stainless-steel chain bracelet, guided by magnets, fell into place with the click of someone stacking nickels” (Ian Parker, "The Shape of Things to Come," February 23 & March 2, 2015).

6. “The table previously covered with a flat cloth was now uncovered: it was a glass-topped Apple Watch display cabinet, accessible to staff from below, via a descending, motorized flap, like the ramp at the rear of a cargo plane” (Ian Parker, "The Shape of Things to Come," February 23 & March 2, 2015).

7. “The most astounding is ‘Robe with Mythic Bird’ (1700-40), from an unknown tribe of the Eastern Plains: a tanned buffalo hide pigmented with a spiky abstraction, probably of a thunderbird, in red and black, which rivals the most exciting modern art” (Peter Schjeldahl, "Moving Pictures," March 16, 2015).

8. “Beadwork, metal cones, and cotton and silk cloth figure in a headdress from the Eastern Plains, circa 1780, along with local stuffs including bison horns, deer and horse hair, and porcupine quills” (Peter Schjeldahl, "Moving Pictures," March 16, 2015).

9. “There was a Boston mule made from textured velvet in crimson or gold, inspired by a Persian-lamb coat that Haslbeck had discovered in a flea market. An Arizona sandal had a rose-gold leather foot bed and an upper made from pinkish-peach tweed threaded with iridescent silver. It looked as if it had been cut from the sleeve of a Chanel jacket. Another Arizona sandal, in black leather, had been lined in sapphire-blue shearling” (Rebecca Mead, "Sole Cycle," March 23, 2015).

10. “Driving outside Oklahoma City one evening last November, I ended up stopped in traffic next to an electronic billboard that displayed, in rotation, an advertisement for one per cent cash back at the Thunderbird Casino, an advertisement for a Cash N Gold pawnshop, a three-day weather forecast, and an announcement of a 3.0 earthquake, in Noble County” (Rivka Galchen, "Weather Underground," April 13, 2015)

Credit: The above artwork is by Andrea Kalfas; it appears in the February 9, 2015 New Yorker as an illustration for Emma Allen’s “Bar Tab: Winnie’s.”

February 23 & March 2, 2015 Issue

“As I write this, The New Yorker is dead,” claimed Renata Adler, in her bitter Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (1999). Well, that was sixteen years ago, and The New Yorker is still with us, more vibrant than ever, as the current issue – the loaded and layered 90^th Anniversary Issue – vividly shows. Of its many pleasures – Mary Norris’s "Holy Writ" (“Chances are that if you use the Oxford comma you brush the crumbs off your shirtfront before going out”), Ian Frazier’s "The Cabaret Beat" (“Portrait photographers emphasized Ross’s hair, which grew straight up and which a famous actress said she would like to walk barefoot in”), James Wood’s "Look Again" (“It is the writer who sees everything, hears everything, and reserves the right to fiddle with the aperture”) – the most piquant, for me, is Ian Parker’s brilliant "The Shape of Things to Come." It’s a profile of Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice-president of design. Its materials are vast and finely woven: people [Ive, J. J. Abrams, Robert Bruner, Michael Ive (Ive’s father), Steve Jobs, Powell Jobs, Clive Grinyer, Bob Mansfield, Tim Cook, Eugene Whang, Dan Riccio, Jeff Williams, Marc Newson, Bart André, Richard Seymour, Jeff Williams, among others]; events (a launch of new Apple products and services, a visit to Apple’s industrial design studio, a tour of Apple’s future campus); things [“a black steam-punk watch,” “three eight-foot-high computer-numerical-control (C.N.C.) milling machines,” “dozens of custom sketchbooks that had padded blue covers and silver edging,” “Ive’s black Bentley, which is as demure as a highly conspicuous luxury car can be,” “a Rams-designed Braun MPZ2 Citromatic juicer,” “an Apple Watch … in rose gold, with a band of white rubbery plastic,” “a glass-topped Apple Watch display cabinet, accessible to staff from below, via a descending, motorized flap like the ramp at the rear of a cargo plane”]. It brims with inspired sentences (e.g., “Ive’s aesthetic is not austere: one could think of the work done here as a reticent man’s idea of exuberance, with rapture expressed in the magnetic click of a power adapter”; “But others may have had the thought, or the half-thought, that the sounds made the phones more coherent – a more natural accompaniment to glass, aluminum, and Helvetica Neue”). Best of all is Parker’s liberal use of the first-person. He’s not only an observer; he’s a participant (“I spoke to Dye at a table by the lawn at Infinite Loop”; “Inside the shed, I tried on a watch, and its stainless-steel bracelet, guided by magnets, fell into place with the click of someone stacking nickels”; “The next day, I visited Ive in his studio”). “The Shape of Things to Come” is a masterpiece. I enjoyed it immensely.

Best of 2014

Well, the end of the year approaches. Time now to compile my “Best of 2014” list. I know there are skeptics who consider such lists pointless. But I enjoy the process. It’s a way of deliciously prolonging my 2014 New Yorker reading experience.

Here then is a selection of my favorite 2014 New Yorker pieces (with a choice sliver from each in parenthesis):

Talk Stories

1. Sophie Brickman, "Say Cheese," January 6, 2014 (“He was trying to capture the perfect shot of a pumpkin muffin with his Nokia phone”)

2. Nick Paumgarten, "Reunion," February 3, 2014 (“His upper lip was mottled, like a bruised fruit – a life in brass”)

3. Lizzie Widdicombe, "Table Talk," March 17, 2014 (“ ‘If I talk, you gotta drink the vodka’ ”)

4. Ian Frazier, "Bus Ride," April 14, 2014 (“To ride the B-46 north on Utica Avenue is to feel the city accumulate and intensify on both sides”)

5. Ian Frazier, "Do Not Cross," June 2, 2014 (“but give these objects a few minutes of contemplation and a minor visitation of the sublime may occur”)

6. Mark Singer, "Risky Business," July 21, 2014 (“ ‘As soon as they started moving the bulls out of the pens into the bucking chutes, I could see Bushwacker go from docile to this’ – he pantomimed a bull pawing the ground – ‘and I thought, This bull knows’ ”)

7. Mark Singer, "Meritorious," August 11 & 18, 2014 (“Afterward, Angell says softly, ‘Jim Leyland coming by. That’s really something.’ ”)

8. Tad Friend, "Rembrandt Lighting," November 10, 2014 (Gilroy is “as thin and pale as dental floss”)

9. Ian Parker, "Oldies But Goodies," November 10, 2014 (“As Thiebaud put it, there are still mornings that start with the thought: This morning, I’d like to paint a pie”)

10. Oliver Sacks, "Night of the Ginkgo," November 24, 2014 (“tough, heavy Mesozoic leaves such as the dinosaurs ate”)

Reporting

1. Tad Friend, "Thicker Than Water," February 10, 2014 (“They hung there for five seconds – their port gunwale tilting overhead, the Yamaha outboard whirring in the air – as if time were taking a breath”)

2. Raffi Khatchadourian, "A Star in a Bottle," March 3, 2014 (“I put on goggles and looked at the cylindrical reactor core, its dense crush of parts, rendered in bright colors, seeming to float in a vast gray horizonless space”)

3. Peter Hessler, "Revolution On Trial," March 10, 2014 (“I was sitting next to the cage, and after a while Mohamed el-Beltagy, one of the accused, began gesturing to me through the bars”)

4. Nick Paumgarten, "Berlin Nights," March 24, 2014 (“The music was churning, hypnotic, almost psychedelic, and I abandoned myself to it”)

5. Ian Frazier, "Blue Bloods," April 14, 2014 (“throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks”)

6. Burkhard Bilger, In Deep," April 21, 2014 (“Now he stood at the shore of a small, dark pool under a dome of sulfurous flowstone”)

7. Lizzie Widdicombe, "The End of Food," May 12, 2014 (“With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad”)

8. Dana Goodyear, "Paper Palaces," August 11 & 18, 2014 (“He looks clicked together, like a Lego figurine”)

9. Richard Preston, "The Ebola Wars," October 27, 2014 (“By looking at a few genomes of Ebola, the scientists hoped to grasp an image of the whole virus, which could be conceived of as a life-form visible in four dimensions, as vast amounts of code flowing through time and space”)

10. Ben McGrath, "The Ice Breaker," December 15, 2014 (“Slow it down now, and watch carefully: Subban’s skate blades reëstablish contact with the ice a second before he one-times a laser beam into the upper right corner”)

Criticism

1. Peter Schjeldahl, "The Outlaw," February 3, 2014 (“But there’s no gainsaying a splendor as berserk as that of a Hieronymus Bosch painting”)

2. Louis Menand, "Imitation of Life," April 28, 2014 (“Updike is a highly literate illumination of a supremely literate human being”)

3. James Wood, "The World As We Know It," May 19, 2014 (“as in Naipaul’s work, the pages seem scarred with remembered wounds”)

4. Dan Chiasson, "Mother Tongue," June 2, 2014 (“the book’s strong effect of having been written, unlike most prior poetry about having kids, under the conditions it describes”)

5. Alex Ross, "Blockbuster," June 23, 2014 (“Plaintive strands of near-tonal melody floated in an eerie, wide-open space defined at its edges by groaning bass timbres, wayward piano figures, and the rustlings of maracas, vibraslap, snare drum, and other percussion. It felt like an encampment encircled by watchful eyes”)

6. Anthony Lane, "Balancing Acts," July 21, 2014 (“We happen upon ourselves when nothing much happens to us, and we are transformed in the process; that is why the Mason with the earring from whom we take our leave, on his first, blissed-out day of college, both is and is not the affable imp of seven, or the mumbler who bumped his way through puberty, and that twin sense of continuity and interruption—of life itself as tracking shot and jump cut—applies to everyone. Just like the final fade.”)

7. James Wood, "Away Thinking About Things," August 25, 2014 (“His experiments in vernacular Scots push and twist the language, sometimes to breaking points”)

8. Alex Ross, "Under the Stars," August 25, 2014 (“One great pleasure of the Bowl is the sense of a spell being cast, and it happened here: in the third movement of the Mahler, when a ghostly klezmer band files by, seven thousand leaned in, their red wine and grilled chicken neglected, their motionless heads etched by the light pouring off the stage”)

9. David Denby, "Lasting Impressions," September 1, 2014 (“But the ‘plot’ is no more than the men’s thorny emotional connection and their mutual fixation on death”)

10. James Wood, "Fly Away," December 8, 2014 (“Within a paragraph or two, the reader senses an attentive purity in the narrator’s prose. She seems alert to everything”)

Thank you New Yorker for another great year of blissful reading.

Postscript: Today (January 3, 2015), I amended the above list, deleting Dana Goodyear’s “Élite Meat,” and inserting her "Paper Palaces." Goodyear had a great 2014, producing four wonderful pieces, all of which could’ve made my list. I decided to go with one. I’ve finally settled on “Paper Palaces” as my favorite.

Credit: The above artwork is by Jacob Escobedo; it appears in the March 3, 2014 New Yorker as an illustration for Raffi Khatchadourian’s “A Star in a Bottle.”