August 5, 2024 Issue

Hooray! “Bar Tab” is back! Is it just a one-time appearance or is it back for good? Time will tell. I vote for the latter. I love “Bar Tab.” I was shattered when it was discontinued in 2018 (see my farewell salute here). This week’s “Bar Tab: Another Country” is by Jiayang Fan. She’s written some of the column’s classics. Recall her wonderful “Bar Tab: Fat Buddha,” May 23, 2016 [“At Fat Buddha, an East Village Asian-fusion ultra-dive, the eponymous Buddha (corpulent, imperious, swathed in mini disco balls, and encased in a glass box stuffed with cash) looks like a reincarnated bouncer who opted for an off-book route to enlightenment: namely, booze, hip-hop, and a jovial no-holds-barred policy on happy-hour pork buns”]. In “Bar Tab: Another Country,” she mentions two drinks I’d like to try: a C’mon Dad Gimme the Car (“a tequila-forward, lip-tickling strawberry-and-jalapeño cocktail named for a Violent Femmes song”); and a I May Destroy You (“a smoky mezcal-and-Aperol number inspired by the HBO show”). Mm, great names, great drinks! More “Bar Tab,” please.   

April 2024 Food Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. It’s the 2024 Food Issue, a digital-only issue about the culinary world. What a feast! Adam Iscoe’s “No Reservations,” Helen Rosner’s “Padma Lakshmi’s Funny Side,” Jiayang Fan’s “Another Chinatown,” Patricia Marx’s “Spoiler Alert,” Hannah Goldfield's "Holey Grail" – all excellent! But, for me, the highlight is Gary Shteyngart’s delightful “Shaken and Stirred.” Why? Because it’s sheerly, purely, unimpeachably hedonistic. Shteyngart goes on a Martini tour of some of New York City’s grandest bars, and he does it in the company of some very witty drinkers. Here he’s at the Lobby Bar, in Hotel Chelsea, with his friend Amor Towles:

The Lobby Bar is sumptuous, with a bar top that accommodates a Parthenon’s worth of marble, and banquettes that are cozy and velvety. Amor came properly dressed in a vest for the occasion, while I had hastened off the Amtrak in my country garb. The Dukes Martini was assembled tableside—the ingredients presented on a foldout stand—by a young server skilled in the pouring arts. When it comes to the purist’s dry Martini, there are two things to remember. First, there is a mantra that Amor himself has coined: “Crisp, clear, and cold.” The Lobby Bar follows these directives by freezing the glasses, as well as the gin or vodka. The second is the “vermouth rinse.” In this maneuver, the composition I usually turn to for a dry Martini—one part vermouth to five parts gin—is almost entirely done away with. The vermouth is conscripted only to coat a rather enormous glass and is then tossed away before the gin or vodka, which has been primed with a dash of salt-water solution, is poured. (I have been told that at the original Dukes the vermouth was ignominiously tossed onto the carpet, whereas at the Chelsea it is merely splashed into a tiny glass of olives, perhaps later to be lapped up by an alcoholic dog.) Notably, no ice or shakers are used and the alcohol is neither shaken nor stirred, creating a ninety-five-per-cent undiluted Martini, which, at this volume, functions as a kind of uncontrolled insanity.

I read that and immediately found myself thirsting for a Martini.

Shteyngart and Towles begin drinking. Shteyngart writes,

The first Martini, essentially a vermouth-coated container for what I eyeballed to be two and a half to three shots of juniper-noted, grapefruit-evoking Tanqueray No. Ten gin, immediately put us in a mood. The mood was a good one. I cannot remember whether it was Amor or I who said “I’m feeling very chummy.” Perhaps we both said it. The Dukes Martini came with an array of garnishes, of which I found the lemon peel most conducive to the juniper crispness of the Tanqueray.

Then they each have a Dukes Martini with Ketel One vodka. After that they order shrimp cocktails and split a B.L.T. sandwich to fortify themselves for their third drink, an 1884 Martini. Shteyngart describes it superbly:

This beast is premade with two types of gin—Boatyard Double Gin, from Northern Ireland, and the New York Distilling Company’s Perry’s Tot Navy Strength Gin—which clocks in at a ridiculous 114 proof. This dangerous concoction is then fat-washed with Spanish Arbequina olive oil, after which it is frozen and the olive oil’s fat removed, while vermouth, lemon liqueur, a house-made vetiver tincture, and a few dashes of lemon-pepper bitters are added. A lemon peel is then showily expressed over the glass tableside and a very briny Gordal olive and a cocktail-onion skewer are plopped in. Although more sizable quantities of vermouth and other pollutants are at play than in the classic Dukes Martini, the over-proofed gin does a lot of the talking and one is soon very convincingly drunk.

The Chelsea is just the first stop on this sybaritic binge. Another night Shteyngart goes to the Gotham Restaurant with his friend J. Smith-Cameron. She likes the place because of the bartender, a guy named Billy. They each have a Vesper (“a drink that de-Balkanizes the conflict between vodka and gin by combining both, with a splash of Lillet Blanc serving as the Holy Spirit”). This is followed by two Gibsons. Then Billy mixes them a Martinez. Shteyngart writes,

The cocktails are related, but after the crisp minimalism of a Gibson, the Martinez is akin to encountering a violent early hominid in a downtown bar. Sweet vermouth and maraschino are conscripted alongside the usual gin. Billy uses Carpano sweet vermouth, which, to my palate, provides hints of bitterness instead of overwhelming sweetness. It went down as easy as a Martinez can, and J. and I were now thoroughly drunk. Gotham’s kitchen was closed, so we headed across the street to get burgers at the Strip House to buffer our stomachs. When we left, an hour later, Billy had also crossed the street to get a drink at the bar. There he was, with his sleeves still rolled up, saying goodbye to the evening.

That “It went down as easy as a Martinez can, and J. and I were now thoroughly drunk” made me laugh.

Another night, Shteyngart goes to Tigre, on Rivington Street, on the Lower East Side, with his friend Adam Platty. Shteyngart writes,

Tigre is one of the most beautiful bars of recent vintage that I have seen. Windowless, it glows like a jewel box, and the striking semicircle of the bar is not unlike that of the U.N. Security Council, though studded with booze. Platty remarked that “all these bartenders look like Jesus,” and our handsome open-shirted server so resembled the Lord that I couldn’t help but hum, “Oh, come, let us adore him,” under my breath. The highlight of Tigre’s Martini menu is the vodka-based Cigarette, which Platty immediately qualified as “smoky as fuck.” “It’s old-fashioned, like if you smoked a cigarette while having a Martini,” Jesus told us, which is absolutely on point. 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.

That last sentence is inspired, combining words (“Truman vodka,” “flaming orbit,” Empirical,” “Stephen King,” “pyrokinetic,” “Charlene McGee,” “smoked juniper,” “nicotine and tar”) I’m sure have never been combined before. Reading Shteyngart’s piece. I started to feel tipsy. I wasn’t drinking, but it felt like I was. I was getting drunk on his Martini-drenched prose. 

Shteyngart attends other bars as well: Sunken Harbor Club (Immortal Martini); Dante (Dante Martini); Temple Bar (Plymouth Martini); Bemelman’s Bar (Tanqueray Ten); Le Rock (Au Poivre, Super Sec, L’Alaska, In and Out). It’s quite a Martini marathon! I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Another source of pleasure in Shteyngart's piece are the jazzy, glamorous photos by Landon Nordeman. They enhance the text magnificently.

Photo by Landon Nordeman, from Gary Shteyngart's "Shaken and Stirred"

Best of 2022: GOAT

Photo by Kenyon Anderson, from Jiayang Fan's "Tables For Two: Gugu Room"

Here are my favourite “Goings On About Town” notes of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: All’ Antico Vinaio,” April 25 & May 2, 2022 (“Towering stacks of schiacciata emerged from the basement at regular intervals, shiny with olive oil and sparkling with coarse salt, releasing clouds of steam from a dense landscape of air bubbles as the loaves were sliced horizontally, ends slivered off and passed to patiently waiting customers”); 

2. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Kate Millett,” February 28, 2022 (“The quasi-functional sculptures—tables, chairs, cabinets, a bed—are anthropomorphized domestic objects, in which found elements combine with others that were hand-carved or upholstered by the artist. Millett’s not quite figures are at once goofy and strange. Fluted or cabriole legs alternate with puppet-like limbs; a slatted chair back, painted bright red, is inset with a pair of blue eyes; a china cabinet is topped by a smooth wooden head. In ‘Blue-Eyed Marble Box,’ from 1965, an undercurrent of perversity surfaces: a Queen Anne coffee table forms the base of a blocky centauride, whose rectangular torso is pierced by rolling-pin finial nipples”); 

3. Richard Brody, “Movies: Show People,” August 8, 2022 (“Winking cameos abound: Davies takes a second role, as herself; Vidor plays himself, too; Charlie Chaplin, slight and exquisite, brings a Shakespearean grace to his self-portrayal as a humble moviegoer; and a long tracking shot of stars at a studio banquet table plays like a cinematic death row, displaying such luminaries as Renée Adorée, William S. Hart, and Mae Murray, just before they were swept away in waves of sound”);

4. Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: Rosella,” January 31, 2022 (“For dessert, you can have that American favorite, carrot cake, here on the verge of savory, fortified with sunchoke miso and garnished with candied orange peel and marigold flowers. The cake is scooped into a bowl, its sides smeared with a generous whoosh of scrumptious white frosting. The star ingredient? The cult favorite Ben’s cream cheese, from Rockland County, just up the road”);

5. Andrea K. Scott, “At the Galleries: 'Court, Epic, Spirit,' ” February 28, 2022 (“Ask for a magnifying glass at the front desk, the better to lose yourself in the details: a pearl-and-gold piercing in an elephant’s ear at the coronation of Rama; a peacock in a tree overlooking a gang of drug-addled sadhus; the gray-flecked beard of 'A Man of Commanding Presence.' There are decorative flourishes, too, including a tall cotton panel intricately printed with flora and fauna in crimson and green, used to line what must have been a magnificent tent, pitched for royalty on the Coromandel Coast in the mid-seventeenth century—glampers, take note”);

6. Rachel Syme, “On Television: ‘The Resort,’ ” August 1, 2022 [“ ‘The Resort,’ a splashy new streaming offering from Peacock and the creator Andy Siara (‘Palm Springs’), feels like a slushy beach drink made in a blender using parts of other recent shows: take a dash of ‘White Lotus’ (for the tropical hotel setting), add a shake of ‘Nine Perfect Strangers’ (for the air of campy, unhinged mystery among the palm trees), and top it off with the likes of ‘The Flight Attendant’ or ‘The Afterparty’ (for their good old-fashioned, soapy murder mysteries). But just because this show is a piña colada of frothy ideas doesn’t mean it isn’t satisfying. The charm-oozing stars Cristin Milioti and William Jackson Harper play a couple on vacation in Mexico who become unwittingly embroiled in solving a crime that took place there years before. The cast is chock-full of shimmery character actors—Skyler Gisondo, Debby Ryan, Nick Offerman, Ben Sinclair, Becky Ann Baker, Dylan Baker—and the twists and turns are tense enough to keep you glued to the screen on a sweltering day. Think ‘Romancing the Stone’ meets a bottle of S.P.F. 50—this is made for high-summer bingeing”];

7. Vince Aletti, “In the Museums: ‘William Klein: YES,’ ” August 29, 2022 (“Klein’s best pictures are cinematic character studies, with every face and every figure singular, animated, and vividly present for his camera—a gaggle of kids with baseball cards and bubble blowers, a sidewalk full of distracted businessmen, a dapper young man sprinting through Harlem”);

8. Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: Gugu Room,” September 12, 2022 (“The most persuasive dishes unapologetically layer richness upon richness.” |”Around the room, skewers of meat were being delivered at a fast pace, some rapturously waved into the frames of gleeful selfies”);

9. Michaelangelo Matos, “Music: The Black Dog: ‘Brutal Minimalism,’ ” February 14 & 21, 2022 (“The grainy, gray-toned percussion, redolent of cracked concrete walls, and the low-mixed chimes, like faraway train signals, add to the verisimilitude. Even when the beats come forward, they amplify the background details”);

10. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Queens Lanka,” August 1, 2022 (“A plate of “rice and curry,” one recent afternoon, included four varieties of the latter—made with yellow dal, or split peas; batons of beetroot, almost chocolate-like in their melty richness; jackfruit; and pineapple—in addition to a tantalizing tangle of sticky-sweet deep-fried sprats, and a version of a traditional relish called gotu kola sambol, with finely chopped kale, red onion, and tomato.” | “A lush, enormous banana leaf was folded carefully around a tightly packed pie chart of delights, over rice: slippery, soft curried cashews; dark, crispy snips of zippy batu moju, or fried-eggplant pickle; seeni sambol, a relish of supple tamarind-and-chili-glazed shallots; a fluffy curried-mackerel-and-potato fritter”).

Best of 2019: GOAT

Jessica Pettway's photo for Shauna Lyon's "Tables For Two: Jajaja Plantas Mexicana"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Goings On About Town” pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl's “Art: T. C. Cannon,” September 9, 2019 ("One of his last paintings, 'Two Guns Arikara' (1978), blazes with special promise: a stern man wearing a mixture of traditional and contemporary garb sits holding a pair of long-barrelled pistols. The picture’s uniformly intense hues—purple, red-orange, burnt orange, lilac, terre verte, sienna, cerulean, golden yellow, violet, black, and white—generate a visual cadenza, violently serene").

2. Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Barca,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (“The broth in her zuppa di pesce, a Sicilian-style fish stew abundant with mussels, clams, shrimp, black sea bass, Castelvetrano olives, and fregola, a pearl-shaped pasta, is so appealingly redolent of Pernod that I couldn’t resist sipping the last dregs straight from the lidded crock after my spoon had been cleared”).

3. Andrea K. Scott’s “Art: ‘Maya Lin,’ ” January 14, 2019 (“As the marbles shimmer along the floor, then flow up the walls and across the ceiling, they become dotted lines on a sheet of paper, a map in the midst of being folded”). 

4. Richard Brody’s “Movies: Under the Silver Lake,” April 29, 2019 (“A zine traces long-ago Hollywood scandals; a friend finds the secrets of the world on the back of a cereal box; clips and names of classic movies and video games hint at vast secret connections; a popular band fronts a cult; and a reclusive old songwriter claims to be behind all modern culture and its labyrinthine conspiracies”).

5. Johanna Fateman’s “Art: Heidi Bucher,” May 20, 2019 (“Among the nine stunning pieces in this exhibition, which have yellowed and become more scab-like with age, is a drooping mold of one of that building’s windows, its slightly bowed shutters suggesting the wings of an enormous insect”).

6. Briana Younger’s “Night Life: Ari Lennox,” June 3, 2019 (“Her love-struck tales are consistently gorgeous, but it's when she weaves in the mundane details—a new apartment, watching ‘Adventure Time,’ shopping at Target—that the silken muscle of her voice makes itself most evident, a reminder that there is soul to be found in even the most prosaic life events, that just having breath can be worth singing about”).

7. Michaelangelo Matos’ “Night Life: Wata Igarashi,” May 20, 2019 (“As synth patterns shape-shift in slow motion and crisp percussion slumps into slurping timbres, his mixes find the sounds' edges melting into one another”).

8. Jiayang Fan’s “Tables For Two: The Fulton,” July 29, 2019 (“Two words: chocolate mousse. The tiny tower of decadence, so elaborately layered with peanut caramel, chocolate crunch, passion-fruit sorbet, and vanilla ice cream that it appears almost indecent, represents the restaurant in a few ostentatiously luscious bites: a routine dessert spruced up into something needlessly sumptuous, but also unimpeachably satisfying”).

9. Andrea K. Scott’s “Art: Aki Sasamoto,” April 22, 2019 (“Blown-glass tumblers the color of whiskey spin on a trio of round barroom tables, powered by gusts of air from H.V.A.C. tubes, whose nozzles suggest empty bottles of booze. The mood matches the circular logic of an alcohol-addled mind. Screening in another room is video of the artist performing a cryptic ritual; it was commissioned by Triple Canopy, a vital downtown nonprofit as uncategorizable as Sasamoto’s art. The enticing setup: a forest, a doughnut, an ant”).

10. Shauna Lyon’s “Tables For Two: Jajaja Plantas Mexicana,” September 16, 2019 [“For some reason, there are peas and corn, too, but also beans and guacamole (thank God), and the chips are nicely crunchy”].

July 8 & 15, 2019 Issue

Is this a misprint? “I tried the snowsuit out on a stuffed bear the brown of the bark of a sugar maple.” It’s from Jill Lepore’s absorbing personal history piece “The Deadline,” in this week’s issue. Should it read, “I tried the snowsuit out on a stuffed bear brown as the bark of a sugar maple”? Maybe that’s too square. Maybe Lepore is trying for something more spontaneous and concise. Her style is compressed, like Muriel Spark’s. But there’s something jarring about that “the” between “bear” and “brown.” I compared the print version with the online version; they’re the same. So it’s either a typo or a stylistic quirk. I can’t decide.

Another line in Lepore’s piece that puzzled me is “Most of my ideas about parenting came from Marge [Simpson], fretting beneath her blue beehive.” Come on! There’s no way that’s true. Lepore is angling for a laugh; in so doing, she undermines her credibility. 

But “The Deadline” also contains a sentence so beautiful it took my breath away: “Upstairs, one of the skylights blew open and the rain came pouring in, onto the wedding dress I’d sewn from a bargain bolt, brocade.”

Other inspired sentences in this week’s issue:

If the crunch of the artery pleases you, move on to the pork kidney, which is cut into flowery shapes that vaguely resemble miniature porcupines and lands on the tongue with an umami-forward bounce. – Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: Da Long Yi Hot Pot”

Basquiat’s is no genre of art but art, period. – Peter Schjeldahl, “Could Have Been Me”

He was a genial American eccentric, cultivating his own slant. – Dan Chiasson, “The Sense of an Ending”

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. – Anthony Lane, “What If?”

Best of 2018: Reporting

Janne Iivonen, illustration for Ian Frazier's "The Maraschino Mogul"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ian Frazier, “The Maraschino Mogul,” April 23, 2018 (“As summer progressed, to add a further touch of the apocalyptic, bees returning at the end of the day to hives in Red Hook began to glow an incandescent red. Some local beekeepers found the sight of red bees flying in the sunset strangely beautiful. All of them had noticed that their honey was turning red, too”).

2. Nicholas Schmidle, “Rocket Man,” August 20, 2018 (“Ten seconds into the burn, SpaceShipTwo was supersonic. Stucky began trimming the h-stabs, steadily increasing the vehicle’s pitch until it reached sixty-eight degrees. He and Mackay were travelling at Mach 1.8—about twice as fast as a Tomahawk cruise missile. Outside the vehicle, the light was draining from the sky, turning it a deep, muddy blue”).

3. Raffi Khatchadourian, “Degrees of Freedom,” November 26, 2018 (“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”).

4. David Grann, “The White Darkness,” February 12 & 19, 2018 (“It was hard to breathe, and each time he exhaled the moisture froze on his face: a chandelier of crystals hung from his beard; his eyebrows were encased like preserved specimens; his eyelashes cracked when he blinked”).

5. Zadie Smith, "Through the Portal," May 7, 2018 (“Yet what is a goddess doing here, before these thin net curtains? What relation can she possibly have to that cheap metal radiator, the chipped baseboards, the wonky plastic blinds?”).

6. John McPhee, “Direct Eye Contact,” March 5, 2018 (“In a storm, a big oak in mast, up a slope from my cabin there, fell not long ago. Its trunk broke freakishly—about twenty feet up—and the crown bent all the way over and spread the upper branches like a broom upon the ground. In the branches were a number of thousands of acorns. The next morning, there was enough bear shit around that oak to fertilize the Philadelphia Flower Show”).

7. Rebecca Mead, “Meal Ticket,” June 18, 2018 (“The aged lamb on my plate looked like shreds of an automobile tire, and it tasted like something I wouldn’t be able to wash out of my hair for a week”).

  

8. Nick Paumgarten, “Getting a Shot,” January 29, 2018 (“With thirty minutes until count, they re-racked for one try. Anderson got his fake beating, and off it went, bodies flying all over the place, well past the call of ‘cut.’ Sample opened his eyes wide: ‘That one looked a little real.’ The offenders, sweaty and ebullient, collected their pizzas and filed out, under guard”).

9. Jiayang Fan, “The Spreading Vine,” March 12, 2018 (“The bootleg wine was warm, and, when I raised my cup, I could see thick sediment dancing inside. The security guard had mentioned that the wine hadn’t yet been filtered, but Liu and Fatty didn’t seem bothered. We took a sip, and Fatty’s mouth puckered. The wine was harsh, sweet but astringent, and the taste seemed to register in the esophagus as much as in the mouth. As the men drained their cups, Liu reflected that at least it hadn’t cost them anything”).

10. Janet Malcolm, “Six Glimpses of the Past,” October 29, 2018 (“I see some resemblance to myself in pictures of him. That’s all I can say about Oskar. If I had known I was going to write about him, I would have asked my mother questions. But now I am like a reporter with an empty notebook. Oskar is out of reach”).

July 23, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. David S. Allee’s radiant “Naumburg Orchestral Concerts” night shot for “Goings On About Town” is transfixing. And what makes it transfixing is that raccoon sitting in a tree fork, looking at Allee as he takes the picture. Allee is a superb photographer. I admired his “Domino Sugar Factory” series immensely: see Jessie Wender, “Inside the Domino Sugar Factory,” newyorker.com, May 19, 2014.

David S. Allee, "Naumburg Orchestral Concerts" (2018)

2. And let’s give a huzzah for Neima Jahromi’s excellent “Bar Tab: Gilligan’s at Soho Grand,” containing this sparkling line: “On a recent afternoon, the nautical-jungle atmosphere was buoyed by a waitress in a blue-and-white Breton shirt, who issued a muted Tarzan yell as she strode by with a bottle of brut.”

  

3. “Talk of the Town” ’s new illustrator, João Fazenda, debuts this week with three images, including a dandy double portrait of Catherine O’Hara and Martin Short. It’s too early to say whether Fazenda is as good as Tom Bachtell. Bachtell is a master. He illustrated “Talk” for over twenty years. I’m going to miss him.

João Fazenda, "Catherine O'Hara and Martin Short" (2018)

4. The passage in Sam Wasson’s Talk story “Yes, And” in which Eugene Levy impersonates a “lugubrious rabbi” and says, “What a place to lose a cow,” made me laugh. The whole piece is terrific. It’s spurred my interest in Wasson’s writing. I think I’ll take a look at his Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. (2011).

5. I found David Remnick’s “Left Wing of the Possible” a refreshing change from the magazine’s usual Trump-bashing. Yes, the bastard deserves it. But it’s also important to spotlight politicians who offer a positive alternative to him. That’s what Remnick does in his absorbing piece, profiling twenty-eight-year-old democratic socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, Remnick says, is “almost certain to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.” In the Democratic primary, she soundly defeated the incumbent, Joseph Crowley, on a platform of “Medicare for all, a tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee, and criminal-justice reform.” I like the cut of her jib. I hope she wins.

6. I’ve previously commented on the connection between “journey” and “journalism.” They both share the same sematic root, “jour,” which is French for “day” – a day’s travel, the record of a day’s experience. But the connection is more than just sematic. The best journalism, for me, involves travel – an excursion of some sort. Such a piece is Jiayang Fan’s “Delivering Modernity,” a report on how Chinese tech companies like JD.com are transforming rural China. Fan visits a JD depot in Xinhuang, in the far west of Hunan Province.  She accompanies a JD courier as he makes deliveries to nearby villages (“We got stuck behind a truckload of squealing pigs whose rickety pen threatened to spill them onto our windshield”), visits a restaurant in Xinhuang (“I asked the proprietor, an aproned woman in her forties, if there was a menu, and she nodded, moving to the back of the room, past baskets of unwashed leafy vegetables. She yanked open a refrigerator door to display plastic containers of pig intestines, ears, and other offal. A pig’s head rolled slightly on the bottom shelf”), visits JD headquarters in Beijing (“Outside, in the parking lot, the company tests its fleet of self-driving cars”), talks with JD’s founder and C.E.O., Liu Qiangdong (“Fashion is among the company’s fastest-growing areas, and when Liu extended his hand I glimpsed a watch by Audemars Piguet, which recently partnered with JD to launch its first online boutique”), watches a drone arrive at a JD landing pad (“As it drew closer, the first thing I could make out was a red box under the belly of the drone. A minute later, I saw three spinning propellers, which seemed improbably small for the size of their load, like the wings of a bumblebee”), visits a training center for drone pilots (“The screens displayed animations of quadcopters that looked vaguely drunk as they wove through the sky toward landing pads”), and accompanies a “white-glove courier” on his rounds (“Shang makes his deliveries in a small electric car painted with bursts of JD red”). Drones, squealing pigs, expensive watches, self-driving cars, white-glove couriers – just some of the ingredients of Fan’s absorbing piece. I enjoyed it enormously. 

7. John Lanchester is a brilliant critical writer. I enjoy reading his arguments. In his “Doesn’t Add Up,” he takes on three recent economics books, contending that they “overreach,” i.e., extend their theories further than they usefully go. For example, he says of Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, “There is something thrilling about the intellectual audacity of thinking that you can explain ninety per cent of behavior in a society with one mental tool.” I relish Lanchester’s succinctness (e.g., “Our motives are often not what they seem: true. This explains everything: not true”). “Doesn’t Add Up” shows him in bracingly sharp form. 

March 12, 2018 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue I enjoyed most is Jiayang Fan’s “The Spreading Vine,” an account of her recent wine tour in China’s Ningxia region. Fan drives along the Helan Mountain Grape Culture Corridor (“Billboards advertising various wineries—housed in faux-French châteaux, sleek modernist structures, giant pagodas—appeared, like fast-food signs along a highway”), visits wineries (“The château has stone towers with conical roofs, in imitation of the châteaux of the Loire Valley, and cherub-adorned fountains recalling the ones at the Boboli Gardens, in Florence”), talks with winemakers (“Zhang mentioned that rosés were relatively new to the Chinese market; she suspected that they’d catch on, thanks to their juicelike color and clean, slightly sweet taste”), eats grapes (“I crouched down, picked a grape, and popped it into my mouth. It was astonishingly sweet, less like fruit than like jam or sticky nectar”), and tastes wine (“A 2014 Cabernet blend I tasted bore out what Robinson had said: medium-bodied and somewhat floral, it seemed like a Bordeaux”).

My favorite part comes near the end, when Fan describes drinking bootleg wine with her driver, Liu, and his friend, Fatty:

Being in possession of contraband wine put the men in a giddy mood, and, not long after we left, Fatty pulled over and Liu fetched one of the jugs of wine from the trunk. Having driven me to at least half a dozen wineries, they took me for an expert and were eager to get my opinion. As Liu produced some grimy plastic cups from the recesses of the car, I remembered a tasting at Silver Heights, where wines were daintily paired with Camembert imported from Normandy, via Shanghai. The bootleg wine was warm, and, when I raised my cup, I could see thick sediment dancing inside. The security guard had mentioned that the wine hadn’t yet been filtered, but Liu and Fatty didn’t seem bothered. We took a sip, and Fatty’s mouth puckered. The wine was harsh, sweet but astringent, and the taste seemed to register in the esophagus as much as in the mouth. As the men drained their cups, Liu reflected that at least it hadn’t cost them anything.

“The Spreading Vine” is a pleasurable read – Fan’s best piece since her superb “The Accused” (The New Yorker, October 12, 2015). 

April 17, 2017, Issue

I see in the “Briefly Noted” review of Richard Holmes’s new book, The Long Pursuit, in this week’s issue, that Holmes “swears by what he calls the ‘Footsteps principle,’ which entails going everywhere that ‘the subject had ever lived or worked, or travelled or dreamed.’ ” Reading this, I recalled Geoff Dyer, in Granta’s recent “Journeys” issue, describing travel writing that follows “in the footsteps of …” as “the literary equivalent of package tours in which destination and experience are so thoroughly predetermined that one is reluctant to make a booking.” I’m curious what Dyer would make of Holmes’s “Footsteps principle.” It seems to me that The Long Pursuit is worthy of more than just a “Briefly Noted” review. I wish The New Yorker would ask Dyer to review it. He’s a superb critic. He’d be an excellent sub for James Wood.

Other notes on this week’s issue:

1. The Maureen Gallace painting, “Sandy Road” (2003), in “Goings On About Town,” brought to mind Peter Schjeldahl’s wonderful “America at the Edges” (The New Yorker, October 19, 2015), in which he describes Gallace’s art:

Gallace’s means are narrow: she employs uniformly quick, daubed brushwork and colors kept to a mid-range of tones that makes whites jump out. Her end is description, not of how things look but of how they seem. What is a breaking ocean wave like? Gallace answers with stabs of creamy off-white and gray-blue shadow. It’s her best guess, as is the specific blue of the sky on the given day. In one picture, single blue strokes approximate tidal pools. Elsewhere, a slight touch of green in the sea hints at fathomless deeps. Qualities of light, too, feel gamely speculative. (To me, they tend to evoke morning hours, when the visible world, well rested, has something almost eager about it.) The houses often lack doors and windows. Gallace is plainly shy of anyone or anything that might even seem to return her gaze. She conveys a vulnerable aloneness wholly given over to absorption in appearances. Looking at the paintings, I feel that I am always just beginning to look.

2. The William Mebane photograph, illustrating Jiayang Fan’s delectable “Tables For Two: Tim Ho Wan,” is one of his finest. I’m a Mebane fan. His photo for Silvia Killingsworth’s “Tables For Two: Babu Ji” was #6 on my “Best of 2016: Photos.” His “Tim Ho Van” is sure to be a candidate for “Best of 2017.”

3. I find “Bar Tab” drink descriptions irresistible. There’s a dandy in David Kortava’s “Bar Tab: Skinny Dennis”:  “If you are going to stay and drink, Willie’s Frozen Coffee—a decadent caffeine-and-whiskey sludge named for Willie Nelson—is a must.”

Postscript: I want to add that Richard Holmes’s Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985) is, for me, a touchstone, particularly the first section, titled “1964: Travels,” in which he tells how his youthful journeys through the Cévennes, following the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson, led him towards biography.

Best of 2016: GOAT

Photo by Meredith Jenks

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

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

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

3. Colin Stokes, “Bar Tab: The Ship,” May 16, 2016 (“One wore a single black latex glove and smashed a large ice cube with a wand-like spoon to make the gin-based Gloria, with Campari, dry vermouth, and triple sec, from a recipe he’d ‘found in a book not too long ago’ ”).

4. Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: The Lucky Bee,” October 31, 2016 (“On a recent Tuesday, one patron was about to call an Uber when the coconut tapioca pudding arrived, unassuming in a lowball glass. Beneath a cloud of golden-crusted marshmallows were banana-toffee gems, tapioca pearls, and an exquisite layer of liquid honey”).

5. Matthew Trammell, “Night Life: Under the Bridge,” July 11 & 18, 2016 (“Compact and glowingly musical, the album reworked silent film scores and nimble kalimba phrases into a humming city tableau, on which the young rapper sulks through his writhing neighborhood with the moral baggage of an Arthur Miller lead”).

6. Emma Allen, “Bar Tab: The Johnson’s,” September 26, 2016 (“A first-time patron strolled in, looked around, and summed up the scene, rather approvingly: “Oh, so this is like a fake shithole, basically.” But, hey—it’s one with bathroom doors that consistently lock, if that’s worth anything to you”).

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

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

9. Andrea K. Scott, “Art: Subject to Change,” August 22, 2016 [“The show opens with ‘A Movie’ (1958), a free-associative pageant of found footage, which flashes both slapstick (a clip of a periscope cuts to a voluptuous pinup, then to a speeding torpedo) and tragic (executed bodies strung up by their feet, an elephant swarmed by its hunters, children beset by famine), compressing the thrill, dread, desire, hostility, and too-muchness of life into twelve stunning minutes”].

10. Richard Brody, “Movies: Hell or High Water,” August 22, 2016 (“Only Bridges emerges whole; with his typical brilliance, he leaps from the laconic to the rhetorical, making even the shady brim of his hat speak volumes”).

Credit: The above photo by Meredith Jenks is from Jiayang Fan’s “Tables For Two: The Lucky Bee,” The New Yorker, October 31, 2016.