Mid-Year Top Ten 2026

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):

Best Reporting and Essays

1. Ed Caesar, “The Stunt Pilot,” June 1, 2026 ("Once the plane passed the highway, Slipkan gave Gusak the order to shoot. The plane was slightly less than nine hundred feet away from the drone. Gusak squeezed the trigger, and the cabin of the Antonov filled with the drilling sound of automatic-weapon fire and the smoky-sweet smell of spent rounds").

2. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Volume Six,” April 27, 2026 ("You want Aisle 7, north side, top shelf, Pennington Quality Market, or wherever you get your I.G.A. cherries. The larger the jar, the larger the cherry, in generally discernible fractions, so you want the sixteen-ouncer. I.G.A., of course, is the Independent Grocers Alliance, and this is your vox-pop cherry, your socialist cherry, but politics is not why you drown it in bourbon").

3. Michael Schulman, “Deepfaking Orson Welles,” February 9, 2026 ("Then, there was what Saatchi called the 'happiness' problem: left to its own guided intuition, the A.I. technology often makes characters look cheerier, especially women. Saatchi played an A.I. clip of sullen Aunt Fanny, in the grim final scene, inappropriately smirking in her rocking chair. 'In terms of subtle despair, it has absolutely no idea what to do,' he said. 'That’s part of why having the actor is really important' ”).

4. Lauren Collins, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” May 4, 2026 ("Finally, he drove to the spot where we’d looked on the first day. 'It was the very last place I could go,' he said. He walked until he saw our footprints and then pushed a little farther. About half a mile on, he spotted a champagne bottle, green and clear, with a perfect little cigarette of a scroll inside—the real thing, at last").

5. Rebecca Mead, “The Landscape Artist,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("The environment was Goldsworthy’s true studio. He makes art using natural materials—stacked stones, interlaced leaves, threaded wool—that might take hours to create and then only moments to evanesce").

6. Nicola Twilley, “Pour One Out,” January 12, 2026 ("We established that I am prone to overthinking, that I’m not a huge fan of the earthy and acidic notes that are considered the hallmark of the region’s flagship varietal, and that the only sample I’d willingly purchase was a blend of one-quarter smoke-tainted wine and three-quarters not. According to my checklist, it tasted like tobacco, black pepper, and dark fruit, with a slight herbaceous note and a bitter finish").

7. Ian Frazier, “The Ice Curtain,” January 26, 2026 ("While walking around Nome, I came upon and tried to make sense of the city’s former hospital building, which sprawls in an indeterminate shape and contains the offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles, a car-repair garage, a pawnshop, the Nome courthouse, and the labyrinthine workshops of Rolland Trowbridge, an enterprising man who bought the building and damaged his knee crawling around in its crannies as he rehabbed it for its present uses").

8. Paige Williams, “Call of the Wild,” January 19, 2026 ("He ate daylilies, violet greens, chickweed, shepherd’s purse, greenbrier tips, sheep sorrel, thistle stalks. He learned how to make bamboo-pokeweed spring rolls, persimmon ice cream, spicebush muffins, dandelion jelly, pan-fried groundnuts, watercress soup, acorn cookies, roast squirrel glazed with honey and balsamic vinegar. If a wild hog came onto his property, he killed, butchered, and ate it, then freeze-dried the leftovers. He dried stalks of goldenrod and mint on racks").

9. Julian Lucas, “Urban Legend,” June 29, 2026 ("What’s a novel but a big score of details burgled from the world? And what’s a novelist but a fence, furnishing imaginary scenes with choice pieces of reality while obscuring their provenance?").

10. Jon Lee Anderson, “Is Cuba Next?,” March 30, 2026 ("A military band played a patriotic tune, and the marchers began to make their way through the city, bearing torches and chanting old revolutionary slogans: 'Socialism or Death,' 'I Am Fidel.' As they sang and shouted about honor, sacrifice, and the fatherland, they seemed like adherents of a religion in which the rewards are realized only in the hereafter").

Best Cover

Barry Blitt, Split Screen (February 16 & 23, 2026)

Best of “The Critics”

1. James Wood, “Visiting Hours,” May 11 & 18, 2026 ("Sylvie systematically deconstructs Suzanna’s world. You don’t have to visit your mother, she says. But I do have to, Suzanna replies. 'According to who?' Sylvie asks. 'You don’t even have to go to school.' Fed on moral scraps, the child must find her own meaning on which to subsist").

2. Alex Ross, “Crisis Mode,” May 25, 2026 ("Instruments and voices accumulate into immense, sustained, saturating dissonances, with a snare drum cutting through the tear-gas haze. Characteristically, Czernowin’s control of timbre, texture, and structure yields a kind of cataclysmic grandeur. Then, at the very end, she kicks away the frame of art and makes things blunt. Singer and her doppelgänger plead together: 'Don’t take my child away / Don’t take my child / Don’t / No.' The final syllables accelerate into a blur, whereupon a ritual of wailing erupts. A composer writes to the limits of her art, and steps into the real").

3. Zachary Fine, “Let It Bleed,” January 12, 2026 ("From one perspective, the shape is an island seen from above. From others, it’s a half-finished paint job, a blast hole, or an ocular stain. The choice is yours: you can survey it cartographically, insist on its flatness or depth, or be reduced to your own eyeball").

4. Hannah Goldfield, “Daily Bread,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("We spend our lives in a cycle of having eaten and then needing to do it again; how we feed ourselves reflects our relationship to money, time, pleasure, place. If the food diary pushes its practitioners toward solipsism, or toward showing off, its popularity also evinces something encouraging: a curiosity about how other people live, the texture of their days").

5. Hilton Als, “The Seer,” March 9, 2026 ("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").

6. Zachary Fine, “The Doctor Is In,” March 23, 2026 (Schiele could have placed Graff next to an operating table, like Rembrandt’s Dr. Nicolaes Tulp or Eakins’s Dr. Samuel Gross. He could have given him the dignity of Goya’s Dr. Arrieta, or made him look dashing, like Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi, with his crimson robe and Turkish slippers. Instead, Schiele strips Graff of a stethoscope and examination room, and reduces the background to platelets of white. Who would know that Graff was a talented doctor, or a hearty and athletic man who liked the outdoors and played the cello, or that he had two divorces on the horizon? His body, with its mottled face and hands, is the only wisp of narrative.)

7. Zachary Fine, “Back to the Future,” April 13, 2026 (The centerpiece of the expansion, which was led by the architects Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, in collaboration with the firm Cooper Robertson, is an atrium that snaps right onto the side of the flagship building. I can’t say it was worth the renovation’s eighty-two-million-dollar price tag, but the space is brilliantly subtle. It works like a snorkel for the museum, giving it a new column of air for the vertical flow of traffic to the galleries, which have basically doubled in size.

8. Anthony Lane, “Seeing and Believing,” April 20, 2026 (My favorite sentence in Graham-Dixon’s book has him probing the nitty-gritty of Vermeer’s roofs: “It is possible that he ground actual red terracotta tiles in with his pigments and oil to get the required result.”)

 9. Justin Chang, “Art of the Steal,” April 13, 2026 (Once Lori enters Julian’s home, the film springs to life. So does Soderbergh’s camera, which begins sniffing and roving about the space like a dog unleashed.)

10. Zachary Fine, “Monster Mash,” February 16 & 23, 2026 (But the film persuades with its frightening beauty: the shimmering flesh-colored rocks, the throbbing soundtrack, the smoothness of the creature’s skin. It’s all too human, but not.)

Best Illustration

Bill Rebholz's illustration for Rachel Symes' "On and Off the Avenue: A Total Flop"

Best of “Goings On”

1. Taran Dugal, “Bar Tab: Ornithology,” January 12, 2026 ("Sometime during the coda, the guests’ cocktails arrived. The Autumn in New York, a tangy, gin-heavy blend of lemon and crème de violette, was just fine, and not quite worth its sixteen-dollar price tag").

2. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Cove,” January 26, 2026 ("An oyster is poached in chamomile oil and served with wisps of creamy chestnut. A carrot is roasted to marshmallow sweetness, tempura-fried, and wrapped in charred sweet leaves of caraflex cabbage, then draped in uni and drizzled with spiced quince syrup. Like much of what’s on McGarry’s menu, it has a lot going on, but it doesn’t feel busy or chaotic; McGarry layers ingredients and flavors like washes of watercolor").

3. Jillian Steinhauer, “Art: Louise Bourgeois’s ‘Art Can Still Enthrall,’ ” February 2, 2026 ("The display, although understated, highlights the rhythms of Bourgeois’s obsessive repetitions, and pleasure comes in the form of details, such as in an untitled piece in which a pair of marble eggs hides in a stack of weathered crates").

4. Dan Stahl, “Bar Tab: Haswell Green’s,” February 9, 2026 ("Several pages of beverage options include ninety varieties of whiskey, plus wine, beer, cider, and custom cocktails like the mezcal-forward P.Y.T., which, well—imagine a drinkable cigarette").

5. Hilton Als, “Photo Booth: William Eggleston’s Lonely South,” February 9, 2026 ("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").

6. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: The Eighty-Six,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("I was, for my sins, dining with a vegetarian, and twenty ounces felt too ambitious to tackle alone, so I went instead for the New York strip, served bone-in. The exterior, salted and peppered, crackled from a hard sear; the inside was tender pink from edge to edge. The sauces I’d ordered alongside were hardly necessary: an eggy, vinegar-tart béarnaise, and a wiggly, wobbly gelée-adjacent steak sauce made with veal demi-glace. I dipped my fries into them, at least, and enjoyed a whole phalanx of steak-house sides: garlicky spinach; butter-laden mashed potatoes; a strikingly photogenic creamed-corn potpie with a swirly croissant top; snappy green and yellow long beans, dressed in a sharp lemon vinaigrette that sliced through the density of the rest of the food").

7. Rachel Syme, “On and Off the Avenue: Spring in the Trenches,” April 13, 2026 ("We aren’t watching chicks hatch or witnessing the miracle of foaling or plucking clumps of wild ramps from the earth. Instead, we continue traipsing through concrete, burdened with utter confusion about what, exactly, to wear: spring is a time of meteorological fakeouts; one day it will be balmy, the next frigid. Or, mornings are crisp and call for bundling up, but dress in too many layers and you’ll overheat by noon. Rain, April’s rude house guest, visits erratically and unannounced").

8. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Dean’s,” June 8, 2026 ("The restaurant rewards the diner who understands that, at this kind of proudly jolie-laide establishment, there’s a secret code: the more vividly horrid-sounding a dish, the more glorious it will be. The boiled ham, for instance, is heaven: two thin slices of meat, pink as tongues, with a parsley bechamel dotted with tiny, tender favas, and a mass of rough-mashed potatoes that seemed to be nearly half butter, salted just to the ecstatic edge of overmuch"). 

Best Poem

Rosanna Warren, “Coots,” March 30, 2026 (It would snow soon, / we walked fast, night was spreading its cloak, / the western skyline sparkled its broken glass, / and the birds in their tuxedos tightened their rings / so the water rippled glossily / out around them, catching glints).

Best “Talk of the Town”

1. Julian Lucas, “A Real Gas,” January 26, 2026 ("She was sanding down an L-shaped knob for a client in the Hamptons, who’d hired her to modernize his nineteen-thirties Magic Chef. Behind her was an Aladdin’s cave of more than a hundred and fifty venerable gas ranges, some with polished chrome fixtures and others nearly rusted through. There were Chambers, Garlands, Crowns, and a hulking, buttercup-yellow Roper that resembled a muscle car. In a world going electric, the Stove Lady keeps their flames alive: 'Nobody—not nobody, anywhere—does what I do' ").

2. Ben McGrath, “Ice Capades,” March 2, 2026 ("The fourth running of the Van Nostrand, when it finally transpired, after two days of postponement, featured three boats from the Shrewsbury club and three from New York. All, per the rules, were so-called 'A' boats: restored antiques, wooden, with gaffed rigs. From a squinting distance, they resembled Hudson River sloops. Up close, they were more like giant crosses atop machetes. The wind was a fluky northwesterly, gusty at the starting gun, such that a couple of blades levitated briefly, as if launching into flight. Then came the lulls, and a reminder that sailing, even on sherbert, can be a “hurry up and wait” kind of sport. Dan Lawrence’s son, Luke, piloting Ariel, which once belonged to the Roosevelts’ neighbor Archie Rogers, took the first heat, and then the second, obviating the need for a third. No team scores needed this time. The New Yorkers had won, and the cup was going home to Newburgh after a hundred and thirty-five years").

3. Sarah Larson, “Big Time,” March 16, 2026 ("At a Gagosian gallery in Chelsea the other day, the master rigger Joe Vilardi, a gray-haired Long Islander in a hoodie that said 'Budco Enterprises,' surveyed the final steps of the installation of Michael Heizer’s new exhibition, 'Negative Sculpture.' The show features 'Convoluted Line A' and 'Convoluted Line B' (2024), two eighty-seven-and-a-half-foot curved steel troughs that wend through the gallery’s floor like a figure skater’s tracks on ice").

4. Henry Alford, “Special Deliveries,” April 6, 2026 ("At 10:44 a.m., after docking near West Thirty-ninth Street, a thousand and fifty-six feet above trucks stuck in traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, the package was assigned to a Dutch X biker named C Jay Jaime, a Brooklyn-born, thirty-four-year-old father of three, who would be riding around town on a special pedal-assist e-bike that came equipped with a windshield, a roof, and an attached trailer. Jaime, who had on a yellow reflective vest and a helmet, held up his phone near his supervisor’s and, courtesy of the FarEye app, instantly received the coördinates for the packages—a total of forty-five—he’d be delivering. “This should take about six hours,” he said. The Sephora box would be his nineteenth of the day. He removed the parcel from its Kevlar tote and placed it on a shelf in the trailer. The D.O.T. estimates that two cargo bikes can do the work of a van or a box truck. Moreover, the trim little contraption cut a wholesome figure reminiscent of a Richard Scarry book—as if a courtesy tram birthed a tiny Zamboni").

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Fanboy,” June 15, 2026 ["He was sitting in a corner of Old Rabbit Club, a bar on MacDougal Street, drinking a non-alcoholic beer. He had on a Waylon Jennings T-shirt under a red plaid shirt, and an MF Doom baseball cap that contained a cascade of curly hair that Vile has a tendency to hide behind. A beer-menu lamplight suggested that the color of his Chuck Taylors was lavender. He was hanging out late (a) to make the trip down the turnpike at midnight (“Musicians know, it’s an easy shot late at night—it’s like teleportation”) and (b) to catch another band’s gig at Le Poisson Rouge"].

6. Ian Frazier, “ICE Prison Watch,” June 22, 2026 (Doremus Avenue and the warehouses and tank farms and truck lots and junk yards along it are not far from the Passaic River. This is swampy Jersey, as opposed to hilly Jersey. Next to the prison visitors’ parking lot, a small catchment pond holds runoff. The lawn around the pond had been mowed without anybody picking up the trash beforehand. Two Canada geese and six gangly brown-suède goslings walked among the refuse, while in the near distance the truck horns and the protesters’ chants rose up. The geese had been there off and on for days.)

Best Photo

Ian Loring Shiver's photo for Helen Rosner's "New York's Finest Sandwich"

Best of newyorker.com

1. Helen Rosner, “New York’s Finest Sandwich,” March 22, 2026 ("What I find most wondrous about the Vegitalian is that it’s not a vegetarian sandwich that happens to be good. It’s not a concession to dietary preference, or a consolation prize. It is, in every sense, a more considered sandwich than the typical monument to meat; every ingredient is load-bearing, each element thought through and assigned a job. The result is a sandwich that illuminates, a sandwich that delights, a sandwich that redefines the Italian combo as a structure, a set of relationships, a formula that admits many solutions. The meat never figures, and you never miss it; all you miss, when the sandwich is gone, is the sandwich itself").

2. Samanth Subramanian, “Sohrab Hura’s Frozen Vision of Kashmir,” May 2, 2026 ("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").

3. Max Norman, “August Sander’s Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World,” May 21, 2026 (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.)

4. Taran Dugal, “How Raghu Rai Captured an India in Transition,” May 23, 2026 ("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").

5. Hilton Als, “The Expansive Joy of Mao Ishikawa,” May 30, 2026 ("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!").

6. Naaman Zhou, “How City Kids Used to Play on the Streets of New York,” June 6, 2026 ("Earlier, I’d asked Cooper what her favorite picture was in the series. It was one she’d taken of a go-kart race down an abandoned stretch of the West Side Elevated Highway. Two groups of kids are screeching down the road. Other boys are sitting on the guardrail, or strolling and watching from a distance. It’s otherwise empty—just the kids and the road. Like almost all of Cooper’s photos, the scene is fleeting, a remnant of a New York that no longer exists. That highway was demolished, and, though Cooper saved one of the go-karts, and exhibited it at the Museum of the City of New York, she wasn’t able to keep it. In the seventies, when Cooper took these photos, she already knew that what she was seeing was temporary. 'I would drive around Alphabet City, and I would see these things,' she said. 'But they might last for a couple of hours. If I saw it one day, generally, it wouldn’t be there the next' ").

7. Naomi Fry, “The Delicious Anticipation – and, Yes, Release – of ‘Heated Rivalry,’ ” January 10, 2026 ("To try to tell if someone likes you—if someone might even want to have sex with you and, if so, when, and what that encounter might be like, and, once it’s over, when and how it might be repeated—can be one of life’s greatest pleasures").

8. Alex Ross, “What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann,” March 14, 2026 ("What, exactly, was the root of Sontag’s 'shame' over the encounter with Mann, if her semi-fictional story reflected her real-life attitude?").

9. Rebecca Mead, “David Hockney’s Hidden Depths,” June 16, 2026 ("His 'pool paintings,' including 'A Bigger Splash,' remain his most iconic works, despite the fact that he made only a dozen or so of them. They capture a kind of carefree milieu that manages to be suggestively hedonistic while being almost Edenic in the loving treatment of male nudity").

10. Zach Helfand, “How to Canoe to the World Cup in New Jersey,” June 16, 2026 (“The Hackensack appeared behind the parking lot, surprisingly broad and sparkly. Phragmites reeds lined the water, and the American Dream mall loomed over the far bank. It didn’t smell too bad. Except for the cars roaring overhead on a nearby bridge, a continuation of Route 3, it was pretty peaceful”).

Best Sentence

Over and over, I ran those films on our family projector, watching Pepper Constable (6'1", 191) go off-tackle, shucking Yalies, Harvards, on his way to the end zone. - John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Volume Six” (April 27, 2026) 

Best Paragraph

Once the plane passed the highway, Slipkan gave Gusak the order to shoot. The plane was slightly less than nine hundred feet away from the drone. Gusak squeezed the trigger, and the cabin of the Antonov filled with the drilling sound of automatic-weapon fire and the smoky-sweet smell of spent rounds. A stream of orange tracers rained from the minigun. After a few bursts of gunfire, a small plume of black smoke tailed out behind the Shahed, and it began losing altitude. The crew expected it to explode, but it glided into a field beneath the Antonov without detonating—a surprise for a farmer the next morning. Inside the plane, there was no jubilation. After the successful kill, Gusak spent a few minutes tidying up his work station, collecting round casings into a burlap bag. - Ed Caesar, “The Stunt Pilot” (June 1, 2026) 

Best Detail

Two Canada geese and six gangly brown-suède goslings walked among the refuse, while in the near distance the truck horns and the protesters’ chants rose up. - Ian Frazier, "ICE Prison Watch" (June 22, 2026)

Best Description

Every other detail of the Vegitalian likewise replaces an element that the meats provided in the original. Arugula, in lieu of more traditional iceberg lettuce, adds peppery bite. Pecorino, rather than Parmigiano, provides funk. In addition to mozzarella (salty, springy) there is a very nontraditional layer of Swiss cheese, lending a gently savory note. Rather than a conventional splash of red-wine vinegar, the Vegitalian gets a hefty smear of Court Street Grocers’ signature “hoagie spread,” a piquant relish of kalamata and green olives plus a briny, giardiniera-style mix of cauliflower, carrots, peppers, and other pickly things. There’s also a smear of mayo—Italian-combo sacrilege, in some sandwich circles, though I’ve always felt that it boosts the lusciousness of this sort of sandwich. The bread is a soft-crumbed, crackly-crusted seeded roll, with faintly salty pockets of air. - Helen Rosner, "New York’s Finest Sandwich" (March 22, 2026)

Best Drink

The Calcutta Cutie – “a pear-and-chai-infused vodka—sweet, refreshing, and just bitter enough” (Taran Dugal, “Bar Tab: Ornithology,” January 12, 2026).

Ian Frazier's "The Maraschino Mogul"

Illustration by Janne Iivonen, from Ian Frazier's "The Maraschino Mogul"

Reading the section of John McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa 6” called “Maraschino,” in last week’s issue, I was reminded of another great “maraschino” piece – Ian Frazier’s “The Maraschino Mogul.” It first appeared eight years ago in the April 23, 2018, New Yorker, and is included in Frazier’s recently published collection The Snakes That Ate Florida. Last night, I re-read it. 

It’s quite a story, beginning with red bees and ending in tragedy. It centers on a man named Arthur Mondella – the “maraschino mogul” of the title. Mondella owned Dell’s Maraschino Cherries, a factory in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn that makes maraschino cherries. It was a successful business. But it contained a secret. Mondella was using the basement of his cherry factory to grow marijuana hydroponically. The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office became suspicious. On February 24, 2015, officers raided the factory. Frazier tells what happened next: 

While examining some shelves, they found what appeared to be a false wall. They told him they were going to send for a warrant to search behind it. As they waited for the warrant, Mondella excused himself to use the bathroom. Once inside, he locked the door and would not come out.

The police tried to persuade him to unlock the door. He refused, and asked them to bring his sister, Joanne. They did. Through the door, he said to her, “Take care of my kids.” Then he shot himself in the head with a .357 Magnum pistol he had been carrying in an ankle holster.

Frazier continues:

Behind the false wall the officers discovered a ladder leading down to a large basement, twenty-five hundred square feet, and space for about a hundred marijuana plants in a well-set-up system of hydroponic cultivation under L.E.D. grow lights. They also found about a hundred pounds of harvested marijuana, a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in cash, and a small office containing a desk with books on plant husbandry and a copy of “The World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime.” In a garage area they came upon a collection of vintage cars, a Bentley and a Rolls-Royce among them, which suggested that Mondella led a flashier life when not at the factory. Later reports mentioned his use of cocaine, his boat, his lavish spending in restaurants, and his fiancée, a former Penthouse model.

What’s this got to do with bees? Well, as Frazier shows, the unravelling of Mondella’s secret life began five years earlier, in 2010, when beekeepers in Red Hook noticed that bees returning to their hives were glowing an incandescent red. They noticed that their honey was turning red, too. The cause was eventually traced to Mondella’s cherry factory. Bees were observed flying in its direction and visiting puddles of red juice around it on the sidewalk. A beekeeper had his red honey analyzed. It tested positive for F.D.&C. Red No. 40, a food-safe dye, which is an ingredient of the maraschino syrup used by Mondella’s factory. 

The phenomenon of the red bees attracted considerable media attention and caught the eye of the authorities. As Frazier says, “The heightened attention caused by the bee episode had increased the factory’s visibility. In 2013, Brooklyn elected a new D.A., Kenneth Thompson, who set out to clean up pollution in the borough. His office decided to take a look at some stalled environmental cases.” 

My summary doesn’t do this great piece justice. Read it. It’s a fascinating story! Frazier tells it perfectly. 

April 27, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John McPhee’s brilliant “Tabula Rasa, Volume 6.” It appears that McPhee’s “old-man project” is working. It’s keeping him alive. But I’d argue it’s doing more than that. It’s refining his already incomparable style – making it even fresher, lighter, zingier. “Unhomogenized, this was udder-grade milk of the Champlain Valley.” I love that sentence. It’s from “A Legacy Taste of Cream” – the first piece in this new volume. Consider this one, from “Maraschino,” the number four piece in the volume: “I.G.A., of course, is the Independent Grocers Alliance, and this is your vox-pop cherry, your socialist cherry, but politics is not why you drown it in bourbon.” There’s something deliciously surreal about that line – the combination of “Independent Grocers Alliance,” “vox-pop cherry,” “socialist cherry,” “drown,” and “bourbon” – that makes me smile. Here’s one more – this from the seventh piece “For One Person”: “Over and over, I ran those films on our family projector, watching Pepper Constable (6'1", 191) go off-tackle, shucking Yalies, Harvards, on his way to the end zone.” The name “Pepper Constable” is itself a minor pleasure. Couple it with “go off-tackle” and “shucking Yalies, Harvards” and you have an inspired sentence. There are dozens of such felicities in this latest “Tabula Rasa.” I enjoyed it immensely.  

On the Horizon: John McPhee's "Tabula Rasa: Volume 6"

Illustration by Seb Agresti, from John McPhee's "Tabula Rasa: Volume 6"

I see that the April 27 New Yorker contains another instalment of John McPhee’s great “Tabula Rasa” series. It’s tempting to read it now on newyorker.com. But I’ll wait for the print edition. I avidly look forward to it. McPhee is one of my favorite writers and one of this blog’s touchstones. Click on the label "John McPhee" and you’ll find 150 posts on his work. 

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #6 John McPhee's "Season on the Chalk"

Photo by John Holloway, from John McPhee's "Season on the Chalk"

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is John McPhee’s “Season on the Chalk” (March 12, 2007).

In this splendid piece, McPhee explores the geology and geography of the chalk-based landscape that extends from the downs and sea cliffs of southeast England to the Champagne country of northern France. It contains one of the most beautiful landscape descriptions in all of New Yorker writing. Before I get to it, I want to set the scene.

McPhee starts in Gravesend, England, and introduces his theme immediately:

The massive chalk of Europe lies below the English Channel, under much of northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and—from Erith Reach to Gravesend—under fifteen miles of the lower Thames. My grandson Tommaso appears out of somewhere and picks up a cobble from the bottom of the Thames. The tide is out. The flats are broad between the bank and the water. Small boats, canted, are at rest on the riverbed. Others, farther out on the wide river, are moored afloat—skiffs, sloops, a yawl or two. Tommaso is ten. The rock in his hand is large but light. He breaks it against the revetment bordering the Gordon Promenade, in the Riverside Leisure Area, with benches and lawns under oaks and chestnuts, prams and children, picnics under way, newspapers spread like sails, and, far up the bank, a stall selling ice cream. He cracks the cobble into jagged pieces, which are whiter than snow. Chalked graffiti line the revetment and have attracted the attention of Tommaso, who now starts his own with the letter “R.” Two of his grandsons, Tommaso and Leandro, are with him. 

Notice McPhee’s use of the present tense. Tomasso appears. The tide is out. Boats are at rest on the riverbed. Tomasso cracks the cobble. Everything is happening now. The immediacy of McPhee’s writing distinguishes it from the retrospective accounts of the previous four pieces in this series. I relish it.

“Season on the Chalk” unfolds in seven untitled segments. Segment 1 describes the chalk landscape of southern England – the town of Chalk (“with a thoroughfare called Chalk Road, a barber’s called Chalk Cuts, and a neighborhood called Chalk Park, where mobile homes have tile roofs”), the cliffs of Dover (“the chalk cliffs under their cap of vegetation are like the filling in a broken wafer, a cross-sectional exposure of the nation’s basement”), the North Downs, and the South Downs:

In billows of chalk, the Downs rise from the sea and go on rising northward to elevations approaching a thousand feet, culminating in the escarpment that plunges to the Weald. 

Segment 2 takes us to a vineyard in a small, deep South Downs valley, “countersunk in the highest chalk,” called Breaky Bottom. McPhee visits there with his friend Hal Doyne-Ditmas. McPhee writes, 

We descend, helically, and park under a horse chestnut near a flint wall, a house, a flint barn. We step into a scene of utter quiet. Call this the most peaceful place in Europe—willows over the flint garden wall, a line of poplars against the sky, cattle like brown pebbles far up the circumvallate grazings, fewer than few human inhabitants, proprietor nowhere in sight. He is in his kitchen, conferring with a buyer.

Notice the mention of flint. It’s a secondary theme of this piece. McPhee will have more to say about it in segment 6.  

The owner of the Breaky Bottom vineyard is Peter Hall. He gives McPhee and Doyne-Ditmas a tour of his flint barn where his fermentation tanks and wine press are located. They then adjourn to Hall’s kitchen and engage in some wine-tasting. McPhee writes, 

The kitchen in Breaky Bottom’s farmhouse trails modern kitchens by about a hundred years and is a hundred times as pleasant, with its apparatus in heavy black iron, its slanting window light, its glasses and bottles on the blue oilcloth of a large wooden table. Listening to Peter Hall, we sit and sip, appreciate, spit. A pitcher is in service as a glass spittoon. A 2003 still wine is “like sucking a lemon at half time,” we are told. “It’s refreshing, zestful.” A 1996 Müller-Thurgau is “elegantly shaped, like a Gewürztraminer, but it has backed off from there.” The main events are the champagnes (a term he doesn’t use). “This young ’03 is pretty zesty, sharp, punchy stuff.” This 1999 is “more rounded, bigger flavor—quite a drink. . . . I’m growing Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Seyval Blanc now principally with fizz in mind, to see what comes off this chalk.” Already, his production is “preponderantly fizzy,” and soon, he says, he might decide “to go a hundred per cent fizz.”

McPhee says, “For my part, I am not ejecting a whole lot of what I am sipping, and I am getting a little drunk.”

In segment 3, McPhee is on the French chalk. The transition is a beauty:

From Breaky Bottom out through Beachy Head, under the Channel, and up into Picardy, and on past Arras and Amiens, the chalk is continuous to Reims and Épernay. To drive the small roads and narrow lanes of Champagne is to drive the karstic downlands of Sussex and Surrey, the smoothly bold topography of Kentish chalk—the French ridges, long and soft, the mosaic fields and woodlots, the chalk boulders by the road in villages like Villeneuve-l’Archêveque. Here the French fieldstone is chalk, and the quarry stone—white drywalls, white barns, white churches. The chalk church of Orvilliers-Saint-Julien. The chalk around the sunflowers of Rigny-la-Nonneuse. The chalkstone walls at Marcilly-le-Hayer. Near Épernay, even the cattle are white; and vines like green corduroy run for miles up the hillsides in rows perpendicular to the contours, and the tops of the vines are so accordant that the vines up close look more like green fences, and the storky, long-legged tractors of Champagne straddle rows and run above the grapes.

Oh, man! That is a gorgeous piece of writing. I love its specificity. I love its vividness. I love its rhythm. I love its use of sentence fragments. I love its use of place names. It’s an inspired prose poem! 

In this segment, McPhee drives the roads and lanes that connect the Champagne vineyards: “Up in the vineyards over Ay, a Sunday afternoon in steady rain, the green vines glisten, while water on the chalk roads runs like milk. Your car goes up to its hubcaps in milk.”

He visits the Église Abbatiale, in Hautvillers, where the Benedictine monk Pierre Pérignon is reputed to have invented champagne. But McPhee says no: 

He was a skilled blender, according to the geologist James E. Wilson’s “Terroir: The Role of Geology, Climate, and Culture in the Making of French Wines,” but, contrary to Pérignon’s worldwide reputation, he did not add to the wines the magic bits of sugar and yeast that enhance carbonation in the second fermentation and result in champagne as we know it and he did not.

McPhee also visits the extensive storage tunnels of Moët & Chandon: 

Dimly lighted passages reach so far into a mournful and brooding gloom that the eye is stopped not by rock but by darkness. Along the sides, as in a catacomb, are vaults, crypts—a seemingly endless series of crypts, typically six feet by sixteen feet, like one-fifth of your one-room apartment. The tight space notwithstanding, in each crypt lie some twenty thousand bottles of champagne.

Segment 4 is a brief essay on the geology of the massive chalk landscape – the English downlands and white sea cliffs, the bottom of the Channel, and the Champagne region – that McPhee is exploring. The key geologic period is the Cretaceous, which began a hundred and forty-five million years ago and lasted for eighty million years. “Cretaceous” derives from the chalk that formed during that period. McPhee writes,

The chalk it is named for developed during roughly half of Cretaceous time—temporally the more recent half, stratigraphically the upper half. The chalk is made of the calcareous remains of microscopic marine plants and animals that lived in the water column and sank after death—slower than riddled yeast—in epicontinental seas. The chalk accumulated at the rate of about one millimetre in a century, and the thickness got past three hundred metres in some thirty-five million years.

McPhee visits the heavily chalked city of Maastricht – chalk basilicas, chalk churches. Where was all that chalk quarried? Answer: just five miles up the River Maas, in Sint Pietersberg. McPhee travels there by boat:

The breeze is cool on the open deck, and the boat is soon running past saturated fields that resemble the fens of Cambridgeshire which are also on the chalk. Jet Skis circle the boat, and weave Olympic rings around slow-moving barges full of crushed cars. Other barges, carrying ores and grains, are everywhere on the river, as are private cabin boats, nosing around the barges like pretentious tugs.

In Sint Pietersberg, McPhee tours the Grotten Sint Pietersberg – a chalk quarry:

In a group, you follow a guide with two electric lanterns, suspended from bails like railroad lanterns. He hands one to the last guidee in line, then leads the way into darkness, cracking jokes in English. His name is Leon Frissen. He is short, stocky, balding, and friendly. You follow him down and down through a gallery system, and if you’ve ever been in a salt mine the place reminds you of a salt mine. The constant temperature is ten degrees Celsius and you shiver. Now you are about thirty-five metres below the surface. The gallery walls are seven metres high. The lantern light is the only light. It throws awkward, lurching shadows. Seeing me struggle to write notes, Frissen takes a flashlight out of his pocket and gives it to me. Rounding a corner, we look down a straight corridor into a mournful and infinite gloom. Frissen says the corridor goes on for several kilometres before the next bend. He says there are three hundred and fifty kilometres of galleries in and beyond the mountain, hewn, by blokbrekers, with three tools: chisel, hammer, and saw. The quarrying resumed in the thirteenth century and continued until 1926.

In segment 5, McPhee writes about the Cretaceous Extinction, in which some two-thirds of all species on earth perished. What happened? McPhee appears to subscribe to the “bad luck theory” – a bunch of natural events like continental drift, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and glaciation piling up at once. He concludes, “While the earth moves on toward the first mass extinction caused by a living species, debates about earlier ones are really unresolved.”

Segment 6 cuts back to the English Downs. McPhee and Doyne-Ditmas are atop the chalk cliffs of Sussex – “Cuckmere Haven to Beachy Head—the whitest in the Cretaceous Terrain, fairly glaring in the sun when there’s a sun. Eroded in a rhythm of reëntrants and promontories, they call to mind a row of clerestory windows. Almost straight down them—hundreds of feet—are waves.” 

McPhee reports that the cliffs of Sussex are being eroded at an average rate of about thirty-five centimetres a year. He observes that close up, “the chalk cliffs appear to be studded, almost like formal shirts, with uniform black dots.” Those dots are chunks of flint, McPhee says. He describes them:

The shingle beaches below the white cliffs consist almost entirely of flint cobbles the size of ostrich eggs. If you stand next to a chalk cliff and lift your head, you look up a wall spiky with projecting flints. When they fall, they sometimes break. A cracked-open surface, opaque and light to dark gray, is smooth and shines like glass. The old structures of half of Sussex, not to mention Surrey, seem to be made of flint—flint churches, flint terraces, flint houses reinforced with bricks at the corners, flint retaining walls bordering sunken lanes. Doyne-Ditmas seems especially fond of the big flint prison in Lewes, its flints, black and gray, “giving it a sort of piebald aspect.” In some flint construction, the nodules were left whole. More often, they were hammered open—cracked like walnuts—so that their flat glassy surfaces would shine. The process is known as knapping and the results are knapped flints. Some flints were knapped so painstakingly that their outer surfaces were not only flat but also rectangular. In building walls they seem to be obsidian bricks.

In segment 7, the final section of the piece, McPhee visits Charles Darwin’s Down House, on the North Downs. He writes,

If you drive here from, say, the north side of the Thames, you move very slowly from stoplight to stoplight through the heavy density of South London, scarcely a patch of green, and then, suddenly, you’re in Darwin’s Downe, on swelling land among pony carts and open fields, horses, jodhpurred women perched in saddles, knapped flints like oyster shells up the wall of a country teahouse called Evolution 1.

In Newton Stacey, he walks through fields down to where the River Dever meets the River Test. He writes,

Coot are swimming on the River Test, two swans and four cygnets on the Dever. Over the junction pool, an ash ripe with ash keys spreads its canopy across the two rivers. They are surprisingly narrow and intimate, not much more than brooks—the Test, the mother stream, scarcely three feet deep and thirty wide. Its bank, squared off and shored with planking, is level and closely mowed so that anglers can walk beside the water unimpeded, dry shod, with no thought of stepping in. It just isn’t done, stepping in. The air is full of damselflies, midges, mayflies, swifts, and swallows, the sandy chalky bottom thick with cress and water crowfoot. The angler is wise to creep along the footpath, or, at least, to tiptoe. One unwary step and a two-pound brown explodes from cover under the lip of the bank and vanishes upstream. You sit down on a bench and think it over. Arctic grayling, which have even higher standards of water quality than trout do, share this sacred water, as does Esox lucius—the piscivorous Devil, the savage Fiend, the pike—known to grow as large as one stone three consuming trout. The underwater water crowfoot grows so fast that the waterkeeper mows it like the grass. In his fish garden, beside the Dever, the waterkeeper’s shed roofs are thatched, a bull trout is memorialized that was “killed August 1934,” and drying at the tops of posts are the heads of four huge pike.

A vivid ending to a wonderful trip. I enjoyed it immensely.

2025 Year in Review

Let’s begin with a drink, shall we? How about one of those espresso Martinis with a creamy glug of banana liqueur that Rachel Syme wrote about in her wonderful “Bar Tab: Monsieur” (April 7, 2025). Mm, that hits the spot. Okay, let’s roll!

Highlight #1: The magnificent 100th Anniversary Issue (February 17 & 24, 2025), loaded with delectable writing, including Jill Lepore’s “War of Words,” Nick Paumgarten’s “Helicopter Parents,” Burkhard Bilger’s “Stepping Out,” and Jackson Arn’s “Royal Flush.” 

Highlight #2: The splendid “Takes” series, in which New Yorker contributors revisited notable works from the magazine’s archive. I loved Stephen Colbert’s piece on Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale.” Sample: “From Hollywood to the Hasty Pudding, we waft like smoke from an unfiltered Pall Mall through Carson’s worlds, most of which are gone.”

Highlight #3: Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” columns – every last ravishing one of them. I devoured them all, licking my lips, craving more. Here’s a taste:

Another salad of chewy-crisp pork jowl and sliced melon is zingy with garlic and pickle-tart. The round sweetness of squid, fried in a light-as-air batter, is magnified by intensely floral curry leaves and a salty snowfall of shaved cured egg yolk. A bone-in pork chop, thick as a dictionary, tender as can be, and drowning in a luscious mess of charred tomatoes marinated in a sugar-lime-fish-sauce concoction, features every shade of sour and sweet. [“Tables for Two: Bong,” September 29, 2025]

Highlight #4: Nathan Blum’s extraordinary short story “Outcomes” (November 3, 2025). I’m not sentimental, but this piece moved me to tears. It’s about two students at a college in Maine – a freshman who grew up nearby and a senior from New York City – who meet and form a connection. The freshman’s name is Nolan Everett and the senior’s is Heidi Lane. They meet at the climbing wall in the college rec center. Nolan works there as a belayer. Heidi registers to use the climbing wall. She’s never climbed before. Nolan teaches her. The relationship evolves. The ending is heartbreaking. This is the best short story to appear in The New Yorker since Maile Meloy’s brilliant “Travis, B.” (October 28, 2002). 

Highlight #5: The appearance of another great “Tabula Rasa” piece by my hero, John McPhee. In this one, he says, among other interesting things, “I attribute my antiquity to dark-chocolate almond bark.”  

Other top picks of the year (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

Ian Frazier’s “Pigeon Toes,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“On the ironing board, which is set at a convenient height, she cuts up old loaves that she gets for free from a nearby bakery, and then she tosses the bread cubes onto the granite paving blocks of the plaza. Pigeons appear almost instantly, pecking so avidly that dozens of individual bread cubes go flying into the air above the mass of birds like popping popcorn”).

Nick Paumgarten’s “Guitar Heroes,” May 26, 2025 (“‘Are you ready?’ Margouleff asked at the warehouse. He unlocked a door, and immediately a thick, corky scent hit me, the emanation of hundreds of aging guitars—the great variety of hardwoods, the glue and paint and lacquer, the oxidation of strings and coils, the leather straps and handles, and the sarcophagal musk of the cases themselves”). 

Paige Williams’ “Still Life,” June 9, 2025 (“It was nine-thirty in the morning and so windy that miniature flags on graves were horizontal. The gravediggers were preparing for a funeral at two. Four neon-orange stakes marked off a rectangle in front of a headstone. The stone was inscribed with the name of a woman buried at nine feet; her husband was coming in at seven”).

Alexandra Schwartz’s “Going Viral,” September 1 & 8, 2025 (“Across genres, her calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with quick wit and cheerful perversity, pressing the reader close to her comic, confiding ‘I’”).

D. T. Max’s “The Behemoth,” September 22, 2025 (“The tower was a cone that narrowed to a point as it ascended. At the center of its circular base was a glimmering white hyperboloid, a gigantic stone object that looked like a cooling tower at a nuclear power plant. The hyperboloid had no top or bottom—it was a skylight that opened onto the nave below. Through this aperture, sunlight could filter all the way down to the church floor”).

Anthony Lane’s “Cinema Paradiso,” September 29, 2025 (“In a courtyard strung with lights, at a late-night showing of  ’A Santanotte, a Neapolitan film from 1922, I kept glancing away from the fervid melodrama to admire the projector behind me: a steampunk dream, built in Milan in the nineteen-thirties, which appeared to be made from a trash can, half a dozen alarm clocks, and two bicycle wheels. It emitted a bright plume of smoke, as if miniature furnaces were being stoked within”).

Rivka Galchen’s “The Heat of the Moment,” November 24, 2025 ("In the summer of 2022, a rig set up not far from Cornell’s School of Veterinary Medicine drilled for sixty-five days through layers of shale, limestone, and sandstone, passing beyond the geologic time of the dinosaurs to a crystalline basement dating to the Proterozoic eon, more than five hundred million years ago").

Alex Ross’s “Written in Stone,” December 1, 2025 (“One evening, I leaned on a fence as the sun went down, the horizon glowing orange against a cobalt sky. A whitish mist stole in from the lochs, encircling a nearby house until only its roof and chimneys remained. Spectral shapes caught my eye: sheep were trimming the grass around the site. When they detected my presence, they streamed away en masse, fading into the fog, which matched their coats. The stones loomed as black silhouettes. I felt a sweet shiver of the uncanny”).

Best Cover

Richard McGuire’s “Zooming In” for the April 14, 2025 “Innovation & Tech” issue.

Best “Talk of the Town”

Ben McGrath’s “Dumpster Diving,” September 15, 2025 (“Their attention turned to a giant cherry-colored armoire that had belonged to a professor now on sabbatical in Malaysia. How to get it to Bay Ridge? Ching had an idea. He could have it trucked with the weekly deliveries to Tandon, which is in downtown Brooklyn. ‘Then, there is a wonderful Home Depot probably less than a mile away,’ he said. ‘You can rent a U-Haul for nineteen dollars, and it’s good for ninety minutes. So, if you time it just right, early in the morning . . .’”).

Robert Sullivan’s “Manhattan’s Springs,” September 22, 2025 (“On a recent summer day, Greenberg moved through the Bronx with the brisk authority of a biker who has little time for automobiles, methodically checking the map on his phone, pulling copies of Smith’s photos from his backpack, watching for construction sheds. ‘The city will take the photos down, and so will landlords, but they seem to last longest on these sheds,’ he said”).

Nick Paumgarten’s “Big Pink,” October 6, 2025 (“At the head of the quarry, ospreys had built a nest high atop an abandoned derrick bedangled like a maypole with rusty cables”).

Jane Bua’s “Shedding,” October 13, 2025 (“At 8 p.m., the band slunk onstage, the house lights cut out, and Puth trotted up in a baggy Elastica T-shirt. He parked at the fake Rhodes, and the set began. At every keys solo and drum rip, he put on a goofy grin or a quasi-sexual stank face”).

Bruce Handy's “Shadow Boxing,” December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026 ("Five plate-glass windows offer a view into a re-creation of the cluttered basement studio in which the twentieth-century American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell once cobbled together the “shadow boxes” that he is best known for").

Best Illustration

David Plunkert's illustration for Daniel Immerwahr's "Check This Out" (January 27, 2025).

Best of “The Critics”

Justin Chang’s “Mean Time,” January 13, 2025 (“Woe betide anyone who bumps into Pansy on the street, but to watch her onscreen produces a kind of bruised exhilaration; her viciousness has an awesome life force. At a certain point, I began wondering whether Pansy would be best served not by counselling or antidepressants but by a few pints and an open mike”).

Daniel Immerwahr’s “Check This Out,” January 27, 2025 (“Even the supposedly attention-pulverizing TikTok deserves another look. Hayes, who works in TV, treats TikTok wholly as something to watch—an algorithmically individualized idiot box. But TikTok is participatory: more than half its U.S. adult users have posted videos. Where the platform excels is not in slick content but in amateur enthusiasm, which often takes the form of trends with endless variations. To join in, TikTokers spend hours preparing elaborate dance moves, costume changes, makeup looks, lip synchs, trick shots, pranks, and trompe-l’oeil camera maneuvers”).

Jackson Arn’s, “Royal Flush," February 17 & 24, 2025 (“In many of the cases from ‘Seeing Red’ where red does dominate, the work in question comes off as an affront, crossing some chromatic line—look at Warhol’s “Red Lenin” or STIK’s “Liberty (Red)” and feel the wet raspberry splatter you”). Arn’s sudden departure from The New Yorker this year saddened me. I will miss him. 

Adam Gopnik’s “Fresh Paint,” April 14, 2025 (“Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open”).

Louis Menand’s “Strong Opinions,” June 2, 2025 (“And the rumpled, rubber-faced manner, the popping eyes, the languorous drawl, the charmingly wicked grin he flashed when he thought he had scored a kill—Buckley was a show unto himself”).

Anthony Lane’s “Easy Music,” July 7 & 14, 2025 (“Has anyone listened more intently than Leonard to the infinite bandwidths of spoken English? So sharp are his ears, when pricked up, that somebody, way back in the Leonard genealogy, must have made out with a lynx”).

James Wood’s “Escape Route,” July 21, 2025 (“Dyer’s rise is solitary, freakish, and shadowed always by the chance that it might never have happened”).

Dan Chiasson, “Sense and Sensibility,” August 11, 2025 (“Schuyler worked in two primary verse modes, ostensibly opposites: we could call them blips and loop-the-loops. The blips are short, ribbonlike lyrics, trimmed to the moment, their sharp enjambments inspired by the Renaissance-era poet Robert Herrick; the loop-the-loops follow long Proustian arcs in margin-busting lines reminiscent of Walt Whitman”).

Hannah Goldfield’s “Take Me Back," September 15, 2025 (“Many of the most beloved food venders sell a single, time-honored classic: bubbling-hot, batter-fried cheese curds, as sparkly as nuggets of gold, from a stall called the Mouth Trap; the Corn Roast’s deeply burnished cobs, dunked in melted butter; crispy, wispy sweet-onion rings at Danielson’s & Daughters”).

Maggie Doherty's “Rambling Man,” October 20, 2025 (“Illuminated by Richardson’s biography, “The Snow Leopard” becomes an even more intriguing object. It is both a record of a man’s failings and a book written to avoid confronting them”).

James Wood’s “Last Harvest,” November 10, 2025 (“These investigations are meticulous, tender, palpable: buildings and radios, cars and first kisses, songs and streets are all made newly alive in memory”).

Hannah Goldfield's “Still Rising,” December 15, 2025 ("From a small tray of sheer pira—Afghan milk fudge, made with cardamom and orange-blossom water—he used a cookie cutter to extract glossy circles to fit into a Danish-like pastry, between layers of a vanilla pastry cream and diplomat cream. The texture of the finished product was delightfully riotous, shards of crisp golden crumb collapsing into the pleasingly claggy fudge and luscious custard").

Best Photo

Malike Sidibe’s portrait of Lorna Simpson for Julian Lucas’s “Now You See Her” (May 12 & 19, 2025)

Best of “Goings On”

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: L&L Hawaiian Barbecue,” March 3, 2025 (“Get a musubi or two, which is marvellous, the squishy pillow of rice, the ineffable Spamminess of Spam, the sweet smear of teriyaki”).

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: La Tête d’Or,” March 31, 2025 (“A well-prepared steak is goddam delicious”).

Rachel Syme’s “Local Gems: Fountain Pen Hospital,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“The store’s longtime head salesman is a fountain-pen savant. I recently went hunting for a wet-writing flexible nib and, within a few moments, he produced from the back room a glossy black Parker Lucky 2½ from the nineteen-twenties. ‘This, this, is the pen for you,’ he said. He was right”).

Marella Gayla’s “Bar Tab: Liar, Liar,” May 26, 2025 (“There was a looser scene on a weeknight, when a round of frosty Martinis, a sampling of cloudy, tart orange wines, and a peppery bottle of red, shared with two colleagues, seemed less like a life-style statement and more like a bold recommitment to the very act of living”).

Helen Rosner’s “Three Ice-Cream Sundaes for the Start of Summer,” June 16, 2025 (“The dark, slithery-hot chocolate sauce has a bittersweet edge that makes the whole thing feel dimensional and a little bit electric”).

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Bong,” September 29, 2025 [“Mama Kim’s namesake lobster (listed with the minimal description ‘IYKYK’) is a magnificent mountain of crustacean legs and claws, the pieces stir-fried with oodles of slivered ginger and a sweet-spicy herbaceous paste, made by Mama Kim, that clings, slurpably, to the meat and drips juicily onto a pile of rice below”].

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Chateau Royale,” October 27, 2025 (“I recommend ending your meal with a splash of Champagne poured from a silver ewer over a garnet-hued sphere of cassis sorbet – a thrilling riff on a Kir Royale, providing a bit of fizz and lightness at last”).

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: I’m Donut ?,” December 1, 2025 (“The somewhat controversial scrambled-egg doughnut features a sugary original doughnut piped full of soft curds and a squirt of a sweet-savory tomato mayonnaise—a bold and bizarre breakfast manifesto that refuses to be definitively sweet or definitively savory. I loved it unreservedly, though I imagine I might be in the minority”).

Best Poem

Arthur Sze’s “Mushroom Hunting at the Ski Basin,” March 24, 2025 (“Driving up the ski-basin road, I spot purple asters / and know it is time”).

Best “Shouts & Murmurs”

Josh Lieb’s “Bagels, Ranked,” April 21, 2025 [“Dances with, rather than fights against, the cream cheese and the lox. (Or whitefish, if that’s your thing. I don’t judge)”].

Best newyorker.com Posts

Joshua Yaffa’s “At the Edge of Life and Death in Ukraine,” August 2, 2025 (“Van Wessel captures how something can be at once utterly horrible, an emotional devastation for which no one is prepared, and also grimly routine”).

Helen Rosner’s “Three Plays on the Pancake,” August 3, 2025 (“Like the version made famous at Golden Diner (which Herrera has credited as an inspiration), these are true, literal pancakes: made not on a griddle but in individual cast-iron pans, which define the pancake’s shape, constraining its boundaries and creating a distinct crispiness to the outsides that plays in beautiful counterpoint to the soft, almost meltingly creamy insides. A serving of two pancakes arrives under a brutalist slab of butter so substantial that I thought, at first, it was a thick slice of cheese”).

Best Sentence

Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open. – Adam Gopnik, “Fresh Paint” (April 14, 2025)

Best Paragraph

The medal ceremony that night was a surreal sight: more than three thousand band members crowded onto the field in candy-striped rows. Bourbon County ended up placing second in its class—a triumph under the circumstances—just behind another Kentucky band, from Murray High School. But my favorite moment was earlier in the evening. Deep beneath the stands, in the vast tunnels and rehearsal rooms around the field, half a dozen bands were warming up—drumming, stretching, tossing rifles, and playing arpeggios as they waited for their turn to perform. Walking from room to room, I passed wooden ships, Victorian cages, and giant Day-Glo flowers in the hall. A trio of Elmer Fudds was hunched in conversation over here, two orange bunnies giggling in a corner over there. Some strays from the “Menagerie” show came wandering down the hall, past a pair of water sprites from Broken Arrow and a few butterfly girls from Cypress, Texas. It was like the world’s biggest costume party. – Burkhard Bilger, “Stepping Out” (February 17 & 24, 2025)

Best Description 

The birds wheeled over the aviary while Fritz circled. Komme, komme, Waldi: the song receded as the microlight got farther away and then swelled as it neared. This rise and fall, its approaching and distancing, was at once a cheer, a prayer, and a lament, and it induced in me—and, I somehow believed, in everyone else, too—a kind of heartache, like the longing for loved ones or the pain of their aging away. The microlight’s distant motor echoing off the hangar’s corrugated shell sounded like a deranged string section. An old sailboat was propped against the tin. Swallows darted around, feeding on the flies. A commercial jet passed soundlessly overhead. – Nick Paumgarten, “Helicopter Parents” (February 17 & 24, 2025)

Best Detail

Its main entrance, at Twenty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, is marked by an imposing brownstone Gothic Revival structure, the Arch, where a pandemonium of monk parakeets has long kept an elaborate nest. – Paige Williams, “Still Life” (June 9, 2025)

And now here’s to you Burkhard Bilger for your dazzling, vibrant, exhilarating “Stepping Out” – my #1 Pick of the Year! 

Thank you, New Yorker, for another marvelous year of reading pleasure.

Credits: (1) The New Yorker (100th Anniversary Issue, February 17 & 24, 2025); (2) Mathieu Larone’s illustration for Nathan Blum’s “Outcomes” (November 3, 2025); (3) Photo by Hannah Whitaker for Nick Paumgarten’s “Guitar Heroes” (May 26, 2025); (4) Photo by Matteo de Mayda for Anthony Lane’s “Cinema Paradiso” (September 29, 2025); (5) The New Yorker, April 14, 2025); João Fazenda’s illustration for Robert Sullivan’s “Manhattan Springs” (September 22, 2025); (6) David Plunkert's illustration for Daniel Immerwahr's "Check This Out" (January 27, 2025); (7) James McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland (1871-74); (8) Photo illustration by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin for Hannah Goldfield’s “Take Me Back” (September 15, 2025); (9) Malike Sidibe’s photo portrait of Lorna Simpson for Julian Lucas’s “Now You See Her” (May 12 & 19, 2025); (10) Lanna Apisukh’s photo for Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Bong” (September 29, 2025); (11) Luci Gutiérrez’s illustration for Josh Lieb’s “Bagels, Ranked” (April 21, 2025); (12) Brian Finke’s photo for Burkhard Bilger’s “Stepping Out” (February 17 & 24, 2025); (13) Mathias Depardon’s photo for Nick Paumgarten’s “Helicopter Parents” (February 17 & 24, 2025).