Best of 2022: Reporting

Illustration by Nada Hayek, from Nick Paumgarten's "Five  O'Clock Everywhere"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets): 

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Five O’Clock Everywhere,” March 28, 2022 (“Men with guitars set up outside someone’s garage, and the golf carts appear out of nowhere. Commence the beer pong. Pool parties, poker nights, talent shows, toga parties, pig roasts. Cigar-club meeting, group renewal of wedding vows, a pub crawl in old St. Augustine. Oktoberfest this fall had a “Gilligan’s Island” theme; “Hoodstock” was hippies, Fireball, and multicolored jello shots. The golf carts zip and swerve”);

2. Luke Mogelson, “The Wound-Dressers,” May 9, 2022 (“Horenka, which bordered Bucha to the east, was the scene of fierce Russian shelling—on our way, as we passed Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles, a mortar exploded on the road ahead of us, rocking the ambulance and obliging us to turn back for a while. It was dark when we finally reached our destination, and bright trails streaked across the night sky. Rockets launched by the Ukrainians flashed in the woods”);

3. Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In,” May 30, 2022 (“I braced myself. The water pressure was intense—almost strong enough to clean a sidewalk. I could taste the salt. The therapist was yelling instructions, but I could hardly hear them over the roar of the spray. She started with my ankles, working methodically up the line: calves, thighs, butt, triceps, shoulders. As she power-washed my back, I fixated on a single thought: Please don’t hit a mole!”);

4. Jill Lepore, “Moving Right Along,” July 25, 2022 (“It was rusty and brown, with a stick shift, and the locks didn’t work and it smelled like smoke, except more like a campfire than like cigarettes, and we took it camping and pushed down the seats to make a bed and slept inside, with two toddlers and a baby and a Great Dane, and we all fit, even with fishing poles and Swiss Army knives and battery-operated lanterns and binoculars and Bananagrams and bug spray and a beloved, pint-size red plastic suitcase full of the best pieces from our family’s Lego collection”);

5. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three,” February 7, 2022 (“Driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries is a good way of getting to know the state, and it beats the hell out of horses”);

6. Rivka Galchen, “Who Will Fight With Me?,” October 3, 2022 (“Whenever there were clearance sales at the Dillard’s at the Sooner Fashion Mall, my mom and I would page through the folded button-up shirts, each in its cardboard sleeve, the way other kids must have flipped through LPs at record stores. We were looking for the rare and magical neck size of 17.5. If we found it, we bought it, regardless of the pattern”);

7. Annie Proulx, “Swamped,” July 4, 2022 (“I stepped out of the boat and felt the ground move in an undulating roll. It was a mat of sphagnum moss, and although some people say it is like walking on a waterbed, its billowy heave seemed to me more like a wave of dizziness before you pass out—a very slow falling sensation although you remain upright.

8. John Seabrook, “Green Giants,” January 31, 2022 (“The pits were a mechanical Pamplona of nitromethane bulls, their belching tailpipes and fiery exhaust wrinkling the air, and their pit crews almost feral with the oddly fruity aroma of the fuel and the acrid stench of the smoking, treadless tires that the guys called slicks”);

9. Ed Caesar, “Seize the Night,” October 3, 2022 (“Reaching the d.j. booth from the street feels like a psychedelic re-creation of the Steadicam shot in “GoodFellas”: after walking past a security guard, you enter a garden filled with sculptures of unicorns, giraffes, and naked women, then follow a winding corridor, lined with red lights, that leads you past a bustling kitchen and mixed-sex bathrooms into the main room of the club, where you pass through the V.I.P. area and, finally, down a small flight of stairs. The loudness is engulfing. Mesmeric hexagonal light panels rise and fall over the dance floor in response to the music, making the club feel like a living organism”); 

10. William Finnegan, “Big Breaks,” May 30, 2022 (“The only time the waves seem to have any heft at all is when the rider gets deeply barrelled. Suddenly, we’re in a blue room with walls of rushing water, and we’re being pursued by a horizontal waterfall and a fire hose of mist”). 

August 8, 2022 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Great cover! R. Kikuo Johnson’s “Double-Parked,” showing two bicycles, one blue, one orange, locked to a no-parking sign, is my pick for best cover of the year so far.

2. Calvin Tomkins’s “Becoming Modern,” a profile of painter Salman Toor, provides fascinating background on the evolution of Toor’s “virtuoso personal style.” I’ve been a fan of Toor ever since I saw his wonderful “Sleeping Boy”: see my “Salman Toor’s Sensual Apprehension of Life” (May 8, 2021). Tomkins’s description of that painting is excellent: “In 'Sleeping Boy,' a young man who resembles Toor lies on white sheets so lusciously painted that they look edible, his face and his naked body illuminated by light from an open laptop.”

3. John Seabrook’s “On Alert,” an absorbing report on acoustic car styling, contains several excellent sound descriptions, including this beauty: “Many prospective buyers’ first experience of a car or a truck is the CLICK ker-CHUNK that the driver’s-side door makes when they close it, followed by a faint harmonic shiver given off by the vehicle’s metal skin.” 

4. Speaking of inspired sentences, here’s one from Richard Brody’s capsule review of the 1928 silent film Show People: “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.”

January 31, 2022 Issue

Once again John Seabrook’s beloved Ford F-150 pickup appears in his writing. You’ll recall that’s what he was driving when he hit black ice, in his superb “Six Skittles” (April 9, 2018). Now, in “Green Giants,” in this week’s issue, he considers replacing it with an electric version, a Ford F-150 Lightning. And once again, it’s his personal experience of the product that makes his piece so engaging. He attends a car show in Austin, Texas, where the Lightning is on display. He notes, among other things, that the new truck has a “frunk” (“Instead of a hunk of throbbing, greasy metal up front, there’s a lockable storage space large enough to fit two sets of golf clubs, and equipped with a drain so that the frunk can be filled with ice and drinks”). 

He tours the Rouge Electric Vehicle Centre, in Dearborn, Michigan, where the Lightning is assembled:

We came to the largest of the robots, a Fanuc M-2000iA, which can lift a vehicle frame at least thirteen feet into the air. The robot deftly picked up the truck’s eighteen-hundred-pound Korean-made lithium-ion battery, which looked like a rooftop cargo-carrying case. The reinforced high-strength plastic shell contained hundreds of AA-battery-size cells filled with chemicals. The Fanuc placed the battery on the truck’s chassis, and the skillet floated farther down the line.

Most interestingly, he takes one of Ford’s new electric vehicles – a Mustang Mach-E – for a two-hundred-and-sixty-mile test-drive. His description of this trip is, for me, the highlight of the piece. And, as was the case in his wonderful “Scooter City” (April 26 & May 3, 2021), in which he a tries out an e-scooter, the experience is mixed. It starts well. He and his son, Harry, set out from Brooklyn. He notes that the car “can deliver microbursts of acceleration, without cycling through gears, in the way that an electric egg beater can go directly to the high-speed setting, skipping low and medium.” Seabrook enjoys these “microbursts of acceleration.” He says, 

My driver’s brain was far more engaged by these torquey sprints than by a steady rate of high speed. I’m pretty sure Cousin Charlie would have dug it. But the torque wasn’t truly satisfying until I turned on the “propulsion sound” in the “unbridled” mode (it’s a Mustang, remember), so that I heard the speed. Harry shook his head. O.K., Vroomer.

One thing they have to be mindful of is that the car needs to be recharged. At first, their search for a charging station goes smoothly. He writes,

The navigation system correctly calculated that if we drove to the Electrify America direct-current chargers in the Chicopee Marketplace mall, in western Massachusetts, we would have twenty-four per cent of battery life remaining. We arrived after nine, so the vast parking lot was mostly empty. The Mach-E’s G.P.S. led us to the chargers—four plugs in green-glowing, gas-pump-like stations next to a Home Depot. Could this be right? No one else was using them.

They plug in and walk to a restaurant. While they eat, Seabrook monitors the battery’s charging progress on his phone. That's a very cool detail. 

But as they drive north the temperature drops, and, as it does, the projected range of the vehicle keeps diminishing. Range anxiety sets in. Seabrook says, 

The navigation system apparently hadn’t figured this change in weather in its original calculation, which, at least to me, seemed neither seamless nor delightful. It began to rain. We were both showing signs of range anxiety by the time we arrived, at 11:30 p.m., nearing empty. We plugged into a regular outlet in the barn, in the dark.

The next day doesn’t go well. Seabrook writes,

The Mustang didn’t charge much overnight on my 120-volt outlet. The car’s navigation system—or the spotty rural cell coverage—failed to route me to the closest Electrify America chargers, across the state border in New Hampshire, and, for safety reasons, I couldn’t use the FordPass app on my phone to navigate while the car was moving. Ford’s charging infrastructure will inevitably improve as more E.V.s hit the road. Today wasn’t my day. I finally found the charging stations in the West Lebanon Walmart parking lot, but they weren’t working properly, and angry drivers were on the phone with customer service. It was still raining; puddles had formed in the depressions around the chargers, and my feet got wet while I was trying to get a hundred and fifty kilowatts flowing into my car, which isn’t as unsafe as it sounds.

Will Seabrook replace his old gas-fed F-150 with a new electric Lightning? He might not. Towards the end of the piece, he road-tests another electric pickup – Rivian’s futuristically designed R1T. He says, “Still, from my first glimpse of the truck’s front end I was smitten.” Smitten! Oh, oh, that doesn’t bode well for the Lightning. 

“Green Giants” provides an illuminating glimpse of the impending rise of the electric vehicle. I enjoyed it immensely.  

Best of 2021: Reporting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2021 Year in Review

Illustration from newyorker.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 27, 2021 Issue

Talk about triggers! One paragraph into John Seabrook’s superb “Zero-Proof Therapy,” in this week’s issue, and I found myself craving a cold zero beer. By the time I finished the fourth paragraph – 

I swirled the beer and admired the lacery of foam, as the bubbles slid slowly down the side of the glass. I took a deep whiff—the Cascade hops, from the Pacific Northwest, had notes of pineapple and hay. I brought the glass up to my lips, and took a long swallow. A tingle of good cheer seemed to spread through my hand up my right arm and into my chest.

- I was on my way to the fridge to get a can of Libra, my favorite N.A. beer. It’s produced by a craft beer company called Upstreet, located in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. And it’s damn tasty – a crisp pale ale with a tropical aroma, and a refreshing amount of citrus hoppiness. I pulled the tab and took a few swigs. Ah, fucking delicious! With my Libra in hand, I went back to Seabrook’s piece and devoured the rest of it. What a great piece of writing – where greatness means clear, vivid, evocative, absorbing, entertaining, perceptive. It’s about two things: Seabrook’s “raging non-alcoholism,” and his discovery of a great zero-alcoholic beer called Run Wild made by the Athletic Brewing Company in Stratford, Connecticut. He says of Run Wild,

Though lacking the depth and complexity of an alcoholic craft beer, Run Wild offers a breadth of flavors that partly makes up for alcohol’s absence, along with the mouthfeel of real beer: frisky, foamy, pillowy. I wanted to know how Athletic had figured this out.

“Zero-Proof Therapy" is a perfect blend of the personal and the reportorial. I enjoyed it immensely. 

April 26 & May 3, 2021 Issue

Just finished reading John Seabrook’s “Scooter City,” in this week’s New Yorker. What a terrific piece! It’s about e-scooters in New York City. Actually, it's more than that; it's about mode change, geofencing, multimodalism, and other aspects of the fascinating hi-tech world of micromobility. It's also about Seabrook's personal experiences driving an e-scooter: 

Cruising down Carlton Avenue, I caught the giddy appeal of e-scootering. “It’s like supercharging yourself for a few minutes,” as Assaf Biderman put it to me. You stand there, and with virtually no effort at all—only the slightest pressure of your index finger on the trigger-shaped throttle button—you’re skimming along through the air. But the standing position also accounts for the P.B.E. (Paul Blart Effect): you look like a blissed-out dork. 

Driving in the bike lanes, he encounters “hostile vibes”: 

Human-powered cyclists—my erstwhile mode buddies—seemed especially peeved at me. Was it my lack of body language, which seemed to make it difficult for oncoming riders to anticipate my projected path? Was it mode rage? Purists, like my friend Rob, think that bike lanes should not be for motors of any kind, including e-bikes, and certainly not for e-scooters. But, if you forgo the dangers of the open road, and scooter on the sidewalk, you menace pedestrians; in addition, some city sidewalks, which are maintained by property owners, are in worse shape than the streets. (It’s also illegal.) In vain, I searched the eyes of passing scooterists for some inter-modal camaraderie, but I found only a shared sheepishness.

I love that last sentence. The whole piece is intriguing. Are e-scooters the proto-vehicle of the future? After reading Seabrook’s absorbing article, I’d have to say it’s a real possibility.

Best of 2019: Reporting

Ilya Milstein's illustration for Alexandra Schwartz's "Bounty Hunters"

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

1. Alexandra Schwartz’s “Bounty Hunters,” November 25, 2019 (“You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart”).

2. Ian Frazier’s “Pumper’s Corner,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (As Rachael walked me through each well, I appreciated the Rube Goldberg-ness of it all. No two were the same. ‘The guys out here like to say that a well is like a woman, because each one needs to be handled differently,’ Rachael said. She had been to these wells often, and sort of whispered each one, the way she would a horse. She put her hands on pipes, felt for hot spots, peered into gauges, cocked an ear for wrong sounds. She had me listen at a pipe where rising gas from a mile down hissed and echoed—all O.K. there”).

3. Nick Paumgarten’s “The Descent of Man,” April 29, 2019 (“I glanced up and saw for the first time, shadow-blue and telephoto close, the final section of the Streif, where the racers, after soaring off a jump, come hauling across a steep, bumpy, fallaway traverse—legs burning, skis thrashing—and into the final plunge, the Zielschuss, reaching speeds of almost ninety miles an hour”).

4. Burkhard Bilger’s “Extreme Range,” February 11, 2019 (“The voices were growing louder, circling the silo one by one with the choir close behind. Wells lifted his head to the cloud of voices rising and swirling toward the ceiling, then stretched out his arms as they joined in a great, ragged chord. When they fell silent, I could hear the tapping of rain on the roof outside. Then a last voice sang out—Shaw’s quiet mezzo, wafting up like a fleck of ash above a flame”).

5. Nicola Twilley, “Trailblazers,” August 26, 2019 (“The lit cannister of fuel I was holding, known as a drip torch, had a long, looped neck that emitted a jaunty quiff of flame”).

6. James Lasdun’s “Glow,” April 29, 2019 (“A crack appeared in the clouds directly above us. It widened, showing a sprinkling of stars and then the entire Big Dipper. There was a stirring among the photographers: their cameras had started detecting things. After a moment, an oblique greenish bar like the one I’d seen the night before became visible. It grew brighter and denser, then contracted into an oval of emerald light. People chattered excitedly. I was about to warn them not to get too carried away when a streak of brilliant green shot out of the oval, at high speed, and zoomed over our tipped-back heads, corkscrewing across the sky. I almost toppled over while following its trajectory. The green light formed several tentacles, which twisted and writhed together and looped in circles. Astonishment was proclaimed in a half-dozen languages. The circles dropped needles of piercing brightness that travelled, in tandem, around the sky, as if tracing the undulations of a celestial shower curtain”).

7. Rivka Galchen, “The Eighth Continent,” May 6, 2019 (When a Masten rocket takes off, it has a delicate appearance. One of the newer ones, the Xodiac, looks like two golden balloons mounted on a metal skeleton. A kite tail of fire shoots out as the Xodiac launches straight up; at its apex, it has the ability to tilt and float down at an angle, as casually as a leaf”).

8. Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Under Water,” April 1, 2019 (“On the model, the spillway gates were represented by small strips of brass attached to copper wires. Because they hadn’t worked properly in previous trials, an engineer was watching over them from a folding chair. He looked like a latter-day Gulliver, bent over a drowning Lilliput. He, too, I noticed, had wet socks”).

9. Douglas Preston’s “The Day the Earth Died,” April 8, 2019 (“He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass”).

10. John Seabrook’s “Machine Hands,” April 15, 2019 (“It was only at the very end of the eight-second window that the Pitzer wheel dropped down and—in a blur of motion that recalled Doctor Octopus, the Spider-Man villain, attacking one of his victims—the claws grabbed and picked the ripe berries in a fraction of a second, pop-pop-pop, and deposited them, apparently unbruised, on a shelf at the top of the machine’s chassis. Then the robots moved on to the next plant in that row”).

December 24 & 31, 2018 Issue

Dylan Kerr’s absorbing Talk story, “Birds of a Feather,” in this week’s issue, tells about an exhibition of avian art at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Kerr reports that the show includes “some two dozen taxidermied birds from the National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C.” He describes what the Cooper Hewitt curators saw when they visited the Museum of Natural History:

When the curators were granted access, the experience was shocking. “It’s just row after row of drawers,” De León said, as the crystalline song of a resplendent quetzal rang out from a speaker. Méndez, who speaks with a soft Mexican accent, nodded gravely. “You cannot help but, first of all, smell the formaldehyde,” she said. “And then you open, and you open to death.”

Reading that passage, I recalled another New Yorker piece on taxidermied birds – John Seabrook’s brilliant “Ruffled Feathers” (May 29, 2006), in which he describes, among other things, the bird collection of Britain’s Natural History Museum:

The collection is housed in a new building that abuts the museum, which is now open to the public. The bird skins, the feathers still as soft as the day they were shot, in some cases a hundred and fifty years ago, lie on their sides in acid-free cardboard boxes, in large white cabinets that form long spooky corridors stretching the width of the building. 

Illustrating Seabrook’s piece is a beautiful, sorrowful Martin Schoeller photo of ten tagged bird skins. Here’s a detail from it:

Martin Schoeller, "Bird Skins" (Detail)

April 9, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John Seabrook’s “Six Skittles,” a fascinating personal account of what it’s like to be the victim of a black-ice accident. Seabrook puts us squarely there behind the wheel with him (and his nine-year-old daughter, Rose, in the backseat), as he loses control of both steering and brakes, and becomes “the passenger in a two-ton object now driven by the physics of inertia and friction, with a front-row seat to your own demise.”

Seabrook is very good on the science of what happened, describing the type of black ice he encountered (“Mine was garden-variety black ice. It formed the same way that the clear ice on my windshield formed. Even at higher elevations, where raindrops could be five degrees below freezing, they don’t crystallize into sleet or snow, which would be less slippery; instead, they remain in a liquid, ‘supercooled’ state, until they ‘nucleate’—become ice—on striking anything hard, such as the road surface or a car”), and his heightened awareness as his vehicle spun and left the road (“Neuroscience has a pretty good explanation for what happened in my head during those several seconds. A close encounter with extreme danger led to abnormal neuro-electric activity in the limbic system and temporal lobes of my brain, which sent signals to my adrenal medulla, located on top of the kidneys, and told them to secrete adrenaline”). 

He’s even better when he describes the dynamics of the experience itself:

We were now sliding backward at about fifty-five miles per hour, while also drifting slightly east, because that was the last steering move I had made before losing control. I studied the vectors as though they’d been drawn in marker on the windshield. It appeared that our present course and speed would carry us across the path of the propane truck before it hit us, and we would slide off the east side of I-91 North, facing south, where there was a width of shoulder, and also, I noted with newly enhanced peripheral vision, a snowy, uphill bank that would absorb the impact on my side of the truck. At this point, about two seconds had passed since I had lost control.

“Six Skittles” is a brilliant mixture of variegated ingredients – black ice, Emily Dickinson, “heuristic trap,” “crystalline array,” Skittles, Ambrose Bierce, Albert Einstein, near-death experience, depersonalization, Buddhism, to name a few. It shows a great journalist writing at the peak of his power, concentrating on his black-ice experience, extracting meaning after meaning, even verging on the cosmic:

The traction system of social life is good at getting us going, and keeping us on the road, but it fails when we hit the figurative black ice—death—as eventually we all do. It may be true, as Buddhism teaches, that only when we calmly accept that everything ends, including our selves—“profound acceptance,” in Heim’s phrase—can we see the miracle of this world for what it really is.

I enjoyed this piece immensely.

December 4, 2017 Issue

This week’s New Yorker brims with piquant details: “seagulls, nominally and stickily rendered, as if piped on with black icing” (“Goings On About Town: Art: Whitney Museum: ‘Laura Owens’ ”); “Yvette, a raw industrial duo whose jagged tracks should come with cautionary signage” (“Goings On About Town: Night Life: Eaters”); “black-garlic jam (if mahogany had a flavor it would be this)” (Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: Ferris”); the white bones of a dead raccoon’s hand that “seemed to reach / out toward the sun as it hit the water, / showing all five of his sweet tensile fingers / still clinging” (Ada Limón, “Overpass”); the mud-encrusted riding goggles in Thomas Prior’s striking color portrait of Puerto Rican jockeys Irad and Jose Ortiz, illustrating John Seabrook’s excellent “Top Jocks”; Paolo Pellegrin’s arresting black-and-white photos of reed huts for Ben Taub’s absorbing “The Emergency”; the roll of adding-machine tape on which A. R. Ammons composed his great “Tape for the Turn of the Year” (“The poem’s margins were set by the tape’s width, about two inches; it began where the tape started and ended when it ran out, with no chance for revisions as Ammons’s words slalomed down its length”: Dan Chiasson, “One Man’s Trash”); Alexander Calder’s “kinetic, wire-and-collage miniature circus, complete with a full cast of characters, from ringmaster to strongman,” made “creature by creature, out of wire bent with pliers, and powered by everything from springs to balloons” (Adam Gopnik, “Wired”).

January 23, 2017, Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that most absorbed me is John Seabrook’s “My Father’s Cellar,” a memoir of his “drinking career,” starting with his youthful exposure to his father’s fabulous wine collection and ending just recently with therapy aimed at “untangling alcohol from my life.” What’s really being untangled, it seems to me, is Seabrook’s relationship with his snobbish aristocratic father. It’s an ongoing Seabrook project. Nineteen years ago, Seabrook wrote a piece called “My Father’s Closet” (The New Yorker, March 16, 1998) in which he says, “My Father used his clothes to pass along culture to me. I, in turn, used clothes to resist his efforts.” Now, in “My Father’s Cellar,” Seabrook asks, “Just what was my father up to, in introducing me to alcohol?” His answer: “He was passing along something he loved, and, moreover, something we could do together for the rest of his life (and did).” But Seabrook isn’t content with this answer. He asks another question: “Perhaps he was trying to educate a thirteen-year-old in the gentlemanly art of drinking?” In answer to this, he writes,

Possibly, but I doubt it ever occurred to him that his namesake, John, Jr., might have a weakness for alcohol. Alcohol was not about weakness in our family. It was about strength. I understood early on that what was important was not how much you drank but how well you held it.

Seabrook then writes,

My father didn’t anticipate that when it came to alcohol I was not going to be like him. Our house sat atop a Fort Knox of alcohol, and, at least as far as I could tell, he never had one glass more than he should. But for me alcohol offered an escape from control, his and everyone else’s. A glass of wine gave me a kind of confidence I didn’t otherwise feel—the confidence to be me.

The implication is that Seabrook feels he disappointed his father. He may be right. All I know is that, given his elite upbringing, Seabrook could’ve become another William F. Buckley. Instead, miraculously, he emerged a literary journalist in the John McPhee tradition, writing such classic New Yorker reporting pieces as “The Flash of Genius,” “The Fruit Detective,” and “American Scrap.” Who’s to say? If he’d submissively followed his old man’s teachings on how to drink (and dress), he might not be the brilliant writer he is today.

“My Father’s Cellar” brims with memorable passages. My favorite is Seabrook’s description of his father descending the stairs to the wine cellar:

“You can help me pick the wine for tonight,” he said one Saturday afternoon before a dinner party, when I was seven or eight. Thrilled, I followed him down the steep, curving steps that led to the basement. He was dressed in his casual weekend clothes: wide-wale corduroys the color of straw, a pale-yellow dress shirt, beautiful brown ankle boots with pink socks poking out of the tops. He moved carefully on the stairs, gripping the right-hand railing and lowering his foot slowly onto the next step, then stamping down with his heel to make sure it gripped before putting his weight on it. Years before, while riding alone one Sunday morning, he’d been thrown from his horse and landed on an irrigation pipe, cracking his pelvis. The horse had run back to the farm, and the men had gone out looking for my father, not finding him until several hours later, lying in a ditch. That was one of the few stories he told in which he was ever at a disadvantage. It wasn’t heard often.

Comparing “My Father’s Cellar” with “My Father’s Closet,” I find the earlier piece slightly preferable for one specific reason – the scene in the tailor shop:

Later he took me to A-Man Hing Cheong, his Hong Kong tailor, to be “measured up” for a few “country” suits (a glen plaid and a window pane check) and, presumably, many others in the future. (“Big men can wear bolder plaids and more details without appearing to be fairies,” Dad once advised me.)

“Which side?” the tailor asked; he spoke a bit of English. He was kneeling in front of me, pointing at my crotch and waggling his forefinger back and forth.

“He wants to know which side you wear your pecker on,” my father said.

“Yeh yeh, ha ha ha, yar peck-ah!”

Both pieces are terrific – chronicles of Seabrook's resistance to being molded in the image of his highbrow, bespoke-suited, wine-connoisseur father. As he says in “My Father’s Closet,” “My boyhood’s closet was a riot of misplaced anger exhibited towards innocent garments. Inside the little lord’s scrubbed and Etonian exterior there seemed to be a dirt farmer struggling to get out.”

Best of 2015: Talk

Here are my favorite “Talk of the Town” stories of 2015 (with a choice quote from each selection in brackets):

1. Mark Singer, "All-Nighter," May 11, 2015. (“Or does it refer to stuff that’s really, really hard to follow, especially when certain brainiacs insist on reading their turgid prose in a monotone that makes us doubt our very existence, because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile?”)

2. Ian Frazier, "Russophilia," February 16, 2015. (“When undone, scarves with modernistic prints sent out gusts of international perfume.”)

3. Nick Paumgarten, "Hut!," June 22, 2015. (“They flew on the tide, the city sparkling by.”)

4. Lizzie Widdicombe, "Air Bus," June 1, 2015. (“The helicopter made its shuddering descent. Legs shook; sippy cups spilled. Marcy said, ‘Wow! I love this part!’ The pilot yelled, ‘Touchdown!’ ”)

5. Nick Paumgarten, "Amerks," October 5, 2015. (“Dutton, eighty-two, had a brush cut, a firm jawline, and teeth that looked suspiciously like replacements for a set scattered on a frozen pond.”)

6. Ian Frazier, "Amo, Amas," August 3, 2015. (“Languages and facts flew like sparks from a grindstone and skidded bluely onto the board.”)

7. Sarah Larson, "Cinephiles," January 19, 2015. (“The waitress brought Murray two rum-and-water options. He took one and said, of the other, ‘You give that to the kids at the orphanage.’ ”)

8. Lauren Collins, "Birds-Eye View," July 6, 2015. (“Out on the runway, a queue was forming: a Middle East Airlines A320, bound for Beirut; a KLM 737, heading back to Amsterdam; the state aircraft of the United Arab Emirates, a private 747, half snow goose, half tapir, its snout sniffing the sky.”)

9. Alec Wilkinson, "Hands," June 29, 2015. (“When Elfman arrived, he said that he began collecting when he was travelling the world after graduating from high school. ‘I was in Bamako, Mali, and I bought a standing, smiling skeleton carved from a single piece of bone, probably an elephant bone,’ he said. ‘There was a guy in the market with three of them. I negotiated for a day, with breaks for lunch.’ ”)

10. John Seabrook, "Free," February 2, 2015. (“Tagaq, who is thirty-nine and has jet-black hair and a girlish face, had removed her sealskin boots and was sitting barefoot on the floor of the Diker Pavilion, a large oval space on the museum’s ground level.”)

Credit: The above portrait of Tanya Tagaq, by Tom Bachtell, is from John Seabrook's "Free," The New Yorker, February 2, 2015.

The Year In Review: Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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