September 15, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. No regard for due process – that’s my takeaway from Jonathan Blitzer’s disturbing “Enemies of the State.” It documents the alarming abuse of power of ICE, Border Patrol, and other U.S. officers who are carrying out Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. It’s going to be up to human rights advocates and the courts to stop the abuse. Otherwise, the U.S. is headed the way of Nazi Germany. 

2. I enjoyed Ben McGrath’s Talk story “Dumpster Diving,” especially his description of the plan on how to move the “giant cherry-colored armoire”: 

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 . . .”

3. Hannah Goldfield’s “Take Me Back,” an account of her visit to this year’s Minnesota State Fair, contains this delicious description:

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.

Best of 2020: Reporting Pieces

Photo by Paolo Pellegrin, from Ben Taub's "Five Oceans, Five Deeps"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2020 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ben Taub’s “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” May 18, 2020 (“Most submarines go down several hundred metres, then across; this one was designed to sink like a stone. It was the shape of a bulging briefcase, with a protruding bulb at the bottom. This was the pressure hull—a titanium sphere, five feet in diameter, which was sealed off from the rest of the submersible and housed the pilot and all his controls. Under the passenger seat was a tuna-fish sandwich, the pilot’s lunch. He gazed out of one of the viewports, into the blue. It would take nearly four hours to reach the bottom”).

2. “April 15, 2020,” May 4, 2020 (“As the sun came up, dully brightening the morning, it revealed that the day was ordinary and out of the ordinary at the same time. Figures appeared far apart on the boardwalk, each one alone, each making a different exercise motion. One was using a jump rope, another had two small dumbbells, and another a piece of pipe. Many wore masks. On the horizon to the left lay the narrow sand spit of the Rockaways, a stratum of pale-brown beach below a gray-green line of bushes and trees. To the right loomed the grayish point of Sandy Hook, in New Jersey. In between, a small boat motored slowly by, its wake as white as a bridal train. The ordinary-extraordinary day settled in and locked itself into place. The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere. The whole city had become a waiting room”).

3. Alex Ross’s “The Bristlecones Speak,” January 20, 2020 (“Spears of dead wood jut into the air. The trunk is a marbled hulk stripped of bark, like driftwood thrown from a vanished ocean. A ribbon of live bark runs up one side, funnelling water and nutrients to clumps of green needles high above”).

4. Bill Buford’s “Good Bread," April 13, 2020 (“By nine, a line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people and from music being played at high volume. Everyone shouted to be heard—the cacophonous hustle, oven doors banging, people waving and trying to get noticed, too-hot-to-touch baguettes arriving in baskets, money changing hands”).

5. Burkhard Bilger’s “Building the Impossible,” November 30, 2020 (“Unlike the slide, which bullies through the apartment like a giant intestine, the staircase seems to crystallize the spaces it’s in. Built of white nanoglass—an opaque and extremely hard synthetic stone—it twists up through the building in precisely organized shards, offering sudden glimpses through the rooms unfolding around it”).

6. Vinson Cunningham’s “Eightyish,” April 13, 2020 (“Outside, I imagine that each stranger’s head is crowned by a saint’s halo of fatal droplets, waiting to surf on one of my breaths into my body and cut through my lungs like a spray of glass”).

7. Jonathan Blitzer’s “Juan Sanabria,” April 20, 2020 (“He’d been among the first fatalities. ‘Was he the eleventh person who died? I was trying to figure out if he was the tenth or the eleventh,’ Comerford told me. ‘That made this whole thing very real. Before, the deaths were just statistics. Knowing that one of them was Juan, it gave the thing a face’”).

8. Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Independent People,” June 8 & 15, 2020 (“That evening, the weather was clear and cool—by New York standards, too cool to eat outside, by Reykjavík standards balmy. The outdoor cafés were crowded. Restaurants had been asked to arrange their tables to keep groups two metres apart, but some diners, I noticed, had pushed the tables closer together. Everyone was talking and laughing, masklessly. The scene was completely ordinary, which is to say now exotic—just people meeting up with friends for dinner. For a traveller these days, this might be an even better draw, I thought, than glaciers or whale-watching”).

9. Luke Mogelson’s “The Uprising,” June 22, 2020 (“Barricades around the four surrounding blocks impeded traffic and law enforcement. The sidewalk outside the Cup Foods grocery store—where an employee had called the police after suspecting George Floyd of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill—was buried under bouquets, mementos, and homemade cards. Activists delivered speeches between the gas pumps at a filling station; messages in chalk—“fight back,” “stay woke”—covered the street”).

10. Dana Goodyear’s “From the Ground Up,” October 12, 2020 (“The walls are made from elongated quartzite bricks, with gray-scale variations reminiscent of the larchwood slats of his atelier. Open seams in the ceiling allow sunlight to enter in ghostly lines—some defining an alternative volume within the space, others fanning out like an annunciation. A brass spout funnels water from the source, St. Petersquelle, into a brass basin with cups attached by chains. In one secluded pool, swimming around a corner reveals a chamber where the human voice harmonizes with the room so that humming creates a glorious Gregorian echo”). 

First Person Perfect

Photo by Alice Zoo, from Rebecca Mead's "Going for the Cold"

There’s a type of narrative sentence I find irresistible. Example: “One day, I went to Athens and met Joe Corn, a senior wildlife biologist for SCWDS, who has trapped and studied thousands of wild hogs” (Ian Frazier, “Hogs Wild”). Now, that might strike you as fairly mundane. You were probably expecting something with a bit more pizazz. But pizazz is not what this kind of sentence is about. Here’s another one: “Later that day, I crowded, together with what seemed like the entire remaining population of Reykjavik, into Ingólfstorg square to watch the Iceland-Austria match” (Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running”). That’s a shade more exotic than Frazier’s “wild hogs” line, but it still has the three main ingredients I relish: first-person pronoun (“I”), active verb (“crowded”), and specific nouns (“Reykjavik,” “Ingólfstorg square,” “Iceland-Austria match”). Often one or more of the nouns is a place name. As a means of jump-starting an account of an interesting experience, such sentences are unbeatable. I read them and think, Let’s go! Here are a few examples from recent New Yorker pieces:

Not long after sunrise on a gray Halloween morning, I joined the members of the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association for a celebratory swim and breakfast. – Rebecca Mead, “Going for the Cold”

A little after midnight, while Hunter was still in jail, I swung by Thirty-eighth and Chicago, where people were still congregating. – Luke Mogelson, “The Uprising”

On a cool Monday morning in May, I met Fidel at the Church of the Good Shepherd, an austere gray stone building with red doors on the corner of Fourth Avenue and the Bay Ridge Parkway. – Jonathan Blitzer, “Higher Calling”

One crisp, bright morning in February, I walked along a brook just outside the center of Davos, toward the headquarters of the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research. – James Somers, “Cold War”

In November, just before the first snows shut down access to the Whites, I made a final trip to the Schulman Grove. – Alex Ross, “The Bristlecones Speak”

August 24, 2020 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. “On a cool Monday morning in May, I met Fidel at the Church of the Good Shephard, an austere gray stone building with red doors on the corner of Fourth Avenue and the Bayridge Parkway.” I find such first-person sentences seductive. To me, they’re the essence of great journalism. That one is from Jonathan Blitzer’s excellent “Higher Calling” in this week’s issue. It’s a profile of renegade priest Juan Carlos Ruiz, who helps undocumented immigrants survive the pandemic. Blitzer is a first-rate immigration reporter: see, for example, his superb “Juan Sanabria” (The New Yorker, April 20, 2020). “Higher Calling” is one of his best.

2. Anthony Lane’s 1994 “Goings On About Town” note on François Girard’s ingenious Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, reprised in this week’s issue, is worth quoting in full:

Glenn Gould, as scorned and as revered as any figure in modern music, died in 1982. François Girard’s movie, from 1994, honors Gould’s strong-willed, idiosyncratic genius with a suitably offbeat approach: a bunch of little films, none lasting more than a few minutes, all angling for a new take on the pianist’s life and work—thirty-two ways of looking at Glenn Gould. Scenes from his boyhood and professional career are neatly dramatized; the Canadian actor Colm Feore plays the adult Gould, though he never, thank goodness, tries to reproduce his manner at the keyboard. In between come interviews, dashes of animation, and even a sequence shot in X-ray. The whole enterprise is designed to skirt the traditional traps of the music movie; instead of a laborious bio-pic, we get a sly, quick-witted meditation on a character always likely to elude our grasp. The finale—a Gould recording of Bach is carried into deep space by a Voyager spacecraft—leaves you gawking.

That “x-ray” reference made me smile. I remember that sequence vividly. Lane describes it in more detail in his “The Gould Variations” (The New Yorker, April 18, 1994; included in his 2002 collection Nobody’s Perfect):

You can sense the end coming, as Gould himself did. The astounding sequence of a pianist filmed in x-ray – spectral feet tapping at the pedals, finger bones flying, skull nodding along in time – is both a guide to the wonders of the human machine and a pitch-black joke about its eventual breakdown.

3. Rebecca Mead is a master of those seductive first-person sentences I mentioned above. Her “Nature and Nurture,” in this week’s issue, contains this beauty: “On a gloriously sunny day in June, my husband and I went to visit the Stuart-Smiths at the Barn garden, where they had spent most of their time since the lockdown began.” It also features a beautiful description of foxtail lilies:

We entered an area where trees planted thirty years ago had created a shady canopy. In the dense bed of plants before us, thin stems topped with clinging bursts of delicate pastel flowers—orange, pink, yellow—had grown to twice the height of their neighbors, looking like slender sticks of licorice dipped in sherbet.

 “Nature and Nurture” is about the therapeutic power of gardening. I enjoyed it immensely.

Jonathan Blitzer's Excellent "Juan Sanabria"

Juan Sanabria (Photo from The New Yorker)

I want to make amends for a recent oversight. Reviewing the April 20, 2020, New Yorker, I neglected to note Jonathan Blitzer’s superb “Juan Sanabria.” It’s an account of the life and death of one of New York City’s first coronavirus victims. It’s one of the best pieces to appear in the magazine this year.

Sanabria worked as a doorman at a residential apartment building in the Bronx. Blitzer writes,

There was an art to Sanabria’s salutations. Dana Frishkorn, who’s lived in the building for three and a half years, appreciated that he called her by her first name when she entered, and never failed to tell her “Take care” when she left. Yet somehow Sanabria knew that Anthony Tucker, who has spent five years in the building, preferred to be called by his last name. “Hey, Tuck,” Sanabria would say, extending his hand for a fist bump. When Tony Chen, who runs a boutique tour company and lives on the seventh floor, limped into the building one morning, addled by plantar fasciitis, Sanabria showed him a foot stretch that helped. On another day, when a tenant showed up at the front door with a large couch to take up to his apartment, even though the building’s rules mandated the use of a side door, Sanabria stood watch to make sure a meddlesome neighbor didn’t wander over.

Blitzer talks to many people – members of Sanabria’s family, his friends, apartment residents – composing a distinctive portrait of a warm, humane, ordinary-extraordinary individual.

One of the apartment residents, Georgeen Comerford, says of Sanabria’s death, “That made this whole thing very real. Before, the deaths were just statistics. Knowing that one of them was Juan, it gave the thing a face.”

Blitzer’s tribute does the same thing. It rescues Sanabria from anonymity, from the mass of coronavirus deaths, currently totalling over eighty thousand in the U.S. alone. It honors his singularity and gives him back what the virus stole from him – the breath of life.

May 4, 2020 Issue

The New Yorker’s coronavirus coverage continues to impress immensely. Of its many superb pieces – Peter Hessler’s “Life on Lockdown,” Adam Gopnik’s “Abundance of Caution,” Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The One and the Many,” Rivka Galchen’s “The Longest Shift,” Jonathan Blitzer’s “Juan Sanabria” – perhaps the most striking and original (so far) is “April 15, 2020,” in this week’s issue. It's a kaleidoscopic account of a single day in New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, written by twenty-five New Yorker reporters and illustrated (in the online version) by seventeen photographers. 

Comprising thirty-two snapshots of life in the city, the piece is structured chronologically, beginning “soon after midnight” at John F. Kennedy Airport and ending twenty-four hours later at Lower Manhattan Hospital. In between, it visits, among other places, Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach (“The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere”); the Amazon fulfilment center on Staten Island (“Previously, masked employees wielding thermometer guns had taken co-workers’ temperatures as they entered the four-story building; now an automated system was in place”); the Hudson Theatre near Times Square (“A drained wash of yellowish light came from a single bulb on the lip of the stage”); the Montefiore Medical Center, in the Bronx (“Urgent codes rang out on the P.A. system: ‘Rapid response,’ for when a patient can’t breathe; ‘C.A.C.,’ for cardiac arrest”); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“But, that morning, as daffodils bloomed and cherry trees shed pink petals onto sidewalks all over the city, the urns stood empty”); the American Museum of Natural History (“In individual containers on a sunny windowsill, a dozen large garden spiders sat in their webs”); the Herald Square subway station (“An elderly woman dozed behind a phone-charging kiosk, sitting on a suitcase, leaning against a well-filled shopping cart, her head nodding”); an I.C.U. at Weill Cornell Medicine (“Bright fluorescent lights; on the bed, a gaunt man with paper-white hair, age seventy-five. Intubated. His skin was nearly translucent”); the top floor of an East Village walkup (“Near the window, Fredericks tuned his electric guitar—a teal-blue Bobkat with a Stratocaster neck”); Sherman’s Flatbush Memorial Chapel, in Midwood, Brooklyn (“Inside, four tables held eight bodies, some of them in scuffed orange pouches from the hospital, others in clear sleeves no thicker than garbage bags”); on a tugboat on the north shore of Staten Island (“With its nearly seven-thousand-horsepower engines and azimuth propeller, it can go forward, backward, and sideways, or spin like a top on the water”).

“She wore a high-visibility vest, and her eyes danced brightly above a blue mask” – I relish sentences like that. “April 15, 2020” brims with them.

My favourite part is the visit to Russ & Daughters on East Houston Street. The reporter (is it Helen Rosner?) describes the aroma inside the shop: “The next day, the air was perfumed with a familiar smell—smoky, briny, yeasty-sweet—tinged with a jagged note of surface cleaner.” The quotation at the end made me smile:

Tupper regarded the assemblage as it came together on the counter. “This is a small little order,” he said. “But you know, right now, if someone wants a quarter pound of whitefish salad, we’re doing whatever we can.”

Whoever conceived the idea of this brilliant mosaic portrait of twenty-four hours in the life of NYC as it struggles to deal with the pandemic is a genius. Bravo, New Yorker!

Postscript: The online version of “April 15, 2020” is a remarkable photo text, featuring forty-five still images and four short video loops. The photos and videos don’t appear to depict people or scenes mentioned in the text, but they certainly complement it. Like the text, they document New York's coronavirus reality. Many of them are artfully matter-of-fact. For example:

Andre D. Wagner, "11:50 A.M., Williamsburg, Brooklyn"

Joseph Michael Lopez, "2:53 P.M., West Farms, the Bronx"

Dina Litovsky, "9:58 P.M., Times Square"

My favourite “April 15, 2020” illustration is Sam Youkilis’s “10:13 A.M., Tribeca,” a transfixing fifteen second video loop showing a masked florist assembling a bouquet of purple lilacs – the visual equivalent of a lyric poem. My eyes devour it. 

September 28, 2015 Issue

I’m pleased to see James Wood in the magazine this week. He’s been absent for the last four months, and I’ve missed him. His reviews are, for me, an essential part of The New Yorker. His excellent "The Art of Witness," in this week’s issue, considers The Complete Works of Primo Levi. The piece is noteworthy for at least three reasons: (1) Wood’s recurring use of “moral”; (2) the surprisingly high value he places on “story”; (3) his ongoing preoccupation with death. I can’t recall another Wood review that uses “moral” as often as this piece does. Wood usually takes a formalist approach to criticism. It’s one of the reasons I admire his work. But in “The Art of Witness” he repeatedly invokes morality: Levi’s friend, Sandro Delmastro, is described as being “physically and morally strong”; the clarity of poet and concentration-camp survivor, Dan Pagis, is “ontological and moral”; Levi’s storytelling is “a kind of ethics, when the writer is constantly registering the moral (which is to say, in this case, the immoral) novelty of the details he encounters”; “Levi seems to join us in our incomprehension, which is both a narrative astonishment and a moral astonishment”; “You can feel this emphasis on moral resistance in every sentence Levi wrote”; “This is a classical prose, the possession of a civilized man who never expected that his humane irony would have to battle with its moral opposite”; “That emphasis on resistance makes its sequel, The Truce, not merely funny but joyous: the camps are no more, the Germans have been vanquished, and gentler life, like a moral sun, is returning”; “The philosopher Berel Lang, in one of the best recent inquiries into Levi’s work, argues that this moral optimism makes him a singular figure”; “And he does not exempt himself from this moral mottling: on the one hand, he firmly asserts his innocence, but, on the other, he feels guilty to have survived.” Has Wood exchanged formalism for moralism? No, I don’t think so. He’s describing a writing that is distinctly moral in nature. He says, “You can feel this emphasis on moral resistance in every sentence Levi wrote.” His frequent use of “moral” is a way of conveying this feeling.

Another interesting aspect of “The Art of Witness” is Wood’s praise of Levi’s storytelling. He says, “Many of these horrifying facts can be found in testimony by other witnesses. What is different about Levi’s work is bound up with his uncommon ability to tell a story. It is striking how much writing by survivors does not quite tell a story….” And later in the piece, he observes, “But If This Is a Man and The Truce are powerful because they do not disdain story. They unfold their material, bolt by bolt.” There was a time not long ago when Wood praised “antinarrative” – the “reaching for what cannot be disclosed in narrative” (see his great "Life's White Machine: Ben Lerner," included in his 2012 collection The Fun Stuff). But lately, he seems to have developed a taste for old-fashioned storytelling – stories that “unfold their material, bolt by bolt.” In his recent "All Her Children" (The New Yorker, May 25, 2015), he says of Anne Enright’s The Green Road, “This is storytelling, with the blood-pulse of lived gossip….” And in “Using Everything” (included in his The Nearest Thing to Life), he says, “The good critic has an awareness that criticism means, in part, telling a story about the story you are reading.” Wood has made a strong case for the merits of antinarrative, and he’s made a strong case for storytelling. Lately, he seems to favor the latter.

Like his hero W. G. Sebald, Wood is death-haunted. “Life is bounded by death,” he says in "Why?" (included in The Nearest Thing to Life). “Life is death-in-waiting.” “Toward becoming these old things, these old headstones in mud, we are all traveling,” he says in “Austerlitz” (The Fun Stuff). In “The Art of Witness,” he writes,

Repeatedly, Levi tolls his bell of departure: these vivid human beings existed, and then they were gone. But, above all, they existed. Sandro, in “The Periodic Table” (“nothing of him remained”); Alberto, most beloved among the camp inmates, who died on the midwinter death march from Auschwitz (“Alberto did not return, and of him no trace remains”); Elias Lindzin, the “dwarf” (“Of his life as a free man, no one knows anything”); Mordo Nahum, “the Greek,” who helped Levi survive part of the long journey back to Italy (“We parted after a friendly conversation; and after that, since the whirlwind that had convulsed that old Europe, dragging it into a wild contra dance of separations and meetings, had come to rest, I never saw my Greek master again, or heard news of him”). And the “drowned,” those who went under—“leaving no trace in anyone’s memory.” Levi rings the bell even for himself, who in some way disappeared into his tattooed number: “At a distance of thirty years, I find it difficult to reconstruct what sort of human specimen, in November of 1944, corresponded to my name, or, rather, my number: 174517.

But, above all, they existed – I relish that elegiac note. Perhaps Wood’s profoundest contribution to literary theory is his idea that “To notice is to rescue, to redeem; to save life from itself” (“Serious Noticing,” included in The Nearest Thing to Life). As Wood makes clear, Levi is one of literature’s great rescuers.

Postscript: This week’s issue contains three terrific Talk stories: Andrew Marantz’s "Paint Job" (“He uses Rust-Oleum paint, mostly five colors – black, white, red, blue, green – that are available at Bruno’s Hardware Center, on Court Street”); Emma Allen’s "Big Silky" (“She stepped outside to call Bruce Cost, of artisanal-ginger-ale fame, for black-chicken advice”); Jonathan Blitzer’s "Drive-By" [“He taught Chris Penn how to drive stick in ‘The Funeral’ (’37 LaSalle), and he drove Chloë Sevigny around in ‘The Last Days of Disco’ (’75 Checker Cab)”].