November 25, 2024 Issue

I enjoyed Ben McGrath’s “Clean Your Pipes,” in this week’s issue. It’s a “Talk of the Town” story about the renovation of the giant pipe organ in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Basilica. McGrath reports that the organ has been disassembled and trucked to an old tobacco warehouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. McGrath visits the warehouse. He writes,

Inside the warehouse, and in a garage behind it, technicians were working on the organ’s innards: applying alcohol to the oxblood-stained wooden pipes, attending to “witness marks” (dried candle wax, pencil notations) on the bellows, which turned out to have been reconfigured during a prior intervention, in 1902.

He says, “To a novice eye, the only clear indication that all this labor was in the service of a musical instrument was the triple-decker keyboard sitting on a table, next to some bubble wrap, on the second floor.”

McGrath’s piece reminded me of another New Yorker “pipe organ” story – Laura Preston’s wonderful “Pipe Dreams” (August 22, 2022). In that piece, Preston visits Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall to see some of the pipes of the massive Midmer-Losh get “voiced.” She watches Brant Duddy, a ninety-three-year-old master organ technician at work in the voicing room: “He pries open the lips with a sculptor’s spatula and taps the toe with a tiny hammer. He uses a headlamp to peer down long pipes, and shoves a jeweller’s ring gauge up the toe hole. All the rest is in the ear.”

Best of 2022: Talk

Illustration by João Fazenda, from Laura Preston's "Pipe Dreams"

Here are my favourite “Talk of the Town” pieces of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Laura Preston, "Pipe Dreams," August 22, 2022 (("Duddy, who has a head of white hair and the slow, smooth baritone of a radio broadcaster, was tapping away at the Stentor Sesquialtera rank, then blowing air through the pipes to see how they sang."| "He pries open the lips with a sculptor’s spatula and taps the toe with a tiny hammer. He uses a headlamp to peer down long pipes, and shoves a jeweller’s ring gauge up the toe hole. All the rest is in the ear."| "The sixty-four-foot Diaphone-Dulzian rank is made from enough sugar pine to build a house, and it produces a quintuple low C, a subharmonic tone that sounds like a chopper circling the building");

2. Laura Preston, “Incidental Masterpieces,” April 4, 2022 ("Among the possible masterpieces being prepared for sale at the Found Object Show were a fragment of a birdhouse; a tar bucket; an electrified toilet seat; a piece of wire from a fence made woolly by escaping sheep; a handmade massage device; a braille bingo board; a pouch of nineteenth-century cheese; a hunk of Styrofoam that looked like nineteenth-century cheese; a street sign reading 'Alone Ave.'; a false beard made of real golden hair; a pile of rubber pocket watches; a pork salesman’s pig-shaped suitcase; a magician’s trick ball; a washing-machine agitator shaped like human hands; a hundred-year-old brick impressed with an animal’s footprint; a forgotten softball grown furry with moss; a copper diving helmet that imploded under immense pressure; and a chicken farmer’s handmade wooden shoes, designed to leave spurious bobcat tracks around coops");

3. Adam Iscoe, “Loyalists,” September 19, 2022 ["2:12 p.m. One exchange: Elena Saldana, an apron-clad woman behind the shop’s counter who has worked at the shop for twenty-five years, said, 'What can I get you?' A bespectacled Brit named Harry King, who has been a hairdresser for celebrities and common people in London and New York, replied, 'A tissue.' Two almost-laughs. One Scotch egg bought by King. 'I haven’t had one in years,' he said. 'I’ll sit and have a little cry eating it watching the telly before I go to the gym.' | 2:15 p.m. More than two dozen white roses, hydrangeas, sweet peas, and orchids; lots of Union Jack bunting; a few commemorative plates; and one framed photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, all placed in the store window—pushing aside a few dozen jars of Haywards Traditional Onions (flavor: Medium & Tangy), Heinz Sandwich Spread (original), Baxters Sliced Beetroot (“suitable for vegans”), Batchelors Bigga Marrowfat peas ('No. 1 in UK'), and Marmite. Not pushed aside: one urn holding Archie’s ashes"];

4. Nick Paumgarten and Sarah Larson, “We Want the Cup,” May 23, 2022 ("One suture on the bowl’s lip was the result of its being dropped last year by a Tampa grinder named Pat Maroon") ;

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Night Off," November 7, 2022 (“The hockey: someone had got the Gizz a box at Madison Square Garden, for a Rangers-Sharks game. That night, about twenty of them—band, crew, assorted friends—came in hot. In the second period, the jumbotron caught them mugging for the camera, a melee of mustaches. Later, back in Brooklyn, the festivities went deep. A cry from the stage in Queens the following eve: ‘New York City, you fucked us up last night!’ The band’s set felt like a retaliation”); 

6. Adam Iscoe, “Incognito,” October 10, 2022 (“The bassist for the band Khruangbin, Laura Lee, who uses the showbiz moniker Leezy, stepped outside her apartment in Brooklyn. Her pink nails matched her eyeshadow and the roses on her flowered shirt, which she wore with cleanish white Converses, Levi’s, and a fifteen-ninety-nine black wig that she didn’t buy on Amazon”); 

7. Joshua Yaffa, “Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter,” March 14, 2022 ("After ten, the lights in the station dimmed. People packed up their food and rolled out sleeping bags, the white glow of phone screens casting flickering shadows on the walls of the train car. I crawled into my folded-up blanket, and felt the cold floor beneath me. The muffled rumble of nearby snores felt almost reassuring, a reminder of all the humanity gathered so tightly together. A woman offered me a pillow");

8. David Remnick, “Postscript: Peter Schjeldahl,” October 31, 2022 (“He was someone who, after being lost for a time, knew some things about survival. We met more than twenty years ago. I was looking to hire a full-time art critic. I’d read him for years in the Village Voice. And a voice is what he always had: distinct, clear, funny. A poet’s voice—epigrammatic, nothing wasted”); 

9. Dan Greene, “Stunted Growth,” December 5, 2022 (“He’d brought along his fiancée, the production designer and stylist Lux Wright, and their latte-colored service dog, Wendy, who’d walked in docilely on a gray Ultimate Fighting Championship collar and leash”);

10. David Remnick, “First and Last,” September 12, 2022 (“Gorbachev, of course, made mistakes, serious ones. He tried, for too long, to reconcile irreconcilable ideas and power bases. He failed to reform the K.G.B., which led a coup against him, in August, 1991. And so on. Yet he possessed both the idealism and the political skill to generate something in the world that is, at this dark historical moment of global illiberalism and malevolence, exceedingly rare: a sense of decency and promise. Here was someone raised in a totalitarian system who came to believe in democracy, the rule of law, and the peaceful and orderly transfer of power. Imagine. The hope is that, around the world, his example will prevail”).

2022 Year in Review

Illustration by Seb Agresti, from John McPhee's "Tabula Rasa 3"

Begin with a drink. In tribute to the brave people of Ukraine, I’ll have one of those borscht Martinis that Talia Lavin wrote about a few years ago: “Best and strangest of all is the borscht Martini—beet vodka and dill vodka, sprinkled with Himalayan pink salt and crushed herbs, a pungent, tangy punch in a frosty glass. It’s easy to down one after another, licking the salt from the rim” (“Bar Tab: Anyway Café,” April 30, 2018). Mm, that hits the spot! Slava Ukraini! 

The top story of 2022 was Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. The New Yorker covered it superbly, publishing at least a dozen pieces, including Masha Gessen’s “The Devastation of Kharkiv, Ukraine” (March 22, 2022), Jane Ferguson's "A Search for Survival Outside Kyiv" (March 15, 2022), Keith Gessen’s “The One Place in Lviv Where the War Was Never Far Away” (March 29, 2022), Joshua Yaffa’s “The Siege of Chernihiv” (April 15, 2022), Luke Mogelson’s “Collecting Bodies in Bucha” (April 6, 2022), and David Kortava’s “In the Filtration Camps,” October 10, 2022. I devoured them. If I had to recommend just one, it would be Luke Mogelson’s brilliant “The Wound-Dressers” (May 9, 2022). Here’s a sample:

To prevent the Russians from penetrating Kyiv, the Ukrainians had destroyed the main bridge over the fast-moving Irpin River. Several buildings on the south side of the river had been hit by Russian shells, which had also killed some fleeing civilians. To the north, explosions sounded and smoke filled the sky above another nearby suburb, Bucha. Russian forces had stalled there, and waves of residents were now arriving—abandoning their vehicles at the edge of the caved-in bridge, clambering down a high embankment, and crossing the icy currents on a treacherous walkway composed of pallets and scrap lumber. Passenger buses idled, ready to bring displaced Ukrainians to downtown Kyiv. People advanced single file, lugging bags and suitcases; some hugged dogs, cats, or babies to their chests. Elderly men and women with canes and walkers staggered haltingly over the rickety planks.

For me, the #1 literary story of the year was the loss of Peter Schjeldahl. He died October 21, 2022, age eighty. He’s one of this blog’s touchstones. Click on his name in the “Labels” section, and you’ll find 138 references to his writing. Schjeldahl spun his special brand of magic right to the end. Here’s an excerpt from his wonderful “Dutch Magus” (October 3, 2022), a delectable review of Hans Janssen’s Piet Mondrian: A Life:

Janssen’s expert citations of parallels in music for Mondrian’s art are a treat and a revelation for a musical doofus like me. Janssen likens the artist’s frequent motif, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, of paired horizontal black bands to the bass line running under the saxophone cadenzas of Armstrong’s group and others. (Thereby alerted, I see and spectrally hear it.) If, in Janssen’s telling, one dynamic recurs throughout Mondrian’s aesthetic adventuring, it is rhythm, incipient even in his youthful renderings from nature. Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral. Thought, if any was needed, followed touch.

That “Underlying toccatas impart physicality to works that have too often been taken as dryly cerebral” is inspired! 

Another highlight this year was the appearance of Volume 3 of John McPhee’s on-going personal history “Tabula Rasa.” These pieces are ingenious assemblages of time and space – memories interwoven with story ideas that McPhee never got around to developing. For example, in Volume 3, there’s a wonderful section called “Citrus, Booze, and Ah Bing” that begins with how he came to write his 1967 classic, Oranges, segues to a fascinating account of a 2004 road trip he took in central Kentucky, checking out distilleries (“Driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries is a good way of getting to know the state, and it beats the hell out of horses”), and ends with a visit to an Okanagan Bing cherry orchard (“Dessicated. Lovely. Irrigation-green. Trees punctuated with deep-red dots”). If you relish McPhee’s writing, as I do, you’re sure to enjoy this latest “Tabula Rasa” instalment. 

One of my favourite New Yorker writers, Rivka Galchen, had a great year, producing three marvellous pieces – “Change of Heart” (February 22, 2022), “Who Will Fight With Me?” (October 3, 2022), and “Sound Affects” (October 17, 2022). “Who Will Fight With Me?” is a fond remembrance of her father. Here’s an excerpt:

It would have been difficult for him if he had been vain, because he didn’t buy any of his own clothes, or really anything, not even postage stamps. 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. Button-ups were the only kind of shirts he wore, apart from the Hanes undershirts he wore beneath them. Even when he went jogging, he wore these button-ups, which would become soaked through with sweat. He thought it was amusing when I called him a sweatbomb, though I was, alas, aware that it was a term I had not invented. He appeared to think highly of almost anything I and my brother said or did.

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 notes on, among other things, art, movies, music, and restaurants. Here, for example, is Richard Brody on King Vidor’s 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.

Other highlights: Five book reviews by my favourite literary critic James Wood, including his recent "The Numbers Game" (December 19, 2022); two wonderful pieces by Joy Williams (“Mine Field,” July 11 & 18, 2022, and “Curran Hatleberg’s Florida, Past and Future,” August 5, 2022); Hannah Goldfield’s sublime “Tables For Two”; and Laura Preston’s delightful “Talk of the Town” stories “Incidental Masterpieces” (April 4, 2022) and “Pipe Dreams” (August 22, 2022). 

Any disappointments? The only one I can think of is the absence of Dan Chiasson. He hasn’t appeared in the magazine since May 31, 2021. Not sure if he quit or was fired or is just taking a break. But I miss his subtle close readings.

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. 

August 22, 2022 Issue

Three excellent pieces in this week’s issue: Laura Preston’s “Pipe Dreams,” Nicola Twilley’s “The Cold Rush” and Hua Hsu’s “My Dad and Kurt Cobain.” 

Preston’s piece is a “Talk of the Town” story about the largest musical instrument in the world, a pipe organ called the Midmer-Losh, located at Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall. Preston describes the work of Brant Duddy, “a ninety-three-year-old master organ technician who comes in twice a week to voice the pipes”:

Duddy, who has a head of white hair and the slow, smooth baritone of a radio broadcaster, was tapping away at the Stentor Sesquialtera rank, then blowing air through the pipes to see how they sang. “Toot-toot-tfffoot,” the G pipe went. “A little foggy,” Duddy said. 

The pieces contains several marvelous descriptive passages, including this:

An organ pipe has a mouth, a foot, a toe, an upper and a lower lip, and a tongue, called the languid. Duddy sounds them one by one, listens, and makes adjustments. The son of a Pennsylvania church organist, he has been servicing organs since he was seventeen. “Organ repair is not really an occupation,” he said. “It’s more of a disease.” He pries open the lips with a sculptor’s spatula and taps the toe with a tiny hammer. He uses a headlamp to peer down long pipes, and shoves a jeweller’s ring gauge up the toe hole. All the rest is in the ear.

And this:

“The soft lead pipes have a dark, woodsy flavor,” he said. Zinc pipes pierce the air like a flute. “Listen to that yodel,” he said. “Screaming its little heart out.” The Midmer-Losh’s pipes are arranged in twelve hundred and thirty-five stop tabs, named for the sounds they imitate, among them Viola da Gamba, Tuba d’Amour, Krummhorn, Grave Mixture, and Musette Mirabilis. The sixty-four-foot Diaphone-Dulzian rank is made from enough sugar pine to build a house, and it produces a quintuple low C, a subharmonic tone that sounds like a chopper circling the building.

Twilley’s “The Cold Rush” is a reporting piece on the promise – and the challenges – of establishing “cold chains” in the developing world. A cold chain is “a series of thermally controlled spaces through which your food moves from farm to table.” She calls the cold chain, “the invisible backbone of our food system, a perpetual mechanical winter that we have built for our food to live in.” Her piece is set in Rwanda, where the cold chain doesn’t exist. She accompanies a fish dealer, François Habiyambere, on a five-and-a-half-hour drive to the country’s only flake-ice machine. As they travel, she reports what she sees:

Sometime after 3 a.m., cyclists start to appear. All over rural Rwanda, sinewy young men set out from their homes on heavy steel single-speed bikes that are almost invisible beneath comically oversized loads: bunches of green bananas strapped together onto cargo racks; sacks of tomatoes piled two or three high; dozens of live chickens stacked in pyramids of beaks and feathers; bundles of cassava leaves so massive that, in the predawn light, it looks as though shrubbery is rolling along the side of the road. Over the next four or five hours, as the heat of the day sets in, gradually wilting the cassava leaves and softening the tomatoes, these men will cover hundreds of miles, carrying food from the countryside to sell in markets in the capital, Kigali.

She accompanies a milk collector named Pierre Bizimana:

He pushed a bike, over which were slung two battered steel cans, each capable of carrying a little more than thirteen gallons of milk. For the next two hours, in the gathering humidity, Bizimana, his assistant, and I trudged uphill from one station to another, picking up a gallon here and a half gallon there from a few dozen farmers. Then we headed to the nearby town of Gicumbi, where there is a milk-collection center with an industrial chiller.

She describes a collaboration between the Rawandan and U.K. governments and the U.N. called Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chain, or ACES. She accompanies the ACES team on a tour of Rwanda’s existing refrigeration infrastructure:

Our first stop was a pair of cold-storage rooms built with European Union funding, in 2019, thirty miles south of Kigali, on the road to Tanzania. A member of a local farming coöperative walked us over to a low-slung brick structure; inside, the first things that caught my eye were cobwebs lining the walls. One of the rooms was not functioning, our guide said; the other contained two lonely crates of chili peppers, and the cooling seemed to have been switched on purely in honor of our visit. The spotlessly clean floor certainly did not suggest frequent use. It was also made of wood, a poor choice of material because it is hard to sanitize, so any squashed produce lingers, providing a perfect substrate for fungi and bacteria to grow.

Twilley reports two shocking facts: 

1. Between thirty and fifty per cent of all food produced in developing countries is lost—discarded, unsold and uneaten, thanks to weak or nonexistent cold chains. For farmers surviving on less than a couple of dollars a day, the effect of these losses is substantial; for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, they are estimated to add up to hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

2. Cold chains present a double bind; both their absence and their presence have huge ecological costs. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that if global food waste were a country its greenhouse-gas emissions would be the third largest in the world, right behind China and the U.S. On the other hand, the chemical refrigerants and the fossil-fuel energy used to produce cooling already account for more than seven per cent of global emissions—just one per cent less than food loss. As countries like Rwanda refrigerate, those emissions are increasing rapidly. 

Hua Hsu’s “My Dad and Kurt Cobain” is a gracefully written “personal history” piece. Its opening sentence is terrific: “When my father moved back to Taiwan, my family bought a pair of fax machines.” The four nouns – “father,” “Taiwan,” “family,” “fax machines” – turn out to be four of the piece’s five key ingredients. The other ingredient is Kurt Cobain. It all coheres around the fax machines. In the early nineties, Hsu’s father and mother decided that his father should return to Taiwan to become an executive in the semiconductor industry. At this time, Hsu was in in his mid-teens. Father and son communicated with each other across the Pacific Ocean via fax. Hsu writes,

Faxing was cheaper than long-distance calling, and involved far less pressure. The time difference between Cupertino and Taiwan was such that I could fax my father a question in the evening and expect an answer by the time I woke up. My homework requests were always marked “Urgent.”

The piece contains several moving quotations from Hsu’s father’s faxes. Here’s one he sent to Hsu, replying to Hsu’s fax, discussing Kurt Cobain’s suicide that had happened earlier that day:

I agree that it’s a society tragedy, too much pressure. If he felt that it’s beyond his control or creativity or else, it sometimes led to the conclusion of suicide, especially for talented artists. They felt that the sense of living disappeared. So sometimes, the “normal” people is more easy to adapt to the reality which fills with not ideal situation and needs compromise. That’s the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to every one of us. What do you think?

I find that “What do you think?” very moving. Hsu’s father seems like a great guy – not domineering, not condescending. He just wants to communicate with his son, keep the channels open, get him thinking. 

I enjoyed this piece immensely. I see that Hsu has a memoir coming out next month. It’s called Stay True. I pre-ordered it today.  

Mid-Year Top Ten 2022

Photo by James Nachtwey, from Luke Mogelson's "The Wound-Dressers"

It’s 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):

Top Ten Reporting Pieces

1. Luke Mogelson, “The Wound-Dressers,” May 9, 2022 (“A Ukrainian soldier approached me to say that he’d found another victim. I followed him into the basement of a yellow house, where a rail-thin teen-ager was crumpled on the floor. Blood had leaked from his mouth and nose. The soldier crouched and felt under his skull. ‘He was shot in the back of the head,’ he said”).

2. Ed Caesar, “Sanctuary,” June 27, 2022 (“Inna, Sasha, and Oliviia loaded their bags onto the bus. Inna knew that it might be the last time that she and the girls saw Maksym, but there was no emotional soliloquy from either husband or wife. ‘It wasn’t a movie scene,’ Inna told me. ‘I was concentrated on what is coming—on my tasks. But we both knew what was going on’ ”).

3. Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege,” March 21, 2022 (“War has split Shchastia yet again. Dunets, the civil-military-administration head, was recalled back to the Ukrainian Army, and is fighting with the 128th Brigade. Tyurin, his deputy, stayed on in the city administration, albeit under a new flag. Haidai told me that agents from the F.S.B., the Russian security service, had called to offer him a chance to switch sides. I told them to fuck off,’ he said”).

4. Joshua Yaffa, “The Captive City,” May 23, 2021 (“An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. ‘This was happening one metre away,’ Fedorov said. ‘What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?’ ”).

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Five O’Clock Everywhere,” March 28, 2022 (“Late in the day, I found McChesney playing cornhole in the village square with some friends. I joined in for a while, and then we loaded up the cornhole boards and got into his golf cart and, beers in hand, hummed down the cart path, in the pink subtropical twilight, pines and palms whizzing by, a whiff of fry grease lingering in the air”).

6. Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In,” May 30, 2022 (“I was two minutes late for my treatment. ‘Oh là,’ the therapist clucked, looking at her watch. She instructed me to undress—the spa provided a disposable G-string—and to sit on a table covered with a plastic sheet. Without further discussion, she began daubing my back at strategic points with steaming, tawny mud. When she had finished, she eased me into a reclining position and folded the sheet around me, forming a sort of Hot Pocket in which the mud was the cheese and I was the ham”).

7. 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”).

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. Rebecca Mead, “Norwegian Wood,” April 25 & May 2, 2022 (“I put my bag down on a blond-wood coffee table by the window, and settled into a low swivel chair, its comfortable backrest fashioned from bent-wood strips. In December, Brumunddal enjoys less than six hours of daylight; had I sat there long enough, I could have watched the sun rise and set with only the barest swivel to adjust my line of sight. The room was quiet and, despite the lowering skies, it was light. With its minimal, tasteful furnishings—a narrow blond-wood desk; a double bed made up with white linens and a crimson blanket—it had the virtuous feel of a spa”).

10. Joshua Yaffa, “The Great Thaw,” January 17, 2022 (“Fedorov brought me to a large walk-in freezer, where lumps of flesh and fur were piled on metal shelves; the crescent bend of a tusk was unmistakable. As Fedorov explained, these mammoth remains, dug up across Yakutia, were being stored at zero degrees Fahrenheit, awaiting further scientific study. The space was cramped and frigid—so this is what it’s like to be locked in the permafrost, I thought. I picked up a leg that once belonged to the Maly Lyakhovsky mammoth, a thick stump with reddish-brown hair. ‘Look, its footpad is very well traced,’ Fedorov said. You can see its toenails’ ”).

Best Personal History Piece

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”).

Best Cover

Faith Ringgold, “Jazz Stories: Somebody Stole My Broken Heart” (March 28, 2022)

Best Critical Piece

Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out,” May 16, 2022 (“Swift strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so, as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery, blue water and sky, and orangish flesh”).

Best “Talk of the Town” Story

Laura Preston, “Incidental Masterpieces,” April 4, 2022 (“Among the possible masterpieces being prepared for sale at the Found Object Show were a fragment of a birdhouse; a tar bucket; an electrified toilet seat; a piece of wire from a fence made woolly by escaping sheep; a handmade massage device; a braille bingo board; a pouch of nineteenth-century cheese; a hunk of Styrofoam that looked like nineteenth-century cheese; a street sign reading ‘Alone Ave.’; a false beard made of real golden hair; a pile of rubber pocket watches; a pork salesman’s pig-shaped suitcase; a magician’s trick ball; a washing-machine agitator shaped like human hands; a hundred-year-old brick impressed with an animal’s footprint; a forgotten softball grown furry with moss; a copper diving helmet that imploded under immense pressure; and a chicken farmer’s handmade wooden shoes, designed to leave spurious bobcat tracks around coops”).

Best Illustration

Sergiy Maidukov, "Postcard from Kyiv” (January 31, 2022).

Best “Goings On About Town” Review

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

Best newyorker.com Post

Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege of Chernihiv,” April 15, 2022 (“It was a gray, drizzling morning when I pulled up to the site of the attack. What was once the pharmacy was now a burnt-out shell of red brick. One building had taken a direct hit, leaving an entire wall ripped open, with apartments inside exposed like a doll house”).  

Best Short Story

Kevin Barry, “The Pub With No Beer,” April 11, 2022 (“ ‘It could be one of forty-two things that’s wrong with me,’ Frank Waught half whispered to a pint of Smithwick’s”).

Best Photo

Photo by Dina Litovsky, for Helen Rosner's " 'We Watch the News and We're Crying,' " newyorker.com, March 8, 2020.

Best Sentence

One suture on the bowl’s lip was the result of it being dropped last year by a Tampa grinder named Pat Maroon. – Nick Paumgarten and Sarah Larson, “We Want the Cup”

Best Paragraph

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! – Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In”

Best Detail

In “Blue-Eyed Marble Box,” from 1965, an undercurrent of perversity surfaces: a Queen Anne coffee table forms the base of a blocky centauride, whose rectangular torso is pierced by rolling-pin finial nipples. – Johanna Fateman, “Art: Kate Millett” 

Best Description

Chopin’s Nocturne No. 7, in C-sharp minor, begins with a low, ashen sound: a prowling arpeggio in the left hand, consisting only of C-sharps and G-sharps. It’s a hollowed-out harmony, in limbo between major and minor. Three bars in, the right hand enters on E, seemingly establishing minor, but a move to E-sharp clouds the issue, pointing toward major. Although the ambiguity dissipates in the measures that follow, a nimbus of uncertainty persists. Something even eerier happens in the tenth bar. The melody abruptly halts on the leading tone of B-sharp while the left hand gets stuck in another barren pattern—this one incorporating the notes D, A, and C-sharp. It’s almost like a glitch, a frozen screen. Then comes a moment of wistful clarity: an immaculate phrase descends an octave, with a courtly little turn on the fourth step of the scale. It is heard only once more before it disappears. I always yearn in vain for the tune’s return: a sweetly murmuring coda doesn’t quite make up for its absence. Ultimate beauty always passes too quickly. – Alex Ross, "Moonlight”

Best Question

Why did Laphroaig suggest thick-sliced bacon? – John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three”

Seven Memorable Lines

1. Haidai told me that agents from the F.S.B., the Russian security service, had called to offer him a chance to switch sides. “I told them to fuck off,” he said. – Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege”

2. In the Margaritaville calculus, the benefits of good company outweigh the deleterious effects of alcohol. Merriment is medicinal. – Nick Paumgarten, “Five O’Clock Everywhere”

3. A barking fox kind of gags and hacks, like a cat coughing up a hair ball, except that the fox sounds as if he’s enjoying it. – Ian Frazier, “Stir-Crazy”

4. Gorgeous? Oh, yeah. – Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out”

5. Any writer would have trouble wringing interest out of “Achy Breaky Heart,” “Titanic,” “Friends,” and Pauly Shore. – Frank Guan, “The Decade of Disquiet”

6. I filled a cup and tried it. Rotten eggs and cabbage soup—yes. But chalky, too. I felt like I had licked a blackboard. – Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In”

7. There seem to be more kinds of foam mattresses than there are craft beers from Brooklyn, but don’t be fooled by proprietary terms like “Ambien-injected kosher crypto-foam.”  – Patricia Marx, “Tossed and Turned”

April 4, 2022 Issue

I love lists of what the artist Philip Guston called “crapola.” Laura Preston’s Talk story, “Incidental Masterpieces,” in this week’s issue, contains a dandy:

Among the possible masterpieces being prepared for sale at the Found Object Show were a fragment of a birdhouse; a tar bucket; an electrified toilet seat; a piece of wire from a fence made woolly by escaping sheep; a handmade massage device; a braille bingo board; a pouch of nineteenth-century cheese; a hunk of Styrofoam that looked like nineteenth-century cheese; a street sign reading “Alone Ave.”; a false beard made of real golden hair; a pile of rubber pocket watches; a pork salesman’s pig-shaped suitcase; a magician’s trick ball; a washing-machine agitator shaped like human hands; a hundred-year-old brick impressed with an animal’s footprint; a forgotten softball grown furry with moss; a copper diving helmet that imploded under immense pressure; and a chicken farmer’s handmade wooden shoes, designed to leave spurious bobcat tracks around coops.

Preston's list is the verbal equivalent of a Cornell box or a Rauschenberg combine: junk transformed into art. Alchemy!