May 4, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Lauren Collins’ “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it. Was I interested in what happens when someone throws a message into the sea? Not really. But scrolling through the piece (I was reading the newyorker.com version), I encountered a photo with this caption: “The champagne bottle Buffington found on the island of Mayaguana had a perfect little cigarette of a scroll inside, secured with a Band-Aid.” That’s an interesting sentence. So I went back to the beginning and began reading in earnest. The piece profiles a man named Cliff Buffington, “one of the world’s most prolific hunters of messages in bottles.” Collins says of him,

Buffington’s exploits are particularly impressive given that he’s the default parent of two young kids and lives in a landlocked state. He is forty-one and has a master’s degree in English literature; for some years, he did technical writing for a nuclear-waste-removal company. As his LinkedIn profile notes, he is also a musician, playing “guitar, harmonica, and mandolin across genres.” Basically, he’s an earnest and chipper guy, given to recording himself yearningly singing Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away,” and to crunching on apples while saying things like “Cool beans!” He is quick to make a friend, and maintains relationships with dozens of people whose bottles he’s retrieved. He once found a bottle with a note and an eight-year-old piece of wedding cake inside and traced it back to Ed and Carol Meyers, a Virginia couple who were celebrating their first anniversary. Buffington himself got married several years later and wrote on Instagram, “So, naturally, Ed & Carol came to our wedding & it felt like a blessing.”

She describes his office:

Buffington’s home office recalls a museum exhibition on Mesopotamian material culture crossed with a frat house the morning after a blowout party. There are empty bottles everywhere—crammed onto shelves, catching the light on a windowsill. A bar cart overflows with bottles that Buffington has yet to open, or “solve,” as he likes to say. “I would describe this place as a chaotic nightmare,” Buffington told me cheerfully. He keeps the tools of his trade in a garage workshop that he calls the Lab: a spray bottle (for hydrating flaking paper), a U.V. black light (for reading faded lettering), Channellock pliers (for wrenching off aluminum caps), a rotary tool with a diamond drill bit (for slicing into recalcitrant ones), laparoscopic needle drivers (for removing messages without the risk of shattering or breakage). Buffington’s wife, a surgeon, suggested the last tool after watching him struggle with bamboo skewers and bits of tape. A lone aluminum can among the bottles contained the dregs of a Bell’s Two Hearted I.P.A.

The piece really takes off when Buffington invites Collins to join him on a bottle-searching mission on the remote Bahamian island of Mayaguana. She says,

Buffington warned that Mayaguana would be no Margaritaville. “We are not talking about a ‘stroll’ here,” he wrote. “A typical day of hunting involves hiking maybe 8-15 miles on a beach: soft sand sucking energy from every footstep; relentless sun hammering you on exposed, shadeless shores.” He recommended that I come equipped with trekking poles, fingerless sun gloves, a multipurpose tool that included “pliers and a knife at minimum,” and “one 3-liter water reservoir with hose.” He also suggested packing provisions, including canned chicken, for “suitcase burritos,” and powdered Pedialyte.

Collins’ account of the bottle search is excellent. Here’s a sample:

After an hour of brain-joggling transit, we made it to the beach—something out of a shipwreck novel, devoid of any trace of human presence. Dropped onshore, Buffington and I walked and walked some more. There was no cell service, and Brown would be out of walkie-talkie range until we approached the pickup spot. For most of history, an island was a place of real isolation. Now a message could reach you practically anywhere—you had to find an island within an island to get off the grid. The experience of being totally incommunicado was liberating, but I also felt a sense of dread: What if I got heatstroke, or broke an ankle? Or, worse, what if Buffington did?

They find a number of bottles that appear to contain messages. But there’s nothing of any significance. Collins flies home. Buffington stays behind and continues his search. He finds a promising-looking bottle – the one described in the photo caption. Collins writes,

A couple of weeks later, Buffington held the bottle close to his computer camera, turning it slowly for me to admire. He pointed out that whoever had written it had sealed the scroll with a Band-Aid. “The really exciting thing is you can see writing in there,” Buffington said. He was right. Even at a distance, I could make out at least one full sentence, written in what looked like Sharpie: “Thanks for finding me.”

The piece moves into its final stage – tracking down the author of the bottle-message. Buffington succeeds in doing so. The author’s name is Joyce VanGilder. She’d written it six years ago, in 2020, during the pandemic, on the shore of North Carolina, not far from Frying Pan Lighthouse, which is mentioned in the message. Collins talks with her:

Confronted with her handiwork six years later, after a journey that likely took it into the Gulf Stream and around the entire clockwise circuit of the North Atlantic—a trip of several thousand punishing miles—VanGilder seemed more concerned about the bottle than about the message. “I feel like an international litterbug,” she admitted. Buffington had shown her a photograph of the site where the bottle was found. “When I saw all the stuff that was sitting around where he picked it up, I was, like, ‘Man, I guess I need to get down there and clean up some trash,’ ” she said.

The piece ends poignantly. Collins makes a personal connection:

VanGilder had sent the bottle with casual intentions, but I was oddly moved by receiving it. I grew up in Wilmington, not far from the Frying Pan, and, in 1988, my father had a bad accident on Bald Head, the nearest point of land. As I read about the tower, the names of local TV affiliates and the daily newspaper from my childhood kept cropping up. For almost a decade, I’d been writing a book about Wilmington. Physically, I was in France, but my head was in my home town. Somehow, it seemed, it had written me back.

Collins’ piece unfolds magnificently. Highly recommended.

September 22, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. The Maira Kalman cover is brilliant! Titled “Stéphane Mallarmé with Shawl,” it shows the poet all in gray, wearing a vivid red-and-white patterned scarf and an opulent pink bowtie. Kalman is one of the preeminent colorists of our time. It’s great to see her still doing New Yorker covers.

2. One of my favorite “Talk of the Town” writers is Robert Sullivan. He relates (as I do) to quirky individuals who do things solely for their own sake. His “Manhattan's Springs,” in this week’s issue, is a perfect example of his own idiosyncratic work. It’s about a Brooklyn-based photographer named Stanley Greenberg, who walks through upper Manhattan and the Bronx, posting copies of James Reuel Smith’s photos of old springs and wells near the spots where they originally existed. Sullivan writes,

On a recent summer day, Greenberg moved through the Bronx with the brisk authority of a biker who has little time for automobiles, methodically checking the map on his phone, pulling copies of Smith’s photos from his backpack, watching for construction sheds. “The city will take the photos down, and so will landlords, but they seem to last longest on these sheds,” he said. Many of the photographs have already disappeared, though a friend recently spotted one that had been posted in June, at Broadway and 108th Street, outside a closed bagel shop. “I don’t care,” Greenberg said. “I just want to post them all.”

It's a curious project, charting the disappearance of old water sources. Greenberg has a deep sense of transience. So does Sullivan. I enjoyed this piece immensely.

3. Another enjoyable piece is Lauren Collins’ “The Unicode.” It’s a profile of a giant clothing company based in Tokyo called Uniqlo. Until I read this piece, I’d never heard of it. Collins visits the company’s headquarters. She visits a newly renovated Uniqlo store in the Tokyo neighborhood of Asakusa. She visits the Uniqlo store in Paris. She visits the Uniqlo offices in London, where she talks with Uniqlo’s creative director Clare Waight Keller. She attends an event at Tate Modern, in London, in which people around the world vie to design a Uniqlo shirt. In Paris, she meets and talks with Uniqlo’s founder, Tadashi Yanai, who still serves as its C.E.O., and who is now the second-richest man in Japan. It’s quite a tour! My favorite part is Collins’ description of Uniqlo’s factory:

The employees were working on a batch of women’s chocolate-brown 3D Knit Soufflé Yarn Skirts (size M) and forest-green 3D Knit polo shirts (size XL). After the machines pumped out the items, the clothes were sent, ten at a time, to be examined for flaws. At an inspection station, a woman in pigtails and a surgical mask was in the process of checking a green polo. She draped it over two upright illuminated cones—think lightsabres mounted on a lazy Susan—scrutinizing the fabric for snags and holes. As we watched, a chimelike tune filled the room. “Five minutes until break,” Tomoya said. 

Collins is excellent at conveying the culture of complex corporations. Her “House Perfect” (The New Yorker, October 3, 2011), a portrait of IKEA, is masterly. “The Unicode” is every bit as good. 

4. Yet another absorbing piece in this week’s issue is D. T. Max’s “The Behemoth.” It tells about Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, an immense unfinished church in Barcelona, begun in 1882, and the amazing construction work currently underway to complete it. The Sagrada Família is an unusual church. Max describes it as "a head-spinning mixture of morphing geometrical forms, many inspired by nature. Its conical Art Nouveau pinnacles have the lumpy beauty of sandcastles." He visits the construction site and describes the activity. He’s guided by Jordi Faulí, the project’s ninth and current chief architect. The two of them ride rickety construction elevators, crawl through small passageways, climb vertical catwalks. The views are stunning. Here’s a sample:

Suddenly, we were standing inside the Mary tower, which is four hundred and fifty-two feet tall. Its walls were white—the color of purity—and the interior was brightly illuminated by eight hundred triangular windows of translucent white glass. The windows, Faulí later explained, were a scaled-up version of ones Gaudí had made for the sacristy, a section of Sagrada Família for which the architect had made a complete model.

The tower was a cone that narrowed to a point as it ascended. At the center of its circular base was a glimmering white hyperboloid, a gigantic stone object that looked like a cooling tower at a nuclear power plant. The hyperboloid had no top or bottom—it was a skylight that opened onto the nave below. Through this aperture, sunlight could filter all the way down to the church floor.

“The Behemoth” is a fascinating tour of an astonishing architectural work of art. I devoured it.

5. Beautiful architecture is also the subject of Adam Gopnik’s “Making a Move,” a tour of Philadelphia’s new Calder Gardens. Gopnik writes,

As one enters and descends, the space unfolds in a purposefully whimsical range of materials. Volcanic-seeming black rock lines a catacomblike stairway, punctuated by a single glass window framing a lone Calder. Tiered seats lead down into a viewing area that doubles as an amphitheatre for lectures or performances. Though buried, the sometimes monumental forms of the exhibition space rise convexly, lifting upward, while light from the Parkway pours in through floor-to-ceiling windows. Even underground, one feels enlarged, not entombed. And there’s nothing tomblike about the constant rumble of traffic from the boulevard outside.

Uniqlo factory, Sagrada Família, Calder Gardens – all transfixing places you can visit vicariously in this week’s splendid New Yorker. 

December 4, 2023 Issue

Funny, I was thinking of April Bloomfield earlier this week as I considered launching a new series on my blog called “Top Ten New Yorker Food Pieces.” One of the pieces I was thinking of including is Lauren Collins’ brilliant “Burger Queen” (November 22, 2010). It’s a profile of Bloomfield when she was chef at the Michelin-starred New York restaurant Spotted Pig. And now this week’s New Yorker arrives, containing Helen Rosner’s delectable “Tables for Two” review of Sailor, a new Fort Greene restaurant. Who is Sailor’s chef? None other than the great April Bloomfield. It appears she hasn’t lost her touch. Rosner describes Bloomfield’s stuffed radicchio:

Slicing into the sphere of wrapped radicchio leaves, I discovered an interior of fragrant rice studded with firm, creamy borlotti beans. Taking a bite of this mixture, bathed in a wine sauce—which was rich and emulsified and, I learned later, vegan—was like sinking into a quicksand of warmth and flavor. The leaves of the radicchio imparted a lingering hint of bitterness, a scalpel through the savory roundness of everything else. This is the dish, I thought to myself—the dish of the restaurant, perhaps the dish of the year.

That’s from the newyorker.com version of Rosner’s review. If radicchio isn’t your thing, try Bloomfield’s roasted chicken:

The roasted chicken for two is excellent, with burnished skin and tender, herb-infused flesh. It is served directly on top of a pile of Parmesan-roasted potatoes and garlicky braised chard, which absorb all the golden drippings and nearly eclipse the pleasures of the bird itself. 

Mm, I’ll have that, please. 

Mid-Year Top Ten (2023)

Photo by Maxim Dondyuk, from Luke Mogelson's "Underworld"

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):

1. Luke Mogelson, “Underworld,” May 29, 2023 (“On the Zero Line, there was only enough water for drinking, not for washing, and the men’s cracked fingernails and thickly calloused palms were so encrusted with dirt that it seemed to have become part of them”);

2. Luke Mogelson, “Trapped in the Trenches,” January 2 & 9, 2023 ("In the grainy, green world of the phosphor screen, the stars gleamed like bioluminescent plankton. Herring and Rambo moved deliberately between the black silhouettes of trees, many of which had been splintered and contorted by artillery. I was looking at a tilled field to our left when a shimmering tail arced overhead, collided with another streaking light, and radiantly detonated. Herring said that it was a Russian missile intercepted by an anti-aircraft weapon"); 

3. Burkhard Bilger, “Soul Survivors,” June 5, 2023 (“His voice was hoarse with loss, accompanied only by finger snaps and a glimmering electric guitar, like rain in a gutter”);

4. Burkhard Bilger, “Crossover Artist,” April 3, 2023 (“A modicum of noise is essential to any instrument’s sound, it turns out. Reeds rasp, bows grind, voices growl, and strings shimmer with overtones. In West Africa, musicians attach gourds to their xylophones and harps to rattle along as they play. Music, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure”);

5. Jackson Arn, “Early Bloomer,” May 8, 2023 (“With O’Keeffe’s works on paper, however, scrutiny is like oxygen. These are images so dense with detail that the poster treatment would ruin them. ‘No. 12 Special’ (1916) is like a glossary of the footprints that charcoal can leave on paper: thin, slashing lines; plump, leisurely ones; smears pressed into the grain of the page with a rag or a fingertip. No matter how carefully you study these grace notes, you never forget the melodious whole: a bouquet of spirals dragging their tails behind them, refusing to be decoded”);

6. Jill Lepore, “Pay Dirt,” March 20, 2023 (“There are more than two hundred mail-order seed companies in the United States, and, if you’ve ever ordered from any of them, chances are that your mail has been swollen with catalogues, their covers of radicchio red, marigold yellow, and zinnia pink peeking out from beneath the annual drab-gray crop of tax documents and the daily, dreary drizzle of bills, solicitations, and credit-card offers”).

7. Lauren Collins, “Pins and Needles,” March 27, 2023 (“The most memorable looks were the most demotic: shrunken puffers, blasted-out jeans, a leather gown spliced from old handbags, a series of hooded sweatshirts paired with tap pants so paltry that you could almost feel the goosebumps on the models’ scraggy legs”).

8. Rebecca Mead, “Dutch Treat,” February 27, 2023 (“Perhaps she is thinking of neither love nor work, and is instead reflecting on how the slow, perpetual flow of milk serves as an endless measure of time—just as it appears to us now, as we regard her in her reverie”);

9. Merve Emrie, “Marvellous Things,” March 6, 2023 (“But the sheer loveliness and good humor of the vignettes transform each sliver of Mr. Palomar’s life into an expansive state of being. The rhythm of the waves, a flock of starlings, the blue veins in cheese, sunlight rippling on the sea—they hold a beauty and a mystery that Mr. Palomar contemplates with such intensity that he turns them into little universes of meaning unto themselves”);

10. Helen Shaw, “Out of Focus,” February 27, 2023 (“His pieces gleam with a baked Southern California palette: jacaranda light, golf-course-green carpeting, and the parents’ burnished, teak-dark tans”). 

Best Cover

Mark Ulriksen's "About Time" (April 10, 2023)

Best "Talk of the Town" Story

Nick Paumgarten, “Ein Berliner,” June 12, 2023 ("The party that night began at ten, which meant more like midnight. Oontz, oontz, oontz, oontz. The projections of Marquardt’s portraits flashed on the walls, apparently to the beat but in random sequences. The revellers seemed unsure whether to watch or to dance. In the hall, Mosbeck, the gallerist, pulled on cotton gloves and rehung one of the eighties prints, which had been knocked off the wall by the heavy thud of the kick drum. Marquardt, now in a black skirt (Auch die Nacht ist Dunkel), took in the scene and said, “I am happy.” Then he went with Paetke to hang out by the entrance, as though he were working his own party. 'Ja, I am at the door,' he said. 'Maybe this is the normal situation' ”).

Best Illustration

Keith Negley's illustration for Idrees Kahloon's "Border Control" (June 12, 2023)

Best "Goings On About Town" Note

Johanna Fateman, “At the Galleries: Helen Frankenthaler,” April 3, 2023 ("The show proves that Frankenthaler, who died in 2011, at the age of eighty-three, was still at the height of her powers in her sixties—a mercurial colorist moving between pours and the palette knife, translucent washes and clotted impasto. The oceanic drama of the eight-foot-wide “Poseidon,” from 1990, is achieved with layered pools of thinned-out acrylic color in aqua and fog. A flat brush loaded with orange has been dragged across the surface, leaving a fiery trail").

Best Photo

Ross Landenberger's photo for Charles Bethea's "Special Sauce" (April 17, 2023)

Top Five newyorker.com Posts

1. Karl Ove Knausgaard's “Thomas Wågström’s Pictures of the Living and the Lifeless," April 26, 2023 ("All photographs are about transience. This lies in the very nature of photography, since everything in the world is continually changing, and what a photo depicts vanishes the next instant, or becomes something else. One could say that all photography is about loss. But one could also say the opposite: photographs salvage something from time, as from a burning house");

2. Ed Caesar, “Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom,” June 14, 2023 ("I wonder why, then, on hearing the news of his death last night, I found myself momentarily overcome. Perhaps because I met McCarthy first in a peculiarly receptive period, and perhaps because the provenance of my relationship with his writing leads me back through the decades of my own life. And perhaps because, looking again in the old books, I find so much pleasure in the authority of his voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished");

3. Jackson Arn, “The World-Changing Trees of Vincent Van Gogh,” June 5, 2023 ("It’s hard to study one of van Gogh’s motifs without misrepresenting him. He wasn’t really obsessed with cypresses or irises or sunflowers; he was obsessed with the world and burned through it, one object at a time. He kept painting and drawing. The world kept fluttering away");

4. Rivka Galchen, “What Is a Weed?,” May 26, 2023 ("The weed tasted like carrot? Like okra? Like broccoli, almost precisely");

5. Luke Mogelson, “Revisiting Portland’s ‘Summer of Rage,’ ” June 20, 2023 ("The diluted tones, high contrasts, and red-pupilled figures in “Protest City” combine to create a throwback aesthetic that also feels familiar. Dundon was initiated into photography as a high schooler, in the nineteen-nineties, by taking pictures of his friends skateboarding. Many people who grew up around that time will notice, in his work, the influence of skate magazines like Thrasher or Big Brother. This shows in Dundon’s raw, unflattering style of composition but also in his specific preoccupations: wanton vandalism, cheap tattoos, explicit graffiti—abrasions and abandon. This is not just the world of far-left activism. It is the world of wild, angry—and mostly white—urban and suburban youth").

Best Sentence

“No. 12 Special,” from 1916, is like a glossary of charcoal’s capabilities: thin, slashing lines; plump, leisurely ones; smears pressed into the grain of the page with a rag or a fingertip. – Jackson Arn, “Art: ‘Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time’ ” (May 15, 2023)

Best Paragraph

It was pitch-black in the cellar. Even when three of us sat with our knees drawn up, the fourth person could fit only by standing next to the ladder. In the claustrophobic space, I could feel Herring debating what to do. He was lighting a cigarette when a loud whooshing noise, like a cascade of water, roared toward us. “Down!” Herring barked, though there was nowhere farther down to go. I bowed my head and pressed my palms into the dirt floor, which quaked as three successive impacts left a ringing in my ears. – Luke Mogelson, “Trapped in the Trenches” (January 2 & 9, 2023)

Best Detail

You could hear his ski-parka opera coats rustling through the narrow corridors. – Lauren Collins, “Pins and Needles” (March 27, 2023)

Best Description

Gin tends not to agree with me, and yet I couldn’t help but steal sips of a friend’s orange-blossom Negroni, a cold and viscous concoction that lingered on my tongue and in my memory (I can taste it now!), the intoxicating, floral perfume of the orange-blossom water achieving thrilling alchemy with the herbal gin, bitter Aperol, and sweet vermouth. – Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023)

Best Question

How much is too much? Try “Babylon,” the latest film from Damien Chazelle. Within five minutes, we realize that excess is in the air—and, indeed, all over the camera lens, in the form of elephant dung. The ensuing half hour, an excursion into the orgiastic, brings us a woman peeing onto the bloated belly of a partygoer, alpine hills of cocaine, and a dwarf using a giant phallus as a pogo stick. Still to come: a movie producer walking around in the desert, at night, with his head stuck in a toilet seat, and, by way of a bonne bouche, toward the end of the feast, a guy who consumes live rats. Happy now? – Anthony Lane, “Top of the Heap” (January 2 & 9, 2023)

Seven Memorable Lines

1. The courthouse has a way of visiting indignities on all but the robed. – Ben McGrath, “Upstairs, Downstairs” (April 17, 2023)

2. They’ll be red-fleshed and globe-shaped and fist-size and grubby and hairy, and I usually roast them. – Jill Lepore, “Pay Dirt” (March 20, 2023) 

3. Action and description were everything. – Ed Caesar, “Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom” (June 14, 2023)

4. She knows just how to get her characters through the doorway and into a scene—all that they have to do, in order to sign their own moral death warrants, is start talking.  – James Wood, “Desperately Normal” (February 13 & 20, 2023) 

5. Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream. – Rebecca Mead, “Dutch Treat” (February 27, 2023)

6. Plucking out a puckered leathery lime and eating it whole, sticky and sour, left me feeling as lucky as if I’d found the baby in a king cake. – Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023)

7. O’Keeffe is nobody’s idea of a comedian, but the Strand trio could almost be a prank: the great black-and-white photographer gets thrown into a smeary rainbow dunk tank. – Jackson Arn, “Early Bloomer” (May 8, 2023)

April 24 & May 1, 2023 Issue

A detail in Lauren Collins’ Talk story “Decorative,” in this week’s issue, caught my eye: Owen Wilson uses a Brompton to get around Paris. Collins writes, “Wilson arrived on a Brompton folding bike, which he padlocked to an iron fence.” Bromptons are great bikes. Lorna and I travelled Scotland and the Netherlands on them. You can take them on trains, hop off, unfold them, and away you go.  

March 27, 2023 Issue

Lauren Collins is a superb describer. Her “Pins and Needles,” in this week’s issue, is a wonderful example of her art. It’s a profile of Balenciaga’s provocative art director Demna. His wild creations give Collins plenty of material to work with. For example:

The most memorable looks were the most demotic: shrunken puffers, blasted-out jeans, a leather gown spliced from old handbags, a series of hooded sweatshirts paired with tap pants so paltry that you could almost feel the goosebumps on the models’ scraggy legs.

She wore a black double-breasted suit with her usual lank hair and wire-rimmed glasses. The sleeves ran past her fingertips, as is Demna’s wont. He had added long flaps to the trousers, which blurred the line between pant and skirt, swishing like a liturgical vestment as Douglas walked.

You could hear his ski-parka opera coats rustling through the narrow corridors. There were murmurs of appreciation for a trapezoidal satin T-shirt that Demna said took three months to make, and for a clementine-colored day suit with edges that looked like they could draw blood, shown with a slick black fruit-bowl hat.

Collins’s couture descriptions are inspired – right up there with Judith Thurman’s, maybe better. Someday I’ll run a comparison and see who is the best. 

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”). 

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”

May 30, 2022 Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s issue: Lauren Collins’s “Soaking It In” and William Finnegan’s “Big Breaks.” In “Soaking It In," Collins visits the Thermes les Dômes, one of several spa facilities in Vichy, France. She takes the mud treatment:

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.

She drinks the spring water:

I filled a cup and tried it. Rotten eggs and cabbage soup—yes. But chalky, too. I felt like I had licked a blackboard.

And, most memorably, she undergoes the douche à jet:

Later that morning, I visited the hydrotherapy rooms, where I was greeted by a therapist in a black T-shirt and pants, topped with a black plastic apron. I went into a changing stall to hang up my robe.

“Should I leave my bathing suit on?” I called, over the door.

“You can, but it’s better without.”

Soon I was standing stark naked at the far end of a narrow, gray-tiled room, clutching the side bars of a waist-high metal support. About ten feet away, the therapist was unfurling a thick hose from a wall mount.

“Turn to the right,” she said. “Ready?”

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!

“Lift up your feet,” she said.

She hosed down my soles. Then my palms. My whole body was being spray-painted, and she was determined not to miss a spot.

At the end of the treatment, the therapist had me turn toward her. Here it was: the full-on douche à jet, straight to the gut. I closed my eyes and thought of the circulatory benefits.

When she asked if I’d like a final blast of cold water, I surprised myself by saying yes.

Wow! What a great scene! That “I could taste the salt” is pure Collins. Her style is both factual and sensuous. 

Finnegan’s “Big Breaks” profiles extraordinary big-wave surfer Kai Lenny. What makes him extraordinary? Finnegan shows us. He describes a video of Lenny surfing at Nazaré, one of the main arenas of big-wave surfing:

He starts by fading left on an absolutely massive black wall of water, and then reverses direction, driving hard against the grain. The wave is a solid seventy feet by the time he reaches the bottom, but it isn’t the height that stops your eye. It’s the concentrated power of the ocean behind him: probably the hardest-breaking wave ever photographed at Nazaré. Then Kai, turning sharply and slicing cleanly up the face, changes rails and gives it a little downcarve. If you don’t know that he’s surfing straight at a cliff, it probably seems less insane. Still, the nonchalance on a seventy-foot death wave is indelible, which is why they’re playing it over and over in an ad.

At Nazaré, Finnegan watches Lenny attempt a super-dangerous, near-fatal surfing move:

And yet Kai ended up going right. He later said that he had misjudged the takeoff, and let the left get away from him. But it was breathtaking, seeing him run against the grain of the swell on a very large wave. He accelerated, now low in the face, then hit a stack of small wavelets coming off the cliff. It was like running over speed bumps while going eighty on a highway. His fins began to cavitate. His board flipped in the air, bucking him off, and the whole wave landed on him from a considerable height. He later said that his jersey was pulled over his head, so that he couldn’t get to the rip cords for his inflation vest. He was underwater for quite a while.

I was at the lighthouse, looking down on the action. Chumbo was running the ski behind the wave, and when Kai didn’t appear on his board he swerved left toward the turbulence. Kai’s head finally popped up. Chumbo raced to him, slung him onto the rubber sled that rides behind the ski, and gunned it. The next wave was a foamy mess, and Chumbo hit it sideways. The ski went up on its side, and Chumbo tumbled into the water. Kai hung on to the driverless ski for another second or two, before it flipped over and the whole contraption went over the falls. It was a yard sale, with intensely swirling currents, but the two surfers seemed unruffled. Chumbo was mostly concerned that he had lost his phone. He yelled something to Kai, who turned and swam seaward until he found it. Then they were both thrown on the sand by the shore break, along with their tumbling, eight-hundred-pound vehicle.

Again, wow! That is a superb piece of descriptive writing! “Big Breaks” contains other lines equally as good. This one for example:

All the takeoffs were elevator drops, but the faces, some as big as fifty feet, were unusually clean. Kai was taking off extremely deep, chipping in early with crazy paddling power, and then turning hard as the waves spat clouds of trapped air. 

And this:

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.

Collins and Finnegan are two of The New Yorker’s best writers. These two pieces – “Soaking It In” and “Big Breaks” – exemplify their art at its finest.

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"). 

Best of the Decade: Second Thoughts

Photo by George Steinmetz, from Lauren Collins's "Angle of Vision"

Well, I’m midway in my “Best of the Decade” series and I’m having second thoughts about it. I now think it was folly to attempt it. There are just too many great pieces to choose from. Boiling the selection down to twelve has been agony. I’ve had to be absolutely ruthless. Many wonderful pieces have been excluded.

I’m going to continue with the series. But when I’m finished, I intend to provide an alternate list of twelve more pieces – all of which are deserving of “Best of Decade” status. That won’t do justice to all the New Yorker pieces I cherish, but at least it will help mitigate the severity of the selection process.

As for the list I’m currently working on, here are the six picks I’ve made so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

7. Lauren Collins’s “Angle of Vision” (“In dreams—mine, at least—flying is like swimming. But the air was crisp and thin, not viscous, as I’d imagined it. I didn’t have to make my way through it; it made its way through me. Being upright in the air feels like being upside down on the ground. My spine stretched. I felt like I’d be an inch taller when I touched down. In twenty seconds, my feet thudded into the valley floor”);

8.  Joseph Mitchell’s “Street Life” (“Another thing I like to do is to get on a subway train picked at random and stay on it for a while and go upstairs to the street and get on the first bus that shows up going in any direction and sit on the cross seat in back beside a window and ride along and look out the window at the people and at the flowing backdrop of buildings. There is no better vantage point from which to look at the common, ordinary city—not the lofty, noble silvery vertical city but the vast, spread-out, sooty-gray and sooty-brown and sooty-red and sooty-pink horizontal city, the snarled-up and smoldering city, the old, polluted, betrayed, and sure-to-be-torn-down-any-time-now city”); 

9. Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (“During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered”);

10. Robert A. Caro’s “The Transition” (“Whirling in his seat, Youngblood shouted—in a ‘voice I had never heard him ever use,’ Lady Bird recalled—‘Get down! Get down!’ and, grabbing Johnson’s right shoulder, yanked him roughly down toward the floor in the center of the car, as he almost leaped over the front seat, and threw his body over the Vice-President, shouting again, ‘Get down! Get down!’ ”);

11. Elif Batuman’s “The Memory Kitchen” (“Near the beekeeper’s table, a farmer was selling live turkeys. There were seven or eight of them sitting on a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury”);

12. Tad Friend’s “Thicker Than Water” (“The wave caught them from behind and lifted them until they were surfing its face. They hung there for five seconds—their port gunwale tilting overhead, the Yamaha outboard whirring in the air—as if time were taking a breath. Jason still believed that they’d shoot the barrel and make it out. Then the starboard gunwale hit sand, and with fantastic power the wave lifted the boat and hurled it onto the sandbar upside down. All that was visible of Jabb from above was a strip of maroon-painted hull”).

Best of the Decade: #7 Lauren Collins's "Angle of Vision"

Photo by François Lagarde, from Lauren Collins's "Angle of Vision"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #7 pick – Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision" (April 19, 2010).

“Angle of Vision” is one of my all-time favorite New Yorker pieces. It’s a profile of the aerial photographer George Steinmetz. Here’s what I said about it when it originally appeared:

Another tremendous piece this week is Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision." I’m rapidly becoming a Collins devotee. (See my effusions a few weeks ago regarding her lovely "Check Mate.") What I like about her work is her unhesitating willingness to write in the “I” – to present her stories as personal experiences. “Angle of Vision” is an example par excellence of her subjective approach where she not only profiles paraglider flyer/photographer George Steinmetz; she actually straps on a paraglider (Steinmetz calls it a “flying lawn chair”) and flies it herself, reporting back on what it felt like: “In dreams – mine, at least – flying is like swimming. But the air was crisp and thin, not viscous, as I’d imagined it. I didn’t have to make my way through it; it made its way through me. Being upright in the air feels like being upside down on the ground. My spine stretched. I felt like I’d be an inch taller when I touched down. In twenty seconds, my feet thudded into the valley floor.”

“Angle of Vision” is a big, gorgeous multi-panelled mural of a story. Time jumps around. The opening section introduces us to Steinmetz on expedition in southeastern Algeria. Collins is there with him. The next section describes the paraglider and how Steinmetz uses it to take aerial photographs. The third part (the Sefar flight) cuts back to Algeria and shows us Steinmetz and his crew attempting unsuccessfully to photograph an isolated plateau. The fourth part takes us back to the Sahara and talks about the Tuareg people. The fifth part takes us back to the expedition in Algeria and shows us Steinmetz discovering a prime camera subject – the high dunes of Tin Merzouga. Here’s Collins’s wonderful description of the dunes: “Their parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow, reminded me of horseshoe crabs. In the fading light, the sand turned from the color of paprika to a blood-orange shade and then to an iridescent purple, like eyeshadow, eventually deepening to a chocolaty brown.” That “eskered spines” is inspired! The sixth part is a biographic sketch of Steinmetz and an overview of his photographic accomplishments. The seventh section takes us to Steinmetz’s home in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where Collins joins him and they review some of Steinmetz’s photos. Collins’s description of Steinmetz’s aerial shot of the fortified village of Beni Isguen is worth quoting: “Captured at sunrise, in warm light, the houses were the color of seashells. At sunset, they were bleached out, shards of bone. Their roofs, invisible from the street, had been painted in aquas and turquoises, so that from above, they looked like swimming pools.” The eighth and final section of “Angle of Vision” is a mini-history of flying. It concludes memorably with Collins’s own twenty-second paraglider flight.

The foregoing is my separation of Collins’s story into its constituent parts. As she’s written it, there’s no sectioning, no numbering; the whole thing flows seamlessly from the first scene to the last. I’ve taken time to describe its structure because I like how it starts out by plunging us directly into action, into Steinmetz’s desert expedition. Only after we’re caught up in Steinmetz’s struggles in the desert, do we receive the background facts about him, his work, his flying machine, etc. The classic template for this type of narrative structure is, of course, John McPhee’s “Travels in Georgia” (The New Yorker, April 28, 1973). See also his great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977). I wonder if Collins has used this particular structure in any of her previous pieces. I’ll have to check. [The New Yorker & Me, May 7, 2010]

All this still applies. “Angle of Vision” is “a big, gorgeous multi-panelled mural of a story.” Collins’s “unhesitating willingness to write in the ‘I’ – to present her stories as personal experiences” is what I love about her work. That “parabolic swells and eskered spines, splitting shadow” is inspired! For all these reasons, “Angle of Vision” is my #7 pick.