April 16, 2018 Issue

For me, the most absorbing piece in this week’s issue is James Wood’s “Long Road Ahead,” a review of Walter Kempowski’s novel All for Nothing. To say that I’m a fan of Wood’s criticism is an understatement. I’m crazy about it. Of the seven hundred and thirty-six posts I’ve written for this blog, one hundred are tagged with his name, more than any other writer. The next closest is Ian Frazier, with eighty-nine. Wood is a formalist; he analyzes style. That’s what I like most about his work. That he prefers fiction to fact is an annoyance I’ve learned to live with. Many of his critical points are applicable to fiction and nonfiction alike (e.g., his theory of detail). In “Long Road Ahead,” he provides an interesting variation on his notion of “free indirect speech”:

One reason that Kempowski’s interrogative prose has a strange air of detachment is that the words have indeed detached themselves from the characters. Two people bend over the map, each with different anxieties, but who is thinking these thoughts about the Russians? Hirsch, Katharina, Kempowski, or all three? Most of “All for Nothing” is written in free indirect discourse, which is to say that the novelist’s prose closely identifies itself with the perspective and the language of a particular character. But here the questions appear to be voiced by a chorus. The effect is a kind of uncertain omniscience, which allows the novelist not only to move easily among his characters but to blend their thoughts, when need be, into a collective anxiety. It’s a modern epic style. 

Wood has written about free indirect speech before: see, for example, his great How Fiction Works (2008). And I’ve found examples of it in fact pieces (see my post on Lizzie Widdicombe’s “Happy Together,” The New Yorker, May 16, 2016). But in the above-quoted passage, he identifies a new form of it – free indirect speech “voiced by a chorus.” I can’t think of a nonfiction example of it. But from now on, I’ll definitely be watching for it.   

Best of 2017: 21 Inspired Lines

Rosz Chast, "Motherboard (Back)" (2017)

Shauna Lyon, describing the rich refinement of the Brooklyn bistro, Otway, notes “the natural shades of toffee, rhododendron, and sunlight filling the lovely corner space” (“Tables For Two: Otway,” June 26, 2017). That, for me, is one of the year’s most sheerly pleasurable lines. Here are twenty more to go with it:

1. A mustachioed violinist, in quasi-Edwardian garb, crouched almost fetally under water, his bow rising above the surface, like a shark’s fin, then falling below it. [Rebecca Mead, “Transformer,” September 25, 2017]

2. When I look at the back of a Datograph, one of Lange’s more complicated watches (it features a date as well as a chronograph, a kind of stopwatch), I see a small city of silver and gold gears and wheels, a miniature three-dimensional universe in which everyone is running to catch the next bus. [Gary Shteyngart, “Time Out,” March 20, 2017]

3. Rich saxophones and organs stood in for synthesizers, drums jangled and twitched, and vocalists like King Krule gave the beats another sheet of voice. [Matthew Trammell, “Step Out,” June 5 & 12, 2017]

4. The film’s images are filled with a pointillistic profusion of detail—wheat stalks at the roadside, a modern bridge’s metallic latticework, even the duo’s jazzily patterned shirts—that’s as alluring as it is nerve-jangling. [Richard Brody, “On the Wild Side,” July 3, 2017]

5. Save space, too, for malab iyo malawax, sweet crepes soaked in honey and dusted with cinnamon, and a mug of steaming qaxwo, pungent black coffee spiked with ginger. [Nicolas Niarchos, “Tables For Two: Safari,” September 4, 2017]

6. After the great pea-guacamole controversy of 2015, it takes cojones to add mint to an otherwise innocent, chunky scoop, which arrived, one afternoon, dramatically hidden under an elephant-ear-size purple-corn chip. [Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: Atla,” June 5 & 12, 2017]

7. The slanted early-morning sun amid the pillars colors the sides of bread trucks moving slowly on their deliveries. [Ian Frazier, “Drive Time,” August 28, 2017]

8. Now she seemed slight, fine-boned, almost translucent—it was hard to imagine her surviving a sea of forearms, iPhones, and gropey hands. [Nick Paumgarten, “Singer of Secrets,” August 28]

9. Even when she’s performing small steps, or no steps, you can still feel, across the auditorium, that astonishing engine, humming along like an Alfa Romeo, at the base of her spine. [Joan Acocella, “Dance: Alfa Romeo,” June 19, 2017]

10. I nibbled a small pie: it tasted like pumpkin, but with a weedy aftertaste, which brought back Proustian memories of high school. [Lizzie Widdicombe, “High Cuisine,” April 24, 2017]

11. When I went back again a few days later, the studio floor was littered with discarded paintbrushes, dozens of them, some still oozing paint—I got bright orange on one of my shoes. [Calvin Tomkins, “Troubling Pictures,” April 10, 2017]

12. His punch lines are not punched at all but flicked as casually as cigarette butts. [Anthony Lane, “Across the Divide,” June 26, 2017]

13. This is the “seashore at evening,” where lithesome mermaids on motorcycles whiz by, their “leather-clad calves” united with a “noir chassis.”  [Dan Chiasson, “Merry War,” September 4, 2017]

14. It causes the wasp-waisted barmaids in strappy green minidresses to grunt audibly as they muddle handfuls of cherries, and scoop ice as if shovelling a driveway. [Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Fishbowl,” May 29, 2017]

15. Smeared, apocalyptic guitar riffs buoy Bryan Funck’s grim, screeching vocals, which invoke classic black-metal singers while sidestepping any hint of Dungeons and Dragons. [“Night Life: Thou,” January 9, 2017]

16. I’ve imagined a whole film just about the waitress who describes the chorizo and eggs in “Midnight Run.” [Patton Oswalt, “Deep Cut,” September 4, 2017]

17. Actually, the culprit was likely the Slow Reveal, which encourages anything but: a syrupy accelerant in a bisected brass pineapple, the round belly of the bottom half balanced on the stiff fronds of the top half. [McKenna Stayner, “Bar Tab: Super Power,” February 27, 2017]

18. They play a high-octane strain of rock and roll that’s best described as ripping, advancing a thread of brawny, pissed-off fight music hybridized by groups like the Dwarves and Fear. The effect is ideally experienced while pogo-dancing around a room of diaphoretic night owls. [“Night Life: Hank Wood and the Hammerheads,” July 24, 2017]

19. There’s usually sports on the TV, but the broad array of neighborhood bargoers watch indifferently; there are conversations to be had in big, gossipy groups, cold beer to be sipped, flirtations to be advanced in sly increments. [Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Salud,” September 11, 2017]

20. Shroud-like disguises figure into her work from subsequent decades, too, counterbalanced by absurdly tailored pieces, including cinched whirlpools of deconstructed menswear and gingham frocks deformed by asymmetrical humps. [“Art: Metropolitan Museum: Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between,” September 4, 2017]

Enough already! Time to let go. Be off with you, old New Yorkers. Down to the basement you go. The new year’s first issue beckons. There’s a piece in it by Peter Schjeldahl I want to read. Let’s get started.

April 24, 2017, Issue

Last year’s Food & Travel Issue, containing four brilliant pieces (Lauren Collins’s “Come to the Fair,” Dana Goodyear’s “Mezcal Sunrise,” Carolyn Kormann’s “The Tasting Menu Initiative,” and Dexter Filkins’s “The End of Ice”), was my pick for Best Issue of the Year (see here). It’s a tough act to follow. This year’s Food & Travel Issue suffers in comparison. It lacks the kind of pungent, textured specificity I associate with great food and travel writing. Rachel Monroe’s “#Vanlife” isn’t bad, if you relish sentences like “King checked Instagram on her phone; her most recent post, a shot of a storm building over the Pacific, had been something of an aesthetic departure—most Where’s My Office Now images include King, the van, or Penny; the most popular tend to include all three—and it was underperforming.” But I don't. I couldn’t be done with it fast enough. The same goes for Lauren Collins’s “Secrets in the Sauce,” in which the sentence “Barbecue might be America’s most political food” stopped me cold; I didn’t read another line. I skimmed Daniel Mendelsohn’s “An Odyssey,” an account of a trip he and his father took on a cruise ship, retracing Odysseus’ journey. This may strike some as interesting; it didn’t do anything for me. Politics, social media, and patriarchal Greek poetry make a strange and unappealing hash.

Speaking of hash, care for a pot brownie? No, not really, but I read Lizzie Widdicombe’s “High Cuisine” anyway, because … well, because it’s by Lizzie Widdicombe, writer of, among other piquant pieces, the superb “The Bad-Boy Brand” (April 8, 2013). “High Cuisine” contains at least two inspired sentences:

A team from Weedmaps, a “Yelp for pot” based in Irvine, California, was visiting the facility, and a photographer had set up a light box, which he was using to take pictures of pot cookies.

I nibbled a small pie: it tasted like pumpkin, but with a weedy aftertaste, which brought back Proustian memories of high school.

For me, the best food writing in this otherwise dismal Food & Travel Issue is found in Shauna Lyon’s “Tables For Two: King” and Talia Lavin’s “Bar Tab: The Binc.” Lyon’s piece offers pure, sensuous bliss:

A spectacular, bracing salad served at the beginning of March included a pink radicchio that one guest had recently spied in the produce section of Eataly, and a mysterious soft-crunchy, hollow stalk, which turned out to be the heart of a puntarelle, whose chickory-like leaves were more easily identified. The coniglio alla cacciatora, or hunter’s rabbit, came as nubs of tender, gamey meat on a bed of polenta larded with cheese and butter, and the onglet appeared as great red slices of hanger steak, alongside al-dente chickpeas. For dessert, a Pernod semifreddo in a dainty coupe was an inspired touch.

Lavin’s “The Binc” shows a deep pleasure taken in description:

The interior is suffused with a warm, orangey glow, and, though it just celebrated its one-year anniversary, it feels curiously unfocussed in time. There is a faded portrait of a mustachioed man from an indeterminate era, and antique marionettes of soldiers hanging on a cloudy, wall-size mirror; the rest-room signs are done in careful Art Deco lettering. On a recent Saturday night, the bar top was crowded with rows of multicolored tinctures, like cardamom bitters and sweet-potato shrub, which added complexity to cocktails such as the Whitaker (vodka, ginger) and the Fall of Roebling (tequila, habanero). Twelve barflies gave the room a pleasantly full, but not overcrowded, air.

I have a suggestion for next year’s Food & Travel Issue: turn it over to the “Tables For Two” and “Bar Tab” crew; let them write it.

Contenders for "Top Ten Reporting Pieces" (So Far)

Illustration by Bjorn Lie (from Dana Goodyear's "Mezcal Sunrise")

Well, with only eight weeks left in the year, I want to start considering what my “Top Ten Reporting Pieces” might look like. Here are some of the contenders:

Ben Lerner, “The Custodians” (January 11, 2016)

Tad Friend, “Holding the T” (January 18, 2016)

Andrew O’Hagan, “Imaginary Spaces”  (March 28, 2016)

Dana Goodyear, “Mezcal Sunrise” (April 4, 2016)

Carolyn Kormann, “The Tasting-Menu Initiative” (April 4, 2016)

Dexter Filkins, “The End of Ice” (April 4, 2016)

Ian Frazier, “The Bag Bill” (May 2, 2016)

Lizzie Widdicombe, “Happy Together” (May 16, 2016)

Jonathan Franzen, “The End of the End of the World” (May 23, 2016)

Hilton Als, “Dark Rooms” (July 4, 2016)

Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running” (July 11 & 18, 2016)

Jill Lepore, “The War and the Roses” (August 8 & 15, 2016)

Nick Paumgarten, “The Country Restaurant” (August 29, 2016)

Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover” (August 29, 2016)

Janet Malcolm, “The Performance Artist” (September 5, 2016)

Tom Kizzia, “The New Harpoon” (September 12, 2016)

Ian Parker, “Knives Out” (September 12, 2016)

Burkhard Bilger, “Ghost Stories” (September 12, 2016)

Ian Frazier, “Patina” (September 19, 2016)

Elizabeth Kolbert, “A Song of Ice” (October 24, 2016)

These pieces are listed in the order they appeared in the magazine. Eventually, the list will have to be whittled down to ten – no easy task (they’re all excellent pieces). And I’ve learned from previous years not to decide prematurely. Last year, with about three weeks to go, I was sure Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues” would be my #1 pick. Then Ben McGrath’s extraordinary “The Wayfarer” appeared, in the December 14 issue, and I had to revise my opinion (see here). By the way, where is McGrath? He’s a consistent Top Ten contender. But this year, he’s yet to appear. I miss him.  

Lizzie Widdicombe's "Happy Together"

Illustration by Harry Campbell

This is just a quick note to say how much I enjoyed Lizzie Widdicombe’s "Happy Together" (The New Yorker, May 16, 2016.) I failed to mention it in my post on the May 16 issue. Now, I’m feeling guilty. The piece reads like a streak. Widdicombe makes writing seem so effortless, even though I know it isn’t – for her or anyone else. For example, take “Happy Together” ’s second paragraph:

First stop: Craigslist, for a place to live. Kennedy was unfamiliar with the city’s neighborhoods, but he’d seen HBO’s “Girls,” and, he said, “I pretty much knew I was going to be in Brooklyn.” He checked out one-bedroom apartments in Williamsburg, where the average monthly rent is around three thousand dollars. Nope. He eventually landed in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where a guy named Patrick was subletting a room in his two-bedroom apartment for a thousand and fifty dollars a month.

That “Nope” made me smile. Who owns it? It somehow belongs to both Widdicombe and Kennedy. It’s the journalistic equivalent of fiction’s free indirect speech.

Here’s an even better example: “But, he said, ‘I’d end up going to a bar and just sitting there, talking to a bartender and staring at Twitter.’ A thought surfaced: I’m surrounded by people and things to do, and yet I’m so fucking bored and lonely.” That second sentence is Widdicombe bending her words around Kennedy’s thought.

“Happy Together” has a brisk unostentatious naturalness that I relish. Its blend of modern materials (apps, startups, social media) enacts the new mode of living it describes. It seems to re-create, with extraordinary fidelity, the texture of everyday life in the “sharing economy.” It stoked my appetite for more Widdicombe.

March 21, 2016 Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. Among its many pleasures – Maira Kalman’s color-drenched cover (“Spring Forward”), Laura Parker’s delightful Talk story "Bee's Knees" (“She dunked the bee in a tiny bottle containing her special blend of ‘bee shampoo’: a few drops of archival soap and deionized water”), Lizzie Widdicombe’s superb "Barbie Boy" (“At ground level, herds of strange footwear scurried around: silver Adidas sneakers with wings sprouting from the ankles, fuzzy ones with tails and tiger stripes, high-tops with green Teddy bears for tongues”), four excellent reviews (Peter Schjeldahl’s "Laughter and Anger," Dan Chiasson’s "The Tenderness Trap," Jill Lepore’s "After the Fact," and “James Wood’s "Floating Island") – the most piquant, for me, is Judith Thurman’s brilliant "The Empire's New Clothes," a profile of China’s first homegrown master couturier, Guo Pei. Thurman’s lines are as textured as the clothes she describes:

Guo’s Paris début proved to be more of a dessert course than an entrée. There were dresses for a thé dansant, dainty and frosted, in a macaron palette. Sabrina might have worn them. A chiffon poet’s blouse with embroidered cuffs was paired with the only trousers on the runway. Tabards were a theme, gorgeously bejewelled, but they seemed extraneous to the clothes they decorated, and one of them looked like a lobster bib. The first number that Guo sent out, however, announced what she can do when she pulls out all the stops. It was a strapless gown of distressed guipure—with scorched edges, stiffened and gilded—that looked like a giant sea sponge. Salt crystals glistened in its pores. It had the idiosyncratic “hand” of a great artisan.

Normally, I’m allergic to displays of wealth. But Guo’s gown of distressed guipure is something else. A ravishing Pari Dukovic photo of it illustrates Thurman’s piece. I’m glad to have seen it. 

Best of 2015: Talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mid-Year Top Ten 2015

“Aesthetic hierarchies,” James Wood says, in his great The Nearest Thing to Life, “are fluid, personal, eccentric, always subject to revision, and quite possibly a bit incoherent.” Yes, and they’re also fun. I enjoy evaluating The New Yorker. This time each year, I pause, look back over the past six months, and pick my favorite pieces. Here then is my Mid-Year Top Ten 2015.

Reporting

1. David Owen’s “Where the River Runs Dry” (May 25, 2015)

2. Ian Parker’s “The Shape of Things to Come” (February 23 & March 2, 2015)

3. Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Century of Silence” (January 5, 2015)

4. Jill Lepore’s “The Cobweb” (January 26, 2015)

5. Rivka Galchen’s “Weather Underground” (April 13, 2015)

6. Dana Goodyear’s “The Dying Sea” (May 4, 2015)

7. Rebecca Mead’s “Sole Cycle” (March 23, 2015)

8. Luke Mogelson’s “When the Fever Breaks” (January 19, 2015)

9. Jane Kramer’s “The Demolition Man” (June 29, 2015)

10. William Finnegan's “Tears of the Sun” (April 20, 2015)

Criticism

1. James Wood’s “Look Again” (February 23 & March 2, 2015)

2. Dan Chiasson’s “Out of This World” (April 13, 2015)

3. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Moving Pictures” (March 16, 2015)

4. James Wood’s “Circling the Subject” (May 4, 2015

5. Alex Ross’s “Eyes and Ears” (February 9, 2015)

6. Dan Chiasson’s “Beautiful Lies” (March 30, 2015)

7. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Native Soil” (May 25, 2015)

8. James Wood’s “Story of My Life” (June 22, 2015)

9. Dan Chiasson’s “American Snipper” (June 1, 2015)

10. Anthony Lane’s “High Gear” (May 25, 2015)

Talk of the Town

1. Mark Singer’s “All-Nighter” (May 11, 2015)

2. Ian Frazier’s “Russophilia” (February 16, 2015)

3. Lizzie Widdicombe’s “Air Bus” (June 1, 2015)

4. Nick Paumgarten’s “Hut!” (June 22, 2015)

5. Dana Goodyear’s “Life With Father” (June 29, 2015)

6. Sarah Larson’s “Cinephiles” (January 19, 2015)

7. Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Without Audience” (June 1, 2015)

8. John Seabrook’s “Free” (February 2, 2015)

9. Emma Allen’s “Landlord” (June 29, 2015)

10. Alec Wilkinson’s “Hands” (June 29, 2015)

Best Short Story

Louise Erdrich’s “The Flower” (June 29, 2015)

Best Poem

C. K. Williams, “Hog” (February 23, 2015)

Best Blog Post

Jiayang Fan, “Searching for America with General Tso” (“Cultural Comment,” newyorker.com, March 12, 2015)

Best Illustration

Riccardo Vecchio’s illustration for Jane Kramer’s “The Demolition Man” (June 29, 2015) (see above)

Best Photo

Ian Allen’s portrait of Chastity Belt for “Goings On About Town” (May 25, 2015)

Best Cover

Mark Ulriksen’s “Baseball Ballet” (April 27, 2015)

Best Issue

May 25, 2015, containing, among its many pleasures, David Owen’s superb “Where the River Runs Dry,” three first-rate reviews (Anthony Lane’s “High Gear,” James Wood’s “All Her Children,” and Peter Schjeldahl’s “Native Soil”), and Ian Allen’s ravishing, color-drenched “Goings On About Town” photo of the band Chastity Belt.

Best Sentence

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

Best Paragraph

I went farther into the church, making a list of the things that the people of Diyarbakir had left there. Dried scraps of bread. Automotive carpeting. An old shoe. A fragment of a transistor radio. Corrugated plastic, some of it burned. Where the main altar had been, there was a fire pit; among the ashes, a wrapper for a candy called Coco Fino and empty cans of Efes beer. A rusted wire. Coils of shit. In the inset of a wall, someone had arranged several stones in a neat line. Hundreds of daisies reached upward. And as the sun descended behind the high city walls the smell of grilled meat drifted over from nearby homes, and the sound of children playing began to fill the streets. A ball was kicked and it hit the side of a building and bounced. Some boys clambered over the wall that surrounded the church. Women left their kitchens, and climbed to their roofs to collect carpets that had been put out to air. TVs wired to satellite dishes came on, filling spare rooms with their ethereal glow. All of Diyarbakir, it seemed, except the church, drifted forward in time. Overhead, a flock of common swifts darted and circled among the old stone arches. Their black wings arced like boomerangs as they swooped through the ruins—above the piles of earth, the weeds and the wildflowers, all the trash—and their movements were ceaseless, careless, as if unweighted by anything. – Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Century of Silence” (January 5, 2015)

Best Description

Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped. – Rebecca Mead, “Sole Cycle” (March 23, 2015)

Most Memorable Image

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

Most Inspired Detail

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

June 1, 2015 Issue

Pleasures abound in this week’s issue – Richard Brody on Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (“Fuller’s pugnacious direction and his gutter-up view of city life romanticize both the criminal code of honor and the jangling paranoia of global plots; his hard-edged long takes depict underworld cruelty with reportorial wonder as well as moralistic dread”), Emma Allen on a cocktail called What the Doctor Ordered (“The rum made it taste like a mind-bending root beer”), Lizzie Widdicombe on Uber for helicopters (“The helicopter made its shuddering descent. Legs shook; sippy cups spilled. Marcy said, ‘Wow! I love this part!’ The pilot yelled, ‘Touchdown!’ ”), Nick Paumgarten on the end of Vin Scelsa’s “Idiots Delight” (“After ‘Goodnight Ladies,’ Scelsa signed off: ‘Thanks for your ears. I love you all’ ”) – but for me its most piquant delight is Dan Chiasson’s review of John Ashbery’s Breezeway (“These poems conjure a massive mental errata slip made up of what they almost say and nearly mean”). Chiasson is on a roll: four reviews this year, so far – all brilliant!

It would be perverse to say that I enjoyed Michael Specter’s "Extreme City," an account of a recent visit he made to Luanda. The inequality it describes is appalling. But I do relish it as writing. I like going (vicariously) where Specter goes. He’s always out and about, nosing around, seeing what’s to be seen. He says, “One afternoon, I visited Tako Koning, a Canadian petroleum geologist, who lives on the seventh floor of an older building in the center of Luanda,” and I’m right there with him. He says, “One day, I had lunch at Oon.dah, on the first floor of the Escom Center,” and I’m happy to tag along. Specter’s pieces afford the experience of first-person access. The payoff is readerly bliss.

Best of 2014

Well, the end of the year approaches. Time now to compile my “Best of 2014” list. I know there are skeptics who consider such lists pointless. But I enjoy the process. It’s a way of deliciously prolonging my 2014 New Yorker reading experience.

Here then is a selection of my favorite 2014 New Yorker pieces (with a choice sliver from each in parenthesis):

Talk Stories

1. Sophie Brickman, "Say Cheese," January 6, 2014 (“He was trying to capture the perfect shot of a pumpkin muffin with his Nokia phone”)

2. Nick Paumgarten, "Reunion," February 3, 2014 (“His upper lip was mottled, like a bruised fruit – a life in brass”)

3. Lizzie Widdicombe, "Table Talk," March 17, 2014 (“ ‘If I talk, you gotta drink the vodka’ ”)

4. Ian Frazier, "Bus Ride," April 14, 2014 (“To ride the B-46 north on Utica Avenue is to feel the city accumulate and intensify on both sides”)

5. Ian Frazier, "Do Not Cross," June 2, 2014 (“but give these objects a few minutes of contemplation and a minor visitation of the sublime may occur”)

6. Mark Singer, "Risky Business," July 21, 2014 (“ ‘As soon as they started moving the bulls out of the pens into the bucking chutes, I could see Bushwacker go from docile to this’ – he pantomimed a bull pawing the ground – ‘and I thought, This bull knows’ ”)

7. Mark Singer, "Meritorious," August 11 & 18, 2014 (“Afterward, Angell says softly, ‘Jim Leyland coming by. That’s really something.’ ”)

8. Tad Friend, "Rembrandt Lighting," November 10, 2014 (Gilroy is “as thin and pale as dental floss”)

9. Ian Parker, "Oldies But Goodies," November 10, 2014 (“As Thiebaud put it, there are still mornings that start with the thought: This morning, I’d like to paint a pie”)

10. Oliver Sacks, "Night of the Ginkgo," November 24, 2014 (“tough, heavy Mesozoic leaves such as the dinosaurs ate”)

Reporting

1. Tad Friend, "Thicker Than Water," February 10, 2014 (“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”)

2. Raffi Khatchadourian, "A Star in a Bottle," March 3, 2014 (“I put on goggles and looked at the cylindrical reactor core, its dense crush of parts, rendered in bright colors, seeming to float in a vast gray horizonless space”)

3. Peter Hessler, "Revolution On Trial," March 10, 2014 (“I was sitting next to the cage, and after a while Mohamed el-Beltagy, one of the accused, began gesturing to me through the bars”)

4. Nick Paumgarten, "Berlin Nights," March 24, 2014 (“The music was churning, hypnotic, almost psychedelic, and I abandoned myself to it”)

5. Ian Frazier, "Blue Bloods," April 14, 2014 (“throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks”)

6. Burkhard Bilger, In Deep," April 21, 2014 (“Now he stood at the shore of a small, dark pool under a dome of sulfurous flowstone”)

7. Lizzie Widdicombe, "The End of Food," May 12, 2014 (“With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad”)

8. Dana Goodyear, "Paper Palaces," August 11 & 18, 2014 (“He looks clicked together, like a Lego figurine”)

9. Richard Preston, "The Ebola Wars," October 27, 2014 (“By looking at a few genomes of Ebola, the scientists hoped to grasp an image of the whole virus, which could be conceived of as a life-form visible in four dimensions, as vast amounts of code flowing through time and space”)

10. Ben McGrath, "The Ice Breaker," December 15, 2014 (“Slow it down now, and watch carefully: Subban’s skate blades reëstablish contact with the ice a second before he one-times a laser beam into the upper right corner”)

Criticism

1. Peter Schjeldahl, "The Outlaw," February 3, 2014 (“But there’s no gainsaying a splendor as berserk as that of a Hieronymus Bosch painting”)

2. Louis Menand, "Imitation of Life," April 28, 2014 (“Updike is a highly literate illumination of a supremely literate human being”)

3. James Wood, "The World As We Know It," May 19, 2014 (“as in Naipaul’s work, the pages seem scarred with remembered wounds”)

4. Dan Chiasson, "Mother Tongue," June 2, 2014 (“the book’s strong effect of having been written, unlike most prior poetry about having kids, under the conditions it describes”)

5. Alex Ross, "Blockbuster," June 23, 2014 (“Plaintive strands of near-tonal melody floated in an eerie, wide-open space defined at its edges by groaning bass timbres, wayward piano figures, and the rustlings of maracas, vibraslap, snare drum, and other percussion. It felt like an encampment encircled by watchful eyes”)

6. Anthony Lane, "Balancing Acts," July 21, 2014 (“We happen upon ourselves when nothing much happens to us, and we are transformed in the process; that is why the Mason with the earring from whom we take our leave, on his first, blissed-out day of college, both is and is not the affable imp of seven, or the mumbler who bumped his way through puberty, and that twin sense of continuity and interruption—of life itself as tracking shot and jump cut—applies to everyone. Just like the final fade.”)

7. James Wood, "Away Thinking About Things," August 25, 2014 (“His experiments in vernacular Scots push and twist the language, sometimes to breaking points”)

8. Alex Ross, "Under the Stars," August 25, 2014 (“One great pleasure of the Bowl is the sense of a spell being cast, and it happened here: in the third movement of the Mahler, when a ghostly klezmer band files by, seven thousand leaned in, their red wine and grilled chicken neglected, their motionless heads etched by the light pouring off the stage”)

9. David Denby, "Lasting Impressions," September 1, 2014 (“But the ‘plot’ is no more than the men’s thorny emotional connection and their mutual fixation on death”)

10. James Wood, "Fly Away," December 8, 2014 (“Within a paragraph or two, the reader senses an attentive purity in the narrator’s prose. She seems alert to everything”)

Thank you New Yorker for another great year of blissful reading.

Postscript: Today (January 3, 2015), I amended the above list, deleting Dana Goodyear’s “Élite Meat,” and inserting her "Paper Palaces." Goodyear had a great 2014, producing four wonderful pieces, all of which could’ve made my list. I decided to go with one. I’ve finally settled on “Paper Palaces” as my favorite.

Credit: The above artwork is by Jacob Escobedo; it appears in the March 3, 2014 New Yorker as an illustration for Raffi Khatchadourian’s “A Star in a Bottle.”

Journeys and Visits

“Journey” and “journalism” share a linguistic root. I often think of this when I read The New Yorker. Each of its fact pieces is a sort of journey, or at least a visit. This year, the magazine took me on some amazing armchair trips: to Delaware Bay to see horseshoe crabs (Ian Frazier, “Blue Bloods); to Oaxaca, Mexico, to explore one of the deepest caves in the world  (Burkhard Bilger, “In Deep”); to the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique, in the south of France, to view ITER, “the most complex machine ever built” (“Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Star in a Bottle”); to the Cairo Police Academy to see the trial of twenty-one Muslim Brotherhood leaders (Peter Hessler, “Revolution On Trial”); to Berlin’s Berghain, “the most famous techno club in the world” (Nick Paumgarten, “Berlin Nights”); to a café in Kiev, as Russian tanks mass on Ukraine’s northern and eastern borders (Keith Gessen, “Waiting For War”); to Aspen, Colorado, to view the construction of the Shigeru Ban-designed Aspen Art Museum (Dana Goodyear, “Paper Palaces”); to the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles to visit the Soylent headquarters (Lizzie Widdicombe, “The End of Food”); to a convention center in Villa Park, a western suburb of Chicago, to attend a conference of fast-food workers (William Finnegan, “Dignity”); to the Ebola wards of the Kenema Government Hospital, Sierra Leone (Richard Preston, “The Ebola Wars”); to Washington State University’s Bread Lab, in Mount Vernon, to gain a better understanding of the role of gluten in our diet (Michael Specter, “Against the Grain”); and many more.

I’ll soon be compiling my “Best of 2014” list. Expect to see at least a few of the above-mentioned “travel” pieces on it.

Credit: The above artwork is by Istvan Banyai; it appears in the March 24, 2014 issue of The New Yorker as an illustration for Nick Paumgarten’s “Berlin Nights.”

November 24, 2014 Issue

Pleasures abound in this week’s issue (“The Tech Issue”): “the easy, cheesy thrills of the appetizers” at Upland (“Amelia Lester, “Tables For Two”); the “in-process” feel of Bryan Graf’s photograms, “as if the fabric were still moving, refracting and layering gossamer passages of magenta, rose, and acid green” (“Goings On About Town: Art”); the “razor-sharp pulp efficacy” of the action scenes in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (Richard Brody, “Goings On About Town: Movies”); the “subtle but staggeringly delicious truffle pasta with grated yak cheese” at Aldo Sohm Wine Bar (“Sarah Larson, “Bar Tab”); the “heavy, golden, fan-shaped leaves” of New York City’s ginkgoes (Oliver Sacks, “Night of the Ginkgo”); the 10xers on the roof of Altay Guvench’s “hacker mansion,” finishing their drinks in the fog (Lizzie Widdicombe, “The Programmer’s Price”); Sean Parker, in his Plaza Hotel apartment, “dressed in jeans and rust-colored high tops, drinking tea from a white china cup” (John Seabrook, “Revenue Streams”); the sound of a Wyss Institute 3-D printer “clacking and clattering like a busy riveting machine” (Jerome Groopman, “Print Thyself”); the roar of the crowd in Lincoln Theatre, “as it saw Scarlett plant a hatchery – a pulsing, cloudy blue blob – down in the corner, next to PartinG’s home base” (Ben McGrath, “Good Game”); the “jagged music” of Penelope Fitzgerald’s prose – “each sentence is a little different from its predecessor; nothing is allowed to settle into the familiar” (James Wood, “Late Bloom”). I enjoyed it immensely.