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: #9 Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting Bin Laden"

Photo illustration by John Ritter, from Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting Bin Laden"

“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 #9 pick – Nicholas Schmidle’s extraordinary “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011). 

From the moment I saw the news of bin Laden’s assassination, I wanted to know how it happened. Schmidle’s piece told me in detail after fascinating detail. Here, for example, is his description of James, one of the twenty-three Navy SEALs who carried out the raid:

James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer’s frame that one might expect of a SEAL—he is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Other SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A “blowout kit,” for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James’s back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.

The amazing level of specificity in that passage is typical of the entire piece. And it’s all the more impressive when you consider that Schmidle himself didn’t experience any of it. His piece is based entirely on interviews and research. 

Schmidle puts us there with the Navy SEALs in the Blackhawks as they fly towards Abbottabad (“During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered”). 

In a flashback, he puts us with the SEALs in the Nevada desert as they rehearse the mission (“The pilots flew in the dark, arrived at the simulated compound, and settled into a hover while the SEALs fast-roped down”). 

He puts us with President Obama, Vice-President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others, in a small office adjoining the Situation Room, as they watch a video feed “showing real-time footage of the target, which was being shot by an unarmed RQ 170 drone flying more than fifteen thousand feet above Abbottabad.” 

He puts us inside the Blackhawk as it crash-lands inside the walls of bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound (“The pilot jammed the nose forward to drive it into the dirt and prevent his aircraft from rolling onto its side. Cows, chickens, and rabbits scurried”). 

And, most crucially, he puts us inside bin Laden’s bedroom at the moment he’s killed (“The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, ‘For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.’ After a pause, he added, 'Geronimo E.K.I.A.'—‘enemy killed in action’ ”). 

The piece is beautifully structured in nine sections. The first section immediately plunges us into the mission (“Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden”). 

The next two sections are flashbacks, detailing the planning and preparation for the raid. The pivotal fourth section artfully transitions from the grainy black-and-white crash-landing scene that Obama, Biden, et al., are watching on their screen at the White House to the reality of the crash as it’s occurring in bin Laden’s compound. 

Sections 5 and 6 describe the raid as it rapidly unfolds inside the compound, including the killing of bin Laden’s courier (“The Americans’ night-vision goggles cast the scene in pixellated shades of emerald green. Kuwaiti, wearing a white shalwar kameez, had grabbed a weapon and was coming back outside when the seals opened fire and killed him”), bin Laden’s brother, bin Laden’s son, and bin Laden himself. 

Section 7 tells what happened immediately after bin Laden is killed – the placement of bin Laden’s corpse in a body bag, the collection of flash drives, CDs, DVDs, and computer hardware from bin Laden’s house, the extraction of DNA from bin Laden’s body, the destruction of the damaged Blackhawk, and the SEALs’ escape in a Chinook. 

Sections 8 and 9 cover bin Laden’s burial at sea and Obama’s meeting with the SEALs at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. 

Boldly and bravely executed, the raid on bin Laden is one of the most astonishing military feats of our time. Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting Bin Laden" reports it superbly. 

Best of 2019: Talk

João Fazenda's illustration for Adam Gopnik's "If You Listen"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Talk of the Town” stories of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Adam Gopnik, “If You Listen,” August 19, 2019 (“The vessels, placed on pedestals of different heights, are configured out of musical order, to emphasize their range and varied provenances. Beer walked among them. ‘This boat sings a G,’ he said, pointing at a Chinese dragon-boat vase. ‘This earthenware temple by William Wyman, from 1977, that’s a beautiful F, and this very early portrait bust by Gaston Lachaise is our A-flat’ ”).

2. Mark Singer, “Man vs. Mouse,” January 7, 2019 (“He arranged ‘a Maginot Line of glue traps’ and set out a pizza box with a mouse-size hole and, inside, pieces of mozzarella and pepperoni surrounded by glue traps. This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out”).

3. Paige Williams, “Boxes,” July 1, 2019 (“Schiffman plucked a Nikon from her backpack and started shooting—moody light at the bedroom windows, a bouquet of bodega roses”).

4. Ian Frazier, “Cookout,” September 30, 2019 (“Cicadas in the trees did their impersonations of various electrical appliances, hydrangea bushes in the yard burst into even more elaborate bloom, and the incoming sunlight, at a rate of a thousand watts per square metre, transformed into culinary heat, seemed to hum”).

5. Rachel Felder, “Avocado Al Dente,” October 28, 2019 (“Miguel Gonzalez wakes up just after 4 A. M. on most weekdays with one thing on his mind: avocados”).

6. Nicholas Schmidle, “The Anti-Perfect,” September 16, 2019 (“ ‘It’s too early for you,’ she scolded one empty can, its ball bearing rattling around inside it”).

7. Patricia Marx, “Viewing Party,” April 1, 2019 (“There, among the chintz furniture and cucumber sandwiches that could have come over on the Mayflower, was ‘1076 Madison,’ an exhibition of Cynthia Talmadge’s paintings depicting the Campbell building. The art works were displayed on easels that on other occasions had supported wreaths, photo collages, and, in one case, a deceased’s cherished dartboard”).

8. Mark Singer, “ ‘The Anti-“Godot,' " April 15, 2019 ("Lean and nimble, he has dark brown hair that aimed in various opposing directions, a horseshoe mustache, a graying goatee, and scruffy extra-in-a-saloon-scene cheeks”).

9. Ben McGrath, “Boom,” January 28, 2019 (“The best place to watch the Tappan Zee Bridge blow up, this past Tuesday, seemed to be slightly north of Lyndhurst, the old Jay Gould estate, in Tarrytown”).

10. Patricia Marx, “New Shade,” January 14, 2019 (“It was a clear morning—the sky was a shade of blue that resembled Benjamin Moore’s Icing on the Cake”).

September 16, 2019 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Johanna Fateman’s “Goings On About Town” note “Art: ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’ ” contains this superb description:

The melancholy air of an oversized replica of a broken laundry basket, by Ester Partegàs, is balanced by the cathedral-like effect of light filtering through holes in its seafoam-green form. 

2. Shauna Lyon, in her excellent “Tables For Two: Jajaja Plantas Mexicana,” writes, 

For some reason, there are peas and corn, too, but also beans and guacamole (thank God), and the chips are nicely crunchy.

That parenthetical “thank God” made me smile. It reminded me of Pauline Kael’s many parenthetical wisecracks, although Lyon’s line isn’t so much a wisecrack as it is an expression of relief. 

3.  I enjoyed Nicholas Schmidle’s Talk story “The Anti-Perfect,” particularly the part in which the street artist Bahia Shelab talks to her empty paint can: “ ‘It’s too early for you,’ she scolded one empty can, its ball bearing rattling around inside it.”

4. Judith Thurman’s Talk piece “Postscript: James Atlas” pays eloquent tribute to biographer James Atlas, who died September 4, 2019. In her piece, Thurman mentions that Atlas studied under “the great Richard Ellmann.” She says of Ellmann:

In 1959, Ellmann had published his life of James Joyce, a masterpiece that redefined literary biography for a new generation. Its message was that in telling the story of a life with scrupulous fidelity to the facts, an erudite reading of the texts, and a novelist’s feeling for the narrative, a writer could aspire to create a work of literature in its own right.

I totally agree. I discovered Ellmann’s work many years ago when I read a paperback of James Joyce’s Dubliners that included Ellmann’s “The Backgrounds of ‘The Dead.’ ” This essay, which appears as Chapter 15 in Ellmann’s James Joyce, is inspired! It traces the various sources Joyce drew upon to compose his great short story “The Dead.” Here’s a sample:

No one can know how Joyce conceived the joining of Gabriel’s final experience with the snow. But his fondness for a background of this kind is also illustrated by his use of the fireplace in “Ivy Day,” of the streetlamps in “Two Gallants,” and of the river in Finnegans Wake. It does not seem that the snow can be death, as so many have said, for it falls on living and dead alike, and for death to fall on the dead is a simple redundancy of which Joyce would not have been guilty. 

5. Jonathan Dee, in his “Dearly Departed,” a review of two new collections of Lafcadio Hearn’s short stories and a novel about Hearn by Monique Truong, coins the term “meta-folk” to describe Hearn’s writing. Reading Dee’s absorbing piece, I recalled another fine New Yorker review of Hearn’s work – Brad Leithauser’s “Alone and Extremely Alone” (April 22, 1991), included in his wonderful 1995 essay collection Penchants & Places. Leithauser says of Hearn’s writings on Japan, “He pared his prose and showed himself increasingly capable of an almost epigrammatic finish.”

Best of 2018: Reporting

Janne Iivonen, illustration for Ian Frazier's "The Maraschino Mogul"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ian Frazier, “The Maraschino Mogul,” April 23, 2018 (“As summer progressed, to add a further touch of the apocalyptic, bees returning at the end of the day to hives in Red Hook began to glow an incandescent red. Some local beekeepers found the sight of red bees flying in the sunset strangely beautiful. All of them had noticed that their honey was turning red, too”).

2. Nicholas Schmidle, “Rocket Man,” August 20, 2018 (“Ten seconds into the burn, SpaceShipTwo was supersonic. Stucky began trimming the h-stabs, steadily increasing the vehicle’s pitch until it reached sixty-eight degrees. He and Mackay were travelling at Mach 1.8—about twice as fast as a Tomahawk cruise missile. Outside the vehicle, the light was draining from the sky, turning it a deep, muddy blue”).

3. Raffi Khatchadourian, “Degrees of Freedom,” November 26, 2018 (“Then, suddenly, the injector was triggered. The sound of valves opening and closing filled the operating theatre, along with the rush of compressed air through the injector, the noise a lightning-quick mechanical breath, culminating in a metallic clink. In an instant, the ninety-six electrodes were in, like a soccer cleat going into soft earth”).

4. David Grann, “The White Darkness,” February 12 & 19, 2018 (“It was hard to breathe, and each time he exhaled the moisture froze on his face: a chandelier of crystals hung from his beard; his eyebrows were encased like preserved specimens; his eyelashes cracked when he blinked”).

5. Zadie Smith, "Through the Portal," May 7, 2018 (“Yet what is a goddess doing here, before these thin net curtains? What relation can she possibly have to that cheap metal radiator, the chipped baseboards, the wonky plastic blinds?”).

6. John McPhee, “Direct Eye Contact,” March 5, 2018 (“In a storm, a big oak in mast, up a slope from my cabin there, fell not long ago. Its trunk broke freakishly—about twenty feet up—and the crown bent all the way over and spread the upper branches like a broom upon the ground. In the branches were a number of thousands of acorns. The next morning, there was enough bear shit around that oak to fertilize the Philadelphia Flower Show”).

7. Rebecca Mead, “Meal Ticket,” June 18, 2018 (“The aged lamb on my plate looked like shreds of an automobile tire, and it tasted like something I wouldn’t be able to wash out of my hair for a week”).

  

8. Nick Paumgarten, “Getting a Shot,” January 29, 2018 (“With thirty minutes until count, they re-racked for one try. Anderson got his fake beating, and off it went, bodies flying all over the place, well past the call of ‘cut.’ Sample opened his eyes wide: ‘That one looked a little real.’ The offenders, sweaty and ebullient, collected their pizzas and filed out, under guard”).

9. Jiayang Fan, “The Spreading Vine,” March 12, 2018 (“The bootleg wine was warm, and, when I raised my cup, I could see thick sediment dancing inside. The security guard had mentioned that the wine hadn’t yet been filtered, but Liu and Fatty didn’t seem bothered. We took a sip, and Fatty’s mouth puckered. The wine was harsh, sweet but astringent, and the taste seemed to register in the esophagus as much as in the mouth. As the men drained their cups, Liu reflected that at least it hadn’t cost them anything”).

10. Janet Malcolm, “Six Glimpses of the Past,” October 29, 2018 (“I see some resemblance to myself in pictures of him. That’s all I can say about Oskar. If I had known I was going to write about him, I would have asked my mother questions. But now I am like a reporter with an empty notebook. Oskar is out of reach”).

2018 Year in Review

Jorge Colombo, "The Honeywell" (2018)

Behold another fat stack of New Yorkers – forty-eight of them, each a tremendous source of reading pleasure. It’s fascinating to watch the pile grow, starting in January with the first solitary issue. At the beginning of each year, I always wonder whether the magazine will be able to match the quality of its previous year. And each year, it always does. 2018 was no exception. Among the highlights: 

1. The appearance of three of my all-time favorite writers: John McPhee (“Direct Eye Contact,” March 5); Ian Frazier (“Airborne,” February 5; “The Maraschino Mogul,” April 23; “The Day the Great Plains Burned,” November 5); and Janet Malcolm (“Six Glimpses of the Past,” October 29). I treasure their work.

2. Three extraordinary reporting pieces: David Grann’s “The White Darkness” (February 12 & 19); Nicholas Schmidle’s “Rocket Man” (August 20); Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Degrees of Freedom” (November 26).

3. Anna Russell’s wonderful “Talk of the Town” stories, including “Close Shave” (February 5), “Caffeinated” (March 19), “Leafy Greens” (July 9 & 16), and “Reunion” (September 17).

4. Hannah Goldfield’s ravishing “Tables For Two” food descriptions. 

5. All the “Bar Tab” columns, and the wonderful Jorge Colombo artwork that illustrate the newyorker.com versions.

6. Peter Schjeldahl’s brilliant exhibition reviews, and his notes for “Goings On About Town.” Schjeldahl is the magazine’s supreme pleasure-giver. 

I could go on and on. Instead, over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I loved most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another splendid year. I’d be lost without you. New Yorker without end, amen! 

August 20, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nicholas Schmidle’s “Rocket Man,” an extraordinary profile of an extraordinary man – Virgin Galactic’s ace pilot, Mark Stucky. Schmidle puts us squarely there, in the cockpit of SpaceShipTwo, with Stucky and his co-pilot, Dave Mackay, as they fly into space:

Ten seconds into the burn, SpaceShipTwo was supersonic. Stucky began trimming the h-stabs, steadily increasing the vehicle’s pitch until it reached sixty-eight degrees. He and Mackay were travelling at Mach 1.8—about twice as fast as a Tomahawk cruise missile. Outside the vehicle, the light was draining from the sky, turning it a deep, muddy blue.

He describes what Stucky sees:

The Earth’s bright-blue surface filled his porthole. It was a stupendous sight: the outer edge of the atmosphere was dancing with wispy tendrils. The spaceship was now at eighty-four thousand feet—higher than he’d ever been. He could now testify to the awesome power of the “overview effect.”

He shows us Stucky’s poised reaction to an in-flight emergency (Schmidle calls it “a vertiginous surprise”): 

Hurriedly, Stucky attempted to right the ship by blasting thrusters of high-pressure air, which was stored in the wings and was used to orient the vehicle in low-gravity environments. Then he instructed Mackay to unlock and raise the feather. As it went up, the spaceship righted itself, just as it had on Stucky’s harrowing glide flight seven years earlier. The same innovation that had contributed to the 2014 crash was, when properly deployed, a godsend.

That 2014 crash haunts Schmidle’s piece. He describes it magnificently:

WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo zoomed off the runway. They flew about a hundred and fifty miles northeast, alongside a craggy mountain range streaked with purple and green mineral deposits. After reaching Death Valley, and still ascending, they looped back toward the release point. Stucky, in mission control, was watching the cockpit video and listening over the radio as Siebold and Alsbury ran through their checklists.

Alsbury: “Seat belts and shoulder harnesses?”

Siebold: “Snug.”

Alsbury: “Rocket burn timer?”

Siebold: “Set and verified.”

Alsbury: “Stick?”

Siebold: “Stick is forward.”

The pilots flooded their masks with oxygen, in case of an emergency. Neither was wearing a pressure suit.

Alsbury armed the release switch, and the spaceship dropped from WhiteKnightTwo. He fired the rocket. “Good light,” Siebold said, his voice reedy from the onset of g-forces. A moment later, following Stucky’s protocol, Alsbury announced their airspeed: Mach 0.8. They were in the transonic zone. Everything was going well.

“Yeehaw!” Siebold cried out.

Then Alsbury did something inexplicable. “Unlocking,” he said. He began reaching for a lever that controlled the locks on the feather.

Stucky hoped that he’d either misheard Alsbury or failed to notice that the spaceship had passed the transonic zone. He checked the Machmeter on the main display screen, and saw that the speed was still below Mach 1. His body seized: without the locks in place, aerodynamic forces would push the feather up, creating a tremendous amount of drag and shredding the spaceship in midair.

He lunged at the call button, intending to scream, “Don’t!”

Siebold grunted in agony. The audio feed stopped, and the video froze mid-frame. An engineer looked up from his console and gave Stucky a searching look.

Stucky said, “They’re gone.”

“Rocket Man” begins and ends with Stucky’s successful piloting of SpaceShipTwo into space. In between, it chronicles his personal history and how he became involved in Virgin Galactic’s amazing quest to make commercial space travel a reality. It brims with fascinating details – the way SpaceShipTwo is “attached like a marsupial to the belly of a mother ship, WhiteKnightTwo”; the labor-intensive construction of SpaceShipTwo’s frame (“you had to bind together sheets of honeycombed carbon by applying resin, cut the sheets into shapes with laser-guided precision, and bake each piece in a Celotex oven”); the technique suggested by Virgin Galactic’s flight doctor for avoiding passing out while experiencing extreme gravitational forces: “‘Pretend like you’re squeezing a walnut down there,’ she said, referring to my glutinal muscles.”

Schmidle's “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011) and “In the Crosshairs” (June 3, 2013) are New Yorker masterpieces. Now he's produced a third - “Rocket Man.” He's become one of the magazine's best writers.

Nothing "Mere" About It (Contra George Saunders)

Photoillustration by John Ritter (from Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting bin Laden")

George Saunders, in his Introduction to A Grace Paley Reader (2017), says of Paley, "Mere straightforward representation is not her game." That “mere” irks me. It condescends to straightforward representation, i.e., description of reality as it actually is, treating it as a lesser art than fiction. I disagree. There’s nothing “mere” about great reporting pieces such as William Finnegan’s “Silver or Lead” (The New Yorker, May 31, 2010), Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting bin Laden” (The New Yorker, August 8, 2011), Jill Lepore’s “Battleground America” (The New Yorker, April 23, 2012), Richard Preston’s “The Ebola Wars” (The New Yorker, October 27, 2014), and Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017), to name five that quickly come to mind. These extraordinary pieces, in their detail, structure, imagery, rhythm, clarity, and texture, are as artful as any fiction, perhaps more so, because, unlike, say, Saunders’s cartoonish fictions, which distort reality, they report it as accurately as possible.