May 31, 2021 Issue

Nicolas Niarchos is back in the magazine! He’s been absent for a while. He was one of The New Yorker’s best “Bar Tab” writers. Remember his great “Bar Tab: Berlin,” February 8 & 15, 2016 (“At the bottom of the stairs, in a barrel-vaulted watering hole, long lines of people waited for the bathroom from whence burst ebullient gaggles of young women and a madly coughing guy in a Thrasher hat”)? In this week’s issue, Niarchos has a “Reporter at Large” piece titled “Buried Dreams.” It’s about cobalt mining in southern Congo. That’s not a subject high on my list of interests. But because the piece is by Niarchos, I decided to check it out. I found it quite absorbing. I learned, among other things, that southern Congo sits atop an estimated 3.4 million metric tons of cobalt, almost half the world’s known supply, that cobalt is a key ingredient of lithium-ion batteries that are used to power everything from call phones to electric cars, that China is the world’s largest producer of lithium-ion batteries, and that the industrial cobalt mines of southern Congo are largely owned by China. I also learned about the brutal conditions at some of these Chinese-owned mines. Niarchos writes, 

At some sites, the treatment of Congolese by their Chinese bosses is reminiscent of the colonial period. In a video shared with me by Mutindi, of Good Shepherd, a Congolese guard with a Kalashnikov slung across his back beats a man who is lying, semi-naked, in mud, his arms bound. Behind the camera, a man otherwise speaking Mandarin starts yelling “Piga!”—the Kiswahili word for “beat.” In the background are seven of the trucks that Congo Dongfang uses to transport cobalt ore.

Of course, I’m interested in the style of Niarchos’s piece as much as I am in its substance. I relish the way he writes in the “I.” For example:

In a warehouse at the site, I watched a man, his face grim, pulverizing ore on a concrete floor as two Chinese overseers scrutinized creuseurs from behind a barrier of chicken wire. No Chinese employee interacted with me, and nobody responded when I waved in greeting.

One night in Kolwezi, I went to a Chinese-run casino with a few Congolese friends. I was immediately allowed inside, but they were stopped at the door and told that they could not gamble. Black Africans, the casino’s staff explained, can’t be trusted with money. At a roulette table, a host of drunken white South Africans addressed a Congolese croupier as “Black man.”

One Sunday morning, I met Kajumba and Trésor Mputu at the Temple Évangélique de Carmel, a hangar-style megachurch in the center of Kolwezi.

Passages like these give the piece the force of real experience. This is a different, more serious Niarchos than the one I know from “Bar Tab.” And while I admire “Buried Dreams,” I still prefer the sensuous lines of those wonderful sybaritic drinking columns. This one, for example:  “Behind a brown door on a blasted section of Jackson Avenue, a whip-thin saloon that bears the neighborhood’s name is bringing back a version of the past, with the clink of hand-cut ice in tumblers and the waft of freshly cut orange peel” ("Bar Tab: Dutch Kills," November 2, 2015). 

Dina Litovsky's Striking "Jessica West" Photo

Photo by Dina Litvosky for Helen Rosner's "What We're Buying for the Quarantine"

One of the best New Yorker photos of the year (so far) is Dina Litovsky’s picture of an interesting looking woman named Jessica West, wearing sunglasses, surgical mask, and a beautiful textured brown-tan-orange sweater, standing in front of pallets loaded with boxes, bottles, and other subtly colorful items. The photo is one among several excellent Litovskys illustrating Helen Rosner’s “What We’re Buying for the Quarantine” (newyorker.com, March 18, 2020.

Litovsky first impinged my consciousness with her striking kubaneh-in-a-flowerpot photo for Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Timma" (The New Yorker, October 26, 2015). That one made my “Best of 2015: Photos.”

Her sharp capture of Phil Young for Nicolas Niarchos’s “Tables For Two: Lenox Saphire” (January 2, 2017) was on my “Best of 2017: Photos.”

And I wouldn’t be surprised if her “Jessica West” appears on my “Best of 2020” list. 

Excellent work, Dina! 

Best of 2018: Talk

João Fazenda, illustration for Michael Schulman's "Grasshopper"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Talk of the Town” pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Michael Schulman, “Grasshopper,” October 15, 2018 [“He took a breath. ‘Moving along: you also serve a beef-tartare tostada?’ (Correct.) ‘And that has some fried grasshopper on it?’ (Actually, the insect is toasted over a wood fire, Bazdarich said. Radcliffe, his pencil trembling, scribbled ‘toasted’ ”)].

2. Anna Russell, “Leafy Greens,” July 9 & 16, 2018 [“Hydroponics are a slippery slope. You might find yourself, one Sunday morning, at a Santa Monica farmers’ market, loitering among the apples, say. You come across a bunch of papalo, a leafy herb native to central Mexico, and toss it in your mouth (your tastes are expansive; a papalo leaf is nothing to you) and wham!: a brand-new flavor. Suddenly, you’re up at all hours, watching vertical-farming videos on YouTube, ordering seed packets from eBay, buying rhizomes—rhizomes!—and worrying about spider mites. You get some fennel crowns and a pouch of parasitic wasps, and you’re on your way”].

3. Anna Russell, “Reunion,” September 17, 2018 (“Once, he arrived to find cello parts scattered around the room, attended to by different experts, like an intensive-care unit”).

4. Anna Russell, “Caffeinated,” March 19, 2018 (“In Think Coffee, a man in a blazer, holding two hot drinks, waited while the pair examined the dimples on the compostable lids. ‘Decaf, cream, and black—that’s all,’ Specht said”).

5. Anna Russell, “Close Shave,” February 5, 2018 (“Ralph applied shaving cream and started to make short, silent strokes with a straight razor. A fan rattled; outside, a bus pulled away from the curb”).

6. Amy Goldwasser, “Wet Ink,” November 12, 2018 [“After finishing uptown, a few hours later, they went to Maffia’s apartment, to make ink. One batch was pure pokeberry juice (vivid magenta). Another included five varieties of acorn boiled with rust from various sources—nuts and bolts, wire, brackets—and a drop of gum arabic. It came out a complicated silver-gray”].

7. Nick Paumgarten, “Angel in Hastings,” April 23, 2018 [“The contrast between the back seat’s spacious, buttery interior and the driver’s livery (T-shirt, worn jeans, jean jacket) is sharp enough to make you wonder if the car is stolen”].

8. Sam Wasson, “Yes, And,” July 23, 2018 (“Levy furrowed his eyebrows and did an impression of a lugubrious rabbi. ‘What a place to lose a cow,’ he said”).

9. Lauren Collins, “Invitation,” July 9 & 16, 2018 (“De Rougé lifted his laptop so that the Inserras could get a better look at the room’s pistachio-colored moldings. Then he turned around so they could see all the way down the gallery—a two-hundred-and-thirty-foot view”).

10. Nicolas Niarchos, “Cartography,” July 9 & 16, 2018 (“He swivelled the antenna, and the music turned into a burst of Creole”).

July 9 & 16, 2018 Issue

Four excellent “Talk of the Town” stories in this week’s issue: Nicolas Niarchos’s “Cartography”; Anna Russell’s “Leafy Greens”; Betsy Morais’ “Debrief”; and Lauren Collins’s “Invitation.”

Nicolas Niarchos’s “Cartography” is about a guy named David Goren who’s obsessed with pirate radio stations. Niarchos immediately snares my attention with the sort of found detail I relish: 

With one hand, he tuned an FM dial connected to a directional antenna. With the other, he jotted frequencies onto a notepad advertising Ortho Tri-Cyclen. (“That’s my wife’s,” he said. “She’s a nurse-practitioner.”)

Only certain writers notice stuff like that. It may not be much, just a notepad advertising a contraceptive, but it catches Niarchos’s eye. He must’ve asked Goren about it, or Goren noticed him noticing it – hence Goren’s explanation in parenthesis.

The notepad isn’t mentioned again. Niarchos goes on to describe Goren tuning in various pirate radio stations. We listen in as a Caribbean religious pirate hails a man in Toronto: “ ‘Good evening, Mr. Junior,’ a man’s voice said, addressing a listener. ‘Mr. Junior up there in Toronto, Canada.’ ”

In Anna Russell’s “Leafy Greens,” chef Alex Guarnaschelli visits Farm.One, Manhattan’s largest hydroponic farm, located “deep underground beneath the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary and the Michelin-starred restaurant Atera.” Guided by the farm’s creator, Rob Laing, Guarnaschelli tastes some of the plants – anise hyssop, micro-dill, mizuna, mint flower, bronze-fennel fronds. My favourite passage is a description of her encounter with a row of marigolds:

A row of marigolds caught her eye. “The taste of a marigold is one I deeply associate with my first tomato,” she said. She recalled how her grandmother would plant marigolds next to tomatoes because they keep the bugs away.

Laing was collecting a sample from a top shelf. “We’ve seen more people using it for desserts,” he said. “Like with chocolate, even.”

“Oh, that’s so fucking Swedish,” Guarnaschelli said. 

That last line made me laugh, although it’s hard to say why – maybe the emphasis on “Swedish,” maybe its profane gusto. Whatever the reason, it’s a terrific line. Russell captures it perfectly. She has a great ear. 

In Betsy Morais’ “Debrief,” Eugene Thacker, a philosopher who teaches a course on pessimism, meets up with a few of his former students at a Williamsburg bookstore. Morais writes,

A sign on the front door said, “Come on in,” but the store’s grate was pulled down. “Uh-oh,” said Aaron Newman, who recently completed his master’s degree in liberal studies. It had been raining, and there was still mist in the air. Rachelle Rahmé, another recent graduate, said, “I love this kind of weather.” Soon, the sun peeked out, the shopkeeper arrived, and the group was ushered into a pleasant back yard. Thacker, who is from the Seattle area, told them that he takes comfort in a gloomy sky: “It’s contemplative.”

I like the easy-going atmosphere of this piece. For a bunch of pessimists, Thacker and his group seem almost cheerful. Morais catches this paradoxically positive vibe in her final paragraph:

If pessimism is about futility, what’s the point of writing about it? Thacker’s not sure, but he thinks that there’s something interesting about “undertaking the practice anyway.” He added, “Maybe it means next time around, the only students who get A’s are the ones who don’t turn in a paper.” The alums laughed. Humor can be helpful to pessimists. “I went through a phase of watching a lot of standup comedy,” Thacker said. “I love George Carlin. He takes no political side. Everyone deserves our spite.”

Lauren Collins is the veteran in this quartet, with a number of Talk classics to her credit, including, “Sideline” (June 19, 2017), “Dog’s Dinner” (February 8 & 15, 2016), and “Bird’s-Eye View” (July 6, 2015). Her “Invitation,” in this week’s issue, tells the story of a French count who tracked down descendants of an American army doctor who bivouacked at his family’s estate in 1944. The count’s name is Aymeric de Rougé, “the proprietor of Baronville—a twenty-four-hundred-acre estate, an hour southwest of Paris”; the army doctor’s name is Frank Inserra, who “had been particularly kind to de Rougé’s father, Bertrand.” Inserra died in 1990. The nub of this absorbing piece is a Skype conversation between de Rouge and Inserra’s son, Francis, in Rockville, Maryland, and Inserra's daughter, Donna, in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Collins writes,

On a recent Wednesday, Aymeric de Rougé was at Baronville, where he manages ventures related to the estate, including a line of champagne. He sat in front of a laptop in the dining room, beneath a huge chandelier.

“O.K., I have you blasted through the speakers,” he said to Francis and his sister Donna. De Rougé had invited them to visit Baronville, but for now they were Skyping.

My favourite part of “Invitation” is the conclusion, when de Rouge uses his computer to show Francis and Donna the room he’s in:

Toward the end of the conversation, Donna, tearing up, said that it had made her feel as if her father were a little closer. Then Francis addressed the Count. “I have to tell you,” he said, “I’m looking at your house—”

“ ‘House’ doesn’t seem like the right word,” Donna said.

De Rougé lifted his laptop so that the Inserras could get a better look at the room’s pistachio-colored moldings. Then he turned around so they could see all the way down the gallery—a two-hundred-and-thirty-foot view.

“Oh, my heavens,” Donna said. “Can you imagine what that would’ve been like for Dad?”

It’s an inspired ending to a touching story, which Collins beautifully tells in a mere 933 well-chosen words.

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.

Top Ten "Bar Tab" Drinks of 2017

Jorge Colombo, "Super Power" (2017)

If you relish “Bar Tab” drink names, as I do, you’ll likely appreciate the Baby Zombie and the Fuck You Steve, among other alcoholic highlights of 2017. These eminently drinkable concoctions, plus eight others, make up my Top Ten “Bar Tab” Drinks of 2017. Enjoy!

1. The Ancient Mariner (“Rum, grapefruit liqueur, lime”: Wei Tchou, “Cape House,” July 10 & 17, 2017).

2. The John Campbell’s Martini [“And a John Campbell’s Martini (twenty-five dollars) was smooth, with sumptuous olives”: Colin Stokes, “The Campbell,” June 19, 2017].

3. The Royal Mile (“Vodka, a grapefruity rhubarb purée”: Talia Lavin, “Highlands,” July 24, 2017).

4. The Starring Angelo (“In which oodles of Campari are mixed with bourbon and Italian vermouth”: Nicolas Niarchos, “Et Al.,” August 28, 2017).

5. The Penichillin [“Diamond Reef’s signature cocktail harks back to a darling of New York mixology: the Penicillin (Scotch, lemon, honey, ginger), invented by the co-owner Sam Ross when he worked at Sasha Petraske’s Milk & Honey, and now a classic worldwide. Diamond Reef’s frozen take (the Penichillin) employs an age-old principle: anything is more fun when tossed into a slushy machine”: Wei Tchou, “Diamond Reef,” May 1, 2017].

6. Willie’s Frozen Coffee (“A decadent caffeine and whiskey sludge named for Willie Nelson”: David Kortava, “Skinny Dennis,” April 17, 2017).

7. The Moga (“The drink is very spirituous, comprising Japanese whiskey, rum, and aged plum liquor”: Wei Tchou, “Bar Moga,” May 22, 2017).

8. The Fuck You Steve (“Radiates with mezcal, pineapple, and Campari”: Nicolas Niarchos, “Et Al.,” August 28, 2017).

9. The Three Hour Kyoto Negroni (“Sitting permanently atop the counter is a tall and intricate Japanese cold-brew apparatus, in which the makings of a Negroni drip slowly through freshly ground coffee”: David Kortava, “Kobrick Coffee Co.,” September 4, 2017).

10. The Baby Zombie (“Applejack, pineapple rum, absinthe, served in a mug with the likeness of a glaring bird”: Talia Lavin, “The Penrose,” November 27, 2017).

September 4, 2017 Issue

What’s this – a TV-themed New Yorker? Cancel my subscription. Just kidding. I’ll get over it. TV isn’t the only subject covered in this week’s issue, thank God. “Goings On About Town” brims with wonderful items. For example: “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”); “drumbeats soft and clipping, synths modulated into shivers, with vocals sneaking acid-dream motifs in through the fuzz” (“Night Life: Neon Indian”); “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”).

I also enjoyed the two book reviews – Adam Kirsch’s “Voices from the Void” and Dan Chiasson’s “Merry War.” Kirsch’s piece is illustrated with an exquisite Riccardo Vecchio portrait of Fernando Pessoa that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker artwork.

May 1, 2017, Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I enjoy Mark Ulriksen’s vivid baseball covers immensely. This week’s issue features a dandy. Titled “Strike Zone,” it’s a close-up of a scene at home plate: a wide-open-mouthed umpire is calling a strike; a wide-open-mouthed Red Sox batter is expressing dismay; and a wide-open-mouthed Yankee catcher, holding the ball in his mitt, looks ecstatic.

2. “Goings On About Town: Art” says of Maureen Gallace’s paintings, “Like the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, her work generates power from reticence.” It’s an interesting observation. But Bishop also had a keen eye for detail. As Bonnie Costello says in Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), “Her eye delights in the particular.” The same can’t be said for Gallace’s paintings. They efface detail. In this regard, the analogy with Bishop’s poems seems tenuous.

Maureen Gallace, "Summer House / Dunes" (2009)

3. “Goings On About Town: Night Life” says of Alan Broadbent,

He’s played the role of the best man for years now, both as the pianist for Quartet West—the celebrated ensemble led by the late, great bassist Charlie Haden—and as an A-list studio arranger and conductor. But Broadbent also deserves considerable attention for his work as a probing stylist who deftly balances the rhapsodic and the propulsive.

I agree. Listen to him play George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” on his 2005 album ’Round Midnight. It’s the most intense, swinging, gorgeous rendition of that great song you’ll ever hear.

4. Wei Tchow’s piece on Diamond Reef is classic “Bar Tab,” right up there with Nicolas Niarchos’s “Dutch Kills.” Both pieces mention the Penicillin (Scotch, lemon, honey, ginger), my favorite cocktail. Tchow refers to a witty Diamond Reef variation – the Penichillin: “Diamond Reef’s frozen take (the Penichillin) employs an age-old principle: anything is more fun when tossed into a slushy machine.”

Year In Review: One Last Caress

Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn

Readers of this blog may wonder what this year-end flurry of lists – the best of this, the best of that – is all about. I sometimes wonder myself. I think it’s a way for me to prolong the pleasure of these wonderful pieces. The truth is I’m not yet ready to let them go. Yes, I’m looking forward to next year’s run. But I’m also fondly looking back at the many pieces that have afforded me such bliss. In a way, these lists are a last caress before bidding them adieu. But let’s not get too morose. I can always retrieve them from the New Yorker archive any time I want to.

And now I find my listing impulse is not yet exhausted. I want to make one more – a final inventory of 2016 New Yorker reading pleasure. Here goes.

Best Reporting Piece: Dana Goodyear’s “The Earth Mover,” August 29, 2016.

Best Critical Piece: James Wood’s “Scrutiny,” December 12, 2016.

Best “Talk of the Town” Piece: Laura Parker’s “Bee’s Knees,” March 21, 2016.

Best “Goings On About Town” Piece: Nicolas Niarchos’s “Bar Tab: Berlin,” February 8 & 15, 2016.

Best Illustration: Bendik Kaltenborn’s “Thundercat,” for Matthew Trammell’s “Night Life: Rock Bottom,” June 6 & 13, 2016.

Best Photograph: Pari Dukovic’s “Yuja Wang,” for Janet Malcolm’s “The Performance Artist,” September 5, 2016.

Best Short Story: Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Gender Studies,” August 29, 2016 (“Their eyes meet—she’s perhaps three per cent less hammered than she was down in the lobby, though still hammered enough not to worry about her drunkenness wearing off anytime soon—and at first he says nothing. Then, so seriously that his words almost incite in her a genuine emotion, he says, ‘You’re pretty’ ”).

Best Poem: Julie Bruck’s “Blue Heron, Walking,” August 29, 2016 (“these outsized / apprehenders of grasses and stone, snatchers of mouse and vole, / these mindless magnificents that any time now will trail / their risen bird like useless bits of leather”).

Best Blog Post: Lev Mendes’s “Philip Larkin’s Life Behind the Camera” (“Page-Turner,” January 29, 2016) (“Photography, like poetry, may have simply provided him a way of noticing and preserving”).

Best Cover: J. J. Sempé’s “Waves,” for the August 29, 2016, issue.

Best Issue: April 4, 2016 – The Food and Travel Issue, containing “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” – all excellent.

Now, a few images from my 2016 New Yorker reading experience, in no particular order, montage-style:

TEN-FOOT-TALL BALD EAGLE: “I went to see a ten-foot-tall American bald eagle, made entirely out of red-white-and-blue Duck Brand duct tape, on display in a parking lot.” [Jill Lepore, “The War and the Roses,” August 8 & 15, 2016]

SURFBOARD WITH SKELETON: “Hanging just above the front door is a yellow surfboard with a skeleton clinging to it, bony limbs locked around the board for better purchase.” [Talia Levin, “Bar Tab: Otto’s Shrunken Head Tiki Bar & Lounge,” December 12, 2016]

SILVER ADIDAS WITH WINGS: “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.” [Lizzie Widdicombe, “Barbie Boy,” March 21, 2016]

MERMAID GOWN: “Her appliqués mushroom magically on the slope of a skirt. A mermaid gown that Charles James might have made for Gypsy Rose Lee is crossbred with a Ming vase; a cascade of ruffles evokes the waterfall in a brush-painted landscape.” [Judith Thurman, “The Empire’s New Clothes,” March 21, 2016]

SEBRIGHT CHICKENS: “The Sebrights were crazy-beautiful: proud-looking, with jutting breasts, each of their silver-white feathers edged in black, as though someone had outlined them with a Sharpie.” [Lauren Collins, “Come to the Fair,” April 4, 2016]

FLAME TREES: “Lipstick-red flame trees were in bloom, and the air was filled with the intoxicating smell of gasoline.” [Dana Goodyear, “Mezcal Sunrise,” April 4, 2016]

TEN-FOOT-LONG ICICLES: (“Pressing ourselves against the interior walls and shimmying along the narrow banks of the rushing water, we worked our way into a vaulting palace of ice, where ten-foot-long icicles hung from the ceiling like giant fishhooks. Underneath the roar, you could hear the drip of melting ice.” [Dexter Filkins, “The End of Ice,” April 4, 2016]

SOVIET-ERA TRACTOR: “A Soviet-era tractor, spindly and goggle-eyed, gleamed within the shadows of a stone barn.” [James Lasdun, “Alone in the Alps,” April 11, 2016]

GOLDEN SKELETON ON BLUE HORSE: “Walk downhill along the path that leads away from the Sphinx, and you are confronted by a voluptuous golden skeleton—Death—riding a blue horse over a mirrored green sea, from which disembodied arms stretch up to cling to the world of the living.” [Ariel Levy, “Beautiful Monsters,” April 18, 2016]

CALLERY-PEAR TREE: “Elmore, the pro, then dazzled everybody by extracting a noxious blue plastic drop cloth from a sidewalk callery-pear tree in about half a second.” [Ian Frazier, “The Bag Bill,” May 2, 2016]

SKIN BOAT CONFERENCE TABLE: “At the headquarters, a three-story building near the ocean in Barrow, a whaling skin boat provides the center support for a glass-topped boardroom table.” [Tom Kizzia, “The New Harpoon,” September 12, 2016]

VOLKSWAGON KARMANN GHIA: “a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, its hood and trunk popped open, like an upturned deerstalker cap” [Jill Lepore, “Esmé in Neverland,” November 21, 2016]

DANGLING NECKTIE: “Despite an insistent voice in my head telling me to look away, I continued to observe, bending my head farther down for a closer view. As I did so, I failed to notice that my necktie had slipped down through the slats of the louvred screen and was dangling into the motel room within a few yards of the woman’s head.” [Gay Talese, “The Voyeur’s Motel,” April 11, 2016]

WHALE-LIVER MEMBRANE: “ ‘We believe if you follow these rituals, the animals will always come to us,’ Oomittuk said, as he pulled a drum made of whale-liver membrane from a carrying case.” [Tom Kizzia, "The New Harpoon," Septmber 12, 2016]

ORANGE MASON JAR WITH CREAM CLOUD: “The delicious budino arrives in a small orange Mason jar with a cloud of cream.” [Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: Covina,” July 25, 2016]

PORCELAIN DOLL BEER TAPS: “The taps are porcelain doll heads, which stare like angelic witnesses to the evening’s festivities.” [Becky Cooper, “Bar Tab: Yours Sincerely,” June 6 & 13, 2016]

RICKETY GONDOLA: “Chhota Shigri—six miles long and shaped like a branching piece of ginger—is considered one of the Himalayas’ most accessible glaciers, but our way across was a rickety gondola, an open cage reminiscent of a shopping cart, which runs on a cable over the Chandra. With one of the porters working a pulley, we climbed in and rode across, one by one, while fifty feet below the river rushed through gigantic boulders.” [Dexter Filkins, “The End of Ice,” April 4, 2016]

GOLDEN BANANA PEEL: “A lamp whose base is a golden banana peel suggests a knowing wink.” [GOAT, April 25, 2016]

SCARECROW OWL DECOYS: “Wherever you go, scarecrow owl decoys solemnly watch over you from the shelves above.” [David Kortava, "Bar Tab: The Owl Farm," November 14, 2016]

STAG BLADDERS: “He had just urged an audience of Silesian farmers to fertilize their fields with cow intestines stuffed with chamomile blossoms, and stag bladders filled with yarrow root (stag bladders being ‘almost an image of the cosmos’).” [Burkhard Bilger, “Ghost Stories,” September 12, 2016]

And on that pungent note, I’ll end. Thank you New Yorker for another magnificent year of reading pleasure.

Credit: The above illustration, by Bendik Kaltenborn, is from “Above & Beyond” (The New Yorker, January 25, 2016).