January 19, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Paige Williams’ absorbing “Call of the Wild.” It’s a portrait of an auxiliary “all hazards” team of elite outdoorsmen who help park rangers at Great Smoky Mountains National Park pull off the most difficult extractions. The team is named BUSAR, for Backcountry Unit Search and Rescue. It was founded by Andrew Harrington. 

Williams describes Great Smoky Mountains Park. She calls it “a Bermuda Triangle of volatile conditions.” She reports, 

Visitors have been known to climb to a high point to watch a sunset, forgetting that they’ll need light to get back down. They don’t think to bring water. They misjudge distances and underestimate the landscape, which isn’t just steep; it’s slippery, snaky, rocky, rooty, humid, buggy, foggy, and misty. Each year in the national park, there are more than a hundred backcountry emergencies.

She profiles Harrington, who is an ardent outdoorsman and homesteader. She says of him,

He ate daylilies, violet greens, chickweed, shepherd’s purse, greenbrier tips, sheep sorrel, thistle stalks. He learned how to make bamboo-pokeweed spring rolls, persimmon ice cream, spicebush muffins, dandelion jelly, pan-fried groundnuts, watercress soup, acorn cookies, roast squirrel glazed with honey and balsamic vinegar. If a wild hog came onto his property, he killed, butchered, and ate it, then freeze-dried the leftovers. He dried stalks of goldenrod and mint on racks.

Williams talks with other members of Team BUSAR. They’re an impressive crew. One of the piece’s most striking passages is a list of their names (and nicknames), together with a line or two on each, indicating their experience and background:

Big Bill is Bill Ivey, a Smokies wildlife ranger and a marine reservist who is six feet six. Jernigan is Jernigator, who, this year, at age fifty-five, left his software career to become a wilderness E.M.T. and a park ranger, the life he’d wanted all along. Captain Morgan is Andrew Morgan, a physician’s assistant and a former member of the Army Special Forces. Superman is Ken Miller, a retired surgeon who serves with nine local, state, and federal SAR organizations but—so goes a joke—assures his wife that he belongs to only one. (Several years ago, when Miller turned eighty, the guys were so excited about throwing him a surprise party that they forgot to invite him.) Lando, Ben Landkammer, grew up in Montana and trains canines. Silkwood, Mark Silkwood, is also ex-Special Forces, and an Army contractor. Cody Watson, BUSAR’s quartermaster, recently retired early from the Air National Guard; he’s an E.M.T., as is John Danner. Zack Copeland, who chairs BUSAR’s board, is a former wildlife biologist turned poultry farmer. Howitzer, Andrew Howe, is a civil engineer and a competitive mountain biker. Kelly Street is a Knoxville lawyer and a former military-intelligence officer. Caleb Edmiston is a chiropractor who, like Herrington, has competed in mixed martial arts. Greg Grieco played football at the University of Tennessee and now runs a nonprofit that rescues bear cubs. Obi-Wad, Jeff Wadley—a pastor, an author, and a former Civil Air Patrol officer who’s been working SAR missions in the Smokies for more than forty-five years—teaches courses on “lost-person behavior” and may be the greatest living expert on airplane crashes in the park. Daz, Andrew Randazzo, started a company that provides continuing education for medical-industry professionals; he did emergency-response work in New York City during the covid-19 outbreak, and near the border of Syria and Turkey after the earthquakes in 2023. Ski is Brian Borkowski, who flies Black Hawk helicopters for the Tennessee Army National Guard.

Williams also vividly describes two rescues that BUSAR successfully carried out.

My favorite part of “Call of the Wild” is the last section, an account of Williams’ experience camping with the BUSARS. Some of them have brought their kids and dogs with them. I relish this passage:

Street built the fire the way Herrington had taught everyone, using tinder, fatwood, and Vaseline-soaked cotton balls, hit with a spark from a ferro rod. Every busarcarries personal fire-starter kits and a twenty-five-pound pack filled with gear: headlamps, extra batteries, survival blanket, chem light, grid reader, pens, hemostatic gauze, trash bag, dry bag, gaiters, gloves, spork, M.R.E.s, flagging tape, two types of tourniquets, HotHands, 550 cord, multi-tool, folding saw, microspikes. Showing me all of this one day, Sharbs held up a small item and told me what Herrington had told him: “This is the best fire starter in the history of man.” It was a Bic lighter.

Williams has a wonderful eye for detail. Consider this delightful passage, for example:

The kids were up at daybreak, congregating beneath the parachute, having already swung on the rope swing, picked on one another, cried a little, and gotten into a cooler of sodas. One was eating sour cream and shredded cheddar for breakfast until a dog slurped it off her plate. Another made a “rifle” out of duct tape and sticks. Two had turned huge dried leaves into “fairy hats.”

“Call of the Wild” is a memorable portrait of an extraordinary group of people. I highly recommend it. 

Postscript: “Call of the Wild” reminded me of another excellent “search and rescue” piece – Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues,” a report on Iceland’s sprawling system of emergency-response volunteers, known collectively as Slysavarnafélagið Landsbjörg, or, in English, the Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue—ICE-SAR. 

Mid-Year Top Ten 2025

Photo by Mathias Depardon, from Nick Paumgarten's "Helicopter Parents"

Time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Helicopter Parents,” February 17 & 24, 2025 (“Lying in the desiccated grass, amid the dead sunflower stalks and the barrage of flies, the heat rising—the scorching of the sun, the wheedling of the engine—I had an uncommonly intense sense of our implacable need to bend nature to our will, for both good and ill”).

2. Burkhard Bilger, “Stepping Out,” February 17 & 24, 2025 (“Then a voice rang out: ‘Check! Adjust!’ A metronome sounded, and the band began to march. The voice belonged to Chris Kreke, the band’s director. He was standing on the roof of an observation tower four stories above us, leaning over the railing with a microphone in hand. When I went up to join him, I could see the band’s choreography unfolding below: lines crossing and reversing course, squares collapsing and turning inside out, circles exploding into smaller circles like fireworks in slow motion”).

3. Nick Paumgarten, “Guitar Heroes,” May 26, 2025 (“Margouleff handed me the Keithburst and, plugging it into a small amp, urged me to play. One grows accustomed to never touching the art, but I hit some open chords, the few I know. By gum, whether it was the instrument itself or the ghosts of fingers past, the sound was rich and sassy, and moved me to make faces”).

4. Paige Williams, “Still Life,” June 9, 2025 (“It was nine-thirty in the morning and so windy that miniature flags on graves were horizontal. The gravediggers were preparing for a funeral at two. Four neon-orange stakes marked off a rectangle in front of a headstone. The stone was inscribed with the name of a woman buried at nine feet; her husband was coming in at seven”).

5. Ian Frazier, “Pigeon Toes,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“The pigeon lay with its feet spread, like a K.O.’d boxer. Frank started on the left foot, using scissors, tweezers, and other sanitized instruments she took from plastic packages. The work requires a watchmaker’s focus”).

6. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Volume Five,” January 20, 2025 (“I attribute my antiquity to dark-chocolate almond bark”).

7. Nick Paumgarten, “Dreams and Nightmares,” March 10, 2025 (“At the Bounty House of Wingman, the hype guys lined up for free boxes of chicken wings to go with a roll of paper towels, while on a nearby patch of artificial turf civilians and pros took turns attempting to throw green Nerf footballs through downfield targets”).

8. Jill Lepore, “War of Words,” February 17 & 24, 2025 (“ ‘A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that’s open in the back’ was another of Bennet’s aphorisms. ‘An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass’ ”).

9. Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Private Eye,” February 3, 2025 (“Every single moment is so full of information that you could spend a lifetime surveying it”).

10. M. R. O'Connor, “Line of Fire,” February 3, 2025 (“We shrugged on our backpacks—which included silver, cocoonlike fire shelters that we could deploy if we were overtaken by flames—and lined up”).  

Best Cover

Richard McGuire, “Zooming In” (April 14, 2025)

Best of “The Critics”

Justin Chang, “Mean Time,” January 13, 2025 (“Woe betide anyone who bumps into Pansy on the street, but to watch her onscreen produces a kind of bruised exhilaration; her viciousness has an awesome life force. At a certain point, I began wondering whether Pansy would be best served not by counselling or antidepressants but by a few pints and an open mike”).

Daniel Immerwahr, “Check This Out,” January 27, 2025 (“Even the supposedly attention-pulverizing TikTok deserves another look. Hayes, who works in TV, treats TikTok wholly as something to watch—an algorithmically individualized idiot box. But TikTok is participatory: more than half its U.S. adult users have posted videos. Where the platform excels is not in slick content but in amateur enthusiasm, which often takes the form of trends with endless variations. To join in, TikTokers spend hours preparing elaborate dance moves, costume changes, makeup looks, lip synchs, trick shots, pranks, and trompe-l’oeil camera maneuvers”).

Jackson Arn, “Royal Flush," February 17 & 24, 2025 [“In many of the cases from ‘Seeing Red’ where red does dominate, the work in question comes off as an affront, crossing some chromatic line—look at Warhol’s ‘Red Lenin’ or STIK’s ‘Liberty (Red)’ and feel the wet raspberry splatter you”].

Maggie Doherty, “Catch Me If You Can,” March 3, 2025 (“A devil and a sage, a trickster and a teacher, a farm owner incapable of farming, a professor without a college degree: Frost was always two incompatible things at once. He had a doubleness at the very heart of him, and he put his contradictions into his poetry”).

Hannah Goldfield, “Home Slice,” March 31, 2025 (“The first restaurant to become known for Indian pizza is Zante, in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. One day, a few months ago, I made a pilgrimage there, arriving midafternoon to meet the longtime owner, Dalvinder Multani. In the large, empty dining room, quiet but for a Punjabi radio station, I sat at a table by the window and sampled two of the restaurant’s most popular pies, served with mint and tamarind chutneys. One slice was vegetarian, thickly layered with masala sauce, paneer, spinach, and eggplant, plus garlic, ginger, green onions, and a sprinkling of fresh cilantro. The other featured a trio of lamb, chicken, and prawns, the last dyed a near-neon pink with paprika”).

Adam Gopnik, “Fresh Paint,” April 14, 2025 (“Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open”).

Louis Menand, “Strong Opinions,” June 2, 2025 (“And the rumpled, rubber-faced manner, the popping eyes, the languorous drawl, the charmingly wicked grin he flashed when he thought he had scored a kill—Buckley was a show unto himself”).

Elizabeth Kolbert, "Seeds of Doubt," June 30, 2025 ("The new tools and the new threats are bound up in each other—two sides, as it were, of the same leaf. If it is reasonable to imagine that we will, somehow or other, find ways to feed ten billion people, it is also reasonable to fear how much damage will be done in the process").

Best Illustration

Gaia Alari’s illustration for Ian Frazier’s “Pigeon Toes” (May 12 & 19, 2025)

Best “Goings On”

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: L&L Hawaiian Barbecue,” March 3, 2025 [“L&L’s food hits with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and that’s exactly the point. There are leavening notes here and there: a jazzy sliver of cruciferousness from the cabbage that comes with the kalua pork, or the sharp whistle of vinegar that runs through the thin, sweet sauce drizzled over the juicy, panko-crisped chicken katsu (my clear favorite of the proteins). When making your selection, skip the loco moco, made with plain hamburger patties doused in flavorless brown gravy and topped with two fried eggs. You can also pass on the saimin, the restaurant’s take on Hawaiian ramen—made with a dashi broth and whatever meaty toppings your heart might desire—which is so salty as to be near-inedible. Get a musubi or two, which is marvellous, the squishy pillow of rice, the ineffable Spamminess of Spam, the sweet smear of teriyaki”].

Sheldon Pearce, “Goings On: Digicore,” May 5, 2025 (“The hyperpop microgenre digicore—a chaotic, internet-forward mashup of music styles born on Discord servers for use in the video game Minecraft—might have vanished into the ether if not for the explosive artist Jane Remover. Inspired primarily by E.D.M. producers such as Skrillex and Porter Robinson and the rappers Tyler, the Creator and Trippie Redd, the Newark-born musician débuted at seventeen, as dltzk, with the EP “Teen Week” (2021), helping to define an obscure anti-pop scene moving at warp speed. Their music’s wide bandwidth now spans the pitched-up sampling of the album “dariacore” (under the alias Leroy) and the emo-leaning work of the side project Venturing. This all-devouring approach culminates in the ecstatic thrasher album ‘Revengeseekerz,’ a maximalist tour de force that makes ephemerality feel urgent”).

Rachel Syme, “Local Gems: Fountain Pen Hospital,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“The store’s longtime head salesman is a fountain-pen savant. I recently went hunting for a wet-writing flexible nib and, within a few moments, he produced from the back room a glossy black Parker Lucky 2½ from the nineteen-twenties. ‘This, this, is the pen for you,’ he said. He was right”).

Marella Gayla, “Bar Tab: Liar Liar,” May 26, 2025 (“There was a looser scene on a weeknight, when a round of frosty Martinis, a sampling of cloudy, tart orange wines, and a peppery bottle of red, shared with two colleagues, seemed less like a life-style statement and more like a bold recommitment to the very act of living”).

Best Poem

Arthur Sze, “Mushroom Hunting at the Ski Basin,” March 24, 2025 (“Driving up the ski-basin road, I spot purple asters / and know it is time”).

Best “Shouts & Murmurs”

Josh Lieb, “Bagels, Ranked,” April 21, 2025 [“Dances with, rather than fights against, the cream cheese and the lox. (Or whitefish, if that’s your thing. I don’t judge)”].

Best “Takes”

Elizabeth Kolbert, “Takes: John McPhee’s ‘Encounters with the Archdruid,’ ” April 7, 2025 (“Much of the art of ‘Encounters with the Archdruid’ lies in the way that McPhee manages to be both there and not there. He bathes his aching feet in the water. He recalls other trips he has taken with Brower and, separately, with Park. He searches for copper-bearing rocks, and, when he finds them, gets excited. But he never reveals whose side he is on. When it comes to the great question of the piece—to mine or not to mine—he gets out of the way”).

Best Photo

Malike Sidibe’s portrait of Lorna Simpson, for Julian Lucas’s “Now You See Her” (May 12 & 19, 2025)

Best Sentence

Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open. – Adam Gopnik, “Fresh Paint” (April 14, 2025)

Best Paragraph

The medal ceremony that night was a surreal sight: more than three thousand band members crowded onto the field in candy-striped rows. Bourbon County ended up placing second in its class—a triumph under the circumstances—just behind another Kentucky band, from Murray High School. But my favorite moment was earlier in the evening. Deep beneath the stands, in the vast tunnels and rehearsal rooms around the field, half a dozen bands were warming up—drumming, stretching, tossing rifles, and playing arpeggios as they waited for their turn to perform. Walking from room to room, I passed wooden ships, Victorian cages, and giant Day-Glo flowers in the hall. A trio of Elmer Fudds was hunched in conversation over here, two orange bunnies giggling in a corner over there. Some strays from the “Menagerie” show came wandering down the hall, past a pair of water sprites from Broken Arrow and a few butterfly girls from Cypress, Texas. It was like the world’s biggest costume party. – Burkhard Bilger, “Stepping Out” (February 17 & 24, 2025) 

Best Detail

Its main entrance, at Twenty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, is marked by an imposing brownstone Gothic Revival structure, the Arch, where a pandemonium of monk parakeets has long kept an elaborate nest. – Paige Williams, “Still Life” (June 9, 2025)

Best Description

He unlocked a door, and immediately a thick, corky scent hit me, the emanation of hundreds of aging guitars—the great variety of hardwoods, the glue and paint and lacquer, the oxidation of strings and coils, the leather straps and handles, and the sarcophagal musk of the cases themselves. – Nick Paumgarten, “Guitar Heroes” (May 26, 2025)

Best Drink

An espresso Martini with a creamy glug of banana liqueur – Rachel Syme, “Bar Tab: Monsieur” (April 7, 2025)

Credits: (1) photo by Hannah Whitaker, from Nick Paumgarten’s “Guitar Heroes”; (2) photo illustration by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin, from Hannah Goldfield’s “Home Slice”; (3) illustration by Patricia Bolaños, from Marella Gayla’s “Bar Tab: Liar Liar.”

June 9, 2025 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Paige Williams’ superb “Still Life.” It’s an exploration of New York City’s biggest graveyard – Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn. Williams roams its four hundred and seventy-eight acres. Nearly six hundred thousand people are buried there. She describes the place as a “sculpture garden.” It contains more than two hundred and fifty thousand monuments: 

Owls, horses, baseballs, clasped hands, winged hourglasses, and empty beds are among the iconography that I have seen incised on the funerary surfaces. The angels (and they are many) weep and sag, but they also look heavenward. Lambs mean children. Broken flower stems and shorn columns symbolize early death. There are sarcophagi and plinths and cenotaphs. Lord at the obelisks.   

She visits some of its hundreds of mausolea:

Topography is destiny: dozens of mausolea were tucked into those deglaciated cliffs, and during grassier seasons they resemble thatched-roof hobbit houses with bronze or stone doors. Other mausolea are freestanding. Some have Tiffany stained-glass windows. The tomb of Charles Feltman, a restaurateur who supposedly invented the hot dog, is nicer than my apartment. There are four front steps bracketed by two huge urns, half a dozen Corinthian columns, and six life-size maidens, possible goddesses. Atop a cupola, the archangel Michael stands seven feet tall, his sword lowered, facing a Burger King. Feltman’s eternal neighbors include the Sommers, the Lynans, the Archers, and the Gales. The Maniscalcos might like to know that their guardian angel has come to miss her marble arms.

She talks with people who work there, e.g., Rich Moylan, Green-Wood’s president of the past thirty-nine years; Neela Wickremesinghe, Green-Wood’s chief conservator; Jahongir Usmanov, Green-Wood’s operations manager; John Argenziano, the cemetery’s head of security.

She observes a grave being dug:

It was nine-thirty in the morning and so windy that miniature flags on graves were horizontal. The gravediggers were preparing for a funeral at two. Four neon-orange stakes marked off a rectangle in front of a headstone. The stone was inscribed with the name of a woman buried at nine feet; her husband was coming in at seven.

She goes on a Green-Wood tour led by Marge Raymond, “a seasoned singer with a blond updo and sunglasses the size of T-bones.” Paige writes, 

The best stop on her tour is Battle Hill. My trolley unloaded, and we climbed stone steps to the 1776 battleground, two hundred and eighteen feet above sea level. Marge approached an enormous bronze statue of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and war. Minerva faces New York Harbor. Marge told us to turn and follow her gaze. We did, and found the Statue of Liberty staring back.

The piece brims with interesting facts and observations:

Green-Wood’s earliest burial lots, typically fourteen by twenty-seven feet, cost a hundred dollars apiece; today, a grave starts at twenty-one thousand. 

A single grave may hold up to six people: three casketed, three cremated. Green-Wood stacks clients at depths of nine, seven, and five feet. 

A grave at Green-Wood is the only real estate that some New Yorkers ever own. 

Only at Green-Wood is it possible to enjoy a show performed on a Steinway concert grand piano near the tomb of the actual Steinways.

“Still Life” is the liveliest piece about a cemetery that I’ve ever read. Highly recommended. 

December 2, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Paige Williams’ absorbing “Wild Side.” It’s about the bear crisis in Lake Tahoe. Williams reports, “Between 2017 and 2020, humans in Tahoe reported, on average, six hundred and seventy-four encounters with bears per year. That number more than doubled between 2021 and 2022.” Williams talks with bear advocates, bear deterrent experts, law enforcement officers, and Tahoe residents. She talks with Sierra County Sheriff Michael Fisher:

Fisher, who grew up in Downieville and has worked for the Sierra County Sheriff’s Office for twenty-four years, was contending with a more intense bear situation than he had ever seen. In June, a bear turned up at a wedding and destroyed a car, ran off with somebody’s luggage, and came back for the reception. Between July 18th and August 2nd, his office received thirty-four calls about one or more bears in Downieville, Sierra City, Loyalton, and other communities in his jurisdiction. Bears were trying to get into homes, and into a resort cabin at Sierra Shangri-La. A caller who reported a bear trapped inside his Chevy Equinox got mad when the 911 dispatcher, who had no available deputies to send, suggested opening the door and letting the bear out. A woman found a bear swimming in a neighbor’s pool. A bear walked up to a barbecue and ran off when someone rang a cowbell. At about three o’clock one morning, a woman fired a rifle at her front door after a bear tried to get inside. “She could see the door being pulled,” the dispatcher noted.

To me, the most alarming aspect of the crisis is that bears are breaking into homes. Williams visits the scene of one of the break-ins. She writes,

Greg, a general contractor in his seventies, lived at the house and among other properties that he and his wife, Kathy, were remodelling. Their dog, which reliably scared bears away, had died over the summer. On Friday, a bear had tried to get into the house. On Saturday, Greg had run a bear off by using bear spray and throwing rocks. This morning, he had come home to find that a bear had finally succeeded. “The kitchen is just strewn,” he told me. “It got a forty-pound bag of cat food, a thing of roasted garlic, my package of cookies. It got into the coffee. It got into a five-gallon bucket that Kathy saves butterscotch and chocolate chips and stuff in. Didn’t eat a lot of those, but it spread them all over the floor. It didn’t get into the honey. It got into the olive oil. I’ve come into houses where a bear has torn the range hood off, torn the microwave off. The shelves are all broken and everything’s collapsed, or the doors are gone and the whole cabinet’s off the wall. Turned over refrigerators. A house here burned down because a bear broke in and knocked the stove over. The electric igniters went off. It tore the gas line open—gas started spewing. I heard this snapping and popping. It’s ten-thirty at night, and I’m going, What the hell? I walked out in the street and could see the flames. By then, the whole house was engulfed. The fire department saved the foundation.” 

The heart of Williams’ piece is the shocking death of Patrice Miller. Williams reports,

Miller routinely walked to the grocery, which a friend owned, to buy alcohol. In early November, the grocer called the sheriff to say that she hadn’t seen Miller in days. The Halls were already wondering why Miller’s porch light no longer came on at night. A sheriff’s deputy, Malcolm Fadden, went to the house on the afternoon of November 8th. On the front steps, he found a punctured garden hose, spurting water. He turned off the spigot and went to the door. When he looked through a window and saw blood on the floor, he drew his service weapon and stepped inside.

In the living room, Fadden found bear scat, a foot in diameter. In the kitchen, he found Miller dead. Her naked body was gashed with claw marks; her left arm and most of her right leg had been eaten down to the bone. The security bars on the window hung by a single bolt. The cabinets were destroyed. In the bedroom, Fadden saw paw prints and soil, and, on the bed, feces and urine. Miller’s laptop was still plugged in and open. Fadden wrote in his report that she appeared to have been dragged off her bed after she was already dead.

The medical officer described Miller’s cause of death as “perforating sharp and blunt force crushing injuries consistent with bear mauling and subsequent predation.” In other words, Miller was killed by a black bear. Williams reaches the same conclusion: “But the bear did kill Miller, according to the autopsy report, even if it hadn’t come for her.”  

Mid-Year Top Ten 2024

Photo by Landon Nordeman, from Gary Shteyngart's "A Martini Tour of New York City"

Time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

1. Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City,” April 24, 2024 (“The highlight of Tigre’s Martini menu is the vodka-based Cigarette, which Platty immediately qualified as ‘smoky as fuck’ ”). 

2. Luke Mogelson, “The Assault,” April 15, 2024 (“In the operations center, Perun yelled into the radio, ‘No! Don’t cross in front of the entrance!’ But Wolf couldn’t hear him. He kept walking until he reached the open door. For several long seconds, everyone in the operations center watched as he stood there, motionless. Then he crumpled”). 

3. Leslie Jamison, “A New Life,” January 22, 2024 (“The baby and I arrived at our sublet with garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet. At a certain point, I’d run out of suitcases”).

4. William Finnegan, “The Long Ride,” June 10, 2024 ("Dropping in to the heaviest waves, he would fade and stall, casually timing his bottom turn to set up the deepest possible barrel. He would disappear into the roaring darkness, then reappear, usually, going very fast, with that little grin").

5. Alex Ross, “Thoroughly Modern,” June 3, 2024 (“Wang lingered over the passage with unaffected tenderness, giving just a twinge of emphasis to its bittersweet chromaticism”).

6. D. T. Max, “Design for Living,” May 6, 2024 (“He happily spends hours poring over blueprints, dividing former fields of cubicles into small but clever residences and reconceiving onetime copy-machine nooks as mini laundry rooms or skinny kitchens”).

7. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Vol. 4,” May 20, 2024 (“I work with words, I am paid by the word, I majored in English, and today I major in Wordle”).

8. Eric Lach, “Trash, Trash Revolution,” April 15, 2024 (“Some of the trash bags have burst open, but others are curiously intact, and you can still make out a few pieces of furniture that never got a chance to be fully digested”).

9. Ian Parker, "His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy," June 17, 2024 ("In an empty house with no windows, the sound of the ocean filled every room. Underfoot, the original tiles had been hammered out, and so had the cables and pipes that were once embedded beneath. The floor was now rough concrete, covered in cavities and trenches, like a road that had been chewed up by a milling machine ahead of a resurfacing"). 

10. Paige Williams, "Ghosts on the Water," June 24, 2024 ("The pour revealed sea lice, krill, a needlefish, and a bunch of twitchy sticklebacks, as silver as store-bought fishing lures—bycatch, all of which gets returned to the river. Cupping the net from the bottom, the patriarch teased the few glass eels into view and plucked them out, the way you’d pick lint off a sweater").

Best Cover

Klaas Verplancke, “On the Grid” (March 25, 2024)

Best "Talk of the Town" Story

Robert Sullivan, “Find a Grave,” April 8, 2024 (“Instruments came out of the car, Morrow starting off with a reel called ‘Sligo Maid.’ Suddenly, his fiddle popped its tuning peg. ‘That’s Coleman!’ Kelly said”).

Best Illustration

Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli, for Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best "Goings On" Note

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Le B,” March 4, 2024 (“Nearly every dish incorporates luxury ingredients, though they generally show up as supporting players: foie-gras drippings in a creamy onion dip, or an earthy whiff of white truffle in a garlic-cream soup. At times, this can feel a bit like opulence theatre, rather than actual opulence—a black-truffle-flecked gelée, draped over a devilled egg en chemise, tasted like nothing much at all, least of all truffles—but when it works, my God, it works”).

Best Photo

Photo by Bobby Beasley, for David Means’ “Chance the Cat” (January 22, 2024)

Best newyorker.com Post

Nathan Heller, “Helen Vendler’s Generous Mind,” April 30, 2024 (“What she had was an almost tactile understanding of the ancient practice of creating poems as art, and—running her hands like a dressmaker along the back of their stitching, watching the way they draped and moved and caught the light—she could see not only what poets did but how they did it”).

Best Sentence

Austria’s Truman vodka is shot into flaming orbit by an inventive liquor made by Empirical, the Danish distillery, and named after Stephen King’s pyrokinetic character Charlene McGee, which presents on the tongue as a flavorful burst of smoked juniper, hence the feeling that a draw of nicotine and tar can’t be far. – Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City” (April 24, 2024)

Best Paragraph

In restaurants all across the country, I shoved food into my mouth above her fuzzy head as she slept in her carrier beneath my chin. The receipts were headed to my publisher, and I was determined to eat everything: trumpet mushrooms slick with pepper jam, gnocchi gritty with crumbs of corn bread that fell onto her little closed eyes, her head tipped back against my chest. I was flustered and feral, my teeth flecked with pesto and furred with sugar. Then I pulled down my shirt and gave these meals to her. In Los Angeles, I nursed in the attic office above a bookstore lobby. In Portland, I nursed among cardboard boxes in a stockroom. In Cambridge, I nursed in a basement kitchenette beneath the public library. – Leslie Jamison, “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best Detail

Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it. – Nick Paumgarten, “Misty in Manhattan” (February 26, 2024)

Best Description

Of course I got the soup. Plenty of ink has already been spilled over the titillating Soup No. 5, a small tureen of thick brown broth, heavily spiced with sibot (a smoky-tangy blend of Chinese herbs), in which float bits of bull testicles and penis. A bowl is salty and savory, warming and rich; the soup is traditionally consumed as a hangover cure, perhaps owing to the virility of its star ingredients. (One is spongy, the other chewy; I won’t spoil which is which.) I’m not sure if I’d order it on a return visit, though—I’ll save room, instead, for grilled morsels of pork jowl brushed with glossy-sweet barbecue sauce made with banana ketchup, or sticky skewers of eel glazed in lemon-lime soda and ginger. The K.F.C. (Kanto fried chicken), little popcorn nuggets of tender dark meat, arrives with a bowl of dipping sauce that’s so fiery hot, so puckery with fish sauce, that it made me feel wildly alive. – Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Naks” (February 5, 2024)

June 24, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Paige Williams’ absorbing “Ghosts on the Water.” It’s a reporting piece on Maine’s lucrative glass-eel fishery. What’s a glass eel? Williams tells us:

The Sargasso Sea, a warm, calm expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean, is bordered not by land but by four strong currents—a gyre. Vast mats of prickly brown seaweed float so thickly on the windless surface that Christopher Columbus worried about his ships getting stuck. The biodiverse sanctuary within and beneath the sargassum produces Anguilla rostrata, the American eel. Each female lays some eight million eggs. The eggs hatch as ribbonlike larvae that drift to the Gulf Stream, which carries them to the continental shelf. By the time they reach Maine, the larvae have transformed into swimmers about the length of an index finger, with the circumference of a bean sprout and the translucence of a jellyfish. Hence their nickname, glass eels, also known as elvers. The glass eel is barely visible, but for a dark stripe—its developing backbone—and a couple of chia seeds for eyes. “Ghosts on the water,” a Maine fisherman once called them.

And a couple of chia seeds for eyes – I like that. Williams is an excellent describer. Here’s her depiction of an eel-fisherman emptying a tail bag of elvers:

The patriarch’s son set an aquarium net over the top of an empty bucket and strained the first of their sludge. The pour revealed sea lice, krill, a needlefish, and a bunch of twitchy sticklebacks, as silver as store-bought fishing lures—bycatch, all of which gets returned to the river. Cupping the net from the bottom, the patriarch teased the few glass eels into view and plucked them out, the way you’d pick lint off a sweater.

And here’s her description of a scene at an eel-fisherman’s house:

Several days later, Loughran and Glass brought kimchi (a gift from their business partner) and fresh crabmeat over to Glass’s house. They were making crab rolls when I arrived. Glass stoked a fire in a woodstove and handed me a Heineken in a jelly jar. We ate some dried haddock as he prepared the rolls, which he served on square porcelain plates at the dining table, whose centerpiece was a chessboard. Afterward, Glass walked me out to the greenhouse and showed me his dad’s lobster boat, the Don’t Know. He was thinking of renaming it the Andromeda. In the distance we could hear the ocean. He said, “When it’s real rough, it sounds like a lion’s den.”

That is a wonderful passage – vivid, specific, filled with the kind of details ("Heineken in a jelly jar," "square porcelain plates," chessboard centrepiece) I devour. 

“Ghosts on the Water” explores the slimy, smelly, secretive world of glass-eel fishing. I enjoyed it immensely. 

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”).

July 1, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Paige Williams’s delightful “Boxes,” a Talk story about photographer Susan Schiffman, who takes pictures of apartments “that a regular person can afford.” Williams writes, “In apartment after apartment, she captured the small ways in which tenants arranged their material lives—the positioning of houseplants, the clever storage of clothing.” My favorite sentence in “Boxes” is this beauty: “Schiffman plucked a Nikon from her backpack and started shooting—moody light at the bedroom windows, a bouquet of bodega roses.”

Postscript: Here’s another inspired line from this week’s issue:

The “Display only” sign, scrawled in what looks like purple lipstick, doesn’t apply to the chefs, who carve off octopus tentacles and grab resting racks of ribs within sneezing distance to serve throughout the night. [Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: HaSalon”]

November 17, 2014 Issue

Paige Williams’s "Double Jeopardy," in this week’s issue, is impressive. I like its structure, the way its scope keeps expanding – from the facts of Shonelle Jackson’s case to Judge Gordon’s override of the jury’s sentence to the appalling frequency of override usage in Alabama to the constitutionality of override to the link between elected judges, judicial election-spending, and the use of judicial override. The piece climaxes with Judge Gordon, now retired, in his Montgomery office (“His tidy desk held a glass gavel”) talking about his decision to ignore the jury’s unanimous vote and sentence Jackson to death:

He went on, “People talk about being hard on crime. O.K.—are you willing to pay the price? Are you willing to construct the prisons? Staff the prisons? Budget for food and medical care? You can’t put everybody in the penitentiary. You just can’t.” He looked away, shook his head, and said, “Sometimes you just have to put ’em down.”

Sometimes you just have to put ’em down. Gordon talks as if he was dealing with dogs rather than human beings. He chose to put Jackson down even though (1) Jackson might not be the killer and (2) the jury unanimously recommended life. Well, here’s my verdict on the Alabama judicial system after reading Williams’s powerful piece: it’s rotten to the core.

Postscript: A special shout-out to David Black for his luminous, ravishing “Goings On About Town” photo of Seu Jorge.