August 12, 2024 Issue

This week’s issue contains a candidate for Best New Yorker Photo of the Year – Dan Winters’ razor-sharp color portrait of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for Clare Malone’s “The Inheritor.” Over the years, Winters has produced some of the magazine’s most memorable pictures, e.g., his gleaming photo of Pardis Sabeti and Stephen Gire, for Richard Preston’s brilliant “The Ebola Wars” (October 27, 2014), and his unforgettable portrait of face-transplant recipient Dallas Wiens, for Raffi Katchadourian’s extraordinary “Transfiguration” (February 13 & 20, 2012).

In Winters’ artful hands, Kennedy is a great photography subject. But as a politician, he’s repugnant. His opposition to vaccine mandates and military aid to Ukraine is vile. 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Photo by Dan Winters)

Best of 2021: Talk

Illustration by João Fazenda, from Nick Paumgarten's "Bear Cash"

Here are my favourite “Talk of the Town” stories of 2021 (with a choice quote from each in brackets): 

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Lemonland,” August 2, 2021 (“Perhaps you have detected a lemony-fresh scent or a proliferation of odd citrus-inflected selfies in your feeds. Or you might even have found yourself in a plasticine sanctuary of tangerine lemons and Teletubby trees, a contrived oasis where the lemons are yellow and the sky is always blue. Citrovia. Is this a haven on an otherwise soon-to-be-uninhabitable planet? Or another sign of the end?”).

2. Adam Iscoe, “Back at It,” March 15, 2021 (“Quintana, a five-year veteran of the concession stand, wandered behind the candy counter. He found a thirty-five-pound bag of popcorn kernels in a storage closet. ‘At one point during the pandemic, I bought popcorn, just to try to relive the experience,’ he said, as he poured buttery salt powder along with the kernels into a popcorn machine. ‘It wasn’t the same.’ A minute later: pop-pop-pop. ‘Yeah, this is it,’ he said. Pop-pop-pop. ‘This is movie-theatre popcorn!’ ”).

3. Robert Sullivan, “A Two-Hour Tour,” July 5, 2021 (“A quick investigation of the island’s flora and fauna turned up razor clams; moon snails; lots of oyster shells without oysters; mussels, buried just beneath the surface of the island (seemingly held in place by large rocks, a possible geologic key to the island’s tenacity); a red-beard sponge, or Microciona prolifera; and, on the edge of the lee side, green seaweed that had colonized the inside of an automobile tire, a green harbor within a harbour”).

4. Richard Preston, “Hot Tub Drum Machine,” December 20, 2021 (“It took him two weeks of obsessive hammering and regular hot-tub dips to bring thirty-eight chromatic notes to life from the bottoms of two hazmat barrels”).

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Bear Cash,” November 8, 2021 (“Last week, the foundation released a true jackalope, the ‘otoro of this tuna,’ as Bell put it: ‘Johnny Cash at the Carousel Ballroom, April 24, 1968.’ At that time, the Carousel, operated by the Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and others, was a psychedelic dance hall and, effectively, Bear’s sonic laboratory. Whoever passed through got journaled, and dosed”).

6. Adam Iscoe, “The Smell Test,” March 1, 2021 (“A fireball danced on the Jumbotron, and a man holding a big cardboard cutout of Baby Yoda bellowed with something like joy”).

7. David Owen, “Birdlife,” September 20, 2021 [“Late one afternoon this summer, Wolf took a walk in what’s now her principal birding “patch,” the transformed East River piers that constitute Brooklyn Bridge Park. (She and her boyfriend, who is also both a software developer and a birder, live near Red Hook, not far from Pier 6.) ‘I call this the Dark Forest,’ she said, on a shaded path that was maybe two hundred yards from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. ‘There’s a black-crowned night heron that often hangs out here, in this sumac—and there it is.’ A large, hunched bird with a long bill was perched on a branch, camouflaged by foliage. A young man and woman stopped, and the man asked Wolf what she was looking at. ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘How did you even see that?’ ”).

8. Henry Alford, “Cocoon,” January 25, 2021 [“After studying a 2017 cover of Elle that featured Solange Knowles in one of Kamali’s fire-engine-red sleeping-bag coats, he turned his bag inside out (to avoid emblazoning his chest with the jumbo ‘Sportneer’ logo), and cinched it with a red scarf, creating a Michelin Man look in draped dove-gray polyester”].

9. Danyoung Kim, “Splash,” December 6, 2021 (“First stop was North Cove Marina, at Brookfield Place, in the financial district—a mile as the crow flies, two minutes and fifty seconds as the jet skis. No need for coffee on this commute. The Hudson slapping your face will suffice”).

10. Rachel Syme, “Sing Out!,” July 26, 2021 (“The conversation had turned to body glitter. Gardner had some smeared on her cheeks, in a shade called Adult Film”).

December 20, 2021 Issue

Two excellent Talk stories in this week’s issue :

1. Ben McGrath’s “On the Waterfront,” a mini-profile of canoeist Neal Moore:

Moore was inspired to plot a twenty-two-month, seventy-five-hundred-mile journey that will conclude any day now, weather permitting, with a loop around the Statue of Liberty: twenty-two rivers, from the Columbia, near Astoria, Oregon, to the Hudson, with some portaging—or “schlepping,” as Moore likes to call it—over the Continental Divide and alongside the Erie Canal. 

Moore’s journey was inspired by the disappearance of fellow-canoeist Dick Conant. McGrath wrote memorably about Conant in his brilliant “The Wayfarer” (December 14, 20215), one of the best New Yorker reporting pieces of the past ten years. 

2.  Richard Preston’s “Hot Tub Drum Machine,” a wonderful account of the creation of an amazing set of steel drums. Here’s a sample:

After the drum cooled, Dunleavy said, he refined the notes, hitting the steel with an assortment of small hammers while he watched waveforms pulse on the display screen of a strobe tuner. He flipped the drum over frequently, hitting the bubbles alternately from the top and from the bottom: “ ‘I’m gonna get that note,’ you say to yourself.” Once in a while, Dunleavy climbed into the hot tub and soaked his aching deltoids. (“The hot tub is my secret weapon,” he explained.) It took him two weeks of obsessive hammering and regular hot-tub dips to bring thirty-eight chromatic notes to life from the bottoms of two hazmat barrels.

That last line is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of the best Talk stories of the year. 

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. 

January 19, 2015 Issue

This week’s issue contains an extraordinary piece of reporting called "When the Fever Breaks" by Luke Mogelson. It’s a firsthand, front-lines account of how communities in Liberia and Sierra Leone are fighting the spread of Ebola. Mogelson visits slums, hospitals, holding centers, jungle villages. He talks to “survivors” (people who catch Ebola and don’t die), local organizers, health officers, social workers, ambulance drivers. At one point, he accompanies a county burial team to the Liberian village of Jene-Wonde. “Ebola victims are most contagious when they are no longer alive,” Mogelson says, “and in West Africa—where burial rituals, for both Christians and Muslims, entail anointing the deceased—many people have contracted the virus from a corpse.” The wife of Jene-Wonde’s chief has died of Ebola. Her body is inside the village general store. The chief gives permission to retrieve her body. Mogelson describes the procedure:

The sprayers went first—a pair of minesweepers clearing a path. Then the others entered with the bag and the stretcher. They emerged several minutes later and loaded the corpse into the back of the truck. As the truck made its way across the square, women and children spilled out of their houses, sat down in the dirt, and keened. I followed on foot, along with a few locals, all of whom turned back when the truck stopped at a wall of trees. The team filed down a narrow trail, carrying the stretcher through dark jungle. After about a hundred yards, unmarked mounds of rich orange soil rose here and there from the grass. Beside a shallow, rectangular hole, an elderly man in flip-flops, cargo shorts, and a white skullcap leaned on the handle of an old spade. He had dug all the graves. No one else from the village, he told me, was willing to tread in that place.

The team lowered the imam’s wife into the grave. On top of her, they dropped a heap of freshly hacked branches and leaves. Then they stripped off their suits, gloves, and masks and deposited them in the grave as well.

Mogelson’s writing style is factual, unostentatious – well suited to the hard reality he describes. But it has its artful aspects. At one point, describing a trip in Tonkolili District, Sierra Leone, he says, “To get there, we followed barely discernible tire tracks, for miles, through grass so tall and close you feel as if you were in a car wash.”

“When the Fever Breaks” can be read as a companion to Richard Preston’s brilliant "The Ebola Wars" (The New Yorker, October 27, 2014), which describes the work of scientists at the Broad Institute to sequence Ebola’s genome and track its mutations. But the two pieces differ from each other. “The Ebola Wars” is written in the third person; “When the Fever Breaks” is a first-person narrative. It abounds with sentences like “One day in early November, I followed several young men down a warren of sand alleyways, veined by rivulets of sullage, that wound through West Point, the slum to which Fahnbulleh and her husband had been taken,” and “When I visited the quarantine center, in Monrovia, a group of children sat in plastic chairs inside the gate, near a metal seesaw.” I relish such sentences: the observer becomes a participant; reporting becomes experience.

Postscript: I delight in thisness, i.e., “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion” (James Wood, How Fiction Works, 2008). Thisness is palpability, specificity, concreteness. New Yorker writing brims with it. For example, in this week’s issue, it’s there in the description of the Goldschmied & Chiari mirrors on show at Lorello Gallery: “Composite photographs of billowing smoke transferred to reflective glass, have been tinted petal pink or storm-cloud gray” (“Goings On About Town: Art”). It’s there in Amelia Lester’s representation of the Via Carota’s pumpkin-and-sage ravioli: “fluffy, beautiful, and fleeting, an exercise in virtuosity equivalent to a concert pianist running up and down a scale very fast” ("Tables For Two"). It’s there in Jiayang Fan’s description of Nitecap’s Key Lime Fizz “with a lit candle suspended in its froth” ("Bar Tab"). It’s brilliantly there in Sarah Larson’s capture of Bill Murray’s line to the waitress at Tao when she brought him two rum-and-waters: “He took one and said of the other, ‘You give that to the kids at the orphanage’ ” ("Cinephiles"). Sometimes thisness can be in the form of a piquant fact, e.g., “KidZania has its own currency, kidzos, which can be used in branches around the world, or deposited in the central bank and accessed with a realistic-looking credit card” (Rebecca Mead, "When I Grow Up"); “Recently, researchers at the University of Southern California built a prototype 'virtual human' named Ellie, a digital therapist that integrates an algorithm similar to Affdex with others that track gestures and vocal tonalities” (Raffi Khatchadourian, "We Know How You Feel"). It’s hard to say how useful all this is. But in terms of writing as pure writing, I devour it. My favorite example of thisness, in this week’s issue, is Sasha Frere-Jones’s description of the Sleater-Kinney band’s guitar tones: “fuzzed, doubled into octaves, thin, then soaked, overloading” ("Sister Saviors"). “Sleater-Kinney” is itself an inspired bit of thisness. It comes, Frere-Jones says, from the name on a highway exit ramp in Olympia, Washington.

December 1, 2014 Issue

Recently, I’ve read some amazing New Yorker medical pieces – Jerome Groopman’s “Print Thyself” and “The Transformation,” Richard Preston’s “The Ebola Wars” – but Emily Eakin’s “The Excrement Experiment,” in this week’s issue, is one of the damnedest things I’ve ever read. It’s about treating disease with fecal microbiota transplants (FMT). It’s the type of subject that’s so novel and arresting that the reporter is well advised to just get out of the way and let the facts speak for themselves. That’s what Eakin does. Along the way, she generates interesting, slightly surreal sentences such as, “In September, Leach gave himself a fecal transplant with the aid of a turkey baster and a bemused Hadza man, who served as his donor.” Eakin’s “Celluloid Hero” (The New Yorker, October 31, 2011) made my “Best of 2011” list. “The Excrement Experiment” may well be a “Best of 2014” contender.

Another piece in this week’s issue that I enjoyed immensely is Joseph Mitchell’s “A Day in the Branch,” a fragment of a memoir found in his papers after he died in 1996. It’s a reminiscence of his time growing up in North Carolina when he spent many of his days roaming a wild swamp river called the Pittman Mill Branch. He says of the river, “I would walk slowly and keep looking into the water, studying it. The water mesmerized me….” Reading that brought to mind the great opening paragraph of his classic “The Rivermen” (The New Yorker, April 4, 1959; included in his 1992 collection Up in the Old Hotel), in which he says, “I often feel drawn to the Hudson River, and I have spent a lot of time through the years poking around the part of it that flows past the city. I never get tired of looking at it; it hypnotizes me.” “A Day in the Branch” shows the roots of Mitchell’s deep appreciation of the Hudson – the youthful days he spent pleasurably hanging around the Pittman Mill Branch, walking it, smelling it, fishing it, swimming in it, climbing its trees, sometimes pretending he was a bobcat.    

Journeys and Visits

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

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

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

October 27, 2014 Issue

Richard Preston hasn’t been on my radar for years. The last piece by him that I remember reading is “Climbing the Redwoods” (The New Yorker, February 14, 2005). But now here he is, in this week’s issue, with “The Ebola Wars.” It’s extraordinary! To say that it’s about how genomics research can help contain Ebola fairly describes its gist, but hardly does justice to the riveting life-and-death drama at its core, a drama that hinges on access to the experimental drug ZMapp, described by Preston as “a cocktail of three antibodies that seemed especially potent in killing Ebola.” The piece reads like a streak. Preston has a gift for figuration that turns complex phenomena into vivid images, e.g., on the size of one Ebola particle, he says, “If it were the size of a piece of spaghetti, then a human hair would be about twelve feet in a diameter and would resemble the trunk of a giant redwood tree.” He describes the look of an Ebola-infected cell as having the appearance of “a ball of tangled yarn.” Regarding microtubes of human blood serum, he says, “Each microtube was the size of the sharpened end of a pencil and contained a droplet of human blood serum, golden in color and no bigger than a lemon seed.” His description of how a DNA-sequencing machine works is amazing:

Using a pipette, a technician sucked up about a tenth of Gire’s Ebola droplet—an amount like a fleck of moisture on a wet day—and placed it on a glass slide known as a flow cell. The fleck of liquid contained the full library of code from the blood of the fourteen Ebola patients. The bit of water spread into channels on the flow cell, which sat in the mouth of an Illumina HiSeq 2500 machine, one of the fastest DNA sequencers in the world.

For the next twenty-four hours, the sequencer worked automatically, pulsing liquids across the flow cell, while lasers shone on it. On the surface of the flow cell, hundreds of millions of fragments of DNA had gathered into hundreds of millions of microscopic colored spots. The colors of the individual spots were changing as the process went on, and a camera took pictures of the changing field of spots and stored the data. Twenty-four hours later, the machine had finished reading Gire’s library of bar-coded fragments of DNA. The data were sent to the Broad Institute’s computer arrays, which assembled all the fragments into finished genetic code—it organized the vast pile of books in the library and placed the letters of all the books in their proper order on shelves. On Sunday, June 15th, Gire and Sabeti got word that the computers had finished their job. The result was twelve full genomes of Ebola virus—the Ebolas that had lived in twelve of the fourteen people.

Then Preston cuts from the Genomics Platform to the Ebola ward at Kenema hospital in Sierra Leone, and we are suddenly in hell:

Khan was inside the plastic Ebola ward, and the place was a mess. There were thirty or more Ebola patients in the ward, lying on cholera beds, and the floor was splashed with everything that can come out of the human body. Khan was making rounds, with one nurse, both of them wearing P.P.E.

The contrast between the two realities – the cerebral, stainless steel, high-tech Genomics Platform, on the one hand, and the ghastly, chaotic, plastic-walled Ebola ward at Kenoma hospital, on the other – is transfixing. The person who knits the two worlds together, who coolly moves between them is the research scientist Stephen Gire. Preston says that Gire is “tall and quiet, and there is an air of precision about him.” Preston’s prose enacts that precision. “The Ebola Wars” is astonishingly achieved.