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 23, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. David S. Allee’s radiant “Naumburg Orchestral Concerts” night shot for “Goings On About Town” is transfixing. And what makes it transfixing is that raccoon sitting in a tree fork, looking at Allee as he takes the picture. Allee is a superb photographer. I admired his “Domino Sugar Factory” series immensely: see Jessie Wender, “Inside the Domino Sugar Factory,” newyorker.com, May 19, 2014.

David S. Allee, "Naumburg Orchestral Concerts" (2018)

2. And let’s give a huzzah for Neima Jahromi’s excellent “Bar Tab: Gilligan’s at Soho Grand,” containing this sparkling line: “On a recent afternoon, the nautical-jungle atmosphere was buoyed by a waitress in a blue-and-white Breton shirt, who issued a muted Tarzan yell as she strode by with a bottle of brut.”

  

3. “Talk of the Town” ’s new illustrator, João Fazenda, debuts this week with three images, including a dandy double portrait of Catherine O’Hara and Martin Short. It’s too early to say whether Fazenda is as good as Tom Bachtell. Bachtell is a master. He illustrated “Talk” for over twenty years. I’m going to miss him.

João Fazenda, "Catherine O'Hara and Martin Short" (2018)

4. The passage in Sam Wasson’s Talk story “Yes, And” in which Eugene Levy impersonates a “lugubrious rabbi” and says, “What a place to lose a cow,” made me laugh. The whole piece is terrific. It’s spurred my interest in Wasson’s writing. I think I’ll take a look at his Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. (2011).

5. I found David Remnick’s “Left Wing of the Possible” a refreshing change from the magazine’s usual Trump-bashing. Yes, the bastard deserves it. But it’s also important to spotlight politicians who offer a positive alternative to him. That’s what Remnick does in his absorbing piece, profiling twenty-eight-year-old democratic socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, Remnick says, is “almost certain to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.” In the Democratic primary, she soundly defeated the incumbent, Joseph Crowley, on a platform of “Medicare for all, a tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee, and criminal-justice reform.” I like the cut of her jib. I hope she wins.

6. I’ve previously commented on the connection between “journey” and “journalism.” They both share the same sematic root, “jour,” which is French for “day” – a day’s travel, the record of a day’s experience. But the connection is more than just sematic. The best journalism, for me, involves travel – an excursion of some sort. Such a piece is Jiayang Fan’s “Delivering Modernity,” a report on how Chinese tech companies like JD.com are transforming rural China. Fan visits a JD depot in Xinhuang, in the far west of Hunan Province.  She accompanies a JD courier as he makes deliveries to nearby villages (“We got stuck behind a truckload of squealing pigs whose rickety pen threatened to spill them onto our windshield”), visits a restaurant in Xinhuang (“I asked the proprietor, an aproned woman in her forties, if there was a menu, and she nodded, moving to the back of the room, past baskets of unwashed leafy vegetables. She yanked open a refrigerator door to display plastic containers of pig intestines, ears, and other offal. A pig’s head rolled slightly on the bottom shelf”), visits JD headquarters in Beijing (“Outside, in the parking lot, the company tests its fleet of self-driving cars”), talks with JD’s founder and C.E.O., Liu Qiangdong (“Fashion is among the company’s fastest-growing areas, and when Liu extended his hand I glimpsed a watch by Audemars Piguet, which recently partnered with JD to launch its first online boutique”), watches a drone arrive at a JD landing pad (“As it drew closer, the first thing I could make out was a red box under the belly of the drone. A minute later, I saw three spinning propellers, which seemed improbably small for the size of their load, like the wings of a bumblebee”), visits a training center for drone pilots (“The screens displayed animations of quadcopters that looked vaguely drunk as they wove through the sky toward landing pads”), and accompanies a “white-glove courier” on his rounds (“Shang makes his deliveries in a small electric car painted with bursts of JD red”). Drones, squealing pigs, expensive watches, self-driving cars, white-glove couriers – just some of the ingredients of Fan’s absorbing piece. I enjoyed it enormously. 

7. John Lanchester is a brilliant critical writer. I enjoy reading his arguments. In his “Doesn’t Add Up,” he takes on three recent economics books, contending that they “overreach,” i.e., extend their theories further than they usefully go. For example, he says of Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, “There is something thrilling about the intellectual audacity of thinking that you can explain ninety per cent of behavior in a society with one mental tool.” I relish Lanchester’s succinctness (e.g., “Our motives are often not what they seem: true. This explains everything: not true”). “Doesn’t Add Up” shows him in bracingly sharp form.