March 16, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Sarah Larson’s “Talk of the Town” story “Big Time.” It’s a mini-profile of master rigger Joe Vilardi, who installed Michael Heizer’s new exhibition “Negative Sculpture” at a Gagosian gallery in Chelsea. The show, Larson says, “features ‘Convoluted Line A’ and ‘Convoluted Line B’ (2024), two eighty-seven-and-a-half-foot curved steel troughs that wend through the gallery’s floor like a figure skater’s tracks on ice.” These sculptures weigh more than eighteen tons. That’s nothing for Vilardi. Larson says that he’s worked with “a Who’s Who of colossal sculpture: Heizer and Serra, but also Simone Leigh, Jeff Koons, MOMA. The biggest and heaviest stuff can involve cranes, hydraulic gantries, barges, and police escorts.” 

Vilardi talks about the time he installed a Richard Serra work at Kenyon College:

“The vertical of the sculpture was sixty feet tall—massive. Years of planning, really difficult. A beautiful sculpture. We were all in awe as we were doing it,” Vilardi said. “You’re bringing in steel plates that weighed close to a hundred thousand pounds each, that had to be then stood up and then one leaned against the next. We had five cranes there, balancing these plates, guys up in baskets working the clamps and lining things up and welding. At the end of it, it’s pretty impressive. It’s crazy when you think, Look what we just accomplished. Who are we? We just started out as a bunch of riggers—and riggers are really what we are—and here we are assembling something, a combined weight of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds, sixty feet tall, in the middle of a courtyard of a school, that will be there—it could be there forever.”

Larson’s delightful story reminded me of another New Yorker piece on Michael Heizer’s work – Dana Goodyear’s brilliant “The Earth Mover” (August 29, 2016). Goodyear visits Heizer’s monumental “City,” in Garden Valley, Nevada, and describes it in detail. Here’s a taste:

In every direction, at every angle, wide boulevards disappeared around corners, to unseen destinations, leading me into depressions where the whole world vanished and all that was left was false horizon and blue sky. Fourteen miles of concrete curbs sketched a graceful, loopy line drawing around the mounds and roads. Ravens wheeled, and I startled at a double thud of sonic boom from fighter jets performing exercises overhead. I sat down in a pit; flies came to tickle my hands. It was easy to imagine myself as a pile of bones. Before no other contemporary art work have I felt induced to that peculiar, ancient fear: What hand made this, and what for?

Michael Heizer, City (Photo by Jamie Hawkesworth)

Best of 2022: Talk

Illustration by João Fazenda, from Laura Preston's "Pipe Dreams"

Here are my favourite “Talk of the Town” pieces of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Laura Preston, "Pipe Dreams," August 22, 2022 (("Duddy, who has a head of white hair and the slow, smooth baritone of a radio broadcaster, was tapping away at the Stentor Sesquialtera rank, then blowing air through the pipes to see how they sang."| "He pries open the lips with a sculptor’s spatula and taps the toe with a tiny hammer. He uses a headlamp to peer down long pipes, and shoves a jeweller’s ring gauge up the toe hole. All the rest is in the ear."| "The sixty-four-foot Diaphone-Dulzian rank is made from enough sugar pine to build a house, and it produces a quintuple low C, a subharmonic tone that sounds like a chopper circling the building");

2. Laura Preston, “Incidental Masterpieces,” April 4, 2022 ("Among the possible masterpieces being prepared for sale at the Found Object Show were a fragment of a birdhouse; a tar bucket; an electrified toilet seat; a piece of wire from a fence made woolly by escaping sheep; a handmade massage device; a braille bingo board; a pouch of nineteenth-century cheese; a hunk of Styrofoam that looked like nineteenth-century cheese; a street sign reading 'Alone Ave.'; a false beard made of real golden hair; a pile of rubber pocket watches; a pork salesman’s pig-shaped suitcase; a magician’s trick ball; a washing-machine agitator shaped like human hands; a hundred-year-old brick impressed with an animal’s footprint; a forgotten softball grown furry with moss; a copper diving helmet that imploded under immense pressure; and a chicken farmer’s handmade wooden shoes, designed to leave spurious bobcat tracks around coops");

3. Adam Iscoe, “Loyalists,” September 19, 2022 ["2:12 p.m. One exchange: Elena Saldana, an apron-clad woman behind the shop’s counter who has worked at the shop for twenty-five years, said, 'What can I get you?' A bespectacled Brit named Harry King, who has been a hairdresser for celebrities and common people in London and New York, replied, 'A tissue.' Two almost-laughs. One Scotch egg bought by King. 'I haven’t had one in years,' he said. 'I’ll sit and have a little cry eating it watching the telly before I go to the gym.' | 2:15 p.m. More than two dozen white roses, hydrangeas, sweet peas, and orchids; lots of Union Jack bunting; a few commemorative plates; and one framed photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, all placed in the store window—pushing aside a few dozen jars of Haywards Traditional Onions (flavor: Medium & Tangy), Heinz Sandwich Spread (original), Baxters Sliced Beetroot (“suitable for vegans”), Batchelors Bigga Marrowfat peas ('No. 1 in UK'), and Marmite. Not pushed aside: one urn holding Archie’s ashes"];

4. Nick Paumgarten and Sarah Larson, “We Want the Cup,” May 23, 2022 ("One suture on the bowl’s lip was the result of its being dropped last year by a Tampa grinder named Pat Maroon") ;

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Night Off," November 7, 2022 (“The hockey: someone had got the Gizz a box at Madison Square Garden, for a Rangers-Sharks game. That night, about twenty of them—band, crew, assorted friends—came in hot. In the second period, the jumbotron caught them mugging for the camera, a melee of mustaches. Later, back in Brooklyn, the festivities went deep. A cry from the stage in Queens the following eve: ‘New York City, you fucked us up last night!’ The band’s set felt like a retaliation”); 

6. Adam Iscoe, “Incognito,” October 10, 2022 (“The bassist for the band Khruangbin, Laura Lee, who uses the showbiz moniker Leezy, stepped outside her apartment in Brooklyn. Her pink nails matched her eyeshadow and the roses on her flowered shirt, which she wore with cleanish white Converses, Levi’s, and a fifteen-ninety-nine black wig that she didn’t buy on Amazon”); 

7. Joshua Yaffa, “Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter,” March 14, 2022 ("After ten, the lights in the station dimmed. People packed up their food and rolled out sleeping bags, the white glow of phone screens casting flickering shadows on the walls of the train car. I crawled into my folded-up blanket, and felt the cold floor beneath me. The muffled rumble of nearby snores felt almost reassuring, a reminder of all the humanity gathered so tightly together. A woman offered me a pillow");

8. David Remnick, “Postscript: Peter Schjeldahl,” October 31, 2022 (“He was someone who, after being lost for a time, knew some things about survival. We met more than twenty years ago. I was looking to hire a full-time art critic. I’d read him for years in the Village Voice. And a voice is what he always had: distinct, clear, funny. A poet’s voice—epigrammatic, nothing wasted”); 

9. Dan Greene, “Stunted Growth,” December 5, 2022 (“He’d brought along his fiancée, the production designer and stylist Lux Wright, and their latte-colored service dog, Wendy, who’d walked in docilely on a gray Ultimate Fighting Championship collar and leash”);

10. David Remnick, “First and Last,” September 12, 2022 (“Gorbachev, of course, made mistakes, serious ones. He tried, for too long, to reconcile irreconcilable ideas and power bases. He failed to reform the K.G.B., which led a coup against him, in August, 1991. And so on. Yet he possessed both the idealism and the political skill to generate something in the world that is, at this dark historical moment of global illiberalism and malevolence, exceedingly rare: a sense of decency and promise. Here was someone raised in a totalitarian system who came to believe in democracy, the rule of law, and the peaceful and orderly transfer of power. Imagine. The hope is that, around the world, his example will prevail”).

Mid-Year Top Ten 2022

Photo by James Nachtwey, from Luke Mogelson's "The Wound-Dressers"

It’s 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):

Top Ten Reporting Pieces

1. Luke Mogelson, “The Wound-Dressers,” May 9, 2022 (“A Ukrainian soldier approached me to say that he’d found another victim. I followed him into the basement of a yellow house, where a rail-thin teen-ager was crumpled on the floor. Blood had leaked from his mouth and nose. The soldier crouched and felt under his skull. ‘He was shot in the back of the head,’ he said”).

2. Ed Caesar, “Sanctuary,” June 27, 2022 (“Inna, Sasha, and Oliviia loaded their bags onto the bus. Inna knew that it might be the last time that she and the girls saw Maksym, but there was no emotional soliloquy from either husband or wife. ‘It wasn’t a movie scene,’ Inna told me. ‘I was concentrated on what is coming—on my tasks. But we both knew what was going on’ ”).

3. Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege,” March 21, 2022 (“War has split Shchastia yet again. Dunets, the civil-military-administration head, was recalled back to the Ukrainian Army, and is fighting with the 128th Brigade. Tyurin, his deputy, stayed on in the city administration, albeit under a new flag. Haidai told me that agents from the F.S.B., the Russian security service, had called to offer him a chance to switch sides. I told them to fuck off,’ he said”).

4. Joshua Yaffa, “The Captive City,” May 23, 2021 (“An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. ‘This was happening one metre away,’ Fedorov said. ‘What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?’ ”).

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Five O’Clock Everywhere,” March 28, 2022 (“Late in the day, I found McChesney playing cornhole in the village square with some friends. I joined in for a while, and then we loaded up the cornhole boards and got into his golf cart and, beers in hand, hummed down the cart path, in the pink subtropical twilight, pines and palms whizzing by, a whiff of fry grease lingering in the air”).

6. Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In,” May 30, 2022 (“I was two minutes late for my treatment. ‘Oh là,’ the therapist clucked, looking at her watch. She instructed me to undress—the spa provided a disposable G-string—and to sit on a table covered with a plastic sheet. Without further discussion, she began daubing my back at strategic points with steaming, tawny mud. When she had finished, she eased me into a reclining position and folded the sheet around me, forming a sort of Hot Pocket in which the mud was the cheese and I was the ham”).

7. William Finnegan, “Big Breaks,” May 30, 2022 (“The only time the waves seem to have any heft at all is when the rider gets deeply barrelled. Suddenly, we’re in a blue room with walls of rushing water, and we’re being pursued by a horizontal waterfall and a fire hose of mist”).

8. John Seabrook, “Green Giants,” January 31, 2022 (“The pits were a mechanical Pamplona of nitromethane bulls, their belching tailpipes and fiery exhaust wrinkling the air, and their pit crews almost feral with the oddly fruity aroma of the fuel and the acrid stench of the smoking, treadless tires that the guys called slicks”).

9. Rebecca Mead, “Norwegian Wood,” April 25 & May 2, 2022 (“I put my bag down on a blond-wood coffee table by the window, and settled into a low swivel chair, its comfortable backrest fashioned from bent-wood strips. In December, Brumunddal enjoys less than six hours of daylight; had I sat there long enough, I could have watched the sun rise and set with only the barest swivel to adjust my line of sight. The room was quiet and, despite the lowering skies, it was light. With its minimal, tasteful furnishings—a narrow blond-wood desk; a double bed made up with white linens and a crimson blanket—it had the virtuous feel of a spa”).

10. Joshua Yaffa, “The Great Thaw,” January 17, 2022 (“Fedorov brought me to a large walk-in freezer, where lumps of flesh and fur were piled on metal shelves; the crescent bend of a tusk was unmistakable. As Fedorov explained, these mammoth remains, dug up across Yakutia, were being stored at zero degrees Fahrenheit, awaiting further scientific study. The space was cramped and frigid—so this is what it’s like to be locked in the permafrost, I thought. I picked up a leg that once belonged to the Maly Lyakhovsky mammoth, a thick stump with reddish-brown hair. ‘Look, its footpad is very well traced,’ Fedorov said. You can see its toenails’ ”).

Best Personal History Piece

John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three,” February 7, 2022 (“Driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries is a good way of getting to know the state, and it beats the hell out of horses”).

Best Cover

Faith Ringgold, “Jazz Stories: Somebody Stole My Broken Heart” (March 28, 2022)

Best Critical Piece

Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out,” May 16, 2022 (“Swift strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so, as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery, blue water and sky, and orangish flesh”).

Best “Talk of the Town” Story

Laura Preston, “Incidental Masterpieces,” April 4, 2022 (“Among the possible masterpieces being prepared for sale at the Found Object Show were a fragment of a birdhouse; a tar bucket; an electrified toilet seat; a piece of wire from a fence made woolly by escaping sheep; a handmade massage device; a braille bingo board; a pouch of nineteenth-century cheese; a hunk of Styrofoam that looked like nineteenth-century cheese; a street sign reading ‘Alone Ave.’; a false beard made of real golden hair; a pile of rubber pocket watches; a pork salesman’s pig-shaped suitcase; a magician’s trick ball; a washing-machine agitator shaped like human hands; a hundred-year-old brick impressed with an animal’s footprint; a forgotten softball grown furry with moss; a copper diving helmet that imploded under immense pressure; and a chicken farmer’s handmade wooden shoes, designed to leave spurious bobcat tracks around coops”).

Best Illustration

Sergiy Maidukov, "Postcard from Kyiv” (January 31, 2022).

Best “Goings On About Town” Review

Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: All’Antico Vinaio,” April 25 & May 2, 2022 (“Towering stacks of schiacciata emerged from the basement at regular intervals, shiny with olive oil and sparkling with coarse salt, releasing clouds of steam from a dense landscape of air bubbles as the loaves were sliced horizontally, ends slivered off and passed to patiently waiting customers”).  

Best newyorker.com Post

Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege of Chernihiv,” April 15, 2022 (“It was a gray, drizzling morning when I pulled up to the site of the attack. What was once the pharmacy was now a burnt-out shell of red brick. One building had taken a direct hit, leaving an entire wall ripped open, with apartments inside exposed like a doll house”).  

Best Short Story

Kevin Barry, “The Pub With No Beer,” April 11, 2022 (“ ‘It could be one of forty-two things that’s wrong with me,’ Frank Waught half whispered to a pint of Smithwick’s”).

Best Photo

Photo by Dina Litovsky, for Helen Rosner's " 'We Watch the News and We're Crying,' " newyorker.com, March 8, 2020.

Best Sentence

One suture on the bowl’s lip was the result of it being dropped last year by a Tampa grinder named Pat Maroon. – Nick Paumgarten and Sarah Larson, “We Want the Cup”

Best Paragraph

I braced myself. The water pressure was intense—almost strong enough to clean a sidewalk. I could taste the salt. The therapist was yelling instructions, but I could hardly hear them over the roar of the spray. She started with my ankles, working methodically up the line: calves, thighs, butt, triceps, shoulders. As she power-washed my back, I fixated on a single thought: Please don’t hit a mole! – Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In”

Best Detail

In “Blue-Eyed Marble Box,” from 1965, an undercurrent of perversity surfaces: a Queen Anne coffee table forms the base of a blocky centauride, whose rectangular torso is pierced by rolling-pin finial nipples. – Johanna Fateman, “Art: Kate Millett” 

Best Description

Chopin’s Nocturne No. 7, in C-sharp minor, begins with a low, ashen sound: a prowling arpeggio in the left hand, consisting only of C-sharps and G-sharps. It’s a hollowed-out harmony, in limbo between major and minor. Three bars in, the right hand enters on E, seemingly establishing minor, but a move to E-sharp clouds the issue, pointing toward major. Although the ambiguity dissipates in the measures that follow, a nimbus of uncertainty persists. Something even eerier happens in the tenth bar. The melody abruptly halts on the leading tone of B-sharp while the left hand gets stuck in another barren pattern—this one incorporating the notes D, A, and C-sharp. It’s almost like a glitch, a frozen screen. Then comes a moment of wistful clarity: an immaculate phrase descends an octave, with a courtly little turn on the fourth step of the scale. It is heard only once more before it disappears. I always yearn in vain for the tune’s return: a sweetly murmuring coda doesn’t quite make up for its absence. Ultimate beauty always passes too quickly. – Alex Ross, "Moonlight”

Best Question

Why did Laphroaig suggest thick-sliced bacon? – John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three”

Seven Memorable Lines

1. Haidai told me that agents from the F.S.B., the Russian security service, had called to offer him a chance to switch sides. “I told them to fuck off,” he said. – Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege”

2. In the Margaritaville calculus, the benefits of good company outweigh the deleterious effects of alcohol. Merriment is medicinal. – Nick Paumgarten, “Five O’Clock Everywhere”

3. A barking fox kind of gags and hacks, like a cat coughing up a hair ball, except that the fox sounds as if he’s enjoying it. – Ian Frazier, “Stir-Crazy”

4. Gorgeous? Oh, yeah. – Peter Schjeldahl, “Going Flat Out”

5. Any writer would have trouble wringing interest out of “Achy Breaky Heart,” “Titanic,” “Friends,” and Pauly Shore. – Frank Guan, “The Decade of Disquiet”

6. I filled a cup and tried it. Rotten eggs and cabbage soup—yes. But chalky, too. I felt like I had licked a blackboard. – Lauren Collins, “Soaking It In”

7. There seem to be more kinds of foam mattresses than there are craft beers from Brooklyn, but don’t be fooled by proprietary terms like “Ambien-injected kosher crypto-foam.”  – Patricia Marx, “Tossed and Turned”

November 23, 2020 Issue

Three striking artworks in this week’s issue:

1. Sergiy Maidukov’s portrait of Grace Jones for Sarah Larson’s “Podcast Dept.”

2. Naila Ruechel’s photos for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: EMP To Go."

3. Andrea Ventura’s portrait of Paul Celan for Ruth Franklin’s “A Word, a Corpse.”

Maidukov and Ventura are established New Yorker illustrators. I’ve long admired their work. But Ruechel’s bold, color-drenched photography is new to me. I look forward to seeing more of it in the magazine. 

Best of 2019: The Critics

Josh Cochran's illustration for Sarah Larson's "Home on the Range"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Not Waving,” May 27, 2019 (“I was lucky to catch a rehearsal of a performance work by Brendan Fernandes that will take place at scheduled but infrequent times: five ballet dancers in black leotards strike varying poses on an arrangement of skeletal frameworks in black-painted wood. That was dreamy”).

2. James Wood, “Contents Under Pressure,” January 14, 2019 (“It’s a sign of how vital the rest of the book feels that a phrase like ‘caustic speech,’ which would be inoffensive enough in many novels, seems here irradiated with fakery”). 

3. Dan Chiasson’s “Freewriting,” October 14, 2019 (“The black bars of redacted text, which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours”).

4. Anthony Lane's “What If?,” July 8 & 15, 2019 (“Boyle, especially in the early scenes, provides acceleration; at the exact moment when Jack, standing at a bus stop, properly understands what the future holds, the camera hurries toward him like an excited kid”).

5. Alex Ross’s  “The Concerto Challenge,” March 25, 2019 (“The first movement follows the rudiments of sonata form, with the scampering opening material set against a slinky cantabile second theme that has a whiff of old Hollywood about it, as if Bette Davis were sipping a Scotch with the blinds drawn”).

6. Sarah Larson’s “Home on the Range,” February 4, 2019 (“The plot whirls along, heading inevitably toward collaborative writing, drunken mayhem, brandished golf clubs, existential crises, flying toast”).

 7. Alexandra Schwartz's “Painted Love,” July 22, 2019 (“She has the memoirist’s prerogative—this is how I remember it—and Picasso’s tyranny and brilliance are hardly in dispute”).

8. Hilton Als’s “Seen and Heard,” September 23, 2019 (“As in the Williams portrait, whiteness—here the whiteness of Horne’s turban, which sits like a beacon at the top of the image—is used to underline the blackness in the photograph, black skin and black as a color that leads to black feeling and thought”).

9. Janet Malcolm’s “The Unholy Practice,” September 23, 2019 (“The best intentions, however, can be broken on the wheel of skillful (or even inept) interviewing. Discretion so quickly turns into indiscretion under the exciting spell of undivided attention”).

10. Thomas Mallon's “Word for Word,” December 16, 2019 (“These changes alchemize a small piece of gold into a small piece of lead. Lowell slackens Hardwick’s prose into poetry, robs it of precision and pith”).

February 4, 2019 Issue

Sarah Larson, in her excellent “Home on the Range,” in this week’s issue, reviews a revival of Sam Shepard’s 1980 True West, a play I’ve always wanted to see ever since I read John Lahr’s memorable review of it in the March 27, 2000, New Yorker (included in his great 2015 collection, Joy Ride). Lahr called it “a droll tale of sibling rivalry.” That 2000 production starred Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly. (Reilly is one of my favorite actors; his performance in The Sisters Brothers is, for me, one of 2018’s movie highlights.) What made Lahr’s piece memorable was his description of the play’s action. For example:

When the lights come up on the two brothers in the next scene, Austin is burnishing one of a dozen newly acquired toasters (“There’s gonna’ be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning,” he says); meanwhile, in the foreground, Lee is taking out his writer’s block on the typewriter, smashing it to smithereens with a nine iron. Here Shepard is at his best: loose, intuitive, his dialogue rippling with subtle shifts of mood and ideas. In this impeccably staged piece of slapstick, while Reilly tears up the dining alcove looking for a pencil, Hoffman pads behind him, priming his toasters with white bread and talking about going back to the desert with Lee. “There’s nothing real down here, Lee! Least of all me!” he says. The frenzy builds to a sidesplitting, infantile epiphany. Lee knocks the toast out of Austin’s hand, then as Austin drops to his hands and knees to pick it up, grinds each slice into the floor.

That is a marvelous passage, and what makes it marvelous is its specificity – the burnishing of the toaster, the smashing of the typewriter with a nine iron, the grinding of each slice of toast into the floor.

Edward Sorel, illustration for John Lahr's "True West"

Larson’s piece contains vivid passages, too:

This could be your grandmother’s kitchen. Cherry-print wallpaper, sunny yellows, lush houseplants, decorations approaching kitsch without succumbing to it—everything conveys haimish order and care. There’s love in this room, and it’s about to get torn apart.

Hawke, in a scuzzy trenchcoat, looking convincingly greasy, enjoys himself, at times nearly singing his lines, waving his hands in teasing disdain. But he doesn’t overdo it. 

The plot whirls along, heading inevitably toward collaborative writing, drunken mayhem, brandished golf clubs, existential crises, flying toast. 

Josh Cochran, illustration for Sarah Larson's "Home on the  Range"

Comparing the two pieces, I think I still like Lahr’s the best. But Larson makes a valid point when she says, “Shepard’s writing and his vision are as powerful as ever, but American masculinity has evolved since he wrote ‘True West’; what’s true for one generation may not be true for the next.”

"Bar Tab" 's Last Call?

Jorge Colombo, "Super Power" (2017)

Looks like “Bar Tab” is kaput. The last one was Neima Jahromi’s “Bar Tab: The Uncommons,” in the November 19 New Yorker. Since then, there’ve been five straight issues sans “Bar Tab.” I miss it. I miss the fabulous cocktails: Diamond Reef’s The Penichillin, Et Al’s The Fuck You Steve, The Penrose’s Baby Zombie, Camp’s The Dirty Girl Scout, Rose Bar’s Notorious Nude, Existing Condition’s popcorn-infused rum-and-Cokes, Primo’s signature vodka Martini, “served with an anchovy skewered under an olive” (Colin Stokes, “Bar Tab: Primo’s”), on and on. I’m getting thirsty just thinking about them. 

I miss the vivid bar descriptions: “Visiting Super Power, with the gentle glow of a blowfish lamp, the fogged windows dripping hypnotically with condensation, and the humid, coconut-scented air, was exactly like being on a cruise, but everyone was wearing wool.” Remember that? It’s from McKenna Stayner’s wonderful “Bar Tab: Super Power.” Earlier this year, a “Bar Tab” appeared that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker writings: Elizabeth Barber’s “Bar Tab: Ophelia.” Here’s a taste: 

At the bar, the twosome ordered again (pink prosecco poured sybaritically over sherry and Campari), beneath a taxidermic bird—an albino pheasant, clarified the bar staff, after a brief conference. The pair took in this deceased fowl, and observed, through the cathedral-like windows, the coy, unforthcoming façades of Midtown East. The effect was to make them feel as if they were in a birdcage, doomed to contemplate unreachable possibilities they should know better than to want. 

I miss “Bar Tab” ’s sensuous details. For example:

Lattes are served with delicate feathers etched in foam; the music is unobtrusive; and the soft glow from teardrop-shaped fixtures stipples drinkers’ faces with chiaroscuro.  [Talia Lavin, “Bar Tab: Cocoa Bar”]

With eyes closed, one might mistake a flute of the honey-hued jasmine variety for a very dry prosecco, save for the intense floral perfume that lingers after each sip. [Wei Tchou, "Bar Tab: 29B Teahouse"]

Better yet was the Falling Up, with bourbon, apple brandy, Cynar, lemon, fresh ginger, and port. Served in a brandy snifter, piled high with pebbled ice, like a sno-cone, and garnished with an elaborately carved wedge of gala apple, it swirled cloudily in the glass, looking gloriously silly. [Sarah Larson, “Bar Tab: Wassail”]

I miss all that great stuff. Please, New Yorker, tell me it isn’t true. Tell me “Bar Tab” will soon be back, intoxicating as ever.     

Best of 2015: Talk

Here are my favorite “Talk of the Town” stories of 2015 (with a choice quote from each selection in brackets):

1. Mark Singer, "All-Nighter," May 11, 2015. (“Or does it refer to stuff that’s really, really hard to follow, especially when certain brainiacs insist on reading their turgid prose in a monotone that makes us doubt our very existence, because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile?”)

2. Ian Frazier, "Russophilia," February 16, 2015. (“When undone, scarves with modernistic prints sent out gusts of international perfume.”)

3. Nick Paumgarten, "Hut!," June 22, 2015. (“They flew on the tide, the city sparkling by.”)

4. Lizzie Widdicombe, "Air Bus," June 1, 2015. (“The helicopter made its shuddering descent. Legs shook; sippy cups spilled. Marcy said, ‘Wow! I love this part!’ The pilot yelled, ‘Touchdown!’ ”)

5. Nick Paumgarten, "Amerks," October 5, 2015. (“Dutton, eighty-two, had a brush cut, a firm jawline, and teeth that looked suspiciously like replacements for a set scattered on a frozen pond.”)

6. Ian Frazier, "Amo, Amas," August 3, 2015. (“Languages and facts flew like sparks from a grindstone and skidded bluely onto the board.”)

7. Sarah Larson, "Cinephiles," January 19, 2015. (“The waitress brought Murray two rum-and-water options. He took one and said, of the other, ‘You give that to the kids at the orphanage.’ ”)

8. Lauren Collins, "Birds-Eye View," July 6, 2015. (“Out on the runway, a queue was forming: a Middle East Airlines A320, bound for Beirut; a KLM 737, heading back to Amsterdam; the state aircraft of the United Arab Emirates, a private 747, half snow goose, half tapir, its snout sniffing the sky.”)

9. Alec Wilkinson, "Hands," June 29, 2015. (“When Elfman arrived, he said that he began collecting when he was travelling the world after graduating from high school. ‘I was in Bamako, Mali, and I bought a standing, smiling skeleton carved from a single piece of bone, probably an elephant bone,’ he said. ‘There was a guy in the market with three of them. I negotiated for a day, with breaks for lunch.’ ”)

10. John Seabrook, "Free," February 2, 2015. (“Tagaq, who is thirty-nine and has jet-black hair and a girlish face, had removed her sealskin boots and was sitting barefoot on the floor of the Diker Pavilion, a large oval space on the museum’s ground level.”)

Credit: The above portrait of Tanya Tagaq, by Tom Bachtell, is from John Seabrook's "Free," The New Yorker, February 2, 2015.

Best of 2015: GOAT

Here are my favorite “Goings On About Town” pieces of 2015 (with a choice quote from each selection in brackets):

1. Amelia Lester, "Tables For Two: Shuko," August 10 & 17, 2015). (“ ‘Did he say scallop sperm?’ He did, and it’s mild, sweet, and a little bit wobbly, like custard.”)

2. Sarah Larson, "Bar Tab: Wassail," April 20, 2015. (“Better yet was the Falling Up, with bourbon, apple brandy, Cynar, lemon, fresh ginger, and port. Served in a brandy snifter, piled high with pebbled ice, like a sno-cone, and garnished with an elaborately carved wedge of gala apple, it swirled cloudily in the glass, looking gloriously silly.”)

3. Emma Allen, "Bar Tab: Winnie's," February 9, 2015. (“One evening in Chinatown, a young woman in a Nirvana T-shirt took a break from mixing Hawaiian punches—a juggling act involving eight kinds of liquor, pineapple juice, and grenadine—to pull out a giant laser disk, grab a mic, and perform “Santeria,” by Sublime.”)

4. Andrea K. Scott, "Boxing Days," June 29, 2015. (“It’s a portable survey of Cianciolo’s career, revealing a hunter-gatherer of the flea market and an inveterate archivist of her own process. They’re the shamanic-punk heirs to a lineage of inside-the-box thinkers whose most famous son is Joseph Cornell.”)

5. Emma Allen, "Bar Tab: Livingston Manor," March 16, 2015. (“So it is that such throwbacks as wood reclaimed from a Virginia elementary school and a bourbon-and-ginger-spiked egg cream called the Bugsville Fizz coexist with neoteric features like a hearty dark lager from Catskill Brewery (est. 2014), a duck-rillette banh mi, and a woman guilelessly confessing, ‘I never really got into Seinfeld, I think because I was too young.’ ”)

6. Richard Brody, "Bodies of Work," June 22, 2015. (“Fairchild, who performs like a counterculture Gena Rowlands, is irresistibly passionate and volatile even in repose, and Shults displays a bold visual and dramatic sensibility with his impressionistic rearrangement of time and his repertory of darting, whirling, plunging, and retreating camera moves, which seem to paint the action onto the screen.”)

7. Colin Stokes, "Bar Tab: Threes Brewing," June 29, 2015. (“Appropriately, first on the list is the terrific Negligence, which blends gin, basil syrup, lemon, and absinthe into what looks like a green juice cleanse, but is much better for you, depending on who you trust. ‘Your mouth might not be able to detect how strong it is, but your liver will,’ a server advised.”)

8. Nicolas Niarchos, "Bar Tab: Dutch Kills," November 2, 2015. (“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.”)

9. Jiayang Fan, "Bar Tab: Play Lounge," February 16, 2015. (“Hookah beer towers (strawberry, mint, melon) are hailed like cabs on a busy avenue.”)

10. Silvia Killingsworth, "Tables For Two: Timna," October 26, 2015. (“Kubaneh is a Yemenite-Jewish yeast loaf traditionally eaten on the morning of the sabbath, after it has baked overnight at a low temperature. Mesika’s version is served steaming hot in a clay flowerpot, freckled with sesame seeds. Its texture falls somewhere between brioche, challah, and croissant, and it pulls apart like cotton candy.”)

Credit: The above illustration, by Rebecca Monk, is from Jiayang Fan’s "Bar Tab: Play Lounge," The New Yorker, February 16, 2015.

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.