Best of 2022: Illustrations

Patrick Leger, End of the Road (2022)

Here are my favorite New Yorker illustrations of 2022:

1. Patrick Leger's illustration for Ian Parker's "End of the Road," November 14, 2022 (see above);

2. Nada Hayek's illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "Five O'Clock Everywhere" (March 28, 2022);

3. Josh Cochran's illustration for Andrea K. Scott's "Fall Art Preview" (August 15, 2022);

4. Sergiy Maidukov's illustration for his "Postcard from Kyiv" (January 31, 2022);

5. Toma Vagner's illustration for Anthony Lane's "Living for the City" (February 14 & 21, 2022);

6. Wesley Allsbrook's illustration for Elizabeth Kolbert's "A Vast Experiment" (November 28, 2022);

7. Carnovsky's illustration for Rivka Galchen's "Change of Heart" (February 28, 2022);

8. Bill Bragg's illustration for Merve Emre's "Getting to Yes" (February 14 & 21, 2022);

9. Klauss Kremmerz's illustration for Jill Lepore's "Moving Right Along" (July 25, 2022);

10. Adam Carvalho's illustration for Anthony Lane's "Restless" (April 18, 2022).

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: Illustrations

Sergiy Maidukov's illustration for Alex Ross's "The Concerto Challenge"

Here are my favorite New Yorker illustrations of 2019:

1. Sergiy Maidukov’s illustration for Alex Ross’s “The Concerto Challenge,” March 25, 2019 (see above).

2. Sergiy Maidukov's illustration for Hua Hsu's "Dance About Dance" (December 9, 2019)

3. Nancy Liang’s illustration for James Marcus’s “A Dark Ride” (October 29, 2019)

4. Liam Hopkins’ illustration for Steve Smith’s “Garden Music” (August 19, 2019)

5. Max Dalton’s illustration for Andrea K. Scott’s “Fall Preview” (August 26, 2019).

6. Leo Espinosa’s illustration for Nick Paumgarten’s “Unlike Any Other” (June 24, 2019).

7. Aude Van Ryn's illustration for Andrea K. Scott's "At the Galleries" (November 4, 2019)

8. Keith Negley’s illustration for Nick Paumgarten’s “The Symptoms” (November 11, 2019).

9. Daniel Salmieri's illustration for Mark Binelli's "Arrivederci, Little Italy" (December 8, 2019)

10. João Fazenda’s illustration for Adam Gopnik’s “If You Listen” (August 19, 2019).

Mid-Year Top Ten (2019)

Katy Grannan, illustration for Ian Frazier's "Pumper's Corner"

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):

Reporting

1. Ian Frazier, “Pumper’s Corner,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (“As Rachael walked me through each well, I appreciated the Rube Goldberg-ness of it all. No two were the same. “The guys out here like to say that a well is like a woman, because each one needs to be handled differently,” Rachael said. She had been to these wells often, and sort of whispered each one, the way she would a horse. She put her hands on pipes, felt for hot spots, peered into gauges, cocked an ear for wrong sounds. She had me listen at a pipe where rising gas from a mile down hissed and echoed—all O.K. there”).

2. Burkhard Bilger, “Extreme Range,” February 11, 2019 (“The voices were growing louder, circling the silo one by one with the choir close behind. Wells lifted his head to the cloud of voices rising and swirling toward the ceiling, then stretched out his arms as they joined in a great, ragged chord. When they fell silent, I could hear the tapping of rain on the roof outside. Then a last voice sang out—Shaw’s quiet mezzo, wafting up like a fleck of ash above a flame”).

3. Nick Paumgarten, “The Descent of Man,” April 29, 2019 (“I glanced up and saw for the first time, shadow-blue and telephoto close, the final section of the Streif, where the racers, after soaring off a jump, come hauling across a steep, bumpy, fallaway traverse—legs burning, skis thrashing—and into the final plunge, the Zielschuss, reaching speeds of almost ninety miles an hour”).

4. James Lasdun, “Glow,” April 29, 2019 (“A crack appeared in the clouds directly above us. It widened, showing a sprinkling of stars and then the entire Big Dipper. There was a stirring among the photographers: their cameras had started detecting things. After a moment, an oblique greenish bar like the one I’d seen the night before became visible. It grew brighter and denser, then contracted into an oval of emerald light. People chattered excitedly. I was about to warn them not to get too carried away when a streak of brilliant green shot out of the oval, at high speed, and zoomed over our tipped-back heads, corkscrewing across the sky. I almost toppled over while following its trajectory. The green light formed several tentacles, which twisted and writhed together and looped in circles. Astonishment was proclaimed in a half-dozen languages. The circles dropped needles of piercing brightness that travelled, in tandem, around the sky, as if tracing the undulations of a celestial shower curtain”).

5. Douglas Preston, “The Day the Earth Died,” April 8, 2019 (When we arrived, DePalma’s site lay open in front of us: a desolate hump of gray, cracked earth, about the size of two soccer fields. It looked as if a piece of the moon had dropped there. One side of the deposit was cut through by a sandy wash, or dry streambed; the other ended in a low escarpment. The dig was a three-foot-deep rectangular hole, sixty feet long by forty feet wide. A couple of two-by-fours, along with various digging tools and some metal pipe for taking core samples, leaned against the far side of the hole. As we strolled around the site, I noticed on DePalma’s belt a long fixed-blade knife and a sheathed bayonet—a Second World War relic that his uncle gave him when he was twelve, he said”)

6. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Under Water,” April 1, 2019 (“Flying at an altitude of two thousand feet, I could make out the houses and farms and refineries that fill the strips, though not the people who live or work in them. Beyond was open water or patchy marsh. In many spots, the patches were crisscrossed with channels. Presumably, these had been dug when the land was firmer, to get at the oil underneath. In some places, I could see the outlines of what were once fields and are now rectilinear lakes. Great white clouds, billowing above the plane, were mirrored in the black pools below”).

7. Rivka Galchen, “The Eighth Continent,” May 6, 2019 (“When a Masten rocket takes off, it has a delicate appearance. One of the newer ones, the Xodiac, looks like two golden balloons mounted on a metal skeleton. A kite tail of fire shoots out as the Xodiac launches straight up; at its apex, it has the ability to tilt and float down at an angle, as casually as a leaf. When Xodiac nears its designated landing spot, it abruptly slows, aligns, seems to hesitate, lands. It’s eerie—at that moment, the rocket seems sentient, intentional”).

8. Joshua Rothman, “What Lies Beneath,” March 25, 2019 (“Sacks bent down and selected another strip of linen. Using his brush, he glued it to the wooden shingle, half obscuring its red eyes. The fabric flowed vertically down the canvas. Leaning in, he used his fingers to adjust its path, creating ridges and folds so that it would be open to oxygen. Then, from a nearby worktable, he retrieved a box of kitchen matches. He struck one of them and set fire to the linen. The flames rippled upward, serpentine. He watched them climb, then, after a few seconds, used his brush to snuff them out. Some of the linen was gone. We stood looking at the materials, colored by smoke, now joined by a scar”).

9. John Seabrook, “Machine Hands,” April 15, 2019 (“It was only at the very end of the eight-second window that the Pitzer wheel dropped down and—in a blur of motion that recalled Doctor Octopus, the Spider-Man villain, attacking one of his victims—the claws grabbed and picked the ripe berries in a fraction of a second, pop-pop-pop, and deposited them, apparently unbruised, on a shelf at the top of the machine’s chassis. Then the robots moved on to the next plant in that row”).

10. Rebecca Mead, “The Perfect Paint,” March 18, 2019 (“When I was visiting, a batch of Hague Blue was being stirred to completion. The enormous vat of paint shimmered like a luxurious pool in a Turkish hammam, and I almost wanted to climb in”).

Personal History

1. Anne Boyer, “The Undying,” April 15, 2019 (“I try to be the best-dressed person in the infusion room. I wrap myself up in thrift-store luxury and pin it together with a large gold brooch in the shape of a horseshoe. The nurses always praise the way I dress. I need that. Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins”).

2. Robert A. Caro, “Turn Every Page,” January 28, 2019 (“There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself. I loved going through those files, making them yield their secrets to me”).

3. James Marcus, “Blood Relations,” March 11, 2019 (“I peeled a yellow leaf away from the stone. It occurred to me that, as I got older, the beautiful, booming abstractions were becoming real. When I was young, eternity was too big to grasp. The years were elongated, shining, countless. But my father, I now understood, was gone forever”).

4. Kathryn Schulz, “The Stack,” March 25, 2019 (“My father, by contrast, loved books ravenously. His always had a devoured look to them: scribbled on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with coffee, Scotch, pistachio dust, and bits of the brightly colored shells of peanut M&M’s”).

5. Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Hereafter, Faraway,” June 10 & 17, 2019 (“Then his camera captures us from behind, me clinging to my mother’s hand as we walk toward a rendezvous with our future selves”). 

The Critics 

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “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. Peter Schjeldahl, “Exposed,” May 13, 2019 (“You see the comprehensive capture of scenes on the wing. If the camera tilts, it’s not for arty effect but to squeeze in the relevant details of, say, a group of women bustling forward between a beggar in a wheelchair and a small group of people standing or sitting at a curb—three rhythms in flashing counterpoint”).

3. James Wood, “Escape Velocity,” April 1, 2019 (“Hempel, like some practical genius of the forest, can make living structures out of what look like mere bric-a-brac, leavings, residue”).

4. James Wood, “Contents Under Pressure,” January 14, 2019 (“Gunaratne’s powers of observation are so acute and extractive that he can trust his material to generate its own human significance”).

5. Dan Chiasson, “A Still Small Poem,” April 8, 2019 (“His forms vary depending upon what his senses perceive: jagged and tense around a mountain lion, long and languid next to a butterfly”).

6. Alex Ross, “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”).

7. Anthony Lane, “Adrift,” February 4, 2019 (“But the noir is beige at the edges, and the sex is hopelessly brisk and coy; if Baker wanted it steamy, he should have put the kettle on to boil”).

8.  Anthony Lane, “Awkward Ages,” May 27, 2019 (“It’s a sumptuous performance from Burke, whom I’ve seen on TV playing the nefarious Dolokhov, in the BBC’s “War and Peace,” and onstage as the agonized pastor in Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm,” and who gives off an aroma of loucheness as if it were expensive cologne”).

9. Sarah Larson, “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”).

10. Lauren Oyler, “Sex Ed,” April 1, 2019 (“These sentiments, which sever intellect from feeling or mind from body, are decidedly not Dworkinesque, and the ease with which we’ve pulled out what is useful or prophetic about her work suggests that we’re still not reading her writing the way she would read it: closely, actively”). 

Talk of the Town

1. 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”).

2. 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”).

3. 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”).

4. 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”).

5. 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”).

Goings On About Town

1. Andrea K. Scott, “Art: ‘Maya Lin,’ ” January 14, 2019 (“As the marbles shimmer along the floor, then flow up the walls and across the ceiling, they become dotted lines on a sheet of paper, a map in the midst of being folded”).

2. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Barca,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (“The broth in her zuppa di pesce, a Sicilian-style fish stew abundant with mussels, clams, shrimp, black sea bass, Castelvetrano olives, and fregola, a pearl-shaped pasta, is so appealingly redolent of Pernod that I couldn’t resist sipping the last dregs straight from the lidded crock after my spoon had been cleared”).

3. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Heidi Bucher,” May 20, 2019 (“Among the nine stunning pieces in this exhibition, which have yellowed and become more scab-like with age, is a drooping mold of one of that building’s windows, its slightly bowed shutters suggesting the wings of an enormous insect”).

4. Briana Younger, “Night Life: Ari Lennox,” June 3, 2019 (“Her love-struck tales are consistently gorgeous, but it's when she weaves in the mundane details—a new apartment, watching "Adventure Time," shopping at Target—that the silken muscle of her voice makes itself most evident, a reminder that there is soul to be found in even the most prosaic life events, that just having breath can be worth singing about”).

5. Richard Brody, “Movies: Under the Silver Lake,” April 29, 2019 (“A zine traces long-ago Hollywood scandals; a friend finds the secrets of the world on the back of a cereal box; clips and names of classic movies and video games hint at vast secret connections; a popular band fronts a cult; and a reclusive old songwriter claims to be behind all modern culture and its labyrinthine conspiracies”).

6. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: O:n°,” April 15, 2019 (“Servers, wearing chic indigo smocks, operate as carefully as cat burglars, slipping inconspicuous timers in and out of their pockets as they glide around the room”).

7. Peter Schjeldahl, “At the Galleries: Matvey Levenstein,” March 4, 2019 (“Layered grays, orange-flavored sepia, and the odd palely simmering pink or blue constitute—or conjure, or exhale—spectral woods, clouds, a snow-covered ancient graveyard, and a storm at sea”).

8. Michaelangelo Matos, “Night Life: Wata Igarashi,” May 20, 2019 (“As synth patterns shape-shift in slow motion and crisp percussion slumps into slurping timbres, his mixes find the sounds' edges melting into one another”).

9. Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: Szechuan Mountain House,” June 3, 2019 (On a recent Tuesday, two Gen X-ers and one millennial, all Sichuan natives, sat down under silk lanterns and poured themselves jasmine tea from a cast-iron pot into bone-china cups so fine they resembled the pearly inside of seashells.

10. Richard Brody, “Movies: Enthusiasm,” March 18, 2019 (“He films with a wild, expressive energy, panning rapidly to follow the swinging clapper of a bell and depicting electric wires as ecstatic striations of the sky”).

newyorker.com

1. Chris Wiley, “How Larry Sultan Made His Father a Metaphor for Dashed American Dreams,” April 7, 2019 (“In the picture that came out of that poolside photo shoot, we see that behind the elder Sultan is a rolling expanse of tightly cut grass soaking up the water from an automated sprinkler system, which passes for rain in those parts—a landscape on life support. His father is tan, but he is also old, his body clearly heading toward its twilight, and he looks somewhat melancholy—despairing, even—as if the empty pool in front of him were a reservoir of regrets”).

2. Chris Wiley, “Lee Friedlander’s Intimate Portraits of His Wife, Through Sixty Years of Marriage,” January 11, 2019 (“Looking at these pictures, it is impossible not to feel the palpable tug of time’s undertow, its inexorable movement toward we-know-not-what. This is underscored in the show by a handful of purposeful echoes. Here, a young Lee with his uncanny, icy eyes and lolling forelock is nestled close to Maria, her face a vision of benign tolerance; there, on a windswept Oregon beach, Lee cranes his head away from his camera awkwardly to nuzzle in adoration against Maria, who is elegance personified, and now thirty years older. Here is photography’s ultimate irony: it can freeze time, but never stop it”).

3. Alexandra Schwartz,“ ‘While I Live, I Remember’: Agnès Varda’s Way of Seeing,” March 30, 2019 (Her films, which celebrate the art of the foraged and the found, can be like associative essays, or like poems).

4. Lauren Collins, “On the Roof of Notre Dame, Before It Burned,” April 15, 2019 (“The omniscient of the Internet told us not to fret, that cathedrals had been built and burned before. But Parisians watched with the supplicant helplessness of the ages, singing hymns on their knees as the firefighters battled to save the north belfry on the second day of Holy Week”).

5. Charlotte Mendelson, “Seeds, The Gateway Drug to Gardening,” April 23, 2019 (“To the unafflicted, seeds may seem like nondescript black dots, distinguishing themselves only once they’ve blossomed. But look closely and you’ll see that they are quietly astonishing in their variety, particularly when they’re patiently waiting in the dried remains of last year’s flowers: the papery discs of hollyhock, neatly arranged in doughnut rings; glossy nigella specks in spiky spheres; the fat succulence of apples; the pony flank of chestnut; speckled borlotti or elma beans, black and white like baby killer whales; poppies like salt shakers; and calendula, my favorite, an explosion of prickly crescents, dry brown springs tight with life”).

Favorite Short Story

Han Ong, “Javi,” June 10 & 17, 2019 (“Hard to credit that the figure in front of him is a woman. The silhouette is huge and partly obscured by the screen door. He, on the other hand, is in plain sun, right in the middle of the gravel path—hesitant to go any closer—all of the New Mexico sky on top of him”).

Favorite Poem

Daniel Halpern, “Catch,” April 15, 2019 (“the sound of the ball popping the leather / in the silence below the summer Valley trees, / an occasional pale-colored car sliding // past us, unnoticed / down Vesper”).

Favorite Issue

April 29, 2019 (“The Travel Issue”), containing Lauren Collins’s “Kitchen Companion,” James Lasdun’s “Glow,” and Nick Paumgarten’s “The Descent of Man” – all excellent.

Favorite Cover

Malika Favre, “Summer Hours” (May 27, 2019)

Favorite Illustration

Sergiy Maidukov, illustration for Alex Ross’s “The Concerto Challenge” (March 25, 2019)

Favorite Photograph

Immo Klink, illustration for Nick Paumgarten’s “The Descent of Man” (April 29, 2019)

Favorite Sentence

Listening to Bone, Wells realized that his story was etched into the very sound of his voice: a slow, dehydrated drawl, thick with Southern heat and vocal fry, the indolence of small towns and the drag-footed pace of a heart slowed by heroin. – Burkhard Bilger, “Extreme Range” (February 11, 2019)

Favorite Paragraph

My cancer was not just a set of sensations or lessons in interpretation or a problem for art, although it was all of these things. My cancer was a captive fear that I would die and leave my daughter in a hard world with no resources, a fear, too, that I had devoted my life to writing and sacrificed all I had and never come to its reward. It was a terror that all I’d ever written would sit data-mined but not read in Google’s servers until even Google’s servers were made of dust, and in the meantime I would become that unspeaking thing, a dead person, leaving too soon everyone and everything I loved the most. – Anne Boyer, “The Undying” (April 15, 2019)

Favorite Detail

When she came out of her house, she was brushing her teeth. The arrival of a stranger at her door at nine-thirty in the morning did not faze her, and she continued to brush for a few minutes as we talked. – Ian Frazier, “Pumper’s Corner” (February 18 & 25, 2019)

Favorite Description

But my favorite dish might be the karsod, another soup. With a putty-pale sheet of lightly oiled dough stretched over the top of the bowl, it resembles an uncooked potpie, a broadcast of blandness. To pierce the surface and access the piping hot broth inside is to be reminded that mild does not necessarily equate to boring. In a version with lamb, the simple, slightly gummy pastry and the clear, fragrant liquid, dotted sparingly with scallion, cilantro, and translucent coins of potato, provide an optimal canvas for the gently gamy flavor of the simmered meat—as humble yet surprising as the restaurant itself. – Hannah Goldfield, "Tables for Two: Lhasa Fresh Food" (May 20, 2019)

Seven Memorable Lines

1. At a certain point, I found myself trapped in a vortex of flashbulbs, loden, jawlines, and boobs. – Nick Paumgarten, “The Descent of Man” (April 29, 2019)

2. He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass. – Douglas Preston, “The Day the Earth Died” (April 8, 2019)

3. Humans are producing no-analogue climates, no-analogue ecosystems, a whole no-analogue future. – Elizabeth Kolbert, “Under Water” (April 1, 2019)

4. Andria was wearing a three-piece suit, accented by a scarlet pin that glowed like a pomegranate seed. – Lauren Collins, “Kitchen Companion” (April 29, 2019)

5. Also, as the T-shirts for sale on Amazon suggest, we are always supposed to be able to tell cancer that “you messed with the wrong bitch!” In my case, however, cancer messed with the right bitch. – Anne Boyer, “The Undying” (April 15, 2019)

6. There would be no closure, no healing. I would simply adjust myself to a new and severely depleted reality. The world would come to an end, as it always does, one world at a time. – James Marcus, “Blood Relations” (March 11, 2019)

7. “You’re no more than a hooker,” she says, and Baker retorts, quick as anything, “A hooker who can’t afford hooks.” Zing! Who said the age of wit was over? – Anthony Lane, “Adrift” (February 4, 2019)