Best of the Decade: Second Thoughts

Photo by George Steinmetz, from Lauren Collins's "Angle of Vision"

Well, I’m midway in my “Best of the Decade” series and I’m having second thoughts about it. I now think it was folly to attempt it. There are just too many great pieces to choose from. Boiling the selection down to twelve has been agony. I’ve had to be absolutely ruthless. Many wonderful pieces have been excluded.

I’m going to continue with the series. But when I’m finished, I intend to provide an alternate list of twelve more pieces – all of which are deserving of “Best of Decade” status. That won’t do justice to all the New Yorker pieces I cherish, but at least it will help mitigate the severity of the selection process.

As for the list I’m currently working on, here are the six picks I’ve made so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

7. Lauren Collins’s “Angle of Vision” (“In dreams—mine, at least—flying is like swimming. But the air was crisp and thin, not viscous, as I’d imagined it. I didn’t have to make my way through it; it made its way through me. Being upright in the air feels like being upside down on the ground. My spine stretched. I felt like I’d be an inch taller when I touched down. In twenty seconds, my feet thudded into the valley floor”);

8.  Joseph Mitchell’s “Street Life” (“Another thing I like to do is to get on a subway train picked at random and stay on it for a while and go upstairs to the street and get on the first bus that shows up going in any direction and sit on the cross seat in back beside a window and ride along and look out the window at the people and at the flowing backdrop of buildings. There is no better vantage point from which to look at the common, ordinary city—not the lofty, noble silvery vertical city but the vast, spread-out, sooty-gray and sooty-brown and sooty-red and sooty-pink horizontal city, the snarled-up and smoldering city, the old, polluted, betrayed, and sure-to-be-torn-down-any-time-now city”); 

9. Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (“During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered”);

10. Robert A. Caro’s “The Transition” (“Whirling in his seat, Youngblood shouted—in a ‘voice I had never heard him ever use,’ Lady Bird recalled—‘Get down! Get down!’ and, grabbing Johnson’s right shoulder, yanked him roughly down toward the floor in the center of the car, as he almost leaped over the front seat, and threw his body over the Vice-President, shouting again, ‘Get down! Get down!’ ”);

11. Elif Batuman’s “The Memory Kitchen” (“Near the beekeeper’s table, a farmer was selling live turkeys. There were seven or eight of them sitting on a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury”);

12. Tad Friend’s “Thicker Than Water” (“The wave caught them from behind and lifted them until they were surfing its face. They hung there for five seconds—their port gunwale tilting overhead, the Yamaha outboard whirring in the air—as if time were taking a breath. Jason still believed that they’d shoot the barrel and make it out. Then the starboard gunwale hit sand, and with fantastic power the wave lifted the boat and hurled it onto the sandbar upside down. All that was visible of Jabb from above was a strip of maroon-painted hull”).

Best of the Decade: #12 Tad Friend's "Thicker Than Water"

Jason Mleczko (Photo by Grant Cornett)

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favorite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I’ll pick a piece and try to express why I’m drawn to it. Today, I begin with my #12 choice – Tad Friend’s superb “Thicker Than Water” (February 10, 2014).

“Thicker Than Water” tells about a Nantucket nautical nightmare: a huge wave overturns a boat carrying five young sport-fishermen. The piece puts you squarely there with the men in the churning water as they fight for survival. Of its many vivid images, the one that sticks in my mind is of the twenty-three-foot boat, named Jabb, hanging in the air and then beginning to flip:

The wave caught them from behind and lifted them until they were surfing its face. They hung there for five seconds—their port gunwale tilting overhead, the Yamaha outboard whirring in the air—as if time were taking a breath. Jason still believed that they’d shoot the barrel and make it out. Then the starboard gunwale hit sand, and with fantastic power the wave lifted the boat and hurled it onto the sandbar upside down. All that was visible of Jabb from above was a strip of maroon-painted hull.

That “as if time were taking a breath” is inspired. The whole piece is inspired, from its opening sentence (“The stripers weren’t biting”) to the concluding words of Tom Mleczko, who rescued the five men: “What if I hadn’t seen that little movement? What if I’d been looking two degrees to the left? The ocean—it turns out it’s pretty impersonal. It doesn’t care.”

The names of the five guys are Jason Mleczko, Andrew Curren, Joe Coveney, Kent McClintock, and Alex Cameron. Jason is the skipper. Friend says of him: “A strapping six-foot-five fisherman with dirty-blond hair, Jason had the candid, boisterous manner of a golden retriever.” The other main “character” in the piece is Jason’s father, Tom, “whose four boats constituted the island’s largest fleet.” Friend describes Tom as “a taciturn, gravel-voiced man who loved to combat the elements.” When Jabb capsizes, Jason knows that his father is likely their only hope of being saved. But he also knows that his father will be disappointed in him for allowing Jabb to flip (“His mind went to his father. I’m an idiot, he thought. We don’t capsize”). 

The action of “Thicker Than Water” is the rescue, with a psychological undertow flowing from the conflicted father-son relationship. This conflict surfaces dramatically during the rescue when Tom coldly refuses to help Jason secure Jabb:

Up top, Jason threw his arms around his father, who gave him a preoccupied pat and said, “What are we going to do about that boat?” Jason stared, hoping his father would say, “You take the wheel, and I’ll go anchor Jabb,” but he didn’t. Tom knew he was behaving stiffly, and he later said, “I felt that, as Jason’s employer and his father, I should make this whole thing better—only I didn’t know how.” Jason unspooled the line attached to Purple Water’s anchor, cut a hundred and fifty feet, and threw the anchor overboard. Then, reluctantly, he followed the anchor into the water and swam the line to Jabb. As he began making clumsy half hitches, tethering the line to Jabb’s bow with numb fingers, the passengers came on deck, astonished that Tom wasn’t immediately taking Alex to the hospital, and even more astonished to see Jason back in the water. When the task was done, Jason swam to Purple Water’s bow, but couldn’t pull himself onto it. Tom looked over, askance, and Jason said, “Cap, I’ve been in the water for four hours—I’m at about ten per cent.” He finally crabbed himself aboard.

It’s an astounding moment in an astounding piece. I read it six years ago when it first appeared; I’ve never forgotten it.  

Best of 2017: Talk

Tom Bachtell, "Michel Houellebecq" (2017)

Here are my favorite “Talk of the Town” stories of 2017:

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Bong Show,” May 15, 2017 (“One object widely admired by the other lampworkers was a pea-green monster truck with big black tires and flames exuding from six tailpipes—every inch of it glass”).

2. Ian Frazier, “Extra Credit,” August 7 & 14, 2017 [“On exhibit were a palm-leaf book the size of a sheaf of paint samples, a big ball of raw rubber from a rubber tree (one of Sri Lanka’s resources), boxes of Ceylon tea (“We have the best, best tea”), a large stone grinder for spices (“Sri Lankan women were strong, back in the day”), her grandmother’s sitar, a replica of a seated Buddha considered to be the fifth-greatest statue in the world, and a statue of the fasting Buddha (“For six years, he ate no food and never opened his eyes”) that was made of welded iron”].

3. Robert Sullivan, “Facing History,” June 19, 2017 (“At Goodfellows, a barbershop on Fourth Avenue, people knew the church but not the tree. ‘In the North? That seems strange,’ a customer said”).

4. Lauren Collins, “Sideline,” June 19, 2017 (“He must have been chewing on his cigarette, because it hung from his mouth like a broken limb”).

5. Tad Friend, “Pulverizer,” June 19, 2017 (“Slugging down the rest of his soda, he continued, ‘I had an acting teacher who told me, “Michael, there are two types of actors: those who act with their ass”—squirmy Richard Dreyfuss types—“and those who act with their balls.” ’ His eyes got moist. ‘On this movie I got down on my knees and prayed before takes, and then just grabbed my balls and tried somehow to be of service’ ”).

6. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Incidents,” June 19, 2017 (“In front of him, a set of stairs led up to a rectangular opening cut into a wall. Beyond the opening was an empty chamber. Lights installed in the walls of the chamber were making it glow different shades—first fuchsia, then baby blue, then electric yellow. Everything outside the chamber also kept changing color, including Turrell”).

7. Nick Paumgarten, “Good Taste,” November 27, 2017 (“His top-of-the-line loudspeaker system, at three hundred and forty thousand dollars (no wonder we settle), is the Imperia: two seven-foot steel towers, each with a couple of huge flared wooden horns, one atop another, along with some smaller aluminum-alloy horns. Between them, on the floor, are the boxed bass horns. The standing horns, fashioned out of Pennsylvania ash, bring to mind an old gramophone, or a morning glory. They make it sound as if the musicians are in the room”).

8. Anna Russell, “Odds and Ends,” November 6, 2017 (“ ‘I like ordinary objects,’ Oldenburg said. ‘If you have one object meet some other object, which claims to be ordinary, then you’d have something even more extraordinary.’ He moved to another shelf. ‘That’s a bottle, that’s a piece of an automobile tire, and this”—he pointed to a brown globule—‘is obviously something coming out of a tube’ ”).

June 19, 2017 Issue

This week’s issue contains four superb Talk of the Town pieces: Robert Sullivan’s “Facing History”; Tad Friend’s “Pulverizer”; Lauren Collins’s “Sideline”; and Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Incidents.”

Sullivan’s “Facing History” starts with the issue of whether a Brooklyn street named after Confederate General Robert E. Lee should be renamed (“When the city of New Orleans took down its last Confederate statue, of General Robert E. Lee, Representative Yvette Clarke, of New York’s Ninth Congressional District, had a local take. She tweeted, ‘We should do likewise with General Lee Avenue in Brooklyn’ ”). In the fifth paragraph, it shifts focus to another Robert E. Lee memorial:

General Lee Avenue is not the only Confederate memorial in Bay Ridge. Another can be found just a few blocks away, at St. John’s Episcopal Church, on Fort Hamilton Parkway. In the church’s front yard, there is a maple tree marked with an iron sign that reads, “This tree was planted by General Robert Edward Lee, while stationed at Fort Hamilton.” The sign was installed in 1912, also by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The piece then proceeds to tell the history of St. John’s Episcopal Church and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and ends with a visit to Goodfellows barbershop and a conversation with two dog walkers.

The first appeal of this delightful piece is the appearance of spontaneity. It seems completely natural, as relaxed as conversation. Secondly, it brims with interesting facts. An inventory of its contents looks like this:

General Robert E. Lee – Representative Yvette Clarke – Bay Ridge – Fort Hamilton – United Daughters of the Confederacy – Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church – Confederate-statue removals – June 19^th, or Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the end of slavery – St. John’s Episcopal Church – Southern Poverty Law Center – Brooklyn Daily Eagle – the Robert E. Lee tree – two Brooklyn politicians – Shore Road – Indecision, the Bay Ridge hardcore band – Goodfellows, a barbershop on Fourth Avenue – two residents walking their dogs

The piece is like a Cornell box filled with fascinating objects. And yet it coheres; it tells a story. That’s another of its attractions: its “plot” unfolds from real life. This is true of all good Talk stories, including the other three pieces discussed here.

Tad Friend’s “Pulverizer” is a sort of mini-profile of the actor Anthony Michael Hall. Its opening paragraph snared my attention immediately:

“Left arm straight, head down,” Anthony Michael Hall murmured as he took his stance at the Chelsea Piers driving range. His 5-wood carved the air but only grazed the ball, which lolloped gently over the Astro-Turf toward the Hudson River. Hall glared after it. “First of all, plant your fucking feet!” he told himself. “Turn your hips. Be the ball!” When his next shot boinged sideways into the protective netting, he cracked up. “My mother taught me that, to laugh at yourself,” he said. The actor, who goes by Michael, had arrived wearing an outfit that seemed to embody this precept: black suit, white sneakers, tomato-red T-shirt, Ninja Turtle-green backpack. “I’m not afraid of color,” he explained. “It’s my Italian side.”

I read that, and I just kept going, devouring the piece in about four minutes, and then going back to savor this line: “The hairs on his forearm stood erect, like little soldiers.”

All four of these pieces end in quotation. “Pulverizer” ’s might be the most memorable. Friend quotes Hall saying, “On this movie I got down on my knees and prayed before takes, and then just grabbed my balls and tried somehow to be of service.”

In “Sideline,” Collins describes her recent visit with the writer Michel Houellebec at his Paris apartment. She writes,  

Houellebecq answered the door wearing a denim shirt and jeans—hiked up to a seemingly concave chest—and ushered a visitor inside, past a polka-dot shopping cart, some metal shelves stocked with bottled water, and a closet filled with three-ring binders. One had the feeling that Houellebecq, like a lot of his characters, might not get out much.

I relish the way Collins sketches detail – three quick strokes (“TV, recliner, lots of yellow”) and – voila! – Houellebecq’s living room springs to life. She’s an excellent noticer. At one point in “Sideline,” she says of Houellebecq, “He must have been chewing on his cigarette, because it hung from his mouth like a broken limb.”

Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Incidents” also reports on a visit. She’s present with the artist James Turrell at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams, as he views preparations for the opening of new wing showing nine of his works, including “an apartment-size piece” titled “Perfectly Clear.”

One of the pleasures of Kolbert’s piece is her vivid description of “Perfectly Clear”:

In front of him, a set of stairs led up to a rectangular opening cut into a wall. Beyond the opening was an empty chamber. Lights installed in the walls of the chamber were making it glow different shades—first fuchsia, then baby blue, then electric yellow. Everything outside the chamber also kept changing color, including Turrell.

One of Turrell’s associates, Ryan Pike, was tapping on a laptop that controlled the lights. At times, the chamber seemed to vanish, and it looked as if the opening had become a wall of radiant color. At other points, the chamber reappeared, and its back wall became visible. At still other points, the lights strobed and a sort of psychedelic plaid pattern appeared across the opening.

“We’re not getting much printout with this one,” Turrell told Pike, who tapped away more vigorously.

That detail of the associate tapping away “more vigorously” in response to Turrell’s comment is inspired!

All four of these pieces are terrific. Which is my favorite? I think it might be Sullivan’s “Facing History.” His visit to Goodfellows barbershop in search of local knowledge of the Robert E. Lee tree made me smile. It's such a Sullivan-esque thing to do.

Best of 2016: Reporting

Photo by Jamie Hawkesworth

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2016 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover,” August 29, 2016 (“He walked over to the kissing point and got down on his knees. He blew some fine dirt from the joint and ran a finger through the dust. His silver cross hung down. The picture was: artist, archeologist, supplicant, looking at an entrance to the underworld”).

2. Tad Friend, “Holding the T,” January 18, 2016 (“I sent him on a long scavenger hunt, then decoyed him in for a backhand drop and flicked it crosscourt into open space. At 9–10, I thumped a series of forehand rails and then whipped a crosscourt by him. Another crosscourt got me a game ball at 12–11, and a backhand volley, a perfect nick at the perfect time, closed it out”).

3. Nick Paumgarten, “The Country Restaurant,” August 29, 2016 (“Baehrel has concocted a canny fulfillment of a particular foodie fantasy: an eccentric hermit wrings strange masterpieces from the woods and his scrabbly back yard. The extreme locavore, pure of spade and larder. The toughest ticket in town. Stir in opacity, inaccessibility, and exclusivity, then powder it with lichen: It’s delicious. You can’t get enough. You can’t even get in”).

4. Janet Malcolm, “The Performance Artist,” September 5, 2016 (“She had come to tame the beast of a piece, this half-naked woman in sadistic high heels. Take that, and that, Beethoven!”).

5. Ian Frazier, “Patina,” September 19, 2016 (“When you have Statue of Liberty green on the brain, you see it all around you, especially on infrastructure. Being aware of the color somehow makes the city’s bindings and conduits and linkages stand out as if they’d been injected with radioactive dye. When you look for the color, the city becomes an electric train set you’re assembling with your eyes”).

6. Hilton Als, “Dark Rooms,” July 4, 2016 (“She had no interest in trying to show who they were under the feathers and the fantasy: she was in love with the bravery of their self-creation, their otherness”).

7. Jonathan Franzen, “The End of the End of the World,” May 23, 2016 (“Although the colony was everywhere smeared with nitric-smelling shit, and the doomed orphan chicks were a piteous sight, I was already glad I’d come”).

8. Jill Lepore, “The War and the Roses,” August 8 & 15, 2016 [“Either they were willing to have Trump speak in their stead (“I am your voice”), the very definition of a dictator, or else they wanted to speak for themselves, because the system was rigged, because the establishment could not be trusted, or because no one, no one, could understand them, their true, particular, Instagram selves”].

9. Carolyn Kormann, “The Tasting-Menu Initiative,” April 4, 2016 (“Carola Quispé, a former Gustu student, aimed the gun into a glass of foamy pink liquid and topped it off with smoke, then added a coca-leaf garnish. ‘It’s made with papa-pinta-boca-infused singani, lime juice, and egg whites, balanced with palo santo syrup,’ she said. It felt like drinking incense”).

10. Elizabeth Kolbert, “A Song of Ice,” October 24, 2016 (“One iceberg reminded me of an airplane hangar, another of the Guggenheim Museum. There was a sphinx, a pagoda, and a battleship; a barn, a silo, and the Sydney Opera House”).

Honorable Mention: Tom Kizzia, “The New Harpoon,” September 12, 2016.

Credit: The above photograph, by Jamie Hawkesworth, is from Dana Goodyear’s “The Earth Mover” (The New Yorker, August 29, 2016).

Best of 2016: Talk

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Here are my favorite “Talk of the Town” pieces of 2016 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Laura Parker, “Bee’s Knees,” March 21, 2016 (“She dunked the bee in a tiny bottle containing her special blend of ‘bee shampoo’: a few drops of archival soap and deionized water. She held the bottle up to the light and gave it a firm swirl. One of No. 1’s legs fell off. ‘She’s old, she’s tired—she’s falling apart,’ Doering said”).

2. Ian Frazier, “Body Phrases,” August 22, 2016 (“The tactful steps of dancers trying not to disturb were small and beguiling choreographies in themselves. A soft step-step-step-step, head down, with torso bent; then longer quiet strides in the open, toward the elevator up ahead”).

3. Ian Frazier, “Connected,” January 25, 2016 (“By design, the Link has no flat surfaces on which you can leave, say, an almost-empty Pabst bottle in a wrinkled paper bag. These Superman booths still have the little shelf beside the phone and always will. Their small privacy will still vibrate, occasionally, with the old lonesome pay-phone emotions of our former lives. The Links, savvier about human entanglements, will not”).

4. Mark Singer, “Sleight of No Hands,” February 8 & 15, 2016 [“Somehow—Jay’s biography, though it comes as close as any source to explaining the how of how, still leaves a reader at the intersection of belief and disbelief—he did magic (specialty: cups-and-balls), played several instruments (dulcimer, trumpet, flute), trick-shot with pistols, demonstrated exquisite ball control at skittles, danced the hornpipe on his leather-encased stumps, married four times, and sired fourteen children (proof, as Jay noted in Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, of ‘one fully operative appendage’)”]. 

5. Tad Friend, “The Undead,” November 21, 2016 (“ ‘One reason Gabriel was so excited was because he was going to a hotel with her, away from the kids,’ Muldoon said. ‘The Wellington Monument they ride past is by any reckoning a phallic symbol.’ He nudged his wife. ‘You’re on your own with that one,’ Korelitz said”).

6. Tad Friend, “Framing,” September 5, 2016 (“She passed a Caribbean woman who was pushing an old white woman in a wheelchair and bending low to murmur to her charge. The caregiver’s teeth were widely separated, like a baby’s. ‘I love that woman’s teeth!’ Johnson cried. ‘If we weren’t going to get iced coffee I would go find a way to film her.’ As she walked on, she kept turning to look back”).

7. Mark Singer, “Bank Shot,” September 26, 2016 [“When he arrived at Eyebeam, the immediate challenge was to center the logo of American Eagle Savings Bank on the cover of Theories of Business Behavior, by Joseph William McGuire (formerly in the collection of the Cloud County Junior College Library, of Concordia, Kansas)”].

8. Ian Frazier, “Don’t Tread On Me,” October 3, 2016 (“He ordered a decaf espresso and asked the waiter to top it off with Sambuca. A smell of licorice rose”).

9. Tad Friend, “Out of Character,” August 29, 2016 (“Foster, thirty-five, is the character actor’s character actor: his body a grenade, his face the pin”).

10. Eric Lach, “Fire Starter,” January 18, 2016 (“Hickory will make a house smell like a ski lodge. Cherry is prized for the way it crackles and pops in a fireplace”).

Credit: The above illustration, by Tom Bachtell, is from Laura Parker’s “Bee’s Knees” (The New Yorker, March 21, 2016).

November 21, 2016, Issue

This week’s issue contains two scintillating pieces by Jill Lepore: “Esmé in Neverland,” an account of an unsuccessful attempt to make J. D. Salinger’s “For Esmé – With Love and Squalor” into a movie; and “Wars Within,” part of the superb series “Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America.”

“Esmé in Neverland” begins with Lepore poking around an overgrown eighteenth-century Vermont farm:

Ruins were everywhere. The overgrown labyrinth; stone walls; the foundations of barns; a pine shack, collapsed; abandoned roads; a junk yard at the bottom of a ravine, a little village of bathtubs and glass bottles and old stoves and washbasins; dumped cars, a Plymouth of indiscernible vintage, a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, its hood and trunk popped open, like an upturned deerstalker cap. Grapevines climbed up the mopey branches of a willow. Wasps had lain siege to the barn. There was a wooden rocking horse in the shed, a faded Victorian settee in the attic, and, crammed in between the rafters, resting on plaster made of lime and horsehair, there were corncob husks that had been fashioned into Colonial dolls, folded and tied into the shape of skirted girls.

Note that Karmann Ghia; it appears again at the end of the piece. In between, Lepore tells the fascinating story of how J. D. Salinger’s “For Esmé – With Love and Squalor” (The New Yorker, April 8, 1950) nearly got made into a movie. The man at the center of this project was a TV director named Peter Tewksbury. Lepore is a consummate rescuer of the dead (see, for example, her superb “Joe Gould’s Teeth,” The New Yorker, July 27, 2015); Tewksbury is one of her great rescues. He was a successful TV director, winning an Emmy in 1959 for “Father Knows Best.” But, as Lepore reports, “Toward the end of the nineteen-sixties, he threw his Emmy out the window of a car and left Hollywood.” He and his wife, Ann Schuyler, moved to a farm in Vermont, then to California, , then to Canada, then back to Vermont, where, Lepore says, “he lived very happily, until his death, in 2003, when he was nearly eighty.” One of the things he did during his Vermont years was make cheese. Lepore writes,

Tewksbury learned to make cheese by driving from dairy to dairy, talking to farmers. He got a job at the Brattleboro Food Co-op as a dishwasher. He worked his way up to the cheese counter. “I know the cheeses and I know the people,” he wrote, in his only book, “The Cheeses of Vermont.” In 2001, a reporter from the Times found him after calling every Tewksbury in the phone book. Tewksbury agreed to meet him at the co-op. He came out from behind the cheese counter with his hat on and sat down. He gave the reporter fifteen minutes, the length of his break. He did not mention J. D. Salinger.

Amazing! Here’s a guy who directed Elvis Presley, Fred MacMurray, and Danny Thomas, had two hit TV series (“Father Knows Best” and “My Three Sons”), and happily spent the last thirty years of life working at the cheese counter of the Brattleboro Food Co-op. I admire the hell out of him.

As for that Karmann Ghia with “its hood and trunk popped open, like an upturned deerstalker cap” that Lepore finds as she noses around Tewksbury’s old farm, it reappears in the piece’s brilliant final paragraph:

I left the labyrinth and went back to the barn. I laid my spade on the floor. I hung up my axe. I wondered who owned that Karmann Ghia. I crammed a jackknife into my pocket and went back to the woods. I figured I might be able to pry open the glove compartment.

Jill Lepore is among The New Yorker’s very best writers. “Esmé in Neverland” is one of her finest pieces. I enjoyed it immensely.

The other Lepore piece in this week’s issue, “Wars Within,” is part of the “Aftermath” series assessing the implications of Trump’s shocking election. Of the series’ sixteen essays, “Wars Within” comes closest to expressing my view. Lepore writes, “There are many reasons for our troubles. But the deepest reason is inequality: the forms of political, cultural, and economic polarization that have been widening, not narrowing, for decades.” What’s needed, in my opinion, is what Charles Reich advocated in The New Yorker forty-six years ago: a change of consciousness (“The Greening of America,” September 26, 1970). Peter Tewksbury’s life exemplifies such a change.

Other pleasures in this week’s issue: “Goings On About Town” ’s delightfully surreal description of Carolee Schneemann’s “Precarious” (“An associatively structured collage of degraded video footage, focused on the constrained movements of a caged cockatoo, a chained bear, dancing prison inmates, and the artist herself, wearing a blindfold”); Jeremy Liebman’s gorgeous photograph of Yeman Café’s kitchen stove, illustrating Nicolas Niarchos’s sensuous “Tables For Two” (“The liquid is murky but it sparkles with citrusy zest when it hits the tongue”); Colin Stoke’s vivid “Bar Tab” description of the “unironic” goings on at Kettle of Fish (“Choruses of ‘I Love My Green Bay Packers’ and ‘The Bears Still Suck’ bounced off wood-panelled walls like a ball off a receiver’s hand, and homesick Wisconsinites ordered delicious ‘imported’ brats buried in sauerkraut and mustard for five dollars”); Tad Friend’s inspired Talk story “The Undead,” in which cast members of “The Dead, 1904” rehearse for an “immersive re-creation” of the holiday feast in James Joyce’s “The Dead” (“O’Reilly sampled the petits fours and wondered whether the quinoa and Tabasco-flavored ones might not be anachronistic”); Gary Shteyngart’s brilliant “Aftermath” contribution, “Dystopia” (“The jump from Twitter racism to a black church set aflame on a warm Southern night is steady and predictable”); Dan Chiasson’s wonderful “Cross Talk,” a review of Ishion Hutchinson’s “punk-baroque” poetry [“His sound effects are exquisite: the clusters of consonants (hard ‘c’s, then ‘b’s and ‘p’s) and the vowels so open you could fall into them, the magisterial cresting syntax, the brilliant coupling of unlike words (‘iceberg-Golgotha’)”].

Contenders for "Top Ten Reporting Pieces" (So Far)

Illustration by Bjorn Lie (from Dana Goodyear's "Mezcal Sunrise")

Well, with only eight weeks left in the year, I want to start considering what my “Top Ten Reporting Pieces” might look like. Here are some of the contenders:

Ben Lerner, “The Custodians” (January 11, 2016)

Tad Friend, “Holding the T” (January 18, 2016)

Andrew O’Hagan, “Imaginary Spaces”  (March 28, 2016)

Dana Goodyear, “Mezcal Sunrise” (April 4, 2016)

Carolyn Kormann, “The Tasting-Menu Initiative” (April 4, 2016)

Dexter Filkins, “The End of Ice” (April 4, 2016)

Ian Frazier, “The Bag Bill” (May 2, 2016)

Lizzie Widdicombe, “Happy Together” (May 16, 2016)

Jonathan Franzen, “The End of the End of the World” (May 23, 2016)

Hilton Als, “Dark Rooms” (July 4, 2016)

Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running” (July 11 & 18, 2016)

Jill Lepore, “The War and the Roses” (August 8 & 15, 2016)

Nick Paumgarten, “The Country Restaurant” (August 29, 2016)

Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover” (August 29, 2016)

Janet Malcolm, “The Performance Artist” (September 5, 2016)

Tom Kizzia, “The New Harpoon” (September 12, 2016)

Ian Parker, “Knives Out” (September 12, 2016)

Burkhard Bilger, “Ghost Stories” (September 12, 2016)

Ian Frazier, “Patina” (September 19, 2016)

Elizabeth Kolbert, “A Song of Ice” (October 24, 2016)

These pieces are listed in the order they appeared in the magazine. Eventually, the list will have to be whittled down to ten – no easy task (they’re all excellent pieces). And I’ve learned from previous years not to decide prematurely. Last year, with about three weeks to go, I was sure Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues” would be my #1 pick. Then Ben McGrath’s extraordinary “The Wayfarer” appeared, in the December 14 issue, and I had to revise my opinion (see here). By the way, where is McGrath? He’s a consistent Top Ten contender. But this year, he’s yet to appear. I miss him.  

August 29, 2016 Issue

This week’s issue contains pieces by two of the magazine’s best writers – Nick Paumgarten and Dana Goodyear. Paumgarten’s “The Country Restaurant” probes the “myths” surrounding Damon Baehrel, a gourmet restaurant in Earlton, New York, that Bloomberg News calls the “most exclusive restaurant in the U.S.” The restaurant is named after its “presiding wizard and host, who serves as forager, farmer, butcher, chef, sous-chef, sommelier, waiter, busboy, dishwasher, and mopper.” One of the “myths” is that the restaurant is booked through 2025. Another is that all the ingredients of the dishes it serves are derived from the “twelve acres of yard, garden, forest, and swamp” on which it’s located. The skeptical nature of the piece is expressed in its tagline: “You can’t get in. It’s booked through 2025. Or is it?”

Reading “The Country Restaurant,” I found myself cheering for Baehrel. I didn’t want him to be unmasked as a fraud. “Betrayal” journalism, in which the writer secures the subject’s trust and then proceeds to write an ugly portrait of him, gives me the creeps. Paumgarten comes close to writing such a piece, but, in the end, after noting all the “bogusness,” seems to side with Baehrel and his “sublime” cooking. He writes,

Later, back outside, as Baehrel led us [Paumgarten and a photographer] around the property and identified plants, my attention wandered, and I thought about my first visit, months before, and a particular dish, the sixth course, which had so engaged my attention that the only surreptitious photo I got of it was of a plate licked clean. It consisted of a small layered cube of wild daylily tuber and wild honey mushrooms—a phyllo of the soil. He’d sliced the tubers thin and soaked the mushrooms in fresh maple sap, then stacked them in more than a dozen fine alternating layers. He then roasted it on a slab of oak wood, dribbled it with grapeseed oil and wild-fennel-frond powder, and added a drizzle of dried milkweed pods cooked in fresh birch sap, which he’d mashed in a stone bowl with some rutabaga starch, and a second drizzle that he called burnt-corn sauce, made from liquefied kernels that he’d scraped off the cob onto a stone, dried, then thinned out with sycamore sap. Somehow I got all this down in the notebook. Beneath it, I’d written, “Sublime.”

Now, down by the road, near the gate, Baehrel guided us alongside his garden beds. In one of them, a single sprig of asparagus rose from the earth. He snapped it off and handed it to me. It tasted like—asparagus.

It’s a great ending. I confess I’ve read that last bit about the asparagus numerous times. What does it mean? It could mean that Paumgarten was relieved to find at least one thing at Damon Baehrel that was what it appeared to be. Or, it could signify that Paumgarten had decided to put aside all his doubts about Damon Baehrel’s authenticity and go with the evidence of his senses. It’s a fittingly ambiguous conclusion to an arresting, delicious piece. I devoured every word.

The authenticity of Dana Goodyear’s subject – seventy-one-year-old earth sculptor Michael Heizer – is never in doubt. What a wild, crazy, brilliant guy! Here, in Goodyear’s terrific “The Earth Mover,” is our first view of him:

At a crosswalk, Heizer—ravaged, needy, fierce, suspicious, witty, loyal, sly, and pure—leaned against a lamppost to rest, thin on thin. He wore a felt rancher hat whose band was adorned with the tips of elk antlers, and a jackknife in a holster at his waist. In the eighties, Andy Warhol photographed him wearing plaid flannel, his hands raised like claws and a vague, suggestive smile on his lips: Am I scaring you, honey? Now, with his hat casting an elliptical shadow on the pavement, he looked ready for another portrait.

That “thin on thin” is pure Goodyear; she’s a superb describer. And here, in one of the most memorable scenes of the piece, is Heizer painting in his New York City loft:

He picked up a can of paint that a studio assistant had mixed—imperial Venetian bronze blended with carbon black and dark brown to create a tone he called “volcanic”—and poured it through a net into a tin tray. Painting with a roller is physical work. With effort, he covered the roller with paint and stepped up to a canvas whose bottom-heavy angularity resembled an origami swan, banded with green tape. He climbed a ladder to the third rung from the top and started painting from the upper left in long, smooth strokes. Within a few seconds, something had gone wrong. “Arrrgh! Not good!” He got down from the ladder and inspected the painting for impurities. There was a fleck of white, which he picked out with the tip of his knife. On his knees, he went at the lower portion of the canvas, bending double with each stroke and pulling himself up again with the ladder.

“Fu-u-u-u-uck, I can’t breathe anymore,” he said after a few minutes of intense application. His tongue was hanging out, and his mouth was open like that of a parched man receiving rain. Los Lobos’s sax came through the wall. “Here it is! Yo! Ha, ha, ha, yo!” he laughed, suddenly revived. With saxophone, the painting looked better to him: twenty bucks’ worth of paint from Ace Hardware transformed into a cosmic offering. He bent over, hands on knees, panting, and looked up with a giddy smile. “That’s somethin’, huh?” he laughed. “Cuidado.”

My god, I love that passage – so many piquant details! And that drawn out “Fu-u-u-u-uck” is inspired.

Heizer’s art tool of choice isn’t a paintbrush or a paint roller – it’s a bulldozer. In “The Earth Mover” ’s final section, there’s a scene in which Goodyear rides with Heizer in a 996K Caterpillar loader, “perching on the armrest of the driver’s seat,” as he moves earth (“a specially formulated dirt that looked like turbinado sugar”) and packs it around an eighty-foot-long steel box to form a sculpture called “Compression Line.” Goodyear writes,

A wooden wall with I-beams anchored in concrete was making it hard to back up; there was nowhere to turn around. Heizer smashed his bucket deliberately into an offending beam. Rales stood under a shade tent, watching. “She’s all wired up, thinks I’m going to knock her building over,” he said, and wiggled his fingers at her—“Don’t worry”—then signalled for her to snap a picture. To me, he said, “Wanna see the loader work?” and went at the beam again. He took his hands off the controls like a bronco rider, swaying, and put his fists up—whoop, whoop. I hadn’t seen him happier. Three workers in orange vests looked away.

It’s a great scene – one of many in this excellent piece. And it’s Goodyear’s presence in the cab with Heizer that, for me, makes it extra vivid.

“The Country Restaurant” and “The Earth Mover” are wonderful pieces. I enjoyed them immensely.

Postscript: Other aspects of this week’s issue that I enjoyed: Andrea K. Scott’s description of Agnes Martin’s paintings – “whisper-pale shimmering grids” – in “Art: Fall Preview”; Matthew Trammell’s “Night Life: Fall Preview” (“with electric odes to evening chills and a timbre that clears storm clouds”); Richard Brody’s capsule review of Hell or High Water (“Only Bridges emerges whole; with his typical brilliance, he leaps from the laconic to the rhetorical, making even the shady brim of his hat speak volumes”); the cocktails in Talia Lavin’s “Bar Tab: Pouring Ribbons” [“Complex cocktails arrive in ornate teapots or nestled in tiny chafing dishes: the Painted Veil (Scottish-toffee-pu-ehr-tea-infused Beefeater gin, Hong Kong Baijiu) is a frosted chalice of smoky caramel, while the Snake in the Grass (Tanqueray gin, coconut water, makrut-lime leaf) offers a compelling argument for pairing alcohol with Greek yogurt”]; Christaan Felber’s light-filled “Hao Noodles and Tea by Madame Zhu's Kitchen” photo illustration; Tad Friend’s description of Ben Foster – “his body a grenade, his face the pin” (“Out of Character”); Vinson Cunningham’s “A Darker Presence,” on the National Museum of African American History and Culture (“no one will leave without scores of wide-eyed did-you-know’s to share”); Julie Bruck’s beautiful “Blue Heron, Walking” (“these outsized / apprehenders of grasses and stone, snatchers of mouse and vole, / these mindless magnificents that any time now will trail / their risen bird like useless bits of leather”); and Curtis Sittenfeld’s wickedly good short story, “Gender Studies” (“Their eyes meet—she’s perhaps three per cent less hammered than she was down in the lobby, though still hammered enough not to worry about her drunkenness wearing off anytime soon—and at first he says nothing. Then, so seriously that his words almost incite in her a genuine emotion, he says, 'You’re pretty'"). 

Mid-Year Top Ten (2016): Reporting Pieces

Photo by Benjamin Lowy

Time to pause, look back, and take stock of my 2016 New Yorker reading experience thus far. As ever, pleasure is my guide. The reporting pieces that afforded me the most pleasure are:

1. Jonathan Franzen’s "The End of the End of the World," May 23, 2016 (“Although the colony was everywhere smeared with nitric-smelling shit, and the doomed orphan chicks were a piteous sight, I was already glad I’d come.”)

2. Carolyn Kormann, "The Tasting-Menu Initiative," April 4, 2016 (“Carola Quispé, a former Gustu student, aimed the gun into a glass of foamy pink liquid and topped it off with smoke, then added a coca-leaf garnish. ‘It’s made with papa-pinta-boca-infused singani, lime juice, and egg whites, balanced with palo santo syrup,’ she said. It felt like drinking incense.”)

3. Andrew O’Hagan, "Imaginary Spaces," March 28, 2016 (“The set was a living organism, emitting turmoil and images of chaos: when an old piano was played, its discordancy seemed to echo through the language; when Cumberbatch, as Hamlet, feigned madness, or became mad, the portraits on the walls seemed to glower at him.”)

4. Dana Goodyear, "Mezcal Sunrise," April 4, 2016 (“She poured some into a jícara, the dried hull of a fruit, often used to serve mezcal, and offered it to me. It was tangy and slick, like a dirty Martini, with a whiff of neat’s-foot oil.”)

5. Ben Lerner, "The Custodians," January 11, 2016 [“In Kline’s work, I discover (or at least I project) vulnerability as well as technophilia: rather than producing works that can be shattered or lost, he is sending blueprints into the future.”]

6. Ian Frazier, "The Bag Bill," May 2, 2016 (“Elmore, the pro, then dazzled everybody by extracting a noxious blue plastic drop cloth from a sidewalk callery-pear tree in about half a second.”)

7. Tad Friend, "Holding the T," January 18, 2015 (“These friendships are usually squash-specific: we play, postmortem a bit, then part. But they’re stamped by the pleasure of jamming together, of collaborating on a jubilant rag of hissing strings, percussive splats, sneaker squeaks, and winded grunts.”)

8. Dexter Filkins, "The End of Ice," April 4, 2016 (“Chhota Shigri—six miles long and shaped like a branching piece of ginger—is considered one of the Himalayas’ most accessible glaciers, but our way across was a rickety gondola, an open cage reminiscent of a shopping cart, which runs on a cable over the Chandra. With one of the porters working a pulley, we climbed in and rode across, one by one, while fifty feet below the river rushed through gigantic boulders.”)

9. Judith Thurman, "The Empire's New Clothes," March 21, 2016 (“Her appliqués mushroom magically on the slope of a skirt. A mermaid gown that Charles James might have made for Gypsy Rose Lee is crossbred with a Ming vase; a cascade of ruffles evokes the waterfall in a brush-painted landscape.”)

10. Jill Lepore, "The Party Crashers," February 22, 2016 (“With our phones in our hands and our eyes on our phones, each of us is a reporter, each a photographer, unedited and ill judged, chatting, snapping, tweeting, and posting, yikking and yakking. At some point, does each of us become a party of one?”)

Honorable Mentions: Patricia Marx, “In Search of Forty Winks” (February 8 & 15, 2016); Lizzie Widdicombe, “Barbie Boy” (March 21, 2016); Lauren Collins, “Come to the Fair” (April 4, 2016); James Lasdun, “Alone in the Alps” (April 11, 2016); Gay Talese, “The Voyeur’s Motel” (April 11, 2016); Rachel Aviv, “The Cost of Caring” (April 11, 2016); Elizabeth Kolbert, “Unnatural Selection” (April 18, 2016); Ariel Levy, “Beautiful Monsters” (April 18, 2016); Lauren Collins, “The Model American” (May 9, 2016); Lizzie Widdicombe, “Happy Together” (May 16, 2016); Raffi Katchadourian, “The Unseen” (June 20, 2016).

Tomorrow, I’ll post my favorite critical pieces.

Credit: The above photo, by Benjamin Lowy, is from Carolyn Kormann’s “The Tasting-Menu Initiative” (The New Yorker, April 4, 2016).