July 20, 2026 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are:

1. Taran Dugal’s “Bar Tab: Folk.” Here’s a sample: 

The guests ordered the Mangalorean, named after the chef Jay Kumar’s birthplace, an Indian city on the Arabian Sea: a sublime, sweet, velvety mix of rum, pineapple, lime, and coconut cream infused with amchur, a tangy spice made from unripe mangoes. 

2. Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Fro-Yo Fever.” Here’s a taste:

You’ll do far better if you walk to Eighty-eighth and Madison and dip into the small, cool Madison Fare, a specialty-foods-and-candy storefront opened, in 2022, by the chef Amin Kinana, whose frozen-yogurt creations are, by my estimation, unreserved works of art. The yogurt itself is dense and almost puckeringly sour, and oh, my God, the toppings. They’re some of the most spectacular toppings I’ve ever encountered, an array of ritzy, globe-spanning garnishes that evoke the posh worldliness of peak-era Dean & DeLuca: snowy cubes of Turkish delight, cinnamon-dusted pecans, bitter cocoa nibs, pistachio knafeh, vibrant edible flowers, honey on the comb, actual honest-to-goodness raspberry coulis.

Photo by Lanna Apisukh, from Helen Rosner's "Fro-Yo Fever"

3. Dan Chiasson’s “One Last Thing,” a review of Franz Wright’s posthumous Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments. Chiasson writes,

Celan’s shattered “neversongs” taught Wright important elements of his own style: the lines narrowing as they approach silence, like water disappearing down a drain; the clauses and multisyllabic words split like cordwood by line breaks; the pressurized neologisms picking up where available vocabulary runs out of road; the rich, sometimes asphyxiating details that make a beeline into the senses.

4. Zachary Fine’s “Go East,” a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition “Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy.” Fine’s commentary on the paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme is excellent. Here’s a sample:

Gérôme is the rare artist who’s easy to like and to hate. Every painting is a model of academic crispness and polish, filled with visual cues and prearranged emotional payoffs. “The Snake Charmer,” on loan from the Clark, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, shows a naked boy wrapped in an enormous snake while an old man plays a flute. We’re brought into the scene via the boy’s illuminated buttocks, and conducted to the background, where a crew of ten soldiers gawk at the spectacle. To the right, there’s a guy with a beatific smile who seems to be enjoying more than the snake, an enormous gun propped vertically between his legs. Tabulate the number of stiff objects in the painting (gun, stick, flute, sabre, etc.) and you’ll see that the whole thing is a festival of phallic abundance. Just in case you forget to feel aroused, Gérôme reminds you to.

And another:

How do we account for the beauty of “Bashi-Bazouk” (1868-69)? The subject is just a man with a colorful headdress. Bashi-bazouks were a feared paramilitary outfit in the Ottoman Army, known for cracking skulls, and yet the sitter is a paragon of calm, not violence. He’s almost certainly a civilian whom Gérôme put in a costume. There’s a rifle on his shoulder, but it’s not shooting anytime soon; if anything, the mouth of the gun feels like a chimney inside the painting, letting out invisible puffs of psychological smoke. All the exquisite details—the man’s glowing salmon-pink tunic, the cherrylike tip of his headdress, the fluffy tassels—are an excuse for pure visual stimulation. 

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk (1868-69)

Mid-Year Top Ten 2026

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):

Best Reporting and Essays

1. Ed Caesar, “The Stunt Pilot,” June 1, 2026 ("Once the plane passed the highway, Slipkan gave Gusak the order to shoot. The plane was slightly less than nine hundred feet away from the drone. Gusak squeezed the trigger, and the cabin of the Antonov filled with the drilling sound of automatic-weapon fire and the smoky-sweet smell of spent rounds").

2. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Volume Six,” April 27, 2026 ("You want Aisle 7, north side, top shelf, Pennington Quality Market, or wherever you get your I.G.A. cherries. The larger the jar, the larger the cherry, in generally discernible fractions, so you want the sixteen-ouncer. I.G.A., of course, is the Independent Grocers Alliance, and this is your vox-pop cherry, your socialist cherry, but politics is not why you drown it in bourbon").

3. Michael Schulman, “Deepfaking Orson Welles,” February 9, 2026 ("Then, there was what Saatchi called the 'happiness' problem: left to its own guided intuition, the A.I. technology often makes characters look cheerier, especially women. Saatchi played an A.I. clip of sullen Aunt Fanny, in the grim final scene, inappropriately smirking in her rocking chair. 'In terms of subtle despair, it has absolutely no idea what to do,' he said. 'That’s part of why having the actor is really important' ”).

4. Lauren Collins, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” May 4, 2026 ("Finally, he drove to the spot where we’d looked on the first day. 'It was the very last place I could go,' he said. He walked until he saw our footprints and then pushed a little farther. About half a mile on, he spotted a champagne bottle, green and clear, with a perfect little cigarette of a scroll inside—the real thing, at last").

5. Rebecca Mead, “The Landscape Artist,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("The environment was Goldsworthy’s true studio. He makes art using natural materials—stacked stones, interlaced leaves, threaded wool—that might take hours to create and then only moments to evanesce").

6. Nicola Twilley, “Pour One Out,” January 12, 2026 ("We established that I am prone to overthinking, that I’m not a huge fan of the earthy and acidic notes that are considered the hallmark of the region’s flagship varietal, and that the only sample I’d willingly purchase was a blend of one-quarter smoke-tainted wine and three-quarters not. According to my checklist, it tasted like tobacco, black pepper, and dark fruit, with a slight herbaceous note and a bitter finish").

7. Ian Frazier, “The Ice Curtain,” January 26, 2026 ("While walking around Nome, I came upon and tried to make sense of the city’s former hospital building, which sprawls in an indeterminate shape and contains the offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles, a car-repair garage, a pawnshop, the Nome courthouse, and the labyrinthine workshops of Rolland Trowbridge, an enterprising man who bought the building and damaged his knee crawling around in its crannies as he rehabbed it for its present uses").

8. Paige Williams, “Call of the Wild,” January 19, 2026 ("He ate daylilies, violet greens, chickweed, shepherd’s purse, greenbrier tips, sheep sorrel, thistle stalks. He learned how to make bamboo-pokeweed spring rolls, persimmon ice cream, spicebush muffins, dandelion jelly, pan-fried groundnuts, watercress soup, acorn cookies, roast squirrel glazed with honey and balsamic vinegar. If a wild hog came onto his property, he killed, butchered, and ate it, then freeze-dried the leftovers. He dried stalks of goldenrod and mint on racks").

9. Julian Lucas, “Urban Legend,” June 29, 2026 ("What’s a novel but a big score of details burgled from the world? And what’s a novelist but a fence, furnishing imaginary scenes with choice pieces of reality while obscuring their provenance?").

10. Jon Lee Anderson, “Is Cuba Next?,” March 30, 2026 ("A military band played a patriotic tune, and the marchers began to make their way through the city, bearing torches and chanting old revolutionary slogans: 'Socialism or Death,' 'I Am Fidel.' As they sang and shouted about honor, sacrifice, and the fatherland, they seemed like adherents of a religion in which the rewards are realized only in the hereafter").

Best Cover

Barry Blitt, Split Screen (February 16 & 23, 2026)

Best of “The Critics”

1. James Wood, “Visiting Hours,” May 11 & 18, 2026 ("Sylvie systematically deconstructs Suzanna’s world. You don’t have to visit your mother, she says. But I do have to, Suzanna replies. 'According to who?' Sylvie asks. 'You don’t even have to go to school.' Fed on moral scraps, the child must find her own meaning on which to subsist").

2. Alex Ross, “Crisis Mode,” May 25, 2026 ("Instruments and voices accumulate into immense, sustained, saturating dissonances, with a snare drum cutting through the tear-gas haze. Characteristically, Czernowin’s control of timbre, texture, and structure yields a kind of cataclysmic grandeur. Then, at the very end, she kicks away the frame of art and makes things blunt. Singer and her doppelgänger plead together: 'Don’t take my child away / Don’t take my child / Don’t / No.' The final syllables accelerate into a blur, whereupon a ritual of wailing erupts. A composer writes to the limits of her art, and steps into the real").

3. Zachary Fine, “Let It Bleed,” January 12, 2026 ("From one perspective, the shape is an island seen from above. From others, it’s a half-finished paint job, a blast hole, or an ocular stain. The choice is yours: you can survey it cartographically, insist on its flatness or depth, or be reduced to your own eyeball").

4. Hannah Goldfield, “Daily Bread,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("We spend our lives in a cycle of having eaten and then needing to do it again; how we feed ourselves reflects our relationship to money, time, pleasure, place. If the food diary pushes its practitioners toward solipsism, or toward showing off, its popularity also evinces something encouraging: a curiosity about how other people live, the texture of their days").

5. Hilton Als, “The Seer,” March 9, 2026 ("When I was younger and didn’t “get” Atget, I thought of his images as silent, with no action, no story. But now I can see that they are full of story—the story of time and its passage. My visits to the I.C.P. convinced me that Atget knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to make an epic record of time and place").

6. Zachary Fine, “The Doctor Is In,” March 23, 2026 (Schiele could have placed Graff next to an operating table, like Rembrandt’s Dr. Nicolaes Tulp or Eakins’s Dr. Samuel Gross. He could have given him the dignity of Goya’s Dr. Arrieta, or made him look dashing, like Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi, with his crimson robe and Turkish slippers. Instead, Schiele strips Graff of a stethoscope and examination room, and reduces the background to platelets of white. Who would know that Graff was a talented doctor, or a hearty and athletic man who liked the outdoors and played the cello, or that he had two divorces on the horizon? His body, with its mottled face and hands, is the only wisp of narrative.)

7. Zachary Fine, “Back to the Future,” April 13, 2026 (The centerpiece of the expansion, which was led by the architects Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, in collaboration with the firm Cooper Robertson, is an atrium that snaps right onto the side of the flagship building. I can’t say it was worth the renovation’s eighty-two-million-dollar price tag, but the space is brilliantly subtle. It works like a snorkel for the museum, giving it a new column of air for the vertical flow of traffic to the galleries, which have basically doubled in size.

8. Anthony Lane, “Seeing and Believing,” April 20, 2026 (My favorite sentence in Graham-Dixon’s book has him probing the nitty-gritty of Vermeer’s roofs: “It is possible that he ground actual red terracotta tiles in with his pigments and oil to get the required result.”)

 9. Justin Chang, “Art of the Steal,” April 13, 2026 (Once Lori enters Julian’s home, the film springs to life. So does Soderbergh’s camera, which begins sniffing and roving about the space like a dog unleashed.)

10. Zachary Fine, “Monster Mash,” February 16 & 23, 2026 (But the film persuades with its frightening beauty: the shimmering flesh-colored rocks, the throbbing soundtrack, the smoothness of the creature’s skin. It’s all too human, but not.)

Best Illustration

Bill Rebholz's illustration for Rachel Symes' "On and Off the Avenue: A Total Flop"

Best of “Goings On”

1. Taran Dugal, “Bar Tab: Ornithology,” January 12, 2026 ("Sometime during the coda, the guests’ cocktails arrived. The Autumn in New York, a tangy, gin-heavy blend of lemon and crème de violette, was just fine, and not quite worth its sixteen-dollar price tag").

2. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Cove,” January 26, 2026 ("An oyster is poached in chamomile oil and served with wisps of creamy chestnut. A carrot is roasted to marshmallow sweetness, tempura-fried, and wrapped in charred sweet leaves of caraflex cabbage, then draped in uni and drizzled with spiced quince syrup. Like much of what’s on McGarry’s menu, it has a lot going on, but it doesn’t feel busy or chaotic; McGarry layers ingredients and flavors like washes of watercolor").

3. Jillian Steinhauer, “Art: Louise Bourgeois’s ‘Art Can Still Enthrall,’ ” February 2, 2026 ("The display, although understated, highlights the rhythms of Bourgeois’s obsessive repetitions, and pleasure comes in the form of details, such as in an untitled piece in which a pair of marble eggs hides in a stack of weathered crates").

4. Dan Stahl, “Bar Tab: Haswell Green’s,” February 9, 2026 ("Several pages of beverage options include ninety varieties of whiskey, plus wine, beer, cider, and custom cocktails like the mezcal-forward P.Y.T., which, well—imagine a drinkable cigarette").

5. Hilton Als, “Photo Booth: William Eggleston’s Lonely South,” February 9, 2026 ("The real stunner when it comes to showing us community is Eggleston’s 1972 image of a young Black woman, sitting in a church pew with other women of color, turning to look over her shoulder at the camera. The woman’s hair is straightened—“correct”—and she is thin; she wears a sleeveless, wine-colored dress, and the long fingers of her left hand rest on her left shoulder, partly hiding her mouth. It’s a powerful evocation of the psychology of beauty in the American South. Is she covering her mouth because she’s been made to see her lips as too big? Does she straighten her hair because the “natural” look has caught on only in big cities, where women have more freedom to express themselves, or is she simply trying to align herself with the older women she is sitting with, to be one with them? By looking at the white man behind the camera, is she doing something forbidden? We’ll never know. And it’s those many mysteries, rooted in the real and the possible, that continue to make photography in general, and Eggleston’s in particular, so fascinating").

6. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: The Eighty-Six,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("I was, for my sins, dining with a vegetarian, and twenty ounces felt too ambitious to tackle alone, so I went instead for the New York strip, served bone-in. The exterior, salted and peppered, crackled from a hard sear; the inside was tender pink from edge to edge. The sauces I’d ordered alongside were hardly necessary: an eggy, vinegar-tart béarnaise, and a wiggly, wobbly gelée-adjacent steak sauce made with veal demi-glace. I dipped my fries into them, at least, and enjoyed a whole phalanx of steak-house sides: garlicky spinach; butter-laden mashed potatoes; a strikingly photogenic creamed-corn potpie with a swirly croissant top; snappy green and yellow long beans, dressed in a sharp lemon vinaigrette that sliced through the density of the rest of the food").

7. Rachel Syme, “On and Off the Avenue: Spring in the Trenches,” April 13, 2026 ("We aren’t watching chicks hatch or witnessing the miracle of foaling or plucking clumps of wild ramps from the earth. Instead, we continue traipsing through concrete, burdened with utter confusion about what, exactly, to wear: spring is a time of meteorological fakeouts; one day it will be balmy, the next frigid. Or, mornings are crisp and call for bundling up, but dress in too many layers and you’ll overheat by noon. Rain, April’s rude house guest, visits erratically and unannounced").

8. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Dean’s,” June 8, 2026 ("The restaurant rewards the diner who understands that, at this kind of proudly jolie-laide establishment, there’s a secret code: the more vividly horrid-sounding a dish, the more glorious it will be. The boiled ham, for instance, is heaven: two thin slices of meat, pink as tongues, with a parsley bechamel dotted with tiny, tender favas, and a mass of rough-mashed potatoes that seemed to be nearly half butter, salted just to the ecstatic edge of overmuch"). 

Best Poem

Rosanna Warren, “Coots,” March 30, 2026 (It would snow soon, / we walked fast, night was spreading its cloak, / the western skyline sparkled its broken glass, / and the birds in their tuxedos tightened their rings / so the water rippled glossily / out around them, catching glints).

Best “Talk of the Town”

1. Julian Lucas, “A Real Gas,” January 26, 2026 ("She was sanding down an L-shaped knob for a client in the Hamptons, who’d hired her to modernize his nineteen-thirties Magic Chef. Behind her was an Aladdin’s cave of more than a hundred and fifty venerable gas ranges, some with polished chrome fixtures and others nearly rusted through. There were Chambers, Garlands, Crowns, and a hulking, buttercup-yellow Roper that resembled a muscle car. In a world going electric, the Stove Lady keeps their flames alive: 'Nobody—not nobody, anywhere—does what I do' ").

2. Ben McGrath, “Ice Capades,” March 2, 2026 ("The fourth running of the Van Nostrand, when it finally transpired, after two days of postponement, featured three boats from the Shrewsbury club and three from New York. All, per the rules, were so-called 'A' boats: restored antiques, wooden, with gaffed rigs. From a squinting distance, they resembled Hudson River sloops. Up close, they were more like giant crosses atop machetes. The wind was a fluky northwesterly, gusty at the starting gun, such that a couple of blades levitated briefly, as if launching into flight. Then came the lulls, and a reminder that sailing, even on sherbert, can be a “hurry up and wait” kind of sport. Dan Lawrence’s son, Luke, piloting Ariel, which once belonged to the Roosevelts’ neighbor Archie Rogers, took the first heat, and then the second, obviating the need for a third. No team scores needed this time. The New Yorkers had won, and the cup was going home to Newburgh after a hundred and thirty-five years").

3. Sarah Larson, “Big Time,” March 16, 2026 ("At a Gagosian gallery in Chelsea the other day, the master rigger Joe Vilardi, a gray-haired Long Islander in a hoodie that said 'Budco Enterprises,' surveyed the final steps of the installation of Michael Heizer’s new exhibition, 'Negative Sculpture.' The show 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").

4. Henry Alford, “Special Deliveries,” April 6, 2026 ("At 10:44 a.m., after docking near West Thirty-ninth Street, a thousand and fifty-six feet above trucks stuck in traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, the package was assigned to a Dutch X biker named C Jay Jaime, a Brooklyn-born, thirty-four-year-old father of three, who would be riding around town on a special pedal-assist e-bike that came equipped with a windshield, a roof, and an attached trailer. Jaime, who had on a yellow reflective vest and a helmet, held up his phone near his supervisor’s and, courtesy of the FarEye app, instantly received the coördinates for the packages—a total of forty-five—he’d be delivering. “This should take about six hours,” he said. The Sephora box would be his nineteenth of the day. He removed the parcel from its Kevlar tote and placed it on a shelf in the trailer. The D.O.T. estimates that two cargo bikes can do the work of a van or a box truck. Moreover, the trim little contraption cut a wholesome figure reminiscent of a Richard Scarry book—as if a courtesy tram birthed a tiny Zamboni").

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Fanboy,” June 15, 2026 ["He was sitting in a corner of Old Rabbit Club, a bar on MacDougal Street, drinking a non-alcoholic beer. He had on a Waylon Jennings T-shirt under a red plaid shirt, and an MF Doom baseball cap that contained a cascade of curly hair that Vile has a tendency to hide behind. A beer-menu lamplight suggested that the color of his Chuck Taylors was lavender. He was hanging out late (a) to make the trip down the turnpike at midnight (“Musicians know, it’s an easy shot late at night—it’s like teleportation”) and (b) to catch another band’s gig at Le Poisson Rouge"].

6. Ian Frazier, “ICE Prison Watch,” June 22, 2026 (Doremus Avenue and the warehouses and tank farms and truck lots and junk yards along it are not far from the Passaic River. This is swampy Jersey, as opposed to hilly Jersey. Next to the prison visitors’ parking lot, a small catchment pond holds runoff. The lawn around the pond had been mowed without anybody picking up the trash beforehand. Two Canada geese and six gangly brown-suède goslings walked among the refuse, while in the near distance the truck horns and the protesters’ chants rose up. The geese had been there off and on for days.)

Best Photo

Ian Loring Shiver's photo for Helen Rosner's "New York's Finest Sandwich"

Best of newyorker.com

1. Helen Rosner, “New York’s Finest Sandwich,” March 22, 2026 ("What I find most wondrous about the Vegitalian is that it’s not a vegetarian sandwich that happens to be good. It’s not a concession to dietary preference, or a consolation prize. It is, in every sense, a more considered sandwich than the typical monument to meat; every ingredient is load-bearing, each element thought through and assigned a job. The result is a sandwich that illuminates, a sandwich that delights, a sandwich that redefines the Italian combo as a structure, a set of relationships, a formula that admits many solutions. The meat never figures, and you never miss it; all you miss, when the sandwich is gone, is the sandwich itself").

2. Samanth Subramanian, “Sohrab Hura’s Frozen Vision of Kashmir,” May 2, 2026 ("What does “Snow” testify to? Possibly to a way of life that not only survives many kinds of precarity—cruel weather, scanty income, a despotic army—but that even molds itself to them. I kept returning to an image of the side of a house with unfinished red brick walls and a corrugated metal roof. Quilts and blankets burst out of its upper windows, perhaps to be aired or perhaps as plugs to keep out the winter wind. It’s a sight so unexpected that it feels faintly comic, until you clock just how many blankets there are—and how bitterly cold it must be in that house at night. The day is bright, and the distant peaks are carpeted in green, but there’s still a berm of snow on the road by the house, as if to warn that the winter will never entirely leave this land").

3. Max Norman, “August Sander’s Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World,” May 21, 2026 (Despite his claims to universality, Sander thought with his eye, which was attracted to abnormal bodies, unforgettable faces, unkempt free thinkers, and all sorts of people the Nazis would soon label “unerwünscht,” or undesirable.)

4. Taran Dugal, “How Raghu Rai Captured an India in Transition,” May 23, 2026 ("My favorite shot from the book is “Monsoon Downpour in Delhi,” from 1984, which shows a bull pulling a load in the heavy rain, its driver balancing barefoot atop a wooden cart. To his left is a black car with a bulky, rounded frame, glimmering in the deluge. One look at the image and I remembered the Delhi monsoons from my childhood summers—the intolerable humidity, the legions of darkened clouds gathering on the horizon, followed by stentorian thunder and relentless, life-affirming rain. The photo functioned as a window into the past, but it reminded me, too, of the future").

5. Hilton Als, “The Expansive Joy of Mao Ishikawa,” May 30, 2026 ("The photographs in 'A Port Town Elegy' are strong images about being trapped and exercising masculinity. But who takes the poor’s power or demand for power seriously? Ishikawa doesn’t sentimentalize these guys; she lets them get in her face (and, by extension, her frame), she pays attention to them, and imagine how rare that is in their world!").

6. Naaman Zhou, “How City Kids Used to Play on the Streets of New York,” June 6, 2026 ("Earlier, I’d asked Cooper what her favorite picture was in the series. It was one she’d taken of a go-kart race down an abandoned stretch of the West Side Elevated Highway. Two groups of kids are screeching down the road. Other boys are sitting on the guardrail, or strolling and watching from a distance. It’s otherwise empty—just the kids and the road. Like almost all of Cooper’s photos, the scene is fleeting, a remnant of a New York that no longer exists. That highway was demolished, and, though Cooper saved one of the go-karts, and exhibited it at the Museum of the City of New York, she wasn’t able to keep it. In the seventies, when Cooper took these photos, she already knew that what she was seeing was temporary. 'I would drive around Alphabet City, and I would see these things,' she said. 'But they might last for a couple of hours. If I saw it one day, generally, it wouldn’t be there the next' ").

7. Naomi Fry, “The Delicious Anticipation – and, Yes, Release – of ‘Heated Rivalry,’ ” January 10, 2026 ("To try to tell if someone likes you—if someone might even want to have sex with you and, if so, when, and what that encounter might be like, and, once it’s over, when and how it might be repeated—can be one of life’s greatest pleasures").

8. Alex Ross, “What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann,” March 14, 2026 ("What, exactly, was the root of Sontag’s 'shame' over the encounter with Mann, if her semi-fictional story reflected her real-life attitude?").

9. Rebecca Mead, “David Hockney’s Hidden Depths,” June 16, 2026 ("His 'pool paintings,' including 'A Bigger Splash,' remain his most iconic works, despite the fact that he made only a dozen or so of them. They capture a kind of carefree milieu that manages to be suggestively hedonistic while being almost Edenic in the loving treatment of male nudity").

10. Zach Helfand, “How to Canoe to the World Cup in New Jersey,” June 16, 2026 (“The Hackensack appeared behind the parking lot, surprisingly broad and sparkly. Phragmites reeds lined the water, and the American Dream mall loomed over the far bank. It didn’t smell too bad. Except for the cars roaring overhead on a nearby bridge, a continuation of Route 3, it was pretty peaceful”).

Best Sentence

Over and over, I ran those films on our family projector, watching Pepper Constable (6'1", 191) go off-tackle, shucking Yalies, Harvards, on his way to the end zone. - John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Volume Six” (April 27, 2026) 

Best Paragraph

Once the plane passed the highway, Slipkan gave Gusak the order to shoot. The plane was slightly less than nine hundred feet away from the drone. Gusak squeezed the trigger, and the cabin of the Antonov filled with the drilling sound of automatic-weapon fire and the smoky-sweet smell of spent rounds. A stream of orange tracers rained from the minigun. After a few bursts of gunfire, a small plume of black smoke tailed out behind the Shahed, and it began losing altitude. The crew expected it to explode, but it glided into a field beneath the Antonov without detonating—a surprise for a farmer the next morning. Inside the plane, there was no jubilation. After the successful kill, Gusak spent a few minutes tidying up his work station, collecting round casings into a burlap bag. - Ed Caesar, “The Stunt Pilot” (June 1, 2026) 

Best Detail

Two Canada geese and six gangly brown-suède goslings walked among the refuse, while in the near distance the truck horns and the protesters’ chants rose up. - Ian Frazier, "ICE Prison Watch" (June 22, 2026)

Best Description

Every other detail of the Vegitalian likewise replaces an element that the meats provided in the original. Arugula, in lieu of more traditional iceberg lettuce, adds peppery bite. Pecorino, rather than Parmigiano, provides funk. In addition to mozzarella (salty, springy) there is a very nontraditional layer of Swiss cheese, lending a gently savory note. Rather than a conventional splash of red-wine vinegar, the Vegitalian gets a hefty smear of Court Street Grocers’ signature “hoagie spread,” a piquant relish of kalamata and green olives plus a briny, giardiniera-style mix of cauliflower, carrots, peppers, and other pickly things. There’s also a smear of mayo—Italian-combo sacrilege, in some sandwich circles, though I’ve always felt that it boosts the lusciousness of this sort of sandwich. The bread is a soft-crumbed, crackly-crusted seeded roll, with faintly salty pockets of air. - Helen Rosner, "New York’s Finest Sandwich" (March 22, 2026)

Best Drink

The Calcutta Cutie – “a pear-and-chai-infused vodka—sweet, refreshing, and just bitter enough” (Taran Dugal, “Bar Tab: Ornithology,” January 12, 2026).

4 Illuminating "Photo Booth" Pieces

Photo by Sohrab Hura

As I’ve mentioned here before, I love photography writing. I relish reading perceptive critics’ attempts to extract meaning from what is an inherently enigmatic medium. Recently, newyorker.com, in its “Photo Booth” department, published four excellent photography reviews: Samanth Subramanian’s  “Sohrab Hura’s Frozen Vision of Kashmir” (May 2, 2026); Max Norman’s “August Sander’s Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World” (May 21, 2026); Taran Dugal’s, “How Raghu Rai Captured an India in Transition” (May 23, 2026); and Hilton Als’, “The Expansive Joy of Mao Ishikawa” (May 30, 2026). I want to consider each of them and note some of their highlights. 

Samanth Subramanian, in “Sohrab Hura’s Frozen Vision of Kashmir,” reviews a new book of Hura’s photos called Snow. Two things about the book strike him immediately: (1) “Each of the hundred and seventy-five photos sits by itself, square and silent, on a white page, without a jot of text to indicate when and where it was taken, or what it depicts”; and (2) “there’s barely any direct sign of the conflict that has, for decades, eaten into the very bones of Kashmir, a territory claimed so ferociously by India and Pakistan that they’ve fought several wars over it, pushing its people into anger, ruin, and, since the nineteen-eighties, armed uprisings against Indian rule.”

Subramanian’s piece functions like an introductory essay to Hura’s book. He tells us that Hura, who lives in Delhi, took these photos beginning in 2015, when he first travelled to Kashmir; that the photos pre-date the wrenching violence inflicted by the Indian state upon Kashmiri society, starting in 2019; and that Hura’s approach to taking these photos was improvisatory. On this last point, Subramanian says,

He’d go to Srinagar or Pahalgam, catch a bus out, disembark in the countryside, and meander back into town through fields and villages. Invariably, people would wonder about this lone outsider on foot and invite him into their homes for tea. Much of “Snow” unfolds in the domestic or pastoral register. Two bowls of rice on a blue carpet, gleaming as they catch the sun from the window. A teen-ager dragging home an orange cooking-gas cylinder with the aid of just a rope. Tomatoes floating in a large, clear puddle. A sheep being shorn, its shearer tossing onto a blue tarp drifts of wool that look no different from the snow on the surrounding ground.

Photo by Sohrab Hura

Subramanian admires these photos not just for their beauty, but for their cold reality. He writes,

The snow is, of course, everywhere. In the Indian psyche, the idea of Kashmir as a winter wonderland has been unshakeable, polished often through Bollywood numbers that interrupt some urban plot to whisk their hero and heroine away to dance and sing on the Himalayan slopes. In some of Hura’s photos, the snow is still beautiful when it swaddles a landscape, Bruegel-like. But mostly the snow is a pervasive, persistent force: stacked so high outside a window that it cuts off the light, enveloping cars, coming down day and night. Even when the snow is absent, winter, its coldhearted parent, makes itself felt in the bare branches of trees and the sere grass in the fields. Kashmir is as much hardship as it is beauty, as much despair as it is resilience.

For me, the best part of Subramanian’s piece is its concluding paragraph:

What does “Snow” testify to? Possibly to a way of life that not only survives many kinds of precarity—cruel weather, scanty income, a despotic army—but that even molds itself to them. I kept returning to an image of the side of a house with unfinished red brick walls and a corrugated metal roof. Quilts and blankets burst out of its upper windows, perhaps to be aired or perhaps as plugs to keep out the winter wind. It’s a sight so unexpected that it feels faintly comic, until you clock just how many blankets there are—and how bitterly cold it must be in that house at night. The day is bright, and the distant peaks are carpeted in green, but there’s still a berm of snow on the road by the house, as if to warn that the winter will never entirely leave this land.

What does “Snow” testify to? – I relish that question. And I relish the way Subramanian finds an answer in one of Hura’s photos.

Max Norman’s “August Sander’s Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World” is a review of Yale University Art Gallery’s exhibition “August Sander’s People of the 20th Century.” This is a show of Sander’s famous series of portraits taken from about 1910 to around 1950 in which he sought, as Norman says, “to make nothing less than a visual catalogue of all the types and professions in Germany.” Norman describes it as Sander’s “largest exhibition yet” – “the images are hung in tall, orderly grids, like a periodic table of the human elements.” I’m familiar with Sander’s work: see my “On August Sander: Dyer v. Lane” (June 21, 2014).  

What’s interesting about Norman’s piece is his observation that while Sander saw people in terms of categories – farmers, tradesmen, artists, professions, and so on – he also noticed difference, singularity, oddness. He says, “Despite his claims to universality, Sander thought with his eye, which was attracted to abnormal bodies, unforgettable faces, unkempt free thinkers, and all sorts of people the Nazis would soon label 'unerwünscht,' or undesirable.” 

I love that “Sander thought with his eye.” It locates Sander’s art not in his classifications, but in his visual acuity. 

Photo by August Sander

I also like the way Norman attempts to see through the poses of Sander’s subjects to their real lives. He says of one portrait:

A farmer and his wife, allegorized as “Propriety and Harmony,” look out at us from hooded eyes like a beat-down Adam and Eve. The man subtly smiles as he rests a hand on his seated wife’s shoulder, but she holds her mouth in a weary slant and clasps a bouquet of flowers, which, along with her black dress, turn this not so much into an aged nuptial portrait as a memento mori. With bracing clarity and a drop of respectful nostalgia, Sander shows us people as they were, rather than as they wanted to be.

Taran Dugal, “How Raghu Rai Captured an India in Transition” is a tribute to Rai, who passed away April 26, 2026, at the age of eighty-three. Dugal reviews Rai’s 2015 book Picturing Time, “a kaleidoscopic compendium of work that spans fifty years and chronicles modern India through its formative decades, as it grappled with newfound statehood and the volatile forces of breakneck modernization.” Dugal says,

Despite the documentary nature of his work, Rai’s practice, as he writes in “Picturing Time,” was rooted in the “divine concept of darshan,” or “a complete awareness” of “the reality of a place, a person, the physical and the inner aura, reflected in its entirety.” He believed that “some situations arise from somewhere to bless you with the unexpected,” and understood that a good photo unfolds like a dream: initially, the lightning-bolt shock of aesthetic confrontation, and later the remembrance—memory-images persisting long after the page is turned, the book put away, the subject of the picture itself long forgotten. 

That’s a little too cosmic for me. But one of the photos used to illustrate Dugal’s piece is inspired. It’s called “Monsoon Downpour in Delhi” (1984). Dugal describes it superbly:

My favorite shot from the book is “Monsoon Downpour in Delhi,” from 1984, which shows a bull pulling a load in the heavy rain, its driver balancing barefoot atop a wooden cart. To his left is a black car with a bulky, rounded frame, glimmering in the deluge. One look at the image and I remembered the Delhi monsoons from my childhood summers—the intolerable humidity, the legions of darkened clouds gathering on the horizon, followed by stentorian thunder and relentless, life-affirming rain. The photo functioned as a window into the past, but it reminded me, too, of the future.

Photo by Raghu Rai

The last piece I want to note in this excellent quartet of “Photo Booth” essays is Hilton Als’ “The Expansive Joy of Mao Ishikawa.” It’s a review of an exhibition of Ishikawa’s photos on view at Alison Bradley Projects, New York, called "Rogue." Als sees photos as essentially mysterious. He says Ishikawa’s pictures are “marked by an expansive joy, one in which the medium plays a part, for sure, but the majority of which comes from her subjects and their willingness to display themselves before her camera, an instrument that mystifies even as it elucidates.”

The show consists of four series of photos: “Red Flower,” “Life in Philly,” “A Port Town Elegy,” and “My Family.” Of the “Red Flower” pictures, Als says,

All are gelatin-silver prints, a format that adds to the shock and the warmth of the flash lighting. In one shot, we see a couple in bed, looking delightedly at the camera, and then, in the next, the same couple facing each other as they kiss. The tenderness of their need is moving. The third image shows some Black men outside what I assume to be a bar. The distance is reportorial—Ishikawa pulls back to show us what this world looks like, at least in part—and what really gets to me are certain details in the picture. It’s a warm night; to the right of the frame, a woman in a long dress stands between two men. The man to her left wears a short-sleeved shirt; her companion on the other side sports a patterned shirt, light-colored pants, and a pair of white shoes. The flash is like another level of heat. But what one fixates on here is how the two men flanking the woman stand protectively close to her. They are not possessive; they simply recognize her smallness, her vulnerability, while Ishikawa recognizes theirs.

That “What really gets to me are certain details in the picture” made me smile in recognition. It's the response of a true photography writer. Recall Roland Barthes: “Certain details may 'prick' me” (Camera Lucida).  

My favorite passage in Als’ review is his description of the “A Port Town Elegy” series. He writes,

The men in “A Port Town Elegy” are day laborers and dockworkers she met through a bar she owned in Naha. The energy in these pictures is different from that in “Red Flower”—more confrontational, infused with male bravado and despair. The subjects are defined by poverty and its limiting power: one gets the sense that they drink to forget themselves, while howling to declare themselves—to the cosmos, to one another, to Ishikawa’s camera. A man dancing alone, barefoot, is a wonderful portrait of unself-conscious desolation and freedom, all at once. The photographs in “A Port Town Elegy” are strong images about being trapped and exercising masculinity. But who takes the poor’s power or demand for power seriously? Ishikawa doesn’t sentimentalize these guys; she lets them get in her face (and, by extension, her frame), she pays attention to them, and imagine how rare that is in their world! 

Ishikawa doesn’t sentimentalize her subjects; she pays attention to them. Her photos are serious acts of attention. 

Photo by Mao Ishikawa

January 12, 2026 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Taran Dugal’s “Bar Tab: Ornithology” launches the new year in fine style. It’s a miniature masterpiece worth quoting in full:

The raison d’être of Ornithology, a bohemian jazz club in Bushwick situated under the rumbling J/Z line, is scrawled in white text on its exterior façade, next to a mural of a pinstriped Charlie Parker blowing away on his sax: “Bird lives.” This insistence on the genre as a thriving subculture, not yet relegated to graffitied-over plaques of scenes-once-prosperous, grounds the ethos of the joint, which hosts a constant rotation of some of the most exciting combos in New York. On a recent frigid Tuesday, a pair of seasoned patrons had tickets for the Ornithology Big Band, a ten-piece group, who had set up under some dusty Moroccan-style rugs hanging from the rafters. Across the room, Pharoah Sanders, in a large black-and-white portrait, looked on with an expression of discontent. The patrons took their seats by the bar as the group launched into a cover of “My Favorite Things,” from “The Sound of Music.” Sometime during the coda, the guests’ cocktails arrived. The Autumn in New York, a tangy, gin-heavy blend of lemon and crème de violette, was just fine, and not quite worth its sixteen-dollar price tag. The Calcutta Cutie, however, made up for it, with a pear-and-chai-infused vodka—sweet, refreshing, and just bitter enough. It lasted through the end of the third song, penned by one of the saxophonists, who glanced anxiously around the room as his bandmates took solos. “Don’t fuck this up,” his furrowed brow all but yelled. As the set wound down with the mournful Duke Ellington number “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” the guests got to work on a Juju, a delightful, ginger-forward mix of rosemary-infused rum and lime. Spit valves full, chops spent, the band finished their set, and the patrons, ears ringing, set out into the night.

Jazz and cocktails. It doesn’t get much better than that. Ornithology sounds like my kind of bar. Thank you to Dugal for his vivid report.

2. Who is going to be The New Yorker’s new art critic? Adam Gopnik? Hilton Als? Julian Lucas? They’ve all produced “Art World” pieces recently. But for my money, the most promising candidate is Zachary Fine. His “Let It Bleed,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. It’s a review of MoMA’s “Helen Frankenthaler: A Grand Sweep,” a show of five Frankenthaler masterpieces. Fine says of it,

It features five paintings by five different artists named Helen Frankenthaler. They were all raised on Park Avenue, educated at Bennington College, and classified as second-generation Abstract Expressionists, but I have trouble seeing them as one and the same. The five pieces offer, in turn, biomorphic hints of de Kooning, the ragged shapes of Clyfford Still, the bold geometries of Ellsworth Kelly, the paint smears of Gerhard Richter, and something that looks like toothpaste squeezed onto an orange peel. The organizing force behind them, if you can spot it, has a wily mind and a preternatural gift for dispatching cliché from the canvas. After 1952, I don’t know if Frankenthaler could have painted a cliché if she tried.

That’s an intriguing way of seeing these paintings – “five paintings by five different artists named Helen Frankenthaler.” Fine’s observation that “The five pieces offer, in turn, biomorphic hints of de Kooning, the ragged shapes of Clyfford Still, the bold geometries of Ellsworth Kelly, the paint smears of Gerhard Richter, and something that looks like toothpaste squeezed onto an orange peel” made me smile. The piece brims with original, perceptive comments. This one, for example, on Frankenthaler’s “Commune” (1969):

Picture a gray-green mass floating in the middle of a canvas that’s more than eighty square feet. The soupy explosions of the fifties, like “Jacob’s Ladder,” have been slurped back into a single, intelligible shape. From one perspective, the shape is an island seen from above. From others, it’s a half-finished paint job, a blast hole, or an ocular stain. The choice is yours: you can survey it cartographically, insist on its flatness or depth, or be reduced to your own eyeball.

Fine’s writing is fresh, vivid, and illuminating. I think the magazine has found its next art critic. 

3. I avidly read Justin Chang’s “Baby Blues,” a review of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s new movie “Young Mothers.” I love Dardenne films. I love their matter-of-fact documentary style. Their “The Kid with a Bike” is one of my all-time favorite movies. Their new one is about several teen-age moms staying in and around a Belgian maternity ward. Chang finds it a shade too schematic. He writes, 

Do these four stories, with their subtle yet strategic variations of attitude and circumstance, smack of a troubling tidiness—a desire to cover as much sociological ground as possible with each pass of the narrative baton? “Young Mothers” won the Dardennes a screenplay prize at Cannes last year, which may only corroborate the charge that their naturalism here feels a touch too scripted. With less time to spend on each story, they lean more on exposition, which doesn’t play to their (or most anyone’s) cinematic strengths. The filmmakers are at their best when they bring us into direct communion with their characters’ unspoken thoughts, but, with the exception of Ariane—Halloy Fokan’s gaze is a killer—we don’t linger with any of them long enough to cultivate that degree of psychological intimacy.

Nevertheless, Chang likes the film. He says, “Yet ‘Young Mothers’ holds us all the same: not with the urgency, perhaps, of its predecessors but with an emotional pull as lovely and irresistible as the sudden dawning of a smile on a baby’s face.” It appears that “Young Mothers” is another excellent addition to the Dardenne oeuvre.