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).

September 12, 2016, Issue

Hooray! Bilger is back! He’s been absent from The New Yorker for almost two years. I’ve missed him. He’s one of the New Yorker greats, in my opinion – right up there with Liebling, Mitchell, McPhee, and Frazier. Now, here he is, with a terrific “Personal History” piece called “Ghost Stories,” set in Germany, in which he participates in a weird form of group therapy known as Familienaufstellung. His participation isn’t just for reporting purposes; it’s personally motivated. He says, “Like the others in the room, I was there to untangle a knot in my mind. I’d come to Germany to research the life of my grandfather Karl Gönner.” Gönner was born in Weil am Rhein, Germany. He fought in the First World War. During World War II, he was sent to Occupied France to work as a schoolteacher in an Alsatian village. He was also a member of the Nazis Party, and eventually became the village’s Ortsgruppenleiter, or Party chief. Bilger writes,

My mother rarely talked about his years in France, but she was well versed in the atrocities committed by men in his position. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Vichy regime. It must have been a torment to her, trying to square what she learned with her memories of her father. How could he have been both the man she knew and the monster history suggested?

Bilger participates in two Familienaufstellungs. His description of the second one produces one of the piece’s most vivid passages:

By the end of the second day, I’d been a brother, a grandfather, Restlessness, and the country of Germany. I’d watched people burst into tears, climb into one another’s laps, and pretend to be God. I’d heard a woman scream that she was bleeding from her vagina and that crows had eaten her baby. At times, the sobs and shouting rose to such a pitch that I worried that the police might come.

Bilger is skeptical about the reliability of Familienaufstellung narratives. He likens the process to “a visit to a psyche under the sober auspices of therapy.” What impresses him is “the careful attention people paid to one another.” He says, “The very act of empathizing so deeply seems to help people understand themselves.”

“Ghost Stories” is different from Bilger’s previous work. It’s more personal. He’s always written in the first person. But here his “I” is very close to his material. I think it’s one of his best pieces.

Three other excellent articles in this week’s issue are: Tom Kizzia’s “The New Harpoon,” Ian Parker’s “Knives Out,” and Dan Chiasson’s “Force of Nature.” In “The New Harpoon,” Kizzia visits the Inupiat community of Point Hope, on the Chukchi Sea in northern Alaska. The piece brims with interesting details (“a whaling skin boat provides the center support for a glass-topped boardroom table”; “a drum made of whale-liver membrane”). Parker’s “Knives Out” profiles The New York Times’ restaurant critic, Pete Wells (“His expressions of enthusiasm often take the form of wariness swept away: Wells found joy in a conga line at Señor Frog’s, in Times Square”). Chiasson’s “Force of Nature” is a review of Alice Oswald’s new poetry collection Falling Awake (“These poems give us the sensation of living alongside the natural world, of being a spectator to the changes that mark our mortality”).

I devoured all these pieces. This week’s New Yorker is one of the year’s best.