This has been a strange year to be an archivist, a role that seeks to illuminate the present by excavating the past. Typically, my routine consists of unearthing pieces that allow readers to experience some measure of diversion or quiet reflection amid the hubbub of the world swirling around them. This year, it was the world that seemed, at times, to stand still. As many of us began working remotely, the fundamentals of my job shifted. Living through such an extraordinary time has expanded my work in surprising and meaningful ways. In July, The New Yorker published a dissent-themed Archival Issue that reflected the growing calls for change resounding across the globe. The urgent nature of the pandemic and life under quarantine elicited new examinations of past pieces about outbreaks of disease, such as Richard Preston’s “Crisis in the Hot Zone” and Michael Specter’s “Nature’s Bioterrorist.” James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind” drew an upswell of interest during the marches for racial justice over the summer, as my colleague Michael Luo has noted. It turns out that, for many, there’s been more time to spend on archival spelunking—alighting on themes both familiar and further afield—when there’s very little chance of being interrupted by in-person office meetings and social commitments.
All that extra time has certainly been put to good use. Last year, we débuted New Yorker Classics, a newsletter designed to highlight notable and newly digitized pieces from our archive. It quickly became one of our most popular dispatches, with readers discovering and revisiting stories ranging from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” to Nora Ephron’s “Moving On.” This year, we turned our archival spotlight on pieces by Arthur Miller, Hannah Arendt, Gabriel García Márquez, and many others. And we created new themed collections on such subjects as con artists and hoaxes, literary portraits, and the nineteen-eighties. As this tumultuous year winds down, we’re offering ten of our classic stories from the archive as both a break from 2020 and illuminating points of comparison. We hope that you’ll take some time to enjoy these pieces this holiday season.
—Erin Overbey, archive editor
“Why I Wrote ‘The Crucible,’ ” by Arthur Miller
At the beginning of 2020, with the country embroiled in impeachment hearings, I was interested in addressing present events by resurfacing an unexpected piece from the past. In a serendipitous moment, I recalled a ruminative essay, from 1996, by the playwright Arthur Miller, which explored how he came to write his iconic drama “The Crucible.” It was during his research on the Salem witch trials, Miller explains, that he found a fitting setting for his parable about persecution and paranoia. He writes about the fraught political climate of the fifties, when politicians of all stripes were cowed by seemingly daily attacks from Senator Joseph McCarthy. In hindsight, Miller observes, McCarthy, like so many other firebrands from history, appeared “nearly comical, a self-aware performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat-shtick.” Miller was struck by the lengths to which otherwise rational people were willing to go to indulge the paranoid fantasies of an erratic politician. During periods of political delirium, he seems to be saying, it can be all too easy to perceive demagogues as invincible; yet, once a political fever breaks, even giants begin to look small.
“Eichmann in Jerusalem,” by Hannah Arendt
In 1963, the journalist Hannah Arendt published an expansive five-part series on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal and one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. Although Arendt recognized the monstrosity of Eichmann’s actions, she also perceived him as a bureaucrat, motivated primarily, she argued, by ambition and opportunism rather than anti-Semitism. Arendt’s true subject is the appeal of authoritarianism and the ease with which despotism can take hold. In one of the most famous passages in the piece, she notes that the trial, with its revelations about the genocide, resulted in a lesson on “the fearsome word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” It’s all too easy, she argues, to dismiss men like Eichmann as outliers. Arendt’s piece is ultimately a study of what occurs when the unimaginable is normalized—and when a society begins not only to tolerate persecution but to embrace it.
“Orwell on the Future,” by Lionel Trilling
The literary critic Lionel Trilling contributed multiple book reviews to The New Yorker during the forties and fifties. One of my favorites is his review of the novel “1984,” George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, which ran in the magazine when the book was published, more than seventy years ago. Trilling calls “1984” a “profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book.” The novel, he argues, serves as a clarion call against the kind of intellectual apathy that facilitates the ascent of despots and dictators. He perceived it as a fantasy of a political future as yet untold. Orwell, Trilling writes, was fascinated by the effects of emotional and cultural dispossession—and he had an oracle’s gift for identifying the vulnerabilities within our civic compacts. Trilling’s examination of Orwell’s vision presents an intriguing glimpse into another fraught era—the beginning of the Cold War. And his review offers a prescient reminder that the dissemination of misinformation often goes hand in hand with authoritarianism.
“Living Through the Blitz,” by Mollie Panter-Downes
In a year in which New York City was turned upside down by COVID-19, it was striking to revisit Mollie Panter-Downes’s dispatches from London during the Second World War. Panter-Downes wrote a regular column from the city for forty-five years, and some of those pieces are collected in her terrific anthology of war letters, “London War Notes.” In the fall of 1940, she wrote an essay about how residents were faring during the early days of the Blitz. “The great sweep of Regent Street, deserted by everyone except police and salvage workers, stared gauntly like a thoroughfare in a dead city. It would have been no surprise to see grass growing out of the pavements.” For Londoners, she wrote, there were no longer such things as good nights. Reading about the heroic efforts of relief workers amid the ghostly avenues feels eerily familiar. And Panter-Downes’s ability to render visceral the unsettling metamorphosis of the lives she observes offers us a trenchant account of the resiliency of a city and its people.
“Distance,” by Roger Angell
Roger Angell’s work is as exhilarating as the sporting events he has covered—in addition to his many other subjects—for nearly six decades. Angell, who turned a hundred this year, has a poet’s grasp of the small, intimate moments that capture the arc of his subjects’ lives. In 1980, he profiled Bob Gibson, one of the greatest pitchers of all time. Gibson, who played for the St. Louis Cardinals, was a complex figure. As an athlete, he thrilled his colleagues with his extraordinary talent, yet he refused to play the off-field role of the sports icon. His prowess was so transcendent that, as Angell wrote, he “made pitching look unfair.” Like much of Angell’s work, this piece is a corker—soaring with crackling energy and verve. You don’t have to be a baseball fan to appreciate the rousing quality of Angell’s prose. Just take a break from your daily routine and revel in one of the great sports essays by a veritable master of the form.
“The Itch,” by Atul Gawande
Atul Gawande, who was recently appointed to President-elect Biden’s coronavirus advisory board, has covered medicine for The New Yorker since 1998. In 2008, he published a fascinating report on the case of a thirtysomething woman who had developed an unbearable itch on the side of her head, after an episode of shingles. “It crawled along her scalp,” he writes, “and no matter how much she scratched it would not go away. ‘I felt like my inner self, like my brain itself, was itching,’ she says.” There’s something contagious about the idea of an itch; we can feel a tickle on the back of our neck as Gawande describes each new detail of the woman’s affliction. The piece is paced like a thriller, showcasing the woman’s alarm as her condition progresses to a horrifying dénouement. Like a medical Edgar Allan Poe, Gawande crafts a spine-tingling narrative that demonstrates how an otherwise common condition can suddenly transform into a nightmare.
“The Dead Zone,” by Malcolm Gladwell
In the year of COVID-19, Malcolm Gladwell’s sweeping report on the devastating influenza pandemic of 1918 became relevant again. A mutated strain of the virus spread across every continent in the early twentieth century, killing more Americans in the course of several months than were killed in the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. Streetcars were converted into hearses to house the dead, and entire cities were overwhelmed. Gladwell’s piece unfolds as a riveting series of flashbacks to 1918, offering a salient look at what can happen when a catastrophic virus sweeps across the globe. It also presents a daunting lesson in how we might battle the current pandemic, and new viruses that eventually emerge.
“The Autumn of the Patriarch,” by Gabriel García Márquez
The Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, the author of “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” among other novels, published nearly a dozen pieces in the magazine in the course of three decades. In 1976, he contributed a short story about an aging Caribbean dictator whose intensifying paranoia and destructiveness lead to his downfall. The novelist later claimed that the character was a composite of several Latin-American dictators, particularly Juan Vicente Gómez, of Venezuela. García Márquez explores the increasing isolation of his protagonist, and he describes the despot’s growing frustration as he realizes that his remaining acolytes are useless—“that they were dissembling from habit, that they lied to him out of fear, that nothing was true in that crisis of uncertainty which was rendering his glory bitter.” García Márquez’s tale is a penetrating meditation on the political wreckage that can result when an untethered leader is surrounded solely by extremists and sycophants.
“Bird,” by Whitney Balliett
Whitney Balliett, one of the magazine’s music critics for five decades, once remarked that jazz is the “art of surprise.” Balliett’s 1976 profile of the jazz legend Charlie (Bird) Parker chronicles the musician’s personal excesses and artistic virtuosity. It’s an arresting portrait of a musician whose expansive view of the genre allowed him to immerse himself—and his listeners—in unexplored musical waters. Balliett’s writing evokes the fluctuations in tone and timbre of a jazz maestro. Parker’s “rhythms had a muscled, chattering density,” the writer observes. “He crackled and poured and roared.” As he chronicles Parker’s lyrical evolution, Balliett uncovers the hidden layers of one of music’s most complex innovators. He presents the artist in full, documenting the ways in which Parker upended the world of jazz and inspired a new generation of musicians—leaping, floating, and gliding melodiously along the way.
