Reporting a story for the Talk of the Town section has traditionally required a fair amount of hanging out. Since the magazine’s début, in 1925, Talk writers have loitered on film sets and on street corners, and have eavesdropped on—or overheard, if you will—endless conversations, from the musings of spoiled private-school kids on the Upper East Side to the romantic overtures of young men at the Biltmore Bar. When the pandemic hit, however, this kind of fly-on-the-wall reporting became all but impossible. With street corners empty and conversations happening inside homes, our writers had to find ever more creative ways to capture the rhythms of life in the COVID era. Zoom and FaceTime were helpful tools, as a way of entering a subject’s home, and writers zeroed in on the minutiae in the background—a C.E.O.’s unmade bed; a plate of Mexican-wedding cookies in Laura Dern’s living room. Many writers went outside to cover the workers who were keeping things running: porta-potty operators, food-delivery guys, and a rabbi among them. There were also pieces that experimented with form, as well as stories that asked the big questions, like who’s responsible for all the broken windows on the subway?
But, as inventive as these stories were, they never felt out of place. The best Talk pieces of the year, a handful of which are listed below, in chronological order, embody the style of the section that the staff writer Lillian Ross once described as “the sharpest, funniest, and often timeliest short form writing in the history of the magazine.”
The other Harvey Weinstein’s ordeal began on August 4, 1993, when the sixty-eight-year-old formal-wear executive, dubbed the “tuxedo king” by the tabloids, was abducted from the parking lot of a Jackson Heights diner. The kidnappers dropped him in a narrow pit, shackled him into a squat, and sealed the pit with a heavy lid.
—Bruce Handy, “A Tale of Two Harveys” (January 20, 2020)
“big state energy,” the State of New Jersey tweeted, apropos of nothing, on December 21st. “u up,” the State of New Jersey tweeted, without punctuation, at 2:45 a.m. on Christmas Eve. “Who let New Jersey have a Twitter,” a guy named Gary wondered, on Twitter, not long ago. “your mom,” the State of New Jersey responded. That one got nearly half a million likes.
—Andrew Marantz, “How New Jersey’s Twitter Found Its ‘Big-State Energy’ ” (January 20, 2020)
In the final scene of the movie “The Oscar,” Frankie Fane is at the Academy Awards, up for Best Actor. When Merle Oberon, as herself, announces the winner—“Frank . . . Sinatra”—Fane begins clapping psychotically, his face a mask of bewilderment, a GIF in every frame.
—Dana Goodyear, “The Return of ‘The Oscar,’ An Unseeable, Unwatchable Flop” (February 10, 2020)
In China, where He Yujia has been contracted to translate the first four Johnson books, reader concerns have nothing to do with health or speed. Yujia is an engaging thirty-three-year-old who, apart from sporadic gigs as an amateur standup comedian, works seven days a week for as many as fourteen hours a day. Words pour out of her like a mountain stream at the sunny end of that shrinking glacier.
—Peter Hessler, “China’s L.B.J. Cliffhanger!” (February 10, 2020)
Though not a germaphobe by nature, he’d been converted by the job. At 9 a.m., he set out for work wearing a pair of light-brown gloves. “I call them subway condoms,” he said. “I use gloves everywhere. I don’t touch my face. If I see someone coughing or sneezing, I keep my distance. On airplanes, I wipe everything down. I stay away from bowls of mixed nuts or candy.” He told a story of visiting a temple in Bhubaneswar, India, and having a monkey jump on his back and stick a finger in his mouth: “Twenty-four hours later, rip-roaring diarrhea.”
—Nick Paumgarten, “A Local Guide to the Coronavirus” (March 9, 2020)
Codekas’s main tip for the quarantined: carve out a space of your own, away from your partner. “When Matt was on Skype, I went into the closet,” she said. Think of it as a quarantine within a quarantine.
—Tyler Foggatt, “To Have and To Hold, in Quarantine and in Health” (March 23, 2020)
“Controlling cleanliness around B.M.s is the earliest way the child asserts control,” Andrea Greenman, the president of the Contemporary Freudian Society, said. “The fact that now we are all presumably losing control creates a regressive push to a very early time. So, I guess that translates in the unconscious to ‘If I have a lifelong supply of toilet paper, I’ll never be out of control, never be a helpless, dirty child again.’ ”
—Henry Alford, “What Would Freud Make of the Toilet-Paper Panic?” (March 30, 2020)
The texts from Elmhurst were frequent, but increasingly strained and, sometimes, garbled:
“I just wanna get better and spend whatever I ha left with u guys not here.”
“I cann’t sleep.”
“I will wall out here.” (I will walk out of here.)
“Scared working as hard as a I can to get rid of this nightmare.”
—Victor Zapana, Jr., “Texts from my Father, in Elmhurst Hospital” (April 13, 2020)
The last time the artist Tom Sachs was at his SoHo studio before he began quarantining with his wife and young son at their house in Queens, he had only thirty minutes to grab whatever he might need in order to work remotely. “I thought it was just going to be for a long weekend,” he said, on a video call from his basement studio in Rockaway. “I brought my laptop and an extra phone charger. I brought a Cup O’Noodles cardboard box filled with the scraps that were on the table that were really disorganized. I only brought one pencil, so I’m shaving my pencil perfectly.”
—Naomi Fry, “The Art of Making Do (and Emergency AirPod Retrieval)” (May 4, 2020)
Taylor admits to naked partisanship—Room Rater gushed over the “lovely” view of some unexceptional shrubbery visible through a window in Hillary Clinton’s study—but, regarding bookshelves, there is one hard-and-fast rule. “You’re going to get whacked on Room Rater if you put more than one of your own books cover forward,” he said. “A little self-promotion is fine, but don’t push it.”
—Bruce Handy, “What Would Room Rater Say?” (May 18, 2020)
“When I left home,” he wrote, “I thought about what I would do when I arrived in New York: treat the sick and pray for the souls of the dead and wonder about 100 years from now, when all of this is just a fairy tale about death becoming a person who takes the form of a bat to fly across the world: the next generations’ story of the witch that eats children.”
—Mark Rozzo, “War Poems of the Pandemic” (May 18, 2020)
Both David Mansfield and his wife, Maggie, fell ill with COVID-19 in March. She was sicker than he was, but neither needed to be hospitalized. When they got better, he turned to long-neglected projects around the house. She suggested he get rid of some dead yew trees in the front yard. The yews surrounded a rusty iron pipe, about four and a half feet in diameter, with a round cover, set down vertically in the ground; he assumed it was some kind of drainage pipe. But the more he examined it, once the yews were gone, the odder it seemed. He sent an inquiry to the offices of the Township of West Orange, and a woman there quickly called him back. She had never come across such a thing before. She said that a building permit issued for that address in 1961 allowed for the construction of a steel fallout shelter.
—Ian Frazier, “A Reminder of ‘Duck and Cover’ in a New Jersey Front Yard” (June 8 & 15, 2020)
Anthony Scaramucci used to be Trump’s mouthpiece, but he has extended his reach, offering himself as a spokesperson to anyone who can pay. On Cameo, he holds a pillow that says “MOOCH” and bellows, “I’ll talk about anything, as you guys know. So look me up, dial me in, and tell me what you want me to say to you!” He concludes with a loud kissing noise and promises to respond within three days.
—Antonia Hitchens, “From the Trump White House to Fox News to . . . the Cameo App?” (June 29, 2020)
Moss smiled. She has two cats, Lucy and Ethel, one of which was slinking in and out of the frame. “We’re talking about Shirley,” Moss whispered in its ear. “She also liked cats, Ethel.”
—Michael Schulman, “Shirley Jackson’s Son Talks to His Fictional Mom, Elisabeth Moss” (June 29, 2020)
She turned onto a dead-end road, passing a rival agent’s sign. “That guy is eightysomething,” she said, “and I guarantee he’d hump a hill faster than you.”
—Charles Bethea, “Would You Like to Buy a Bunker?” (July 6 & 13, 2020)
He once visited his friend Lauren Bacall for breakfast and inadvertently terrified her grandsons. “Their mum went to the bedroom and said, ‘Boys, come out—Davy Jones is in the kitchen!’ So they locked the door. Like, ‘Are you insane?’ ”
—Sarah Larson, “Bill Nighy’s Obsessions, Onscreen and Off” (July 6 & 13, 2020)
“What kind of style do you want?” Eiden asked Stevens.
“Think Swift Boat,” Stevens replied.
“I knew exactly what I’d found myself in the middle of,” Eiden recalled.
—Nick Paumgarten, “Is Working with the Lincoln Project Sleeping with the Enemy?” (July 20, 2020)
In the street, the barricades lay in splinters. Witnesses said that the driver had approached the barriers, stopped, then slowly plowed through them, his tinkly music providing a taunting soundtrack.
“Mister Smashee!” a neighbor shouted.
—Zach Helfand, “When the Ice-Cream Man Goes Rogue” (August 24, 2020)
Kapital! is the creation of Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot, celebrity sociologists in a country where “celebrity sociologist” is not an oxymoron.
—Lauren Collins, “Stop Doomscrolling and Play a Board Game About Class Warfare” (September 21, 2020)
How did a Kennedy end up in a sensitive role in the Trump Administration? After graduating from Harvard, in 2016, Max Kennedy did some time at consulting and investment firms; he planned to take the LSAT in March, but the pandemic cancelled it. At loose ends, he responded to a friend’s suggestion that he join a volunteer task force that Jared Kushner was forming, to get vital personal protective equipment, such as masks, to virus hot spots. Kushner, he was told, was looking for young generalists who could work long hours for no pay. “I was torn, to some extent,” Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat, said. “But it was such an unprecedented time. It didn’t seem political—it seemed larger than the Administration.” And he knew people who’d been sick. So in March he volunteered for the White House COVID-19 Supply-Chain Task Force, and drove to Washington.
