Best New Yorker Articles of 2021

Lawrence Wright on the mistakes and the struggles behind America’s COVID-19 tragedy.

His runaway success began with castaway junk: a bag of bottle caps along the road. Now, Julian Lucas writes, the Ghanaian sculptor is redefining Africa’s place in the global art scene.

Some of Trump’s supporters had been declaring, at rally after rally, that they would go to violent lengths to keep the President in power, Luke Mogelson writes. A chronicle of an attack foretold.

To get her fellow-citizens to care about threatened animals, Paula Kahumbu became a TV star, Jon Lee Anderson writes.

Trump transformed immigration through hundreds of quiet measures. Before they can be reversed, they have to be uncovered, Sarah Stillman writes.

The area between Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen resembles the nineteen-seventies city that’s been romanticized in the movies, Rivka Galchen writes. But do we really want to live in “Taxi Driver”?

While the virus has ravaged rich nations, reported death rates in poorer ones remain relatively low. Siddhartha Mukherjee writes about what probing this epidemiological mystery can tell us about global health.

Dexter Filkins on whether peace talks with the Taliban and the prospect of an American withdrawal will create a breakthrough or a collapse.

While political leaders trade threats, the pandemic has made Americans even more reliant on China’s manufacturers, Peter Hessler writes.

For years, employees of the Pierre enjoyed some of the most enviable union jobs in New York City, Jennifer Gonnerman writes. How much of that will survive the pandemic?

Racist policies are bad for business, as the state’s own history can attest, Jelani Cobb writes.

Daniel Alarcón on the uncertain future of the Arecibo Observatory, and the end of an era in space science.

As mass detentions and surveillance dominate the lives of China’s Uyghurs and Kazakhs, a woman struggles to free herself, Raffi Khatchadourian writes.

Personal History by John McPhee: A project meant not to end.

The country’s cyber forces have raked in billions of dollars for the regime by pulling off schemes ranging from A.T.M. heists to cryptocurrency thefts, Ed Caesar writes. Can they be stopped?

You have to play a role that isn’t really you. It’s like slavery. You have to meet all those demands and keep a sense of yourself as well, Winfred Rembert writes.

Douglas Preston writes about a new explanation for the fate of the Dyatlov party, a group of Soviet cross-country skiers, whose deaths, in 1959, in the freezing mountains of the Urals, have become a topic of endless speculation.

On a hillside ages ago, people inscribed a naked man with a twenty-six-foot-long erect penis, Rebecca Mead writes. Why did they do it?

The Havana Syndrome first affected spies and diplomats in Cuba. Now it has spread to the White House, Adam Entous writes.

Kurtis Minder finds the cat-and-mouse energy of outsmarting criminal syndicates deeply satisfying, Rachel Monroe writes.

After a year of tragedy and uncertainty, New Yorkers are revisiting old haunts—and sharing them with new faces. Adam Gopnik writes about the post-pandemic awakening.

Lauren Collins writes about how the star of “Lupin” pulled off his greatest confidence trick.

Margaret Talbot writes about women who feel drawn by God to the calling—and won’t let the Vatican stop them.

During a time when the country has been starkly divided on matters ranging from the pandemic to the Presidency, the Court has largely avoided partisanship, Jeannie Suk Gersen writes.

In his fight against Black erasure, the Roots drummer, who has amassed two hundred thousand LPs (plus bags full of “Soul Train” VHS tapes), makes his directorial début with “Summer of Soul,” about the mostly forgotten series of concerts in Harlem, in 1969, Bruce Handy writes.

With Alexey Navalny in prison, one of his closest aides is carrying on the lonely work of the opposition, Masha Gessen writes.

Nicholas Lemann on the contested past and the uncertain fate of affirmative action.

Calvin Tomkins profiles the artist Kerry James Marshall, a virtuoso of landscape, portraiture, still-life, history painting, and other genres of the Western canon.

Drought is shrinking one of the country’s largest reservoirs, revealing a hidden Eden, Elizabeth Kolbert writes.

WPKN-FM—on which you can hear a Stevie Wonder song performed by an all-women jazz septet or twenty minutes of Tuvan throat singing—moves to a new location in downtown Bridgeport, Connecticut, David Owen writes.

Zach Helfand writes about the minor leagues testing the Automated Ball-Strike System. But isn’t yelling and screaming about bad calls half the fun of baseball?

From 2000: “The people who will be coming tonight and tomorrow night to Les Halles, a restaurant on Park Avenue South where I work as the chef, aren’t like the people who come during the week,” Anthony Bourdain writes.

The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden, author of the new book “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality,” is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything.

Margaret Talbot on Joshua Prager’s “The Family Roe” and the all-too-human plaintiff of Roe v. Wade, who captured the messy contradictions hidden by a polarizing debate.

Showcase by Haruki Murakami: How I amassed more T-shirts than I can store.

Jill Lepore on how efforts to rescue African American burial grounds and remains have exposed deep conflicts over inheritance and representation.

Vinson Cunningham reviews Martyna Majok’s play, presented by New York Theatre Workshop at the Lucille Lortel, which focusses on two precisely defined characters to explore the injustices experienced by Dreamers in America.

David Remnick on how, half a century after the Beatles broke up, McCartney is still correcting the record—and making new ones.

Joshua Yaffa reports on what happened to Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the only known African American to die in the Gulag.

At fourteen, Ron Bishop helped convict three innocent boys of murder. They’ve all lived with the consequences, Jennifer Gonnerman writes.

Nick Paumgarten writes about Owsley Stanley, the legendary Grateful Dead soundman and LSD chemist, who left behind thirteen hundred reels of live recordings from his sonic laboratory, including a newly released recording of the night Johnny Cash came to town.

There’s no way to confirm that a crop was grown organically, Ian Parker writes. Randy Constant exploited our trust in the labels—and made a fortune.

Masha Gessen writes about Dmitry Muratov and the journalists of Novaya Gazeta, who report on dangerous conflicts and endure threats of their own.

Nicola Twilley writes about the designer Adrian Fisher, who has devoted the past four decades to bringing back mazes, long regarded as historical curiosities. He has created more than seven hundred—including one on a skyscraper in Dubai and another that’s now reproduced on Britain’s five-pound note.

Ian Urbina writes that the E.U., tired of migrants arriving from Africa, has created a shadow immigration system that captures them before they reach its shores, and sends them to brutal Libyan detention centers run by militias.

Dexter Filkins writes about how Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya came to challenge her country’s dictatorship.

Lauren Collins on a food-world star’s method and mess.

The U.S. promised protection to the locals it relied on during the war, Eliza Griswold writes. When it withdrew, it abandoned thousands to the Taliban.