The restaurant reservation piece didn't feel very "New Yorker"-y to me but is worth a read.
I was going to complain that you picked the wrong Tad Friend piece to be in your top five only to realize the motivation speaker one came at the tail end of 2023 (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/11/jesse-itzlers-secrets-of-success).
My less scientific top five of features. There's a number of reviews / other articles that would probably edge out one or two of these but that's too much work to go through before I go to bed:
Battling Under a Canopy of Drones - I can't believe the access that Luke Mogelson got on this reporting on the Ukraine war
Alpha Girls - Fascinating angle on a super-well-known person and slice of society.
Piecing Together the Secrets of the Stasi - Great piece of history.
The Letters of Oliver Sacks - Not sure excerpts should count, but I was really floored by the scope and quality of these. Although whenever I read correspondences like this I get depressed at my lackluster output. And on the subject of excerpts, I think we both didn't think the Emily Nussbaum excerpt from her Reality TV book was that interesting, but I really ended up enjoying the full book. The chapter on Candid Camera was a must-read.
Reckoning with the Dead at the Sphere - The best of the "fun" features this year.
Honorable mention goes to Alexandra Schwartz's profile of Miranda July which pointed me to All Fours, definitely the best novel I read this year (err, um, last year).
And I will keep reading William Finnegan on surfing, Peter Hessler on his Chinese students, and John Lee Anderson on anything in the Western Hemisphere until the end of time.
The restaurant reservation piece didn't feel very "New Yorker"-y to me but is worth a read.
I was going to complain that you picked the wrong Tad Friend piece to be in your top five only to realize the motivation speaker one came at the tail end of 2023 (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/11/jesse-itzlers-secrets-of-success).
My less scientific top five of features. There's a number of reviews / other articles that would probably edge out one or two of these but that's too much work to go through before I go to bed:
Honorable mention goes to Alexandra Schwartz's profile of Miranda July which pointed me to All Fours, definitely the best novel I read this year (err, um, last year).
And I will keep reading William Finnegan on surfing, Peter Hessler on his Chinese students, and John Lee Anderson on anything in the Western Hemisphere until the end of time.