December 1, 2025 Issue

The two pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: I’m Donut ?” and Alex Ross’s “Written in Stone.” Rosner’s piece is a review of the new Times Square doughnut shop called I’m Donut ?. Her description of the store’s doughnuts is delectable. Here’s a sample:

There are chocolate and matcha variants, their subtle flavors baked into the dough. Then there are filled doughnuts, whose puffy centers are pumped with flavored creams, all of them vivid and none too sweet: custard, more matcha, fragrant sake gelée with Chantilly, airy peanut-butter cream swirled with tart Concord-grape jelly. There are some New York-exclusive flavors, like a ring doughnut glazed in neon-pink strawberry icing, freckled with bits of freeze-dried berry that crackle and melt on the tongue, or a chocolate variety with a caramel-espresso cream filling that was unexpectedly, thrillingly bitter and complex. The somewhat controversial scrambled-egg doughnut features a sugary original doughnut piped full of soft curds and a squirt of a sweet-savory tomato mayonnaise—a bold and bizarre breakfast manifesto that refuses to be definitively sweet or definitively savory. I loved it unreservedly, though I imagine I might be in the minority.

Mm, I’ll have one of those chocolate ones with the caramel-espresso cream filling, please.

Ross’s “Written in Stone” is a paean to the Orkney Islands. He says, “Orkney is one of those places where the veil over the distant past seems to lift.” He visits various Neolithic ruins: the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar, the tomb at Maeshowe. His favorite site is Stenness. He writes,

During a recent visit to Orkney, I kept returning to Stenness, at all hours and in all weather. On drizzly days, with skies hanging low, the stones resemble ladders to nowhere. In bright sun, hidden colors emerge: streaks of blue against gray; white and green spatters of lichen; yellowish stains indicating the presence of limonite, an iron ore. Pockmarks and brittle edges show the abrading action of millennia of wind and rain. I watched as tourists approached the stones and hesitantly touched them, as if afraid. When I put my own hands on the rock, I felt no obvious emanations, though I did not feel nothing. One evening, I leaned on a fence as the sun went down, the horizon glowing orange against a cobalt sky. A whitish mist stole in from the lochs, encircling a nearby house until only its roof and chimneys remained. Spectral shapes caught my eye: sheep were trimming the grass around the site. When they detected my presence, they streamed away en masse, fading into the fog, which matched their coats. The stones loomed as black silhouettes. I felt a sweet shiver of the uncanny.

I love that description of the sheep, “streaming away en masse, fading into the fog, which matched their coats.” “Written in Stone” is a wonderful tour of Neolithic Orkney. I enjoyed it immensely.