January 19, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Paige Williams’ absorbing “Call of the Wild.” It’s a portrait of an auxiliary “all hazards” team of elite outdoorsmen who help park rangers at Great Smoky Mountains National Park pull off the most difficult extractions. The team is named BUSAR, for Backcountry Unit Search and Rescue. It was founded by Andrew Harrington. 

Williams describes Great Smoky Mountains Park. She calls it “a Bermuda Triangle of volatile conditions.” She reports, 

Visitors have been known to climb to a high point to watch a sunset, forgetting that they’ll need light to get back down. They don’t think to bring water. They misjudge distances and underestimate the landscape, which isn’t just steep; it’s slippery, snaky, rocky, rooty, humid, buggy, foggy, and misty. Each year in the national park, there are more than a hundred backcountry emergencies.

She profiles Harrington, who is an ardent outdoorsman and homesteader. She says of him,

He ate daylilies, violet greens, chickweed, shepherd’s purse, greenbrier tips, sheep sorrel, thistle stalks. He learned how to make bamboo-pokeweed spring rolls, persimmon ice cream, spicebush muffins, dandelion jelly, pan-fried groundnuts, watercress soup, acorn cookies, roast squirrel glazed with honey and balsamic vinegar. If a wild hog came onto his property, he killed, butchered, and ate it, then freeze-dried the leftovers. He dried stalks of goldenrod and mint on racks.

Williams talks with other members of Team BUSAR. They’re an impressive crew. One of the piece’s most striking passages is a list of their names (and nicknames), together with a line or two on each, indicating their experience and background:

Big Bill is Bill Ivey, a Smokies wildlife ranger and a marine reservist who is six feet six. Jernigan is Jernigator, who, this year, at age fifty-five, left his software career to become a wilderness E.M.T. and a park ranger, the life he’d wanted all along. Captain Morgan is Andrew Morgan, a physician’s assistant and a former member of the Army Special Forces. Superman is Ken Miller, a retired surgeon who serves with nine local, state, and federal SAR organizations but—so goes a joke—assures his wife that he belongs to only one. (Several years ago, when Miller turned eighty, the guys were so excited about throwing him a surprise party that they forgot to invite him.) Lando, Ben Landkammer, grew up in Montana and trains canines. Silkwood, Mark Silkwood, is also ex-Special Forces, and an Army contractor. Cody Watson, BUSAR’s quartermaster, recently retired early from the Air National Guard; he’s an E.M.T., as is John Danner. Zack Copeland, who chairs BUSAR’s board, is a former wildlife biologist turned poultry farmer. Howitzer, Andrew Howe, is a civil engineer and a competitive mountain biker. Kelly Street is a Knoxville lawyer and a former military-intelligence officer. Caleb Edmiston is a chiropractor who, like Herrington, has competed in mixed martial arts. Greg Grieco played football at the University of Tennessee and now runs a nonprofit that rescues bear cubs. Obi-Wad, Jeff Wadley—a pastor, an author, and a former Civil Air Patrol officer who’s been working SAR missions in the Smokies for more than forty-five years—teaches courses on “lost-person behavior” and may be the greatest living expert on airplane crashes in the park. Daz, Andrew Randazzo, started a company that provides continuing education for medical-industry professionals; he did emergency-response work in New York City during the covid-19 outbreak, and near the border of Syria and Turkey after the earthquakes in 2023. Ski is Brian Borkowski, who flies Black Hawk helicopters for the Tennessee Army National Guard.

Williams also vividly describes two rescues that BUSAR successfully carried out.

My favorite part of “Call of the Wild” is the last section, an account of Williams’ experience camping with the BUSARS. Some of them have brought their kids and dogs with them. I relish this passage:

Street built the fire the way Herrington had taught everyone, using tinder, fatwood, and Vaseline-soaked cotton balls, hit with a spark from a ferro rod. Every busarcarries personal fire-starter kits and a twenty-five-pound pack filled with gear: headlamps, extra batteries, survival blanket, chem light, grid reader, pens, hemostatic gauze, trash bag, dry bag, gaiters, gloves, spork, M.R.E.s, flagging tape, two types of tourniquets, HotHands, 550 cord, multi-tool, folding saw, microspikes. Showing me all of this one day, Sharbs held up a small item and told me what Herrington had told him: “This is the best fire starter in the history of man.” It was a Bic lighter.

Williams has a wonderful eye for detail. Consider this delightful passage, for example:

The kids were up at daybreak, congregating beneath the parachute, having already swung on the rope swing, picked on one another, cried a little, and gotten into a cooler of sodas. One was eating sour cream and shredded cheddar for breakfast until a dog slurped it off her plate. Another made a “rifle” out of duct tape and sticks. Two had turned huge dried leaves into “fairy hats.”

“Call of the Wild” is a memorable portrait of an extraordinary group of people. I highly recommend it. 

Postscript: “Call of the Wild” reminded me of another excellent “search and rescue” piece – Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues,” a report on Iceland’s sprawling system of emergency-response volunteers, known collectively as Slysavarnafélagið Landsbjörg, or, in English, the Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue—ICE-SAR. 

Nicola Twilley's "Pour One Out"

Photo by Bobby Doherty, from Nicola Twilley's "Pour One Out"

I find myself still thinking about Nicola Twilley’s excellent “Pour One Out,” in last week’s issue. The piece is about the California wine industry’s quest to save wine from wildfire smoke. Twilley reports that smoke taint is costing the industry billions of dollars. She talks with researchers studying the impact of smoke on wine grapes. She visits their experimental vineyards at Washington State University. She participates in a smoke-tainted wine taste test at Oregon State University. She notes various techniques devised to solve the issue, including spraying grapes with a clay-based powder called kaolin, mixing smoky wines with activated carbon, and extracting smoky compounds from the tainted wine. None are satisfactory. The research continues. 

What sticks in my mind is the last section of the piece, in which Twilley shifts perspective. Instead of treating smoky taste as a flaw, she treats it as part of the wine’s “aeroir.” She talks with vintner Cyler Varnum, who had what she calls a “breakthrough.” She writes,

When people visited Varnum’s tasting room, in the Willamette Valley, they often asked how that year’s vintage had fared, given the wildfires. Varnum decided to take them back to a barrel and pull a sample so they could see for themselves. Some made a face and spat it out; others could taste the smoke but found it curious rather than repulsive; still others loved it. “That was the realization: we don’t dictate people’s tastes,” he told me, as we sat in his tasting room. “I shouldn’t be trying to tell people that it’s a flaw. I’d rather be, like, ‘This was 2020: you might like it, you might not.’ ”

“Still others loved it” – that made me smile. There’s no accounting for people’s taste. Twilley’s last paragraph is a beauty, worth quoting in full:

Varnum, in his tasting room, shared what little remained of his 2020 stock, starting with a traditional sparkling blanc de blanc he’d bottled under the moniker Toast, made entirely from Zolnikov’s Chardonnay grapes and fermented in neutral oak. “It’s interesting, because when you think about champagne, you want toasted-brioche, crème-brûlée notes—that’s actually a quality you’re looking for,” he explained. On first sniff, I was not optimistic: the nose, as Varnum delicately put it, was “more on the burnt side of toast.” But the taste was much more nuanced: light, clean, and bright, with a browned-piecrust quality that never built into the bitter charred note I’d learned to anticipate. Earlier that year, Varnum’s partner, Taralyn, told me, they’d had a bonfire and brought out the glasses. “I think I drank almost a whole bottle,” she said. “Around a campfire, it’s delicious.” 

“Pour One Out” is an interesting take on a challenging "climate change" issue. I enjoyed it immensely. 

The Art of Quotation (Part VIII)

My favorite form of quotation is the parenthetical extract. I learned it from reading Helen Vendler. It’s an effective way of illustrating a point. Here’s an example from Vendler’s “ ‘Oh I Admire and Sorrow,’ ” a review of Dave Smith’s poetry collection Cumberland Station (1977), included in her great Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980). She’s commenting on the poem “On a Field Trip at Fredericksburg”:

There are many daring flashes: the demotic beginning (“maybe / fifteen thousand got it here”); the surrealistic fantasy (“If each finger were a thousand of them / I could clap my hands and be dead / up to my wrists”); the dismissive meiosis for the atomic bomb (“one silly pod”); the substitution of birds for the soldiers in blue and gray uniforms (“a gray blur preserved / on a blue horizon”); the unobtrusive symbols (the drummers, “rigid as August dandelions,” yield to “one dark stalk snapped off,” and the hint of death in the “drift of wind / at the forehead, the front door”). 

I love this form of quotation. It embeds fragments of the subject text in the commentary. When done well, it’s the verbal equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine. 

Inspired Sentence 7

A few special conifers such as bristlecone pine can live through sequential, sectorial deaths – compartmentalizing their external afflictions, shutting down, section by section, producing fertile cones for an extra millennium with the sustenance of a solitary strip of bark.

That’s from Jared Farmer’s brilliant Elderflora (2022), a history of ancient trees. I relish the clear scientific precision of it (“sequential,” “sectorial,” “compartmentalizing”). Farmer is explaining how the bristlecone pine works, how it manages to live almost indefinitely. I love that “compartmentalizing their external afflictions.” The final part – “shutting down, section by section, producing fertile cones for an extra millennium with the sustenance of a solitary strip of bark” – is inspired. Note that “for an extra millennium” – not a year, not a decade, not a century. A millennium! All from a “solitary strip of bark”!

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #8 Anthony Lane's "Because the Night" and Berton Roueché’s “Trans Europ Nuit”

Illustration by Christoph Niemann, from Anthony Lane's "Because the Night"

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is actually two picks. I originally intended to choose just one – Anthony Lane’s “Because the Night” (May 11, 2020), a wonderful essay on the pleasures of traveling by night train. However, as I was rereading it, I was reminded of another great “night train” piece that I’d read many years ago – Berton Roueché’s “Trans Europ Nuit” (December 28, 1981). The two pieces complement each other beautifully. I’ve decided to consider them together – a rare double combo. Here we go! All aboard!

Lane begins,

If on a winter’s night a traveller is about to board a train, a fortifying drink is of the essence. Thus it was that I stood in line at Burger King, on the concourse at Central Station, in Glasgow, and asked for a hot tea. The only reason that I wasn’t seeking out a dram of whiskey was that I had already done so, dropping into a pub on my way to the station. In short, I was well drammed up—as was the Glaswegian beside me, who leaned on the counter and inquired what I was up to. Taking the Caledonian Sleeper to London, I replied. He fixed me with a canny eye and said, “Are you not afraid o’ the wee virus?”

That passage makes me smile every time I read it. So many interesting elements. As an opening paragraph of a travel piece, it’s almost unbeatable. Lane’s next paragraph is equally good:

The answer, foolishly, was no. I was too excited by the thought o’ catching the wee train to be worried about catching anything else. It was late evening, on February 28th; the year would soon leap into the twenty-ninth, and that touch of temporal rarity added to the occasion. The departure of a night train—by definition, a humdrum event for the station staff—exudes, for all but the most jaded travellers, the thrill of an unfamiliar ritual. By day, if late, you run for a train; if early, you tut and sigh at having to tarry so long. At night, on the other hand, you saunter, and deliberately show up in good time. Why? Not because of security, passport control, or the other chores that affront the airline passenger, shortening tempers and sapping every soul, but because you want to settle in and enjoy the show. Patiently, the train awaits you, with a theatrical air of suspense, and the moment of its leaving is akin to the curtain’s rise. 

Lane’s writing hooks me and reels me in. Part of its allure is his wit. Here’s his description of the interior of his sleeping compartment:

When turning from the window to the door, in my compartment, I had to revolve on the spot, as if roasting on a vertical spit, and, despite my being the sole occupant, both bunks had been let down, locked into place, and joined by a ladder. A printed notice offered advice: “Guests should use the ladders in the traditional manner, by always facing the bed as they climb up and down.” What other manner is there? Had the train recently hosted the cast of Cirque du Soleil, perhaps, who insisted on descending head first, arms outstretched, after crooking one knee over the top rung?

And here’s his description of the food:

No less baffling was the Room Service Menu. Pies, cheeses, broth, smoked venison on a platter, and a parade of wines and spirits: all these, and more, could be ferried to one’s bedside. Caledoniaphiles were urged to dine on “Haggis, Neeps & Tatties”—neeps meaning turnips, tatties meaning potatoes, and haggis meaning all your deepest terrors wrapped up in a sphere of stomach skin, then boiled. Precisely what you want to snack on, in other words, while passing through a tunnel at half past two in the morning. The entire feast could be washed down with a Ginger Laddie. Don’t ask.

At this point, as Lane begins a discussion of the history of the Pullman sleeping car, I think we’ll change trains and board Roueché’s Danish Express. He’s traveling from Copenhagen to Paris:

The train moved, was moving. It moved as silently, as smoothly, as naturally as a ship under sail. The platform slid away. In a moment, in half a moment, we were moving at speed, racing—out of the glare of the sheds and into a dusky daylight, through spreading railroad yards, past factories and warehouses, past blocks of apartment houses, past a deserted suburban station, past another spread of apartment s. Then we were in an open countryside of fields, pastures, hedgerows, an occasional mannered plantation of pine or white birch. Denmark is a small country, and Copenhagen is on two tiny islands, but I had a sense of space that was almost Kansan. There wasn’t a house as far as I could see. Then, suddenly, there were six or eight houses clustered together along a narrow street—little square houses, like doll houses, with steep, red-tiled, pyramidal roofs. American farmers live on the farm. In Denmark, farmers live in the village. The enormous countryside began again. It was a landscape made for snow, for blizzards, for raging winds. The dusk deepened. There was a spark of light in the distance, a spidery glint of water, and then it was dark.

Roueché’s trip is low-event, but if you want to experience the pleasure of night train travel, it’s perfect. He describes his compartment. He talks with the steward. He talks with another passenger. His train crosses the Baltic Sea by ferry. He describes having supper on the ferry. He observes other people in the ferry bistro. He returns to his train compartment. He sleeps. He wakes up around midnight. The train is in Hamburg. There’s joviality coming from the next compartment:

I thought I heard a guitar. I heard shrieks and roars of laughter. I heard glasses and bottles and what sounded like somebody dancing. I looked at my watch: it was almost midnight. I looked out at the station again. There were plenty of people about—walking, waiting, waving, embracing. And a variety of uniforms: brown, blue, green. Two youths were sitting on a bench, gazing at the train, eating ice-cream cones: it might have been noon in a park. They suddenly slid away. We were moving, but moving backward. We moved out of the station, past pillars, past stairs, past benches and people, past signs for Marlboro and Coca-Cola in German, and into a yard, past a string of freight cars on a siding. They were painted bright red, and on each, in white, was the name “Blue Star Lines.” The joviality next door continued. The train stopped, waited, and moved forward again. We pulled in to a platform—a different platform. A woman sat on a bench, slumped in sleep, a cat in a box at her feet. We waited, we moved, we slipped away backward again. I dropped onto my pillow. There were footsteps, running footsteps, in the corridor.

In the morning, Roueché gets up, shaves, and packs his things. He talks with the steward. He watches the French countryside fly past. And then he’s in the Gare du Nord in Paris. He leaves the train and has coffee in the station. Ho hum, you might say. Not at all. It’s total bliss. Lane says the same thing at the end of his piece: “Such was the non-event of the journey. Yet I relished every mile of it.”

Acts of Seeing: Almond Tree

Photo by John MacDougall

January 29, 2024, we were cycling in Portugal. I came around a bend and there was this beautiful old almond tree in full frothy blossom. At least I think it’s an almond tree. Please tell me if it isn’t. I want to know. I love the twisted black trunk. Like great old poets and great old painters and great old movie directors, it’s still producing beauty. What a wonderful day that was! See that cyclist on the road in the distance? That’s Lorna, leading the way, as usual, while I straggle behind, stopping to savor the views and take pictures. 

January 12, 2026 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Taran Dugal’s “Bar Tab: Ornithology” launches the new year in fine style. It’s a miniature masterpiece worth quoting in full:

The raison d’être of Ornithology, a bohemian jazz club in Bushwick situated under the rumbling J/Z line, is scrawled in white text on its exterior façade, next to a mural of a pinstriped Charlie Parker blowing away on his sax: “Bird lives.” This insistence on the genre as a thriving subculture, not yet relegated to graffitied-over plaques of scenes-once-prosperous, grounds the ethos of the joint, which hosts a constant rotation of some of the most exciting combos in New York. On a recent frigid Tuesday, a pair of seasoned patrons had tickets for the Ornithology Big Band, a ten-piece group, who had set up under some dusty Moroccan-style rugs hanging from the rafters. Across the room, Pharoah Sanders, in a large black-and-white portrait, looked on with an expression of discontent. The patrons took their seats by the bar as the group launched into a cover of “My Favorite Things,” from “The Sound of Music.” Sometime during the coda, the guests’ cocktails arrived. The Autumn in New York, a tangy, gin-heavy blend of lemon and crème de violette, was just fine, and not quite worth its sixteen-dollar price tag. The Calcutta Cutie, however, made up for it, with a pear-and-chai-infused vodka—sweet, refreshing, and just bitter enough. It lasted through the end of the third song, penned by one of the saxophonists, who glanced anxiously around the room as his bandmates took solos. “Don’t fuck this up,” his furrowed brow all but yelled. As the set wound down with the mournful Duke Ellington number “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” the guests got to work on a Juju, a delightful, ginger-forward mix of rosemary-infused rum and lime. Spit valves full, chops spent, the band finished their set, and the patrons, ears ringing, set out into the night.

Jazz and cocktails. It doesn’t get much better than that. Ornithology sounds like my kind of bar. Thank you to Dugal for his vivid report.

2. Who is going to be The New Yorker’s new art critic? Adam Gopnik? Hilton Als? Julian Lucas? They’ve all produced “Art World” pieces recently. But for my money, the most promising candidate is Zachary Fine. His “Let It Bleed,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. It’s a review of MoMA’s “Helen Frankenthaler: A Grand Sweep,” a show of five Frankenthaler masterpieces. Fine says of it,

It features five paintings by five different artists named Helen Frankenthaler. They were all raised on Park Avenue, educated at Bennington College, and classified as second-generation Abstract Expressionists, but I have trouble seeing them as one and the same. The five pieces offer, in turn, biomorphic hints of de Kooning, the ragged shapes of Clyfford Still, the bold geometries of Ellsworth Kelly, the paint smears of Gerhard Richter, and something that looks like toothpaste squeezed onto an orange peel. The organizing force behind them, if you can spot it, has a wily mind and a preternatural gift for dispatching cliché from the canvas. After 1952, I don’t know if Frankenthaler could have painted a cliché if she tried.

That’s an intriguing way of seeing these paintings – “five paintings by five different artists named Helen Frankenthaler.” Fine’s observation that “The five pieces offer, in turn, biomorphic hints of de Kooning, the ragged shapes of Clyfford Still, the bold geometries of Ellsworth Kelly, the paint smears of Gerhard Richter, and something that looks like toothpaste squeezed onto an orange peel” made me smile. The piece brims with original, perceptive comments. This one, for example, on Frankenthaler’s “Commune” (1969):

Picture a gray-green mass floating in the middle of a canvas that’s more than eighty square feet. The soupy explosions of the fifties, like “Jacob’s Ladder,” have been slurped back into a single, intelligible shape. From one perspective, the shape is an island seen from above. From others, it’s a half-finished paint job, a blast hole, or an ocular stain. The choice is yours: you can survey it cartographically, insist on its flatness or depth, or be reduced to your own eyeball.

Fine’s writing is fresh, vivid, and illuminating. I think the magazine has found its next art critic. 

3. I avidly read Justin Chang’s “Baby Blues,” a review of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s new movie “Young Mothers.” I love Dardenne films. I love their matter-of-fact documentary style. Their “The Kid with a Bike” is one of my all-time favorite movies. Their new one is about several teen-age moms staying in and around a Belgian maternity ward. Chang finds it a shade too schematic. He writes, 

Do these four stories, with their subtle yet strategic variations of attitude and circumstance, smack of a troubling tidiness—a desire to cover as much sociological ground as possible with each pass of the narrative baton? “Young Mothers” won the Dardennes a screenplay prize at Cannes last year, which may only corroborate the charge that their naturalism here feels a touch too scripted. With less time to spend on each story, they lean more on exposition, which doesn’t play to their (or most anyone’s) cinematic strengths. The filmmakers are at their best when they bring us into direct communion with their characters’ unspoken thoughts, but, with the exception of Ariane—Halloy Fokan’s gaze is a killer—we don’t linger with any of them long enough to cultivate that degree of psychological intimacy.

Nevertheless, Chang likes the film. He says, “Yet ‘Young Mothers’ holds us all the same: not with the urgency, perhaps, of its predecessors but with an emotional pull as lovely and irresistible as the sudden dawning of a smile on a baby’s face.” It appears that “Young Mothers” is another excellent addition to the Dardenne oeuvre. 

Tables for Two Tango: Hannah Goldfield's "HK Food Court"

Photo by David Williams, from Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: HK Food Court"

This is the third post in my series “Tables for Two Tango,” a celebration of Hannah Goldfield’s and Helen Rosner’s wonderful New Yorker restaurant reviews. Each month I select a favorite piece by one or the other of them and try to say why I like it. Today’s pick is Goldfield’s delectable “Tables for Two: HK Food Court” (February 3, 2020).

I chose this piece because it shows Goldfield’s democratic taste. She’s as much at home in a humble food court as she is in a Michelin-starred restaurant. For her, it’s all about the food. I also chose it because it contains an intensely vivid food description – one I’ve never forgotten.

HK Food Court is located in the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, in New York City. It consists of a couple of dozen stalls—serving regional Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Filipino cuisine. 

Goldfield visits more than once and orders from various stalls. She loves Lao Ma Spicy’s hot-and-sour soup:

But the soup is what haunts my daydreams: a large disposable plastic bowl priced irresistibly, at $4.99, and packed precariously full of glass noodles in an intensely flavorful broth—indeed hot, both in temperature and flavor, scarlet with chili oil, and vinegar-sour. For a few dollars extra, you can add a protein: beef, shrimp balls, Spam. Either way, the final and most crucial ingredients are dry-roasted peanuts with their papery brown skins intact, sweet leaves of steamed bok choy, and an intoxicating spoonful of ground pork, sautéed with tender curls of wood-ear mushroom and pickled radish.

Mm, I can almost taste it. How does Goldfield do it? Intensity, vividness, sensuousness – a combination of all three. I love that “packed precariously full of glass noodles,” and that “dry-roasted peanuts with their papery brown skins intact,” and that “tender curls of wood-ear mushroom.” It might be the most exquisite soup description I’ve ever read.

And Goldfield is not done. She’s just warming up. She visits other stalls:

One evening, at Lan Zhou Ramen, I ordered fat coins of Japanese eggplant—so shellacked in oil that they looked like porcelain yet melted forgivingly in the mouth—and bunches of chives as pliant as seagrass. From Mr. Liu Henan Wide Ramen, one stall over: cubes of fried wheat-bran dough dusted in cumin and a spiral-cut potato.

And now the climax:

I knew what to get at a seafood stall called Chili Boiled Fish, where live ones flopped around in a tank. A friendly cashier with a tattoo on her neck of a lipstick kiss carefully sealed a patterned bowl (for which I paid a five-dollar deposit) with plastic wrap to insure that it stayed hot. That proved unnecessary; it was many minutes before the dish cooled to less than scalding—which didn’t stop me from immediately plunging my flimsy spoon into the oily depths to find silky fillets of fish, tender cabbage, and chunks of cucumber, Sichuan peppercorns clinging to all, staining my rice with neon drips.

And there it is – “staining my rice with neon drips” – an inspired detail! The whole piece is inspired! One of “Tables for Two” ’s all-time best.  

2025 Year in Review

Let’s begin with a drink, shall we? How about one of those espresso Martinis with a creamy glug of banana liqueur that Rachel Syme wrote about in her wonderful “Bar Tab: Monsieur” (April 7, 2025). Mm, that hits the spot. Okay, let’s roll!

Highlight #1: The magnificent 100th Anniversary Issue (February 17 & 24, 2025), loaded with delectable writing, including Jill Lepore’s “War of Words,” Nick Paumgarten’s “Helicopter Parents,” Burkhard Bilger’s “Stepping Out,” and Jackson Arn’s “Royal Flush.” 

Highlight #2: The splendid “Takes” series, in which New Yorker contributors revisited notable works from the magazine’s archive. I loved Stephen Colbert’s piece on Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale.” Sample: “From Hollywood to the Hasty Pudding, we waft like smoke from an unfiltered Pall Mall through Carson’s worlds, most of which are gone.”

Highlight #3: Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” columns – every last ravishing one of them. I devoured them all, licking my lips, craving more. Here’s a taste:

Another salad of chewy-crisp pork jowl and sliced melon is zingy with garlic and pickle-tart. The round sweetness of squid, fried in a light-as-air batter, is magnified by intensely floral curry leaves and a salty snowfall of shaved cured egg yolk. A bone-in pork chop, thick as a dictionary, tender as can be, and drowning in a luscious mess of charred tomatoes marinated in a sugar-lime-fish-sauce concoction, features every shade of sour and sweet. [“Tables for Two: Bong,” September 29, 2025]

Highlight #4: Nathan Blum’s extraordinary short story “Outcomes” (November 3, 2025). I’m not sentimental, but this piece moved me to tears. It’s about two students at a college in Maine – a freshman who grew up nearby and a senior from New York City – who meet and form a connection. The freshman’s name is Nolan Everett and the senior’s is Heidi Lane. They meet at the climbing wall in the college rec center. Nolan works there as a belayer. Heidi registers to use the climbing wall. She’s never climbed before. Nolan teaches her. The relationship evolves. The ending is heartbreaking. This is the best short story to appear in The New Yorker since Maile Meloy’s brilliant “Travis, B.” (October 28, 2002). 

Highlight #5: The appearance of another great “Tabula Rasa” piece by my hero, John McPhee. In this one, he says, among other interesting things, “I attribute my antiquity to dark-chocolate almond bark.”  

Other top picks of the year (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

Ian Frazier’s “Pigeon Toes,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“On the ironing board, which is set at a convenient height, she cuts up old loaves that she gets for free from a nearby bakery, and then she tosses the bread cubes onto the granite paving blocks of the plaza. Pigeons appear almost instantly, pecking so avidly that dozens of individual bread cubes go flying into the air above the mass of birds like popping popcorn”).

Nick Paumgarten’s “Guitar Heroes,” May 26, 2025 (“‘Are you ready?’ Margouleff asked at the warehouse. He unlocked a door, and immediately a thick, corky scent hit me, the emanation of hundreds of aging guitars—the great variety of hardwoods, the glue and paint and lacquer, the oxidation of strings and coils, the leather straps and handles, and the sarcophagal musk of the cases themselves”). 

Paige Williams’ “Still Life,” June 9, 2025 (“It was nine-thirty in the morning and so windy that miniature flags on graves were horizontal. The gravediggers were preparing for a funeral at two. Four neon-orange stakes marked off a rectangle in front of a headstone. The stone was inscribed with the name of a woman buried at nine feet; her husband was coming in at seven”).

Alexandra Schwartz’s “Going Viral,” September 1 & 8, 2025 (“Across genres, her calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with quick wit and cheerful perversity, pressing the reader close to her comic, confiding ‘I’”).

D. T. Max’s “The Behemoth,” September 22, 2025 (“The tower was a cone that narrowed to a point as it ascended. At the center of its circular base was a glimmering white hyperboloid, a gigantic stone object that looked like a cooling tower at a nuclear power plant. The hyperboloid had no top or bottom—it was a skylight that opened onto the nave below. Through this aperture, sunlight could filter all the way down to the church floor”).

Anthony Lane’s “Cinema Paradiso,” September 29, 2025 (“In a courtyard strung with lights, at a late-night showing of  ’A Santanotte, a Neapolitan film from 1922, I kept glancing away from the fervid melodrama to admire the projector behind me: a steampunk dream, built in Milan in the nineteen-thirties, which appeared to be made from a trash can, half a dozen alarm clocks, and two bicycle wheels. It emitted a bright plume of smoke, as if miniature furnaces were being stoked within”).

Rivka Galchen’s “The Heat of the Moment,” November 24, 2025 ("In the summer of 2022, a rig set up not far from Cornell’s School of Veterinary Medicine drilled for sixty-five days through layers of shale, limestone, and sandstone, passing beyond the geologic time of the dinosaurs to a crystalline basement dating to the Proterozoic eon, more than five hundred million years ago").

Alex Ross’s “Written in Stone,” December 1, 2025 (“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”).

Best Cover

Richard McGuire’s “Zooming In” for the April 14, 2025 “Innovation & Tech” issue.

Best “Talk of the Town”

Ben McGrath’s “Dumpster Diving,” September 15, 2025 (“Their attention turned to a giant cherry-colored armoire that had belonged to a professor now on sabbatical in Malaysia. How to get it to Bay Ridge? Ching had an idea. He could have it trucked with the weekly deliveries to Tandon, which is in downtown Brooklyn. ‘Then, there is a wonderful Home Depot probably less than a mile away,’ he said. ‘You can rent a U-Haul for nineteen dollars, and it’s good for ninety minutes. So, if you time it just right, early in the morning . . .’”).

Robert Sullivan’s “Manhattan’s Springs,” September 22, 2025 (“On a recent summer day, Greenberg moved through the Bronx with the brisk authority of a biker who has little time for automobiles, methodically checking the map on his phone, pulling copies of Smith’s photos from his backpack, watching for construction sheds. ‘The city will take the photos down, and so will landlords, but they seem to last longest on these sheds,’ he said”).

Nick Paumgarten’s “Big Pink,” October 6, 2025 (“At the head of the quarry, ospreys had built a nest high atop an abandoned derrick bedangled like a maypole with rusty cables”).

Jane Bua’s “Shedding,” October 13, 2025 (“At 8 p.m., the band slunk onstage, the house lights cut out, and Puth trotted up in a baggy Elastica T-shirt. He parked at the fake Rhodes, and the set began. At every keys solo and drum rip, he put on a goofy grin or a quasi-sexual stank face”).

Bruce Handy's “Shadow Boxing,” December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026 ("Five plate-glass windows offer a view into a re-creation of the cluttered basement studio in which the twentieth-century American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell once cobbled together the “shadow boxes” that he is best known for").

Best Illustration

David Plunkert's illustration for Daniel Immerwahr's "Check This Out" (January 27, 2025).

Best of “The Critics”

Justin Chang’s “Mean Time,” January 13, 2025 (“Woe betide anyone who bumps into Pansy on the street, but to watch her onscreen produces a kind of bruised exhilaration; her viciousness has an awesome life force. At a certain point, I began wondering whether Pansy would be best served not by counselling or antidepressants but by a few pints and an open mike”).

Daniel Immerwahr’s “Check This Out,” January 27, 2025 (“Even the supposedly attention-pulverizing TikTok deserves another look. Hayes, who works in TV, treats TikTok wholly as something to watch—an algorithmically individualized idiot box. But TikTok is participatory: more than half its U.S. adult users have posted videos. Where the platform excels is not in slick content but in amateur enthusiasm, which often takes the form of trends with endless variations. To join in, TikTokers spend hours preparing elaborate dance moves, costume changes, makeup looks, lip synchs, trick shots, pranks, and trompe-l’oeil camera maneuvers”).

Jackson Arn’s, “Royal Flush," February 17 & 24, 2025 (“In many of the cases from ‘Seeing Red’ where red does dominate, the work in question comes off as an affront, crossing some chromatic line—look at Warhol’s “Red Lenin” or STIK’s “Liberty (Red)” and feel the wet raspberry splatter you”). Arn’s sudden departure from The New Yorker this year saddened me. I will miss him. 

Adam Gopnik’s “Fresh Paint,” April 14, 2025 (“Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open”).

Louis Menand’s “Strong Opinions,” June 2, 2025 (“And the rumpled, rubber-faced manner, the popping eyes, the languorous drawl, the charmingly wicked grin he flashed when he thought he had scored a kill—Buckley was a show unto himself”).

Anthony Lane’s “Easy Music,” July 7 & 14, 2025 (“Has anyone listened more intently than Leonard to the infinite bandwidths of spoken English? So sharp are his ears, when pricked up, that somebody, way back in the Leonard genealogy, must have made out with a lynx”).

James Wood’s “Escape Route,” July 21, 2025 (“Dyer’s rise is solitary, freakish, and shadowed always by the chance that it might never have happened”).

Dan Chiasson, “Sense and Sensibility,” August 11, 2025 (“Schuyler worked in two primary verse modes, ostensibly opposites: we could call them blips and loop-the-loops. The blips are short, ribbonlike lyrics, trimmed to the moment, their sharp enjambments inspired by the Renaissance-era poet Robert Herrick; the loop-the-loops follow long Proustian arcs in margin-busting lines reminiscent of Walt Whitman”).

Hannah Goldfield’s “Take Me Back," September 15, 2025 (“Many of the most beloved food venders sell a single, time-honored classic: bubbling-hot, batter-fried cheese curds, as sparkly as nuggets of gold, from a stall called the Mouth Trap; the Corn Roast’s deeply burnished cobs, dunked in melted butter; crispy, wispy sweet-onion rings at Danielson’s & Daughters”).

Maggie Doherty's “Rambling Man,” October 20, 2025 (“Illuminated by Richardson’s biography, “The Snow Leopard” becomes an even more intriguing object. It is both a record of a man’s failings and a book written to avoid confronting them”).

James Wood’s “Last Harvest,” November 10, 2025 (“These investigations are meticulous, tender, palpable: buildings and radios, cars and first kisses, songs and streets are all made newly alive in memory”).

Hannah Goldfield's “Still Rising,” December 15, 2025 ("From a small tray of sheer pira—Afghan milk fudge, made with cardamom and orange-blossom water—he used a cookie cutter to extract glossy circles to fit into a Danish-like pastry, between layers of a vanilla pastry cream and diplomat cream. The texture of the finished product was delightfully riotous, shards of crisp golden crumb collapsing into the pleasingly claggy fudge and luscious custard").

Best Photo

Malike Sidibe’s portrait of Lorna Simpson for Julian Lucas’s “Now You See Her” (May 12 & 19, 2025)

Best of “Goings On”

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: L&L Hawaiian Barbecue,” March 3, 2025 (“Get a musubi or two, which is marvellous, the squishy pillow of rice, the ineffable Spamminess of Spam, the sweet smear of teriyaki”).

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: La Tête d’Or,” March 31, 2025 (“A well-prepared steak is goddam delicious”).

Rachel Syme’s “Local Gems: Fountain Pen Hospital,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“The store’s longtime head salesman is a fountain-pen savant. I recently went hunting for a wet-writing flexible nib and, within a few moments, he produced from the back room a glossy black Parker Lucky 2½ from the nineteen-twenties. ‘This, this, is the pen for you,’ he said. He was right”).

Marella Gayla’s “Bar Tab: Liar, Liar,” May 26, 2025 (“There was a looser scene on a weeknight, when a round of frosty Martinis, a sampling of cloudy, tart orange wines, and a peppery bottle of red, shared with two colleagues, seemed less like a life-style statement and more like a bold recommitment to the very act of living”).

Helen Rosner’s “Three Ice-Cream Sundaes for the Start of Summer,” June 16, 2025 (“The dark, slithery-hot chocolate sauce has a bittersweet edge that makes the whole thing feel dimensional and a little bit electric”).

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Bong,” September 29, 2025 [“Mama Kim’s namesake lobster (listed with the minimal description ‘IYKYK’) is a magnificent mountain of crustacean legs and claws, the pieces stir-fried with oodles of slivered ginger and a sweet-spicy herbaceous paste, made by Mama Kim, that clings, slurpably, to the meat and drips juicily onto a pile of rice below”].

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Chateau Royale,” October 27, 2025 (“I recommend ending your meal with a splash of Champagne poured from a silver ewer over a garnet-hued sphere of cassis sorbet – a thrilling riff on a Kir Royale, providing a bit of fizz and lightness at last”).

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: I’m Donut ?,” December 1, 2025 (“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”).

Best Poem

Arthur Sze’s “Mushroom Hunting at the Ski Basin,” March 24, 2025 (“Driving up the ski-basin road, I spot purple asters / and know it is time”).

Best “Shouts & Murmurs”

Josh Lieb’s “Bagels, Ranked,” April 21, 2025 [“Dances with, rather than fights against, the cream cheese and the lox. (Or whitefish, if that’s your thing. I don’t judge)”].

Best newyorker.com Posts

Joshua Yaffa’s “At the Edge of Life and Death in Ukraine,” August 2, 2025 (“Van Wessel captures how something can be at once utterly horrible, an emotional devastation for which no one is prepared, and also grimly routine”).

Helen Rosner’s “Three Plays on the Pancake,” August 3, 2025 (“Like the version made famous at Golden Diner (which Herrera has credited as an inspiration), these are true, literal pancakes: made not on a griddle but in individual cast-iron pans, which define the pancake’s shape, constraining its boundaries and creating a distinct crispiness to the outsides that plays in beautiful counterpoint to the soft, almost meltingly creamy insides. A serving of two pancakes arrives under a brutalist slab of butter so substantial that I thought, at first, it was a thick slice of cheese”).

Best Sentence

Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open. – Adam Gopnik, “Fresh Paint” (April 14, 2025)

Best Paragraph

The medal ceremony that night was a surreal sight: more than three thousand band members crowded onto the field in candy-striped rows. Bourbon County ended up placing second in its class—a triumph under the circumstances—just behind another Kentucky band, from Murray High School. But my favorite moment was earlier in the evening. Deep beneath the stands, in the vast tunnels and rehearsal rooms around the field, half a dozen bands were warming up—drumming, stretching, tossing rifles, and playing arpeggios as they waited for their turn to perform. Walking from room to room, I passed wooden ships, Victorian cages, and giant Day-Glo flowers in the hall. A trio of Elmer Fudds was hunched in conversation over here, two orange bunnies giggling in a corner over there. Some strays from the “Menagerie” show came wandering down the hall, past a pair of water sprites from Broken Arrow and a few butterfly girls from Cypress, Texas. It was like the world’s biggest costume party. – Burkhard Bilger, “Stepping Out” (February 17 & 24, 2025)

Best Description 

The birds wheeled over the aviary while Fritz circled. Komme, komme, Waldi: the song receded as the microlight got farther away and then swelled as it neared. This rise and fall, its approaching and distancing, was at once a cheer, a prayer, and a lament, and it induced in me—and, I somehow believed, in everyone else, too—a kind of heartache, like the longing for loved ones or the pain of their aging away. The microlight’s distant motor echoing off the hangar’s corrugated shell sounded like a deranged string section. An old sailboat was propped against the tin. Swallows darted around, feeding on the flies. A commercial jet passed soundlessly overhead. – Nick Paumgarten, “Helicopter Parents” (February 17 & 24, 2025)

Best Detail

Its main entrance, at Twenty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, is marked by an imposing brownstone Gothic Revival structure, the Arch, where a pandemonium of monk parakeets has long kept an elaborate nest. – Paige Williams, “Still Life” (June 9, 2025)

And now here’s to you Burkhard Bilger for your dazzling, vibrant, exhilarating “Stepping Out” – my #1 Pick of the Year! 

Thank you, New Yorker, for another marvelous year of reading pleasure.

Credits: (1) The New Yorker (100th Anniversary Issue, February 17 & 24, 2025); (2) Mathieu Larone’s illustration for Nathan Blum’s “Outcomes” (November 3, 2025); (3) Photo by Hannah Whitaker for Nick Paumgarten’s “Guitar Heroes” (May 26, 2025); (4) Photo by Matteo de Mayda for Anthony Lane’s “Cinema Paradiso” (September 29, 2025); (5) The New Yorker, April 14, 2025); João Fazenda’s illustration for Robert Sullivan’s “Manhattan Springs” (September 22, 2025); (6) David Plunkert's illustration for Daniel Immerwahr's "Check This Out" (January 27, 2025); (7) James McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland (1871-74); (8) Photo illustration by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin for Hannah Goldfield’s “Take Me Back” (September 15, 2025); (9) Malike Sidibe’s photo portrait of Lorna Simpson for Julian Lucas’s “Now You See Her” (May 12 & 19, 2025); (10) Lanna Apisukh’s photo for Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Bong” (September 29, 2025); (11) Luci Gutiérrez’s illustration for Josh Lieb’s “Bagels, Ranked” (April 21, 2025); (12) Brian Finke’s photo for Burkhard Bilger’s “Stepping Out” (February 17 & 24, 2025); (13) Mathias Depardon’s photo for Nick Paumgarten’s “Helicopter Parents” (February 17 & 24, 2025). 

3 Great Thematic Travelogues: Robert Macfarlane's "The Old Ways"

This is the first in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll begin with a review of The Old Ways. 

Macfarlane is a landscape writer; this book is a landscape book – one of the best. Its subject is old paths. Macfarlane says, “Paths and their markers have long worked on me like lures: drawing my sight up and on and over. The eye is enticed by a path, and the mind’s eye also.” In The Old Ways, he travels sixteen ancient paths located in England, Scotland, Spain, Tibet, and Palestine, logging his impressions as he goes. He’s a superb describer. One aspect of his writing I want to highlight here is his art of description.

The book is beautifully structured: sixteen chapters, each one chronicling a particular journey. For example, Chapter 3, titled “Chalk,” is an account of his walk along one of England’s oldest chalk paths – the Icknield Way. Here’s a sample:

I slept that night in a Neolithic dormitory on a seabed of chalk. I found my sleeping place just west of a medieval village called Pirton, through the centre of which the Way passed. I left Pirton at about nine o’clock by a wide and high-edged path that was obviously of old use, its sides grown with dog-rose, yarrow, cherry plums and damsons. I’d developed the rolling hip-sway of a sailor on shore leave, brought about by fatigue and sore joints. The evening air was hot, still; the eastern sky inky blue, orange in the west. The chalk of the path gathered the late light to itself, glowing whitely in the twilight. Pale trumpets of bindweed jumped forward to the eye. In the verge lay the part-eaten corpse of a blackbird, its scaly legs severed from its body and placed neatly alongside one another, like a knife and fork after a meal.

In Chapter 7, titled “Peat,” he walks a Hebridean footpath known as Manus’s Stones. On this journey, he finds two beehive shielings, sleeps in one and has his breakfast in the other one. He writes,

From inside, the simple but exquisite architecture of the shieling was more apparent. It was constructed of gneiss slabs that had neatly overlapped to create the corbelling. Turf had then been laid on top to act as a windbreak, insulation and mortar: a living roof that grew together and bound the gneiss in place.

In Chapter 12, called “Ice,” he joins his friend John Miceler on an expedition to Minya Konka, the highest mountain in Sichuan province, China. They follow the trails that once connected the tea-growing regions of Sichuan with Nepal and Tibet, and then the pilgrimage routes – some of them 700 years old – that converge on the peak. Here’s his description of one stage of the journey:

The morning’s ascent, on a subtle path up through sparkling oak and pine woods, was among the finest forest hours I have ever spent. Sunlight, sifted by foliage, cross-hatched the path. The lower head of the valley was lost in haze. Another unidentifiable snow range rose above it. We might have been walking through a Chinese scroll painting. The understory of the forest was thickened with rhododendron, whose leaves shone bronze where the full light caught them. Up through the trees we went, crossing iced streams and passing through tunnels of leaning oaks, following a leaf-and-dirt path. Cairns marked its route, some with niches filled with flower heads, leaves and feathers. 

Most of Macfarlane’s travels are done on foot. But there are exceptions. For example, in Chapter 5 (“Water – South”), he and Ian Stephen sail a century-old cockle-shell called Broad Bay, exploring the ancient sea road from Stornoway to the Shiant Islands in the Minch, east of Harris in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland:

We pursued our long and lonely tacks, like cross-stitches made over the direct line of the sea road, zigzagging south through the Minch towards the Shiants. Inland was the grey-green Lewis coastline, with its sumping sea lochs and high headlands. Eastward, on the mainland, sun fell full on the Torridon Hills, gilding them such that I could discern peaks I’d known underfoot – Beinn Eighe, Beinn Alligin, Liathach – and whose paths I could remember well. Shifts in light changed the sea’s substance. Clouds pulling over and the sea a sheeny steel; sunshine falling and the sea a clean malachite green.

In Chapter 13 (“Snow”), Macfarlane and his friend David Quentin traverse the Wiltshire section of the Ridgeway, one of England’s oldest paths, by means of cross-country skiing: 

Low light, saturating the landscape with a dull glow that never thickened to a shine but still drew blues from the long-lying snow. Where the chalk showed, it was the yellow of polar-bear fur or an old man’s knees. I found it all bleakly beautiful: the air battened down, the light at its slant. It felt both absurd and wonderful to be moving on skis over this ancient path.

My favorite part of The Old Ways is Chapter 4, titled “Silt.” It’s Macfarlane’s account of his walk along an extraordinary off-shore path called the Broomway, allegedly the deadliest path in Britain and “certainly the unearthliest path I have ever walked,” Macfarlane says. It leaves the land at a place called Wakering Stairs, in Essex, and then heads due east, straight out to sea. Several hundred yards offshore, it curls northeast and runs for around three miles, still offshore, before cutting back to make landfall at Fisherman’s Head. Macfarlane is again accompanied by his friend David Quentin. In one of the book’s finest passages, Macfarlane writes,

Out and on we walked, barefoot over and into the mirror-world. I glanced back at the coast. The air was grainy and flickering, like an old newsreel. The sea wall had hazed out to a thin black strip. Structures of unknown purpose – a white-beamed gantry, a low-slung barracks – showed on the shoreline. Every few hundred yards, I dropped a white cockle shell. The light had modified again, from nacreous to granular to dense. Sound travelled oddly. The muted pop-popping of gunfire was smudgy, but the call of a cuckoo from somewhere on the treeless shore rang sharply to us. A pale sun glared through the mist, its white eye multiplying in pools and ripples.

Macfarlane’s sense of light is exquisite: “The light had modified again, from nacreous to granular to dense.” “Low light, saturating the landscape with a dull glow that never thickened to a shine but still drew blues from the long-lying snow.” “Light pearled on barley.” “The chalk of the path gathered the late light to itself, glowing whitely in the twilight.” “A scorching band of low white light to seaward; a thin magnesium burn-line.” “Light quibbling on the swell.” “Clouds pulling over and the sea a sheeny steel; sunshine falling and the sea a clean malachite green.” “The sun gold in the sky, pouring down its heatless light; hard snow, high albedo.” “Sunlight, sifted by foliage, cross-hatched the path.” “Sunlight curled and pooled on the shell of a blue-black beetle dragging and bumping itself towards the monastery.” 

The book abounds with vibrant, interesting people – pathfinders, wayfarers, old-way walkers past and present: Edward Thomas, old-way walker extraordinaire, “the guiding spirit of this book”; Broomway walker Patrick Arnold; Macfarlane’s friend David Quentin, who accompanies Macfarlane on four of his walks; Ian Stephen, the savvy Stornoway sailor who guides Macfarlane on his seaway excursions; Finlay MacLeod, “a keen celebrant of the Outer Hebridean landscape”; Anne Campbell, mapper of the Bragar moorland; the Hebridean artist Steve Dilworth, whose Geocrab workshop is one of the highlights of the book; Macfarlane’s grandfather Edward Peck, “who had helped high country and wild places to cast their strong spells over me”; Nan Shephard, prose poet of the Highland landscape; Raja Shehadeh, who guides Macfarlane on two walks in occupied Palestine; Miguel Angel Blanco, creator of the amazing Library of the Forest, located in his Madrid basement; Jon Miceler, Tibetologist and mountaineer, who invites Macfarlane to join him on an expedition to Minya Konka; Eric Ravilious, English landscape painter and “path-obsessive.”   

The most interesting and vibrant “character” of all is Macfarlane himself. His keen, active, perceptive, responsive “I” is present on almost every page: “I slept that night in a Neolithic dormitory on a seabed of chalk.” “I climbed to the top of Eilean an Taighe and followed its southeastern cliff-edges.” “Down on the storm beach, as dusk approached, I spent an hour building a small domed and chambered cairn out of dolerite, for the pleasure of the act of construction.” “I walked on south-east all that day towards the Isle of Harris, following shieling path, croft path, drover’s road and green way, stitching a route together.” “I placed my handful of bog myrtle, azalea, juniper and dried heather on a natural ortholith of granite, and set then alight: a brief flare of orange in the dusk, a beacon-fire at the pass.” “I slipped off my rucksack, socks and shoes, left them all in the shadow of the first peak, and set off to investigate the ridge and scramble its rocks.” “I approached Segovia across baking plains.” “I passed dew ponds and tumuli, and a big field mushroom lying upside-down on its cap, its black gills like the charred pages of a book.” 

I’ve been quoting extensively, perhaps excessively. But I can’t resist. This book is as layered and loaded as a honeycomb. So many great passages! Here’s one more. This one is from Chapter 7 (“Peat”):

The sun set over the Atlantic. The water a sea-silver that scorched the eye, and within the burn of the sea’s metal the hard black back of an island, resilient in the fire, and through it all the sound of gull-cry and wave-suck, the sense of rock rough underhand, machair finely lined as needlepoint, and about the brinks other aspects of the moment of record: the iodine tang of seaweed, and a sense of peninsularity – of the land both sloping away and fading out at its edges.  

Each chapter can be read as a stand-alone essay. But they’re all linked. They flow chronologically one to the next, beginning and ending on the chalk. They’re also linked by the spirit of Edward Thomas, who is the book’s presiding deity. “He ghosted my journeys and urged me on,” Macfarlane says. The penultimate chapter, “Ghost,” is an inspired re-creation of what Thomas was doing and thinking during the days leading up to his death at the Battle of Arras, April 9, 1917.

I want to go back to that first passage I quoted from The Old Ways: “Paths and their markers have long worked on me like lures: drawing my sight up and on and over. The eye is enticed by a path, and the mind’s eye also.” What does Macfarlane mean when he says “and the mind’s eye also”? I think he’s referring to his imagination. He not only vividly describes the paths as they are; he imagines how they used to be and who used to walk them. Two examples: (1) Macfarlane sleeping outdoors at a place on the chalk downs called Chanctonbury Ring: “After I’d eaten, I lay down to sleep, placed an ear to the turf and imagined the depths of history the soil held – Neolithic, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Roman, Augustan, down through all of which the beech roots quested”; (2) Macfarlane tracking the tracks of a 5000-year-old man near Liverpool, feeling a co-presence – “the prehistoric and the present matching up such that it is unclear who walks in whose tracks.” 

In future posts, I’ll delve more deeply into this great book, exploring its structure, action, description, and meaning. But first I want to introduce the other two books in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Roger Deakin’s brilliant Waterlog.