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). 

August 4, 2025 Issue

Burkhard Bilger has a knack for riveting my attention on subjects I have absolutely no interest in. Recall his “Open Wide” (November 25, 2019), on baby food. Baby food? Come on! But then I read the first sentence, then the next, and the next, and before you know it, I’d devoured the whole damn thing. Same goes for his “Word of Mouth,” in this week’s issue. It’s about dentistry. Dentistry? Good god, is there anything more boring? But, because it’s Bilger, I decided to at least read the first paragraph:

On weekday mornings in late winter, they start to arrive before dawn. They drive in from Arizona or California, catch a shuttle from Yuma, or park their car in a lot in the Sonoran Desert and cross the border on foot. The path for pedestrians follows State Route 186, past a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses offering free Bible courses, along a twisting corridor of razor wire and chain-link fence, through passport control, and into Los Algodones. By noon, more than a thousand people will have walked from the United States to Mexico, in the shadow of the thirty-foot wall that divides them. They come on bicycles and in wheelchairs, pushing walkers and leaning on canes. They come to be healed or transformed or to put an end to their pain, preferably at deep-discount prices.

I read on. Bilger describes Los Algodones, also known as Molar City, as “part Lourdes and part Costco.” More than a thousand dentists have set up shop there. Their patients are mostly Americans who can’t afford the U.S.’s dental care. Bilger visits the place. He writes,

When I first arrived, on a Sunday evening in March, the clinics were all closed. At the Quechan Casino, on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation just across the border, the slot machines were thronged with patients killing time before their appointments or flights home. Myron Arndt, a former tire-shop owner from Minnesota, was hunched over a Rich Little Piggies machine. He was scheduled to get four new front teeth the next day. Mike Sherer, a tinsmith from Michigan, was having some dentures and implants put in, and Terry Bussard, a retired magnesium-plant foreman from Utah, was sporting two new plates of dentures. One of the few without an appointment was Conny Everett, who runs a pretzel stand at local fairgrounds. She needed a cavity filled but couldn’t bring herself to go. She has a tendency to gag during procedures, she told me. “Last year, I got in the chair—it was all paid for—and I just chickened out. I’m, like . . .” She put her fist in her mouth and widened her eyes.

I relish that “hunched over a Rich Little Piggies machine.” 

Bilger stays at the Hacienda Los Algodones (“Every morning at the Hacienda Los Algodones, guests gather over breakfast to trade stories about their teeth”). He visits a Los Algodones dental clinic called Sani Dental:

The glass door to Sani Dental was outlined by a giant tooth. Stepping inside from the clattering street felt like a jump cut in an action film, with a subtitle saying “Miami” or “Dubai.” The lobby was hushed and spacious, with two eager young receptionists in matching polo shirts. A long arched corridor stretched behind them, soothingly lit like an undersea passage. There were seventeen examination rooms on one side and a row of white leather couches on the other, with waiting patients. The clinic’s thirty-five dentists and sixty-six support staff see more than nine thousand clients a year. (Sani also has branch offices in Cancún and Playa del Carmen, as well as a plastic-surgery and hair-transplant clinic in Los Algodones called Sani Medical.) At its newly built, three-story laboratory, teams of designers create digital models of implants and dentures, then fabricate the molds with 3-D printers. The finished products are cast in ceramic, gold, titanium, steel, or chromium cobalt, then glazed by local artisans to match the patient’s teeth and gums.

He gets his own teeth examined: “Being a patient at Sani Dental is a bit like being a car chassis at a Ford factory. For the next three days, my teeth and I would get passed from scheduler to diagnostician to clinician to lab tech, then back to the clinician, and finally to an accountant to settle the bill.”

Diagnostician, Dr. Miranda Villa, delivers the assessment:

To stay healthy, he said, my teeth would need ten fillings, mostly to plug the gaps exposed by receding gums. Straightening them out would take a little more work. All but four of my teeth—twenty-eight in total—would need to be reshaped. This meant grinding them down to little nubs of enamel, like pegs on a cribbage board, then capping them with crowns. The Sani lab would cast the crowns out of white zirconia, a ceramic much harder than stainless steel, tint them to my specifications, and shape and size them to fit my jaw. Then a clinician would cement them into place.

And the cost? Bilger writes,

The ten fillings would be seven hundred dollars—about a fourth of the going rate in Brooklyn. The full treatment would cost fourteen thousand. Before I made my decision, though, Sani Dental would mock up some plastic crowns that could fit over my existing teeth. “Smile Design,” Miranda Villa called it. “It’s like trying on a suit before you buy it,” he said.

Bilger opts for the fillings and undergoes the “smile design” procedure (“Terrazas spent the next twenty minutes chiselling off any rough edges and seams. It was an oddly claustrophobic experience: I felt like a statue trapped inside a piece of marble, slowly getting released by a pick and a drill”). Then he makes an interesting journalistic move. Before he decides on whether to go through with the teeth-straightening, he visits a famous Beverly Hills dentist, Dr. Kevin Sands, for a second opinion. The result is the same: “twenty-eight crowns and one implant. The only difference was in cost. Sands wanted a hundred and nineteen thousand dollars for the work—more than eight times the Sani Dental price.” 

In the end, Bilger decides not to have his teeth straightened. I love the way he puts it: “Still, there’s something to be said for staying crooked. The more I looked at the Smile Design picture from Sani Dental, the more I knew that I’d miss my old biters.”

In summarizing this great piece, I’ve omitted many wonderful details, e.g., the x-ray of Bilger’s skull (“What stuck with me, instead, was the sight of my skull. It looked like something unearthed by paleontologists in Tanzania: ancient, battered, encrusted with minerals”), the guy who is in Los Algodones not to have his teeth fixed but to get his truck customized (“ ‘I want leather bucket seats and pearlescent paint with metal flakes on the bodywork,’ he said. ‘It’ll have live flames in front that taper into ghost flames’ ”).    

“Word of Mouth” immersed me in the Molar City dental experience. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Mid-Year Top Ten 2025

Photo by Mathias Depardon, from Nick Paumgarten's "Helicopter Parents"

Time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Helicopter Parents,” February 17 & 24, 2025 (“Lying in the desiccated grass, amid the dead sunflower stalks and the barrage of flies, the heat rising—the scorching of the sun, the wheedling of the engine—I had an uncommonly intense sense of our implacable need to bend nature to our will, for both good and ill”).

2. Burkhard Bilger, “Stepping Out,” February 17 & 24, 2025 (“Then a voice rang out: ‘Check! Adjust!’ A metronome sounded, and the band began to march. The voice belonged to Chris Kreke, the band’s director. He was standing on the roof of an observation tower four stories above us, leaning over the railing with a microphone in hand. When I went up to join him, I could see the band’s choreography unfolding below: lines crossing and reversing course, squares collapsing and turning inside out, circles exploding into smaller circles like fireworks in slow motion”).

3. Nick Paumgarten, “Guitar Heroes,” May 26, 2025 (“Margouleff handed me the Keithburst and, plugging it into a small amp, urged me to play. One grows accustomed to never touching the art, but I hit some open chords, the few I know. By gum, whether it was the instrument itself or the ghosts of fingers past, the sound was rich and sassy, and moved me to make faces”).

4. 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”).

5. Ian Frazier, “Pigeon Toes,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“The pigeon lay with its feet spread, like a K.O.’d boxer. Frank started on the left foot, using scissors, tweezers, and other sanitized instruments she took from plastic packages. The work requires a watchmaker’s focus”).

6. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Volume Five,” January 20, 2025 (“I attribute my antiquity to dark-chocolate almond bark”).

7. Nick Paumgarten, “Dreams and Nightmares,” March 10, 2025 (“At the Bounty House of Wingman, the hype guys lined up for free boxes of chicken wings to go with a roll of paper towels, while on a nearby patch of artificial turf civilians and pros took turns attempting to throw green Nerf footballs through downfield targets”).

8. Jill Lepore, “War of Words,” February 17 & 24, 2025 (“ ‘A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that’s open in the back’ was another of Bennet’s aphorisms. ‘An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass’ ”).

9. Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Private Eye,” February 3, 2025 (“Every single moment is so full of information that you could spend a lifetime surveying it”).

10. M. R. O'Connor, “Line of Fire,” February 3, 2025 (“We shrugged on our backpacks—which included silver, cocoonlike fire shelters that we could deploy if we were overtaken by flames—and lined up”).  

Best Cover

Richard McGuire, “Zooming In” (April 14, 2025)

Best of “The Critics”

Justin Chang, “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, “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, “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”].

Maggie Doherty, “Catch Me If You Can,” March 3, 2025 (“A devil and a sage, a trickster and a teacher, a farm owner incapable of farming, a professor without a college degree: Frost was always two incompatible things at once. He had a doubleness at the very heart of him, and he put his contradictions into his poetry”).

Hannah Goldfield, “Home Slice,” March 31, 2025 (“The first restaurant to become known for Indian pizza is Zante, in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. One day, a few months ago, I made a pilgrimage there, arriving midafternoon to meet the longtime owner, Dalvinder Multani. In the large, empty dining room, quiet but for a Punjabi radio station, I sat at a table by the window and sampled two of the restaurant’s most popular pies, served with mint and tamarind chutneys. One slice was vegetarian, thickly layered with masala sauce, paneer, spinach, and eggplant, plus garlic, ginger, green onions, and a sprinkling of fresh cilantro. The other featured a trio of lamb, chicken, and prawns, the last dyed a near-neon pink with paprika”).

Adam Gopnik, “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, “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”).

Elizabeth Kolbert, "Seeds of Doubt," June 30, 2025 ("The new tools and the new threats are bound up in each other—two sides, as it were, of the same leaf. If it is reasonable to imagine that we will, somehow or other, find ways to feed ten billion people, it is also reasonable to fear how much damage will be done in the process").

Best Illustration

Gaia Alari’s illustration for Ian Frazier’s “Pigeon Toes” (May 12 & 19, 2025)

Best “Goings On”

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: L&L Hawaiian Barbecue,” March 3, 2025 [“L&L’s food hits with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and that’s exactly the point. There are leavening notes here and there: a jazzy sliver of cruciferousness from the cabbage that comes with the kalua pork, or the sharp whistle of vinegar that runs through the thin, sweet sauce drizzled over the juicy, panko-crisped chicken katsu (my clear favorite of the proteins). When making your selection, skip the loco moco, made with plain hamburger patties doused in flavorless brown gravy and topped with two fried eggs. You can also pass on the saimin, the restaurant’s take on Hawaiian ramen—made with a dashi broth and whatever meaty toppings your heart might desire—which is so salty as to be near-inedible. Get a musubi or two, which is marvellous, the squishy pillow of rice, the ineffable Spamminess of Spam, the sweet smear of teriyaki”].

Sheldon Pearce, “Goings On: Digicore,” May 5, 2025 (“The hyperpop microgenre digicore—a chaotic, internet-forward mashup of music styles born on Discord servers for use in the video game Minecraft—might have vanished into the ether if not for the explosive artist Jane Remover. Inspired primarily by E.D.M. producers such as Skrillex and Porter Robinson and the rappers Tyler, the Creator and Trippie Redd, the Newark-born musician débuted at seventeen, as dltzk, with the EP “Teen Week” (2021), helping to define an obscure anti-pop scene moving at warp speed. Their music’s wide bandwidth now spans the pitched-up sampling of the album “dariacore” (under the alias Leroy) and the emo-leaning work of the side project Venturing. This all-devouring approach culminates in the ecstatic thrasher album ‘Revengeseekerz,’ a maximalist tour de force that makes ephemerality feel urgent”).

Rachel Syme, “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, “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”).

Best Poem

Arthur Sze, “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, “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 “Takes”

Elizabeth Kolbert, “Takes: John McPhee’s ‘Encounters with the Archdruid,’ ” April 7, 2025 (“Much of the art of ‘Encounters with the Archdruid’ lies in the way that McPhee manages to be both there and not there. He bathes his aching feet in the water. He recalls other trips he has taken with Brower and, separately, with Park. He searches for copper-bearing rocks, and, when he finds them, gets excited. But he never reveals whose side he is on. When it comes to the great question of the piece—to mine or not to mine—he gets out of the way”).

Best Photo

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

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 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)

Best Description

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. – Nick Paumgarten, “Guitar Heroes” (May 26, 2025)

Best Drink

An espresso Martini with a creamy glug of banana liqueur – Rachel Syme, “Bar Tab: Monsieur” (April 7, 2025)

Credits: (1) photo by Hannah Whitaker, from Nick Paumgarten’s “Guitar Heroes”; (2) photo illustration by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin, from Hannah Goldfield’s “Home Slice”; (3) illustration by Patricia Bolaños, from Marella Gayla’s “Bar Tab: Liar Liar.”

February 17 & 24, 2025 Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. It’s the 100th Anniversary Issue, packed with reporting pieces, personal essays, and reviews. The digital version is even richer, containing five additional articles. It’s a sumptuous literary banquet, featuring three of my favorite writers – Jill Lepore, Nick Paumgarten and Burkhard Bilger.  

I love Lepore’s “War of Words.” It’s a look at some of the writer-editor battles that shaped The New Yorker. For example, Edmund Wilson vs. Harold Ross:

Many have balked at The New Yorker’s bruising editing, never mind Ross’s rule that the more they kvetched, the less he thought of them. “Can’t we have some signed agreement about my copy not being changed by other people?” Edmund Wilson asked Ross. (The answer was no. “He is by far the biggest problem we ever had around here,” Ross wrote, greatly regretting having hired Wilson not only as a writer but as an editor. “Fights like a tiger, or holds the line like an elephant, rather. Only course is to let him peter out, I guess.”)

And Vladimir Nabokov vs. Katherine White:

In a letter to Katharine White, Nabokov drew a line not so much in the proverbial sand as with the underline key on his typewriter: “I shall be very grateful to you if you help me to weed out bad grammar but I do not think I would like my longish sentences clipped too close, or those drawbridges lowered which I have taken such pains to lift.” White later wrote to Updike, “Nabokov’s the best writer in English but sometimes he’s maddening and I do not like what his ego has done to make him so very complex.” 

Lepore’s piece brims with memorable comments on the editorial process. My favorite is John Bennet’s “A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that’s open in the back. An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass.”

Another captivating piece in this excellent anniversary New Yorker is Nick Paumgarten’s “Helicopter Parents.” It’s about a team of scientists who uses a microlight aircraft to teach a flock of endangered northern bald ibises to migrate. How do they do it? Paumgarten tells us:

The birds left Bavaria on the second Tuesday in August. They took off from an airfield, approximated a few sloppy laps, and then, such are miracles, began to follow a microlight aircraft, as though it were one of them. The contraption—as much pendulum as plane—reared and dipped as its pilot, a Tyrolian biologist in an olive-drab flight suit and amber shooting glasses, tugged on the steering levers. Behind him, in the rear seat, a young woman with a blond ponytail called to the birds, in German, through a bullhorn. As the microlight receded west into the haze, the birds chasing behind, an armada of cars and camper vans sped off in pursuit.

It's a fascinating endeavour. The birds are often stubborn. Paumgarten hangs out with a camera crew filming the project:

I retreated with one of the producers to a patch of scrub grass, out of sight of the birds and the cameras. We lay down in the stubble, at the edge of a sunflower plot, the fallen heads strewn in the arid soil like abandoned hornet’s nests. A light breeze kicked up. The sunflower stalks rattled. As the sun warmed the field, the flies got to work.

He describes the action:

The birds began to fly, as Helena called out to them. “Here she comes,” the producer said. Helena began running across the field, toward the microlight. She took big but uneven strides, on account of the knee. Fritz, in the microlight, was waving his arms like a bird. Helena reached the microlight, adjusted her ponytail, and then climbed into the back seat, as the birds flew in ragged circles nearby. Fritz revved the engine, a desperate, needling whine, and the vessel lurched down the airstrip, the chute billowing awake behind him. And then, just like that, the craft was airborne, and Fritz throttled down, and for a moment it hung there, almost ludicrously slow, appearing to swing like a plumb beneath the chute, before turning toward the east, where the rising sun flashed off the sea. You could hear Helena’s keening singsong through the megaphone, a kind of Teutonic muezzin. “Komme, komme, Waldi!” Come, come, Baldies. Two tones, up-down up-down, like a crowd chanting, “Let’s go, Rang-ers!”

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.

This is superb writing! It gets even better. Here’s my favorite passage:

Lying in the desiccated grass, amid the dead sunflower stalks and the barrage of flies, the heat rising—the scorching of the sun, the wheedling of the engine—I had an uncommonly intense sense of our implacable need to bend nature to our will, for both good and ill. The air stank of fertilizer, of the excrement we spread to grow food for ourselves. The miracle of flight, the cycle of poop and protein, our elaborate efforts to undo harm: what creatures we are. Fritz made laps, orbits passing like days.

What creatures we are, and what a writer Paumgarten is. “Helicopter Parents” is a fascinating look at the incredible lengths scientists will go to try to save a species from extinction. I enjoyed it immensely. 

The 100th Anniversary Issue also contains a wonderful piece by Burkhard Bilger called “Stepping Out.” It’s about America’s spectacular new marching-band culture. No longer just about marching in formation, marching band has become both a dazzling art and a fierce sport. Bilger writes,

The top bands have dozens of staff, budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and fleets of trucks for their instruments, props, costumes, and sound systems. They don’t just parade up and down the field playing fight songs. They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers, playing full symphonic scores. They don’t call it marching band anymore. They call it the marching arts.

Bilger visits Bourbon County High School, in eastern Kentucky, home of the Marching Colonels. He goes to Indianapolis and spends time with two of America’s most successful marching bands – the Avon High School Marching Black and Gold, and the Carmel High School Marching Greyhounds. He attends America’s preeminent marching-band contest – the Grand National Championships in Indianapolis. He talks with band directors, band members, and band parents. Everywhere he goes, he logs his impressions. Here’s his description of a rehearsal by the Carmel High School Marching Greyhounds:

Carmel High School is north of Indianapolis, across Interstate 465, in a suburb of lamplit streets and posh boutiques. It was close to 7:30 p.m. when I arrived. Temperatures were in the eighties and the sun had slid to the horizon like a drop of melted wax, but the band was still practicing. The students were lined up outside the school stadium, in a parking lot painted with yard lines and numbers like a football field. They stood at attention for a moment, their arms bent in front of them in various positions, as if holding invisible instruments. Then a voice rang out: “Check! Adjust!” A metronome sounded, and the band began to march.

The voice belonged to Chris Kreke, the band’s director. He was standing on the roof of an observation tower four stories above us, leaning over the railing with a microphone in hand. When I went up to join him, I could see the band’s choreography unfolding below: lines crossing and reversing course, squares collapsing and turning inside out, circles exploding into smaller circles like fireworks in slow motion. The patterns were so complex that the drill designer, Michael Gaines, had to use a 3-D program called Pyware to choreograph them. The coördinates for each player’s movements could be loaded onto a smartphone or printed onto a spiral-bound dot book—one page for each movement—then drilled until they were pure muscle memory. “Look at me!” Kreke said, his voice reverberating below. “That was really good until the end. When we come into page 13, we have to have a much stronger direction change. That is twelve counts, and you have to get a really energetic step-off. Yes?”

“YESSIR!”

And here’s a delightful description of some of the shows he saw at the Grand National Championships:

If the event’s structure seems proof of its military roots, its content is a riot of invention, like a French garden overrun by exotics. A band from Newburgh, Indiana, came out in black cloaks and purple berets, like characters from “The Matrix” headed to a poetry reading. Then they flitted around the field like bats. A group from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, reënacted a solo sailing trip around the world, with the band tossing itself about like waves and rocking on skeletal ships. A show called “The Cutting Edge,” by a band from Cedar Park, Texas, doubled down on the title’s pun, with music from “Sweeney Todd” and Samuel Barber, and the band marching around giant barber poles. Some shows were earnest and philosophical, others sentimental or goofy. In “Menagerie,” from a school in Kingsport, Tennessee, the color guard were caged like animals in a zoo, clad in polka-dot bodysuits. In “Shhhh . . . It’s Rabbit Season,” by a band from Mason, Ohio, the musicians marched out in caps and hunting jackets, like Elmer Fudd, while the color guard wore neon-orange rabbit suits. Then the musicians chased the rabbits around to “The Barber of Seville” and the “William Tell” Overture.

And here’s another splendid passage:

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.

"Stepping Out" takes us inside the agonizing, ecstatic, operatic, surreal world of marching band. It's a brilliant piece - one of Bilger's best. 

There’s a fourth article in this marvellous Anniversary Issue that I want to celebrate – Jackson Arn’s “Royal Flush.” But I’ll do that in a separate post.  

Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #1 "Retrospective Review: Burkhard Bilger's 'The Egg Men' "

Photo by Hans Gissinger, from Burkhard Bilger's "The Egg Men"

This is the tenth and final post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “Retrospective Review: Burkhard Bilger’s ‘The Egg Men’ " (January 30, 2011):

This post marks the first of what I hope will be a series of retrospective reviews of New Yorker stories that I remember with pleasure. Today, I begin with a look at one of my all-time favorite pieces, Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men” (The New Yorker, September 5, 2005).

I’ll structure my review around the following four questions:

1. What is “The Egg Men”?

2. How is it constructed?

3. What is its governing aesthetic?

4. Why do I like it so much?

1. What is “The Egg Men”?

Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men” is a fact piece about egg cooks who work at the Tropical Breeze Café, in the Flamingo hotel, Las Vegas. It’s approximately 8000 words long, divided into nine sections. Here’s a brief summary of each section’s contents:

Section 1 – Describes the Tropical Breeze; tells about Scott Gutstein, the café’s head chef; describes café’s kitchen, as the cook’s “entrench” themselves for Saturday morning breakfast rush.

Section 2 – Tells about Bilger’s experience working as a short-order cook at a Seattle breakfast place called Julia’s; describes a cook named Jack whose cooking “was a seamless sequence of interchangeable tasks reduced to their essential motions: crack, flip, scoop, pour, crack, pour, flip, scoop.”

Section 3 – Returns to the Tropical Breeze kitchen, at seven-thirty, Saturday morning; describes scene (“There were five egg and grill cooks and twenty waiters for close to three hundred diners, and tables were turning over about every thirty-eight minutes; continues with profile of Gutstein.

Section 4 – Describes Tropical Breeze in further detail (“The coffee shop’s kitchen is half the length of a football field, and it’s only the tail end of an intestinal tangle of prep kitchens, washrooms, and walk-in refrigerators that are shared by the restaurants and that coil around and beneath the casino”); tells about Gutstein’s involvement in the kitchen renovations two years ago.

Section 5 – Describes the Tropical Breeze’s “three good egg cooks” – Martin Nañez Moreno (“the omelette man”), Joel Eckerson (“the over-easy man”), and Debbie Lubick (“makes all the poached-egg dishes”); describes the scene in the Tropical Breeze’s kitchen when the morning rush begins (“When I arrived at the line, the heat seared my lungs – the griddle, at about six hundred degrees, was wreathed in steam from cooking pots and egg pans”); describes a sequence in which Eckerson cooks ten pairs of eggs simultaneously; describes a kitchen incident in which a waitress refuses to serve an order of pancakes because they’re cold.

Section 6 – Describes techniques of egg-cracking and egg-flipping; describes short-order cooking as “a feat of timing”; tells about research findings of Warren Meek, a Duke University neuroscientist, who calls short-order cooks “the master interval timers.”

Section 7 – Describes Bugsy’s Backroom, the Flamingo’s employee cafeteria (“deep in the netherworld backstage of the casino”); considers why Las Vegas casino workers seldom quit their jobs; puzzles over why Joel Eckerson, who has worked at the Flamingo for nineteen years, and Martin Nañez Moreno, who has worked there for eleven, are still cooking eggs.

Section 8 – Tells about Bilger’s visit to Las Vegas’s Corsa Cucina restaurant “to see how the other half cooked”; describes Stephen Kalt, Corsa Cucina’s executive chef (“Watching him work is like seeing short-order set to opera”); reports Kalt’s view that the Tropical Breeze short-order cooks are “a different animal” in that they “grew up seventeen generations on a farm in Mexico,” that they are happy where they are “Because that’s the culture, that’s the rhythm – you put seeds in the ground year after year.”

Section 9 – Tells about Bilger’s visit to Gutstein’s home; reports Gutsteins comments regarding his attempts to promote Eckerson (“I’ve given him the opportunity to be a manager, to get out of that bullshit five-hundred-degree heat for eight hours. I’m like, ‘Come on, Joel, you’re better than that!’ But he doesn’t want it. Straight up? He’s in such a comfort zone that it’s hurting him”); reports Bilger’s assessment of Gutstein (“Yet Gutstein wasn’t so different [from Eckerson]. When I asked if he would ever work at Pink Ginger, the Flamingo’s Asian restaurant, his shoulders shook as if a spider had scurried down them. ‘I wouldn’t be able to stand it,’ he said”).

I set out the contents of “The Egg Men” because I want to show the rich combination of ingredients – cooks, kitchens, restaurants, autobiography, neuroscience, Las Vegas, etc. - that Bilger folds into it. He creates quite a literary omelet! And I devour every delicious word of it.

2. How is it constructed?

The core of “The Egg Men” is its description of the Tropical Breeze’s kitchen reality. Five of the story’s nine sections are set in that kitchen. The first section shows us the kitchen “at six o’clock on a recent Saturday morning.” Bilger says, “Saturday morning is zero hour for short-order cooks. The café, which prepares some twenty-five hundred meals on an average weekday, may serve an extra thousand on weekends with the same cooks.” Bilger shows Gutstein to be completely at home in the kitchen’s high-stress environment. He quotes Gutstein as saying, “It gets crazy. I love it. Grown men come out of here crying.” Section 1 sets the theme: Las Vegas short-order cooks, in general, and Tropical Breeze short-order cooks, in particular, are a special breed.

Section 2 of the story cuts away from the Tropical Breeze and takes us back twenty years to Bilger’s days as a short-order cook at Julia’s in Seattle. The flashback from the Tropical Breeze to Julia’s is smoothly executed, and the section is key because it explains Bilger’s fascination with short-order cooks - what makes them tick, their extraordinary multi-tasking ability.

Sections 3, 4, 5, and 6 are located back in the Tropical Breeze. They contain many sharp, precise, vivid descriptions of short-order cooking. For example, here’s Bilger’s wonderful description of Eckerson in action:

“I need a four on two, sunny and scrambled, both wearing sausage!” a grill cook at the next station shouted. Joel nodded. The grill cooks usually made their own eggs to go with steaks or pancakes, but they sometimes needed help: “four on two” meant four eggs on two plates. Joel ripped a spool of new orders from the printer and tucked them under a clamp above the counter, then started cracking eggs into pans two at a time. When he was done, he had ten pairs of eggs cooking: five from previous orders, two from the grill cook’s order, and three from the new orders. He finished the five original orders first. He put a pair of sunnys under a broiler and used his forefinger to break the yolks on a pair that had been ordered over hard. Then he flipped the eggs in that pan and those in three other pans that had been ordered over easy – one, two, three, four. He pivoted back to the counter, set five plates on it, and garnished them all with potatoes and bacon or sausage. He then flipped the over-hards and over-easies again, slid them onto their plates along with the sunnys from the broiler, and placed all the plates under the hot lights above the counter.

That “used his forefinger to break the yolks on a pair that had been ordered over hard” is a superbly noticed detail. Bilger brilliantly crafts sequences of kitchen action. Here’s his description of Eckerson’s egg-cracking technique:

When Joel cracked eggs, his fingers were as loose and precise as a jazz guitarist’s. He held one egg between his thumb and his first two fingers, another curled against his palm. He rapped the first egg on the rim of the pan, twisted it into hemispheres, and opened it as cleanly as if it were a Fabergé Easter egg. As the spent shell fell into the trash, he shuttled the second egg into position, as if pumping a rifle.

In section 6 of “The Egg Men,” Bilger makes an audacious move; he describes the workings of short-order cooks’ minds in neuroscience terms. His piece shifts from talk of sunnys, over-hards, and over-easies into scientific terminology – “burst of dopamine,” frontal cortex,” “oscillatory neurons,” etc.

Then, in the article’s final three sections, Bilger shifts again. His narrative moves from the Tropical Breeze in search of even more meaning. Bilger looks for insight into why the egg men at the Tropical Breeze choose to remain egg men, why they refuse to climb the culinary hierarchy, why they seem happy in their work.

Of these final three sections, my favorite is section 7 in which Bilger visits Bugsy’s Backroom. It contains this terrific description:

All around us, groups of other casino workers were hunched over Formica tables in their gaudy uniforms, picking at food or watching TV on overhead monitors. There were crap dealers with gold shirts and flaming-sunset collars and cuffs, middle-aged cocktail waitresses wearing coat dresses with plunging necklines; gangs of of scruffy young waiters from Margaritaville in Hawaiian shirts. In the far corner, under the cool fluorescent lights, a quartet of blackjack dealers with slicked-back hair were playing cards with a distracted air.

Detail by detail, a way of life is being evoked here. Bilger serves us a succulent slice of it. “The Egg Men” is built in stages, focusing first on the egg cooks at the Tropical Breeze, then opening out into other locations – Bugsy’s Backroom, the Corsa Cucina, Scott Gutstein’s home - as it expands its meaning in a setting (Las Vegas) that’s often used to represent meaninglessness.

3. What is its governing aesthetic?

It would be easy to say that the art of “The Egg Men” is in its details. But you could say that about most New Yorker pieces. “The Egg Men” brims with fine details: “nicotine-yellow walls,” “sausagy arms,” “a mixed hash in a tub the size of a baptismal font,” “toast with the texture and density of prairie sod,” "a pale sweet face edged with melancholy,” eggs thrown high in the air “like salsa dancers.” But its art is also in Bilger’s descriptions of the egg cooks in action, e.g., Eckerson cooking ten pairs of eggs simultaneously. Crisp, precise descriptions of short-order technique are essential to this story, the tagline of which is “How breakfast gets served at the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas.” Bilger shows us how in writing that enacts the craftsmanship of the cooks he describes.

4. Why do I like it so much?

Reading “The Egg Men,” I experience double bliss: the subject is tremendously interesting and the writing is intensely pleasurable.

I look forward to when Bilger collects “The Egg Men” in a book. I’d snap it up faster than you can say, “I need a four on two, sunny and scrambled, both wearing sausage!”