June 15, 2026 Issue

Nick Paumgarten, in his “Talk” story “Fanboy,” in this week’s issue, describes the musician Kurt Vile:

He was sitting in a corner of Old Rabbit Club, a bar on MacDougal Street, drinking a non-alcoholic beer. He had on a Waylon Jennings T-shirt under a red plaid shirt, and an MF Doom baseball cap that contained a cascade of curly hair that Vile has a tendency to hide behind. A beer-menu lamplight suggested that the color of his Chuck Taylors was lavender. He was hanging out late (a) to make the trip down the turnpike at midnight (“Musicians know, it’s an easy shot late at night—it’s like teleportation”) and (b) to catch another band’s gig at Le Poisson Rouge.

That’s an inspired passage! Four swift, vivid, specific sentences and – voilà! – Vile springs to life. Paumgarten is a great writer.  

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. 

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). 

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.”

May 26, 2025 Issue

Nick Paumgarten is on a phenomenal roll this year. In just five months, he’s produced three superb pieces: “Helicopter Parents” (February 17 & 24); “Dreams and Nightmares” (March 10); and now, in this week’s issue, “Guitar Heroes.” The new piece is about the massive guitar collection of two guys, Dirk Ziff and Perry Margouleff. Paumgarten describes it as “the world’s finest collection of vintage guitars.” Last year, Ziff and Margouleff donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Paumgarten talks with the two men. He visits the warehouse where the collection is stored. He writes,

“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. Guitar collectors know and savor this smell. Margouleff has thought of hiring a perfumer to try to re-create it. “When someone brings me a guitar, the first thing I do is smell it,” he said. “Smell is a fingerprint. It’s how I tell if it’s real or not.”

Receding into the warm amber light of the warehouse’s middle distance, on both sides and a few tiers, were red-carpeted shelves of old cases packed as snug as library stacks. Here was a Beinecke of guitars. Margouleff explained the sorting system—make, model, serial number, with a chronological overlay. Gibsons, Fenders, Martins, Gretsches, D’Angelicos. In the open floor space were Oriental carpets, black leather couches and club chairs, dozens of vintage amps, coffee-table books, and an old Schwinn Sting Ray with a banana seat. It was not so much man cave as man arsenal, teeming yet tidy, the lair of a latter-day Count of Monte Cristo. The temperature stayed at sixty-eight, humidity at fifty per cent. Photography was forbidden.

I like that “old Schwinn Sting Ray with a banana seat” detail. This piece brims with vivid details (e.g., “the sarcophagal musk” of the guitar cases, “an early Stratocaster prototype, with a half-melted pick guard”; “a 1959 Sunburst model, its cherry-red finish faded to yellow”).

Paumgarten also visits the Met to view the first tranche of guitars delivered to the museum. This results in some of the piece’s most absorbing passages. This one, for example:

The guitars kept coming, like pitches at a batting cage. Before long, we reached the heart of the collection, the dawn of the solid-body electric guitar and, eventually, of rock and roll. “These guitars were really for music that didn’t even exist yet,” Margouleff said. Wheeldon presented the “Klunker,” an Epiphone Zephyr DeLuxe that, in 1941, Les Paul modified to be essentially a solid-body—he bolted a steel bar into the body and sealed the f-holes. Later, Gibson, which Paul endorsed, insisted that he put a Gibson decal on the headstock. But the case read “Mary Ford,” who was Paul’s wife and partner, and an ace as well. “Mary and Sister Rosetta Tharpe were the first two female rock stars,” Margouleff said. “The instrument itself isn’t sexist.” Add Mother Maybelle Carter and Elizabeth Cotten to this particular Mt. Shredmore, and the story of the guitar is no longer as dude-centric as conventional wisdom deems it to be.

And this:

The next solid-body specimen was designed in Downey, California, in 1948, by a motorcycle builder and racer named Paul Bigsby. Merle Travis, the country-and-Western hot shot, had asked Bigsby for an electric guitar with the sustain of a Hawaiian lap steel guitar. “Bigsby built everything, including all the casting, the inlay, winding the pickup coils,” Margouleff said. Downey was where Leo Fender first saw Travis playing a Bigsby guitar, which he then copied, to produce a prototype of the classic Fenders. Opening a battered case, Wheeldon unveiled the prototype, its white body paint chipped—an object not nearly as elaborate as the Bigsby and yet, in light of the Telecasters and Stratocasters to come, possibly more august. Next up was an original Fender Esquire and then an early Stratocaster prototype, with a half-melted pick guard. Its materials had been “self-destructing.” “There was a lot of trial and error with the plastics,” Margouleff said. “They were working with volatile chemicals and man-made junk. There’s a reason Stradivariuses are still here. They’re made entirely of wood.” A pristine 1954 Strat was next, its shape as familiar and enduring as that of a spoon.

And this:

But the cream of the collection, and Ziff’s particular obsession, was the Les Pauls of the late fifties, which, when they débuted, did not sell well. Wheeldon presented a 1959 Sunburst model, its cherry-red finish faded to yellow. This was the “Keithburst,” which Keith Richards played on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the Rolling Stones’ (and, it is believed, the Sunburst’s) first appearance on American television, in 1964. “This was not a popular instrument at the time,” Margouleff said. “It was out of production.” He contends that Richards must have bought it in New York, on Music Row, though Richards has said that he got it in London. (In the early nineteen-fifties, the British government imposed import restrictions that affected American guitars, so they were uncommon in the U.K.) In England, Richards apparently shared it with Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, among others, whetting their appetites for the older American instruments.

And most especially this:

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.

That last line is inspired. The whole piece is inspired – one of Paumgarten’s best. 

May 5, 2025 Issue

Helen Rosner, in her “Tables for Two,” in this week’s issue, praises Danny & Coop’s, a Philly-cheesesteak restaurant in the East Village. She says,

The cheesesteak is good. It’s very good. It’s a hefty twelve-incher, the roll split lengthwise and filled with a glorious gloop of cheese (smooth and saucy Cooper Sharp, no relation to Bradley) and sliced rib-eye steak (tender, velvet-soft, paper-thin) run through with sweet ribbons of griddled onion. It’s the best cheesesteak I’ve had in New York, which isn’t saying much; it’s just as good as the best one I’ve had in Philadelphia, which is saying plenty.

Rosner’s review reminded me of another great “Tables for Two” Philly-cheesesteak piece – Nick Paumgarten’s “Tony Luke’s” (April 11, 2005). It contains one of my all-time favorite Paumgarten lines:

The cheesesteaks here are about a foot long, and they are served without the benefit of being cut in half. As a result, as you eat one, the structural integrity starts to go; well-cheesified clumps of steak ooze out the sides. Quick flanking bites along the roll’s perimeter don’t much help, and soon you find yourself pushing the thing into your mouth like a log into a chipper. 

March 10, 2025 issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nick Paumgarten’s brilliant “Dreams and Nightmares.” It’s an account of his experience in New Orleans, attending Super Bowl LIX and some of the parties and promotions leading up to it. “Eagles plus the Big Easy: I had to be there,” he says. The piece is part personal history and part reporting. Paumgarten reflects on his love of football (“I love the sport itself, the complexity of it, the variety of bodies and roles, the grace amid the peril, the sacrifice, the story lines, the religious devotion to the fate of the team and a city that’s not even my own”), his love of the Philadelphia Eagles (“The sight of the Kelly-green jerseys, against the sickly inchworm green of Veterans Stadium’s diabolical artificial turf, got its talons in me”), and his conflicted view of the Super Bowl. At times, he seems to relish the event (“It’s hard to think of anything that comes close, unless you count Christmas”). At other times, he seems to detest it (“The vulgarity and rot were palpable then, as they seem to have been, come to think of it, even when Hunter S. Thompson was in Houston for Super Bowl VIII, in 1974”). 

Paumgarten visits Media Row at the convention center (“I saw a man in a green Saquon Barkley jersey, green Eagles overalls, and green-and-silver face paint—bald but for a tight green Mohawk”). He meets up with a wealthy friend and they go to a night club called Empire (“Bouncers ushered us past the line and through the throngs inside to a table near the front”). He attends and Eagles-fan party in the Garden District (“cheesesteaks from Yinzer’s, soft pretzels, and Tastykakes”). His description of game day is detailed and vivid:

Tributaries of fans—from Bourbon and Baronne, Tchoupitoulas and Magazine—poured into Poydras Street and flowed toward the Dome. The doomsday prophets and kooks along the way brought to mind the streetside hubbub in John Kennedy Toole’s “Confederacy of Dunces.” You had your born-agains bearing signs: “God Hates Your Idols” (possible), “Free Will Is a Satanic Lie” (true enough), “God Hates Drunks” (no, He does not), “God Hates Fags” (no), “God Hates You” (me?). A vender evaded the constabulary with his pushcart of “Donald Fucking Trump” and “Bitch I’m an Eagle” T-shirts. A group of gentlemen dressed in white, in white cowboy hats, with patches of presumably fake blood over their privates, led a protest against male circumcision, with a sign that read “Nobody Wants Less Penis.” It seemed right-wing-coded, but I couldn’t be sure. The Black Israelites, meanwhile, were out on Canal Street. Scalpers offered tickets: for a man bearing a notebook, the price was “face value.” (The average price of a ticket, on the secondary market, was sixty-five hundred dollars. The cheapest ticket was twenty-six hundred.) But there were some bargains around: you could get your face painted with your team’s colors for twenty bucks, and a Coors Light for eight.

The piece brims with wonderful, original, quasi-surreal sentences. This one, for example:

George Kittle, the San Francisco 49ers tight end, wearing a Little Caesars T-shirt adorned with pizza-slice icons, showed up with his mother at the Sports Illustrated booth—a sad little Wayne-and-Garth-calibre nook, reflective perhaps of the diminishment of both a medium and a “brand”—with boxes of Crazy Puffs.

And this:

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. 

“Dreams and Nightmares” is a tour de force of personal journalism. I enjoyed it immensely.

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.