August 12, 2024 Issue

This week’s issue contains a candidate for Best New Yorker Photo of the Year – Dan Winters’ razor-sharp color portrait of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for Clare Malone’s “The Inheritor.” Over the years, Winters has produced some of the magazine’s most memorable pictures, e.g., his gleaming photo of Pardis Sabeti and Stephen Gire, for Richard Preston’s brilliant “The Ebola Wars” (October 27, 2014), and his unforgettable portrait of face-transplant recipient Dallas Wiens, for Raffi Katchadourian’s extraordinary “Transfiguration” (February 13 & 20, 2012).

In Winters’ artful hands, Kennedy is a great photography subject. But as a politician, he’s repugnant. His opposition to vaccine mandates and military aid to Ukraine is vile. 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Photo by Dan Winters)

Best of the Decade: #4 Raffi Khatchadourian's "Transfiguration"

Photo by Dan Winters, from Raffi Khatchadourian's "Transfiguration"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #4 pick – Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Transfiguration” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2012).

“Transfiguration” is an extraordinary account of a ground-breaking surgical operation – “a full face transplant, something that had never been done before.” What do I mean by “extraordinary”? Consider this passage:

Pomahac walked back to the Tupperware container and gently took the transplant out. His movements were clinical and measured, as if he were handling a delicate piece of art. The face was the same color as his surgical gloves: latex beige, pale, glistening with ice water. It was slightly unshaven, as if the beard had grown in transit. The rubbery-looking skin supported an inch or so of cartilage, vessels, fat, and nerves – a red mash of tissue – beneath it. Spread out in Pomahac’s hands, the face was massive, about the circumference of a hubcab.

I read that eight years ago, when the piece first appeared, and I’ve never forgotten it. Khatchadourian’s depiction of the face color (“latex beige, pale, glistening with ice water”) is transfixing. The detail about it being “slightly unshaven” is inspired. His description of the whole complex, intense operation, consisting of two procedures (removal of the donor’s face; replacement of the recipient’s face with the donor’s face), is spellbinding. Over the years, I’ve read some great New Yorker action descriptions (McPhee on canoeing, Angell on baseball, Paumgarten on skiing, Buford on cooking), but this piece on surgery is – I’ll say it again – absolutely extraordinary.

Khatchadourian is an excellent noticer of details. Here’s his description of the surgeon Bohdan Pomahac transferring the face:

Pomahac carefully swiveled from the trolley to the operating table, placing the donor’s face where Wien’s own face had been. “It’s going to go twice around his,” he observed dispassionately. During the dissection, Pomahac had cut the skin far beyond the hairline, to transplant part of the scalp as well. The donor’s hair was slightly lighter than Wiens’s – it had some gray in it – and some of Wiens’s hair poked out from underneath, as if he were wearing an ill-fitting mask.

That “some of Wiens’s hair poked out from underneath, as if he were wearing an ill-fitting mask” is superb.

It’s not clear whether Khatchadourian actually witnessed the face transplant first hand, or whether his descriptions are reconstructions based on videos, transcripts, interviews, etc., but it doesn’t matter. His account of the operation appears totally authentic, completely accurate, and positively riveting.

Not only is Khatchadourian a great describer; he’s also a brilliant quoter. “Transfiguration” is a rich, beautifully interwoven assemblage of quotation from multiple first and secondary sources. Khatchadourian appears to have sought out and directly talked to most of the people principally involved, including Dallas Wiens, the incredibly brave, resilient, tolerant recipient of the face transplant; Jeffrey Janis, the reconstructive surgeon who oversaw Wiens’s miraculous recovery at Parkland Hospital; Bernard Devauchelle, chief of maxillofacial surgery at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire d’Amiens, who conducted the first face transplant; Bohdan Pomahac, America’s “leading specialist in face transplants,” and leader of the surgical team that performed Wiens’s operation; Elof Eriksson, chief of plastic surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who was a key member of Pomahac’s team; and various members of Wiens’s family.

Reviewing this piece back in 2012, I wrote, “Khatchadourian’s ‘No Secrets’ and ‘The Gulf War’ are brilliant, but ‘Transfiguration’ is his masterpiece (so far). It’s an unforgettable piece of writing. It moves Khatchadourian to the front rank of New Yorker writers.” 

Best of 2018: Reporting

Janne Iivonen, illustration for Ian Frazier's "The Maraschino Mogul"

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ian Frazier, “The Maraschino Mogul,” April 23, 2018 (“As summer progressed, to add a further touch of the apocalyptic, bees returning at the end of the day to hives in Red Hook began to glow an incandescent red. Some local beekeepers found the sight of red bees flying in the sunset strangely beautiful. All of them had noticed that their honey was turning red, too”).

2. Nicholas Schmidle, “Rocket Man,” August 20, 2018 (“Ten seconds into the burn, SpaceShipTwo was supersonic. Stucky began trimming the h-stabs, steadily increasing the vehicle’s pitch until it reached sixty-eight degrees. He and Mackay were travelling at Mach 1.8—about twice as fast as a Tomahawk cruise missile. Outside the vehicle, the light was draining from the sky, turning it a deep, muddy blue”).

3. Raffi Khatchadourian, “Degrees of Freedom,” November 26, 2018 (“Then, suddenly, the injector was triggered. The sound of valves opening and closing filled the operating theatre, along with the rush of compressed air through the injector, the noise a lightning-quick mechanical breath, culminating in a metallic clink. In an instant, the ninety-six electrodes were in, like a soccer cleat going into soft earth”).

4. David Grann, “The White Darkness,” February 12 & 19, 2018 (“It was hard to breathe, and each time he exhaled the moisture froze on his face: a chandelier of crystals hung from his beard; his eyebrows were encased like preserved specimens; his eyelashes cracked when he blinked”).

5. Zadie Smith, "Through the Portal," May 7, 2018 (“Yet what is a goddess doing here, before these thin net curtains? What relation can she possibly have to that cheap metal radiator, the chipped baseboards, the wonky plastic blinds?”).

6. John McPhee, “Direct Eye Contact,” March 5, 2018 (“In a storm, a big oak in mast, up a slope from my cabin there, fell not long ago. Its trunk broke freakishly—about twenty feet up—and the crown bent all the way over and spread the upper branches like a broom upon the ground. In the branches were a number of thousands of acorns. The next morning, there was enough bear shit around that oak to fertilize the Philadelphia Flower Show”).

7. Rebecca Mead, “Meal Ticket,” June 18, 2018 (“The aged lamb on my plate looked like shreds of an automobile tire, and it tasted like something I wouldn’t be able to wash out of my hair for a week”).

  

8. Nick Paumgarten, “Getting a Shot,” January 29, 2018 (“With thirty minutes until count, they re-racked for one try. Anderson got his fake beating, and off it went, bodies flying all over the place, well past the call of ‘cut.’ Sample opened his eyes wide: ‘That one looked a little real.’ The offenders, sweaty and ebullient, collected their pizzas and filed out, under guard”).

9. Jiayang Fan, “The Spreading Vine,” March 12, 2018 (“The bootleg wine was warm, and, when I raised my cup, I could see thick sediment dancing inside. The security guard had mentioned that the wine hadn’t yet been filtered, but Liu and Fatty didn’t seem bothered. We took a sip, and Fatty’s mouth puckered. The wine was harsh, sweet but astringent, and the taste seemed to register in the esophagus as much as in the mouth. As the men drained their cups, Liu reflected that at least it hadn’t cost them anything”).

10. Janet Malcolm, “Six Glimpses of the Past,” October 29, 2018 (“I see some resemblance to myself in pictures of him. That’s all I can say about Oskar. If I had known I was going to write about him, I would have asked my mother questions. But now I am like a reporter with an empty notebook. Oskar is out of reach”).

2018 Year in Review

Jorge Colombo, "The Honeywell" (2018)

Behold another fat stack of New Yorkers – forty-eight of them, each a tremendous source of reading pleasure. It’s fascinating to watch the pile grow, starting in January with the first solitary issue. At the beginning of each year, I always wonder whether the magazine will be able to match the quality of its previous year. And each year, it always does. 2018 was no exception. Among the highlights: 

1. The appearance of three of my all-time favorite writers: John McPhee (“Direct Eye Contact,” March 5); Ian Frazier (“Airborne,” February 5; “The Maraschino Mogul,” April 23; “The Day the Great Plains Burned,” November 5); and Janet Malcolm (“Six Glimpses of the Past,” October 29). I treasure their work.

2. Three extraordinary reporting pieces: David Grann’s “The White Darkness” (February 12 & 19); Nicholas Schmidle’s “Rocket Man” (August 20); Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Degrees of Freedom” (November 26).

3. Anna Russell’s wonderful “Talk of the Town” stories, including “Close Shave” (February 5), “Caffeinated” (March 19), “Leafy Greens” (July 9 & 16), and “Reunion” (September 17).

4. Hannah Goldfield’s ravishing “Tables For Two” food descriptions. 

5. All the “Bar Tab” columns, and the wonderful Jorge Colombo artwork that illustrate the newyorker.com versions.

6. Peter Schjeldahl’s brilliant exhibition reviews, and his notes for “Goings On About Town.” Schjeldahl is the magazine’s supreme pleasure-giver. 

I could go on and on. Instead, over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I loved most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another splendid year. I’d be lost without you. New Yorker without end, amen! 

November 26, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Antony Huchette's snowy illustration for “Goings On About Town” ’s “Celebrating the Holidays” is delightful.

Antony Huchette, "Celebrating the Holidays" (2018)

2. Also in GOAT, Steve Futterman’s note on Carol Sloane at Birdland caught my eye, reminding me of Whitney Balliett’s 1987 Sloane profile, in which he describes her singing as “conversation put to music” (“Carol Sloane and Julie Wilson,” The New Yorker, April 6, 1987).

3. Frédéric Bazille’s gorgeous “Young Woman with Peonies” (1870), illustrating Hilton Als’ “At the Galleries: ‘Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet to Matisse to Today’ ” helps offset Janet Malcolm’s startling opinion, expressed in her recent “Six Glimpses of the Past,” that open peonies are “blowsy and ugly.”

Frédéric Bazille, "Young Woman with Peonies" (1870)

4. Peter Schjeldahl’s GOAT note on Dike Blair is a beauty, and is worth quoting in full:

Blair has been painting coolly beautiful little still-lifes of ordinary things in ordinary places for so long that, by now, they seem almost to paint themselves, for their own enjoyment. A pink cocktail luxuriates in a stemmed glass, never mind the somewhat gawky foreshortening of the tabletop that it shares with a cloth napkin and a bowl of nuts. Spatters of paint on a cement floor get a kick out of suggesting a frontal abstract painting, while still knowing perfectly well what they are. A yellow line and the shadow of a car bumper on a parking lot, water in a swimming pool, a torn-open FedEx envelope near a window fan, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, and a nodding tulip in a vase on a nighttime windowsill become unwilled memories—the almost, but not quite, meaningless retention of the small, sticky epiphanies that bind us to life.

5. Richard Brody reprises his brilliant capsule review of Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby” in this week’s “Goings On About Town,” and why not? It’s one of his best pieces. The last line is sublime: 

And Hawks brought to fruition his own universe of hints and symbols to conjure the force that rules the world: she tears his coat, he tears her dress, she steals his clothes, she names him “Bone,” and the mating cries of wild animals disturb the decorum of the dinner table, even as a Freudian psychiatrist in a swanky bar gives viewers an answer key.

6. Raffi Khatchadourian’s absorbing “Degrees of Freedom” tells about an extraordinary neuroscientific experiment in which a paralyzed woman’s brain is directly connected to a robotic arm. Khatchadourian is a superb describer of complex technological devices and procedures. His description of the implanting of the microelectrodes in the woman’s brain is unforgettable. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Then, suddenly, the injector was triggered. The sound of valves opening and closing filled the operating theatre, along with the rush of compressed air through the injector, the noise a lightning-quick mechanical breath, culminating in a metallic clink. In an instant, the ninety-six electrodes were in, like a soccer cleat going into soft earth.

Khatchadourian’s “Degrees of Freedom” is every bit the equal of his great “Transfiguration” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2012). I enjoyed it immensely. 

August 21, 2017 Issue

“Phil Stewart, an affably geeky, sandy-haired strawberry geneticist, offered me a yellowish-white specimen with rosy stains, like a skinned knee when the blood starts seeping through.” I enjoyed that sentence. It’s from Dana Goodyear’s absorbing “Strawberry Valley,” in this week’s issue. The piece is about Driscoll’s, “the world’s largest berry company,” and its attempt to breed the perfect strawberry. It’s also about rival strawberry breeding programs – Driscoll’s proprietary program versus the “public, open, non-exclusive” program of the University of California, Davis. Until I read Goodyear’s piece, I had no idea the berry business was so brass-knuckle. Lawsuits, talent raids, illegal breeding – it’s war!

Another piece in this week’s issue that hooked my attention is Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Man Without a Country,” a sequel to his great “No Secrets” (The New Yorker, June 7, 2010). Both pieces profile WikiLeaks's embattled founder, Julian Assange. In “No Secrets,” WikiLeaks is still a work in progress; Assange is portrayed as a “mixture of seriousness and amusement, devilishness and intensity.” Khatchadourian writes, “Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.”

In “Man Without a Country,” that paradox still hasn’t been confronted; Assange’s portrait is much darker; WikiLeaks appears to be an instrument of Russian state hackers. Khatchadourian writes, “Whatever one thinks of Assange’s election disclosures, accepting his contention that they shared no ties with the two Russian fronts requires willful blindness.”

Khatchadourian’s “I” is more pronounced in “Man Without a Country” than it is in “No Secrets.” His own attempt to understand Assange is part of the story. For this reason, I think I prefer it slightly more. Both pieces are superb – intricate portraits of a brilliant, combative, possibly crazy cryptographer, who craves the world’s attention.

December 19 & 26, 2016, Issue

Pick of the Issue (the “World Changers” issue) this week is Raffi Khatchadourian’s absorbing “The Long View,” a profile of landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky. The piece’s tagline is “Edward Burtynski’s quest to photograph a changing planet,” but Khatchadourian appears doubtful that that’s what Burtynsky is really up to. He writes, “In fact, throughout his career, Burtynsky has used his camera to create painterly abstractions as often as he has to create sublime imagery.” He says of Burtynsky’s “Nickel Tailings #34” and “Nickel Tailings #35,” “They appeared to be saying something forceful about the modern world, but with enough looking that forcefulness began to dissolve: was this a study in ultra-toxicity, or was it a benign terrain transformed by photographic sorcery?” That, for me, is the piece’s central question. Khatchadourian doesn’t resolve it. Instead, he calls Burtynsky’s photos “visual puzzles.”

“The Long View” follows Burtynsky on a phot0 shoot in Laos, Nigeria. Chaotic, complex Laos, home to twenty-one million people, is a great documentary subject. But, except for aerial shots, Burtynsky doesn’t capture it. Neither does Katchadourian. There are no inspired descriptions of the place that deliver us directly into the rub of things like the ones he wrote in his superb “A Century of Silence,” an account of his trip to Diyarbakir, in southwestern Turkey. “The Long View” reflects its subject, an abstractionist photographer who transforms industrial terrains into beautiful images drained of reality. Some of those images are undeniably ravishing: see, for example, "Saw Mills #1, Lagos, Nigeria 2016,” one of the illustrations accompanying Khatchadourian’s piece. But they don’t engage me. I don’t think they engage Khatchadourian, either. They’re missing a crucial element – human actuality.

June 20, 2016 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Raffi Khatchadourian’s brilliant "The Unseen," an “Annals of Science” piece about microbiology. I almost passed it up. I’m not crazy about science writing. But Katchadourian has written some of the best New Yorker pieces of the last five years. Recall his extraordinary "Transfiguration" (February 13 & 20, 2012), for example. So I decided to plunge in, and was immediately caught up in the description of 1960s Soviet Moscow – the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy, the Cosmos Pavilion, the Monument to the Conquerors of Space, Vostok rockets, and Soyuz orbiters. On one level, “The Unseen” is a dual profile of microbiologists Slava Epstein and Kim Lewis. On another, it’s a fascinating account of Epstein and Lewis’s discovery of a powerful new antibiotic. And on a third, it’s an alarming report on a potential end-of-the-road for antibiotics. Along the way, Katchadourian explores, among other things, the Great Oxygenation Event, the Age of Microbes, and the Great Plate Count Anomaly. There are no flashy sentences in “The Unseen”; it’s built solidly of fact (e.g., “More than half the cells in the human body are microbial”; “That our atmosphere is twenty-one percent oxygen is a bacterial fact”; “Already there are strains of tuberculosis and gonorrhea, among other pathogens, that are resistant to virtually every drug in the medical arsenal”). But it's the exotic blend of samizdat and petri dish, refuseniks and microbial weeds, Sakharov and lantern-eye fish that appealed to me. “The Unseen” is a curious, distinctive literary brew. I enjoyed it immensely.

Mid-Year Top Ten 2015

“Aesthetic hierarchies,” James Wood says, in his great The Nearest Thing to Life, “are fluid, personal, eccentric, always subject to revision, and quite possibly a bit incoherent.” Yes, and they’re also fun. I enjoy evaluating The New Yorker. This time each year, I pause, look back over the past six months, and pick my favorite pieces. Here then is my Mid-Year Top Ten 2015.

Reporting

1. David Owen’s “Where the River Runs Dry” (May 25, 2015)

2. Ian Parker’s “The Shape of Things to Come” (February 23 & March 2, 2015)

3. Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Century of Silence” (January 5, 2015)

4. Jill Lepore’s “The Cobweb” (January 26, 2015)

5. Rivka Galchen’s “Weather Underground” (April 13, 2015)

6. Dana Goodyear’s “The Dying Sea” (May 4, 2015)

7. Rebecca Mead’s “Sole Cycle” (March 23, 2015)

8. Luke Mogelson’s “When the Fever Breaks” (January 19, 2015)

9. Jane Kramer’s “The Demolition Man” (June 29, 2015)

10. William Finnegan's “Tears of the Sun” (April 20, 2015)

Criticism

1. James Wood’s “Look Again” (February 23 & March 2, 2015)

2. Dan Chiasson’s “Out of This World” (April 13, 2015)

3. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Moving Pictures” (March 16, 2015)

4. James Wood’s “Circling the Subject” (May 4, 2015

5. Alex Ross’s “Eyes and Ears” (February 9, 2015)

6. Dan Chiasson’s “Beautiful Lies” (March 30, 2015)

7. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Native Soil” (May 25, 2015)

8. James Wood’s “Story of My Life” (June 22, 2015)

9. Dan Chiasson’s “American Snipper” (June 1, 2015)

10. Anthony Lane’s “High Gear” (May 25, 2015)

Talk of the Town

1. Mark Singer’s “All-Nighter” (May 11, 2015)

2. Ian Frazier’s “Russophilia” (February 16, 2015)

3. Lizzie Widdicombe’s “Air Bus” (June 1, 2015)

4. Nick Paumgarten’s “Hut!” (June 22, 2015)

5. Dana Goodyear’s “Life With Father” (June 29, 2015)

6. Sarah Larson’s “Cinephiles” (January 19, 2015)

7. Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Without Audience” (June 1, 2015)

8. John Seabrook’s “Free” (February 2, 2015)

9. Emma Allen’s “Landlord” (June 29, 2015)

10. Alec Wilkinson’s “Hands” (June 29, 2015)

Best Short Story

Louise Erdrich’s “The Flower” (June 29, 2015)

Best Poem

C. K. Williams, “Hog” (February 23, 2015)

Best Blog Post

Jiayang Fan, “Searching for America with General Tso” (“Cultural Comment,” newyorker.com, March 12, 2015)

Best Illustration

Riccardo Vecchio’s illustration for Jane Kramer’s “The Demolition Man” (June 29, 2015) (see above)

Best Photo

Ian Allen’s portrait of Chastity Belt for “Goings On About Town” (May 25, 2015)

Best Cover

Mark Ulriksen’s “Baseball Ballet” (April 27, 2015)

Best Issue

May 25, 2015, containing, among its many pleasures, David Owen’s superb “Where the River Runs Dry,” three first-rate reviews (Anthony Lane’s “High Gear,” James Wood’s “All Her Children,” and Peter Schjeldahl’s “Native Soil”), and Ian Allen’s ravishing, color-drenched “Goings On About Town” photo of the band Chastity Belt.

Best Sentence

Or does it refer to stuff that’s really, really hard to follow, especially when certain brainiacs insist on reading their turgid prose in a monotone that makes us doubt our very existence, because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile? – Mark Singer, “All-Nighter” (May 11, 2015)

Best Paragraph

I went farther into the church, making a list of the things that the people of Diyarbakir had left there. Dried scraps of bread. Automotive carpeting. An old shoe. A fragment of a transistor radio. Corrugated plastic, some of it burned. Where the main altar had been, there was a fire pit; among the ashes, a wrapper for a candy called Coco Fino and empty cans of Efes beer. A rusted wire. Coils of shit. In the inset of a wall, someone had arranged several stones in a neat line. Hundreds of daisies reached upward. And as the sun descended behind the high city walls the smell of grilled meat drifted over from nearby homes, and the sound of children playing began to fill the streets. A ball was kicked and it hit the side of a building and bounced. Some boys clambered over the wall that surrounded the church. Women left their kitchens, and climbed to their roofs to collect carpets that had been put out to air. TVs wired to satellite dishes came on, filling spare rooms with their ethereal glow. All of Diyarbakir, it seemed, except the church, drifted forward in time. Overhead, a flock of common swifts darted and circled among the old stone arches. Their black wings arced like boomerangs as they swooped through the ruins—above the piles of earth, the weeds and the wildflowers, all the trash—and their movements were ceaseless, careless, as if unweighted by anything. – Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Century of Silence” (January 5, 2015)

Best Description

Haslbeck suggested that I try on the lace-up boot, and I slipped my bare foot into it. With the warmth and softness of the fur, and the cradling comfort of the foot bed, it felt wonderful. I think I may have gasped. – Rebecca Mead, “Sole Cycle” (March 23, 2015)

Most Memorable Image

The helicopter made its shuddering descent. Legs shook; sippy cups spilled. Marcy said, “Wow! I love this part!” The pilot yelled, “Touchdown!” – Lizzie Widdicombe, “Air Bus” (June 1, 2015)

Most Inspired Detail

When undone, scarves with modernistic prints sent out gusts of international perfume. – Ian Frazier, “Russophilia” (February 16, 2015)

January 19, 2015 Issue

This week’s issue contains an extraordinary piece of reporting called "When the Fever Breaks" by Luke Mogelson. It’s a firsthand, front-lines account of how communities in Liberia and Sierra Leone are fighting the spread of Ebola. Mogelson visits slums, hospitals, holding centers, jungle villages. He talks to “survivors” (people who catch Ebola and don’t die), local organizers, health officers, social workers, ambulance drivers. At one point, he accompanies a county burial team to the Liberian village of Jene-Wonde. “Ebola victims are most contagious when they are no longer alive,” Mogelson says, “and in West Africa—where burial rituals, for both Christians and Muslims, entail anointing the deceased—many people have contracted the virus from a corpse.” The wife of Jene-Wonde’s chief has died of Ebola. Her body is inside the village general store. The chief gives permission to retrieve her body. Mogelson describes the procedure:

The sprayers went first—a pair of minesweepers clearing a path. Then the others entered with the bag and the stretcher. They emerged several minutes later and loaded the corpse into the back of the truck. As the truck made its way across the square, women and children spilled out of their houses, sat down in the dirt, and keened. I followed on foot, along with a few locals, all of whom turned back when the truck stopped at a wall of trees. The team filed down a narrow trail, carrying the stretcher through dark jungle. After about a hundred yards, unmarked mounds of rich orange soil rose here and there from the grass. Beside a shallow, rectangular hole, an elderly man in flip-flops, cargo shorts, and a white skullcap leaned on the handle of an old spade. He had dug all the graves. No one else from the village, he told me, was willing to tread in that place.

The team lowered the imam’s wife into the grave. On top of her, they dropped a heap of freshly hacked branches and leaves. Then they stripped off their suits, gloves, and masks and deposited them in the grave as well.

Mogelson’s writing style is factual, unostentatious – well suited to the hard reality he describes. But it has its artful aspects. At one point, describing a trip in Tonkolili District, Sierra Leone, he says, “To get there, we followed barely discernible tire tracks, for miles, through grass so tall and close you feel as if you were in a car wash.”

“When the Fever Breaks” can be read as a companion to Richard Preston’s brilliant "The Ebola Wars" (The New Yorker, October 27, 2014), which describes the work of scientists at the Broad Institute to sequence Ebola’s genome and track its mutations. But the two pieces differ from each other. “The Ebola Wars” is written in the third person; “When the Fever Breaks” is a first-person narrative. It abounds with sentences like “One day in early November, I followed several young men down a warren of sand alleyways, veined by rivulets of sullage, that wound through West Point, the slum to which Fahnbulleh and her husband had been taken,” and “When I visited the quarantine center, in Monrovia, a group of children sat in plastic chairs inside the gate, near a metal seesaw.” I relish such sentences: the observer becomes a participant; reporting becomes experience.

Postscript: I delight in thisness, i.e., “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion” (James Wood, How Fiction Works, 2008). Thisness is palpability, specificity, concreteness. New Yorker writing brims with it. For example, in this week’s issue, it’s there in the description of the Goldschmied & Chiari mirrors on show at Lorello Gallery: “Composite photographs of billowing smoke transferred to reflective glass, have been tinted petal pink or storm-cloud gray” (“Goings On About Town: Art”). It’s there in Amelia Lester’s representation of the Via Carota’s pumpkin-and-sage ravioli: “fluffy, beautiful, and fleeting, an exercise in virtuosity equivalent to a concert pianist running up and down a scale very fast” ("Tables For Two"). It’s there in Jiayang Fan’s description of Nitecap’s Key Lime Fizz “with a lit candle suspended in its froth” ("Bar Tab"). It’s brilliantly there in Sarah Larson’s capture of Bill Murray’s line to the waitress at Tao when she brought him two rum-and-waters: “He took one and said of the other, ‘You give that to the kids at the orphanage’ ” ("Cinephiles"). Sometimes thisness can be in the form of a piquant fact, e.g., “KidZania has its own currency, kidzos, which can be used in branches around the world, or deposited in the central bank and accessed with a realistic-looking credit card” (Rebecca Mead, "When I Grow Up"); “Recently, researchers at the University of Southern California built a prototype 'virtual human' named Ellie, a digital therapist that integrates an algorithm similar to Affdex with others that track gestures and vocal tonalities” (Raffi Khatchadourian, "We Know How You Feel"). It’s hard to say how useful all this is. But in terms of writing as pure writing, I devour it. My favorite example of thisness, in this week’s issue, is Sasha Frere-Jones’s description of the Sleater-Kinney band’s guitar tones: “fuzzed, doubled into octaves, thin, then soaked, overloading” ("Sister Saviors"). “Sleater-Kinney” is itself an inspired bit of thisness. It comes, Frere-Jones says, from the name on a highway exit ramp in Olympia, Washington.