There is virtually no way I could have resisted Sylvie McNamara’s dispatch from her journey to a disreputable McDonald’s in Stafford, Virginia. I’ve listened to my share of the Doughboys podcast, and regularly debate burger rankings with my son. What’s more, I went to high school just two miles down the road from this particular location, whose aggregated Google reviews won it dubious distinction in a nation of interchangeable fast-food franchises. Thankfully, McNamara’s lighthearted investigation, which invites readers to consider Robert Caro and teenage commitments to the social contract, will satisfy you no matter your relationship with the Golden Arches. It reminded me of tongue-in-cheek alt-weekly features, a few pleasurable Paris Review web essays, and that episode of Mystery Show where Starlee Kine goes deep with a Ticketmaster employee. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba, I loved it.

I asked the employee for an explanation. “I think I can give you real insight,” he said. “It be the certain workers we got.” He himself is a high schooler, but he said that “we’re starting to get more younger managers. As soon as they turn 18, they’re getting a manager spot. I think my general manager’s 20. It’s a lot of kids getting these manager titles and positions, but they’re not really managers.”

I told him that to be honest, that environment sounded kind of fun.

John Berger spent a meaningful portion of his life thinking, with precision and care, about how to look at the world—an effort he detailed in numerous essays and books, among them Ways of Seeing and About Looking. “Reading them, you often feel you’re standing next to him in the museum or even looking through his eyes at a painting or a sculpture,” writes A.O. Scott. “You pay attention to his attention.” Scott, an attentive reader himself, brings Berger’s lifelong project into our famously distractable era; his consideration of Berger is a primer for observation and study, a gentle nudge to focus, lest we lose sight of something essential.

Right now, we’re in the midst of an attention crisis, individually and collectively snared in an infinite scroll of disruption and distraction. Berger saw this crisis coming and foresaw its consequences. In 1978, writing about photography and its impact on the modern world, he argued that the dominance of images “creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: Memory ceases to be necessary or desirable. With the loss of memory, the continuities of meaning and judgment are also lost to us.” That diagnosis seems even truer today, as the functions of remembering, judging and interpreting are increasingly offloaded from human minds and communities into the ether of social media feeds and artificial intelligence. We’re in danger of forgetting how to look.

Paul Rankin’s account of a father-son camping trip and an exchange with an inscrutable stranger reads like it was plucked from an anthology of Southern gothic tales. It’s a tense, slightly spooky meditation on how private faith can grow wild and unruly, how isolation breeds suspicion, and how readily we project our fears.

The more I affirmed my faith, the more suspicious the man became, as if he hadn’t come to share the good news but to catch us in a damnable lie. As the interrogation persisted, I couldn’t help thinking of how Flannery O’Connor once described the South as a Christ-haunted place. I love Jesus, but, good Lord, his ostensible followers can be irksome and even sinister at times. Clearly unconvinced by my profession of faith but out of ideas—or maybe just weary with the effort—the stranger finally walked the three steps back to his camp site.

For lack of a better idea, I relit the stove and was adjusting the flame when the man returned, holding one hand behind his back.

With a flourish he brought out a cross fashioned of two sticks and thin binding wire. This he presented to Fish, then added that he’d have a big surprise waiting in the morning. With that, he turned and walked away, into the woods and out of sight.

Krill, writes Gordon Peake, are “the least zeitgeisty creatures imaginable”: small, shrimp-like crustaceans whose total population numbers in the hundreds of trillions. Until recently, krill has mostly served as a snack for whales. Now, however, krill is “the latest iteration of capitalism on the frozen frontier,” a health supplement whose market is valued at roughly a billion dollars. Peake spends weeks aboard the Allankay with a crew of vegan activists devoted to ending the krill trade. His dispatch is a brisk history of extractive capitalism in the Antarctic, a fascinating study of an utterly uncool creature, and an uproarious account of a reluctant sailor earning his sea legs. Take the journey with him.

I contemplated the fillets of pink salmon defrosting on my kitchen counter, not too far from the shelf where I keep my supplements, including krill oil, part of my long-established daily routine of taking elixirs with vague but impressive claims about “improved heart health” and “enhanced brain function.” Labels depicting regal seabirds and majestic trawlers and a barmy sense that the more expensive the supplement, the more potent it must be also guided my “decision-making.” I told Hammarstedt I was the sort of fellow who enabled such an industry to exist. He responded with an offer: I should go down to Antarctica to see the krill business for myself.

Nearly 60 years ago, John McPhee rafted the Colorado River with a longtime Sierra Club reader and his nemesis, taking notes as the men argued over the fate of the land, the future of Lake Powell. Today, McPhee is 95 years old and widely acknowledged as a singuler chronicler of place, people, and time. As David Schurman Wallace notes, he also has “a good chance of outlasting the lake.” In a stimulating review of Encounters with Wild America, a four-book collection by McPhee, Wallace sets a master’s time-intensive and famously lengthy projects against the contemporary attention economy and the media industry. Longform writing didn’t spring from a hashtag; it was a natural outcome of applying narrative frames to complex subjects, including nature itself. Now, writes Wallace, “this work of dedicated attention, so essential to thinking about, say, the environment, is at risk of becoming a relic.”

[McPhee’s] work is an artifact, one that aids reflection, but demands you stop first and take things slowly. It’s no accident that the books that Library of America have chosen to canonize first are about nature and the people who inhabit it. To appreciate, or even just think about an expanse—a nearly deserted forest, a glacier, a stretch of tundra—is difficult. You can look at an image, but you can just as quickly turn away or scroll past. His writing is a tool that helps us feel distance. You have to spend time on the page getting to know it, trying to imagine things you will most likely never experience yourself.

There are more than 800 surveillance towers located along U.S. borders, a number that is expected to triple in the next decade. These towers, according to a government accountability report, “detect items of interest, such as people.” But interest can be fickle. As part of “Dying on Camera,” a sprawling package of features co-published by the MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego, Lillian Perlmutter reports on the death of Graciela Gómez Hernández, one among hundreds of migrants whose final moments seem as though they should have been witnessed. “The proximity of so many deaths to high-resolution cameras leaves two distinct possibilities,” Perlmutter writes. “Either the system didn’t detect these people in distress, or it did detect them—and officials offered no response. “

Surveillance towers have proliferated in recent years, as contractors added newer camera systems that use artificial intelligence to distinguish border-crossers from other people and animals, and track their movements, at an overall cost of more than a billion dollars. Yet as the cameras scan the terrain, migrants continue to die in plain sight. 

A quarter-century ago, after a deadly terrorist attack raised fiery explosions from the World Trade Center buildings, the US Department of Homeland Security introduced a color-coded advisory system, under which orange signified “High Risk of Terrorist Activities.” For many people, including Dushko Petrovich Córdova, “this ambient, lingering orange signaled that emergency was continuous, a new way of living.” Ours is a world of prison jumpsuits and Home Depot, leaders with an affinity for fake tans and “aptitude for the orange of perpetual crisis,” public health maps of infection rates painted various shades of orange to mark severity, a sky dyed orange by wildfire smoke. We are inundated by the color; it feels, at times, inescapable. Is it really? Follow Córdova to the brilliant end of this stunner.

Once, in the late ’90s, a few years before the dawn of the orange era, I found myself in Montreal for a friend’s wedding. There was a wildfire nearby, and I remember trying to capture the eerie effect of the atmosphere turning orange with the disposable cameras that had been handed out to all the guests. The resulting pictures looked underexposed and nothing more, the otherworldly orange haze rendered mostly regular gray.

So, decades later, in 2023, when photos of smoke from yet another Canadian wildfire began to appear on social media, I was surprised by how well digital photography had captured what had proved so elusive in the late disposable-camera era. The best civilian shot I saw was of the scenery through a window. The cool interior lighting framed the orangeness outside, in the same way that you might frame a sunset, except that instead of a bright band of orange light at the horizon, this orange was everywhere, pressing at all the edges of the window frame and probably trying to get in through the cracks. In another image I saw a gray cat sitting on a windowsill, apparently unperturbed by the wide expanse of horror just behind it.

A few years ago, Sebastian Barry—whose collected literary works, drawn from family history and lore, offer “a loser’s history of 20th-century Ireland”—announced that the final novel in his series would tackle the relationship between his parents. “The declaration seemed to set the table for a feast of disclosure,” writes Giles Harvey, who spoke with Barry for more than a year as the novel took shape. But the feast never arrived. The “career-spanning profile” Harvey once suggested to Barry becomes a study of abuse, memory, and revelation—one Barry’s forte, and now, perhaps, his greatest struggle.

Barry and I corresponded for the next year and a half, during which the novel appeared to be on course. Then, in July of last year, he sent me a surprising email. Something had happened in the time since his father died, Barry explained. “Where there was once a great need to proclaim aloud,” he wrote — neglecting to specify just what it was he’d felt the need to proclaim — Barry now found himself in a different state of mind. “A matter I thought so urgent and in need of saying” had come to seem better served by a “strange new beneficent silence.”

“Who wouldn’t decide to be their most expansive and radiant self?” Ah, but would you pursue that self through a sheet of tempered glass? In this literal tour de force, Katherine Cusumano shadows wrestlers navigating the independent promoters of the Pacific Northwest, granting sensational access to the lives and ambitions behind elaborate personas you’ve never heard of and will almost certainly search YouTube for. Cusumano is note-perfect on the details, taking obvious delight in the gimmicks of each wrestler’s beloved character and relishing the complexity of the choreography, rehearsed in elaborate code. (“Clothesline, crossbody in the corner, clothesline, Superman, Superman, I’m fired up, whoop, sliced bread, Ricky catches, oh shit, real fast.”) Spectacle abounds, but Cusumano rises above it, way up on the turnbuckle, with a heartening consideration of how we understand our own stories, and what we devote to realizing them.

I found myself drawn to this world, to its freakish feats of acrobatics, to its relentless and obsessive blurring of the boundary between reality and story, and, more than anything, to the supreme, sometimes monastic devotion of its competitors. I had been trying for ages to understand competition, ambition, the scaffolding that holds up good-bad, win-lose, and wrestling confounded these binaries. I started talking to Drexl, an old-timer with one foot out the door of his career, who eventually referred me to Amira, an emerging wrestler with an already impressive résumé, and I thought that was so like wrestling, to proffer such perfect narrative symmetry. They agreed—more readily than I’d expected, given how fiercely professional wrestlers have historically protected the secrets of their work—to let me follow them around. Which is how I ended up behind the curtain.

During one of his son’s hockey games, Nick Paumgarten watches as his eight-year-old is hit from behind, only to rise to his feet and use his stick to hit the side of his opponent’s head. Alongside his concern for his son’s head and neck, Paumgarten, who has written about his own hockey-related concussions, rapidly processes the outcomes of the exchange: a game-deciding penalty, his own reflexive rationalization, and the evaluation of other parents who “held me in some way responsible, as both father and coach, for the violence and loss of self-control.” Paumgarten’s essay is rich with such moments of parent-coach double-consciousness, and sensitive to the numerous ways, some of them awful, in which those two identities intrude upon each other.

That Sunday, it wasn’t yet 8 A.M. when a Rye player shoved James from behind into the boards. James went down awkwardly and stayed prone a moment, then leaped up and, with an implausible ferocity, cross-checked the other kid in the ear. The Rye boy collapsed to the ice, and the other kids poured in and began grappling with one another, while parents shouted and pointed. Soon there was a pile of mites, with the two referees pulling players off and flinging them aside like puppies. Through the windows, you could see that the sun had risen over the Long Island Sound. I thought of my son’s fellow second graders back in the city, likely still asleep or watching cartoons in their pajamas or getting dressed for church or whatever the unrinked got up to on weekend mornings, but here at Playland my boy had instigated a munchkin brawl.

Not long after the death of his father, Derek Askey, a new father himself, is selected as an alternate juror for a murder trial. The experience upends the typical vulnerability and openness of his life: Askey, under court order, cannot speak with his wife about the random violence heaped upon him, yet nevertheless worries about what his infant son “received from me” during his wordless days in the courtroom. He must withstand the gruesome details of the criminal trial, yet will not be allowed to participate in the jury’s deliberations. His personal essay is a challenging exploration of enforced silence, and the ways in which we seek to unburden ourselves through voice.

Before the trial, the other would-be jurors and I were asked our names, our occupations, whether we had spouses or children, and whether we could be impartial regarding the case, in which a man was being accused of murdering his girlfriend. At first I was curious to hear other people’s answers—Oh, wow, that guy fixes airplanes?—but curiosity quickly gave way to numb shock at how many people’s lives had been touched by domestic violence or murder. Or both. People you see every day. People who fix airplanes. One man said that, when he was little, his dad had beaten his mother; if he was being honest, he didn’t think he could be unbiased. The man was dismissed, and a woman was called up from the uncomfortable wooden pews to face the same interrogation. She had been attacked herself, she said. Some women had sisters, sisters-in-law, or best friends who’d been hit by a spouse or boyfriend.

Audiophiles are sometimes described in terms reserved for cults; a 1956 New Yorker story, referenced in Colin Vanderburg’s exceptional tour of extreme listening, refers to “a remarkably articulate group of zealots” and “an almost mystical reverence for sound.” Vanderburg travels among the believers, tracing the decades-long promise of “consumer audio innovations” to their technological apex: the New York International Audio Show, where audiophiles sample six-figure sound systems in pursuit of a signal as pure as the world they already inhabit.

More than anything, I have spent long passages of this earthly life sitting on my ass, listening. I listen to music, but what I hear is sound. Texture, timbre, and tone; clarity and detail; space and depth. And I hear, even more acutely, what thwarts sound. Shrill treble, muddled bass — for me these are worse than peeves. They offend hearing. They diminish the human sensorium. Earbuds repulse me; laptop speakers grate; a tabletop Bluetooth unit is a kind of vandalism.

The word audiophile — etymologically, one who “loves to hear” — has a wine-sipping pretension that I hate, but sometimes an ugly shoe fits. Like similarly suffixed psychopathologies, the term suggests a state of warped dependence, of inbent sublimation. I didn’t set out to be this way, but neither have I ever sought help. My symptoms are apparent, their causes obscure. What, after all, do we love when we love sound?

A shattered grin, a wornout crown, a discolored incisor. How do our broken pieces define us? For The American Scholar, Joshua Bodwell offers a brief autobiography in dental work, examining the ways in which a broken tooth and a handful of interventions shaped his self-perception over decades. He also chews over (sorry) a select literary history of teeth, from Chaucer to Raymond Carver, and seems to ask virtually everyone in his life about their own smiles. His essay is an engaging study of imperfection, of a type many folks live with but might easily hide.

I left my chipped tooth untouched for a long time. It continued to discolor. I suppose I accepted it. Maybe it did make me look, as my friend suggested, tough. At the very least, it gave me an air of wildness. Or maybe it was because I was without dental insurance and acceptance was the easiest path. For long periods, I forgot about my tooth entirely. Until, of course, I met someone new who would ask, assuming it was recent, “What happened to your tooth!?” With that I went tight-lipped.

Then a surprising thing began to happen. As I got older, became a father, moved into a more demanding career, I found that I thought about my tooth less and less. At least, I think I did. I mean, I must have: There are photos of me with friends from this period, laughing without reserve, my half fake tooth on full display. A strange thing was happening to my unchipped front tooth, too: It began to seem more perfect than it actually was simply because it shared the stage with a chipped partner.

Count the verbs in Alexander Chee’s essay, note the absence of emotional language, and then thank Annie Dillard for her part. Chee, an essayist and fiction writer, revisits his undergraduate writing workshop with Dillard, the distinguished, Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction writer who died last week at 81. Chee’s account of their semester together is an affectionate portrait that doubles as a brisk craft talk; in it, he puts Dillard’s lessons through their paces, a fitting tribute to the teacher who borrowed cigarette drags from her students, chewed through caramel candies during class, and nurtured his own artistic evolution with her rules and exercises.

Narrative writing sets down details in an order that evokes the writer’s experience for the reader, she announced. This seemed obvious but also radical—no one had ever said it so plainly to us. She spoke often of “the job.” If you’re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don’t have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel.

. . .

One afternoon, at her direction, we brought in our pages, scissors and tape, and told to bring several drafts of an essay, one that we struggled with over many versions.

Now cut out only the best sentences, she said. And tape them on a blank page. And then when you have that, write in around them, she said. Fill in what’s missing and make it reach for the best of what you’ve written thus far.

J.B. MacKinnon files a remarkable dispatch from among the members of the so-called Ostrich Army, who convened last fall in British Columbia to protest the planned culling of 300 or so birds following an H5N1 outbreak. The plight of the birds and the various claims made in their defense—that their antibodies could yield a cure for bird flu or COVID-19, for instance—are intriguing enough on their own. But it’s MacKinnon’s study of the Ostrich Army itself that helps this story take flight (even if the subjects at its center cannot). As helicopters pass overhead and a suspected kill pen mysteriously catches fire, suspicion mounts among the troops, and interpretations diverge. A genuinely surprising portrait of a loose, wayward movement, delivered with peak dramatic tension.

This was the Ostrich Army way: every event called for interpretation, an attempt to see through to hidden endgames. “One thing with black magic,” one camper would later say to me, “is they tell you what they’re going to do before they do it.” And so, at first light, when firefighters had won the day and the smoke cleared to reveal the ostrich flock still standing, the sight didn’t lead to any reconsideration of the night’s theories of clandestine slaughter. The Army simply moved on, hoping to make better sense of the next move, or the one after that. The birds really could die this day.

The FBI isn’t the only interested party searching for Mary Carole McDonnell, the 74-year-old producer behind TV series like I Married a Murderer. There are the former employees who allege millions in unpaid wages, and the two sons who claim their mother forged their signatures on bank documents. There’s an entrepreneur in the United Arab Emirates who accuses her of “mind games,” and the former bank vice-president turned true-crime podcaster who’d like to make a documentary about McDonnell. Cheyenne Roundtree goes deep on the woman who, nearly a decade ago, walked into a California bank with a pecan pie and left with a $15 million loan before vanishing.

The story has all the makings of a viral documentary replete with breathless details, similar to the ones McDonnell’s company produced. Her backstory is littered with half-truths and deceptions, including a lie that her mentally disabled younger sister was murdered after being kidnapped. Questions remain on how she was able to pull off such a brazen heist. And it has sparked an ongoing hunt among the FBI, banking institutions, a true-crime podcaster, and television producers to see who can unravel McDonnell’s tangled history, track her down in a foreign land, recoup the financial losses she caused, and perhaps bring the unbelievable tale to screens.  

Goro Miyazaki’s first feature prompted his father, internationally acclaimed filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, to leave a premier screening for a smoke. At 85, the elder Miyazaki still works daily at Studio Ghibli, the singular storytelling operation beloved for its hand-drawn animations and explorations of environmentalism and family dynamics, in films such as My Neighbor Totoro and Howl’s Moving Castle. Whether Goro may succeed his father as Studio Ghibli’s leader is a central question of Sohee Kim and Felix Gillette’s feature, but it’s not the only one; Ghibli, now a subsidiary of a Japanese TV network, has long avoided the easy profits of sequels and held artistic vision at the center of its business. “To the outside world, how, exactly, Ghibli operates has always been something of a mystery,” Kim and Gillette write. Their story is a quiet, fascinating succession drama, rich with vulnerable characters and concerned with an old question: How can art best sustain itself?

It’s been more than two-and-a-half years since Ghibli’s latest film hit theaters, Hayao’s The Boy and the Heron. The movie, about a youngster who loses his mother and gets mixed up with mystical birds, was a success, winning the Academy Award for best animated feature and generating more than $290 million in global ticket sales. But since its premiere, Ghibli has announced no theatrical movies, intensifying scrutiny of the gnomic company.

The hunt for something new, Yoda and Miyazaki say, is ongoing — but tricky. The process is driven by the intuition of the studio’s aging founders rather than more prosaic concerns such as market research, investors or the calendar. “They don’t think ahead that much,” Yoda says. “We have put out films inspired by whatever’s happening at that point in time.” If it doesn’t feel right, he says, Ghibli won’t force something into production: “It doesn’t mean that they’ve stopped thinking about or coming up with creative ideas. They’re constantly thinking about, ‘OK, if we were to put a film out now, what would that be?’ ”

“I don’t understand enjoying something without caring about it,” Andre Agassi tells Lizzy Goodman midway through her thoughtful character study. Goodman shadows the former tennis great as he tries to get comfortable in his pickleball years, detailing the dynamic interplay of Agassi’s moods: Fun Andre, Philosopher Andre, Dark Andre. Many of the best athlete profiles extend the narrative of a legend beyond the court, making more complicated human meaning once a subject has set the game aside. Here, Goodman and Agassi achieve a gratifying volley, the journalist turning over the athlete’s challenging interiority and sending it back to him to consider.

The made-for-TV version of the Andre 2.0 story might go something like this: A retired, middle-aged tennis great takes up a goofily named, hugely popular new sport and is finally able to exorcise the demons that haunted him throughout his tennis career. This seemed to be the story Agassi was beginning to tell after the watch event, as he sat on an ottoman at the bar of his hotel, holding a dry Belvedere martini with extra olives. He talked about his love of pickle, how it challenged him mentally, how suited his body felt to its movements. He shifted around in his seat, trying to keep his perpetually embattled back from seizing up. “I was on a tennis court today,” he said. “What the [expletive] was I doing on a tennis court?”

But it became apparent, over the months that followed, that it would take more than a new sport to resolve the central question that all three of Agassi’s personas have been wrestling with for a long, long time. He summarized it, wryly, as he ordered another cocktail: “Why do I end up doing so many things that I actually don’t want to do?”

What do privilege and accountability look like for an AI agent on the wrong side of the law? Evan Ratliff rounds up a collection of challenging cases in which AI agents have functioned as co-conspirators in criminal acts, offered courtroom statements on behalf of deceased victims, and perpetrated deeds that, for humans, are considered to be illegal. Legal teams have already sought to seal their clients’ chats with AI agents, likening the exchanges to conversations with an attorney. Ratliff’s feature is an omnibus, and you’ve likely encountered one or two of his stories via other outlets. Here, the concerns he gathers together reveal the breadth of challenges facing the American legal system.

AI chatbots are already serving as confidants and co-conspirators, assisting and even encouraging humans acting on their darkest impulses. They’re occupying ersatz roles as therapists and lawyers, relationships our legal system typically shields with confidential privilege. They’re producing new kinds of criminal evidence and offering up the beguiling possibility of preventing crime before it happens. And as they’re given more autonomy across our digital and physical systems, they’re even gaining the ability to commit crimes themselves, absent specific human instruction — and, perhaps, in defiance of it.

Jake Edmiston, a business reporter for the Toronto Star, thinks highly of his mustard chicken recipe. So when one batch goes over like a lead balloon, he checks his namesake ingredients and finds that his usual glass pot of Maille Dijon Originale is extraordinarily spicy—a fact he confirms, good reporter that he is, by conducting a blind test with a professional taster. In no time, Edmiston is on the floor of one of Canada’s largest mustard mills, trying to stay dry and avoid mustard dust burns(!), and peppering Unilever, Maille’s owner, with questions. This isn’t exactly a case for Benoit Blanc, but Edmiston’s investigation takes a few surprising turns and drops some serious knowledge on glucosinolates on the way. Every ingredient is in harmony here.

“Do a little dollop,” she said, then turned her back so I could do my work in secret.

I spooned the mustard from my jar onto a plate, and some from another jar of Maille I found in the grocery store that morning. She tried the sample from my jar first and sputtered a little. 

“It’s quite spicy,” she said.

I asked her how much spicier it was than the control jar. 

“Like, 10 times,” she said.