For a brief time, Sacha Jafri was both the creator of the world’s largest painting and one of the world’s most expensive living artists, after his 17,000‑square‑foot work The Journey of Humanity was theatrically “sold” for $62 million at a Dubai charity auction. The buyer, French “crypto billionaire” André Abdoune, never paid a cent and, given his history as a serial fraudster, almost certainly never will—meaning no money ever reached the charities that were promised the proceeds. So what was the real story: a giant painting, or a giant scam?

Many of Jafri’s other claims do not stand up to scrutiny. He is often touted as an artist whose work sells in the millions, but publicly available commercial auction records are more modest. His most expensive painting before The Journey Of Humanity was a piece called Dance of the Midnight Samurai, which sold in 2019 for approximately $70,000. The previous year, another work, Dreamscape II, went unsold at two auctions, before eventually being acquired for $893. Newspaper articles document purchases by Kevin Spacey and Guy Ritchie, but there are no reports of sales to Bill Gates, Leonardo DiCaprio, Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. No pictures exist of their red-printed hands.

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.

I had never heard of the delightfully named Hudsonian godwit before this piece—yet, given their achievements, they deserve global fame. These slight, mudflat-loving shorebirds hold the record for the longest nonstop flight, clocking journeys of seven thousand miles or more that one scientist deems “technically impossible.” Rivka Galchen follows researchers from Patagonian mudflats to Alaskan bogs as they try to understand the biology behind these incredible flights. Along the way, she even gets to hold one of our little celebrities, an “otherworldly and wondrous” experience.

Migratory shorebirds are usually not a person’s first bird crush. They lack the supernatural aura of the resplendent quetzal, and they don’t go in for outlandish mating displays like that of the prairie chicken. As the Princeton University biology professor and shorebird-lover David Wilcove put it, migratory shorebirds can give an impression of being “little brown guys, buzzing around in the mud, not too big and not too small, and, whether one is a stint or a phalarope or a knot or a godwit, they’re just kind of there.” And yet, Wilcove told me, they are a birder’s kind of bird. Once people get to know them, they tend to fall in love.

What does it mean to live in a disappearing place? For Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, Brad Bolman, a professor of history and environmental studies at Tulane University, writes about New Orleans, the shifting borders between land and sea, and the political and economic forces that continue to shape the city’s fate in a time of climate catastrophe.

If Los Angeles is the city that has been imaginatively destroyed again and again in film and TV, as Thom Andersen argues in Los Angeles Plays Itself, New Orleans is the one that has been destroyed countless times in reality. We have survived worse and rebuilt before, many insisted. We’re staying.

It was a reaction as understandable emotionally as it was disconnected from environmental reality. But that gap is a feature of life in the Crescent City. As I watched my first Mardi Gras parade this spring, junk falling in never-ending torrents from brightly decorated floats, a friend sympathetically interjected, “This must be driving you crazy.” What they meant was that as someone who teaches about environmental history but isn’t from here, I must be especially affected by the throwaway culture of the city’s most famous fête and its tons and tons of plastic beads, made from the same fossil fuels that are causing sea levels to rise around us.