Mark Singer

Raising a glass to the New Yorker legend—born five years before the founding of this magazine, and a contributor for the past seventy-six—as he celebrates a milestone birthday.

Before Milch went to work in Hollywood, he taught writing at Yale while collaborating on a two-volume anthology of American literature with the critics Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, who had been a mentor to Milch when he was an undergraduate there, in the mid-sixties. Reading Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Twain, James, and Faulkner in such depth helped Milch create complex television characters whose voices were each marked by singular diction. His dialogue was suffused wit…

His words increasingly signify his confusion about who he is and what he has got himself into.

I still wince at his dead-on appraisal of my travel piece: “You’ll notice that I stopped marking this halfway through. What you’ve written is interesting only to you.”

Despite the danger, James Foley went to Syria to bear witness and give others a voice.

Nearby stands the customarily taciturn Bob Gibson—the St. Louis Cardinals samurai whom Angell artfully opened up for a 1980 Profile, on the cusp of Gibby’s election to the Hall—and across the way his garrulous battery mate Tim McCarver (“I caught him a hundred and ninety-seven starts”) holds forth. Now George Brett comes to pay his respects—“a brilliant repeated exhibit of precision and style and success,” Angell once wrote, teeing up a Muybridge-esque anatomization of Brett’s hitting mechanics—…

One recent weeknight in the vaulted-ceilinged refectory of the General Theological Seminary, in Chelsea, Jonah Disend threw a bar mitzvah for Redscout, the…

Thomas Rayfiel’s novel “In Pinelight” presents the monologue of an elderly retired deliveryman in upstate New York, a soul-shriving stream of …

A Michigan dentist’s improbable transformation.

As someone who once devoted several months to studying Donald Trump’s career and habits, an endeavor alternately excruciating and pleasurable, I …

Nikola Tesla

Mark Singer on Cooke City, Montana, where “high-marking”—a dangerous snowmobiling sport—is king.

From 1993: The magician’s deft illusions flout reality, and he rejects the notion that magic is a suitable entertainment for children.