RECENT WORK (Selected)
“The Smell Test,” The New York Times Magazine, June 2024.
Most diseases can be identified by methods more precise and ostensibly scientific than aroma, however, and we tend to treat odor in general as a sort of taboo. “A venerable intellectual tradition has associated olfaction with the primitive and the childish,” writes Mark Jenner, a professor of history at the University of York. Modern doctors are trained to diagnose by inspection, palpation, percussion and auscultation; “inhalation” is not on the list, and social norms would discourage it if it were.
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“The Secrets of the JFK Assassination Archive,” New York, November 2023.
The commissioners were at one point solemnly passing round Kennedy’s bloodied necktie from November 22; a bullet hole was clearly visible. When the garment came to him, Dulles, puffing on his pipe, examined it for a moment and then, passing it along, remarked, “I didn’t know Jack wore store-bought ties.”
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“The Odor of Things,” Harper’s, December 2021.
We tend to experience the olfactory realm as a shapeless suffusion, forever shifting, eluding description the way fog eludes the grasp of one’s hand.
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“What Lies Beneath,” The Guardian Long Read, November 2021.
He kept a trove of photographs of cadavers in various states of mutilation, which he liked to show around, and also delighted in telling the story of his mother’s first husband, a German who had been decapitated by the Nazis. “He was a charming young man,” a friend from that period told me, “who had an extreme attraction to the macabre.”
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“Superspreader,” The New York Times Magazine, May 2020.
“Hubris,” Raoult told me recently, at his institute in Marseille, “is the most common thing in the world.” It is a particularly dangerous malady in doctors like him, whose opinions are freighted with the responsibility of life and death. “Someone who doesn’t know is less stupid than someone who wrongly thinks he does,” he said. “Because it is a terrible thing to be wrong.”
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“The Kilogram’s Long, Slow Climb to Harmony,” NewYorker.com, November 2018.
Insofar as the notion of the American avoirdupois pound has any official meaning, it is by relation to the kilogram, of which, by law, it is 0.45359237. This is not to suggest that the kilogram possesses some inherent authority. Like all units of measure, it is a tool entirely of man’s making. It exists in nature no more than a pound does, or a unicorn.
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“Terrorist by Association,” The New Republic, October 2018.
“Abdelkader Merah created Mohammed Merah,” the public prosecutor would claim. The two had functioned as a unit, “the one who played the role of sage, the other who played the role of combatant.” The prosecution held that Abdelkader had radicalized his brother, had provided him with the beliefs that were evidently the cause of his violence, and on its face this seemed a perfectly reasonable claim.
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"There Will Always Be Fires," Harper’s, August 2018.
Oxygen, fuel, and heat, each in sufficient proportion, will ignite into fire, releasing more heat, igniting more fuel and oxygen, releasing more heat, and so on. A bad wildfire is the consequence of still further chain reactions, a small fire that sets off a stronger fire that sets off a fire that is stronger still—a succession of cataclysms, each more terrible than the last and each opening the way to something more terrible than itself.
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"Did We Adopt a Jihadist?" GQ, November 2017.
The violence in Syria was only the handmaiden to something more powerful, it seemed to him, some raging elemental force that had billowed up over the territory like a storm and seized control of the inhabitants below. “The place is under a spell,” Padnos said. Sweden was not.