All photographs by Oliver Egger.

Just as the sun begins to peek over the flat horizon of Coon Rapids, Iowa, 1,383 pigeons fill the sky. The birds pour out as a single winged mass from the rows of flung-open coops on the transport truck. They rise and circle higher into the morning air. Strong gusts from the south-southwest soon scatter them into hundreds of solitary black dots across the slabs of clouds.

They could fly anywhere. They could head north to go swimming in the cool rush of the Middle Raccoon River. Go southwest to inspect the quality of lampposts in Omaha. Or simply land on and rest in one of the maples below. But each pigeon, as if pulled by a magnet, turns due east. They flap their wings as fast as they can until they disappear over the horizon—all heading toward Chicago, all heading home.

Or so I heard. While the pigeons were being released on that morning of Friday, October 17, in a field in west-central Iowa, I was nearly four hundred miles away, sitting in a dinky Sheraton Hotel near O’Hare Airport for the board meeting of the annual convention of the American Racing Pigeon Union (ARPU). The ARPU is the largest pigeon-racing organization in America, with 6,650 members, but this summit on expanding vaccine accessibility for their birds, boosting youth participation, and updating pigeon tracking software was before an audience of no more than fifteen, which, as one hour became two, dropped to a die-hard five.

As a man in a USA trucker hat rose to ask the board about their pigeon lobbyist (yes, even they have one), the hundreds of airborne pigeons were locking on to the exact coordinates of the home lofts—scattered in backyards and garages within a fifty-mile radius of this hotel—where they had been raised. As they soared over cube-cut farmland, scanning for hawks with their orange eyes, they had no idea that fifty thousand dollars were at stake, that the humans that raised them were anxiously waiting for them to swoop in, or that they were competitors in the convention’s main event: the yearly ARPU combine. No, they were just trying to get home.

Read More

Photograph by David Schurman Wallace.

The old people are going apeshit for the mariachis. My dad and I are sitting on a bench in the plaza at the bottom of the hill, killing time before the next play. We were hoping to do a little reading, but then, under the light of a half moon shaded by trees, the musicians appeared and started playing a promotion for the reopening of a nearby Mexican restaurant. A crowd appeared from thin air: the ranks of the silver-haired and still-fit, the perennial window-shoppers of this cultural oasis, who show more enthusiasm for this advertisement than for any of the Shakespeare plays we’ve been to so far. They take a lot of pictures on their phones of the brass-buttoned musicians, who put in their work. They try to clap along. A couple even dances for a song or two: a dip, a twirl, more applause. Romance never dies—its definition only degrades.

For several years when I was growing up, my family drove to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In Ashland, the main drag of olde-time, small-town storefronts fold into the surround of rolling evergreen hills; an actual babbling brook, complete with footbridge, runs through it. Ashland is a certain kind of cultural haven for those who mute their wealth tastefully under their shawls. With a complex of three theaters at its heart, it hosts a ninety-year-old institution dedicated to spreading the word of the Bard all summer long. As a child, I was always soothed sitting in the darkness, where everything felt perfectly in order. One scene stitched into the next, the actors hit their lines, and together we headed toward marriage or death.

It began as a nostalgia trip. My parents hadn’t been since before the pandemic, and for me it had been even longer. A combination of COVID and wildfires had threatened to bankrupt the festival, so we agreed it was time to both support and take stock. And my parents are getting older—who knows if we’ll ever do it again. On our drive, we see the dead skeletons of trees still left after the burning, with new greenery coming up in their shadows. Read More

Illustration by Sean Donahue.

When one’s boss says, “We’re goin’ to Italy in January,” one is not in a position to disagree. There is Italy: beautiful. There is the gentle coercion: “We’re goin’.” There are the professional considerations: one’s boss. And there is the mysterious magnetism of the occasion itself: Some sort of conference? For international journalists? And we’ll be skiing the whole time?

“It’ll be a team-building thing,” the boss told Our Journalist over the phone. Something more was said about “networking with the foreign press” and “footing the bill for our airfare,” and Our Journalist soon found himself committed to attending the Ski Club of International Journalists’ seventieth annual meeting.

The boss’s name is Ryan, and he has a way of making things happen. “Inviting Chandler to Italy, so it’ll be the four of us,” he texted a few days later. The fourth person is Valen. They are all young American journalists, and they work for the same magazine. Ryan is the managing editor, Valen and Chandler are contributing writers, and Our Journalist is a modest copy editor. He has gently placed commas into Valen’s and Chandler’s articles.

Read More

Martin Amis poses for a photo in his North London home on Oct. 18, 2005. Courtesy of Writer Pictures/Graham Jepson, via AP Images.

“They’re waiting for an autograph from Salman Rushdie,” the man behind me explained. After everything he’s been through. People were gathering behind a barricade at a door of the 92nd Street Y, down the block from the one where I stood waiting for “A Celebration of Martin Amis.” A couple of minutes passed, during which time the man behind me also decided to tell me that he thought the attempt on Donald Trump’s life seemed staged. Then the actual Salman Rushdie arrived at our door, wearing a tan Yankees cap, and walked right in, unbothered by fans. Suspicious of my line mate’s sense of the nature of the assassination attempt and his suggestion that the crowd was there for a novelist, I excused myself and went to investigate. A woman at the barricade said they were there for Murderbot. (This, I gathered from Google later, is an action-comedy TV series.)

A literary writer in 2025 may not pull throngs of fans hanging off a barricade the way an action comedy TV series can. But the crowd passing through the lobby of the 92nd Street Y, there to hear a set of distinguished writers talk about Amis, was indeed soon in the hundreds. Martin Amis, whom Geoff Dyer once called the “Mick Jagger of literature,” was among our last great literary celebrities. Along with his crew of London writer friends—which included Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, and Rushdie—Amis moved like a star, back when writers (I’m told) commanded that kind of public attention.

In the lobby, some attendees self-identified as Amis diehards: Paige McGreevy, who works at the United Nations, remembered being eighteen in Barcelona, staying out until six in the morning, sleeping all day in her blackout-shaded room, and then waking up and inhaling Money in bed. The novelist Julian Tepper recalled with a cringe the time he approached Amis at a PEN gala and did the whole “Mr. Amis, I just wanted to say—” thing. Another Money fan, Emilie Meyer, who said she was a friend of the Amis family’s, marveled at the way its protagonist combines piggishness with a nimble, pixielike wit. Meyer is a bookseller at Aeon Bookstore, and she often recommends Amis’s work to people who come in seeking books for a vacation—that way, she explained, they will always remember it as the trip when they read Amis. Read More