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.

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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

Photograph by Meg Bernhard.

Alfalfa smells warm and earthy and sort of sweet, like socks after a long hike, but not in a bad way. It is soft, with oblong green leaves the size of a pinkie nail. I know this because on a chilly February afternoon I drove a hundred and forty miles to the Imperial Valley, one of the state’s largest farming regions, pulled over to an unattended field, and ripped up a clump. It was a brown day; the wind turbines in Palm Springs were spinning and a dust storm was brewing. The air was more humid than normal. Alfalfa grows everywhere around the West, but it’s peculiar to see vast green fields in this place—a low, dry desert where vegetation is scarce and water even scarcer. But the Imperial Valley, home to an accidental salt lake and a mountain made of multicolored painted adobe clay, is one of California’s weirder places. The Salton Sea’s gunky shoreline takes off-road vehicles prisoner. A roving mud puddle eats at the highway. Roughly a hundred and fifty thousand acres of alfalfa grow in a place that sees fewer than three inches of rain a year.

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Photograph by Austin Aughinbaugh. Courtesy of Studio Augie.

A 1,650-pound American bucking bull named Man Hater paused at the entrance to the Madison Square Garden floor and fixed me with his dark, soulful eyes. “Hi, puppy,” I said.

A bearded wrangler scoffed. “That’s no puppy.”

Before opening night of the Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden, on January 3—the eighteenth annual such event and first to sell out all three days—a small press corps had gathered by the tunnel to watch the athletes arrive. Not the human athletes but their bovine counterparts, which plodded up the corridor, chased by a mounted cowboy chanting in a low voice. The bulls advanced with the sheepish dignity of prizefighters in ill-fitting suits.

In a few hours, these animals would try to buck their riders, who would try desperately to stay on for eight seconds—the basic drama of a rodeo. A popular myth claims rodeo bulls are compelled to buck by a strap wrapped around their testicles, but as any spectator can observe, these are clearly swinging free. “Take a rope, tie it around yours, and pull it up tight—and see how high you can jump,” says Chad Berger, a livestock contractor, in a Professional Bull Riders (PBR) promotional video meant to dispel this misconception. The real instigator is a strap wrapped around the bull’s flank—an annoyance that provokes an animalistic urgency to get it off, a response I know well, having once attempted to put pants on my dog for Halloween. “It’s basically like if I tickle your armpits—that’s about what it does to them bulls,” Berger says. Madison Square Garden’s three-day Monster Energy Buck Off, I learned, would be fueled by a tickling of the bulls. Read More

Photograph by Helen Rouner.

The evening is balmy on Little Island. Already, I’ve forgotten that there’s a highway just on the other side of the slope, beyond which programmers are riding scooters home from the Google offices and tourists are taking selfies with a globally migrating installation of rattan elephants meant to symbolize “coexistence.” The carefully overgrown flora, maximalist and faintly tropical, is still lush here in early September, and it’s been a long time since the Meatpacking District felt more like a neighborhood than a novelty.

It’s an impression, I’m learning anew, that gets stranger with repetition. I’m standing in the same place I was last night when the authorities canceled the performance of Anthony Roth Costanzo’s The Marriage of Figaro for a rainstorm that never quite materialized. The crowd then had exhibited all five stages of grief at the news: The Marriage of Figaro is sold out for the entirety of its nearly four-week run, and there is no rain date. Returning to the pier tonight, having been granted a reserved seat by the gracious staff, I have a vague sense of traumatic reenactment, that retracing my steps like this and expecting a different outcome might be a sign of my impending insanity. Read More