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Profiles: Westchester County
New Yorker, November 13, 1978
I THOUGHT I ought to take a look at it from the air, so I got hold of my friend Hadden, who has a plane-a little Aeronca Champ that he keeps, in partnership with six others, up in Dutchess County. You couldn’t have asked for a better day. There wasn’t a …Read More
Personal History: Russian Blood, Part 2 Mopsy, Nika, and Uncle
New Yorker, May 3, 1982
MOPSY and I went back together as far as I can go. Roaring Gap, North Carolina, summer of 1951. Mopsy (her youngest daughter, reading about Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail in a little book by Beatrix Potter, decided she should be called Mopsy, and that became her family name; her real name …Read More
Our Far Flung Correspondents (Madagascar)
New Yorker, Mar 7, 1988
THE countryside through the train window could be almost anywhere. The villages dotting it, each clustered around a tall, thin steeple, look French, and the trucks and cars on a road running alongside the tracks are definitely FrenchPeugeots, Renaults, the redoubtable Citroen 2-CV. But they are battered models from ten or …Read More
My Father’s Butterfly
As originally appeared in Natural History Magazine, March, 1996
The display case slid out easily from the tall metal cabinet in the American Museum’s Department of Entomology, and there they were-two small butterflies with shiny, azure wings. My father had caught them on the island of Jamaica in 1933. Ten years later, two of the department’s …Read More
Museum of Money, Talk of the Town
New Yorker, Feb 10, 1986
A FRIEND in Rio de Janeiro Writes: The evolution of the Brazilian cruzeiro is a numismatic saga of incredible complexity. My personal familiarity with the saga covers only ten years, but in that time the changes that the cruzeiro has gone through have been wild, to say the least. When I …Read More
Murder, Drugs, and Money in the Sierra Madre
Outside Magazine, March 1995
IN THE PAST YEAR, EDWIN BUSTILLOS HAD SURVIVED three attempts on his life by the narcotraficantes, and there he was-or what was left of’ him-in the crowd that had come to Chihuahua Airport to meet my plane from Mexico City. His most conspicuous disfigurement, as he greeted me, was his white, sightless …Read More
Murder in Brazil, The Rain-Forest Martyr Chico Mendes
As originally appeared in Vanity Fair Magazine, April 1989
One afternoon a few weeks after Chico Mendes was murdered at his home in Xapuri, deep in the Brazilian Amazon, two thousand miles from the dolce vita of Rio de Janeiro, I went into the rain forest with Raimundo Gadelha, Chico’s thirty-year-old brother-in-law. Xapuri is in the state of Acre, …Read More
Letter From Lhasa
Vanity Fair, May 1991
The Tibetans have an unusual procedure for disposing of their dead: sky burial. The corpses are carried up to craggy hilltops, hacked into little pieces, and fed to lammergeiers, a huge, brown species of vulture. There are practical reasons for this ancient custom: the ground is frozen much of the time and …Read More
Fox Holes, Talk of the Town
A FRIEND who lives way upstate writes: This is kind of an embarrassing confession to make, but this fall I’ve been between projects and I’ve got deep into golf. What interests me most about the game is its unconscious, Zen aspect. I’m practicing what I call “calm recognition”-taking in the flowing contours of the links, …Read More
Flight of the Monarchs
Vanity Fair, November 1999
One afternoon at the end of last August a monarch butterfly, a robust, freshly hatched male who had been cruising around for a few days in a meadow in southern Manitoba, taking nectar from asters and goldenrods, abruptly decamped and started to make his way south in a frenzy of flapping. He …Read More