Even his profile of Anthony Bourdain - the closest Keefe comes to a standard, celebrity-driven piece - is threaded through with questions and consequences, touched with darkness (“‘It’s a gloriously doomed enterprise,’ he acknowledged. “A Loaded Gun,” Keefe’s exploration of Amy Bishop, a neurobiologist who shot several of her colleagues during a faculty meeting, and “The Hunt for El Chapo,” his sprawling story of the notorious Mexican drug lord, are both more immediately enthralling (higher stakes from the outset), but each twists and shifts in unanticipated ways. While I have no interest in wine, for example, I was completely absorbed by “The Jefferson Bottles,” Keefe’s account of possible counterfeiting of ultra-rare wines, in this case, the purported French cellar belonging to Thomas Jefferson. Keefe’s talent is the sort which defies easy pigeonholing: no matter the subject matter, Keefe delivers a thought-provoking, high stakes, utterly compulsive piece. That early observation seems to serve Keefe as a guiding principle throughout the pieces collected in “Rogues.” It is in the shorter form, however, where Keefe is truly at his best. With his last two books, Keefe has established himself as one of the finest non-fiction writers of his generation: “ Say Nothing” was a brilliant exploration of the Troubles in Northern Ireland through the lens of a mysterious disappearance, while “ Empire of Pain” was a deep dive into the Sackler family and the ongoing opioid crisis, and his podcast series, “Wind of Change,” explored the possibility that the CIA might have written the Scorpions’ power ballad which some credit with ending the Cold War.

A new story from George Saunders requires prompt attention (this was previously known as the “Alice Munro exception”).Ī new piece from Patrick Radden Keefe? I will drop everything to read it. There are, however, three exceptions to this ritual: the fiction issues get devoured, cover-to-cover (though they may have to wait for vacation). It’s the curse of the New Yorker, something about good intentions. To be clear, I subscribe to the New Yorker I have done for years.Īnd the arrival of each new issue is the beginning of a multi-part ritual: scan the table of contents, whisper “Oh, I’ll have to read that,” put the new issue on the coffee table, and, three to five days later, move it to the stack of older issues in the basket beside the couch, where it languishes forgotten, creating a stratified fossil portrait of the year’s progress.Īdmit it: you do very much the same. Normally I would feel a bit awkward about making a confession like this, but I have a feeling I’m not alone: I don’t actually read the New Yorker magazine.

Rogues keefe