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Fifty years ago, a glitchy yet terrifying animatronic shark persuaded movie audiences never to go in the water again. Luckily—for the photographer Tod Papageorge, at least—it didn’t keep people off the beaches. That same year, 1975, Papageorge was slowly making his way across the country, from New York City, where he’d become known for his 35-mm. street scenes, to Los Angeles, where he’d shoot throngs of sun-dazed, sweat-glazed beachgoers with a clunkier medium-format camera. He made four trips to L.A.’s beaches between 1975 and 1988, and a selection of the resulting black-and-white photographs—detail-rich, often dense, rapturous yet funny tableaux of stripped-down bodies engaged in sport or sprawled on the sand—will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Connecticut through October 26th.

Amazingly, few of Papageorge’s subjects stare directly at the guy lugging a 6x9-cm.-format camera around the beach, although, as he said, “even on the nude beaches, I was out there in my street clothes, looking like an idiot.” He noted that this was the same kind of format camera that Brassaï used to photograph in Paris night clubs, in the thirties and forties; Papageorge would also use it to photograph inside Studio 54—a series in which the revellers seem as oblivious to his presence as the sunbathers had been (could there be a correlation between the effects of club drugs and heatstroke?).

“In both cases, I just would stand still and pretend I didn’t exist, and eventually people seemed to accept the fact that I didn’t exist, that I’d somehow spontaneously combusted,” Papageorge recalled (this was even true of Wilt Chamberlain, whom he once stumbled upon in L.A.). “I would wait and wait until what I felt was a singular moment, only one moment, just one chance to lift the camera in a single gesture and make a single exposure.”

Papageorge, who is now eighty-four, grew up in the coastal town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In the summers, he worked in his father’s restaurant—“I’m Greek-American, so that’s a necessary condition,” he said. “Hot and sweaty after a day at work, I’d drive to the beach and swim.” But when it came to the West Coast, he added, “I’d never seen an Annette Funicello film, nor was I particularly interested in the Beach Boys.”

He was surprised by what he found in California: “I guess in your imagination you see four or five people wandering around, where in reality it’s piles, crowds of people moving around, so it’s much more enticing, engaging, exciting, because it is so complex.” Papageorge is drawn to formally challenging scrums, which his photos transform into theatrical vignettes or semi-abstractions: in addition to Studio 54, he has photographed in sports arenas, Central Park, and the Acropolis.

The photographer Lisa Kereszi, who organized the new show, is the assistant director in photography at the Yale School of Art, where Papageorge served as director of graduate studies in photography from 1979 to 2013. According to MOCA CT, a staggering forty-one of Papageorge’s M.F.A. students went on to receive Guggenheim Fellowships, and prints of some of their grad-school work, as well as a looping slideshow of photos by almost three hundred of Papageorge’s other students, will be featured in a concurrent show at MOCA CT titled “In the Pool.” The name refers to a renovated former swimming pool at Yale, in which classes and photo critiques are held. Also, Kereszi likes to compare being an art student to “doing laps, over and over—you have crits, over and over, and you get better and better. You know, sink or swim.”

“He was never Doctor Feelgood,” the late photographer and Yale professor Richard Benson once wrote of Papageorge’s pedagogical style. Still, Benson and Papageorge’s good-cop, bad-cop routine (Papageorge’s description) clearly produced results. One infamous Papageorge zinger, “Your work looks like you’ve never read a book” was all the more stinging because Papageorge, who was an English major, has long insisted on “the absolutely direct relationship between photographs and poems.”

Papageorge has said that he also views his beach photographs as musical. In college, he played timpani in the orchestra and drums in a jazz group. When asked whether pounding a drum—bang, bang, boom!—was the opposite of lurking on a beach, hoping to become invisible, he countered, “When you lift the camera to make the picture, that’s something of a ‘bang, bang, boom!’—at least for the photographer.”

The first time I glimpsed the city of New Orleans, I was a small boy in the wheelhouse of a tugboat. My father pushed barges up and down the Mississippi River, and sometimes he let me tag along. The city seemed so luminous at night—so different from tiny Convent, Louisiana, where I was from—that it felt otherworldly and inaccessible. In 2020, I moved there during a painful divorce. Because of that childhood memory, my relocation felt somehow transgressive. I was going where I did not belong.

Shortly thereafter, I began to notice the cats. About a dozen lingered, lazy yet alert, behind my apartment complex. Whenever someone approached, they scattered and hid beneath the building. (I found their behavior relatable.) One evening, I came upon a lean and scraggly cat on the sidewalk that looked dead. Upon closer inspection, I saw that her eyes were swollen shut. She scurried off when I reached out to comfort her.

That night, I stared at my ceiling, worrying that the cat would waste away or wander into traffic. The next morning, I left out something for her to eat. A friend suggested that I research “trap, neuter, return” groups, which sterilize and vaccinate feral cats.

Two days later, I met Nita Hemeter, the short, bespectacled co-founder of a nonprofit called Trap Dat Cat, in front of her pink house. Her face bore the weary bemusement of a veteran of some terrible war. She told me that she had started rescuing animals after reading “Animal Liberation,” by the philosopher Peter Singer, and she lent me two traps. “I’ve been trying for years to get someone to volunteer to trap at that apartment,” she told me. If I succeeded in my mission, she went on, her organization would find the cat a veterinarian.

I baited the traps with mackerel, per Nita’s instructions. Cats sniffed through the wires; one sat on top, as if mocking my efforts, and another crawled inside. But the injured cat appeared only once, uninterested in the trap. After two nights, I resorted to a backup plan: giving out food directly, in hopes of rallying her immune system. Her fellow-cats weren’t going to wait for her to find her Friskies, so this effectively meant feeding the entire colony every day and night. Within a few weeks, Squinty Cat was letting me stand beside her while she ate, and her eyes seemed healed. But now I had a different problem. The cats expected me.

My nightly rounds, which cost a fortune in cat food, continued even after I moved to a new apartment. (My daughter joked that the cats had given me toxoplasmosis and were controlling my mind.) The traps worked fine on other cats; each time a newcomer appeared, I trapped her, brought her to Nita, and released her after a vet neutered and vaccinated her. Each one must have felt like she was being briefly abducted by a U.F.O.

The cats led me, in a roundabout way, to a dog. Three years after I adopted the colony, while checking my mailbox, I made eye contact with a woman who was stapling signs to telephone poles: Michelle Cheramie, the founding director of Zeus’ Rescues, another local nonprofit. I knew her organization well; I’d adopted two house cats from Zeus’. “I lost my dog here in Mid-City,” she said, and handed me a flyer, which I accepted out of politeness. “LOST,” it read. “PINK COLLAR, BROWN SPOTS. IF YOU SEE SCRIM, DON’T CHASE.” It featured a shaggy white dog with sad eyes and floppy ears, along with her phone number.

I was not planning to look for the dog. If anything, I planned to look away. I didn’t have the capacity to care for more animals, and I knew I’d feel beholden to any needy creature I saw. But it was difficult to ignore the van from Zeus’ Rescues, which started turning up at all hours. Whenever someone reported a sighting, Michelle posted the location on social media.

Late one night, weeks later, while depressed and doomscrolling in bed, I came across a string of recent Scrim sightings at intersections near my house. “If you are in the area, please text with location, direction headed and a picture if you can get one,” Michelle wrote. I don’t know why I went out that night. I’m not even a dog person. But it was that or reflect on every mistake I’d ever made.

Two minutes later, two blocks from home, I saw him—a seventeen-pound mutt sniffing around someone’s garden. I kept my distance and messaged Michelle. Immediately, she called me. “The rescue van is just around the corner,” she said. “Keep an eye on him.” The street was poorly lit, with gnarled tree roots that animals could hide behind; passing cars created their own roving shadows. Scrim vanished.

When the van rolled up behind me, Tammy Murray, a woman in a T-shirt and yoga pants, climbed out. She seemed to be not much older than me, perhaps in her early fifties, and she looked exhausted. I told her what had happened. “He does that,” she said. I live in Mid-City, a historically working-class residential area that is more laid-back and lived-in than the French Quarter, a couple miles away. It’s known for colorful shotgun houses, which are tightly clustered and raised against flooding. Tammy typically brought snares or a net gun to Scrim encounters, but he could duck under a house and emerge a block away.

Michelle originally rescued Scrim from a kill shelter in November, 2023, shortly before he was set to be euthanized. He was physically healthy but behaved like a dog who’d experienced abuse and neglect. During a three-month foster placement, he was docile and frightened, but not aggressive. Then, on the first night of a trial adoption in Mid-City, he escaped.

Tammy and her partner, Freba Maulauizada, both lived in Mid-City and had backgrounds in animal rescue, so a couple days after he got loose they volunteered to help. Michelle lived Uptown, twenty minutes away, so she gave them the keys to the rescue van. But Scrim wasn’t food-motivated and ignored traps. You couldn’t get close enough to use a catch pole or a net. He had “lost-dog syndrome,” which meant that he was fear-driven and survival-focussed, and he responded to calls by running.

Over the next several weeks, Michelle asked people to share footage of Scrim from home-security cameras. A record-breaking heat wave settled in, and Scrim was moving only at night. Volunteers organized a neighborhood-wide stakeout, which had the feel of a quiet, quintessentially New Orleans block party—people sitting on porches, drinking wine. I manned a street corner from 11 P.M. to 3 A.M. Even then, there were so many people patrolling the area that Google Maps showed standstill traffic. None of them found Scrim.

After that first night, I found myself driving the long way home from my cat colony. For reasons that weren’t clear to me, I went for early-morning walks and evening runs in places where he’d been spotted. I often saw Tammy in the van. I also noticed a middle-aged woman, who had short blond hair and bright-blue eyes, zipping around on an electric scooter at odd hours and in odd places. Finally, driving by one day, I rolled down my window and asked what she was doing.

“Looking for that dog,” she said in a melodic New Orleans accent. Her name was Barbara Burger, and she worked as a court reporter. Each night, she drove twenty minutes from the suburb of River Ridge to help. “It’s so sad that he’s still running the streets,” she told me. She, too, tended to a cat colony.

Sometimes, I saw a tattooed woman in her early thirties, serenely riding her bicycle. I assumed that she was either dealing drugs or searching for Scrim. Eventually, she introduced herself as Bonnie Goodson. “I’m six years sober, living in New Orleans, so I dabble in insomnia,” she told me. She’d always been too scared of bad drivers to bike in the city, but she felt safer at night.

By late July, Tammy, Michelle, Barbara, Bonnie, and I were sharing updates over a walkie-talkie app called Zello. It wasn’t exactly a social activity; the only way to cover a lot of ground was to avoid one another. But we were seeing our city in a new way. Michelle heard updates from cops and sex workers; even people who stole catalytic converters from cars started to look familiar. We also learned about each other. Michelle, who’d previously worked in I.T., started Zeus’ after seeing the plight of animals during Hurricane Katrina. Bonnie had been in the film industry for fifteen years. Freba, I learned, had migrated to the United States from Afghanistan after the Soviets invaded. When Tammy told her that I had done a tour of duty there, she lit up and said, “You’ve been to my country?” We often talked about her homeland. She once wrote that, as a gay Muslim person in a red state, she identified with the way pit bulls are stereotyped and stigmatized.

Tammy had recently lost her father and closed a furniture-building business. Long patrols gave her time to reassess her life. She gained a special understanding of Scrim’s preferred roads and routes: Palmyra, Conti, Dorgenois; the Lafitte Greenway, a running path that heads southeast toward the French Quarter; and railroad tracks that head northwest. She knew that thunder scared him enough to make him run across six lanes of Canal Street traffic.

Scrim could easily outrun our foot patrols and outmaneuver our cars, so we mostly kept track of his health from afar and tried to determine which house he slept under. Michelle hoped we could barricade all four sides and catch him. When we figured out that he ate cat food at several colonies in Mid-City, Tammy set up twenty-four new feeding stations; other animals were benefitting, too.

One night, after a sighting in Mid-City, Michelle drove up to my car and asked, “Can you drive my truck?” I got behind the wheel while she stood and navigated through the sunroof. Then a voice from the bed of the truck startled me.

“Hi, I’m Kanyon!”

Kanyon McLean was a cheerful young veterinarian who worked at a wildlife sanctuary outside the city. She regularly treated zebras and bison; she was carrying a rifle that shot tranquillizer darts. It was my first time driving a truck with a gunner in the back since Afghanistan. (In four months of weekend shifts, she only attempted to dart Scrim once; the circumstances were seldom right for his safety, or everyone else’s.)

Local media started to cover Scrim. A cute lost dog, a number to text your sightings to: it was an interactive adventure, perfect for the Times-Picayune and the evening news. At first, the breathless news stories seemed charming and harmless. “SCRIM HASN’T BEEN SPOTTED IN 2 DAYS. DOG RESCUER FEARS WORST.” “HOW WILL SCRIM THE STRAY DOG SURVIVE THE COMING COLD SNAP?” They publicized Zeus’ Rescues and the broader rescue community; many people started noticing stray animals. Thousands of texts arrived with possible sightings.

But the publicity also brought out darker impulses. Many strangers accused us of chasing a dog that wanted to be free. This idea seemed nonsensical to us; he ran recklessly through traffic and we witnessed many close calls. Animals died on the city’s roads so often that we kept heavy-duty trash bags in our cars. But Michelle received regular threats. People routinely reported that Scrim was dead, and we had to investigate every time. “I’m barbecuing and eating him,” a particularly barbaric caller said. If someone said he’d been hit by a car somewhere, we might have to search under a dozen nearby houses. We became leery of attention, and Tammy took to calling the prank callers back in retaliation. One night, Freba, noticing that Tammy wasn’t in bed, knocked on the bathroom door.

“Is everything O.K.?”

“Yes.”

“Are you calling that number again?”

“Yes.”

In October, after more than five months of searching, Michelle forwarded a Scrim sighting a few blocks from my house, near a quiet brickyard that Tammy suspected of being his lair. Could I go check it out? I really couldn’t—I was on deadline—but, minutes later, I was there. I found him walking carelessly along the road, the raggedy king of Bienville Street. I followed at a distance as he entered the parking lot of a limousine company.

Scrim noticed me and trotted off, but he moved with familiarity. When Tammy and Michelle arrived, we walked along a fence that surrounded the lot; aside from a gap in the rear, which we could seal, there was no place for him to crawl under or leap over. A week later, someone saw him again. Tammy, Bonnie, Michelle, and one of her employees, Syd DeVictoria-Michel, surrounded the area, and Michelle hit him with a tranquillizer dart. For eight minutes, he ran around with nowhere to go, until Michelle and Tammy managed to snatch him up.

News of Scrim’s rescue spread rapidly. I heard that, in a line at a Taylor Swift concert, someone shouted, “They found Scrim!” and the crowd erupted with cheers. I felt profoundly relieved—but also confused, even bereft. What had I been a part of? Why? I still trudged out to the cat colony nightly, and every so often a familiar furry face vanished. Although I never tried to name the cats, I felt the loss every time. “We might be the only love they ever experience,” Tammy told me one night, over drinks. “I try to remind myself of that.”

Scrim made national news. The New Orleans City Council recognized us at a ceremony for our “dedication to capturing Scrim, the terrier mutt and notorious canine runaway of Mid-City, after 177 days of search and rescue efforts.” (Walking to City Hall, Bonnie told me, “Usually when I come here, I’m protesting.”) When I’d cross some intersection we’d patrolled a hundred times, I’d snap a photo of the street signs and drop it in the group chat. We gathered at one another’s houses to tell the same war stories again and again: the time Michelle and Tammy had had him under a house and a stranger’s “help” allowed him to escape; the time a child had thrown a brick at Tammy, and she’d chased him while promising to give him “an ass beating.”

Nearly six months on the run had cost Scrim a nail, half an ear, and several teeth. (He probably chewed on garbage and stones.) At least twice, he’d been shot with pellet guns or .22-calibre rifles, which helped explain times when he’d vanished for days. He seemed anxious and depressed. We knew he had a long emotional recovery ahead. Michelle sometimes texted us maps showing coördinates from a G.P.S. collar that Scrim now wore, as if to say, “Here is Scrim’s precise location—we’ll never have to search for him again!”

Then, just before 9 A.M. on November 16th, Michelle sent several maps in rapid succession. “PLEASE COME HERE NOW,” she wrote. “He jumped out of my 2nd floor window and started running.”

We converged on Scrim’s coördinates as quickly as we could, but he was back in flight mode. While we waited for him to settle down, Bonnie, Barbara, and I stood near a busy highway. Everything felt misshapen and dreamlike. We’d always searched at night, but now it was daytime; the houses here were much nicer than in Mid-City. We expected his G.P.S. collar to last three days, but his dot disappeared within three hours.

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as drained as I did that day. In Mid-City, Scrim knew where to find food and shelter, but now he was lost in Uptown, and probably hungry. Interstate 10 divided the city like an asphalt moat; I wasn’t even sure that I could get back to Mid-City on foot, and I could read road signs.

We resumed evening patrols, but for me they felt half-hearted, and I soon gave up. The only good news was that Michelle’s social-media posts were met with a supportive response. (“There is nothing negative that you can say to me or about him getting loose again that I haven’t already said to myself in the last 24 hours,” she’d written.) He had pushed through a window screen. Footage from a Ring camera showed him falling thirteen feet, followed by a thump and a yowl. Press coverage called him Houdini.

Days later, Tammy, Michelle, and I spotted Scrim in Audubon Park. We watched him wander near the giraffes in a nearby zoo. He walked stiffly, but his leg didn’t seem broken. Someone eventually startled him and he ran. After that, Tammy set up a feeding station nearby.

I spent the next three weekends mapping out local cat colonies and stapling “LOST” signs to telephone poles. Anytime someone made eye contact, I approached, as Michelle had once approached me. “I lost my dog,” I’d say, and hand them a flyer. We posted sightings on a public map, and, before long, large swaths of the city were dotted with pins. He walked the St. Charles Avenue Streetcar line; he settled in near some older houses in the Lower Garden District. Tammy was convinced that he was trying to find his way back to Mid-City. The interstate was impassable, however, unless he walked a perilous bike path or cut through the crowds downtown. “He’s smart,” Tammy told me. “He’ll figure something out.”

On December 12th, after nearly a month, the Scrim sightings suddenly stopped. Anxious days passed. I noticed that, without admitting it, the team had started talking about him in the past tense. We were each, in our own way, preparing for a post-Scrim world. I secretly hoped that his body would never be found. The world was better with Scrim walking through it, and I wanted his legend to endure.

Six days later, he reappeared in Mid-City.

It was strange to see Scrim become a cultural phenomenon. A dog who had been set for euthanasia—unwanted, unadoptable—ultimately appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Michelle felt like she couldn’t turn down media inquiries; Zeus’ Rescues ran deeply in the red. But the presence of journalists disrupted our cohesion. We were tired, and at three in the morning none of us felt like answering such questions as “How did you get involved?” and “Why this dog?” None of us had good answers. I still don’t. The one that most irritated me was “Why spend so much time doing this, when you could do something like helping the homeless?” The question implied that there were more important things than animals and better ways to spend our time. We felt that Scrim was inherently worthy of help, and he needed it—if we didn’t catch him, he would almost certainly be hit by a car.

We were also doing more than searching for a dog. We engaged freely and deeply with anyone, anywhere, because that was the best way to gain intel. Tammy stocked the van with sanitation kits—things like toothbrushes and soap—for unhoused people she came across. One night, I stumbled upon a woman who’d overdosed, and I waited with her until paramedics arrived. During our search for Scrim, Zeus’ Rescues took in three hundred dogs and cats. Michelle and Tammy spent Christmas morning wading through a canal, rescuing two abandoned pit bulls. Looking for Scrim meant immersing ourselves in the place where we lived, street by street and night after night. We helped where we could.

One day in December, a local reporter happened to be present for a fourth attempt to tranquillize Scrim. Unfortunately, the resulting article featured a photo of Michelle holding the rifle, with the headline “Scrim, famous Mid-City stray dog escapes drug dart again.” We found it sweet that people identified more with the dog than with his pursuers—but now we sounded less incompetent than malicious. Michelle endured a new round of death threats. After that, I said politely but firmly that dart guns and journalists were out, and no one objected.

In mid-January, a once-in-a-century snowstorm loomed. We baited shelters with cat food and liquid smoke, a strong-smelling condiment that he seemed to like. The day before the storm, someone texted a Scrim sighting at an unusual hour—11 A.M.—and I figured it was a mistake. Sure enough, when I arrived, I discovered a young woman trying to lure a dog that a local family allowed to roam the neighborhood. “We can’t let him freeze,” the woman said. This time, I knew what to do. I gave the woman dog food and a nylon slip leash from the back of my car. I thought of this as the Scrim effect: locals were making a decision to look for animals in distress. I also learned that someone had built a shelter for the cat colony I tended.

During the snowstorm, people made “snow Scrims.” By the time they melted, in late January, Tammy was hopeful again. We’d finally found a house Scrim was routinely sleeping beneath. Ring-camera footage showed him leisurely eating cat food on nearby porches. For the first time, he seemed to be behaving like a dog. He’d linger in places and rub his belly on doormats. Tammy and Freba started setting traps in his area.

Meanwhile, on February 10th, a woman named Jennifer Ruley reached out to Trap Dat Cat, the organization that had first introduced me to animal rescue. Kittens kept turning up on her porch. Nita invited her over and showed her how traps worked.

The next morning, at seven o’clock, Nita received a text: “I think I caught Scrim!”

Nita thought Jennifer was joking—until a photo came through. A scruffy white dog had squeezed himself improbably into a cat trap. “Holy shit,” Nita said, and she immediately called Michelle. Scrim, it seemed, had rescued himself.

It was now Mardi Gras season, and Scrim was becoming a sort of patron saint for the city. Partygoers wandered the streets, drinks in hand, wearing Scrim costumes made from furry onesies. One float depicted him as an outlaw, riding a motorcycle through a window to freedom; another showed his big ears flapping triumphantly in the wind. People were spending time and money to honor a troublesome dog of no pedigree, and whatever he stood for: wildness, rebelliousness, a refusal to heel.

Recently, I visited Michelle and said hello to Scrim. He was lying calmly on her sofa, staring at me with a hint of suspicion. He’d befriended Michelle’s enormous Labrador-retriever mix, Scooby, and often followed him around the house. When I offered him pats, he tolerated them. I didn’t mind that Scrim seemed not to recognize me. We had set out to shield him from danger, and he was safe now. In videos, he bounded around the house with his tongue hanging out, wagging his tail furiously.

But I sometimes wish that Scrim could know what he means to me and my adoptive city. Practically every day, I see his likeness on Canal Street murals, devotional candles, and T-shirts with captions such as “No Gods, No Masters.” At cocktail bars, I can order dog-themed drinks such as Born to Run and Slim ’Em, Scrim. I hope he can find a sense of belonging in New Orleans. In searching for him, I certainly did.

In Scrim’s nine months on the run, he saw more of the city than many of us will see in a lifetime. Nowadays, he wears two G.P.S. trackers, and he spends most of his time in Michelle’s house, at Zeus’ Rescues, and on leashed walks around the neighborhood. Even so, every now and then, someone reports that they’ve spotted Scrim out there. I’d like to think that they always will. ♦

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In 2022, The New Yorker published a personal history about growing up in Ireland during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. It covers the interfaith marriage of the author’s parents, which was unusual in Dublin; his mother’s early death; and finding his calling in music. The author was Bono, for more than forty years the lyricist and lead singer of one of the biggest rock bands on the planet. As U2 sold out arenas and stadiums, Bono held forth on a range of social causes; he became “the definitive rock star of the modern era,” as Kelefa Sanneh puts it. Bono joined David Remnick at the 2022 New Yorker Festival to talk about his new memoir, “Surrender.” “When I sang in U2, something got a hold of me,” Bono said. “And it made sense of me.” They discussed how the band almost ended because of the members’ religious faith, and how they navigated the Troubles as a bunch of young men from Dublin suddenly on the world stage. Bono shared a life lesson from Paul McCartney, and he opened up about the early death of his mother. “This wound in me just turned into this opening where I had to fill the hole with music,” Bono said. In the loss of a loved one, “there’s sometimes a gift. The opening up of music came from my mother.”

This segment originally aired on October 28, 2022.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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Kalief Browder was jailed at Rikers Island at the age of sixteen; he spent three years locked up without ever being convicted of a crime, and much of that time was spent in solitary confinement. In 2014, the New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman wrote about Browder and the failings of the criminal-justice system that his case exposed: unconscionable delays in the courts, excessive use of solitary confinement, teen-agers being charged for crimes as adults, brutality on the part of correction officers. Ten years ago, on June 6, 2015, Browder died by suicide. On The New Yorker Radio Hour, Gonnerman shares excerpts from the interviews she recorded with Browder, in which he described the psychological toll of spending years in a twelve-by-seven cell.

This segment originally aired on June 3, 2016.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

In the spirit of summer travel, we’ve asked some of our writers living outside New York City to share a few of their favorite local spots. Read Lauren Collins on an irresistible Parisian toy store; Hannah Goldfield on her search for a prized fruit in Hollywood; Rebecca Mead on a beloved church grounds in London; Inkoo Kang on a quirky hyper-local perfume museum in Berkeley; and Ian Crouch on a mid-Maine nature sanctuary, with pie.—Shauna Lyon

Illustrations by Jackson Gibbs

Toy stores—do those even exist anymore? I can vouch for at least one: Le Bruit du Papier, a small but mighty wonderland in the Ninth Arrondissement, strategically located directly across the street from the rec center where the kids in my neighborhood go to do judo or learn how to play the violin. This is essentially the same concept as putting a bar across from a golf course. No child can walk past the gleaming, apple-red storefront without pressing a nose to the glass and begging to be allowed to go in. What I love about Le Bruit du Papier is what I hate about Le Bruit du Papier. Its proprietor, Myriam Arthaud, knows exactly what her junior customers want. They come in packs, bearing old-school pocket money. (Coins! At Le Bruit du Papier, those are still going strong, too.) They spree on iced-tea-flavored “soda spray,” gelatinous candy eyeballs, capybara-shaped smooshies, One Piece branded Métro-card holders, and—most important—all things Legami, a Milanese maker of animal-topped pens, cutesy erasers, and other adorable crap that is all the rage with tiny Parisian shoppers. This being a French toy store, Arthaud does offer the occasional sop to adults. “There will be soft drinks for the youth and the more sober,” an invitation from the shop read, inviting patrons to come sample the new Beaujolais one recent evening. Dream on, Amazon.

The perfumer Mandy Aftel’s embrace of natural ingredients makes her an anomaly in the fragrance industry, which relies overwhelmingly on synthetic concoctions for its wares. Aftel, who has authored half a dozen books on the art, history, and uses of scent, shares her passion for olfactory possibility through the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents, the only museum in America dedicated to perfume. Operating out of the garage and back yard of her Berkeley home (a block over from Chez Panisse), it is a cozy, family-run affair; on a recent visit, between chats with Aftel herself, I was greeted by her husband and regaled with stories by her son. The museum’s collection includes centuries-old books and a bottle of ambergris (a substance produced in the digestive system of sperm whales), as well as elaborations on perfume’s long history. There are dozens of jars filled with essences that visitors are encouraged to sniff for themselves; my favorites included civet, cassia, and oud. One smelling station presents the ancient and modern extracts of the same plant for comparison. And, because smells are powerful but fleeting, guests can take home samples from the more than two hundred scents in Aftel’s work station, or, as it’s known in the fragrance world, perfume organ. With the Archive, Aftel has created a treasure trove of fragrances that may otherwise be difficult if not impossible to find—and, more important, she has created an opportunity to reorient one’s senses to the world.

Look out from atop Table Rock, a wide perch on the northern end of Grafton Notch State Park, in western Maine (less than two hours northwest of Portland), and you might succumb, for a moment at least, to the foolishness of thinking you’ve got things figured out. It’s a nice spot, nicer than most, and you’re standing on it. Then again, having climbed about a thousand feet of trail in less than a mile, heart still pulsing at your temples, maybe you won’t be thinking at all. Even better! The black flies pierce the reverie through late June, but by July (real summer) you can linger to watch the clouds glide along, casting cool soft shadows on the distant ground, where a thin line of pavement snakes through the trees. And then, in the fall, probably having to make space for some neighbors up there—fellow-peepers—sit on the rock and hug your knees as all around the leaves go yellow, orange, red, and purple. Return to the car, head south a few miles, and pull off at Screw Auger Falls, or someplace quieter, to wash the mud off your calves in the icy Bear River. Change into the clean extra shirt you remembered to pack. Back on the road, still heading south, make one final stop, on the right: the Puzzle Mountain Bakery, in its third decade and under the stewardship of a second generation, named after a peak you just passed (more ledges, more views). It’s a pie stand, or, really, a pie hutch—a red wooden enclosure full of homemade fruit pies, maple-cream cookies, whoopie pies, and jam. They do their baking in a building down a nearby driveway, but the hutch is unmanned, and hours, Thursdays to Mondays, are flexible: cash goes in an old cast-iron tank (or Venmo if you must). There’s no bad time for pie, but there are few better times than this, sitting on the back bumper, passing tins of strawberry rhubarb, blueberry, and apple back and forth. Fingers, or maybe one fork. It’s getting late. Wipe the crumbs off your lap, wrap any leftovers for later, and start the long, or, for the lucky, shortish drive home.

When I moved to London from New York in 2018, I was struck by the city’s palpable sense of layered history, such as can be found by St. Pancras Old Church, just south of Camden Town, whose surroundings comprise a peaceful wedge of green alongside train tracks that lead to both the Midlands and to continental Europe. The majority of the diminutive church’s structure dates to the nineteenth century, but legend claims it as a site of worship since the Romans ruled Britain, while architectural evidence dates it to at least the Anglo-Saxon period, when the River Fleet, long since channelled underground, ran alongside it. In the nineteenth century, the church graveyard was excavated for the coming railway—a gruesome process overseen by a young architect who later became a great novelist, Thomas Hardy. Remains were dug up and transferred elsewhere, while dozens of displaced gravestones were stacked around an ash tree that became known as the Hardy Tree. A couple of years ago, the tree collapsed, on account of disease, and now, amid birdsong and leaf-whisper, the concentric circles of stones, shifted by roots and overgrown with moss, have become a memorial to the organism that once supported them. Elsewhere in the cemetery, an ornate tower topped with a sundial commemorates some others whose final resting place this once was. In a way that I find oddly comforting, it cites “those whose graves are now unseen, or the record of whose names may have been obliterated”—the ultimate fate of all Londoners, and of us all, as the layered past accretes.

I’m only a little embarrassed to admit that on a recent spring Sunday at the weekly Hollywood Farmers’ Market—a sprawling village that seems to materialize out of nowhere, oasis-like, at the rather grim intersection of two concrete thoroughfares—the bounty produced by the fertile valleys of Southern California moved me to joyful tears. Weiser, a farm known especially for its melons, was offering lush bouquets of pea shoots, delicate white flowers and crisp, shapely pods sprouting from curling tendrils, pretty enough to display in a vase. At a stall selling avocados, the vender took highly specific requests, sorting through his bins for specimens of varying size and ripeness. When he noticed my two small children lurking behind me, growing pink and sweaty in the relentless sun and itching to get to the man, a few stalls down, who makes custom balloon creations for tips, he proffered a gift: two of the most miniature of his harvest, each no bigger than a hen’s egg. For months, I’ve been anticipating—patiently, religiously—the return of the Valencia Pride mango grown by Wong Farms, in the Coachella Valley, which bears an almost psychedelically concentrated flavor. This past September, on the final day Wong was selling them at the market, I waited in a line that was at least fifty people deep. By the time I reached the front, they were sold out, but rather than annoyance I felt a surprising sense of peace, a camaraderie with my fellow-shoppers, and a certainty that something else spectacular would be just around the corner.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Sex after sixty
• The joy of sitting this one out
• Seeing the world like Slim Aarons