The New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger had been wanting to write about teeth for years. But his editors weren’t so sure. “I kept pitching this piece, and the editors kept saying, ‘Dentistry, are you serious? Come on,’” he says. Eventually, he managed to grind them down and got the assignment.
His fascination with dentistry stemmed from his personal experience. His bottom teeth, he writes in his July 2025 feature story, “Molar City,” “lean this way and that in a wandering line, like first graders on a field trip.”
His interest in a topic that’s both commonplace and unorthodox will be unsurprising to longtime readers. Bilger has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2000 and has written about topics that range from high school marching bands to the world of youth bull riding in his home state of Oklahoma, and profiles of surprising figures, like that of professional strongman Brian Shaw, a man who stands almost 7 feet tall and weighs over 400 pounds.
“I'm a throwback. I think I'm kind of more in the mold of Joseph Mitchell, or one of the older music writers who would find odd corners of American culture and write about them,” he says.
Before coming to The New Yorker, he was an editor at The Sciences and at Discover magazine. Since then, he’s published two books, “Noodling for Flatheads,” (a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award) and “Fatherland,” and he has won two National Magazine awards. His New Yorker origin story is out of a writer’s fairytale: After pitching to an editor friend and getting nowhere, a sub-sub-editor he didn’t know found the manuscript for his book of essays in the slush pile and called him up wanting to excerpt it.
“To be honest, I feel like there's actually a much better pipeline into writing now than there was back then,” Bilger says. “Because now, you know, we have the web, and we have many more stories, and you can kind of get your feet wet with shorter pieces online, and then do longer pieces.”
“Molar City” took him five months from reporting to publication (not including those years of chewing on it). During the course of reporting, he estimated he interviewed 50 people, read four books, and traveled to two cities to get dental assessments of his own teeth — from both Mexican doctors and a Hollywood dentist to the stars — and to report on the extreme differences between the two experiences.
It turns out that Bilger’s instincts were sharp as his incisors. The story — which delves into the history of dentistry, the failure of American health care, and the violence dentists themselves face — clearly struck a nerve.
Storyboard talked to him about his reporting process, how he managed to meet such interesting characters, and his fascination with dentistry.
The piece begins where the journey into Mexico begins:
On weekday mornings in late winter, they start to arrive before dawn. They drive in from Arizona or California, catch a shuttle from Yuma, or park their car in a lot in the Sonoran Desert and cross the border on foot. The path for pedestrians follows State Route 186, past a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses offering free Bible courses, along a twisting corridor of razor wire and chain-link fence, through passport control, and into Los Algodones. By noon, more than a thousand people will have walked from the United States to Mexico, in the shadow of the thirty-foot wall that divides them. They come on bicycles and in wheelchairs, pushing walkers and leaning on canes. They come to be healed or transformed or to put an end to their pain, preferably at deep-discount prices.
How did you know this would be your lede? There are so many possibilities in the story, from the fascinating characters to the history of dentistry to the celebrity dentist.
It struck me right away, because we hear so much about lines of immigrants trying to get in the United States, and this was just flipping that inside out. It was such an obvious symbol for how broken our health care system is, that this is the thing that's actually pulling everybody in the other direction. And it was the thing itself: there was the wall, 30 feet high, right there. There were people lining up in walkers, in wheelchairs. That wasn't an exaggeration, you know, selling Bibles. I mean, it really was such a scene. And it felt like the old pilgrimage scenes in a funny way, and you're walking between razor wire. As a kind of an explanatory image, it seemed an obvious one to me.
A succession of dentists of varying skill and congeniality have worked on my teeth over the years, to no great effect. When I first moved to Brooklyn, the best I could afford was a gruff woman in a practice misleadingly labelled as “modern” above the door. A Russian émigré, perhaps accustomed to patients of a doughtier nature, she was stingy with anesthesia, I felt, and barked through her mask when I fidgeted. A few years later, when I lived in Germany, the health-care system there paid for regular visits to a gleaming, high-tech office in a lofty penthouse. At my first appointment, the dentist peered at an X-ray of the metal post that my Russian dentist had planted in my jaw and shook his head: “When was this work done? The nineteen-fifties?”
This is a pretty funny piece. Why did you want to write about teeth? And what is it about teeth that makes them so funny?
From the very beginning, I wanted it to be funny and somewhat a personal piece about dentistry, but I also wanted it to say, “hey, you know, our dental health care system is deeply fucked up and much more so than most of our healthcare system.” So I wanted that to be at some level up front right away, to say, “Look, this is going to be a piece about lots of stuff, but it's also going to be about this desperately wrong problem in our life.”
I did think it needed to be funny. And I do think teeth are naturally funny. It's a little bit like cheese. I mean, it's just one of those words that's funny in an odd way. … There is this kind of dark humor built into the topic. And I felt it would be silly not to kind of use it.
The truth is that our ancestors had much better teeth than we do. Neanderthals and other early humans, like the aptly named Nutcracker Man, had burly, oversized molars for grinding down tough stems and coarse grasses. Modern teeth are much daintier, yet they were still built for diets heartier than ours. Eating was meant to be a workout. Chewing raw plants and sinewy meats both strengthened and lengthened the jaw. Without that exercise, our oral growth tends to be stunted.
You spend some time talking about the evolution of teeth in humans. What led you to this path?
It was one of these wonderful serendipitous things. I was at a dinner party in Brooklyn, and I happened to be sitting across from a woman who was a head of research for the Leakey Foundation, a paleontology foundation. And she said, “You're thinking about writing about teeth? You've got to talk about the paleontology of teeth.” And we had a three-hour conversation about it. So she was the one who sent me to the books I ended up reading.
How many books did you read for this?
I think four or five or something, but I had a bunch of them lying around. The two that are clearly the most important to me were “Evolution’s Bite.” And the other one is “The Smile Stealers.”
I actually felt like there was so much material that the trick was being fairly light footed, not spending too long in the paleontology. Because there's like, two paragraphs of paleontology, and in each case, I had to really cherry pick. If this had been the 1970s, this piece would have been 20,000 words.
I met Billy and Nancy Martinez at dinner on my first night. Nancy, who was seventy-three, had long dark-brown hair parted in the middle like Joan Baez and spoke in soft, falling cadences. Billy, four years younger, was short and round and full of vinegar. He would nudge me with his elbow when he told a story, then roll around in his chair laughing at the punch line. They were from Red Cliff, Colorado, an old mining town two hours west of Denver. Billy drove a snowplow and other heavy equipment for the public-works department, and Nancy was a retired customer-service representative for an electrical coöperative. They showed me pictures of the abandoned railroad track where they liked to walk their dog, Miner Jack. Then Billy leaned over and bared his gums at me. He was getting two implants and a few crowns in the morning, he said, yanking his mustache sideways so I could see the gaps between his teeth. He grinned like a ten-year-old on the night before his birthday.
The piece has so many characters — how did you meet them and how many people did you talk to for the story? How did you settle on your main characters, Bill and Nancy?
Oh, I don't know, 50, 60, or something like that. When I was in Los Algodones, I spent a lot of time just going around to people and stopping them while they're playing slot machines and while they're playing blackjack or sitting on the bench waiting for their appointment. Or in the hotel talking to guests who are getting their teeth done. That was actually, to be honest, a wonderful experience. Cold calling, cold interviewing people is tricky. But in this case, everybody wanted to talk about what they were doing.
I'm pretty comfortable talking to a stranger and striking up a conversation. But that kind of thing, where like I'm literally interrupting someone in the middle of a slot machine, that was hard. I've often found just be able to say, “Hi, I'm a reporter from The New Yorker,” even just the word “New York,” even more than the magazine, because a lot of the people I talked to didn't know The New Yorker, but they're like, "Whoa, a New York reporter." That itself is a kind of a calling card.
That one couple, Billy and Nancy Martinez, I made a point of following them and like checking in with them every few hours, actually, while I was there, three or four days. We were in the same clinic, too. So, actually, it wasn't that hard. We were on somewhat the same schedule. But I also just looked for them in the hotel and I got both their cell phone numbers right away and was texting. Billy was sending me these crazy shots of his teeth when they'd just been taken out. He's a hoot. So I followed them pretty closely. Pretty soon I realized they were the ones I was going to follow in the piece.
The symptom most common to our dental shortcomings is a seething resentment, occasionally flaring into rage. Dentists may be the most abused professionals in the country, next to airport check-in agents. In 2020, in a survey by the New York University College of Dentistry, three-quarters of dentists reported that they’d been verbally attacked by a patient, and nearly half had been physically assaulted. …
One of the many things that I learned about when reading this piece is that dentists are the most harassed in the medical profession — and even murdered in a few cases. You write about the case in San Diego of Benjamin Harouni. How did you come to find this out?
I think early on, I just did a sweep. I was looking into every kind of dentistry topic, and I noticed a few killings. And I thought, wow, that's interesting. I didn't know there were dental killings. And then this NYU study at the NYU Dental College came up which was just three years ago. They had a huge survey and found that three quarters of all dentists had been verbally abused and half had been physically abused. And I thought, wow, that's actually a shocking number. Half had been physically assaulted. That is wild. That was actually part of my original pitch. It's all of a piece that dentistry is so fucked up in this country and so broken as a system, and there's so much frustration and anger, and it's all centered on this activity in which we are so vulnerable and so easily triggered, and sent into a rage anyway. So it kind of all felt like that all needed to be there because it all connects together.
The glass door to Sani Dental was outlined by a giant tooth. Stepping inside from the clattering street felt like a jump cut in an action film, with a subtitle saying “Miami” or “Dubai.” The lobby was hushed and spacious, with two eager young receptionists in matching polo shirts. A long arched corridor stretched behind them, soothingly lit like an undersea passage. There were seventeen examination rooms on one side and a row of white leather couches on the other, with waiting patients. The clinic’s thirty-five dentists and sixty-six support staff see more than nine thousand clients a year. (Sani also has branch offices in Cancún and Playa del Carmen, as well as a plastic-surgery and hair-transplant clinic in Los Algodones called Sani Medical.) At its newly built, three-story laboratory, teams of designers create digital models of implants and dentures, then fabricate the molds with 3-D printers. The finished products are cast in ceramic, gold, titanium, steel, or chromium cobalt, then glazed by local artisans to match the patient’s teeth and gums.
What was the most surprising thing about your trip to Mexico?
It kept surprising me. My first thought was, “They've been doing a million patients a year for a while. I'm going to get there and it's going to look like a mall,” you know. It's not going to look all that interesting. I certainly don't want to have any of my prejudices about what medicine looks like south of the border. This is going to be ordinary American style, high-tech dentistry. Then I get there, and no, it looks like a Mexican border town with some really high-tech little clinics interspersed through it.
So you're like, “Whoa, wait a second.” This is more of a mixed scene. And then you get into the bowels of the dentistry office, and it's actually more high-tech than any dentistry office I'd ever been in, and the people are often more trained, better trained than any dentist I'd ever been to. So I kept getting thrown back and forth. It's nice to have your expectations thwarted, your prejudices denied, all that stuff.
***
Tricia Romano is the author of the critically acclaimed oral history about the Village Voice, “The Freaks Came Out To Write,” a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Rolling Stone. She lives in Seattle.
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