Storytelling with humility (and teeth)

The New Yorker's Burkhard Bilger goes to ‘Molar City.’ Plus: Dana Hedgpeth on history’s lessons, and a tribute to a beloved Los Angeles Times mentor

by Mark Armstrong

Image for Storytelling with humility (and teeth) — Photo by Cedric Fauntleroy, Pexels

October 31, 2025

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Dear Storyboard community:

This week we have a new installment of “Behind the Scenes” from Storyboard contributor and author Tricia Romano. She spoke with The New Yorker’s Burkhard Bilger about his recent feature story, “Molar City,” which took him to the border town of Los Algodones, Mexico (population: 5,474), where many Americans are seeking dental care that is too expensive in the U.S.

The story initially was a tough sell to editors, Bilger says, but through humor and his own personal dental history he transports readers to a place that captures the failures of the American healthcare system.

What I particularly appreciate is that Bilger admits to his own prejudices and preconceived notions of what he expected to find on his trip to Mexico. Through research and reporting — cold interviewing strangers in hotels, reading books on the paleontology of teeth — a more authentic story starts to take shape, with Bilger weaving different threads into a whole. As he told Storyboard in 2018, “I need to know that [a story idea] has at least three or four compelling threads running through it: an interesting character with a good backstory, a topic with a fascinating history, and a timely argument or two to justify my covering it now.”

Bilger, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2001, describes his work as “a throwback” to an earlier time. “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.”

For more lessons from Bilger's work, check out the Storyboard archive, with journalistic breakdowns of noodling for catfish and meeting a Parisian plumassier.

Behind the Scenes: Burkhard Bilger weaves humor and history into a story about teeth for The New Yorker

“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 and 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.”

[ Read the story ]

Links of note

“We don't tell history to make people feel badly. We tell history to learn from it. Just because something is ugly or messy, it doesn't mean it's not the truth. It doesn't mean it didn't happen. And we should respect each other's truth.” A must-listen conversation at the WriteLane podcast with Dana Hedgpeth, a reporter for The Washington Post who with colleague Sari Horwitz wrote about the decades of abuse Native American children suffered at boarding schools after being separated from their families by the U.S. government. Horwitz and Hedgpeth, who is a member of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe of North Carolina, won the Dori J. Maynard Justice Award for the five-part series.
Two thoughtful takes on writing essays in 2025: Sari Botton, who has published countless brilliant voices through her newsletters (and before that, with me at Longreads), defends the personal essay at Oldster: “I still very much believe it’s possible to open people’s hearts and minds through personal writing. And I find the identification that takes place between writer and reader to be incredibly valuable.” In the exchange between writer and reader, “both feel seen, and understood, and less alone.” And at the Dirt newsletter, Greta Rainbow untangles the current definitions of essay-writing, from “personal essay” and “braided essay” to “creative nonfiction” and even “laptop nonfiction.”
Finally, I’ll leave you with a beautiful passage from journalist Erika Hayasaki's tribute to Richard Kipling, the former director of the Los Angeles Times Minority Editorial Training Program, who died this week at 81. “He pushed us to find the universal meaning in our stories. … Over the years, I’ve come to think about universal meaning in existential terms. It’s the feeling that underlies everything about why we tell, read, think, and live by stories. Who are we and why? What makes us human? How did we get here? What pulls us apart? What keeps us going? Where do we turn next? What connects us to each other? That is what Richard also left us. An essence, and a spirit of connection.”