Remembering The New Yorker’s Mark Singer

Plus: What makes an ideal Talk of the Town story? And pitching an editor instead of a publication

Mark Singer. (Photo courtesy Michael Mason.)

June 26, 2026

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Mark Singer, the New Yorker staff writer who profiled magician Ricky Jay and shed essential light on Donald Trump as far back as 1997, died of cancer June 19 in New York City. He was 75.

Tributes poured in this week. Susan Orlean described Singer as a “master of the form,” a mentor, and one of her first friends at The New Yorker when she joined the magazine in 1987. “He was the funniest, most delightful person, a sort of ideal big brother,” she wrote in her newsletter. “And this doesn’t even begin to tell you about his work!” In her collection “The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup,” Orlean writes that she discovered the storytelling possibilities inside life's ordinary experiences through reading one of Singer's stories in college: “Supers,” about three New York City building superintendents. "The piece was eloquent and funny and full of wonder even though the subject was unabashedly mundane,” Orlean wrote. “After I read it, I had that rare, heady feeling that I now knew something about life I hadn't known before I read it. At the same time, the story was so natural that I couldn't believe it had never been written until then. Like the very best examples of literary nonfiction, it was at once familiar and original, like a folk melody—as good an example as you could ever find of the poetry of facts and the art in ordinary life."

Born in Tulsa, Singer maintained his Oklahoma connection throughout his life and career. His 1984 book "Funny Money”—first published as a series of stories in The New Yorker—told the story of a small bank's collapse in Oklahoma City amid the oil boom of the 1970s and '80s.

That Oklahoma connection is how I got to meet him once, when he shared stories about his hometown during a Longreads event with the upstart Tulsa magazine This Land Press in 2015. Michael Mason, the publication's founding editor, wrote on Facebook this week: “Behind the scenes, he quietly encouraged and mentored a number of writers in Oklahoma and beyond. Knowing him was one of my life's greatest honors.”

Mason told me: “Mark and I had a chance to work together over the last year—I have about 20 hours of conversation with him recorded. He was planning to write a piece about Tulsa, using [historian] Lee Roy Chapman's life as a vehicle for examining the historiography of his hometown. Toward the end, he looked upon Tulsa, and his own history, with awe, terror, frustration, and ultimately love.”

Links of note

Mark Singer also wrote many pieces for The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker's famed front-of-book section, which has always fascinated me. How does a writer find the right story idea, structure, and voice to create a successful short-form narrative? In The New Yorker's newsletter, Susan Morrison, who has edited Talk of the Town for the past thirty years, reveals what makes a good Talk story: “The main hallmarks are brevity (they top out at eight hundred words) and tone. I like them to be jolly, fizzy, even mischievous. When someone reads a Talk story, I hope they get the same combustive burst of pleasure that they do when they look at a cartoon. James Thurber used to tell writers that a Talk story should be an offhand statement, full of facts, presented with a nonchalant, almost insolent, disregard for facts—‘highly informative, but sounding like my mother describing Einstein’s general theory of relativity.’”
Pitching the editor, not the publication: Tim Herrera, in his Freelancing with Tim newsletter, argues that it is always worth the extra effort to research specific editors at a publication when crafting story pitches. “The time you put into researching a specific editor’s style, tone, story interests, and story history is some of the most valuable time you can spend in terms of ROI. If you know your audience — the editor — and what they’re looking for, it exponentially increases your chances of selling that story. Part of what you’re trying to do with a pitch is to remove reasons for an editor to say no to it and give them reasons to say yes.”
Why I write: Anand Giridharadas, author of the forthcoming book “Man in the Mirror,” reflects on a conversation with a friend early in his career that helped him define his own mission in journalism. “I’m confessing my existential confusion, and Dan, friendship archivist that he is, says: ‘I know what your thing is.’ I was skeptical. ‘What’s that, Dan?’ Simple, he said. ‘Ideas through people.’” Giridharadas's new book recounts the 2023 killing of Jordan Neely, a Black homeless man who was put in a chokehold by Daniel Penny, a white ex-Marine, on a New York City subway train. He said his friend's observation guided him through this project. “What Dan said clarified my sense of what I was supposed to be doing: Locate big ideas as they show up in people, as people grapple with them, argue with themselves and others over them, suffer their effects.”