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. 

The post Behind the Scenes: Burkhard Bilger weaves humor and history into a story about teeth for The New Yorker appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Author Jason Pargin didn’t set out to become a star on TikTok. In fact, he never wanted people to even know his name, let alone what he looked like. He launched his writing career during the halcyon days of the World Wide Web, using a pseudonym to publish books like “John Dies At The End” (made into a movie starring Paul Giamatti) and the New York Times bestseller, “This Book is Full of Spiders.” Later, he became the Executive Editor of Cracked.com, the satirical site known for bizarre trivia, comics, and acerbic humor.

But in 2025, Pargin is one of TikTok's (and Facebook’s) most reliable sources for videos about funny, interesting, or weird factoids and stories. His short storytelling clips about the famous photo of Muhammad Ali’s phantom punch on Sonny Liston, or an unfinished obelisk in Egypt have garnered him over a half a billion views and sustained his writing career. His most recent book, “I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom,” owes at least some of its success to Pargin’s presence on various social media platforms. But he still wishes he didn’t have to show his face on camera to sell books. 

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

How did you transition from being a writer to being on-camera?

My career follows the technology as it developed. I graduated high school in 1993, the technology existed, but there was not an internet you could go browse at that time. So when I graduated college, I got a degree in journalism. I went into journalism, was very bad at it, and lasted like a year and a half in that.

In 1997 or so, we got our first internet connection, and I found out that you can just type stuff and it appears and that other people have to read it. It was like, “Oh, okay, here's the thing I was born for, because there's no oversight and I can be weird.” So I started writing, started blogging — before that word existed — they were just websites.

How did you get into TikTok?

In 2022, finally, every single person around me was saying, “Look, you go to the bookstore, there's a shelf that's called ‘BookTok.’ What they're talking about is on TikTok. That's where there are all these influencers who talk about their favorite books, and that's how books are now sold.” You kind of have to get on board with that, or just slowly be forgotten as your elderly fan base dies out. 

Before I started watching it, I thought it was entirely young people. I thought it was like teenage girls just lip syncing to songs. And people tried to tell me, “Oh, no, like Hank Green is on there. There's science content, there’s people doing one- or two- or three-minute-long bits on some interesting facts, like, that's the stuff you could do.” I mean, that's what Cracked was. We would do these interesting lists of well researched — hopefully — subjects that were boiled down into a digestible, funny format.

So in 2022, for the first time in my life, I downloaded TikTok. I watched it just as a user for about six weeks trying to understand the format, how it worked. I was posting up to four videos a day, just trying different stuff and seeing, first of all, can I get away with not showing my face? And the answer at that time was no. The algorithm demanded you be on camera. 

I was very fortunate, because it turned out I had a knack for it, I guess. But that was very much a surprise to me. I never dreamed of being somebody who people would recognize on the street, right? I didn't want to get famous. I wanted the work to be famous, to be clear.

How did you flop? And how did you make the switch to figure out what works?

The funny thing about TikTok is you can kind of tell right away whether or not it likes a video, because it has a specific method where, even if you just joined that day, it will roll your video out to a group of people, and that is basically a focus group. It may be 100 users or whatever, if they kept watching it most of the way, if one of them shared it or whatever, then they will show it to about 2000 people, then they will keep expanding. And so you can know within 15 minutes if a video, if there's something to it. 

There was one early one that was a very big hit where I was explaining that if you are supervising or working with creative people, that a lot of their work doesn't look like work because the act of sitting around and waiting to have an idea or trying to work through something appears to be them staring at a wall. But that video, I had just gotten off the treadmill, so I was sweaty, and my hair was a mess. I just sat down and turned my camera on, just gave this thought, and it becomes the first, probably, like, six-figure-digit hit. And that was when I realized, “Oh, the barrier to being good at this is actually lower than what I thought.”

Let me also say because there are people [reading] this who’ll notice me omitting something huge, which is that the way social media platforms treat men and women is very different. The comments [women] will [receive] if they change their hair or wear an outfit that people don't like is kind of disgusting. They're an author. They're on there trying to get you to buy their book. No one cares what I look like. There may be like one joke if my hair is not combed that day, but I don't necessarily even brush my hair before getting on camera.

I watch women authors, and they are having to do their hair, they are having to be, like, filming their vacation. They're at an exotic location. They're doing that because the algorithm has said you need to. 

And then they will buy your book if they think you're living a beautiful, interesting lifestyle. It is a totally different playing field, and I hate everything about it.

I try very, very hard to follow many authors on TikTok, and most of them are women. I re-boost their posts, if they ask me for blurbs, I try very hard to support women authors as much as I can.

Your topics are so wide-ranging and change all the time. What’s your process for coming up with the topics?

That's kind of my whole career, like I went into journalism because I was somebody who just loved to read and research things and love trivia and love news, and I was somebody who before the internet existed, I had piles of magazines in my house and newspapers. Once you're doing that as your job, that's all you do all day long. You're looking around for something interesting, and you have some question about how the world works. And then that becomes a video. So if I were trying to teach somebody else how to do it, I don't know that I could, unless that person was naturally curious themselves.

How do you make your videos? Do you write a script? Do you have minions? 

I have no staff at all helping me with any of the 11 various platforms I have to maintain to keep my life going as an author; it's all me. Now, the only reason I don't write out a script for my videos is because I'm not good at reading a script for my videos. You'd be able to tell I was reading. So I have notes that are like the points I'm going to hit, or the facts that I've got to put in there. If I'm going to cite statistics or whatever, I've got to have those written down to make sure I'm not saying it wrong. 

You can film and edit in the app. It takes me about two hours start to finish to get a video done. And you can spend two hours filming, after having spent multiple hours researching it, and then within 15 minutes, you'll see if TikTok has decided to kill it because they don't like the subject matter or something, and instantly that effort will all be wasted.

What are your biggest hits, and why do you think they're big?

It's weird, because you'll have a video that's just pointing out some extremely crazy fact or some extremely stupid joke to the point that not even I understand why it was supposed to be funny, but that's kind of the way this always has worked. There’ll be something that just caught people.

There [are] others where I made it just to amuse myself, and it became a pretty big hit, like that one about the movie “The Town.” I said that there was this enduring mystery where people were trying to figure out what city it took place in. If you've seen that movie, the whole thing is just Boston, Boston, Boston, Boston. Every five seconds everybody in the movie is wearing like a Boston Celtics jersey. They're always in front of some Boston landmark. 

So I just had these screenshots from the movie behind me, and was doing this very serious analysis, like “Nobody can figure out where this thing was filmed, and that people, for a decade, people have been desperately trying to and they've been so tight-lipped about it.” 

How do you find your videos translate to Instagram or YouTube? You post across all of these other platforms, right?

I have far greater reach on Facebook than anywhere else because I've monetized that Facebook account. Facebook pays me three times more than TikTok does, and I have half the follower count there, of all of the social media platforms. Of all the social media platforms, the one that's growing fastest is Facebook, and we think of that as like the old folks home for a bunch of AI slop and old paranoid people. TikTok has been shrinking in its user base for years. That's one of the problems with it. It's never been profitable, and its user base has been shrinking, especially with all the threats of it being banned.

So at this point, this is how you make a living?

Well, I'm a full-time author, in theory, I should be making a living doing that, but I have monetized the video stuff because it's such an absurd usage of time and energy, to the point that, yeah, most of my income now — a little more than half of it — comes from posting to social media. 

What is the most you made off of one video?

You'll see people say, “Well, I've heard you can make $1 per 1,000 views.” TikTok basically has a cap, and then once you reach that, they reduce the amount per view down to below one cent. So I think the most I've ever made off of one video, a mega-viral video probably was like $2,000 but typical revenue for a video is something closer to, like, $15.

So the main reason you started doing this was to get your written work out to the world. Has that worked?

It has. I mean, this kind of saved my author career, if we're being frank. The most recent book that I put out, it overwhelmingly sold because I relentlessly pushed it on TikTok. But what TikTok demands is about 100 times greater than what the average person thinks in terms of trying to promote something. So if I make a video about my book where I'm reading an excerpt or otherwise talking about some subjects, and I'm going to tie it into the book, for about every 2,000 views to the video, I'll sell one copy of the book. So the video gets 40,000 views, I can expect to sell about 20 copies. If it’s just a piece of trivia and I don't mention the book at all, it's just me as TikTok guy, I'll sell about one copy for every million views. And those sound like hopeless numbers for somebody trying to sell their book on TikTok. 

But this is the thing. I made TikTok my full-time job. My split is about 80/20 or 85/15: 85% promotion, 15% writing the book. So my job as a full-time author, my job is not writing books, my job is selling books. And I'm someone who has a traditional publishing deal. I'm somebody who has been on The New York Times bestseller list. I'm somebody who's had a film made from a book that was a cult hit and sold a lot of books. I've sold film rights and TV rights to everything I've ever written. And even then, no matter what the publisher does, no matter how much work their publicity person does in terms of getting the book out to reviewers, that kind of thing, 95% of the promotion has to be done by me, because what people want is me. They want to hear from me. 

The amount of work and energy required to sell enough books to make a middle-class income off of it is, frankly absurd, and most people can't do it because they don't have that time and energy. 

What does your day look like? What part of the day do you actually set aside to write?

It’s not exactly a nine-to-five day. I'll get up in the morning. I'll look at how yesterday’s stuff performed. I'll check to see if I've got warnings or copyright strikes, all of that other administrative stuff that nobody knows about until they start doing it and realizing how time consuming it is. There's always emails from somebody, the publisher, my editor or my agent, something about deals we're talking about, or numbers that have come in, or something just the business side of the business. And then by afternoon, I've usually settled on what I want my video to be about. And then I usually can sit down and and make it and then hopefully by 5 or 6 p.m. all that other stuff is done. I could sit down and start writing on the book or editing the book after dinner. I'm not somebody who can just write a novel in between emails. So the evenings are dedicated to writing the book.

What advice do you give to aspiring creators or journalists?

There's no trick to it, because any trick I gave you would be irrelevant six months from now. It demands an incredible time investment, and that's it. It's kind of the same advice if you ask somebody who is extremely physically fit, or if you ask somebody who is a great at investing, they've gotten very wealthy from investing, they can give you tips that might sound like shortcuts. In reality, that investor makes money because they think about investing all day and all night, and this is what consumes them. 

This audience I have now is by orders of magnitude bigger, far bigger, than any of the audience I had in my blogging years, far bigger than any novel I've ever written, far bigger than any article I've ever written, anything I've done in the world of podcasting — having my face on camera saying these things is much, much, much bigger. I have over half a billion views on that TikTok channel alone. And that's now not my biggest platform. I have 1.3 million followers across all the different platforms that are together. And here's the thing, when the audience goes away, I won't know why then, either.

***

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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