Philip Gourevitch, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has written about genocide in Rwanda, the National Front in France, arranged marriage in Queens, and James Brown, well, everywhere—each in its way a focus of intense emotion. He reports on harrowing events with lucidity and insight, filling readers with terror but not driving them to despair. And he knows his torah.

• PERSON: Jonah, of “and the whale” fame
• PLACE: a CT salvage yard, but not this one
• THING: this baboon skull he keeps in his office