Homeward Bound: On Pigeon Racing (Oliver Egger, November 26, 2025, Paris Review)
As a man in a USA trucker hat rose to ask the board about their pigeon lobbyist (yes, even they have one), the hundreds of airborne pigeons were locking on to the exact coordinates of the home lofts—scattered in backyards and garages within a fifty-mile radius of this hotel—where they had been raised. As they soared over cube-cut farmland, scanning for hawks with their orange eyes, they had no idea that fifty thousand dollars were at stake, that the humans that raised them were anxiously waiting for them to swoop in, or that they were competitors in the convention’s main event: the yearly ARPU combine. No, they were just trying to get home.