| Today, the editor Daniel Zalewski writes about David Grann’s thrilling stories. David Grann has one of journalism’s great back catalogues, and an editor like me can confidently advise a reader that any random plunge into his archive is going to provide pleasure, suspense, and surprise. But one of his earliest pieces for The New Yorker, “The Squid Hunter,” from 2004, holds a special place in my memory, because it offers a hint of where his enormous ambitions would take him. The article is about the quixotic adventures of Steve O’Shea, a marine biologist from New Zealand, who was on an obsessive quest to catch a giant squid and then keep it in captivity. This effort, as Grann portrays it, was both romantic and absurd: the giant squid is one of the largest marine animals, but it is so elusive that, at the time, an adult specimen had never been seen alive, not even on camera. (Scientists finally made a video of the animal in its natural habitat in 2012.) Trying to capture such a creature was a tough game, yet O’Shea had somehow made the rules even harder—his strategy was to track down not an adult giant squid but, rather, a tiny “paralarval” one, bobbing somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. A baby giant squid, Grann gently notes, “is often the size of a cricket.” The story is delightful and poignant, but in hindsight I see that it also reveals something about Grann as a journalist. Like O’Shea, he is drawn to almost preposterous difficulty, though in his case the object of desire is a story, not a sea monster. As Grann’s later work has made clear, home runs are the only kind of swings that interest him. Could he find a story about a grifter who himself becomes the object of a spectacular grift? Could he prove that an innocent man had been put to death? Could he travel into the Amazon and see if any lost civilizations lay buried under all those rotting leaves? Could he excavate dozens of murders of Native Americans that had been lost to history? Grann’s new book, “The Wager,” which The New Yorker excerpted in February, brings him back to the sea—and this time his task is to conjure an epic eighteenth-century misadventure, involving a shipwreck off the coast of Chile whose most shocking details were recorded only in a few dusty journals. Beginning such a project is itself an audacious quest. And that, I suspect, is a big reason Grann wanted to write it. Like Steve O’Shea, Grann can’t resist the temptation to look into the depths, hunting for treasure. His feverish approach to reporting may defy common sense, but it yields a bounty for the reader. | 
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