Antiques Roadshow meets CSI: Crime Scene meets The Da Vinci Code

If you’re like many people who get The New Yorker, you don’t read it cover to cover; and the likelihood that you get around to a given article is in inverse proportion to its number of pages. If that rule holds, then many people will not have read David Grann’s long article on Peter Paul Biro, the man who authenticates paintings using advanced forensic technology, published in the July 12 issue.

Those people are missing out. How often does an article in The New Yorker feature an abrupt turn, a surprising revelation, halfway through? This one does.