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Summary Of The Order Of Things By Apollo Robbins

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“The Order of Things” is an article from The New Yorker by Adam Green. The subject is Apollo Robbins, an extremely talented pickpocket. The occasion is a profile and a feature story published a month before the Department of Defense opened a new research and training facility with Robbins as a professor. The article is written for an audience of high level readers who may be interested magic tricks or pickpocketing. His purpose is to entertain the audience with a story of a pickpocket who returns what he steals while informing them on how pickpockets use “nature of human attention” to steal things without the victim knowing.
This is an expository article and the style is straightforward. His tone is informative and admiring of Robbins. The point of view is entirely in the third person. Green’s diction is neutral in formality and mostly denotative. He uses some advanced vocabulary such as “adjunct, pious, recidivism”, and underpinnings, but most of the words are common and easily understood. Some are the interviews are informal such as Gary Scott's, “I been playing since I was knee-high to a shit-ball.” The article also has some jargon about pickpocketing like pit, prat, skinning the …show more content…

Part of Robbins’ credibility comes from examples of his pickpocketing ability. The other part of his ethos stems from both the description of how his disabilities as a child caused him to gain coordination and a high degree of dexterity, and also how he started career as a thief and a magician in Las Vegas.
There are other pickpockets in the article who Green introduces with some of their history as ethos. For example, he introduces Rod the Hop as “one of the finest card cheats alive” and introduces Gary Scott with his quotes about how he started stealing and pickpocketing. Green also uses Sergeant Tim Shalhoub as the expert on pickpocketing in the Las Vegas Police Department who arrested

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