When pundits worry about what the Internet means for the future of journalism, they're partly fretting over the future of writers like John McPhee. The longtime New Yorker staff writer specializes in careful, expansive nonfiction on basketball strategy, coal trains and tectonic plates. Everybody else, it seems, specializes in what happened five minutes ago. How can a reporter who loves to study million-year geologic processes compete with the 24-hour news cycle?

But if the TMZ.com era has done any harm to McPhee's commitment to long-form journalism, there's little evidence in "Silk Parachute," his latest collection of articles. Unlike 2007's "Uncommon Carriers," which focused on long-haul transport, here McPhee is cheerily all over the place. "Spin Right and Shoot Left" is a stemwinder on lacrosse; "Season on the Chalk" studies the effect of chalk deposits on the people and economies of England and France; "Checkpoints" is a personal tribute to the New Yorker's storied fact-checkers.

What connects those articles, and the book's seven other pieces, is his attention to detail, and his unusual willingness to go wherever the story takes him. The lacrosse piece, for instance, casually leaps from Ireland, where the sport is relatively new, to the D.C.-Baltimore region, where it has a long history. In between, he packs in plenty of names and background, but also plenty of engaging characters, from the taxi driver who'd never heard of the game to the coach who revels in lingo like "isos" and "bull dodges" and more.

McPhee's attention to jargon doesn't just scratch his itch for scholarship. It lets him see what many others miss. For "Rip Van Golfer" he covered the 2007 USGA U.S. Open, and while most of the reporters were stuffed in the media tent, McPhee walked the fairways and listened closely to the press conferences. What he heard weren't the impressionistic sound bites that tend to make the news, but surprisingly revealing details about craft.

As a pioneer of the New Journalism of the 1960s, McPhee has often inserted himself into his stories to keep his densely researched pieces conversational. Still, "Silk Parachute" is more explicitly personal than much of his work. His grandchildren accompany him for his chalk tour, and one of the two long-exposure photographers he profiles in "Under the Cloth" is his daughter Laura. Far from being off-point or self-dealing, the approach adds another humanizing aspect to his work. That strategy is most powerful in the title article, a touching remembrance of his late mother. At just four pages, it's perfect for Internet reading. But its humor, detail, wit and art are informed by years of work by somebody who knows how to spin a long, complex tale.

Mark Athitakis is a reviewer based in Washington, D.C. He blogs at americanfiction.wordpress.com.