The New Yorker December 20, 2021

Steve Coll (“The Fall of the Islamic Republic,” p. 32), a staff writer, is the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. His latest book is “Directorate S.” Melissa Ginsburg (Poem, p. 60) is the author of “Dear Weather Ghost” and “The House Uptown.” Her new book of poems, “Doll Apollo,” will be out next year. Hua Hsu (“The Other Side,” p. 24), a staff writer, will publish the memoir “Stay True” in the fall. Jeanie Riess (The Talk of the Town, p. 16) is a freelance writer based in New Orleans. Frank Viva (Cover), an illustrator and a graphic designer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 2010. His books for children include “Young Frank, Architect” and “Sea Change.” Alexandra Schwartz (The Theatre, p. 70) has been a staff writer since 2016 and…

ORGANIC MATTER Ian Parker is to be congratulated on his extraordinarily clear-eyed look at Randy Constant’s organic-grain-fraud scheme (“Inorganic,” November 15th). Parker’s article conveys the inherent weirdness of the organic commodity market, in which certain grain that is essentially indistinguishable from other grain becomes worth twice as much because of a written record of how it was produced. I have grown field crops organically for seven years, and agree with Parker that “the organic story has legitimate power.” But, though my practices may have a relatively benign impact on my surroundings as compared with conventional farming, their larger environmental impact is not so clear. Controlling weeds without herbicides generally requires more tillage. Turning the soil more frequently means using more diesel fuel per ton of grain, as well as freeing more…

DECEMBER 15 – 21, 2021 Barbara Cook originated the role of Marian the librarian, the headstrong, love-starved heroine of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man,” in 1957. In a splashy new Broadway revival, the role is played by Sutton Foster (above), who, like Cook, has a soprano tone as clear as a bell on a hill and an uncanny ability to make her work look easy. In Jerry Zaks’s production (starting previews on Dec. 20, at the Winter Garden), she’s joined by Hugh Jackman, as the smooth-talking con artist Harold Hill, and a bunch of plucky kids. ART Ruth Asawa The daughter of Japanese immigrants, Asawa, who died in 2013, was detained in internment camps during the Second World War and later thrived artistically in the avant-garde milieu of Black Mountain College, before settling in…

The premise of “Yellowjackets”—a new mystery series on Showtime—is “Lord of the Flies” meets riot grrrl meets the 1993 film “Alive.” A New Jersey high-school girls’ soccer team boards a private plane to the 1996 national championships and crash-lands in a remote forest in the Canadian Rockies, where they must hunker down for nineteen months before a rescue team arrives. To survive, they forage, farm, and even kill. But this isn’t your traditional “stranded teens gone feral” tale. The showrunners Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson have created something deeply sinister and constantly surprising. The action ping-pongs between the past, in which a superb cast of young actors play out the plane disaster, and the present, where a few of the surviving Yellowjackets teammates remain traumatized and stunted by whatever happened…

Sometimes, in New York City, a laundromat is a restaurant and a restaurant is a concept and a concept is a culinary playground in the shape of a chef residency. Such is the case with Fulgurances Laundromat, which is tucked into a refurbished laundromat in Greenpoint and features meals from the imaginations of young talents who are, for the first time, fully in control of their own kitchen. To encourage and accommodate the spirit of experimentation, Fulgurances Laundromat does not proffer menus but instead presents multicourse dinners that reveal themselves throughout the night. The current resident, Aaron Rosenthal, a Boston native who has worked in France for the past nine years, said that he was still figuring out his style, which likely accounted for the breadth of his offerings, like so…

The covid-19 pandemic, like every pandemic before it, is a story of equilibriums: between viral biology and human immune response; between news of the pathogen and fear of it; between the damage it inflicts and the social, economic, and political choices we make. A disease persists as a pandemic as long as these forces remain in flux; it becomes endemic when the balance is, more or less, set. The morning after Thanksgiving, Americans awoke to an unsettling revelation: Omicron, a highly mutated version of the coronavirus, with an unprecedented number of genetic changes, had been detected in southern Africa. Since then, it has appeared in dozens of countries across six continents and in at least twenty-two states. Our equilibrium has shifted again. But what, exactly, has changed? An early sketch of…