The New Yorker January 17, 2022

Hilton Als (“The Dream Catcher,” p. 40), a staff writer, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. His new exhibition, “Toni Morrison’s Black Book,” opens in New York, at the David Zwirner gallery, at the end of January. Kimiko Hahn (Poem, p. 45) teaches at Queens College, City University of New York. Her latest poetry collection is “Foreign Bodies.” D. T. Max (“Interiors,” p. 16) became a staff writer in 2010, and is the author of “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story.” Ronald Wimberly (Cover) created “GratNin,” “Prince of Cats,” and “Black History in Its Own Words.” He is the founding editor of LAAB magazine. Doreen St. Félix (On Television, p. 66), a staff writer since 2017, is The New Yorker’s television critic. Nate Odenkirk (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 23) is a co-writer of…

THE WRITE STUFF The new-age typewriters, digital paper, and featureless word-processing programs that Julian Lucas describes in his piece about “distraction-free” writing devices seem to be an inevitable response to our contemporary condition (“Focus Mode,” December 20th). As someone with adult A.D.H.D., I have experimented with different methods of blocking out distractions while I’m writing. But I would like to push back on the notion, implied by the philosophies and technologies behind some of these devices, that a linear writing process is inherently superior to a more meandering one. Because of the way my brain works, it would be disconcerting to see only the immediately preceding sentence in a text, or to be unable to digitally cut and paste. I can’t imagine writing without being able to jump around and to…

JANUARY 12 – 18, 2022 A century ago, the Stettheimer sisters were known for hosting salons in their Manhattan apartment. Florine was a painter, Ettie wrote novels, and so it fell to Carrie, an aspiring stage-set designer, to manage the household. In domesticity, Carrie found a new muse: from 1916 until 1935, she lavished her talents on an exquisite miniature representation of the sisters’ milieu (including a nursery, pictured above). “The Stettheimer Dollhouse: Up Close” is on view at the Museum of the City of New York through May 20. ART Chando Ao The Postmasters gallery was an early adopter of digital art, which it has been exhibiting since 1991. So its recent foray into the crypto ecosystem—Postmasters now accepts cryptocurrency for all transactions, and also mints and sells N.F.T.s—is only natural. The Chinese…

If the idea of a “pandemic drama” makes you a bit queasy right now, nobody can blame you: it’s hard enough to live through one, let alone muster up the desire to consume fictional content about others doing the same. But don’t let the premise of HBO Max’s new drama “Station Eleven”—about several people who survive a deadly flu that wipes out most of the Earth’s population—deter you from leaping in; the story is less about death and destruction than it is about life, vibrant and wild and humming with promise. The show, which was created by Patrick Somerville and adapted from Emily St. John Mandel’s hit novel of the same name, centers on an actress named Kirsten (an excellent Mackenzie Davis), who was a child when the plague hit.…

“This is bad to broadcast, but, for Hupo, COVID was at first a curse and then, well, an opportunity,” the thirty-one-year-old Jiawen Zhu said of the Sichuanese eatery he co-owns, which opened not long before the pandemic first besieged New York, in March, 2020. As many other Chinese restaurants shuttered, Zhu worked with a skeletal crew of three to keep the doors open. It likely helped, he said, that Hupo is situated in Long Island City, where a fivefold increase in Asian residents in the past decade has transformed the neighborhood. “When something as strange and destabilizing as a pandemic happens, you want to find the familiar,” Zhu remarked. At Hupo, a few solid culinary standbys offer the assurance that “even if the sky falls, Sichuanese will still be here.” With…

On March 25, 1965, at the conclusion of the brutally consequential march from Selma to Montgomery, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a speech titled “Our God Is Marching On!” He spoke to a crowd of twenty-five thousand people on the grounds of the Alabama state capitol, in view of the office window of the segregationist governor George Wallace. The address is not among King’s bestknown, but it is among the most revelatory. King argued that, in the decade since the bus boycotts in that city, a new movement had emerged and an older order was starting to fall away. Referring to the historian C. Vann Woodward’s book “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” King said that racial segregation had begun not simply as an expression of white supremacy but as…