The New Yorker April 18, 2022

Masha Gessen (“The Memorial,” p. 26), a staff writer since 2017, is the author of “Surviving Autocracy.” Victoria Lomasko (Comic Strip, p. 36) is a Russian graphic artist. Her latest book is “Other Russias.” Sam Knight (“London Calling,” p. 22) is a staff writer based in London. His first book, “The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold,” is due out in May. Sheila Heti (Fiction, p. 48) is the author of, most recently, the novel “Pure Colour.” Louis Menand (Books, p. 63), a staff writer, is a scholar-in-residence at New York University School of Law. He published “The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War” in 2021. Ellen Bass (Poem, p. 51) is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches in the M.F.A. program at Pacific University. Her…

HIDDEN DESCENDANTS Jill Abramson’s thoughtful piece about West Ford, a man who was enslaved at Mount Vernon and whose descendants claim that he was George Washington’s son, brought to mind the story of Maria Carter Syphax (“Far from the Tree,” March 14th). Like Ford, Syphax, who was born in 1803, is linked to Washington’s family. Her father was George Washington Parke Custis, a grandson of Martha Washington and a step-grandson of George Washington. Syphax’s mother was Arianna Carter, an enslaved woman who served Martha Washington. Syphax was enslaved at Arlington House, the mansion that Custis built in what is now Arlington National Cemetery, where she served her half sister, Mary Anna Custis Lee, the wife of Robert E. Lee. In 1821, Maria married Charles Syphax, who was enslaved at Mount Vernon.…

APRIL 13 – 19, 2022 Finished soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, “The Skin of Our Teeth,” Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning allegorical comedy, tells the story of human history through a single family—the Antrobuses of Excelsior, New Jersey, who have survived the Ice Age, floods, plagues, and wars. This Lincoln Center Theatre revival (in previews at the Vivian Beaumont), directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, with additional script work by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, reinterprets the Everyman family to embody the Black experience. As ever, it’s advisable to confirm engagements in advance and to check the requirements for in-person attendance. MUSIC Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center CLASSICAL Julius Eastman—a gay Black composer who blazed his own path in the Minimalist movement and died, largely unappreciated, in 1990—has enjoyed a small yet persistent revival during the past several…

The other night at the Commerce Inn, a diner squinted at his phone and complained, “I have no service in here. Literally no bars.” On the one hand, this felt apt: the self-described “Shaker-inspired Early American tavern and cookery,” on a tucked-away corner in the West Village, adheres quite faithfully to its theme. On the other hand, the situation illustrated the tension inherent in opening an Early American restaurant two decades into the new millennium: How does one pull it off without tipping into Epcot territory? Sturbridge Village, but make it chic. You could argue that the Zeitgeist is ripe for this aesthetic, or, indeed, that the Commerce Inn, which opened in December, is helping drive the Zeitgeist. It’s the fifth restaurant from Jody Williams and Rita Sodi, the married chefs…

Just before the Senate Judiciary Committee voted, last week, on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court—one of the final hurdles before her confirmation by the full Senate, on Thursday—Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, offered a personal reminiscence from the hearings. “I got an opportunity during one of the breaks to go up to her parents, and I told them that they clearly raised her right,” Tillis said. “They should be very proud.” Then he voted against her, after a multiday spectacle during which Republican senators portrayed Jackson as a “dangerous” judge engaged in an extremist mission to undermine public safety on behalf of child-sex offenders, terrorists, and shadowy moneyed figures on the far left. Indeed, Tillis’s admiration for parents who had reared such a purported threat…

Sam Van Aken cultivates fruit, binges on fruit, and searches for long-lost fruit, so naturally he has opinions on fruit. His favorite is a lumpy brown apple called the Ashmead’s Kernel. “It looks like somebody taped a potato to the tree,” he said recently, while tending to his nursery, on Governors Island. “But you bite into it and it has this floral bouquet. It’s not like a Gala or a Fuji—industrialized apples.” The Ashmead’s, which used to grow in New York, has three distinct flavors, like a Bordeaux. “I always thought wine tasting was pretentious,” he said. “Now I’m talking about fruit this way.” Van Aken was putting the finishing touches on an art installation called the Open Orchard, which is all about fruit—a hundred trees in two groves that will…