The New Yorker April 25-May 2, 2022

Ronan Farrow (“The Surveillance States,” p. 36), a contributing writer at the magazine, is the author of “Catch and Kill” and “War on Peace.” His reporting for The New Yorker won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service. Kelefa Sanneh (“Tough Business,” p. 30), a staff writer since 2008, recently published his first book, “Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.” Elif Batuman (Fiction, p. 56) became a staff writer in 2010. Her new novel, “Either/Or,” will come out in May. Keith Gessen (Books, p. 71) is the author of the novel “A Terrible Country.” He teaches at Columbia Journalism School. Elisa Gonzalez (Poem, p. 40), the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, is at work on her first book. Naaman Zhou (The Talk of the Town, p. 19)…

BUFFETT’S MIGRATIONS As an aficionado of Jimmy Buffett tunes, I enjoyed Nick Paumgarten’s report from the singer’s Latitude Margaritaville retirement communities (“Five O’Clock Everywhere,” March 28th). His vivid descriptions of some of the Parrotheads who have flocked to these developments elucidate Americans’ growing fascination with unconventional retirement scenarios. Yet Paumgarten missed a chance to point out that Latitude Margaritaville defies a view of retirement that Buffett himself once expressed—in, for example, his 1974 ballad “Migration”: “Most of the people who retire in Florida/Are wrinkled and they lean on a crutch/And mobile homes are smotherin’ my Keys/I hate those bastards so much.” Many of Buffett’s songs and stories convey environmental themes that no longer ring so true, considering the fact that a third Latitude Margaritaville complex will be carved out of Florida’s…

APRIL 20 – MAY 3, 2022 The singer-songwriter Indigo De Souza has rapidly evolved into one of indie rock’s most versatile young voices. After débuting, in 2018, with “I Love My Mom,” an endearing, albeit crude, grunge-pop revelation, her second album, “Any Shape You Take,” from 2021, brought breadth to her songs of unsustainable love, smoothing out her sound and refining her lyrics, even as she extended into new territory sonically and emotionally. On April 24, De Souza brings her bracing, catharsis-driven breakthrough to Music Hall of Williamsburg. ART Morgan Bassichis This gifted New York performance artist’s first solo gallery show is a spare but inviting installation of videos, handwritten to-do lists, and colorful pamphlets offering a series of “Questions to Ask Before” such potentially nerve-racking situations as “Beginning a New Friendship” and “Spending…

I won’t take a side in the battle over whether the city’s office workers should be expected to return to their desks as we shift with an ever-evolving pandemic. I will note that anyone with a desk in or near Midtown West might be incentivized by the promise of a superlative lunch. Last November, All’Antico Vinaio, an extraordinarily popular sandwich shop that originated in Florence, Italy, before expanding to Milan and Rome, opened its first U.S. outpost, in New York. I’ve been to Florence just once, for barely a day some summers ago, and what I did with that day, other than speed through the Uffizi, was optimize for eating. Lunch was at All’Antico Vinaio. I ordered La Paradiso, tripling down on my favorite nut: thin coins of pistachio were spangled,…

In 2003, when the Supreme Court held, in Lawrence v. Texas, that criminalizing gay sex was unconstitutional, it insisted that the decision had nothing to do with marriage equality. In a scathing dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “Do not believe it.” Then, in 2013, when the Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act’s definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman, emphasizing the tradition of letting the states define marriage, Scalia issued another warning, saying that “no one should be fooled” into thinking that the Court would leave states free to exclude gay couples from that definition. He was finally proved right two years later, when the reasoning on dignity and equality developed in those earlier rulings led to the Court’s holding that the Constitution…

One of the more surreal parts of last week’s shooting on the N train was a strange circularity. Here was an alleged perpetrator of monstrous subway violence who was attuned to, and dabbled in, our civic arguments over subway violence. “Eric Adams, what are you doing, brother?” he said in one YouTube rant. “Every car I went to was loaded with homeless people.” He added, of the Mayor, “He can’t stop no crime in no subways.” Nobody doubted the ease of committing any crimes in any subways. The list of recent track-shovings, muggings, and hate crimes caused by untreated mental illness is long and troubling. The wonder is that we’re able to keep a subway running at all. We pack people of all ages, sizes, dispositions, tax brackets, and crankiness levels…