The New Yorker April 4, 2022

Rachel Aviv (“The Price of Admission,” p. 34), a staff writer, is the author of “Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us,” which will be published in September. David Sedaris (“Lucky-Go-Happy,” p. 27) has contributed to the magazine since 1995. His new essay collection, “Happy-Go-Lucky,” will be out in May. Rae Armantrout (Poem, p. 40) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Her latest book is “Finalists.” Sunil Khilnani (Books, p. 64) is the author of “Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives” and “The Idea of India.” Liana Finck (Sketchbook, p. 43), a New Yorker cartoonist, will publish “Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation” in April. Ben McGrath (The Talk of the Town, p. 16) has been a staff writer since 2003. His new book is “Riverman:…

REASONS AND PERSONHOODS Lawrence Wright’s report on the predicament of Happy, an elephant kept at the Bronx Zoo, offers an excellent account of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s long battle to expand the legal definition of personhood (“The Elephant in the Courtroom,” March 7th). Another species that Wright refers to—orcas—represents a strong case for nonhuman personhood, and yet probably stands little chance of obtaining it. Unlike chimpanzees, orcas have no physical features that resemble a human’s, and live only in aquatic environments. Unlike elephants, which humans have trained for centuries, orcas are relative newcomers to captivity. Until the nineteen-sixties, they were generally held to be vicious killers. But orcas have been known to show an astonishing regard for human wellbeing. In the late seventies, the SeaWorld park in San Diego put some recently…

MARCH 30 – APRIL 5, 2022 In 2020, the American floral designer Jeff Leatham—who counts the Dalai Lama, Dolly Parton, and the Kardashians as clients—masterminded the eighteenth annual Orchid Show at the New York Botanical Garden, only to see his kaleidoscope-themed installation abruptly shuttered by the pandemic. Leatham’s extravaganza returns to the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory (pictured) through May 1, reconceived in collaboration with the Garden’s horticulturists, including Marc Hachadourian, the senior curator of orchids. As ever, it’s advisable to confirm engagements in advance and to check the requirements for in-person attendance. THE THEATRE Help In 2019, the poet Claudia Rankine published an essay in the New York Times with a simple conceit. Seeking to understand privilege, she interviewed white men at airports about their white-maleness. Sometimes they were rude—skipping ahead of Rankine on the…

The other day, on a corner in Ridgewood, Queens, I overheard a woman say, “You know that place is owned by Ukrainians?” She was pointing to Varenyk House, a year-old deli and grocery across the street, where I happened to be headed. “It’s a Ukrainian restaurant.” Her companion squinted. “Interesting!” he said earnestly. Taking an interest in Ukrainian food following Russia’s vicious and unprovoked military campaign against its smaller neighbor might seem like a meagre response. But after a conversation with Varenyk House’s owner, Stepan Rogulskyi, I saw value in the gesture. When news of the war broke, Rogulskyi, who emigrated, in 2008, from western Ukraine, where his brothers, parents, and grandparents still live, experienced a period of acute, almost unbearable stress. Weeks later, he was angry, but also optimistic. “I…

In 1996, the year that Vladimir Putin moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow to take a post inside Boris Yeltsin’s Kremlin, the government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta asked its readers a leading question: “Do you agree that we’ve had enough democracy, haven’t adapted to it, and now it’s time to tighten the screws?” The paper set up a hotline and offered the equivalent of two thousand dollars to any caller who could come up with a new “unifying national idea.” The exercise reflected an impoverished country demoralized and adrift. At around the same time, Yeltsin assembled a committee of scholars and politicians to formulate a new “national idea.” Perhaps the newspaper contest could feed the process. But the efforts went nowhere. Yeltsin had failed to build any momentum behind democratic ideals, and…

If you see something, say something, or so we’re often told, though on a recent moonlit night in Central Park the sight of two men lifting Kevlar canoes over the iron fence around the reservoir seemed to concern no one. Joggers jogged, walkers walked—and Neil King and Tyler Maroney, self-styled urban rusticators, scampered down a steep embankment and pushed off into what King later called the “epicenter of emptiness” for an illicit crossing of Manhattan’s largest body of freshwater. A hundred yards in, they clapped paddles together, in celebration. Twenty minutes later, they were high and dry again, heading south and portaging to the Turtle Pond, in anticipation of an amphibious assault on Belvedere Castle. This lark was King’s idea. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, he’d decided last year, amid…