The New Yorker March 15, 2021

Dana Goodyear (“Shot in the Dark,” p. 38) is a staff writer based in California. Her podcast “Lost Hills,” about a murder in Malibu, is out this month. Jelani Cobb (“How Parties Die,” p. 24), a staff writer, is a professor of journalism at Columbia University. Ellen Bass (Poem, p. 44) is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches in the M.F.A. program at Pacific University. Her latest collection is “Indigo.” Tom Gauld (Cover) will publish his first book for children, “The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess,” in August. Elizabeth Kolbert (Books, p. 78), a staff writer, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for “The Sixth Extinction.” Her new book is “Under a White Sky.” Peter Schjeldahl (The Art World, p. 82) has been the magazine’s art critic since…

BUILDING BLACK CAPITALISM I read with interest Kelefa Sanneh’s piece about Soul City, its founder, Floyd McKissick, and Black capitalism, all of which are vital to understanding the story of the United States (“The Color of Money,” February 8th). I could not help but think about another chapter in the history of Black capitalism—the growth of the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma. In spite of the ugly inequities of Jim Crow segregation, the neighborhood thrived, and, because of its affluence, became known as Black Wall Street. Then, starting on May 31, 1921, white mobs attacked Greenwood’s Black residents—resulting in, by some estimates, hundreds of casualties—and burned down more than a thousand homes and businesses. Within a decade of this tragedy, the people of Greenwood rebuilt their neighborhood, only to have an…

ART “Albers and Morandi” In this show, subtitled “Never Finished,” the Zwirner gallery pairs two artists who can seem bizarrely mismatched: Josef Albers, the starchy German-American abstract painter and color theorist, who died in 1976, at the age of eighty-eight, and Giorgio Morandi, the seraphic Italian still-life painter, who died in 1964, at the age of seventy-three. Albers, who was wedded to a format of three or four nested, hard-edged squares, is academic in spirit—easy to admire but hard to like. Morandi, transfixed by the bottles and vases in his studio for fifty years, is deeply poetic. Yet viewing them together electrifies—this is one of the best-installed shows that I’ve ever seen—as their works’ extremes play off each other. Think of it as a pas de deux of a drill sergeant (Albers)…

Fan-Fan Doughnuts 448 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn El Newyorkino 61 Commerce St., Brooklyn Soon after Fan-Fan Doughnuts, in Bed-Stuy, opened, in October, a young girl came in with her parents. Fany Gerson—who started Fan-Fan after parting ways with Dough, the doughnut brand that she co-founded, in 2010—asked if she’d like a demonstration. When she took the girl behind the counter, “the mom was sobbing,” Gerson recalled recently. “She’s, like, ‘It’s just been such a hard time.’ And then I started crying.” Fan-Fan was supposed to début much sooner, in a big, airy space in Clinton Hill where people could linger. When the pandemic struck, a capacious café no longer made sense, so Gerson and her partner decided to use Dough’s original, much smaller location, which had been adapted as a wholesale headquarters for another pastry project.…

If you were lucky, you were merely bored. And, if you were sentient, you had to acknowledge, when tallying up Covid-19’s impact on your own circumstances, that others had it worse. Fifty-two weeks ago, in the early days of March, you may have boarded a subway car or an airplane wearing gloves but no mask, or have scrubbed your hands until the knuckles bled, after blithely sharing the air with twenty thousand other humans at Madison Square Garden. We had a lot to learn. Many of us, though unable to differentiate among a year’s worth of Groundhog Days, can still deliver a meticulous “what I knew and when I knew it” account of the week or so leading up to the lockdown, as society snapped to attention. A final restaurant…

A year ago, we talked with a fifteen-year-old named Camilo, who lived with his mother and two siblings in a shelter with no Internet. The family shared one unreliable laptop and one cell phone. When they spent a night at the home of friends, to use their Wi-Fi, the shelter kicked them out. Last week, Camilo brought us up to date. We still don’t have Wi-Fi, but I have a school iPad that has service. Last spring, we moved to a shelter on the Lower East Side. I didn’t like it because I had to share a room, and I need my own space. But I liked the vibe. It was a good neighborhood, next to East River Park. I had a place to jog. I had a place to feed…