The New Yorker March 29, 2021

Ian Parker (“Fixer-Upper,” p. 34) contributed his first piece to The New Yorker in 1994 and became a staff writer in 2000. Patricia Marx (“Stand Up Straight!,” p. 30), a staff writer, published “You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time: Rules for Couples,” illustrated by Roz Chast, last year. Robert Pinsky (Poem, p. 58) most recently edited the poetry anthology “The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall.” His latest collection is “At the Foundling Hospital.” Carrie Battan (“The Unravelling,” p. 22), a staff writer, has been contributing to the magazine since 2015. Eli Grober (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 29) writes “Here’s Something,” a weekly humor newsletter. Reyna Noriega (Cover), a visual artist, published “In Bloom: A Poetic Documentary of the Journey to Higher Self” in 2019. Judith Thurman (“Eye of the Needle,”…

THE HEART OF THE MATTER Joshua Rothman brings much-needed attention to artificial hearts and to the challenges faced by the engineers, doctors, and patients who are invested in this technology (“Missing a Beat,” March 8th). I am a co-founder of a national coalition for women with heart disease. It is important to remember that artificial-heart research has disproportionately focussed on male patients and that, at this stage, experimental hearts often only fit the chests of large men. Yet heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, and almost as many women as men die of it each year. Gender bias in cardiac clinical trials and in access to advanced medical technologies persists, owing to sexism, misinformation about the extent to which women experience heart disease,…

In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, many New York City venues are closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found around town, as well as online and streaming. MARCH 24 - 30, 2021 THE THEATRE The Aran Islands “And that’s my story”: such is the matter-of-fact ending used by one of the colorful narrators of these tales of magic and murder, told by natives of the desolate, starkly beautiful Aran Islands, off Ireland’s western coast. They were written down, in 1898, by John Millington Synge, a poet, travel writer, playwright (“The Playboy of the Western World”), and founding member of the Abbey Theatre. He had visited the place at the urging of W. B. Yeats, and in his time there, among elemental figures both human and topographical, he found…

My knowledge of the all-male striptease dance troupe Chippendales more or less began with a “Saturday Night Live” sketch in which Chris Farley and Patrick Swayze compete for a coveted spot in the revue. By the time that sketch aired, in 1990, the eleven-year-old Chippendales franchise had passed into the pantheon of pop-culture cheese, and the glittering bow ties and gleaming, oil-slicked pectorals were easy, sleazy punch lines. What I did not know is that the group’s origin story is far more macabre and complicated than savvy businessmen capitalizing on an untapped spigot of female desire. The concept was the brainchild of Somen (Steve) Banerjee, an Indian immigrant and a former janitor, who roped in some questionable partners to finance his shirtless wonders. What happened next is the stuff of…

In his new biography of Mike Nichols, the critic Mark Harris details how, a few months into shooting Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” for HBO, the production fell behind schedule and Nichols’s “spirits started to flag.” What would cheer him up? “Most often, the answer was food,” Harris writes. Nichols’s then assistant would “go to Peter Luger’s every day to get him and the cast burgers for lunch.” Until a few weeks ago, Peter Luger, which was founded in 1887, was just about the last New York restaurant I would have associated with takeout. I had loved it, once, but before the pandemic I hadn’t been in years. A family tradition of steak-fuelled birthday celebrations had fizzled out. On my last visit, in 2015, I’d sat in the overflow space upstairs,…

The National Center for Civil and Human Rights, which opened, to great fanfare, in June of 2014, is housed in an austere wood-fibre-and-glass structure in downtown Atlanta. It is situated at 100 Ivan Allen, Jr. Boulevard, a street named for the late mayor who, on his first day in office, in 1962, removed the “White” and “Colored” signs from city hall. The civil-rights center—like the nearby King Center and streets around the city that have been renamed for the architects of the movement—is a step in the continued institutionalizing of Atlanta’s history as a theatre of the struggle for racial equality. Its permanent exhibits, ever mindful of the nation’s enduring racial inequalities, are nonetheless a kind of exultant retrospective: the objects on display there are artifacts of a moral triumph.…