The New Yorker October 4, 2021

Patricia Highsmith (“A Straight Line in the Darkness,” p. 46), who died in 1995, was the author of more than twenty novels. “Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941-1995” will be published in November. Thomas Meaney (“The Antagonist,” p. 20) teaches at Humboldt University of Berlin. Kathryn Schulz (Books, p. 62), a staff writer, won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2016. She will publish a new book, “Lost & Found,” next year. Kenton Nelson (Cover) is an artist based in California. Erika Meitner (Poem, p. 60) teaches at Virginia Tech. Her sixth book of poems, “Useful Junk,” is forthcoming in 2022. Vladimir Sorokin (Fiction, p. 56) has written numerous novels, plays, short stories, and film scripts. His novels “Telluria” and “Their Four Hearts,” translated, from the Russian, by Max Lawton, will be out…

BETTER MEDICINE Atul Gawande, in his piece on the advantages of Costa Rica’s approach to health care, writes that what set the country apart wasn’t “simply the amount it spent on health care. It was how the money was spent: targeting the most readily preventable kinds of death and disability” (“The Costa Rica Model,” August 30th). As he observes, the medical system in the United States is much more reactive, and less focussed on community care. Limited access to primary care is perhaps the weakest link in our system, and it is largely due to the U.S. establishment’s emphasis on curing disease rather than on ministering to patients’ over-all health. This bias is also reflected in medical schools, which tend to push students toward specialties rather than toward primary care. One way…

SEPTEMBER 29 – OCTOBER 5, 2021 For the show “Only an Octave Apart” (running through Oct. 3, at St. Ann’s Warehouse), Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond stitch together opera and cabaret in medleys arranged by Nico Muhly. One mashup combines two different laments by a woman named Dido: the closing aria from Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” (1689), and the singer Dido’s single “White Flag” (2003). Purcell’s Carthaginian queen cannot forsake love, and the English songwriter echoes her namesake’s dignified demurral: “I’m in love and always will be.” THE THEATRE Polylogues The actor and journalist Xandra Nur Clark wrote and performs this skillful piece of documentary theatre, extracted from dozens of interviews, about polyamory in all its variety, including a household with five members in a collective relationship (there are a lot…

The D’Amelio Show The seventeen-year-old Charli D’Amelio is currently the most popular creator on Tik-Tok, with more than a hundred and twenty-four million followers. Her older sister, Dixie, trails her with a still enormous fifty-four million. And yet the D’Amelios, who are at the center of this Hulu series, insist on perching, somewhat precariously, on the border between exceptionality and ordinariness. “I don’t consider myself famous. I’m just a person that a lot of people follow for some reason,” Charli says. A big part of the family’s brand is their relatability, which can feel simultaneously genuine and curated. Charli and Dixie are what the philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer have called “ideal types of the new dependent average,” their fame both seemingly within reach—stars, they’re just like us!—and yet impossibly far away.…

For four and a half million years, early hominids survived on a plant-based diet—seeds, nuts, roots, tubers. Around 2.6 million years ago, one of our ancestors got the idea to impale another terrestrial mammal with a sharp-edged tool, leaving butchery marks on its bones, later discovered as fossils by archeologists in the Ethiopian highlands. Today, some Homo sapiens still cling to the old ways, calling themselves vegetarian or, in their most traditionalist form, vegan, and envision a future in which the natural order is restored. At Délice & Sarrasin, a charming French bistro in the West Village, vegans can bide their time in style, enticing new recruits with the beau ideal of meatless haute cuisine. Vegan French cookery exposes an interesting paradox. On one hand, the very existence of Délice &…

A good way to get people talking, in this lingering pandemic era, is to ask whether they have tried to rent a car lately. Even if they haven’t, they have likely heard stories, perhaps about largely empty lots at the Atlanta airport, where customers were forced to compete in what the actress Audra McDonald, in an angry tweet, called a “hunger games relay,” or about the man who told the Los Angeles Times that he had booked a compact car to take his kids to Disney-land only to be directed to a van that “reeked of cigarettes and marijuana.” But most of the stories are more quotidian; the common elements are long lines, high rates, few choices, and mysterious references to “supply-chain issues.” What are these supply-chain issues, and why, more…