The New Yorker October 11, 2021

Ed Caesar (“The Dead Ship,” p. 36) is a contributing writer to The New Yorker. His latest book, “The Moth and the Mountain,” came out last year. Karen Russell (Fiction, p. 56) has written five books, including the short-story collection “Orange World” and the novel “Swamplandia!” Michael Schulman (“Hollywood on Trial,” p. 30), a staff writer since 2019, is the author of “Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep.” Joy Harjo (Poem, p. 35), the United States Poet Laureate, published the memoir “Poet Warrior” in September. Peter Schjeldahl (The Art World, p. 65) became the magazine’s art critic in 1998. His most recent book is “Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988-2018.” Luci Gutiérrez (Cover), an illustrator based in Barcelona, is the author of “English Is Not Easy: A Visual Guide to the Language.” Rivka Galchen (“Green…

DEBATING LONG COVID I read with great interest Dhruv Khullar’s detailed account of the complex and sometimes contentious interactions between health-care providers and advocates for patients with COVID-19—particularly those suffering from possibly related chronic illnesses (“The Damage Done,” September 27th). Some of the misunderstandings between doctors and patients may stem from medicine’s unwieldy vocabulary. Khullar describes how Diana Berrent, the forceful patient advocate, implies that people with relatively mild COVID infections can suffer “end-stage organ failure”—total and irrevocable loss of function of a vital organ. The statement’s implausibility makes Berrent seem out of touch with science. But the error is perhaps only a linguistic one. “End-organ damage,” a related but very different condition, is characterized by injury to any organ at the end of the circulatory supply chain that starts at…

OCTOBER 6 – 12, 2021 The poet, novelist, journalist, and artist Etel Adnan (pictured above, on the Brittany coast) was born in Beirut in 1925. She grew up speaking Arabic and Greek at home, and was educated in French and English. In the late nineteen-fifties, while working as a philosophy professor in Northern California, Adnan began to express herself in a new language—painting—making luminous abstractions of the view of Mt. Tamalpais from her home in Sausalito. On Oct. 8, the Guggenheim opens the exhibition “Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure.” MUSIC Boys Noize: “+/-” ELECTRONIC As Boys Noize, the German electronic producer and d.j. Alex Ridha has straddled the pop sphere and the club underground since 2004. On the heels of his Grammy win—for co-producing Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande’s “Rain on Me”—his first studio…

My first experience with soba, the thin Japanese noodle made from buckwheat, was at Honmura An, a temple of Zen elegance in SoHo that, starting in 1991, made its noodles by hand, on the premises, for sixteen years. It was also the first time I had sea urchin, and Honmura An’s soba with uni remains one of the formative (read: rapturous) meals of my life. After that restaurant’s chef and owner, Koichi Kobari, closed shop, in 2007, and left for Tokyo (where he took over his father’s soba restaurant, Honmura-an), it wasn’t until Cocoron came along, a few years later, that I fell, again, for soba. Far from Honmura An’s hushed reverence, the atmosphere at Cocoron, a tidy hole in the wall on Nolita’s Kenmare Street (one of a few locations…

Crises, at least of the American variety, sometimes announce themselves long before the fact, like a save-the-date notice for a future cataclysm. The decade before the Civil War was so rife with talk about potential conflict over slavery that the shots fired at Fort Sumter seemed almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Prior to the 2008 housing crisis, several analysts recognized that market conditions could potentially culminate in a catastrophic crash. For many years, scientists have sounded alarms about rising temperatures and emerging viruses. The common theme in these warnings is our collective unwillingness to address them beforehand. At present, this appears to be the situation regarding American democracy. Late last month, forty-six weeks after voting in the 2020 Presidential election had concluded, Republicans in the Arizona State Senate unveiled the results of…

All politics is performance, but New Yorkers seem particularly susceptible to shtick. Rudolph Giuliani milked the role of America’s mayor for more than a decade before fading into mascara-streaked ignominy. It was New York’s tabloids that first made a star of Donald Trump. And then there’s Andrew Cuomo, whose televised coronavirus briefings were so popular that he won a special Emmy—only to have it revoked nine months later, when he resigned in disgrace. “I never thought it would last,” Hank Morris said the other day, of Cuomo’s brief national run as leading man. “I flipped him on for five minutes and went, ‘Give me a fucking break.’” Through the years, Cuomo has provided good cause for Schadenfreude to many people, but there may be no one with as elaborate a…