The New Yorker October 25, 2021

Tad Friend (“Watch and Learn,” p. 32) became a staff writer in 1998. His memoir about his search for his father, “In the Early Times: A Life Reframed,” will come out in May. Sandy Solomon (Poem, p. 39) won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for “Pears, Lake, Sun.” She teaches at Vanderbilt University. Joshua Yaffa (“Exiled,” p. 26), a Moscow correspondent for the magazine, published “Between Two Fires” in 2020. Tove Ditlevsen (Fiction, p. 52), who died in 1976, was the author of “The Copenhagen Trilogy.” A collection of her short stories, “The Trouble with Happiness,” translated, from the Danish, by Michael Favala Goldman, is due out next year. Edward Steed (Cover) has contributed cartoons to The New Yorker since 2013. Alexandra Schwartz (The Theatre, p. 72), a staff writer since 2016, is a…

DISASTER ON DECK Ed Caesar hauntingly depicts the catastrophe that is due to occur in the Red Sea when the F.S.O. Safer, a deteriorating oil tanker that sits near the coast of Yemen, spills a million barrels of crude (“The Dead Ship,” October 11th). I am a concerned scientist and a member of a team of researchers from Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, and U.C.S.F. A week after Caesar’s piece came out, we published a paper in Nature Sustainability in which we model the humanitarian impacts of the coming disaster, some of which may be even worse than Caesar describes. We expect, in addition to a famine, that the clean-water supply for at least nine million people will be disrupted, which will cause outbreaks of waterborne illnesses and death. We also anticipate that…

OCTOBER 20 – 26, 2021 The British artist Gillian Wearing is celebrated for her photographic and video portraits, which are at once conceptual and empathetic. Recently, Wearing began making sculptures, including the first monument to a woman—the suffragist Millicent Fawcett—ever installed in London’s Parliament Square. On Oct. 20, the Public Art Fund unveils Wearing’s bronze homage to Diane Arbus (pictured) in Central Park’s Doris C. Freedman Plaza; on Nov. 5, the Guggenheim opens the retrospective “Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks.” THE THEATRE The Fever Wallace Shawn’s unrelenting 1990 monologue, performed here by Lili Taylor and directed by Scott Elliott, tells the story, perhaps, of one privileged New Yorker’s destabilizing encounter with Marxism, centering on a night of illness in “a strange hotel room in a poor country where my language isn’t spoken.” The structure is…

If New York City is a graveyard of unrealized dreams, it’s also a maze of hidden passageways leading to new rooms, where one can reinvent oneself in the wake of thwarted ambitions. In the early two-thousands, an aspiring stage actress named Suzaan Hauptfleisch left South Africa for Manhattan. Broadway never called, and this town’s culinary scene is all the better for it. The city has seven thousand four hundred and thirty working actors. It has exactly one South African restaurant and bar: Hauptfleisch’s Kaia, an Upper East Side institution that, in its eleven years, has supplied New Yorkers with 7.2 million dollars’ worth of South African wine, mostly by the glass. By Hauptfleisch’s estimate, upward of ninety per cent of her patrons live within walking distance. She doesn’t take reservations for…

Anyone in need of a warning about what the 2022 midterm elections could bring might consider what took place last month at a candidates’ forum sponsored by the Republican Women of Coffee County, Alabama. Katie Britt, a contender for the Republican nomination to replace Senator Richard Shelby, who is retiring, was asked if she had supported Roy Moore in the 2017 special Senate election. Moore is the Constitution-defying judge who was accused of sexually pursuing teen-age girls; he denied the allegations, but lost to the Democratic candidate, Doug Jones. “I have never supported or voted for a Democrat in my life,” Britt said, but added, “I also think it’s important to stand with women.” That hedged response appeared to provoke the next candidate to speak, Representative Mo Brooks, who accused…

Severin Beckwith and Anna Brettmann, a young couple from Ithaca, New York, have been hiking from Georgia to Virginia on the Appalachian Trail since late September. In western North Carolina, after a few days of hard rain and little sleep, they decided to take a break from the woods. A shuttle delivered them to the Lodge at Fontana Village Resort, a rustic retreat two miles off the trail, where they ate lunch and lay down for a midday nap. Knocking awoke them. There was a muffed voice outside their door. It burst open before Beckwith could unlock it. “Next thing I see is a bunch of guys with riot shields with ‘U.S. Marshals’ written on them,” Beckwith said. “Handguns pointed at my face.” Brettmann was still in bed. A marshal helped…