The New Yorker November 8, 2021

Benjamin Anastas (“The Paper Tomb,” p. 44) teaches literature and writing at Bennington College. His books include the novel “An Underachiever’s Diary” and the memoir “Too Good to Be True.” Kim DeMarco (Cover) began contributing covers to the magazine in 2006. Nick Paumgarten (The Talk of the Town, p. 16; “What a Feeling,” p. 18), a staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 2000. Eileen Myles (Poem, p. 38) has published numerous books, including “Evolution” and “For Now.” Jamil Jan Kochai (Fiction, p. 56), a recipient of an O. Henry Award, is the author of “99 Nights in Logar” and “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories,” which will be out next year. Jennifer Homans (Dancing, p. 74), the magazine’s dance critic, directs the Center for Ballet and the Arts, at N.Y.U.…

THE LONG-COVID CONUNDRUM The New Yorker’s article on Long COVID, in which I was a central subject, was a profound affront to everyone suffering the long-term sequelae of even mild and asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 (“The Damage Done,” September 27th). The piece included no interviews with doctors or scientists directly investigating Long COVID, and no interviews with patients battling the disease. I participated in the article with the understanding that it would be a profile of me and of Survivor Corps—the world’s largest grassroots COVID movement, which I founded—but it proved to be something entirely different. It depicted my organization as anti-science, even though we have reinvented what it means to be citizen-scientists by co-authoring scientific papers and creating a system in which patients and researchers partner to advance science in…

NOVEMBER 3 – 9, 2021 In 1857, Seneca Village, a community of predominantly Black Americans, was destroyed to build Central Park. Beginning Nov. 5, the Met imagines an alternate world, one in which the village still thrives, with “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room,” combining historic and contemporary art and décor. Its visionary lead curator, Hannah Beachler—who won an Oscar for her production design on “Black Panther”—is pictured here, with wallpaper by the Nigerian American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby. THE THEATRE Dana H. In the late nineties, when the playwright Lucas Hnath was a college student at N.Y.U., his mother, Dana Higginbotham, was kidnapped by a man she had met while working as a psych-ward chaplain at a hospital in Florida. She spent five terrifying months as his captive, hustled back…

As a little girl growing up in Vietnam, Nhu Ton—the chef at Bánh, a Vietnamese restaurant that opened in January, on the Upper West Side—was surrounded by the scent of spices. Ton’s family worked and lived in a vast open-air market, and in the mornings her nose frequently awoke to adults shelving bags of cinnamon, coriander, and lemongrass. “When I think about my childhood, I smell it first,” Ton told me. The long aromatic tails that the spices left on her memory now make their mark on Bánh’s menu. “I wanted to create the flavors that I craved,” Ton said. “Things that taste like the particular place where I grew up.” One of those things is good Vietnamese coffee. Buôn Ma Thuô· t, Ton’s home town, is the capital of java…

After Donald Trump lost the Presidential election last year, a law professor named John Eastman drafted, for Trump’s use, a two-page manual for unlawfully throwing out the electoral votes of certain states as they were being tallied in Congress, on January 6th. The name he mentions most often in the memo is that of Vice-President Mike Pence. It appears in such statements as “Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected” and, regarding disrupting the count, “The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission.” Eastman also spoke at Trump’s January 6th rally, where he said that what “we are demanding of Vice-President Pence” is that he intervene in the electoral count. Trump, speaking shortly afterward, cited Eastman’s authority when he said, “If Mike Pence does…

A few months ago, a series of mayoral campaign posters started appearing in New York subway cars and taped to lampposts. Something about the ads seemed off (one for Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams promised: “I Was Beaten by Cops. Now You Can Be Too”), but, then, so has the campaign. The Republican candidate, the Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, once evoked the image of himself as “a hemorrhoid in a red beret.” As for Adams, the Democratic nominee, no one is sure where he lives; he is said to pad around Borough Hall, where he keeps a mattress, in his socks. Fake news, real news—who can keep track? A paper in the Bronx pegged the strange posters as a Sliwa guerrilla operation. One of the ersatz Sliwa ads: “Marxist-Democrat…