The New Yorker December 13, 2021

Dexter Filkins (“An Accidental Revolutionary,” p. 38), a staff writer, received a National Book Critics Circle Award for “The Forever War.” Amanda Gorman (Poem, p. 62) is the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history. Her latest book is “Call Us What We Carry.” D. T. Max (“Coin Toss,” p. 22) is a staff writer and the author of “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace.” Caitlin Reid (Puzzles & Games Dept.) has been a crossword constructor since 2017. Her puzzles have appeared in the Times and the Wall Street Journal. Colin Barrett (Fiction, p. 58) is the author of two short-story collections, “Young Skins” and the forthcoming “Homesickness,” which will be out next year. Doreen St. Félix (On Television, p. 82), The New Yorker’s television critic, has been a…

PAIN AND GAIN Meghan O’Gieblyn, in her review of recent books about suffering, points out that many people believe hardship can be a source of good things (Books, November 15th). I can attest to this. I spent the year of 2011 working in an impoverished town in the Australian outback. I did not choose to do this, and I did not have the resources to leave. The suffering I observed during this time was crushing. Even a year or two after I returned to the U.S., when people asked what the experience had yielded, I couldn’t say. Only later did I realize that it had changed me utterly. That year was difficult. (Indeed, I, along with most of my fellow-workers, was paid an hourly “hardship” bonus by the Australian government.) But…

DECEMBER 8 – 14, 2021 The photographer Gordon Parks was the first Black director to make a major-studio feature: “The Learning Tree,” from 1969, an autobiographical drama about growing up in Kansas in the nineteen-twenties. It’s screening in Anthology Film Archives’ near-complete retrospective of Parks’s films (through Dec. 11). Also included are the TV movie “Solomon Northup’s Odyssey,” the bio-pic “Leadbelly,” the personal documentary “Moments Without Proper Names,” and, of course, the Harlem-based private-eye thriller “Shaft.” MUSIC Kati Agócs CLASSICAL The signature “Composer Portraits” series at Miller Theatre, which has supplied a vital platform for dozens of established and emerging artists through the years, resumes for the venue’s first in-person event since March of 2020. In the spotlight is Kati Agócs, whose music is known for its elemental strength and generous lyricism. “Voices of…

With the original Barbuto, Jonathan Waxman nailed the formula for a great neighborhood restaurant: cool location, lack of pretension, seasonal pastas, killer chicken. It opened in 2004, pre-meatpacking-district mania, on a quiet West Village corner below the photographer Fabrizio Ferri’s Industria studio—it didn’t hurt that models and celebrities might drop in after sessions—with garage doors that rolled up in clement weather and a chef’s table in the tiny kitchen, open for all to see. What they saw was calm, genial Waxman himself, doing his thing at a double-decker oven created by the master oven-builder Nobile Attie, making the traditional cuisine of the Italian Riviera feel fresh. When Barbuto was forced to close, in May, 2019, after the building was sold, a collective cry went up from neighborhood fixtures and restaurant lovers…

The legal landscape of the past weeks and months has prompted questions of which people and entities are legitimate interpreters and enforcers of the law and what happens when you take the law into your own hands. Mississippi and other states took the recent changes in personnel on the Supreme Court as an invitation to defy the Court’s constitutional rulings on abortion, and those states now seem likely to prevail. During oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, last Wednesday, the three liberal Justices often seemed to be delivering dirges, as though they had accepted a loss and were speaking for posterity. Mississippi’s ban on abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, which boldly flouts the Court’s precedents setting the line at around twenty-four weeks, is likely to be upheld…

Three hours before Josephine Baker was inducted into the Panthéon last week, Brian Bouillon-Baker, one of her ten sons, was on the terrace of a café in Montparnasse. “We found out in May that they were likely going to nominate Maman,” Bouillon-Baker said. He had been summoned to the Élysée, along with the initiators of a petition urging President Emmanuel Macron to honor Baker’s contributions to the performing arts, to the French Resistance, and to the fight against racism and anti-Semitism by elevating her to the Panthéon, France’s hall of “great men.” “We had been received by Macron’s counsellors, and, at the end of our appointment, Mrs. Macron came into the room,” Bouillon-Baker went on. The President was in Brussels. Bouillon-Baker recalled, “She said, ‘The Élysée is calmer when he’s…