The New Yorker December 27, 2021

Eliza Griswold (“A Dangerous Friend,” p. 40), a contributing writer, won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “Amity and Prosperity.” Her latest book is “If Men, Then: Poems.” George Booth (“The Evening Stroll,” p. 59) has contributed cartoons to The New Yorker since 1969. Elly Bookman (Poem, p. 70) received the 2017 Lorraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review. Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto (“Cryptic Crossword,” p. 57), a classical music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and a math educator, respectively, are the constructors of “Out of Left Field,” a weekly cryptic crossword. Tomi Um (“Where’s Eustace?,” p. 50), an illustrator based in Brooklyn, is at work on a children’s picture book. Paolo Pasco (“The Impossible Crossword,” p. 58) is a contributor to the American Values Club crossword and a crossword…

WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY Charles Bethea’s piece about the efforts of Charlie Munger—the billionaire vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and “amateur architect”—to build a dormitory without windows at the University of California, Santa Barbara, made me uneasy (The Talk of the Town, November 22nd). Munger should take a look at the dozens of houses that Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices lists for sale in the surrounding community. No matter the price of the property, buyers expect each bedroom to come with a window, as is normally required by California’s residential code. Berkshire Hathaway real-estate agents could not represent a windowless room as a bedroom, because it would be unwelcome to buyers. The fact that top university systems in California and Michigan have indulged Munger’s propensity for trapping students in rat mazes shows how desperately these institutions…

DECEMBER 22 – 28, 2021 The towering Norway spruce installed at Rockefeller Center is the tallest holiday tree in New York City, but it isn’t the only evergreen game in town. Forty blocks south, the Stanford White-designed arch in Washington Square Park, one of Manhattan’s liveliest landmarks, is home to a majestic forty-six-foot-tall fir (pictured above). At 5 p.m. on Dec. 24, carollers are invited to Greenwich Village to gather around the Beaux-Arts arch for a sing-along that will likely include a rendition of the classic “O Tannenbaum.” THE THEATRE Company Stephen Sondheim’s gimlet ode to the eternal fear of shrivelling up and dying alone—that is, of being thirty-five and single—from 1970, based on a series of one-act plays by George Furth (who wrote the book), gets a bristling, buoyant revival, directed by Marianne…

It is an irony of history, if not an instance of cosmic feminist karma, that the best British-inspired tea parlors in New York City—among them Tea & Sympathy, Lady Mendl’s, and Brooklyn High Low—are women-owned establishments. From 1657, when tea first became available in London’s coffeehouses, to the early seventeen-hundreds, when women were invited in, recreational tea drinking was the preserve of rumbustious gentlemen. A contemporaneous broadsheet celebrated the drink’s power to “maketh the body active and lusty.” In the course of the next two centuries, the musk of patriarchy lifted from this risqué pastime, and, by 1889, The Ladies’ Home Journal could report that “the five o’clock tea has become an institution of society” where “ladies are generally in the majority.” In the nineteen-eighties, for a New York University workshop,…

“Yesterday was a terrible day,” a legislator wrote in a text to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, on January 7, 2021. “We tried everything we could in our objection to the 6 states. I’m sorry nothing worked.” That text was released last week by the House select committee investigating the events of January 6th, namely, the assault on the Capitol by a mob that was trying to disrupt the tally of electoral votes. The text itself, though, was referring to a parallel attempt by members of the House to engineer the rejection of the votes of six states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) that Joe Biden had won. Neither effort succeeded—and that failure, extraordinarily enough, seems to have been a cause of regret for the apology-texting…

In 2002, Amy Mainzer was finishing her doctorate in astronomy at U.C.L.A. when an astronomer colleague discovered an asteroid. A few years later, she got a nice surprise: he had named it after her. Asteroid nomenclature is regulated by the International Astronomical Union, based in Paris, and vanity naming, Mainzer said recently, is “one of the perks” of her field. The asteroid, 234750 Amymainzer, is about seven and a half kilometres in diameter. Were it to crash into Earth, she said, it would cause an “extinction-level event.” On her laptop, she called up Caltech’s Infrared Science Archive and found it: a tiny red dot on what resembled a square of colorful sandpaper. “Fortunately for the world, I am safely locked in orbit in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter,…