The New Yorker January 3-10, 2022

Evan Osnos (“MAGA-Phone,” p. 32), a staff writer, covers politics and foreign affairs for the magazine. His latest book is “Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury.” Jennifer Egan (Fiction, p. 56) is the author of, most recently, “Manhattan Beach.” Her new novel, “The Candy House,” will be out in April. Peter Hessler (“Going Up,” p. 44) became a staff writer in 2000. His books include “River Town” and “The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution.” Parul Sehgal (A Critic at Large, p. 62), a staff writer, teaches creative writing at New York University. Tadeusz Dąbrowski (Poem, p. 36) is a Polish writer whose work has been widely translated. Two of his poetry collections, “Black Square” and “Posts,” have been released in English. Caitlin Reid (Puzzles & Games Dept.) began constructing crossword puzzles in 2017. Robin…

WHAT IS A THOUGHT? James Somers’s piece about using brain imaging to read human thoughts paints a rosy picture of the potential of technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (“Head Space,” December 6th). Somers says that we’ve discovered what thoughts “really are: patterns of neural activation that correspond to points in meaning space.” But, of course, the mind-brain relationship is considerably more complex. Two mental states might be intrinsically identical, though one is a memory and the other is dreamed up. A thought-decoding device would have trouble distinguishing between the two. Revealingly, Somers compares the history of thought decoding to the breaking of the genetic code by James Watson and Francis Crick. But, in the past few decades, genetic research has shown that one cannot trust a reading of a nucleotide sequence…

DECEMBER 29, 2021 – JANUARY 11, 2022 Shikō Munakata (1903-75) brought Japan’s woodblock tradition into the modern age with his spontaneous, Expressionist approach. “Shikō Munakata: A Way of Seeing,” on view at the Japan Society through March 20, includes the artist’s “Tōkaidō Series,” from 1964—“Yui: Construction at Sea,” pictured above, is among its sixty-one images—for which he travelled along the same coastal route that once inspired the Edo-period ukiyo-e masters Hiroshige and Hokusai. MUSIC Natu Camara AFRO-ROCK Around the turn of this century, Natu Camara began her music career in the Ideal Black Girls, a Guinean quartet considered West Africa’s first all-female R. & B. and hip-hop group. Since relocating to Harlem, the Ivory Coast-born singer has flipped her musical equation. Where before she was an African artist performing music with an American edge,…

Some of the best things in life are not sought out but thrust upon us. Hungary, for instance, was introduced to coffee by way of its occupation by the Ottoman Empire. At Agi’s Counter, in Crown Heights, the chef Jeremy Salamon’s childhood memories of his grandmother sparked the creation of the first thing you notice about his Nosh Plate: huge crackers that undulate like Frank Gehry wall shards. “Growing up, my mom’s mom belonged to a country club, so she would always be eating these very large crackers—like, huge,” Salamon told me. “And she would just be buttering them, and I always thought it was just so comical. It was a sign of bouginess, for some reason: I have this large cracker. So I was, like, I think everybody deserves…

It’s rare that a tiny country like Nauru gets to determine the course of world events. But, for tangled reasons, this rare event is playing out right now. If Nauru has its way, enormous bulldozers could descend on the largest, still mostly untouched ecosystem in the world—the seafloor—sometime within the next few years. Hundreds of marine scientists have signed a statement warning that this would be an ecological disaster resulting in damage “irreversible on multigenerational timescales.” Nauru, which is home to ten thousand people and occupies an eight-square-mile island northeast of Papua New Guinea, acquired its outsized influence owing to an obscure clause of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS. Under UNCLOS, most of the seabed—an area of roughly a hundred million square miles—is considered…

“The Simpsons” takes place in what has been called a “continuous present.” Time passes, but everyone generally stays the same. From the first episode, which aired in 1989, to the seven hundred and sixteenth, which aired earlier this month, Maggie has been a pacifier-sucking infant, Bart has been a fourth-grade rebel, and Homer has worked the same dead-end job at the same nuclear power plant. Even as developments in the real world are reflected in the world of the show—new Presidents, new Popes, legal weed, TikTok—the characters don’t evolve. But there are exceptions. The power plant’s owner, the villainous energy magnate C. Montgomery Burns, has an executive assistant, a bowtied lackey named Waylon Smithers. Smithers pines for his boss, who remains oblivious even as the come-ons grow more overt. (Burns, about…