The New Yorker February 14-21, 2022

Margaret Talbot (“Amy Coney Barrett’s Long Game,” p. 34) is a staff writer. Her latest book, written with David Talbot, is “By the Light of Burning Dreams.” Peter Schjeldahl (The Art World, p. 82), the magazine’s art critic since 1998, published “Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light” in 2019. Alexis Okeowo (“Pop Poetry,” p. 28), a staff writer, is the author of “A Moonless, Starless Sky.” In 2020, Okeowo was named journalist of the year by the Newswomen’s Club of New York. Robin Coste Lewis (Poem, p. 65) received the 2015 National Book Award for poetry. Her new collection, “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness,” is forthcoming in December. Jason Adam Katzenstein (Sketchpad, p. 17), a New Yorker cartoonist, is the author of “Everything Is an Emergency.” Lauren Groff (Fiction, p. 58) won the 2018-19 Story Prize…

FAHRENHEIT FIVE Joshua Yaffa paints a vivid, dire picture of the role that rising temperatures are playing in thawing permafrost, a process that then accelerates climate change (“The Great Thaw,” January 17th). It is impossible to deny the United States’ outsized contribution to the climate crisis, or the need for urgent action. So climate data and reporting need to be legible to as many people as possible. In Yaffa’s piece and other climate journalism, I fear, the sole use of Celsius, without a Fahrenheit conversion, risks understating the problem for too many Americans. A recent poll indicated that Americans are largely unfamiliar with Celsius and would like climate research and reporting to include Fahrenheit. The U.N. Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report 2021 warns that the world is “on track for a…

FEBRUARY 9 – 22, 2022 The visual onslaught of an endless Instagram feed is exhausting, but it’s not without precedent. During the Great Depression, Walker Evans discovered that the storefront window of one photo studio was displaying a staggering two hundred and twenty-five portraits, as seen in “Penny Picture Display, Savannah, Georgia, 1936” (above). The work is on view in the exhibition “A Trillion Sunsets: A Century of Image Overload,” at the International Center of Photography (through May 2). As ever, it’s advisable to confirm engagements in advance and to check the requirements for in-person attendance. MUSIC The Black Dog: “Brutal Minimalism” ELECTRONIC The prolific British techno group the Black Dog—comprising Ken Downie, who co-founded the crew in the early nineties, and the later recruits Martin Dust and Richard Dust—has extended its range with recent…

Forget the soot-colored tabletop grill, the monotonous assault of appetizers, the insistent trail of meaty smoke of a typical Korean barbecue restaurant—as soon as you enter Jua’s dim, opulent interior, it’s clear that this is not that sort of place. With its high ceilings, polished concrete, and formidable vase of plum blossoms, the restaurant, in the Flatiron district, resembles an après-ski lodge for the modern aristocracy. This effect is enhanced by the well-heeled clientele, whose air of regal self-assuredness evokes the character of Jua as much as its spiced firewood fragrance does. Jua, a partnership between the thirty-seven-year-old chef Hoyoung Kim and Hand Hospitality, is similar to Danji, Atoboy, and Little Mad, which all seek to broaden the scope of Korean cuisine along both cultural and economic axes. The multicourse less-is-more…

On January 19th, in the case of Donald J. Trump v. Bennie Thompson, the Supreme Court rejected the former President’s last-ditch attempt to deny the House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021, access to more than seven hundred documents held by the National Archives. The vote was 8–1; the lone dissenter was Clarence Thomas. The decision wasn’t much of a surprise—Trump had relied on a novel, extreme, and haphazardly presented assertion of executive privilege—but it was a turning point, nonetheless. Thompson is the chair of the Select Committee, and last week the Washington Post reported that, when he and his colleagues finally received the documents, they discovered that some of them had been torn up and then taped back together. Such painstaking efforts had been part of…

On a recent Monday afternoon, in a corner banquette in the Greenwich Village bistro Bar Six, Patricia Clarkson greeted a waiter with “Hi, darling!” and happily accepted his suggestion of a drink. “I’ve been up for forty-seven hours,” she said, looking slyly pleased. “I’ll have my usual—a Jack-and-ginger, no ice, lemon.” Clarkson, sixty-two, sat beneath a wall mirror painted with prix-fixe dinner offerings, wearing an elegant midnight-blue blouse (“This is faux silk”) and an antique-style watch (“It was given to me when I won my first Emmy for ‘Six Feet Under’”), amused and languorously glamorous. “I’ve been up since five-fifteen—hence my ‘Today’-show hair,” she said. She leaned back, happy to relax. This month, the second season of “State of the Union,” a SundanceTV series in which she co-stars (written by…