The New Yorker January 24, 2022

Patrick Radden Keefe (“The Bounty Hunter,” p. 32), a staff writer, received the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for his book “Empire of Pain.” His new book, “Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks,” will come out in June. Donika Kelly (Poem, p. 38) has published the poetry collections “Bestiary” and “The Renunciations.” She teaches at the University of Iowa. Eren Orbey (“Fault Lines,” p. 46) is a contributing writer at the magazine. Amanda Petrusich (Pop Music, p. 70), a staff writer, is the author of “Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records.” George Booth (Cover) has contributed cartoons to The New Yorker since 1969. David Kamp (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25) is the author of, most recently, “Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution…

HUMANITIES, REDEFINED Louis Menand, in his review of two books that defend so-called “great books” courses, points out that the tension underpinning both works, between professors’ motivations and their institutions’ priorities, is nothing new (A Critic at Large, December 20th). Recent trends in undergraduate enrollment, however, may help to explain why students seem to be turning away from subjects such as English, foreign languages, and philosophy in favor of more career-oriented courses of study. According to a report published by the Pew Research Center in 2019, between 1996 and 2016, the share of dependent undergraduates in the U.S. who came from families living below the poverty line rose from twelve per cent to twenty per cent. A decline in humanities enrollment might stem from the fact that students from less affluent…

JANUARY 19 – 25, 2022 The streaming service MUBI is a virtual repertory cinema, adding a movie each day alongside ongoing series. The January offerings include notable first features (Janicza Bravo’s “Lemon,” Noah Baumbach’s “Kicking & Screaming”), the new release of the 2020 documentary “There Will Be No More Night,” and a tribute to the Sundance Film Festival, presenting such independent-film classics as “But I’m a Cheerleader,” “Chuck & Buck,” and Jonathan Caouette’s pioneering personal documentary “Tarnation” (pictured above). As New York City venues reopen, it’s advisable to confirm in advance the requirements for in-person attendance. 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…

Cocaine & Rhinestones This exhaustively researched, feverishly delivered history-of-country-music podcast—a passion project and one-man show from Tyler Mahan Coe—was an instant cult hit among music obsessives when its first season came out, in 2017. Coe spent the next few years creating the second season, a wildly ambitious, and wildly long, epic about George Jones. In telling the great singer’s story, Coe zooms in and out to include the development of the Nashville sound, the history of pinball, the invention of ice cream, the Medicis, the production of moonshine, Martin Luther’s opposition to the Roman Catholic Church, Jones’s alcoholism, Tammy Wynette’s affair with Burt Reynolds, the history of drag and masquerade balls—and, quite deftly, cocaine and rhinestones. Coe, an autodidact and the son of the outlaw-country musician David Allan Coe, relishes his…

One of the first Mexican eateries in New York City opened in midtown in 1938. Its proprietor, Juvencio Maldonado, who had sailed over from the Yucatán Peninsula, called his place Xochitl, after an Aztec goddess. He patented a mechanical taco-shell fryer and printed a glossary of imported culinary terms for his befuddled diners. (Tortilla: “a flat, round corn cake, about 6 inches in diameter and 1/16 inch thick … can be bent or rolled, as we shall explain.”) For decades, Xochitl was just about the only game in town. The scene ramified in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when the city’s Mexican population grew eightfold. New arrivals would launch taco trucks, tamale pushcarts, panaderías, tortilla factories, and more than a thousand professional kitchens in the five boroughs. If a certain French…

There’s an urban legend about a Texas man who takes a rifle to the side of his barn and sprays bullets across the wall, more or less at random. Then he finds the densest clusters of holes and paints a bull’s-eye around each one. Later, a passerby, impressed by this display, trots off in search of the marksman. In a reversal of cause and effect, the Texas Sharpshooter is born. The Sharpshooter Fallacy is often used by scientists to illustrate our tendency to narrativize data after the fact. We may observe an unusual grouping of cancer cases and back into an explanation for it, cherry-picking statistics and ignoring the vagaries of chance. As we muddle through COVID-19’s winter surge, the story holds a deeper lesson about the perils of interpreting data…