The New Yorker July 4, 2022

Andrew Marantz (“The Illiberal Order,” p. 36), a staff writer, published “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation” in 2019. Annie Proulx (“Swamped,” p. 20) is the author of “Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis,” which is due out in September. Edward Steed (Sketchbook, p. 55) began contributing cartoons to the magazine in 2013. Nell Wright (Poem, p. 42), a poet and a visual artist, is at work on her first book. Bill Adair (The Talk of the Town, p. 18) is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University. He is the founder of the Web site PolitiFact. Jia Tolentino (Comment, p. 15) became a staff writer in 2016. Her first book, the essay collection “Trick Mirror,”…

FLIGHT ATTENDANCE Jennifer Gonnerman, in her reporting on flight attendants fighting for better treatment, mentions that my sister, Sandie Hendrix, a stewardess at United, was fired, in 1972, after weighing in at a hundred and twenty-seven pounds (“Highflier,” May 30th). It’s worth noting what happened afterward, too. Sandie played a pivotal role in a lawsuit against United, and she eventually got her job back, with back pay and seniority restored, as if she had never left. Unfortunately, the other flight attendants were none too welcoming upon Sandie’s return; they resented that she had kept pace in seniority (which determined flight schedules and home bases) without, as they saw it, having worked for it. Sandie and her fellow-returnees were ever after called the “wide-bodies.” Linda Hendrix McPharlinSan Francisco, Calif. GREAT DEEDS, GREAT DANGER William Finnegan…

JUNE 29 – JULY 5, 2022 In 1998, the Asia Society introduced Americans to a new art scene emerging from China in the seminal show “Inside/Out.” Through Aug. 14, the museum presents a sequel of sorts: “Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity.” Its curator, Barbara Pollack, presents works by seven artists, all born after 1976, for whom the binary of East versus West is essentially moot. Pixy Liao—whose gender-norm-defying photograph “Shoulder,” from 2021, is seen here—grew up in Shanghai and is now based in Brooklyn. DANCE American Ballet Theatre A.B.T.’s production of “Swan Lake,” from 2000, staged by its outgoing artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, is lavish and traditional and ends with a spectacular leap into the lake for the lovers. The company rolls out seven different casts for this season’s performances, June 27-July…

On the cusp of the summer solstice, it’s hard to imagine looking forward to colder, darker months. And yet the other night at Place des Fêtes, a new wine bar and restaurant in Clinton Hill, the idea consoled me. A few weeks prior, I’d had a dish there that I was ready to declare the best of 2022. A skate wing had been quick-cured, cold-smoked, breaded in whipped egg whites and koji-rice flour, and deep-fried twice. The darkly bronzed exterior, dusted in dried lacto-fermented red pepper, looked tough but cracked easily at the nudge of a fork, peeling cleanly along the bone and revealing strips of sweet, succulent meat. Surrounding it were a wedge of Meyer lemon, a delicate pile of dill and Italian parsley, a tiny dish of sauce…

In the weeks since a draft of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—a case about a Mississippi law that bans abortion after fifteen weeks, with some health-related exceptions but none for rape or incest—was leaked, a slogan has been revived: “We won’t go back.” It has been chanted at marches, defiantly but also somewhat awkwardly, given that this is plainly an era of repression and regression, in which abortion rights are not the only rights disappearing. Now that the Supreme Court has issued its final decision, overturning Roe v. Wade and removing the constitutional right to abortion, insuring that abortion will become illegal or highly restricted in twenty states, the slogan sounds almost divorced from reality—an indication, perhaps, of how difficult it has become to…

The right-wing media ecosystem is sometimes described as a perpetual outrage machine (headlines on a recent day included “THE LEFT’S GRAND PLAN TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY” and “ELON MUSK IS THE BOSS ALL WOKE LOSERS NEED”), but that doesn’t mean there aren’t occasional droughts. Last Monday morning, as Howard Polskin began prowling right-wing Web sites in search of material for TheRighting, the newsletter he founded to provide a daily roundup of the conservative commentariat, he looked worried. The previous week, the hearings into the January 6th attack on the Capitol had elicited a steady stream of headlines that were provocative enough to serve as the newsletter’s subject line (“THE J6 COMMITTEE’s REAL TAR-GET IS YOU”). But a weekend break had raised the possibility of an unlikely lull. Ordinarily, Polskin waits…