The New Yorker May 30, 2022

William Finnegan (“Big Breaks,” p. 32) has been a staff writer since 1987. His book “Barbarian Days” received the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2016. Lauren Collins (“Soaking It In,” p. 26), a staff writer, is the author of “When in French.” She is at work on a book about Wilmington, North Carolina. Neima Jahromi (“The Great Pretenders,” p. 18) is a member of the magazine’s editorial staff. Barbara Hamby (Poem, p. 38) has published seven poetry collections, including, most recently, “Holoholo.” Edward Koren (Cartoon, p. 42) began contributing to The New Yorker in 1962. His exhibition “Down to the Bone: Edward Koren and Stephen Gorman” is on display at the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts, through February 5, 2023. Claire-Louise Bennett (Fiction, p. 54) is the author of “Pond,” “Fish Out of Water,”…

REMEMBERING BABYN YAR I always find Masha Gessen’s work thought-provoking, and their piece about Babyn Yar, where German soldiers massacred tens of thousands of Jews in 1941, is no exception (“The Memorial,” April 18th). I’m sure that many other people were first jolted, as I was, into an understanding of that atrocity by Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, from 1962. Subtitled “Babi Yar,” the composition opened with a movement set to Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s searing poem about the massacre. The symphony was greeted with alarm by Soviet authorities. Yevgeny Mravinsky, who had conducted many of Shostakovich’s premières, refused to conduct the Thirteenth; he was replaced by Kirill Kondrashin, who faced pressure to withdraw but resisted. Yevtushenko was compelled to alter his poem, replacing lines expressing solidarity with the murdered Jews with a…

MAY 25 – 31, 2022 For its forty-fifth edition, BAM’s DanceAfrica festival (May 27-30) focusses on the theme of “homegrown,” showcasing some of the local companies and schools that keep African traditions alive in Brooklyn and the Bronx. These include the Bambara Drum and Dance Ensemble (pictured above); the LaRocque Bey School of Dance Theatre, founded in Harlem in 1960; and the festival’s own BAM/Restoration Dance Youth Ensemble, which has been stealing shows for twenty-five years. As New York City venues reopen, it’s advisable to confirm in advance the requirements for in-person attendance. DANCE New York City Ballet For his “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the choreographer George Balanchine decided to divide the evening into two parts. He put most of the story—about parallel amorous follies in the human and fairy realms—in the first. For the second,…

The Content Mines To place the blame for the state of the Internet on tech titans such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos is to imagine that the Internet is a more sensible place than it is. In fact, it’s a lunatic collaborative project, in no small part a function of the minds of the influencers, pop stars, crypto-utopians, rage grandpas, anime superfans, white nationalists, shitposters, and everyone else who shares the Web with you. Luckily, the journalists Ryan Broderick and Luke Bailey are able to find meaning amid the noise on their podcast about online culture, “The Content Mines.” Each episode drills down into a single topic, from COVID disinformation to the scam-happy world of N.F.T.s to social media’s role in the war in Ukraine. Broderick and Bailey…

The Sally Rooney TV multiverse expands with “Conversations with Friends,” a new Hulu show that dramatizes the best-selling Irish novelist’s début, about two college-aged friends who become entangled with a seductive older couple. The show deviates slightly from the book in small details, but the over-all plot is the same. Frances (Alison Oliver) is a sexually inexperienced student in Dublin with dreams of becoming a writer; her best friend, Bobbi (Sasha Lane), is far more precocious and uninhibited. After performing spoken-word poetry at an open-mike event, the duo falls in with an attractive married couple, Nick (Joe Alwyn), a successful actor, and Melissa (Jemima Kirke), a famous writer. Frances and Bobbi become intoxicated with Nick and Melissa’s affluent, bohemian way of life, which oozes casual countryside wealth (a hunting dog;…

In 2007, the chef Victoria Blamey was offered a job at the end of her stage (as a kitchen internship is known) at Mugaritz, a restaurant near San Sebastian, Spain, that’s considered to be among the best in the world. “She distinguished herself at the fish station,” her Web site mentions, rather modestly. “I’ll bet she did,” I thought to myself as I read that line the other day. At her new restaurant, Mena, in a semi-hidden corner of an unassuming Tribeca hotel, she is serving some of the best seafood I’ve ever encountered. If gulping down the freshest raw shellfish evokes the experience of plunging into a bracing ocean wave, Blamey’s iteration, one recent evening, managed to double down on that sensation. She topped a trio of plump, creamy Crowes…