The New Yorker May 9, 2022

Luke Mogelson (“The Wound-Dressers,” p. 46) is a contributing writer to the magazine. His book “The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible” will be out in September. This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Joy Harjo (Poem, p. 66) has served three terms as the U.S. Poet Laureate. Her memoir “Poet Warrior” came out in 2021. Michael Schulman (“Dark Lady,” p. 18; The Talk of the Town, p. 17) became a staff writer in 2019. His new book, “Oscar Wars,” is forthcoming next year. Jiji Lee (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25) is a humor writer based in New York City. Kadir Nelson (Cover) won the 2020 Caldecott Medal. His paintings are in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Doreen St. Félix…

SUPPORT GROUPS Rachel Aviv’s careful and insightful piece about Mackenzie Fierceton points to an important issue on today’s college campuses: the phenomenon of bright, capable students who do not have a stable parent or guardian figure in their lives and who assume that, if they have made it this far, they can also make it through college (“The Price of Admission,” April 4th). The fact is, college is hard even for students with deep family support and security, let alone for those without. But I see hope in the existence of organizations devoted specifically to helping students who lack the privilege of a dependable adult presence. In the Boston area, for instance, there is the Wily Network, which was founded, in 2015, with a mission of providing a “safety net” for students…

MAY 4 – 10, 2022 In the outpouring of adoration following Stephen Sondheim’s death, last year, many fans turned to Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical “Into the Woods,” from 1987, a wise, witty, grief-tinged spin on classic fairy tales. Encores! stages the show at City Center, May 4-15, with an all-star cast that includes (above, from left to right) Cole Thompson (as Jack), Ann Harada (Jack’s Mother), Denée Benton (Cinderella), Neil Patrick Harris (Baker), Sara Bareilles (Baker’s Wife), and Gavin Creel (Wolf and Cinderella’s Prince). As ever, it’s advisable to confirm engagements in advance and to check the requirements for in-person attendance. MUSIC Julianna Barwick AMBIENT In Julianna Barwick’s early recordings, the musician transformed her voice into a chorus of one, looping wordless singing into an aquatic blur. “Healing Is a Miracle,” Barwick’s stormy album…

The last time Gage & Tollner was featured in this magazine, it had been open for fifty-two years. That was in 1931. The management at the time estimated that John Anderson, an oyster-fry cook who had recently died, shucked sixty-six million oysters in his forty-nine-year career—he was on staff when the place opened, in 1879. “Old customers are always coming in again after absences of years, and getting emotional at sight of the same ancient mahogany tables, deep with wax, the red Turkey carpet, the dim, mirrored walls,” the story said. This nostalgia continued for another seven decades, until 2004, when Gage & Tollner, named for its original owners, finally went out of business. For a few years, the downtown-Brooklyn address was occupied by a TGI Fridays, followed by an Arby’s…

“Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” The famous line is from Brecht’s “Life of Galileo,” and it’s often trotted out in reference to repressive regimes and their dissident truthtellers: Václav Havel, in Czechoslovakia; Nelson Mandela, in South Africa; and now Alexei Navalny, in Russia. Just how unhappy political life has been in the United States was demonstrated recently in Lansing, Michigan, when Lana Theis, a Republican state senator, delivered an invocation in the legislature that melded the cadences of prayer with the lexicon of QAnon paranoia: “Dear Lord, across the country we’re seeing in the news that our children are under attack. That there are forces that desire things for them other than what their parents would have them see and hear and know.” State Senator Mallory McMorrow, a…

Carla Zaccagnini was seated on a bench the other day, riffling through a pile of cash. “I’ve been collecting money that’s not in circulation anymore,” she said, looking up from stacks of bills sheathed in cellophane. “So, currencies that are dead.” It was five days before Zaccagnini’s first solo exhibition in the United States would open, at Amant, a nonprofit art space in Brooklyn, and three days before the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics would announce that consumer prices had risen 8.5 per cent in the past year, sparking panic about the cost of broccoli and gasoline. Zaccagnini’s show, “Cuentos de cuentas/Accounts of Accounting,” is based on her childhood in Argentina and Brazil in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, when hyperinflation drove people to hoard U.S. dollars. Zaccagnini recalled that grocery…