The Magazine
October 4, 2021
Reporting
American Chronicles
When Black History Is Unearthed, Who Gets to Speak for the Dead?
Efforts to rescue African American burial grounds and remains have exposed deep conflicts over inheritance and representation.
A Critic at Large
Gayl Jones’s Novels of Oppression
In the author’s work, colonization and racial hatred turn mother against child, Black against white, man against woman.
Life and Letters
A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Woman
The author’s diaries and notebooks chart her early work and love life.
Profiles
Neo Rauch’s Antagonistic Art
German painting’s arch-traditionalist has a brush with controversy.
The Critics
Books
Anthony Doerr’s Optimism Engine
In “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” the world may be falling apart but everything and everyone must come together.
Books
Briefly Noted
“Bewilderment,” “Something New Under the Sun,” “Against White Feminism,” and “Burning Man.”
Books
We’re Shaped by Our Sexual Desires. Can We Shape Them?
What we want may be more socially conditioned than we realize.
Books
The Church of Jonathan Franzen
In “Crossroads,” bad decisions and bad faith weigh down the characters—and propel the novel to startling heights.
Pop Music
The Unexpected Introspection of Lil Nas X
Fans may have thought that the artist’s début album, “Montero,” would be a bawdy romp. Instead, it takes a turn toward the morose and the self-searching.
The Talk of the Town
Amy Davidson Sorkin on the supply-chain crisis; some views of New York; in the escape room; Jane Goodall goes virtual; on talking and being silly.
The Pictures
Margaret Qualley Acts Her Age
The “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood” ingénue and star of the Netflix series “Maid” visits Color Me Mine for some sophisticated conversation.
Dept. of Hope
Jane Goodall’s Survival Guide
The eighty-seven-year-old naturalist knocks around her home on the south coast of England and explains why, despite the floods and fires and melting ice caps, she’s still optimistic about planet Earth.
City Works
Hopper on the Couch, O’Keeffe Against the Floor Lamp
Elie Hirschfeld offers a tour of his home-grown collection of New York City-themed art works in his apartment across from the Met—Warhols, a Hopper, and a Hockney—before they’re donated to the New-York Historical Society.
Comment
The Supply-Chain Mystery
Why, more than a year and a half into the pandemic, do strange shortages keep popping up in so many corners of American life?
Georgia Postcard
Wrongful Conviction, the Game!
Two exonerated convicts visit the escape room run by Cobb County, in Georgia, which was conceived as a prison-break scenario, with visitors playing the role of innocent inmates. Can they get out in time?
Shouts & Murmurs
Shouts & Murmurs
The Age of Monsters
Cartoons
1/16
“Well, the bad news is I can’t find the mustard . . .”
Cartoon by Lars Kenseth
Fiction
Fiction
Red Pyramid
Puzzles & Games Dept.
Poems
Poems
Entire
Poems
To Gather Together
Goings On About Town
Tables for Two
Vegan French Cookery at Délice & Sarrasin
The chef Yvette Caron creates vegetal reinterpretations of meat- and dairy-based dishes with her versions of crab cakes, tournedos Rossini, foie gras, and escargot.
Classical Music
Opera and Cabaret Mashups in “Only an Octave Apart”
At St. Ann’s Warehouse, Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond sing medleys arranged by Nico Muhly, including a number that stitches together two different laments by women named Dido.
Mail
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