The Magazine
October 18, 2021
Reporting
A Reporter at Large
The Shadow Penal System for Struggling Kids
The Christian organization Teen Challenge, made up of more than a thousand centers, claims to reform troubled teens. But is its discipline more like abuse?
Annals of a Warming Planet
Seventy-Two Hours Under the Heat Dome
A chronicle of a slow-motion climate disaster that became one of Oregon’s deadliest calamities.
Profiles
Paul McCartney Doesn’t Really Want to Stop the Show
Half a century after the Beatles broke up, he’s still correcting the record—and making new ones.
American Chronicles
Stash-House Stings Carry Real Penalties for Fake Crimes
The undercover operations seem like entrapment, but their targets can receive long sentences—sometimes even harsher than those for genuine crimes.
The Critics
Books
Laurie Colwin’s Recipe for Being Yourself in the Kitchen
The bossy yet intimate style of her best food writing taught decades of home cooks to trust the strength of their convictions.
Musical Events
The Tense, Turbulent Sounds of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”
Terence Blanchard’s new opera, at the Met, deftly captures the churning inner world of its protagonist.
Books
It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”
From boomers to zoomers, the concept gets social history all wrong.
The Current Cinema
James Bond’s Heavy Heart in “No Time to Die”
Cary Joji Fukunaga’s relentlessly self-referential film, with Daniel Craig making his last bow as Bond, is often exciting, but there’s something inward and agonized about the thrills.
The Talk of the Town
Dhruv Khullar on the coronavirus this winter; L.A.’s mansion wheeler-dealers; on the beach on the stage; an Odyssey of performance; Angels get their wings.
Dept. of Amateurism
The Opera Swimmers of Brooklyn
For the opera “Sun & Sea,” the Brooklyn Academy of Music let ordinary Brooklynites in bathing suits frolic on trucked-in sand and chat with the singers, to create the ambience of a real beach.
Back in Time
Back to the Eighties: Crime, Yucky Subways, and the Guardian Angels!
Curtis Sliwa is running for mayor of N.Y.C. on the Republican ticket, and his civilian crime-watch group is still turning out street icons in red berets.
L.A. Postcard
The Oscars, but for Hollywood Real Estate
At the Power Broker Awards, a gathering of the buzziest Los Angeles real-estate agents, movers and shakers of the “Selling Sunset” ilk, dish on seventy-million-dollar sales and why everyone is getting a pickleball court.
Alfresco
Ancient Greek on the Grass
Armed with a Cyclops eye and a watermelon, Joseph Medeiros performed a one-man Odyssey at dawn in East River Park.
Coronavirus
Another Winter of COVID
Nationwide, the Delta wave is waning, but what do the coming months hold?
Shouts & Murmurs
Shouts & Murmurs
Eight First Impressions of a Time Traveller
Cartoons
1/16
“If you’re working from home today, do you mind if I go hang out at your office?”
Cartoon by Paul Noth
Fiction
Fiction
Not Here You Don’t
Puzzles & Games Dept.
Poems
Poems
Crescendo
Goings On About Town
Tables for Two
The Evolution of an Empire, at Momofuku Ssäm Bar
The latest incarnation of David Chang’s maverick sophomore effort, which once defined the East Village food scene, now resides in an L.E.D.-lit behemoth in the South Street Seaport.
The Theatre
Douglas Carter Beane’s Acid Wit in “Fairycakes”
In his new comedy, which he directs at Greenwich House Theatre, the playwright borrows from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” as well as bits of “Cinderella” and “Pinocchio.”
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