Can Podcasts Improve Our Well-Being?—The Kids Are Back at School—How to Misread Jane Austen
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Plus: the Breonna Taylor decision; Artemisia Gentileschi; and how remote learning has failed students.
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Child by school doors.
Photographs by Dina Litovsky / Redux for The New Yorker
“I’m excited to see my best friend, Mila.” That’s a fifth-grader at P.S. 64 speaking to the writer Helen Rosner, who accompanied the photographer Dina Litovsky for a portfolio of New York City schoolchildren on their first day of in-person learning. “Kids, masked, greeted their teachers with pantomimed high-fives,” Rosner writes. “Some rushed jubilantly toward their classmates, while others solemnly maintained a perimeter of personal space.”
Here are some other recent stories from our pages:
1. “As long as there are two separate justice systems in this country, there is no justice.” The writer ZZ Packer examines the “empty facts” of the Breonna Taylor grand-jury decision.
2. “He and his classmate had been sitting in their virtual space for twenty minutes, waiting for the teacher.” Alec MacGillis followed a twelve-year-old from East Baltimore for several months to learn how remote learning has failed many students.
3. “Pret signifies a momentary escape from work and is entirely identified with it as well.” Sam Knight sketches the deeper resonances of the sandwich chain Pret a Manger.
4. Naomi Fry discusses why adult actors playing seventh-grade girls works so well in the coming-of-age show “Pen15.”
5. “It used to be that in order to preach you needed a pulpit or a TV or radio show, or at least a soapbox. Now all you need is an Internet connection.” Alexandra Schwartz considers the persuasive power of happiness podcasts.
6. “The people who read Austen for the romance and the people who read Austen for the sociology are both reading her correctly.” Louis Menand on how we make Jane Austen a mirror of our own time.
7. Rebecca Mead wrote about Artemisia Gentileschi, the Italian Baroque painter who survived a rape. Scholars are pushing against the idea that her work was defined by sexual assault and celebrating her rich harnessing of motherhood, passion, and ambition.
8. “Several sections of the book are given over to masochistic exchanges with white men in airports.” Katy Waldman reviewed Claudia Rankine’s new book, “Just Us,” in which the poet examines a series of racialized encounters with friends and strangers.
9. Joshua Rothman tried to become a research scientist, but found it extremely boring. Yet it is perhaps this boringness that has allowed the scientific mindset to thrive in the modern era.
10. A perfect! house! tour! by! a! dog!
Good stuff on the Internet: the terrifying-yet-instructive “How Normal Am I?”; Ella Fitzgerald imitating Louis Armstrong; and have you listened to “The Case of the Missing Hit” yet?
Tired of eating eggs for dinner,
Michael Agger, culture editor, www.newyorker.com
P.S. Thanks to those of you who shared the neglected books you’ve been reading, in response to my newsletter last week. Suzy Hillard wrote in from Minneapolis about a “slim volume that packs a punch,” and recommends Willa Cather’s “Lucy Gayheart,” Sam Selvon’s “The Housing Lark,” Larry Watson’s “Montana 1948,” and William Maxwell’s “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” which was first published in two parts in The New Yorker in 1979.
Goings On About Town
Our critics pick the best art, music, film, food, and more.
● The Eritrean-born painter Ficre Ghebreyesus’s canvases, exhibited at Galerie Lelong through October 24th, communicate what it feels like to live in both natural and man-made worlds, in which bodies of water, airplanes, and lone brown figures coexist in a kind of dreamscape.
● At Yun Café & Asian Mart, the clear draw is the menu of Burmese salads—umami-rich, made with fermented tea leaves or tart green mango.
● The ballerinas Misty Copeland and Alessandra Ferri discuss how the coveted part of Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet” has been reimagined through the years, in a conversation from City Center’s “Studio 5.”
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Reviews and Recommendations
Pieces of a guitar and microphones on a pink background.Cultural Comment
The Futility of Rolling Stone’s Best-Albums List
How do you rank Joni Mitchell, the Notorious B.I.G., and Ornette Coleman?
By Sheldon Pearce
A flower arrangement blooming.The New Yorker Documentary
Azuma Makoto’s Botanical Sculptures, in “Flower Punk”
Alison Klayman’s documentary shows how a former punk musician brought his sensibility—part poet, part mad scientist—to the unlikely medium of floral art.
By Andrea K. Scott
Three people in an argument.The Front Row
A Corrupt Demagogue in “A Lion Is in the Streets”
The movie shows how easily a fast-talking rogue with a ravenous ego can win the hearts of the downtrodden while making common cause with their oppressors.
By Richard Brody
Jars of different picked vegetables.Kitchen Notes
Preserving Vegetables for Winter Is a Balm
Culinarily speaking, this is the time of year to prepare, and this year, more than in the past, I can’t rest until it is done.
By Tamar Adler
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