The Magazine
June 1, 2020
Goings On
Tables for Two
Restaurants Reclaim the Frozen Dinner
As fast as takeout and often more delicious, frozen food from local businesses and restaurants is blissfully immune to the passage of time.
Above & Beyond
Do Yoga at Wave Hill—from Home
Perfect tree pose under a canopy of cherry blossoms—one of thirty virtual landscapes from this Bronx horticultural gem that are available as Zoom backgrounds.
The Talk of the Town
Amy Davidson Sorkin on reopening schools; Grim Reaper at the beach; a world without people; getting through it with guitars; Zoom table read.
Reclamation Dept.
Alan Weisman’s Thought Experiment Becomes a Reality
The writer’s 2007 best-seller, “The World Without Us,” imagines what Earth would look like if everyone vanished.
Scare Tactics
Does the Grim Reaper Wear Sunscreen?
As a protest against newly opened beaches, a Florida attorney patrols the sand, warning heedless sunbathers with the words “See you soon!”
The Creative Life
What’s a Writers’ Room Without Junk Food?
Nick Kroll, John Mulaney, Jenny Slate, Lena Waithe, and their colleagues in the animated Netflix series “Big Mouth” survived their first Zoom table read.
Dept. of Avocations
A Brooklyn Guitar Hero
Along with toilet paper and baking supplies, acoustic guitars are flying off the shelf. Who knew that “Smoke on the Water” could cure the quarantine blues?
Comment
The Complex Question of Reopening Schools
The cost of keeping children out of classrooms is unquestionably high, educationally and socially. But reopening is not simply a matter of turning a key.
Reporting & Essays
Coronavirus Chronicles
The New Theatrics of Remote Therapy
How does treatment change when your patients are on a screen?
Our Local Correspondents
The Bushwick House Share Was a Haven—Then COVID-19 Struck
In a collective, you’re only as safe as your least-careful roommate.
Profiles
Lionel Shriver Is Looking for Trouble
The author’s contrarianism has made her famous, but fiction is what she believes changes minds.
Letter from San Francisco
A Window Onto an American Nightmare
As the homelessness crisis and the coronavirus crisis converge, what can we learn from one city’s struggles?
Shouts & Murmurs
Shouts & Murmurs
Some of Your Third-Grade Friend Alex Quiply’s Best Lies
Fiction
Fiction
Two Nurses, Smoking
The Critics
Books
The Scholar Starting Brawls with the Enlightenment
Has the cult of rationality blinded us to the power of transcendence?
Pop Music
The 1975 Has More to Say
“Notes on a Conditional Form,” the band’s new album, serves as a gesture of faith in its fans, who are eager to follow its front man down any path he chooses to take.
Books
Briefly Noted
“The Death of Jesus,” “A Children’s Bible,” “The Equivalents,” and “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers.”
Books
Wartime for Wodehouse
The writer paid dearly for his indomitable high spirits in internment camps, though not in the way one might have expected.
A Critic at Large
How Baseball Players Became Celebrities
Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth transformed America’s pastime by becoming a new kind of star.
The Current Cinema
“The Painter and the Thief” Is a Quaveringly Dark Fairy Tale
The near-electric strangeness of the attraction between this documentary’s protagonists leaves plenty to argue about.
Poems
Poems
Intimacies, Received
Poems
The Estuary
Cartoons
1/16
“The great thing about napping is you don’t need much in an initial outlay to get started.”
Cartoon by Barbara Smaller
Cartoon Caption Contest
The Mail
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