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The Washington Roundtable discusses the upcoming State of the Union address and the public’s shift against Donald Trump on two of his signature issues: the economy and immigration. What pitch might Trump make for himself and the Republican Party heading into the midterms? “On the economy, he’s in the same fix Biden was in,” the staff writer Jane Mayer says. “He's trying to yell at people and tell them, ‘You are better off than you think you are,’ and that, we know, doesn't work.” Plus, the group examines what the retirement of the Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress and what the Democratic governor Gavin Newsom’s opposition to a wealth tax in California can tell us about ideological fissures within both parties.

This week’s reading:

“The E.P.A. Rescinds a Landmark Finding,” by Bill McKibben

“The Chaos of an ICE Detention,” by Jordan Salama

“​Presidents’ Days: From Obama to Trump,” by David Remnick

“Trump Is Still Deporting People Wherever He Wants,” by Isaac Chotiner

“The Jeffrey Epstein Files Are Peter Mandelson’s Final Disgrace,” by John Cassidy

“Zohran Mamdani, the Everywhere Mayor,” by Molly Fischer

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Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs have had a major impact in their short time on the market—currently, one in eight Americans say that they have been on GLP-1 drugs. As tens of millions of people take these medications, anecdotal evidence has emerged that they have a positive effect on alcohol abuse and drug addiction. Researchers are starting to run trials of the drugs for these purposes, and some speculate that GLP-1 drugs could even affect addiction behaviors such as gambling and online shopping. The physician and New Yorker medical correspondent Dhruv Khullar spoke with scientists and patients. “Over the course of my reporting,” he tells David Remnick, “I became more and more bullish on the idea that these are actually going to be really important molecules for the treatment of addiction.”

Khullar’s “Can Ozempic Cure Addiction?” was published on February 9th.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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Conan O’Brien is sixty-two, and he has done, more or less, everything in modern American comedy. President of the Harvard Lampoon. Writer for “Saturday Night Live” and then “The Simpsons.” “Late Night,” starting in 1993. The whole controversy with Jay Leno and the “Tonight Show,” in late 2009. “Conan,” on TBS. A long career in standup. Podcasting. Back in the day, he was a drummer in the Bad Clams. Not a good band, but O’Brien did become a pretty decent guitar player, as you can hear in his performance, with Jack White, of the Eddie Cochran classic “Twenty Flight Rock.”

Lately, he has been preparing to host the ninety-eighth Academy Awards, which will air on March 15th. It is, arguably, the biggest gig in comedy, and, last year, O’Brien pulled it off with his usual sense of knowing self-deprecation. As he kicked off the show, he started striding back and forth, saying, “I am walking to show I have control of the stage.”

Last year, the Oscars were preceded by Donald Trump’s return to the Presidency and the wildfires in Los Angeles; this year, the weather is, arguably, darker. How will O’Brien find a way to provide a mental break for a weary nation? Recently, I spoke with O’Brien, who had taken a break from his writer’s room, about the diminishing relevance of late-night TV, the hilarious story of the death of his parents, and the loss of his close friends Rob and Michele Reiner. Our conversation for The New Yorker Radio Hour has been edited for length and clarity.

Have you started writing and rehearsing for the Oscars?

Yeah, I started writing a while ago. Ideas are like R.A.F. pilots in 1940. You have to generate a lot of them. A lot of them fall by the wayside and then some endure. And so we’ve been going for a while. We’ve got a great writers’ room, and I’ve already started going to clubs to try out material, which is really fun. It’s good to keep you in shape or get you ready.

It’s a high-risk, maybe even low-reward, gig, isn’t it?

I choose not to see it that way.

But you killed!

Yeah, it was really fun. I mean, I grew up watching Bob Hope do it, Johnny Carson do it. So it’s a very cool thing to be connected to. As you know, I’m very interested in history, and this thing has been around for a hundred years—almost a hundred years—so let’s have fun with it, is my attitude.

Anybody give you good tips? Billy Crystal, or anybody else, on how to deal with an audience—I don’t even know how big that audience is now.

No one’s pulled me aside and said, “O. K., here’s the secret—”

Smile.

Yeah, exactly. But what I’ve learned myself over time is that I can’t fake enjoyment. I need to find ways to make sure that I’m having a lot of fun. I need to prepare—I mean, I’m a big preparation person. I work with this brilliant team of writers who are just downstairs from where I’m doing this podcast, and they’re cranking away, and it’s kind of . . . it looks like they’re working on the Glengarry leads. I go down there and they’re all around a long table. . . . “These premises are no good. Yeah, these premises are no good. We gotta get the Glengarry premises.” And I yell at them. I’m the Alec Baldwin who comes in, gives that great speech up front. I’m talking about the movie now. I think we all know that. Not the play.

Where does politics play a role in the way you’re thinking about that kind of night?

It’s tricky. I’ve done political comedy over the years, certainly. I’ve done two White House Correspondents’ dinners. On late night, we used to do lots of political comedy. We’d do it on the TBS show as well. It’s never been in the front of my comedy brain. I don’t think it’s what drives me. I, for better or worse, have a brain that scrambles things, loves cartoon imagery. I am probably as influenced by old movies or literature as I am by, frankly, Warner Bros. cartoons. And it all gets mixed around in my head. It’s very impulsive. I don’t know where my sense of humor comes from, but I know that, when I do political comedy or I make a political joke, it has to really resonate with me. And I can’t tell you what that is, but it has to feel true to my comedic voice or it feels hollow.

Does Trump feel funny to you anymore?

No. I mean, I’ve talked a little bit about this, and I’ve said I think he’s bad for comedy.

What does that mean?

Well, years ago, when I was at Harvard and working on the Lampoon, we would try and think of magazines we could do a parody of. And there was one magazine we always knew we couldn’t parody, which was the National Enquirer. If a magazine has, as its cover, “Elvis Still Alive, Marries Alien and They Have a Baby That’s a Three-Speed Blender”—if that’s what the real magazine’s coming out with, you can’t do a comedic take on that. It’s very difficult, or I think impossible, to do. And I think Trump—if he were a magazine, it’s the National Enquirer. There’s a lot that’s so bombastic and so outrageous and so unprecedented that how do you—“Oh, I’ve got a great Trump impression, and I have him saying this.” Well, that’s not crazier than what really happened yesterday. So I don’t know how this is funny. Does that make sense?

Yes. But, when you watch the cold opens for “Saturday Night Live,” or Jon Stewart on Monday night, or Trevor Noah at the Grammys—I think he even inspired Trump to threaten to sue him.

Guess what, David? That’s not a hard thing to do.

No, I know.

We could do it right now if you want.

I’m involved in a lawsuit right now.

I’m sure you are!

You wouldn’t believe it.

Yeah. Like I say, “S.N.L.”—they’re crazy talented. Jon Stewart, crazy talented. These are all really good people who do that extraordinarily well. When people talk to me about it, I say, Well, all I can do is come out of my own personal experience, which is: this isn’t inspiring a lot of chuckles for me.

Now, there’s a different thing—there are comedians who, when they talk about Trump, quickly get very angry. And I’ve said this before, but I think it’s possible to surrender your best weapon. Your best weapon is to be funny. And if it just evolves into name-calling. . . . I mean, I am all for people trying. And, when there’s a really good joke about the President or the Administration, if there’s a joke about the right or the left and it’s a good one, I’m elated. I just think that in the current climate, things have gotten so stretched out—think about that Dalí melted watch—that it’s hard to find purchase.

Where does the network get involved?

There’s always some issues. I’ve been dealing with networks for most of my life. So there’ll be stuff. And then that’s when you roll up your sleeves and you start arguing back. And it can be—

Do you win?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. You can win. You can also lose.

But on what basis? Are there rules, or is it just human persuasion?

Certainly there are rules about what can be said and what can’t be said. The Academy has rules. I mean, everyone has rules.

Once you’ve lived in New York for a period of time, you come to this awareness that, oh, everything ultimately is a New York co-op. They have their rules. You can say, “Hey, but on this other awards show I got to do this.” Let’s say I’m living at—I’m going to make it up—I’m living at 172 West Eighty-ninth Street. They’ll say, “This is the Drake Building. And you live here at the Drake Building.”

“Yes, yes I do. What I’d like to do is put in my kitchen window . . .”

“No, no, no, no, no. We don’t let people alter the windows here at the Drake.”

And you’ll say, “Oh, O.K. Well, it’s funny, when I lived over at the Macklemore . . .”

And they’ll say, “Yes, we know. That’s the Macklemore.” And suddenly—

It’s O.K. for Nikki Glaser and Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes.

Yeah. I’ll say, “Well, I once did the People’s Choice Awards, and—”

And they’ll say, “Oh, yes. Oh, we know. That’s the People’s Choice Awards—they don’t have standards. Their windows and their kitchens are horrid. You are now . . .”

And so it’s not just the Oscars. Every show probably feels that way about the other shows.

Ever since the Will Smith incident, the slapping incident—and, when we were kids, you had the streaker incident. Do you worry about the kind of unplanned disaster happening?

No. Well, you know, I don’t want anyone to slap me—

But you’d like a streaker.

I’d like a streaker. And you know what I’d really like? A streaker to slap me.

That would send you.

That would just satisfy so many of my dormant Catholic hangups.

But it’s a weird duality here. It’s a weird thing. I like to plan, and I like to prepare. And then I love it when something goes off the rails.

Give me an example in performance.

Oh, just for years and years doing my show. If, accidentally, a light falls, you can make a whole show about that. Do you know what I mean? I don’t know what it is about human beings, but they instinctively know when something is real and of the moment. And then when they see you react in real time like a human being and make something funny out of it, that has ten times the value of anything you could’ve written. So you have to be open for things to slightly go wrong, and it’s fun and electrifying.

My whole life has been: prepare, but then, like any good quarterback, be ready for the whole play to fall apart, and then wing it.

Scramble.

Scramble. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Do you do that, too, as a comedian? To what degree are you—you’re not like you are at home, or at dinner. You’re a heightened “you.” There’s a performance aspect to it.

It’s so funny you say this—I’m always this guy. There is a heightened me, but it’s really not that much different. I routinely will just talk to people on the street, complete strangers, and then that will lead to me doing a bit, and trying to get them into it—trying to do improv with random people on the street. And I’ve been maced.

Yeah, I can imagine.

Yeah. It’s unwanted improv. But it’s not that different. Yes, there’s a heightened me, and there’s a depressed me that just wants to crawl in a corner and read a book, but I have access to this guy a frightening amount of the time.

It doesn’t have to be summoned or forced into being. It’s there.

I think it’s glandular. I mean, I’m joking, but I’m also not joking. My father, who was a very smart man and very analytical and a scientist, was looking at me once—and he watched every late-night show—and he said, “Oh, I see, I see. You’re making a living off of something that should probably be treated.”

And he wasn’t joking. He said, “I see your synapses and the rhythm of your circulatory system . . . and then you found a way to be compensated. I see.” And I thought, Thanks, Dad.

From what I understand, you also treated the death of your parents, in some way, comedically, therapeutically, humanly. I wonder if you could tell that story.

I was in Austria when I got the word that my father had passed. I took a van to another van to the airport, got on a flight, got on another connecting flight, made it back to Boston. And you go through all the intensity of that.

And then there was a moment where I was just outside my house—my family house, the house I grew up in in Brookline. And I got this lovely text from Will Arnett, and he said, you know, “We’re all thinking about you. We’ve all heard the news.” He does the podcast with Jason Bateman and Sean [Hayes]. Whenever we’re together, we always just joke about Bateman, because that’s just what you do. It’s like the show-biz thing. And, if I’m with Bateman, we joke about Will Arnett.

But so, I get this lovely thing from Will Arnett. And I just wrote back, “I blame Bateman.”

And then he wrote, “Oh, I guess we all have our coping mechanisms for . . .” And I cut him off and say, “Jason Bateman killed my father.” Which is insane.

But it’s—make of it what you will. That’s what I said.

I think your father had it right. I think he had it absolutely right.

Exactly. My father had it right. Somewhere, a ghostly father was perched on my shoulder saying, “Yes, yes, this is it. See?”

So the story gets more remarkable because, three days later, my mother passed, in the same room that my father had passed in, which was really shocking. And I’ve laid out now that I have space for comedy still. So Will texted me after a little time had passed, and he said, “If you want, I could have Bateman take care of your sister.” And I immediately texted back, “3053 Beacon Street, Apartment 17F. Make it look like a robbery.” Because I knew my sister Kate—she would find it funny. And so he read all that on the air [on his podcast], and people were just, like, Oh, my God. And it kind of went viral.

And that is how I communicate. I’m a whale. He’s a whale. We make these weird noises at each other. That’s how we communicate. And I know how much I love my parents, and I know what a lovely person Will Arnett is, and Jason Bateman. None of this is real, but it’s this way of doing business and connecting.

When it all came out that I had thrown Kate under the bus, she texted me and said, “You don’t think I could take Bateman?” It’s, like, very good, Kate, thank you. But that was her immediate reaction.

And the funerals hadn’t even taken place yet.

Uh, no, they hadn’t.

So I don’t know. What does it all mean? I mean, I definitely know I am a hundred-per-cent Irish.

When did you recognize this in yourself? How old were you when you started speaking whale-speak, or comedian-speak, and you recognized this inbuilt irony, whatever it is, as a way of being in the world?

Well, when you’re a kid—I think we all do this—you go through your checklist. You emerge into the world. It takes a bunch of years just to figure out what the hell is going on. And then very quickly things start to get sorted out. Am I an athlete? No, I am not an athlete. Do the girls go crazy for me? No, they do not. Am I a math whiz? No, Conan, you are not. Am I a tough guy? Oh, God, no, Conan. You are not. And it’s a lot of nos.

And then I hit this thing where I would make people laugh in class. I wasn’t the class clown—I was very quiet, but I would make friends laugh, and I started writing little plays and putting myself in them, and they were funny. And then, in creative-writing classes or in English class, I would write funny stories. The teacher would have me read them, and everybody would be laughing, because I’d put a lot of comedy in there.

So what happens is that you realize that there’s this one arrow in my quiver. There aren’t thirty-five arrows—there’s one. So I probably started working this comedy thing, unconsciously, in 1972 or 1973, in Brookline, Massachusetts, in a playground. And then you’re just working it and working it. And then I started seeing things on television or in the movie theatre. And you’re learning about rhythm, just learning about rhythm and what’s funny, and why is that funny? And I never got too analytical about it. That’s like the part of the map that disappears and there are dragons there. Like, don’t get into analyzing it. Just what’s funny, what’s not funny.

Let me ask you about late-night TV. The big news about late night this past year was Jimmy Kimmel and Trump and all that. But I think we can agree that what’s happening over time is that the whole late-night scene, and especially being watched in real time—that’s collapsed, or it’s in the process of collapsing.

Yeah.

How much do you care that it’s collapsing?

Well, there’s the sentimental side of me that grew up watching Carson that liked that. But I have a very ingrained wariness of sentimentality. But, when I sort of Google Earth out of the whole thing and try to look at the whole picture, I realize that things are constantly changing. Look at all the things that are changing all the time.

And so people are saying, This is tragic, and you’re, like, Well. . . . I’ve said this to Stephen [Colbert]—

Is Stephen treating it as a tragedy, or what?

Well, I think Stephen very rightly is—

Pissed.

Yeah, he’s pissed, I think rightly, but . . . he’s got a big staff and cares about those people. I’ve been in that situation, and that is excruciating. And so I think he has all the appropriate feelings. What I’ve tried to tell him is that there’s so much of this that doesn’t have anything to do with you. These giant glacial plates are moving, and you are doing the best you can, and you’re such a talented guy, and he’s done an amazing job. And, yeah, there is definitely a thumb on the scale. We all saw that, with Jimmy Kimmel, with the F.C.C.—that was just outrageous and wrong.

But in the larger picture, when you look worldwide and see voices being silenced, they really get silenced. I don’t think that’s going to happen with Jimmy Kimmel, or Stephen Colbert, or anyone who’s doing a late-night show.

And you found a way.

Yeah. I left my late-night show four years ago. I’ve had a wonderful time. I think I reach more people now, either through the podcast or doing the travel show. I have all this freedom to be me in different ways, in different formats. There’s a lot of really beautiful opportunities, and I’ve been having a blast and getting to have types of interviews I never could have had in that old “you’re up in the attic” format.

Like Robert Caro.

Yeah, I can talk to Robert Caro for an hour and a half, and then talk to Al Pacino, but then talk to Charlie XCX for an hour. I mean, this old format is going away, but they’re being replaced by a multitude of other ways to connect with people and be funny, and be satirical, and be probing, and let your talent run wild—that in some ways are more freeing.

And you can be master of your own destiny. You’re not working for, ultimately, a giant toothpaste company or whoever it is who owns your studio. So, again, I find myself trying to be optimistic in these situations.

Conan, we’re about the same age, and we’ve reached the age where, if one of our contemporaries dies, it’s incredibly sad, but it’s not an absolute shock. It’s not a tragedy in the sense of when we were much younger, if somebody died in an accident or of a disease or something. You had something happen this year to two friends who had been guests at your house the night before, the Reiners. Can you talk a little bit about your experience of that horrific tragedy?

I knew Rob and Michele, and then increasingly got closer and closer to them, and I was seeing them a lot. My wife and I were seeing them a lot, and they were so—they were just such lovely people. And to have that experience of saying good night to somebody and having them leave and then find out the next day that they’re gone. . . . I think I was in shock for quite a while afterward. I mean, there’s no other word for it. It’s just very—it’s so awful. It’s just so awful. And I think about how Rob felt about things that are happening in the country, how involved he was, how much he put himself out there—and to have that voice go quiet in an instant is still hard for me to comprehend.

I watched that Mel Brooks documentary that Judd Apatow did—it’s terrific. And there’s Carl Reiner, and they have such a close relationship when they were both in their nineties, I guess, until Carl died. And then Rob Reiner pops up in this, and he seems relatively young and so vibrant and alive. And to have that in the back of your mind as you watch this film—for me it’s tragic. For you, it must be—it’s incomprehensible.

These people are so larger than life, especially if you’ve grown up watching them or appreciating their work. I mean, I just keep mulling over . . . the body of work, I think it’s seven movies that Rob Reiner made, in quick succession, that are classics. Now, if you can make one great movie, that’s impressive. It’s an almost impossible feat. To make two means that you’re one of the greats. To make seven—in, like, a nine-year, ten-year, eleven-year period—is insanity. With “Spinal Tap” alone, if that’d been the only thing he ever did, he influenced my generation enormously. “Spinal Tap”—when it came out, I was in college, and it was like a splitting-the-atom moment. You have those moments where you see something truly remarkable.

And another person I’d put in that category: we just lost Catherine O’Hara, which is incomprehensible. And that’s someone who was perfection. And we’ve all had that feeling where someone’s being eulogized and we’re thinking, They were good, but this person’s kind of laying it on thick. Catherine is just—who’s a funnier performer than Catherine O’Hara? And what people didn’t get to experience personally was, she is—she was, I’m still saying “is”—she’s possibly the nicest person I’ve ever met. Just glowed, and good will. . . .

But here I am on a podcast talking like this is unusual. This is what we’re all contending with. It is something you don’t think about—if you’re lucky, you don’t think about it for the first couple of decades of your life—and then it’s people saying, “Did you hear?” And you walk around concussed for a week. So that’s what it is now, I guess.

Well, I was in a good mood when I got on this podcast.

How are you feeling now?

And you’ve taken me—this is the worst. I mean, this is a colonoscopy right now, and there has been no propofol.

“See you again in five years.” That’s the best thing you can hear at the end.

Or “You didn’t use the right camera.”

Sorry. We’re going to have to do it again.

You used a 1955 Hasselblad. You jammed it up there.

Yeah. Slowly, slowly. Conan O’Brien, thank you. ♦

For more than a decade, the singer-songwriter Mitski has been a totem for yearners. The artist has described herself as a black hole where people can dump their feelings, but her music moves beyond ugly emotions toward catharsis. “Still, nobody wants me / And I know no one will save me, I’m just asking for a kiss / Give me one good movie kiss and I’ll be all right,” she sings on her 2018 nu-disco single “Nobody,” her voice at once covetous and wistful. There is a heightened intensity to her songs, even at their most muted—a simmering cauldron of woe in near-constant threat of bubbling over.

Photograph by Lexie Alley

From her 2016 hit “Puberty 2” to her 2023 album, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,” Mitski has carved out one of the more spellbinding and successful careers in indie music. Alongside her producer and longtime collaborator Patrick Hyland, she has drifted from dream-pop to folk rock to dance music, webbing genre tatters together into a kind of understated yet snug comforter. Her voice is capable of imbuing any canvas with melancholy, but it would be reductive to label her a mere singer of sad songs. Her lyrics crackle with a desire to be made whole, as evidenced by her most recent single, “I’ll Change for You”: “How do I let our love die / When you’re the only other keeper of my most precious memories?” she appeals. Mitski’s new album, “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me,” is out Feb. 27; on the heels of its release, she will play a six-show residency at the Shed (March 2-4, 6-7, 9), opening the spiritual void once more.—Sheldon Pearce

Trisha Brown Dance Company in “Set and Reset.”Photograph by Ben McKeown / Courtesy the American Dance Festival

The New York downtown scene of the sixties and seventies was a place of overlapping friendships and studio space, and the artist Robert Rauschenberg was at the center of it. Rauschenberg’s designs brought a witty, even Surrealist edge to the works of the choreographer Merce Cunningham; later, Rauschenberg worked with the younger Trisha Brown. Almost nine years after her death, Brown’s Trisha Brown Dance Company performs her silvery, fluid “Set and Reset” (1983), to a memorable score by Laurie Anderson, paired with Cunningham’s “Travelogue” (1977), for which Rauschenberg created a performance arena that included bicycle wheels, flags, and tin cans—everything but the kitchen sink.—Marina Harss (BAM; Feb. 26-28.)

In much the same way that youngsters might dig their parents’ Beatles records, the pianist and composer Amy Williams had a formative relationship with the music of the minimalist composer Morton Feldman. Her father, Jan, a percussionist who taught alongside Feldman at the University of Buffalo, also participated in the premières of several of Feldman’s major works, giving Williams a head start in understanding the logic of his elongated tones and weighty silences, which are now the signatures of compositions such as “For Philip Guston” and “Rothko Chapel.” In a nod to Feldman during the year of his centenary, Williams performs his sprawling, evergreen piano piece “Triadic Memories”; its repetitions and ghost harmonics were once described by Feldman as the “biggest butterfly in captivity.”—K. Leander Williams (Miller Theatre; March 3.)

In 1979, the Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld affixed strips of white fabric across the dotted traffic lines of a street in Santiago, turning legible marks into symbols with more open-ended meanings—plus signs or perhaps crosses—and reclaiming the landscape from the regime of Augusto Pinochet. It was the first of many actions Rosenfeld would take, and art works she would make, that disturbed the order of public space as a way of protesting Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship. Alongside her more public, often collaborative, projects, she also made collage films whose emotional impact is built on unexpected juxtapositions—another kind of disruption. “Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces” gathers an eye-opening range of material for her first retrospective in the U.S.—Jillian Steinhauer (Wallach Art Gallery; through March 15.)

The rapper turned pop star Lizzo felt like a lodestar of the twenty-tens Zeitgeist. She transitioned from new-age sensation to feel-good success story: a lyricist with pipes, a twerking flautist, and a high-energy sex- and body-positive entertainer, whose skills and charisma culminated in the 2017 mega-hit “Truth Hurts.” Her 2019 album, “Cuz I Love You,” remains a time capsule of all that felt distinctive about Lizzo as an artist—the duality of her songcraft, its sonic malleability, and her effervescence as a performer. She has since faced allegations of misconduct from former dancers, but her comeback mixtape, “My Face Hurts from Smiling,” which dropped last June, is a reminder of an enduring dexterity.—Sheldon Pearce (Blue Note; Feb. 27-28, March 1.)

Aigner Mizzelle as Lil and Okieriete Onaodowan as Big in “The Monsters,” written and directed by Ngozi Anyanwu.Photograph by T. Charles Erickson

The playwright and director Ngozi Anyanwu’s “The Monsters,” for Manhattan Theatre Club, is a tender two-hander about estranged half siblings. It’s also an unusual athletic performance, which opens with Big (Okieriete Onaodowan), a mixed-martial-arts champion, pummelling an invisible nemesis, like Jacob subduing the Angel. His muscled arms slam the mat, and the audience can smell the sweat. The play isn’t subtle; the final sequence leans hard on truisms about addiction and trauma, which are affecting but overly explicit. But both Onaodowan and the terrific Aigner Mizzelle, as Big’s messy, openhearted younger sister, Lil, are utterly electric and connected. In the most thrilling, soul-filling sequence, Big trains Lil, and then they become their younger selves, play-wrestling with the joy that only children get to feel before the world’s judgments set in.—Emily Nussbaum (City Center Stage II; through March 22.)

Raymond Depardon, who launched his career as a teen-aged photographer in the nineteen-fifties, turned to filmmaking in the seventies and became one of the era’s most artistically distinctive and politically probing documentarians. A retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center (through March 1) includes a remarkable set of films made behind the scenes of the French judicial system. In “Caught in the Acts” (1994), Depardon spotlights a peculiar practice: prosecutors interrogating suspects without a defense lawyer present. Keeping the camera still in a courthouse’s small, windowless chambers, Depardon depicts these face-to-face showdowns as litanies of misery, as the officials make suspects confront the grim circumstances leading to their arrests. With radical austerity, he evokes the burden of hard lives and the crushing force of governmental power.—Richard Brody

Illustration by Patricia Bolaños

Think back, if you can, to your initial foray into cocktails—the revelation in discovering the foaminess of egg whites or, perhaps, the horror of your first dirty Martini. Oddball, a new bar in Alphabet City aimed at “bringing out-there flavors down to earth,” intends to deliver similar thrills to even the most experienced barflies. On a recent icy weekend, two first-timers passed under the scarlet orb affixed above the fogged-up glass entrance, and sat beneath a vintage Japanese jazz poster, as the flickering of their table candle cast shadows on the wall. Soothing R. & B. played as they eyed the menu and its three categories (Easygoing, Energetic, and Explorative). Unwilling to appear faint of heart—“Easygoing is for chumps!”—they opted to start in the middle, with the Lightspeed Drifter, a blueberry-and-whey-based Daiquiri featuring a strong horseradish taste, which took more than a few sips to get accustomed to. Luckily, the Far Side, with its refreshing notes of cilantro, dill, pineapple, and tomatillo, allowed the duo to regroup, taking solace in what tasted like a tropical salsa. There’s no rest for the thirsty, however—the waiter returned, and the guests, after some brief recon, ventured into the Explorative section. The Infinite Loop (“a Vesper Martini goes on vacation,” as the menu put it) was met with grimaces galore, its sharp, dry mix of guava and brandy far too harsh for their taste buds. The explorers, in over their heads, ran for cover to an old reliable, and arrived at the house’s whiskey sour: a sweet, frothy delicacy topped with exquisitely marbled foam. Tongues tested, palates finally pleased, the adventurers decided that this was as good a place to stop as any. When it comes to cocktails, they realized, the well-trodden path trumps the road less travelled.

This week, I’m still thinking about Braden (Clavicular) Peters and the “looksmaxxers,” a subculture of young men obsessed with extreme physical self-improvement and baroque slang who seem to have achieved a new level of public awareness in recent weeks. The looksmaxxers are surely the subject for which several generations of gender-studies Ph.D.s have been training; I can only hope, given the embattled state of the academic humanities, that the experts are here for us when we need them most.

This week, I loved “Anno’s Counting Book.” My mother-in-law was a longtime preschool teacher, and she gives my almost three-year-old son unexpected and excellent books. Recently, she found a thrift-store copy of this wordless 1977 picture book by the Japanese illustrator Mitsumasa Anno. I am not someone who’s inclined to gas up math, but these drawings make the subject feel somehow . . . intuitive, beautiful, and fun?

This week, I cringed at “The Pitt.” I won’t quit “The Pitt,” no matter how clunkingly didactic or saccharine it gets. I’m just going to sit back and let lines like “Most people who think they have a penicillin allergy actually don’t” wash over me. I do, however, wish that the show would stop insisting there is some kind of interesting chemistry between Noah Wyle and the new attending played by Sepideh Moafi; there is not.

Sepideh Moafi and Noah Wyle in “The Pitt.”Photograph by Warrick Page / HBO Max

This week, I’m consuming waffles. I am generally skeptical of single-use kitchen gadgets, but I recently made an exception for a waffle-maker and won’t look back. I get neurotic making pancakes but waffles are gratifyingly foolproof. Invite people over, promise them waffles. Who says no to waffles?

Next week, I’m looking forward to Playreaders. A few months back, a friend who lives in my neighborhood and is a genius started a semi-regular gathering called Playreaders. It’s like a book club, but for reading plays. There is no homework (preparation is actively discouraged); we just eat dinner, drink some wine, read the play aloud, then talk about what we’ve read. For the next installment, we’re doing “Dance Nation,” by Clare Barron.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Robyn’s A.M.A.
• Sheila Heti on tripping for her mental health
• What does Obama know?

Jake Reiss got into bookselling for the money and the girls. Now that he’s ninety years old, he cares less about both, but he still gets up seven days a week and goes to work at what might be the strangest bookstore in America.

Outside, the Alabama Booksmith is so unassuming it’s as if Reiss had forgotten that he was running a retail business: a two-story, nearly windowless structure, surrounded by office parks and parking lots, on a dead-end street in a suburb of Birmingham. Inside, the vibe is half 1970, half 1870, with wood panelling, rattan chairs, and a drop-tile ceiling—but also patterned tablecloths, cozy curtains, a functioning fireplace, and an oversized hourglass. As for the books, they sit on uncrowded shelves along the outer walls, almost all facing out so that customers can, indeed, judge them by their covers. Collectively, they are what make Reiss’s store the only one of its kind in this country: the books are all hardcovers, virtually all first printings, all signed, and, except for a handful set aside on a small shelf, all for sale at the regular retail price. “Our books don’t cost more,” Reiss likes to say, “but they are worth more.”

Reiss has a roster of such slogans, some of which he’s put on little placards around the store. Boosterism comes naturally to him: he has been working in retail since he was six years old, although it took him half a century to find his way into the book trade. He’d never been much of a reader, even after he opened the Booksmith, but somewhere along the way he became one—a salesman so good that he sold himself on the books he was selling.

Reiss is the third Jacob Reiss to call Alabama home. The first was a native of Budapest, born in 1861, the year the American Civil War started. Twenty years after the war ended, he made his way to the reunited States, eventually becoming one of the biggest men in Mobile: an Elk, a Mason, a Shriner, a Rotarian, a trustee of his synagogue, a member of the local lodge of B’nai B’rith, and the owner of a sprawling shop on Dauphin Street. Despite the Ashkenazi custom of not naming children after a living relative, he gave one of his sons his name—oddly, the youngest of his three boys, who became the second Jacob Reiss. Junior inherited the family’s business sense, running his own clothing shop, and its substantial Southern pride, leading Mobile’s Mardi Gras celebrations and passing on the patronym once more.

But Jacob Reiss III rarely uses his Roman numerals, and he prefers to be called Jake. The nonagenarian has an unlikely ponytail and an ornery smile, which he flashed throughout a recent visit. While I signed books, he told me that his role model was not anyone on his father’s side of the family but rather his maternal grandfather, Isadore Prince, who was born in Romania and immigrated to America as a teen-ager. “He came on a boat to Canada, then walked from Canada, pushing a handcart all the way to Mobile. Can you imagine?”

Prince married a Jewish woman whose family had fled the Pale of Settlement, and the two raised nine children above a modest Army-Navy store that he had opened in downtown Mobile. Reiss started working in that store when most children start school and learned just about everything he needed for a lifetime in sales. When it came to a traditional education, though, he was less interested; he did eventually give college a try but soon dropped out and came home to his father’s clothing store, where he worked for nearly a decade before opening his own tailoring shop in Mobile: J. Reiss, Gentlemen’s Attire.

Reiss loved custom tailoring, and he became known as the Tailor to the Pros when he developed a specialty in outfitting professional athletes, making suits for the likes of Jack Kemp, Tommie Agee, and Lee Roy Jordan, a Dallas Cowboy who later served as the featured model in the advertising for a short-lived venture that Reiss branded “the world’s largest turtleneck store.” Turtlenecks turned out to be a fad of the sixties, though, and however fun it was to pal around with sports legends, taking measurements in locker rooms around the county did not pay as much as Reiss thought it might, so he tried expanding his custom tailoring to other cities in the South. “Sadly,” he said, “I discovered custom-tailoring stores do not franchise as well as hamburger stores.”

By then, Reiss had a daughter and two sons, but he and his wife had separated, and soon she and their children moved to Atlanta to be with her family. One of his sons, Jacob Reiss IV, followed him into custom tailoring; the other, Frank, wanted to be a writer, and left Georgia for San Francisco, where he collected rejection letters and paid rent with a job at an antiquarian bookstore. “My brother and my dad came out to visit me,” Frank told me. “And, you have to understand, my dad was the least literary person on the planet—he didn’t even like reading. They only came out West to go skiing and to go gambling. But he came into the store, and he saw all these leather-bound books that were hundreds of years old, and they were selling for thousands of dollars, and he started quizzing me about how it all worked.” Reiss was struck by the economics of the secondhand-book business: “It seemed to me like these people were buying books for pennies and selling them for dollars, and I thought, I could do that.”

Eventually, Frank Reiss moved back to Atlanta and opened A Cappella Books, a shoebox of a store in Little Five Points, and Reiss watched his son’s success with admiration and even some envy. “I followed Frank to library sales to buy books,” he told me, “and then I asked him for a list of the top one hundred writers, and I started going to garage sales on my own, looking for those hundred writers, spending ten cents or a quarter buying each book, filing up my spare closet and then the whole spare bedroom. And once I had done that, I started looking for a location.”

Reiss brought the same flair to bookselling that he’d used elsewhere: the shelf labels were made with the tailor shop’s monogram machine; bolts of paisley tie silk were made into deluxe shopping bags. But he found the actual selling of used books to be a little boring, so another form of arbitrage he exploited was the surfeit of literati who felt that getting to spend their days in a bookstore was practically paycheck enough: in those early years, the employees he hired all knew more about books than he did and almost ran the place themselves. He mostly amused himself playing softball, tennis, and touch football.

Like the Jacob Reisses who’d come before, he seemed to know everyone in town, so it wasn’t surprising when he finally figured out a way to make his bookstore into its own kind of civic institution. That began in 1995, when Reiss learned that the local radio personality Don Keith was about to publish a novel and was hoping to do an event for it. “We said we’d do a book signing, whatever that is,” Reiss remembered. What it was was successful: “We sold a bunch of books and we had a good time, so we thought, Let’s do that again, and that was the start of our signed books.”

For most people, signed first editions conjure images of white gloves and Plexiglas-protected display cases, but Reiss doesn’t generally deal in rare or even old books. Some of his biggest sellers over the years include Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Be Useful,” Debbie Harry’s “Face It,” Joe Namath’s “All the Way,” and, as of this month, Governor Gavin Newsom’s “Young Man in a Hurry.” Like those books, most of his inventory was recently published, and most of his authors are still with us. The Booksmith’s shelves feature an eclectic mix of poetry and literary fiction, plus local and regional titles, along with whatever other nonfiction Reiss has a mind to sell. It might be the only bookstore in Alabama where you can’t find a copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and the only one in the world where you cannot buy a Bible, not to mention anything by J. K. Rowling.

How Reiss manages to acquire enough autographed books from actors, athletes, and best-selling authors to stock an entire store involves a mix of courtship, logistics, and luck. He won’t sell anything signed that isn’t a book, and the books are all first editions—almost no reprints, and never any paperbacks. He has long-standing relationships with publishers and small presses, so he’s often first in line for the signed copies that they distribute around the publication of big titles, though those are slightly less collectible since they generally feature “tip-in” signatures: pages, signed by authors at home or wherever they want, that are then bound into the book later. Because Reiss guarantees sales of several hundred copies, he can sometimes convince publicists to add a book-tour stop in Birmingham, even if it’s just for a lightning signing during which he and his team serve as a kind of human conveyor belt, shuffling signature-ready books by so speedily that the author can make it to a nearby city for another event that same night. When that strategy doesn’t work, he’s not above begging authors directly.

Sometimes it seems like authors are the only people who visit the Booksmith these days. The majority of Reiss’s customers are remote, and it is not a sign that the business is suffering when he says “nobody calls and nobody ever comes by.” That’s just the reality of being online, where the Booksmith is open “24/7” with a bare-bones website but with thorough entries for every book, including a photograph of the author’s signature and a description of where they signed it. The day I visited, just one person called, but it was the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Bragg, one of Reiss’s closest friends, and one person walked through the door, but he bought the most expensive book in the shop, a signed copy of Paul McCartney’s “1964: Eyes of the Storm,” one of the few books selling for more than the retail price—in this case, north of seven thousand dollars.

That sale aside, most of Reiss’s business appears in the store’s inbox, and most of it is more on the scale of thirty-five dollars plus tax and shipping. He maintains an e-mail list with five thousand or so devoted customers from around the world. “We do not solicit,” Reiss explained. “The only way to get on it is to make a purchase and request inclusion.” Almost every Monday afternoon, Reiss e-mails the list about that week’s select titles, and since roughly a thousand of the recipients are regular buyers, many of them respond right away, and Reiss stays at the store until nine or ten at night handling their orders. It’s a convention of the publishing industry that new books come out on Tuesdays, so that’s one of his busiest days, with anywhere from twenty to two hundred orders; a smaller number trickle in throughout the week, though Reiss always knows whenever an author dies or wins a major award because, whatever the day, his inbox fills up with orders or queries about what he might be hiding in the climate-controlled warehouse that takes up around half the store’s square footage.

Aptly enough, the former custom tailor now runs what might be best described as a bespoke bookstore. Those who love and admire Reiss’s business model, and they are legion, are ongoingly baffled by how well it works. One of the store’s “best friends” is the novelist Ann Patchett, who always signs for Reiss, and considers him one of the most interesting booksellers in America. Carla Diebold, who runs Armadillo Alley Books out of her home in Carrollton, Texas, reselling signed and first-edition books online, discovered the Booksmith several years ago, and was stunned that all its books were both signed and regularly priced. “We thought they were insane,” she told me. “Obviously not, since they’re still around, but I have no idea how they do this.”

It helps that Reiss has a small staff, just three employees. These days, he personally chooses all the books that the store sells. That transformation was inspired by marquee events with Southern giants like Bragg, Fannie Flagg, and Pat Conroy, events so well attended that Reiss wondered what all the fuss was about. Soon the former nonreader was devouring two hundred books a year. No one is more surprised by that literary transformation than Frank, who still runs A Cappella Books, in Atlanta. “Like son, like father” is how he likes to describe their business relationship.

The novelist Joshilyn Jackson got to see how carefully Reiss considers his choices when she sold her first book, more than two decades ago, and walked into the Booksmith to talk about it. “Alabama Booksmith was my parents’ bookstore, and my editor had said it was important to meet with independent bookstores, so I decided to practice on Jake,” she told me. It was so early in the publication process that Jackson printed the manuscript of “Gods in Alabama” herself on computer paper, but Reiss talked with her about what she liked to read and said that he’d look at her stack of papers. He liked the novel and started telling other bookstore owners in the South how much they’d like it, too. “If Jake loves a book, he goes to war for it,” Jackson said. “He’s just such a champion of writers, especially new voices.”

Plenty of new voices are featured in the Booksmith’s signed-first-editions club, which costs about five hundred dollars a year: subscribers get a signed book every month, a curated collection of famous and, as Reiss says, “soon to be famous” authors. (He borrowed the idea from his friends at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.) Reiss’s children joke that he has a bit of P. T. Barnum in him, and there is a certain ringmaster energy in the way that Reiss does business: the certificates of authenticity he places in every book he sells; the special rate he negotiated at a nearby hotel for out-of-town customers; the roadside banners he has made for every author who signs at the store, which he likes calling his “showroom.”

My most recent visit to the showroom was on a Friday, so things were slow, except for Reiss, who can still race up and down the stairs to his office. He and Lauren Skinner, one of his sales associates, were planning to spend the afternoon packing up books for that day’s shipment—sealing them in plastic and wrapping them in bubble paper before fitting them into boxes. Because collectors have always been a big part of the Booksmith’s business, careful packaging is essential; when the coronavirus pandemic began, Reiss was better prepared than most bookstore owners because he already had hay-bale-size stacks of bubble wrap and forty different kinds of boxes for shipping.

Not as many customers request personalized inscriptions anymore, but some do, with the date or maybe birthday wishes or someone’s name who is graduating or celebrating some other special occasion. Gifts are a big part of the Booksmith’s business, and I did half my Christmas shopping there last year. Even before he learned to love to read, Reiss the retail genius recognized what every real reader knows: a book is not just its contents but also, and inseparably, a special kind of object, a portal of sorts between people and places and ideas.

Every independent bookstore survives by nurturing that connection between audiences and art, and the Booksmith has thrived by making those invisible connections between writers and readers visible. “I’m a fan and a believer in Charles Darwin,” Reiss told me. I was asking how he had weathered the storms of Barnes & Noble and Amazon, and what he thought about the future of bookselling. “I think bookstores have to evolve,” he said. “We did, and that’s why we’re still here. A lot of people lose their butts in a bookstore, but the successful bookstores are becoming more successful. Darwin said the strong will survive, and that’s true of bookstores, too.” ♦