Explorers Club
A Secret Voyage Across the Seven Seas of Central Park
by Ben McGrath

Two urban Shackletons braved the elements for a clandestine, moonlit canoe excursion down each of the Park’s waterways, from the Harlem Meer in the north to the Pond in the south, dodging the police and “Star Wars” reënactors along the way.

A Sense of Where He’s Been
by Thomas Beller

Bill Bradley, a staid member of the rarefied (the Rhodes Scholarship), the very rarefied (the U.S. Senate), and the super-rarefied (the Knicks’ two championship teams), premières his autobiographical one-man Broadway show, “Rolling Along.”

David Byrne Does Broadway on the Fly
by Rich Benjamin

When COVID sidelined cast and crew of “American Utopia,” Byrne offered ticket holders a refund or the option to attend a reimagined performance with whatever cast members could cook up in a few days.

When the Man in Black Met the Guys in Tie-Dye
by Nick Paumgarten

Owsley Stanley, the legendary Grateful Dead soundman and LSD chemist, left behind thirteen hundred reels of live recordings from his sonic laboratory, including a newly released recording of the night Johnny Cash came to town.

On Air with the Greatest Radio Station in the World
by David Owen

WPKN-FM—on which you can hear a Stevie Wonder song performed by an all-women jazz septet or twenty minutes of Tuvan throat singing—moves to a new location in downtown Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Questlove Remembers the Black Woodstock
by Bruce Handy

In his fight against Black erasure, the Roots drummer, who has amassed two hundred thousand LPs (plus bags full of “Soul Train” VHS tapes), makes his directorial début with “Summer of Soul,” about the mostly forgotten series of concerts in Harlem, in 1969.

• The Plague After the Plague by Nick Paumgarten
• An Expedition to New York Harbor’s Secret, Transient Island by Robert Sullivan
• A Hundredth-Birthday Serenade, from Bill Murray by Sarah Larson
• Feeding the Chef Who Fed Eisenhower and de Gaulle by Rachel Felder
• The Supreme Court’s Surprising Term by Jeannie Suk Gersen

Brave New World
The Samuel Johnson of Emoji

Jeremy Burge isn’t like other tech C.E.O.s. He has never raised money, he has no employees, and his official title is Chief Emoji Officer. But he still deals with controversy, such as demands for a Kurdish-flag emoji and for more emoji skin tones.

by Leo Mirani

The Boards
A Half Century of Sondheim Collaborations
Paul and Alex Gemignani, a father-and-son conductor-singer duo, kibbitz about their long-running engagement with the composer in “the house that ‘Gypsy’ built.”
by D. T. Max

So There Dept.
Your Grandma Was a Chain Migrant!
Jennifer Mendelsohn turns the tables on Trump’s anti-immigrant mouthpieces by digging through their genealogical records.

by Jonathan Blitzer