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| “There is no more exuberant winner than Serena Williams,” Claudia Rankine writes at the outset of this week’s cover story, a profile of the tennis star. The particular quality of that exuberance – the grinning, the laughter, the fist-pumping – is crucial for Rankine (an award-winning poet and essayist, making a rare foray into reporting for the magazine). “Black excellence is . . . supposed to perform with good manners and forgiveness in the face of any racist slights or attacks,” Rankine writes. “And in winning, it’s not supposed to swagger, to leap and pump its fist, to state boldly, in the words of Kanye West, ‘That’s what it is, black excellence, baby.’ “ |
| Mark Leibovich, meanwhile, visits Larry King five years after the cancellation of CNN’s “Larry King Live” and finds the suspendered TV host occupying a strange sort of afterlife, still adjusting to the absence of the spotlight and, at 81, contemplating his own mortality: “I can’t get my head around one minute being there and another minute absent,” he says. But Larry King is still Larry King, ruminating on hip-hop (“You can hum a rap song?”), invisibility (“Would I like to see my friends having sex? Yes”) and his inevitable final cancellation (“If my wife is late for my funeral, I will be very angry”). Online, you can also watch King read aloud the tweets that have made him a cult sensation on Twitter. |
| Elsewhere in the issue, Ben Austen reports from a campaign to diversify tennis on the South Side of Chicago, Scott Shane ponders the posthumous influence of the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and Tamar Adler celebrates the forgotten recipes of cookbooks past. |
Happy reading,
Jake Silverstein
Editor in Chief |
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The U.S. Open Issue
Carolyn Drake/Magnum, for The New York Times
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Who Gets to Play Tennis?
By BEN AUSTEN
On the South Side of Chicago, a campaign to diversify the game.
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Eat
Grant Cornett for The New York Times. Food stylist: Michelle Gatton. Prop stylist: Theo Vamvounakis.
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What We Learn From Old Recipes
By TAMAR ADLER
The cookbooks of the past – free of today’s relentless ambition, optimization and ease – remind us what it means to be a human eater in the world.
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