Episode 5: City Slickers and Soul Food

George Booth started drawing cartoons when he was three-and-a-half years old. (His first was a race car stuck in the mud.) Now nearly ninety, he’s been contributing to The New Yorker for over forty-five years. He sat down with Matt Diffee, a fellow cartoonist who considers Booth his hero, to discuss the virtues of dogs versus cats, and other big questions of the cartoon world. “We are at war,” the French President, François Hollande, declared this week, after terrorists attacked Paris last Friday. David Remnick talks with staff writer George Packer about the banlieues of Paris, and how the the Iraq War hovers over Obama’s response to Syria. Sylvia’s, the soul food institution in Harlem, has ridden waves of change, from the riots of the 1960s through the gentrification of our time. Family-owned businesses are increasingly a thing of the past in New York, but Sylvia’s keeps coming out on top. Tayshana Murphy was eighteen when she was killed. She was the victim of a feud between two housing projects that has been going on for decades. Her father, Taylonn Murphy, has dedicated his life to ending the cycle of retribution and creating a safe space for young people in Harlem. New York City is believed to have one of the highest concentrations of endangered or ‘dying’ languages of any place in the world, and Daniel Kaufman, a linguist, wants to try to save them. Judith Thurman introduces us to Kaufman and the Endangered Language Alliance.