How Columbia’s Campus Was Torn Apart Over Gaza

In today’s newsletter,Andrew Marantz reports on the unrest at Columbia University. Plus: from our Food Issue, Jiayang Fan takes us on a culinary tour of Flushing, and Adam Gopnik explores the art of the cookbook. Was this e-mail forwarded to you?Sign up.

When she has a hankeringfor chili-tossed duck necks or rooster testicles, Jiayang Fan takes the 7 train to the last stop in Flushing, a neighborhood in Queens filled with these and other Chinese delicacies—and a place that reminds herof her mother. As she emerges from the station, she is confronted with a familiar scene: carts of overripe oranges, tall stalks of sugarcane bundled like firewood, and, in Mandarin through a staticky speaker, shouts of “Meatballs, fish balls, all balls on steep discount. Please check out our delicious balls!” And something strange happens, she explains, as it does every time that she finds herself here: “It’s not that I want every one of those things per se. Rather, their ready availability confounds my senses. I confuse my astonishment at the plenitude of everything that is unavailable in Manhattan (and most of America) with acute, irrepressible desire.”

Fan meets up with two friends and they sample everything from river-snail noodles to Emperor’s roasted squab; she buys persimmon cakes, Taiwanese guava, loquats, black-pepper jerky, chicken gizzards. She closes out the night in the unofficial red-light district, toasting her friend with a crab leg.In this vivid piece, which captures all the bright sensations of a neighborhood, Fan takes readers on a food tour at once nostalgic and new.

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We asked New Yorker staffers to predict the next “it” food—the secret item that will, in short order, be everywhere you look.Erin Neil, the associate newsletter editor, offers today’s culinary prophecy.

The brussels-sprout craze of a few years ago seems to be shifting to another cruciferous vegetable—bigger and, dare I say, better.Cabbage, misunderstood for far too long, is finally getting its due. Look at the menus at Superiority Burger, Llama San, Tatiana, and Claud—all featuring cabbage in some creative form. Like its smaller, cuter cousin, cabbage can be caramelized, braised, and roasted, but it can also be grilled, stuffed, pickled, fermented—seriously, you name it. It lasts more than a month in the fridge, and costs only a few bucks. One of my favorite ways to prepare it at home is sautéed in olive oil with lots of salt. Let it sit in the pan until it’s a bit charred and crispy, and then toss it around in a sweet, mustardy sauce. I like it with pork sausage, but it compliments any protein.

P.S. Writing about Rita Dovein 1995, the criticHelen Vendler describedthe poet’s “willingness to slant the myth upward to sublimity, downward to the ordinary, and—at her best—outward to the uncanny.” A writer (and a mentor to many) atThe New Yorker, beginning in the late nineteen-seventies, Vendler died this week, at age ninety. Her essays, on such poets asSeamus HeaneyandAllen Ginsberg, were as lyrical and lovely as the verses she was analyzing.