Contributors

For Fry, a staff writer at The New Yorker, traveling to Los Angeles to profile Kaia Gerber (“All in the Balance,” page 78) presented a welcome break from her lockdown routine. At the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, home that she shares with her husband and nine-year-old daughter (whom Fry has helplessly watched become “very much online” during the pandemic), Fry, like so many of us, has felt the odd strain of having nowhere to go. So a trip west—even one that she’d taken a hundred times before, both on assignment and just because—was a major event. “Just getting on the plane and flying into LAX, it felt special,” she says. “I don’t know if I would be able to live in L.A., but it’s very seductive.” The same could be said of gallivanting around Hollywood with Gerber, her brother, and a close friend of theirs for a day—an experience that Fry found both glamorous and touchingly familiar. “I don’t have a ton of interaction with current-day teenagers or people who are, like, 20,” she says. “But it calmed me down to see that, quote unquote, kids these days weren’t that different from what I remember.”