| “The America I saw while on tour in the fall of 2021 was weary and battle-scarred. Its sidewalks were cracked, its mailboxes bashed in.”  Illustration by Zak Tebbal David Sedaris has been writing for decades, and reading his own work at performances has long been a joyful, yet routine, part of the job. But the pandemic changed everything. In an essay in this week’s issue, Sedaris recalls his last show in 2020: “For the next year and a half I would reflect upon it obsessively, would almost fetishize it.” So when the opportunity to get his old life back arose, in the fall of 2021, with a seventy-two-city tour, he started a diet. He walked fifteen miles a day, stuck to sugar-free Jell-O, and braced himself for a changed world. Follow along as he travels from California to Montana, Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C., where, at the Ritz-Carlton, he sees a woman feeding her terrier bacon and eggs at breakfast. (“Was feeding your dog from a plate in the dining room better than wiping your ass on a face mask? Difficult to say, really.”) And, along the way, find out the question that Sedaris loves to ask teen-agers, and what his boyfriend, Hugh, really thinks of his jokes. —Jessie Li, newsletter editor | 
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