On October 26, 2025, the musicians Lucy Dacus and Rufus Wainwright took the stage for a dialogue with the New Yorker employees author Amanda Petrusich on the twenty sixth annual New Yorker Competition, a weekend of conversations, screenings, performances, and extra. The Competition, which is the journal’s signature occasion, was held in New York Metropolis and introduced collectively main voices in literature, movie, comedy, tv, politics, and medication.
Lucy Dacus is a singer-songwriter, a guitarist, and a file producer. She started her musical journey in Richmond, Virginia, and has launched 4 studio albums, together with “No Burden,” “Historian,” and “Dwelling Video,” which focussed on the worlds of childhood and adolescence. Along with her solo work, Dacus joined forces with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker to kind the band boygenius. Their album, “The Document,” launched in 2023, garnered widespread acclaim and earned the trio three Grammy Awards. Dacus’s most up-to-date solo album, “Ceaselessly Is a Feeling,” explores love, need, and larger-than-life romance. It was launched in March and débuted on the prime of each the Billboard Rock Album Charts and the Billboard People/Americana Album Charts.
Rufus Wainwright is a singer, a songwriter, and a composer, famend for what the New York Instances calls his “real originality.” He has launched eleven studio albums, together with the Grammy-nominated albums “Unfollow the Guidelines” and “Folkocracy”; three DVDs; and 6 reside albums, together with “Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Corridor,” additionally nominated for a Grammy Award. He has written two operas and quite a few songs for movies and tv reveals. His first musical, an adaptation of John Cassavetes’s “Opening Evening” created with Ivo van Hove, premièred in 2024. In the identical yr, his “Dream Requiem” premièred with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. The recording was launched by Warner Classics in 2025, and was adopted by the U.S. première, in Los Angeles.
Amanda Petrusich is a employees author at The New Yorker and the writer of three books. She obtained a Guggenheim Fellowship for her nonfiction and has additionally been nominated for a Grammy Award. Her criticism and options have appeared within the New York Instances, Oxford American, Spin, Pitchfork, GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, and the Virginia Quarterly Evaluate. Her guide “Do Not Promote at Any Worth” examines obsessive collectors of 78-r.p.m. information. She is the writer-in-residence at New York College’s Gallatin College.
