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On October 26, 2025, performers Lucy Dacus and Rufus Wainwright graced the stage for a conversation with the New Yorker contributing writer Amanda Petrusich at the 26th yearly New Yorker Festival, a weekend featuring dialogues, showings, acts, and beyond. The Festival, which represents the magazine’s hallmark occasion, took place in New York City and assembled prominent figures in the domains of writing, cinema, comedy, broadcast, governance, and healthcare.
Lucy Dacus is a vocalist, a guitarist, and a recording engineer. Her musical career commenced in Richmond, Virginia, and she has issued four studio LPs, including “No Burden,” “Historian,” and “Home Video,” which centered on the realms of youth and coming of age. Aside from her individual contributions, Dacus partnered with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker to establish the group boygenius. Their LP, “The Record,” launched in 2023, received extensive recognition and secured the threesome three Grammy Awards. Dacus’s most current solo offering, “Forever Is a Feeling,” delves into affection, yearning, and larger-than-life passion. It appeared in March and inaugurated at the summit of both the Billboard Rock Album Charts and the Billboard Folk/Americana Album Charts.
Rufus Wainwright is a vocalist, a composer, and a musician, lauded for what the New York Times terms his “authentic uniqueness.” He has delivered eleven studio recordings, including the Grammy-nominated albums “Unfollow the Rules” and “Folkocracy”; three DVDs; and six live performances, including “Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall,” also up for a Grammy Award. He has crafted two operas and a plethora of tunes for pictures and TV programs. His initial musical, an adaptation of John Cassavetes’s “Opening Night” conceived with Ivo van Hove, had its debut in 2024. In the selfsame year, his “Dream Requiem” debuted with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. The recording was distributed by Warner Classics in 2025, and was succeeded by the U.S. introduction, in Los Angeles.
Amanda Petrusich is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and the creator of three books. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her nonfiction writings and has also been a contender for a Grammy Award. Her critiques and pieces have been published in the New York Times, Oxford American, Spin, Pitchfork, GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her book “Do Not Sell at Any Price” probes into obsessive devotees of 78-r.p.m. discs. She functions as the writer-in-residence at New York University’s Gallatin School.
Sourse: newyorker.com