“ I like to loiter around the city looking for interesting things,” the artist Jenny Kroik says. Her painting for this week’s New Yorker cover depicts a serious browser at the Strand Bookstore, the cherished bookshop in lower Manhattan. “I have tried to do a painting a day since I moved here from Oregon, a year and a half ago. Bookstores are really good places for inspiration–you see people interacting with the books they have an affinity for, you see how people consume the culture. Sometimes someone will be dressed in a similar way to things he or she is looking at. I love these sort of poetic fun moments.”