Innholdsfortegnelse for December 30, 2019 i The New Yorker

The squawking started in the summer. By late fall, it would become the soundtrack to a tale of urban dogooding gone awry. One morning in July, Kate Boicourt was frying plantains in her apartment in Ditmas Park when a peculiar sound caught her ear. She looked out her fifth-story window and saw a snowy-white bird perched on her fire escape—ten inches tall, with a pink blush around its beak and an impish Mohawk. The bird peered at Boicourt with a hungry stare. “It was like he was saying, ‘I’m here in time for breakfast,’” Boicourt recalled the other day. Boicourt, who is thirty-five and works for the nonprofit Waterfront Alliance, is used to seeing pigeons and seagulls in her leafy neighborhood, but this specimen was new. The bird began appearing…

Each month, the editors of Pulse magazine ask a rock-and-roll star to list which ten CDs he or she would bring to a desert island. Keith Richards selected the following: Little Richard: “Lucille” or “Tutti Frutti” Beethoven’s Third Symphony Anything early by the Nat King Cole Trio Everly Brothers: “That’s Just Too Much” Robert Johnson: “32-20 Blues” Big Bill Broonzy Louis Armstrong: “Pratt City Blues” Blind Willie McTell Carla Thomas Otis Redding Brenda & the Tabulations: “Who’s Lovin’ You” DAY ONE Rigged a distress flag with me gypsy scarf, but it droops like Mick’s jowls. While waiting for it to fly, played all ten disks. Ate a peanut-butter-and-Fluff sandwich the missus packed for me dinner and washed it down with me new poison of choice: Stoli and Sunkist. Smoked a…

Thirteen’s no age at all. Thirteen is nothing.It is not wit, or powder on the face,Or Wednesday matinées, or misses’ clothing,Or intellect, or grace.Twelve has its tribal customs. But thirteenIs neither boys in battered cars nor dolls,Not “Sara Crewe,” or movie magazine,Or pennants on the walls. Thirteen keeps diaries and tropical fish(A month, at most); scorns jump ropes in the spring;Could not, would fortune grant it, name its wish;Wants nothing, everything;Has secrets from itself, friends it despises;Admits none to the terrors that it feels;Owns half a hundred masks but no disguises;And walks upon its heels. Thirteen’s anomalous—not that, not this:Not folded bud, or wave that laps a shore,Or moth proverbial from the chrysalis.Is the one age defeats the metaphor.Is not a town, like childhood, strongly walledBut easily surrounded; is no…

A young couple was browsing at Judy Maxwell Home, a gift shop on Chicago’s North Side, when they noticed a middle-aged, red-haired woman perched on a stool, palpating the sternum of a life-size red Power Ranger. The couple didn’t recognize her, but it was the store’s owner, the actress Joan Cusack. She had on a beige apron over a blue-flowered dress. On the back of the apron, she’d sewn a tiny vintage Barbie outfit. “He’s kind of gone through some hard times,” Cusack said, addressing the shopping couple, as she pressed down on the Power Ranger’s chest. A strangled pleasantry emitted from a speaker inside him. “Very encouraging,” she said, stepping off the stool. The couple left without buying anything, but Cusack considered the transaction a success. She seems concerned…

In the thirties and forties, when I was growing up, the cartoonist occupied a place in the cultural hierarchy not far below that of the movie star and the inventor. Walt Disney, Al Capp, Peter Arno—who, now, could attain their celebrity with just pen and ink? I cut my teeth on blocks and rubber toys depicting Disney characters, illiterately pondered oilcloth pages showing Donald Duck when he looked more like a gander, learned to read from a cardboard booklet telling the cautionary tale of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf, and climbed up through the comics section of the local paper into the slightly racier world of comic books and the single-image cartoons, usually captioned, in Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and—much the best and most…

Mrs. Ruth Faniglia 210 Lester Street Rochester, N.Y. 14623 Dear Mrs. Faniglia, We were very sorry to receive your letter of 23 Feb., which accompanied the I CAN SPEAK!™ you returned, much to our disappointment. We here at KidLuv believe that the I CAN SPEAK!™ is an innovative and essential educational tool that, used with proper parental guidance, offers a rare early-development opportunity for babies and toddlers alike. And so I thought I would take some of my personal time (I am on lunch) and try to address the questions you raised in your letter, which is here in front of me on my (cluttered!) desk. First, may I be so bold as to suggest that your disappointment may stem from your own, perhaps unreasonable, expectations? Because in your letter,…

Miglė Anušauskaitė, a heavily tattooed, thirty-one-year-old Lithuanian cartoonist, is not Jewish. But in 2015, after winning an award for a comic book she created, she used her prize money to start studying languages, including Hebrew. Her Hebrew teacher worked at the Lithuanian national library’s Judaica Research Center, and asked her if she wanted a job. “I still don’t know why,” Anušauskaitė said. “But I was interested.” At her new job, she encountered Yiddish. She decided to learn that, too. Anušauskaitė lives in Vilnius, which has been nicknamed the “Jerusalem of the North.” It was the original home of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO), an organization dedicated to the preservation of Jewish culture. In 1939, YIVO announced a contest for the “best Jewish youth autobiography,” open to young men and women…

Certain comic artists carry an aura that makes everything around them look like their work. In the company of Saul Steinberg, a simple Italian restaurant on Sullivan Street could feel as gravely melancholy and precisely ordered as one of his drawings, while a day spent with Bruce McCall has a hallucinatory atmosphere in which everything in Manhattan seems to have been transplanted from a midsize Canadian city in the nineteen-fifties—to the point that he seems able to find parking spaces at will, as if carrying them in his Torontonian pocket. So when the cartoonist and graphic storyteller Roz Chast invites a friend to dinner near her West Side pied-à-terre, where she escapes from her staider, greener Connecticut life, the Turkish restaurant she chooses inevitably turns out to be the most…

When Super Goat Man moved into the commune on our street, I was ten years old. Though I liked superheroes, I wasn’t familiar with Super Goat Man. His presence didn’t mean much to me or to the other kids in the neighborhood. For us, as we ran and screamed and played our secret games on the sidewalk, Super Goat Man was only another of the guys who sat on stoops in sleeveless undershirts on hot summer days, watching the slow progress of life on the block. The two little fleshy horns on his forehead didn’t make him especially interesting. We weren’t struck by his fall from grace, out of the world of comic-book heroes, among which he had been at best a minor star, to land here in Cobble Hill,…