Innholdsfortegnelse for January 27, 2020 i The New Yorker

Ben Taub (“Indefensible,” p. 32) is a staff writer. Last year, his reporting on Iraq won a National Magazine Award and a George Polk Award. Maggie Smith (Poem, p. 37) is the author of, most recently, “Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change” and the poetry collection “Good Bones.” Raffi Khatchadourian (“Dream Worlds,” p. 18) has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008. Mary South (Fiction, p. 50) is a contributing editor at the literary journal Noon. In March, she will publish “You Will Never Be Forgotten,” a collection of stories. Anthony Lane (The Current Cinema, p. 59), a film critic for the magazine since 1993, is the author of the collection “Nobody’s Perfect.” Luci Gutiérrez (Cover), an illustrator based in Barcelona, is the author of…

Take care when eating the mini sausages at Aquavit, which are fermented for twenty-four hours, then cold-smoked, baked, seared to order, and served with a slightly fruity whole-grain mustard. Their tight, crisp skin, encasing a mixture of barley, spiced pork, and beef, is slick with delicious fat, and you might find, while reluctantly cutting the last of three in half—for equitable sharing with your dinner date, of course—that it slips from beneath your fork and bounces off your plate, as you both look on in abject horror. Which is all to say: take care to eat the mini sausages at Aquavit. Last summer, the thirty-two-year-old Swedish restaurant closed for renovations; it reopened in October. The dining room has been outfitted with midnight-blue banquettes and blond hardwood floors. The wall dividing…

An invitation for a cocktail party honoring lawyers, especially highly skilled ones who are about to argue one of the most momentous cases of the year—the next Supreme Court abortion case—tends to read like a legal document. “Guests are invited to come and go as they please,” noted a message from the Center for Reproductive Rights, a legal-advocacy nonprofit. The party was held in the kitchen at the center’s offices, in a high-rise in the South Street Seaport. The two lead attorneys on June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee (not quite as catchy as Roe v. Wade) whom attendees had come to meet—Julie Rikelman and T. J. Tu—talked with guests while such phrases as “Bogus sham laws!” and “Second-class citizens!” ricochetted around the kitchen island. The two lawyers have been…

“This is a difficult time for our country,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last Wednesday, after the clerk of the House of Representatives arrived in the Senate chamber carrying articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. McConnell added, “But this is precisely the kind of time for which the Framers created the Senate.” That is true, even if his claim that the Senate would “rise above short-termism and factional fever” is risible. Some of McConnell’s Republican colleagues don’t seem to be thinking any longer-term than how many times Trump might tweet about them before their next primary. But this is the Senate we have at an extraordinarily wrenching juncture in our history, and on Thursday, following the direction of the Constitution, Chief Justice John Roberts swore in its members as…

“Eighteen years ago, I was flying home to Alabama,” the actress Octavia Spencer said recently, perched on the edge of a friend’s couch in Los Angeles. Her voice was raspy, like a scratched record; her eyes roved around the room. On the plane, she recounted, she’d been seated next to John Douglas, the former F.B.I. behavioral scientist who specialized in serial killers. (He was the model for Clarice’s boss in “The Silence of the Lambs.”) Spencer had recognized him because she’s obsessed with murder, psychopaths, and crime. “I had read ‘Mindhunter,’”she said. “I kept looking at him, kept looking at him. Finally, the flight attendant said, ‘Mr. Douglas, can I bring you some water?’ I said, ‘I knew it was you!’ We talked the whole flight.” The house, decorated for…

Male field crickets perform mating songs and dances for each other. Female Japanese macaque monkeys pair off into temporary but exclusive sexual partnerships. Pairs of male box crabs occasionally indulge in days-long marathon sex sessions. —The Times. As a male box crab, I’m very wary of being crab-shamed. So I’ve worded my online dating profile to read “Ryan, able to lie motionless for hours to avoid predators, but not you. Looking for stimulating conversation, snails to snack on (because they can’t run away), and heavy non-stop male-on-male action after I’ve buried my female partner in the sand.” But I’m not a sex crustacean—I’m just me. And if that means using my genetically enlarged right claw to attract other interested singles for a last-ditch attempt at romance in a tank at…

In 1973, Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmental activist, acquired a tumbledown sixteenth-century farmhouse outside the ancient village of Mellis, in Suffolk, and began a restoration, repairing stone walls and replacing roof tiles. Among the attributes of Walnut Tree Farm, as the house was called, was a deep, spring-fed moat. It didn’t surround the house, as with a fortified castle, but was excavated into the land, in roughly parallel lines, at the front and the back of the property. The moat had served its original, Elizabethan owner as a water supply, a cooler, and a status symbol. Over the centuries, it fell into disrepair, becoming silted up from falling leaves and rotting tree roots. Deakin had the moat dredged to a depth of ten feet; staked a wooden ladder…

A hundred years ago, on January 20, 1920, Federico Fellini was born in the Italian town of Rimini, on the Adriatic coast. The time and the place matter more than anything else, as we approach him now and try to make sense of the movies he bequeathed—crown jewels such as “La Dolce Vita” (1960) and “8½” (1963), Oscar winners such as “La Strada” (1954), “Nights of Cabiria” (1957), and “Amarcord” (1973), and a cluster of other works. Many of them are warmed by the music of Nino Rota. Some glitter too fiercely for comfort. Rimini has two faces. One face looks out to sea, and any Fellini fan will recall the beach scenes that litter his films. (The bullying hero of “La Strada,” a circus in a strongman, winds up…

The other day, after ninety minutes of solitary yoga on the floor of his home office, in Bel Air, Mark Sweet drove to Stage 20 on the Warner Bros. lot, in Burbank, to preside over the audience during a taping of the CBS sitcom “Mom.” Sweet, a sixty-eight-year-old magician and hypnotist who used to work as a professional Willy Wonka impersonator, wore a gray sweater, black jeans, and Gucci loafers. He carried a small black bag of magic tricks, as he does most Tuesdays and Fridays, when he keeps studio audiences “warm”—primed to laugh loudly at scripted jokes—between takes and reshoots. Sweet took a seat in the empty house to watch the dress rehearsal of the week’s episode. “If you actually distill the comedy, it’s about the laughs,” he said.…

Billie Whitehouse, a thirty-two-year-old Australian fashion designer and tech entrepreneur, has spent years trying to figure out the best use for vibrating fabric. In 2013, she came up with vibrating underwear, for couples in long-distance relationships (she called it Fundawear). After that, she made a G.P.S. blazer, which vibrates to tell the wearer when to turn right or left (Navigate). Her latest invention is vibrating yoga pants, which buzz in contact with specific body parts as directed by a cell-phone app that calls out poses (Nadi X). On a recent Friday morning, Whitehouse invited a handful of Instagram influencers—mostly women, mostly tall—to a loft in NoHo, to test-drive the pants. Mats were laid out beside a breakfast table topped with overnight oats and gluten-free banana bread. Whitehouse began with a…

For a certain sort of nineteenth-century person—the sort with high risk tolerance and little revulsion to brutality—a natural career lay in whaling. The odds of success here were, by almost every measure, poor. An expedition first needed to find whales in the vastness of the oceans. If it succeeded, it had to approach the whales in silence, with a small craft; strike with a harpoon; stay afloat, intact, engaged, and oriented as the poor creatures thrashed about, sometimes for miles through iceberg-laden water; row back to the main ship with the carcasses; harvest the baleen and render the oil; and survive the journey home. “On the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of…