Innholdsfortegnelse for May 11, 2020 i The New Yorker

Evan Osnos (“The Greenwich Rebellion,” p. 28) writes about politics and foreign affairs for the magazine. His book on China, “Age of Ambition,” won the National Book Award in 2014. Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 11), a staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment. She also writes a column for newyorker.com. Anthony Lane (“Because the Night,” p. 40; The Current Cinema, p. 68), a film critic for the magazine since 1993, is the author of the collection “Nobody’s Perfect.” Katherine Dunn (Fiction, p. 48), who died in 2016, is the author of “Attic,” “Truck,” and “Geek Love.” Her novel “Toad” will be published next year. Ed Roberson (Poem, p. 34) is the author of ten books of poetry. His new collection, “Asked What Has Changed,” is forthcoming in 2021.…

The other day, at around 6:45 p.m., an iPad lit up at Contrair, perhaps New York’s only brand-new restaurant. On it was takeout order 63627: one jerk chicken, one crab congee, one lamb birria. Contrair is run by Jeremiah Stone and Fabián von Hauske Valtierra, the chefs behind the Lower East Side tasting-menu spot Contra and Wildair, a natural-wine bar next door—well-loved restaurants that nail that rare hat trick of being impeccably cool, winningly laid-back, and culinarily thrilling. But at the beginning of April, with their dining rooms closed because of the coronavirus, and artful small plates far from people’s minds, Stone and von Hauske Valtierra decided that their gastronomic future lay, at least temporarily, in stews, grills, and braises, packaged to go. (Contrair’s portmanteau name doubles as a punning…

Late last month, while President Trump flirted with solutions to the coronavirus—sunbathing with a “very powerful light,” injecting Lysol to clean the lungs—others elected to smoke pot. In Los Angeles, as a queue of cars crept slowly in a two-hour In-N-Out Burger drive-through line, in Hollywood, a string of people, standing six feet apart, snaked down the block outside the MMD cannabis dispensary. Mishka Ashbel, who co-owns the dispensary with his brother, Slava, said, “We get to provide a little relief to a stressed society.” Los Angeles, which shuttered its beaches and hiking trails, has deemed weed an essential service, critical to residents’ health and well-being. “On 4/20, a lot of people used coming to a dispensary as an excuse to get out of the house, to feel normal again,”…

The fatal confusion of the United States’ response to the coronavirus crisis is now moving to a more disjointed stage: the rush to reopen. Last week, as statewide stay-at-home orders began to expire, governors from Alabama to Missouri softened or declined to extend them. The new measures are a hodgepodge: Texas is allowing movie theatres to reopen, with some limits, but not gyms. Georgia allows both—and massage and tattoo parlors. Some of the steps seem influenced less by epidemiology than by industry lobbies and excessive attention paid to scattered protests. (Polls show that most Americans support closures.) The Attorney General, William Barr, has told prosecutors to look for and take action against “overbearing” restrictions. President Trump, who has left reopening decisions to the states, offering only loose guidelines, does not…

On a recent Thursday, in Portland, Oregon, McCaleb Nesseler-Cass got out of bed five minutes before his ten o’clock check-in at Central Catholic High School. “It doesn’t compare to real school,” he said of the online version. He went back to sleep. After lunch, he headed to the basement to lift weights. “Self-care,” he said. “I’ve got my weights. I’ve got my video games. And sanitizing carts at Trader Joe’s,” where he works on the weekends. (“Makes people feel better.”) After an hour of reading about “the five pillars of Islam,” and a couple playing Super Smash Bros., he got into his Toyota Sienna, cranked up “Althea”—Grateful Dead, 1980—and drove to an office where he volunteers at Youth-Line, a crisis line for teens. “It’s not for school or anything,” McCaleb,…

In the olden days, which, according to historians, ended a few months ago, people used to do the strangest things. They exchanged what were known as “hugs,” presumably a unit of currency, or else “handshakes,” which, judging by the name, may well have been a strain of palsy. “Going out for a drink” entailed gathering at some form of communal well, an obvious source of infection. There was also something called “making out.” Ethnological research has identified this as ritualistic playacting, often terminating in humiliation. No activity from that far-off period, however, seems as inexplicable as this: humans went to the movies. Details are scarce, and memories are hazy, including my own. But I seem to recall that we sat in a blacked-out room, in rows, and frequently in discomfort.…

Two rent payments ago, Donald Trump announced what he termed some “really positive things” for millions of people who were nervous about evictions during the economic shutdown. “Landlords are going to take it easy!” he said. This was not rhetoric: Trump International Hotel, in Washington, D.C., soon asked for rent relief from its own landlord, the federal government, which has yet to announce a decision on whether to grant it. (Evictions continued apace at the real-estate firm owned by Jared Kushner.) Despite the news, rent was still due on April 1st for most American renters, and nearly a third of them couldn’t pay. More were expected to fall off the books for May. “I have seven hundred and seventy-three dollars in my bank account,” Winsome Pendergrass, a Jamaican-born domestic worker,…

Of the many things that we’ve missed in these bewildering weeks of homebound distancing, one is the ability to mark properly the joyful passages of life: births, graduations, weddings, anniversaries. A FaceTime toast or a Zoom-ed congratulations hardly feels sufficient, but, for now, in-person festivities must be deferred for safer, sunnier days. Here at The New Yorker, we had plans to celebrate the astonishing career of our dear friend and colleague Pamela Maffei McCarthy, who has been the magazine’s deputy editor since 1995, and who decided not long ago that the time had come to spend her days doing something new. It wasn’t easy for any of us to accept this news—no one is more respected or adored at One World Trade Center. And yet no one is more deserving…

If on a winter’s night a traveller is about to board a train, a fortifying drink is of the essence. Thus it was that I stood in line at Burger King, on the concourse at Queen Street station, in Glasgow, and asked for a hot tea. The only reason that I wasn’t seeking out a dram of whiskey was that I had already done so, dropping into a pub on my way to the station. In short, I was well drammed up—as was the Glaswegian beside me, who leaned on the counter and inquired what I was up to. Taking the Caledonian Sleeper to London, I replied. He fixed me with a canny eye and said, “Are you not afraid o’ the wee virus?” The answer, foolishly, was no. I…

In 1969, the Children’s Television Workshop made a twenty-six-minute pitch reel to line up stations to air a radically new program that appeared to have, as yet, no title. Instead, a team of fleece- and fur- and muddle-headed puppets were seen brainstorming in a boardroom. “What are those guys doing?” a dubious green frog asks, peering into the room with Ping-Pong eyes. “Well, you see, we haven’t settled on a title for the show yet, so the guys are working on it,” a floppy-eared dog with a wide mouth says. The guys come up with some whoppers. Like “The Two and Two Are Five Show.” “Two plus two don’t make five, you meatball!” “They don’t? Then how about ‘The Two and Two Ain’t Five Show’?” Then they try out a…

Since early April, when the great literary critic and English professor Cheryl A. Wall died, I have been thinking about the last book she published, “On Freedom and the Will to Adorn,” about the African-American essay tradition. Wall was one of the foremost scholars and interpreters of the work of Zora Neale Hurston, and, in “On Freedom,” Wall latches on to Hurston’s assertion that the “will to adorn”—a tendency toward linguistic flourish, even under duress—is an important aspect of “Negro expression.” Wall believed that the black essay has often fulfilled two barely extricable purposes: to argue for political, economic, social, racial, and sexual liberation, and to satisfy a writer’s urge for self-expression through aesthetics. Wall’s insight goes beyond the essay; it’s more like an unveiling of the impulses—sometimes harmonious, sometimes…