Innholdsfortegnelse for May 10, 2021 i The New Yorker

Gideon Lewis-Kraus (“The U.F.O. Papers,” p. 32) is a staff writer and the author of the memoir “A Sense of Direction.” Cynthia Zarin (Poem, p. 31), a regular contributor to the magazine since 1983, teaches at Yale. Her latest book is “Two Cities.” Matthew Hutson (“Growing It Back,” p. 26), a science writer, has published “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking.” Erin I. Kelly (“Hard Labor,” p. 48), a philosopher and the author of “The Limits of Blame,” collaborated with the late Winfred Rembert on his forthcom-ing memoir, “Chasing Me to My Grave.” Thomas McGuane (Fiction, p. 56) began contributing fiction to The New Yorker in 1994. He most recently published “Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories.” Doreen St. Félix (On Television, p. 74), a staff writer since 2017, is the…

Thai Diner 186 Mott St. The other day, I came close to cancelling my plans for lunch outdoors at Thai Diner, in Nolita, on account of the forecast. That would have been a mistake, not because it didn’t rain—it poured—but because the weather actually enhanced the experience. With two friends, I sat on a tidy sidewalk platform, warmed by a heat lamp and dryly ensconced beneath a charmingly retro awning emblazoned with enticing words and images: “steak”; “coffee”; a stack of pancakes with a pat of butter. We felt hearty and resilient, and, best of all, we had the patio to ourselves, which proved especially lucky after we ordered enough food to spill over onto another table. Silky kabocha-squash red curry, with a flaky sheet of roti for dipping, fought…

David Coggins, whose book on fly-fishing, “The Optimist,” comes out from Scribner this week, has fished all over. For bass in Wisconsin, bone-fish in the Bahamas, salmon in Canada, trout in Montana and Patagonia. But one of his favorite places to fish is a four-mile stretch of water in upstate New York belonging to a hundred-and-twenty-year-old club that maintains a Skull and Bones level of publicity paranoia. So let’s just say it’s somewhere in the Catskills, and that the property includes two waterfalls, a gorge, some lively rapids, a couple of deep pools, and what could be mistaken for the moss-lined walls of an ancient grotto. Indoors, the accommodations are fla-grantly unassuming. Coggins spent a few days there last month, and had both good luck and bad. Fishing for trout…

On a sharp morning on the southern edge of Glasgow, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland and the leader of the Scottish National Party, arrived at a dentist’s office for a photo opportunity. Scotland has had its own government since the late nineties, when certain powers were devolved to the country, almost three hundred years after it formed a political union with England. The S.N.P., which has run Scotland since 2007, wants the country to secede from the United Kingdom altogether. On May 6th, Scottish voters will decide whether to reëlect the Party and back Sturgeon’s demand for the second independence referendum in a decade, which polls suggest that she might win. The previous day, announcing her party’s election manifesto, Sturgeon had promised to abolish the dentistry fees charged…

On March 31st, the artist Winfred Rembert died, at the age of seventy-five. He was born in 1945 and grew up in Cuthbert, Georgia, where he picked cotton as a child. As a teenager, he got involved in the civil-rights movement and was arrested in the aftermath of a demonstration. He later broke out of jail, survived a near-lynching, and spent seven years in prison, where he was forced to labor on chain gangs. Following his release, in 1974, he married Patsy Gammage, and they eventually settled in New Haven, Connecticut. At the age of fifty-one, with Patsy’s encouragement, he began carving and painting memories from his youth onto leather, using leather-tooling skills he had learned in prison. I met Rembert in 2015, while I was working on a book…

“Superheroes Are Everywhere,” a “S children’s book celebrating ordinary people, by Vice-President Kamala Harris, has landed, like so many things in American politics today, in the middle of a very childish controversy. It began when residents of Long Beach, California, organized a toy--and-book drive for unaccompanied child immigrants being housed in a convention center there. Someone donated a copy of Harris’s book, and a journalist touring the facility saw it on a cot and took a picture of it. Partisan mayhem ensued, with headlines in the New York Post and on Fox News and complaints from sundry Republicans about an imaginary scheme to put a copy in a “welcome kit” for every immigrant, as if it were the Little Red Book, or an enrollment brochure for the Democratic Party. “Was…

SCENE 1 (A Zoom rehearsal for the New Group’s virtual production of “Waiting for Godot,” which premières this week. Ethan Hawke plays Vladimir. John Leguizamo plays Estragon. Hawke is goateed and in Brooklyn, where it’s afternoon. Leguizamo, in a Mets hat, is in a hotel in London, where it’s evening. The cast, in adjacent boxes, includes Wallace Shawn, as Lucky, and Tarik Trotter, from the Roots, as Pozzo. The director, Scott Elliott, watches the end of a run-through, before the play is filmed in the course of four days.) HAWKE (Vladimir): Well, shall we go? LEGUIZAMO (Estragon): Yes, let’s go. (They do not move.) ELLIOTT: Thank you, guys. That had a really good pace. A couple of things that I jotted down. Wally, those moments around dropping the bag—I think…

Come in, Dracula. Have a seat. Can I get you a cup of joe? Oh, I for got—Joe’s not here. He’s working days now. Would you settle for some coffee? O.K., suit yourself. I called you in because we need to talk. You know how highly I value you. Just between us, you’re the best detective I’ve got. Joe is good, but (also between us) he has not been in top form lately. He’s pale, weak, and drained. In fact, the whole department is pale, weak, and drained. I know you’ve been picking up the slack for everybody, and yet every day you seem to get stronger and grow more into the job. Your work has been irreproachable. I don’t know how you come up with some of your leads.…

On May 9, 2001, Steven M. Greer took the lectern at the National Press Club, in Washington, D.C., in pursuit of the truth about unidentified flying objects. Greer, an emergency-room physician in Virginia and an outspoken ufologist, believed that the government had long withheld from the American people its familiarity with alien visitations. He had founded the Disclosure Project in 1993 in an attempt to penetrate the sanctums of conspiracy. Greer’s reckoning that day featured some twenty speakers. He provided, in support of his claims, a four-hundred-and-ninety-two-page dossier called the “Disclosure Project Briefing Document.” For public officials too busy to absorb such a vast tract of suppressed knowledge Greer had prepared a ninety-five-page “Executive Summary of the Disclosure Project Briefing Document.” After some throat-clearing, the “Executive Summary” began with “A…

During the dramatic swirl of last summer, as newborn activists hit the streets to protest the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and scores of other Black Americans, members of Congress (including the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi) were photographed kneeling in Ghanaian kente cloth, and Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben abruptly reached retirement age. Throughout, the twenty-nine-year-old comedian Ziwe Fumudoh, who lives in Brooklyn, interviewed defendants plucked from the court of “cancel culture” on Instagram Live. Her guests included the actress Rose Mc-Gowan, the food writer Alison Roman, and the influencer Caroline Calloway. One hardball question: “How many Black friends do you have?” It almost always made her interlocutors stutter and squirm. Ziwe (she prefers the monomial) spent a recent rainy morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wearing a…

In each of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoirs, there’s a moment, early on, when she is physically elevated—and seems to survey the sprawl of her own story below her. “Fun Home” (2006) begins with young Alison raised above her father, arms spread, while he holds up her stomach with socked feet. (The gastrointestinal discomfort, Bechdel writes, is “worth the moment of perfect balance.”) When Alison looks down, her father’s gaze meets hers: a mirror. “Are You My Mother?” (2012) opens with a dream sequence, in which an older Bechdel pauses by the bank of a river. The deep water is “murky”; she hesitates and then, overcome by what she describes as “a sublime feeling of surrender,” jumps in, her body sinking through the darkness. And in Bechdel’s newest book, “The Secret…

A man sits alone at a table, in a restaurant, reading a newspaper. Beside A him is a white-jacketed waiter, holding a bottle of red wine. The man tastes a little of the wine and nods. The waiter starts to pour and fails to stop. The wine brims over the top of the glass, like water in a fountain, and spreads across the tablecloth. The waiter mops at the spill with his napkin, to no avail. He could be a murderer, trying to wipe away his crime. Not a word is spoken. In voiceover, though, a nameless woman says, “I saw a man with his mind elsewhere.” That is a scene from “About Endlessness,” the latest—and, according to a rumor that one hopes will prove unfounded, the final—film from the…

ACROSS 1 T.G.I.F. part7 Rating for many premium-cable shows11 ___ Aviv, Israel14 “That wasn’t very kind of you!”15 Measure of how long you’ll have to be patient17 Groups of eight18 Diwali decorations19 Hair product that sounds like an animal20 Punkie Johnson’s show, for short21 African sacred ___ (bird species)22 Recycling container23 ___ up (absorb)25 Entice26 ___ on (overlooked)29 Camera recording, for short31 Barbie’s boo32 Focus of Spelman and Morehouse37 Director of the 2018 Kenyan lesbian romance “Rafiki”38 “No lie!”39 Ingredient in some dandruff shampoos40 Decide41 “I haven’t heard that name in ___”45 Boats like Noah’s47 ___ milk49 See 24-Down50 Landmass in the sea, in Spanish51 “I’m heading there now,” in texts53 Become less difficult56 “Sup?”58 Turn into something else59 Mr. Hyde or Hannah Montana60 One of the five pillars of…