Innholdsfortegnelse for June 7, 2021 i The New Yorker

You borrow your friend’s car and park it behind our apartment. We spend the weekend sorting through our stuff, making a You pile, a Me pile, and an Us pile. We give the Us pile to a trusted third party, perhaps an aunt, who, in turn, threatens to cut each item in the Us pile in half. When one of us flinches and says we’d rather see the other have the thing than see it destroyed, this aunt sagely places the thing in that person’s pile. Then you take the You pile down to your friend’s car and scram, Jack. Make a new profile on my Netflix account so that you can keep using it without my knowing. Call it something nondescript, like “Children” or “Admin”—something I’m unlikely to…

Year of sighs, year of planning ahead—how to acquire food or meet friendsfor afternoon talks in the outdoor air.Of planning nothing. Whole days washed cleanin the round of known rooms, known chores. I followed forecasts to calculate whento walk down the alley, around the block,the same dogs barking, recycling binsbursting with cardboard. I envied people stuckin the country amid trees, beside a lakethat took in sky. And people, I presume,envied us, with our covered front porchand back garden, its sloping tangle of leaves.We’d thrown ourselves down wherever the musicstopped, in a place we planned to stay a seasonat most, until a hidden hand could hit the volume. Year of stories—of books, recorded voicesthrough the night, faces on screens: familiarsholding cocktail glasses, jam jarsinto view to toast … what precisely?happy hours?…

The candles were already lit when Hwee Bin arrived. Her mistake—she’d missed the announcement at breakfast saying today’s party would take place in the Big Hall, instead of in the Rec Room. What was wrong with the Rec Room? she mentally complained, while taking her place in the crowd. Birthday celebrations were always in the Rec Room. But, catching a glimpse of potbellied Kirpal in his wheelchair, Hwee Bin softened. Likely the change had been made because Kirpal was so popular, and more residents than usual were expected to attend. Typically, birthdays were local affairs. Hwee Bin was in Ward 4, one of the fourteen-bed wards, which was a bad thing every day of the year except her birthday, when it meant that she could count on at least thirteen…

In an age of voice-driven fiction, the phrase “novel of ideas” has an unavoidably dusty ring. It summons the drowsy cadence of the philosopher, the tedious rehearsal of concepts on loan from antiquated sources. Knowing this, there is an admirable brazenness to the way that the Japanese novelist Mieko Kawakami describes “Heaven” (Europa), her novel of ideas, newly translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd: “Gaining inspiration from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the work takes up the theme of bullying in middle school and addresses the ultimate question of good and evil,” she has written on her Web site. It is as if she were determined to alert us to the mismatch between the well-worn preoccupations of young-adult fiction and her grand philosophical objectives; as if she wanted us to…

RISKY BUSINESS Sheelah Kolhatkar’s piece about the investment app Robinhood, which has been faulted for encouraging reckless trading practices among young people, prompted me to reflect on how the education system has failed when it comes to teaching our children about finance, investment, and risk (“The Big Gamble,” May 17th). At one point in my career, I taught personal finance to undergraduates; at the same time, my kids were learning about the stock market in school. My students were divided into groups that followed various investment portfolios, from “all in one stock” to money-market mutual funds. Although initially students assigned to the low-risk portfolios were not happy with their gains, at the end of the term, when asked to choose their preferred portfolio, many elected the low-risk money-market funds, saying…

Lia Logio arrived at Hahnemann University Hospital, in Philadelphia, in March, 2018, two months after it was sold to a private-equity firm. Logio, an internist, had come from Weill Cornell, in New York, a prestigious and well-funded nonprofit hospital, where she was a vice-chair. Hahnemann served mostly low-income patients, but it had a range of medical subspecialties and was the primary teaching hospital used by Drexel University’s College of Medicine. “It felt like they had all the ingredients to do something innovative and creative,” Logio said not long ago. “It seemed like an opportunity to have an economy of scale to do coördinated care for poor, complex patients, which usually doesn’t happen very well.” Philadelphia is one of the poorest big cities in the United States, with about a quarter…

Rich Paul, the trusted agent of LeBron James and a bevy of other National Basketball Association all-stars, has spent the pandemic working from his property in Beverly Hills. He often takes calls in a small house in the back yard, which is decorated like an old-time cigar lounge, with framed vintage photographs, dark-brown furniture, and low lighting. When we met there recently, Paul, dressed in a Nike T-shirt, basketball shorts, and sandals, sat in an oversized chair, in front of portraits of James Baldwin and Michael Jackson. There was a poster of Muhammad Ali that took up almost an entire wall, as well as a few stills from gangster movies. “I was watching ‘The Godfather’ at a very young age,” Paul said. Paul, who is forty, is trim and about…

Ralph Nader, now eighty-seven years old, has been a public figure for more than half a century. Many people know him as a longshot left-wing Presidential candidate in four successive elections, from 1996 to 2008, and as the possible spoiler of a Democratic victory in 2000, when he got almost a hundred thousand votes in Florida and Al Gore lost the state by five hundred and thirty-seven. “Ralph Nader is not going to be welcome anywhere near the corridors,” Joe Biden told the Times back then. “Nader cost us the election.” But his real heyday was in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. In 1966, he was the star witness at sensational hearings about automobile safety conducted by Senator Abraham Ribicoff, of Connecticut. Nader, a young lawyer who had just published a…

The “canon” in the title of Jess McHugh’s “Americanon” (Dutton) consists of thirteen American books, from “The Old Farmer’s Almanac,” first published in 1792, to Stephen R. Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” which came out in 1989. It includes Webster’s Dictionary, Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book,” and “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask),” by David Reuben. The works are all mega-sellers. McHugh tells us about the McGuffey Readers, textbooks first used in nineteenth-century homes and schools; they sold more than a hundred and thirty million copies—and, since most copies had multiple readers, the total circulation was even larger. Carnegie’s book came out in 1936, has sold more than thirty million…

“Nini and I are very similar,” Olivia Rodrigo said. “She writes songs about boys and puts them on social media, and that’s totally something that I do in my real life.” Rodrigo was sitting in front of a mixing board, talking about the character she plays on television and the complicated ways in which her life and her art tend to resemble each other. It was 2019, and she was being interviewed in a Disney Channel program with a suitably recursive name: “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series: The Special,” a promotional vehicle (“The Special”) for her television show (“The Series”), which was about a bunch of students mounting a stage production (“The Musical”) of a popular Disney Channel movie from the two-thousands (“High School Musical”). Later in the…

JUNE 2 – 8, 2021 The “Carte Blanche” film series at MOMA, programmed by the prodigious science-fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, concludes this week with two personal works. He discusses his childhood in Harlem and his life as a gay man in nineteen-sixties New York in Fred Barney Taylor’s illuminating documentary “The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman,” from 2007. Delany displays his directorial art in the 1971 featurette “The Orchid,” which blends street theatre and joyful eroticism with ingenious special effects. ART Nona Faustine Candid moments mingle with theatrical gestures in “Mitochondria,” this Brooklyn photographer’s exhibition at Higher Pictures Generation, in Dumbo. The show’s title refers to the DNA that traces the maternal line, and Faustine’s subjects are her family—three generations of Black women,…

“Someone sent me a box of hot dogs,” Danny Meyer said, walking into Union Square Café, his oldest restaurant, clutching a large cardboard package. He placed the parcel on the bar, removed his mask, and opened an accompanying letter, from the owner of a string of hot-dog joints in Utah. The letter thanked Meyer for writing “Setting the Table,” his 2006 best-seller about the power of risktaking, eye contact, and pressed tablecloths. Meyer smiled. The previous day, New York City had officially begun reopening, which meant that restaurants could again start filling their dining rooms. The past year has been the most difficult of Meyer’s gilded career. When the pandemic arrived, his company, Union Square Hospitality Group, shut down its nineteen restaurants and also its events business, which provided catering…

A few days after Thanksgiving last year, Kurtis Minder got a message from a man whose small construction-engineering firm in upstate New York had been hacked. Minder and his security company, GroupSense, got calls and e-mails like this all the time now, many of them tinged with panic. An employee at a brewery, or a printshop, or a Web-design company would show up for work one morning and find all the computer files locked and a ransom note demanding a cryptocurrency payment to release them. Some of the notes were aggressive (“Don’t take us for fools, we know more about you than you know about yourself”), others insouciant (“Oops, your important files are encrypted”) or faux apologetic (“WE ARE REGRET BUT ALL YOUR FILES WAS ENCRYPTED”). Some messages couched their…

In Silicon Valley, Chamath Palihapitiya, who has earned billions of dollars while tweeting things like “Im about to really fuck some shit up” to his 1.5 million followers, rarely requires identification beyond his first name. That’s in part because, in the past decade, he has spent significant time saying things in public that rich people aren’t supposed to say. Venture capitalists are “a bunch of soulless cowards.” Of hedge-fund managers: “Let them get wiped out. Who cares? They don’t get to summer in the Hamptons? Who cares?” (He made both proclamations after he had become a venture capitalist and started a hedge fund; he has yachted off the Italian coast.) Recently, Palihapitiya has achieved even greater prominence by launching a series of special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, which are among…

Cool as the breeze, springcomes and proves the provenblank which was sorrowa turbulent need, a healing.Who am I kidding? To say “spring,”and to say so on the front stepsjust after noon in the bright cool of the day,is a form of dissolution.How have I arrived at that?Your death is only two weeks old, suddenand tender as the buds on the firethornreturning, and an old siren soundcarrying on the breezebetween two finches dartingthrough shattered power linescements a kind of comfort.I accept this. These creosotetears you must’ve seen on a Krakówstatue streaked with rain. What arrives nextis the marvellous phrase“half sea half land”(not yours but close), marvellous I mouthbefore I digress,and then zoom away to teach them, Adam,your “To Go to Lvov.”…

The Haunting of Alma Fielding, by Kate Summerscale (Penguin Press). In nineteen-thirties London, the Hungarian parapsychologist Nandor Fodor began studying Alma Fielding, a housewife who claimed to be tormented by a poltergeist. Fielding summoned birds from thin air, performed astral projection, and channelled spirit voices—feats that raised suspicions of fraud but also led Fodor to a new understanding of the psychology of trauma. Summerscale draws on archival material and adds context, seeing the craze for Spiritualism as reflecting both the bereavements of the First World War and fears of rising European Fascism. “The nation’s phantoms,” she writes, “were distractions from anxiety, expressions of anxiety, symptoms of a nervous age.” On Violence and on Violence Against Women, by Jacqueline Rose (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). These provocative essays probe assumptions that both…

On August 14, 2013, someone posted a six-second video to Vine—the now defunct app that is more or less the spiritual predecessor of TikTok—of a little girl munching loudly on snacks and wearing an iridescent-blue dress. Between bites, the girl looks directly at the camera. “Hey,” she says, with a flick of her eyebrows and a hand on her hip. “I want to be famous.” Although the child remained blessedly anonymous, her wish came true: the clip racked up more than fifty-four million views. Major news sites reposted it; Internet scamps remixed it. The video felt like a distillation—the unfiltered truth of our online attention ecosystem, straight from the mouths of babes. In 2013, Facebook had just bought Instagram, for a billion dollars. Kim Kardashian announced a pregnancy, a divorce,…