Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2, 2021 i The New Yorker

The three of us were in a 1957 de Havilland Beaver, floating in the middle of a crater lake in the southwest quadrant of Alaska. The pilot was recounting the toll that the Vietnam War had taken on him, while, over in the right seat, my boyfriend, Karl, listened. Thanks to proximity, I was listening as well, though chances are they’d forgotten I was there. Outside, water sloshed against the pontoons, rocking the plane gently from side to side. No one had asked this man to tell his story in a long time, but Karl had asked, and so the pilot put the plane down on the lake, turned off the ignition, and began. Karl and I were spending a week fishing at a fly-out lodge outside Iliamna, by which…

1. THE HISTORY In June, 2016, Justice Samuel Alito took the unusual step of reading aloud from the bench a version of his lengthy dissent in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas. A white applicant who had been denied admission had sued, saying that she’d been discriminated against because of her race. The Supreme Court, by the narrowest of margins and on the narrowest of grounds, upheld Texas’s admissions policy. Alito, with steely indignation, picked apart the logic of U.T.’s arguments and of his colleagues’ majority opinion. “This is affirmative action gone berserk,” he declared. The civil-rights revolution ended the Jim Crow system of legally mandated racial segregation in the South. Its success made it obvious that much of the rest of the country was segregated, too, in…

I went upstairs in my mother’s house, telling her I was going to the bathroom. There was a downstairs toilet, but it had a raised seat and a frame with armrests so that she could easily maneuver herself on and off after her hip replacement, and I was squeamish about it. I couldn’t help feeling irrationally that if I used it I’d be contaminated with something: with suffering, with old age. And anyway I didn’t really need to use the bathroom. I went into the one upstairs that was free of any apparatus, closed the door, and sat on the toilet-seat lid, then pressed the flush so that she could hear it. The truth was that every so often I just needed to be alone for a few minutes, not…

Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead). The cool, dispassionate narrator of this novel, set just before the Brexit referendum, has recently moved to The Hague, and works as a translator for a former West African President on trial for war crimes. “Interpretation can be profoundly disorienting,” she says, explaining that the demands of translation often crowd out the moral import of what is said. Away from work, too, she is troubled by the mutability of identities, her own included; she gets involved with a married man, and is fascinated by a mugging in a friend’s neighborhood. “I could understand anything, under the right circumstances and for the right person,” she observes. “It was both a strength and a weakness.” A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam (Hogarth). Abandoning a graduate degree in Delhi to…

OUT OF TIME Rachel Syme, in her piece about deadlines, focusses on how they affect writers’ productivity (“Clock’s Ticking,” July 5th). Deadlines have also proved critical to the effective negotiation and resolution of disputes. As a lawyer specializing in mediation and alternative dispute resolution, I know this firsthand. I was the administrator of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, through which more than five thousand victims and surviving family members received more than seven billion dollars in compensation. The fund required claimants to file within thirty-three months to receive compensation, which often amounted to millions of dollars for a single claim—yet some two-thirds of the claimants waited until the last ninety days to file. In addition, deadlines are important in “getting to yes” for adversaries locked in trial combat; otherwise,…

Swimming backstroke toward the far end of a pool in sunlight— yellow flares in the nearby aspens— in the predawn sky, Mars and Venus glimmered— how is it a glimmering moment coalesces, and the rest slides like flour through a sieve?— how is it these glimmerings become constellations in a predawn sky?— reaching the wall, I turn and push off swimming freestyle— how is it we bobbed in water beyond the breaking surf, and I taste that salt in my mouth now?— how is it, dishevelled, breathless, we drew each other up into flame?— how is it that flame burns steadily within?— reaching the wall, I turn and push off swimming sidestroke— with each scissors kick, I know time’s shears— this is not predawn to a battle when the air…

The girl who said she could never eat a second sliceof pizza my senior year of college is doing really well.My cousin posts a photo of a loaded gun. Have I everheard of the Second Amendment? Have I ever heardof this new recipe? Cauliflower, a hint of lemon, somechopped-up ginger root. Hey, do you want to loseweight in only thirty minutes? Hey, can I have just amoment of your time? Click here to receive a specialinvitation. Click here if you want to believe in God.Tomorrow there’s a Pride walk to support the right tomarry. One comment says: I will pray for your affliction.Another says: I hope you trip, fall down, and die.Swipe up to find my new lip filler. Scroll down to readwhy these four girls were horribly afraid. Greg…

Facebook has a save-the-world mission statement—“to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”—that sounds like a better fit for a church, and not some little wood-steepled, white-clapboarded, side-of-the-road number but a castlein-a-parking-lot megachurch, a big-asa-city-block cathedral, or, honestly, the Vatican. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s C.E.O., announced this mission the summer after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, replacing the company’s earlier and no less lofty purpose: “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Both versions, like most mission statements, are baloney. The word “mission” comes from the Latin for “send.” In English, historically, a mission is Christian, and means sending the Holy Spirit out into the world to spread the Word of God: a mission involves saving souls.…

A boat ferrying a gaggle of rich American tourists makes its way toward A a Hawaiian luxury resort. At the shore, the resort’s decidedly less wealthy, more ethnically diverse staff waits to greet the guests. The groups face each other, as if they were equal expressions on two sides of a mathematical equation, but the equivalence is just an illusion. “Wave like you mean it,” the resort’s manager, Armond (the Australian actor Murray Bartlett), instructs Lani (Jolene Purdy), a native-Hawaiian trainee. Armond explains that the guests expect a kind of pleasant blandness, or an “impression of vagueness,” from the staff. “We are asked to disappear behind our masks,” he says. “It’s tropical Kabuki!” Welcome to “Upstairs, Downstairs,” Aloha State edition. The series, called “The White Lotus,” named for the fictional…

JULY 28 – AUGUST 3, 2021 Throughout the two-thousands, the indie-rock band Bright Eyes recorded diaristic folk music that eventually expanded into pop. Last year, the band emerged from hiatus with a new album called “Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was,” its first since “The People’s Key,” from 2011. On July 31, its multi-instrumentalists (including Conor Oberst, Miwi La Lupa, and Mike Mogis, pictured above) bring their music to Forest Hills Stadium on their first tour in a decade; Lucy Dacus and Waxahatchee open. ART Igshaan Adams Igshaan Adams has a tremendous gift for delicacy and a poet’s understanding of time, of how it can erode and mark our daily lives. The queer South African artist was raised in Bonteheuwel, a former segregated township in Cape…

Even by the standards of chess prodigies, Hou Yifan stood out. It wasn’t so much the way she played the game—dynamically but not dazzlingly, with an aggressive but flexible style. It was that she was a girl. Thirteen years after she became a Grandmaster, at the age of fourteen, people still mention the two big barrettes that used to pin back her bobbed hair. “I never felt restrictions or limitations,” she told me recently, from her home in Shenzhen, China, where she is a professor at Shenzhen University’s Faculty of Physical Education. (Last year, at twenty-six, she became the youngest full professor in the university’s history.) “My parents never taught me that as a girl you should do this or that,” she said. “Teachers never shaped my views in that…

In the mid-seventies, Ted Ngoy was working the late shift at a gas station in Orange County when he tasted his first doughnut. Ngoy, then in his thirties, was instantly hooked. He trained to become a manager at Winchell’s Donuts, a popular chain, before purchasing Christy’s Donuts, a struggling shop in La Habra. Ngoy turned Christy’s around, and in the next few years he acquired more stores in the area. He is said to have popularized the pink box for to-go orders, which became a key part of doughnut iconography. By 1980, he owned twenty Christy’s Donuts throughout Southern California, and he kept expanding. He eventually became known as the Donut King, and he claimed a vast empire. He had come to Southern California as part of a wave of…

On the evening of January 6th, while National Guard troops were still trying to remove an insurrectionist mob from the Capitol, the right-wing activist L. Brent Bozell III appeared as a guest on Fox Business. “They believe this election was stolen,” he said, of the rioters. “I agree with them. They are furious about the deep state.… I agree with them.” He offered a limp concession or two—“You cannot countenance our national Capitol being breached”—but spent most of the segment zigzagging across the thin line between explanation and excuse. As many viewers would have known, Bozell’s father, L. Brent Bozell, Jr., was atitanic figure in the history of modern American conservatism, his influence arguably second only to that of his co-author, brother-in-law, and former college-debate partner, William F. Buckley. What…