Innholdsfortegnelse for September 6, 2021 i The New Yorker

In 1971, I cooked spaghetti to live, and lived to cook spaghetti. Steam rising from the pot was my pride and joy, tomato sauce bubbling up in the saucepan my one great hope in life. I went to a cooking specialty store and bought a kitchen timer and a huge aluminum pot, big enough to bathe a German shepherd in, then went around to all the supermarkets that catered to foreigners, gathering an assortment of odd-sounding spices. I picked up a pasta cookbook at the bookstore, and bought tomatoes by the dozen. I purchased every brand of spaghetti I could lay my hands on, simmered every sauce known to man. Fine particles of garlic, onion, and olive oil swirled in the air, forming a harmonious cloud that penetrated every corner…

I was born in my grandparents’ sprawling house by the Yamuna River in Delhi. When I was a few minutes old, Grandmother welcomed me into the world by writing “Om,” which means “I am” in Sanskrit, on my tongue with a little finger dipped in honey. Perhaps that moment was reinforced in my tiny mind days later when the family priest arrived to draw up my horoscope. As he scribbled astrological symbols on a long scroll, my father named me Madhur, which means “sweet as honey.” My grandfather teased my father, saying that he should have named me Manbhari (“am sated”), since I was the fifth child and the third daughter. But my father continued to procreate, and I was left with honey on my palate and in my soul.…

One day in 1989, a man on a bicycle arrived at the gates of a whisky distillery called Bruichladdich. The distillery sits across the road from the North Atlantic Ocean, on a wild and blustery Scottish island called Islay. The man was Mark Reynier, a third-generation wine dealer from London, who was on vacation with his brother. Their primary objective would have been clear to any passing driver: each bicycle had, strapped to its handlebars, a bundle of golf clubs. At the distillery, Reynier was hoping to achieve his secondary objective. He had grown obsessed with Bruichladdich whisky, an unheralded product known, to those who knew about it, for its unusual delicacy and complexity. He says, “It had the elegance, balance, finesse, harmony—everything I’d been brought up to look for…

The 1954 fall term had begun. Again the marble neck of a homely Venus in the vestibule of Humanities Hall, Waindell College, received the vermilion imprint, in applied lipstick, of a mimicked kiss. Again the Waindell Recorder discussed the parking problem. Again in the margins of library books earnest freshmen inscribed such helpful glosses as “Description of nature,” “Irony,” and “How true!” Again autumn gales plastered dead leaves against one side of the latticed gallery leading from Humanities to Frieze Hall. Again, on serene afternoons, huge amberbrown monarch butterflies flapped over asphalt and lawn as they lazily drifted south, their incompletely retracted black legs hanging rather low beneath their polka-dotted bodies. And still the college creaked on. Hard-working graduates, with pregnant wives, still wrote dissertations on Dostoevski and Simone de…

A ccording to “The Web Guide to Martha Stewart—The UNOFFI-CIAL Site!,” which was created by a former graduate student named Kerry Ogata as “a thesis procrastination technique”and then passed on to those who now maintain it, the fifty-eight-year-old chairman and C.E.O. of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia L.L.C. (“MSO” on the New York Stock Exchange) needs only four hours of sleep a night, utilizes the saved hours by grooming her six cats and gardening by flashlight, prefers Macs in the office and a PowerBook for herself, commutes between her house in Westport and her two houses in East Hampton and her Manhattan apartment in a G.M.C. Suburban (“with chauffeur”) or a Jaguar XJ6 (“she drives herself”), was raised the second-oldest of six children in a Polish-American family in Nutley, New Jersey,…

SEPTEMBER 1 – 7, 2021 The emotional aftermath of the quarantine era will give playwrights plenty to chew on. While in isolation, Ngozi Anyanwu wrote “The Last of the Love Letters” (in previews, opening on Sept. 13), a “meditation on loneliness” that follows a pair of lovers each grappling, in poem-like monologues, with whether to stay or to go. At the Atlantic Theatre Company, which previously staged Anyanwu’s “The Homecoming Queen,” the playwright performs opposite Daniel J. Watts (above), in a production directed by Patricia McGregor. ART “The Earth, That Is Sufficient” There are no missteps in this beautiful, astute show about landscape, broadly defined, at the Nicola Vassell gallery. Subtle affinities thread the diverse selections, mostly paintings, together. A compact composition by the Syrian American painter-poet Etel Adnan, from…

The question in my mind when I arrived at the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival was whether to enter the official crawfish-eating contest or content myself with acts of free-lance gluttony. The idea of entering the contest came from Peter Wolf, an old friend of mine who grew up in New Orleans and returned to Louisiana from New York for the festival this year, having concocted some sort of business conference in Houston to serve as an excuse for flying in that direction. Peter was brought up to appreciate what Louisiana has to offer. His father was the man who put the state government in perspective for me a dozen years ago, just after I had returned from watching the Legislature in Baton Rouge stage some particularly bizarre entertainments in anticipation…

July, 1980. I’m about to turn fifteen and our family is in Seoul, the first time since we left, twelve years earlier. I don’t know if it’s different. My parents can’t really say. They just repeat the equivalent of “How in the world?” whenever we venture into another part of the city, or meet one of their old friends. “Look at that—how in the world?” “This hot spell, yes, yes—how in the world?” My younger sister is very quiet in the astounding heat. We all are. It’s the first time I notice how I stink. You can’t help smelling like everything else. And in the heat everything smells of ferment and rot and rankness. In my grandfather’s old neighborhood, where the two- and three-room houses stand barely head-high, the smell…

The hot pastrami sandwich served at Langer’s Delicatessen in downtown Los Angeles is the finest hot pastrami sandwich in the world. This is not just my opinion, although most people who know about Langer’s will simply say it’s the finest hot pastrami sandwich in Los Angeles because they don’t dare to claim that something like a hot pastrami sandwich could possibly be the best version of itself in a city where until recently you couldn’t get anything resembling a New York bagel, and the only reason you can get one now is that New York bagels have deteriorated. Langer’s is a medium-sized place—it seats a hundred and thirty-five people—and it is decorated, although “decorated” is probably not the word that applies, in tufted brown vinyl. The view out the windows…

The lazy Susan, in antiquity, would have been a fire.Drinking all night, the parents never get drunk.This is an ancient brew, with nuts, seeds, fruitto fuel the hours, to light a center.The tea dispenser’s orange light reminds us:they’re in the dining room, laughing in Chinesewhile we play Scrabble or Monopoly out here.They’re telling stories we don’t bother to recordbecause the nights are long. We’ve heard them before.We don’t comprehend the punch lines. They’re tired.They live this way because of us. We live this way because of them.We don’t comprehend the punch lines. They’re tiredbecause the nights are long. We’ve heard them before,telling stories we don’t bother to record.While we play Scrabble or Monopoly out here,they’re in the dining room, laughing in Chinese.The tea dispenser’s orange light reminds usto fuel the…

The Chair Ji-Yoon Kim (Sandra Oh), the title character of this new Netflix series (created by Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman), is the first woman and the first person of color to chair the English department at the fictional Pembroke University, a prestigious “lower-tier Ivy.” Kim’s cartoonishly out-of-touch colleagues grapple with declining class enrollments. The university’s dean (David Morse) enlists Kim in an effort to cull the faculty, but Kim, loath to betray her former mentors—including Elliot Rentz (Bob Balaban), a Melville expert, and Joan Hambling (a phenomenal Holland Taylor), a crass medievalist—instead tries to help them boost their enrollment numbers. Meanwhile, one of the department’s pillars, the iconoclastic superstar Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass), shows up unprepared to his courses, which remain popular anyway. Other familiar campus controversies include…

On a recent afternoon, the comedian Jaboukie Young-White walked into Syndicated, a bar and movie theatre in Bushwick. He had bleach-blond hair and the beginnings of a mustache, and he wore workout clothes. “I like to exercise, but ‘I want to look plump and juicy’ isn’t enough motivation,” he said. “I need more of a narrative.” He had reserved a spot in a Muay Thai class nearby, but the class had been cancelled because of a sudden rainstorm. The gym’s owner texted him a video, and Young-White held up his phone: floor mats covered in gushing water. “Life during climate change, I guess,” he said, sliding into a booth. Two movie projectors beamed images onto a wall—“Fitzcarraldo,” the Werner Herzog film, next to “Whenever, Wherever,” the Shakira video. “Every bar…

Florence Dunkel, an entomologist at Montana State University, lives in a red saltbox house at the edge of the woods outside Bozeman, with her husband, Bob, whose nickname for her is Ladybug, and, until recently, with Gertrude, a fine-limbed grass-green katydid she rescued from an airplane. The walls of her kitchen are covered with pictures of her eight grandchildren, who call her Oma, or, in the case of one grandson, the Beetle Oma. In a bay window overlooking a vegetable garden, dried flowers hang next to a stained-glass dragonfly. One freezing night at the end of February, Dunkel, who is petite, with fluffy gray curls and rosebud lips, was puttering around her kitchen, a large pair of glasses suspended from a sparkly chain around her neck and an apron tied…

In Havana, the restaurant called Centro Vasco is on a street that Fidel Castro likes to drive down on his way home from the office. In Little Havana, in Miami, there is another Centro Vasco, on Southwest Eighth—a street that starts east of the Blue Lagoon and runs straight to the bay. The exterior of Miami’s Centro Vasco is a hodgepodge of wind-scoured limestone chunks and flat tablets of Perma-stone set in arches and at angles, all topped with a scalloped red shingle roof. Out front are a gigantic round fountain, a fence made from a ship’s anchor chain, and a snarl of hibiscus bushes and lacy palm trees. The building has had a few past lives. It was a speakeasy in the twenties, and for years afterward it was…

More like a vault: you pull the handle outand on the shelves not a lot,and what there is (a boiled potatoin a bag, a chicken carcassunder foil) looking dispirited,drained, mugged. This is nota place to go in hope or hunger.But, just to the right of the middleof the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,heart-red, sexual-red, wet neon-red,shining red in their liquid, exotic,aloof, slummingin such company: a jarof maraschino cherries. Three-quartersfull, fiery globes, like strippersat a church social. Maraschino cherries, “maraschino”the only foreign word I knew. Not oncedid I see these cherries employed: notin a drink, nor on topof a glob of ice cream,or just pop one in your mouth. Not once. The same jar there through an entirechildhood of dull dinners—bald meat,pocked peas, and, see above,boiled potatoes. Maybethey…