Innholdsfortegnelse for October 18, 2021 i The New Yorker

Rachel Aviv (“Lost Youth,” p. 30) became a staff writer in 2013. She is at work on “Strangers to Ourselves,” a book about mental illness. Christoph Niemann (Cover) published “Zoo,” a collection of linocuts and drawings of animals at two Berlin zoos, in July. Rae Armantrout (Poem, p. 49), a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, is the author of, most recently, “Wobble.” Her new poetry collection, “Finalists,” will come out next year. Thomas McGuane (Fiction, p. 52) began contributing fiction to the magazine in 1994. His latest book is “Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories.” Rachel Syme (Books, p. 59), a staff writer, has covered style and culture for The New Yorker since 2012. Dennard Dayle (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25) co-hosts “Weeaboo Hell,” a podcast about anime. His début book, “Everything Abridged,” is…

At this juncture in the evolution of Momofuku, a brand so expansive and brimming with personality—a good amount of which belongs to its iconoclastic founder, David Chang—that it spans four cities, ten locations, and a multi-platform media company, you might wonder if it’s due for a midlife crisis. If a ruby-red Beamer screams panic for a certain breed of middle-aged men, do soulless corporate digs for a guerrilla outfit turned establishment darling signal anxiety about identity for an iconic culinary empire? The question is posed by the latest incarnation of Ssäm Bar, Chang’s maverick sophomore effort, which once defined the East Village food scene and now resides in a glass-walled, L.E.D.-lit behemoth in the South Street Seaport. This isn’t the first time a Momofuku restaurant has found itself inside a…

An open casting call is rarely as egalitarian and meritocratic as the word “open” implies. Starry-eyed hopefuls are expected to possess some panache and some relevant experience, or to be an undiscovered talent of mythic proportions. But the Brooklyn Academy of Music recently decided to embrace the concept of true amateurism. It put out a call for people who wanted to be beachgoers in the avant-garde climate-crisis opera “Sun & Sea.” The piece was commissioned for the Lithuanian pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and this would be its American première. “Job alert,” the notice, posted to BAM’s social-media accounts, read. “No experience necessary. Requirements include: ability to lie on a beach for several hours.” Community members of “any age (at least 12 years old), gender, ability, racial and ethnic…

Joshua Boyer’s mother often had to remind him to think for himself. Growing up in rural Illinois, Boyer quiet and well mannered, a shy white kid who spent his afternoons fishing for strawberry bass in farm ponds and the creeks that feed the Mississippi. But he was drawn to charismatic boys who broke the rules. They would sneak out at night to drink and smoke; they would drive through town in a pickup truck, knocking down neighbors’ mailboxes with a baseball bat. “Are you coming?” they would ask him, and Boyer had trouble saying no. He didn’t say no when a cousin proposed that they run away from home, or when a friend at a rave handed him a small dose of powder heroin. By 2001, when Boyer was twenty-four,…

In “Home Cooking,” a collection of essays first published in 1988, Laurie Colwin states one opinion after another, as plainly as boiled potatoes. “Grilling is like sunbathing,” she announces. “Everyone knows it is bad for you but no one ever stops doing it.” Along with outdoor cooking, outdoor dining is out, too: “I do not like to eat al fresco. No sane person does, I feel.” During Colwin’s brief career, and then well beyond it, countless readers and cooks have aspired to her idiosyncratic recipe for sanity and self-reliance. Its ingredients were laid out primarily in her columns for Gourmet (which “Home Cooking” collects), and, if Colwin’s opinions were bluntly put, they weren’t obvious: she insisted that simple chicken salad had “a certain glamour,” but rarely extolled chocolate(“I don’t love…

The coronavirus pandemic in the United States appears, for the moment, to be in retreat. Since the start of September, daily cases have dropped by a third, and daily hospitalizations have fallen by more than a quarter. COVID deaths, which generally lag behind infections by a few weeks, are now starting to decline from their peak. There are still areas of the country that are struggling. In Alaska, where only half the population is fully vaccinated, hospitals are at capacity and doctors have had to ration intensive care. But, nationwide, the Delta wave is waning. The question now is: What does the winter hold? There are reasons for optimism. Seventy-eight per cent of adults in the U.S. have now received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, and recent…

At six o’clock on a warm Sunday morning, Joseph Medeiros, an actor from Queens with a few Broadway credits, had just ridden his mountain bike across the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan, carrying a big black food-delivery bag, the kind that usually holds pizza. This one was stuffed with forty-two theatrical props, including a watermelon, a loom, a rain stick, a goddess headdress, and a Cyclops eye fashioned out of leather. “This weighs at least fifty pounds,” Medeiros said, setting the bag down on the grass in East River Park. He was sweating through his T-shirt. The props were for his one-man performance of Book II of the Odyssey, set to begin at six-thirty. A few years ago, Medeiros decided that he would memorize Homer’s epic poem in ancient Greek—twelve thousand…

Is this the U.N.? The Time Pod’s not great with location data. Given the diversity and the number of flags, I’m either at N.Y.U. orientation or at the U.N. Nod twice if I’m in the right place. All right, here’s the hard sell: I’m from the future. Still with me? I see one or two handguns out, so I hope the flashy entrance bought me a little credibility. I’m not here to talk about nukes. They’re an existential problem, but people like you can keep a standoff going for a long time. Wait, did that seem haughty? I don’t want to sound haughty. The archives indicate that that’s why you ignored climate warnings. Which is insane, but—damn it! I did it again. Never mind. Starting over. WOW, THE U.N.! Nice…

Wildfires, drought, the prospect of Caitlyn Jenner as governor: nothing can stop people from moving to California. “There were definitely some who left,” Kurt Rappaport, the C.E.O. of Westside Estate Agency, said the other day, referring to the pandemic exodus. He wore a black blazer and stood at the bar at Soho House, the site of the first-ever Power Broker Awards, an Oscars for the unsung heroes of Los Angeles real estate. “But moving to Texas or Florida to save on taxes?” he went on. “Do you want to live in Florida? Miami is cheesy. It’s fun for Art Basel, but have you been to Miami in the summer? Not pretty.” The awards were hosted by the Hollywood Reporter, which publishes an annual list of the area’s top thirty real-estate…

To many New Yorkers, it has become axiomatic that the city is reverting to its bad old nineteen-eighties self. Crime is up, subway ambience is down, the Yankees are World Series starved. Further evidence: Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels and a Koch-era tabloid fixture, is the Republican candidate for mayor. No one gives him much of a shot, though he has garnered slivers of media attention for sharing an Upper West Side studio apartment with sixteen rescue cats, and for doffing his signature red beret at a rally and thereby revealing a dramatic tan line above his brow, the effect of which, the Times said, “brought to mind a black-and-white cookie.” The Guardian Angels, founded in 1979, remain with us, too. The organization is a civilian crime-watch…

Early evening in late summer, the golden hour in the village of East Hampton. The surf is rough and pounds its regular measure on the shore. At the last driveway on a road ending at the beach, a cortège of cars—S.U.V.s, jeeps, candy-colored roadsters—pull up to the gate, sand crunching pleasantly under the tires. And out they come, face after famous face, burnished, expensively moisturized: Jerry Seinfeld, Jimmy Buffett, Anjelica Huston, Julianne Moore, Stevie Van Zandt, Alec Baldwin, Jon Bon Jovi. They all wear expectant, delighted-to-be-invited expressions. Through the gate, they mount a flight of stairs to the front door and walk across a vaulted living room to a fragrant back yard, where a crowd is circulating under a tent in the familiar high-life way, regarding the territory, pausing now…

ACROSS 1 Two-time N.B.A. M.V.P. between K.D. and Russ6 ___ pearls (ingredient in Cantonese dessert soup)10 School with a view of the Charles River: Abbr.13 Seed used to make some butter14 Each15 “The fool ___ think he is wise …”: “As You Like It”16 ___’s (Anheuser-Busch near-beer)17 Type of question with two possible answers19 Hunting cry21 Back cover of a magazine, often22 Grumpy, e.g.24 Variant of a gene25 First Asian-American woman elected to the Senate29 ___ Choppa, “Shotta Flow” rapper30 Loves to bits31 Like 202132 Mysterious cafeteria offering33 ___ moment34 Stat that never goes down35 Serious36 The Mahabharata, for one37 Small component of a larger machine38 It’s “a place on Earth,” per a 1987 No. 1 hit39 R.R. stop40 Spot for a Squirtle, say42 World leader whose name is also…