Innholdsfortegnelse for November 29, 2021 i The New Yorker

William Finnegan (“Finding a Way Up,” p. 46) has been a staff writer since 1987. His book “Barbarian Days” won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for biography. Rebecca Mead (“Pompeii’s Hidden Layer,” p. 38), a staff writer since 1997, is the author of “My Life in Middlemarch.” Her memoir “Home/Land” is forthcoming in 2022. Greg Jackson (Fiction, p. 72) has published the short-story collection “Prodigals.” His début novel, “The Dimensions of a Cave,” will be out in 2023. Megan Fernandes (Poem, p. 53) is the author of the poetry collection “Good Boys.” Carlos Lozada (Books, p. 86), a book critic at the Washington Post, received the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. His first book, “What Were We Thinking,” came out last year. Emily Flake (Sketchbook, p. 70), a New Yorker cartoonist,…

“Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes” The country’s leading precision dance troupe, the leggy Rockettes, strut their stuff once more at Radio City Music Hall. Several times per day, the theatre is engulfed in video projections and torrents of fake snow, and, in one sweet passage, the stage is transformed into a miniature skating rink. (Through Jan. 2.) Neapolitan Crèche A spruce tree graces the entrance to the Medieval Sculpture Hall at the Metropolitan Museum. Eighteenth-century terra-cotta angels in silk robes deck its boughs; at the tree’s base is an elaborate tableau of Baroque figurines, representing both the Nativity, in Bethlehem, and the bustle of daily life in the Italian port city of Naples. (Through Jan. 9.) Holiday Train Show Santa’s sleigh isn’t the only magical transportation…

For a long time now, the American electorate has been resigned to a “permanent campaign,” an unceasing carnival of exploratory committees, chicken dinners, and cable excitements. The 2024 campaign for the Presidency is unique in that it kicked off at around 2 a.m. on November 4, 2020, with a brazen act of seditious rhetoric broadcast live from the East Room of the White House. With the outcome still in question, Donald Trump declared “fraud.” And, when all the votes were counted with Biden as the winner, Trump set about fomenting the insurrection that ended with a mob of his delusional loyalists storming the U.S. Capitol. Trump remains unapologetic, even serene, about those events. He told the journalist Jonathan Karl that he recalls January 6th as “a very beautiful time with…

Evictions have been mercifully rare in New York during the past year and a half, thanks in part to city, state, and federal moratoriums that have kept people in place through the pandemic. But those protections weren’t able to save Aubergine, a picturesquely decrepit flophouse, salon, and culture-freak com-munity at 546 West 113th Street. For half a century, a rotating cast of urban homesteaders—mostly young, often artists or academics—have found refuge in the five-story Beaux-Arts building, which is owned by Columbia University. Rent: five hundred and forty dollars a person. Earlier this year, citing safety concerns, Columbia moved to repossess the building. A couple of weeks before the movers arrived, a few housemates gathered for a stroll through the place. Emilyn Brodsky—thirty-six, a physical-therapy student and a musician, whose most…

Int. Montessori preschool. Logan: Put away your goddam childish things and listen up, thumb-suckers! What’s that hellacious racket? Gerri: Shazaming it … Dan Zanes, “Father Goose.” Logan: Is Raffi not good enough for you callow fucking philistines? It’s no secret that I’m retiring from preschool. Which of you short-pantsed mama’s boys thinks he can step into my size-4 Crocs? Kendall: Respectfully, I have three years of day care under my belt, I’m intimately familiar with our Lego and Lincoln Log operations, I can finger-paint like … like fucking Picasso— Roman: I think what my bed-wetting brother is trying to say is that I would clearly make the best leader, owing to my impeccable motor skills. Logan: Roman, do me a teeny-tiny favor? Stick a fucking pacifier in your drooling piehole.…

Going to therapy always involves some level of transference between the analyst and the analyzed, but it does not often become as toxic, let alone as criminal, as it does in “The Shrink Next Door,” a new AppleTV+ black comedy that covers thirty years of a disastrous relationship between a slick con-man therapist and his gullible schlump of a client. Paul Rudd—going against his squeaky-clean type as a bad guy for once—plays Dr. Isaac (Ike) Herschkopf, a weaselly and wholly unprofessional psychologist who sees an easy mark in Marty Markowitz, a basket-case nebbish played by Will Ferrell. Across three decades, beginning in the eighties (among the show’s pleasures are its throwback big glasses, chunky knitwear, and cozy beards), Ike slowly takes over every aspect of Marty’s world, from joining his…

The U.S. Space Force—the sixth military service branch, which turns two years old next month—provides resources to protect and defend America’s satellites from the likes of the Chinese and the Russians. Space Force members also operate the Global Positioning System satellite constellation, providing G.P.S. services, for free, to everyone on the planet. All extremely important stuff. Yet the Space Force is considered something of a joke—the subject of late-night gibes and Internet memes. Critics have derided it as a vanity project of President Trump, a campaign-rally applause line somehow made real. Last year, when Trump unveiled the Space Force logo, which bears a striking resemblance to “Star Trek”’s Starfleet insignia, Twitter lit up. (“Ahem,” tweeted the original “Star Trek” cast member George Takei. “We are expecting some royalties from this…

Few operas are as mountainous as Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” The rarely performed work, rich with sonic booming and spitty glottal fricatives, has a running time of almost six hours. It ends with a troubling flared-nostril paean to the purity of German art. One of its more deadly lyrics addresses the shoemaking trade with the aperçu “Cobbling certainly has its share of problems.” Wagner’s only comedy is, in a word, impossible. Cue the composer Matthew Aucoin, who recently attended the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “Die Meistersinger.”Aucoin’s opera “Eurydice,” a retelling of the Greek myth from Eurydice’s perspective, based on a play by Sarah Ruhl, made him, at twenty-nine, the youngest composer to have a Met début since the twenty-seven-year-old Gian Carlo Menotti, in 1938. Aucoin is also the author…

The new film from Jane Campion, “The Power of the Dog,” is based on Thomas Savage’s novel of the same name, published in 1967. The title echoes the Twenty-second Psalm, in the King James Bible: “Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.” As the movie ends, you can’t help asking yourself: Who exactly is the dog, and who’s the darling? The year is 1925, and the place is Montana, which is played onscreen by Campion’s native New Zealand. Whether it fulfills the role convincingly—not least in regard to trees and vegetation—is a question that only Montanans will be qualified to answer. What’s undeniable is the glory of the hills, camel-colored and weirdly folded, that loom in the backdrop of the tale. We are…

There’s something at once jovial and jarring about Soothr, the rare restaurant born in the age of COVID that has not only survived but thrived, by adjusting to the erratic rhythms of pandemic dining. Securing a table begins on the pavement, where patrons line up to flash proof of vaccination. The maître d’ facilitates these exchanges from the window of a glass-box foyer; no one leaves without a pithy reminder of the restaurant’s ninety-minute table limit. “The clock starts at the time of the reservation,” someone called out one recent evening, prompting a flurry of phone tapping from aspiring diners, presumably relaying the message to less punctilious companions. Such militaristic timekeeping has undoubtedly become more necessary since Soothr’s acquisition of a Michelin Plate, in May, but the tempo contrasts sharply…

What becomes a legend most? On a brisk day last week in downtown Newark, the answer was a floor-length plaid wool coat; a pair of Uggs with half-dollar-size Swarovski crystal buttons; big glasses with violet lenses; what appeared to be a hand-tooled leather fanny pack; and a tan baseball cap. It was a look that said, “I’m older, I like comfort, but don’t you dare picture me in a tracksuit.” The legend was Dionne Warwick, a month shy of her eighty-first birthday and still possessed of cheekbones that could slice open a thumb. The occasion was an art exhibition partly inspired by her six decades as an award-winning entertainer, but fully in thrall to her late-blossoming Twitter account, which in the past year has added a new and sometimes crotchety…

One recent afternoon in Morocco, a fifty-nine-year-old former Royal Marine Commando named Phil Asher walked me into a desolate valley in the Atlas Mountains, shook my hand, and abandoned me. Asher, whom I had met only the previous evening, has a gray beard, a piercing gaze, and a bone-dry sense of humor. He teaches survival skills to people who have never fast-roped from a helicopter or killed their dinner. That morning, he had spent several hours educating me on the rudiments of living in the wilderness, alone. Now I was in the wilderness, alone. The travel firm that organized my trip, Black Tomato, calls this experience Get Lost—a playful misnomer, since the idea is to do the opposite. A client is dropped somewhere spectacular and scantly populated, and challenged to…

“Come on, Tommy!” Becca Caldwell was urging her husband on. “You got this! Try hard!” Tommy Caldwell was already trying hard. Known for climbing cliffs that rise for thousands of feet above remote places, he was spread-eagled this morning three feet off the ground, clinging to an overhanging boulder in a pine forest near Estes Park, Colorado. The climb he was attempting went from a fiercely difficult start to a desperate right-hand pinch, and he was falling flat on his back each time he tried the move. It was a short fall onto a soft pad beneath him, but still. “Come on, Tommy! This is Tommy’s Arete!” An arete is an outside edge—in this case, the razor edge of a rather tall boulder. Caldwell hit the pad again. He was…

ACROSS 1 Breed seen on bags of Cesar dog food, for short7 Squeeze into a ball12 Widely inclusive13 “___ Iguana” (Bobby McFerrin song)14 First African American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee16 Active stratovolcano situated mere miles from Peru’s second most populous city, Arequipa17 Jethro Tull front man Anderson18 Rio maker19 Trudge through ankle-deep water, say20 Situation Room grp.22 Johnson Sirleaf who won a Nobel Peace Prize during her time as the President of Liberia24 Lug25 Brunch order27 ___ for peace28 Fits together nicely29 2021 film starring Billy Crystal and Tiffany Haddish30 Guys on the take?31 “Miracle Workers” network34 Piece of climbing equipment35 Like everything one guard says, in a classic riddle36 Smiley smile, for short37 Kim ___-hyung, a.k.a. V of the K-pop group BTS38 Captain von Trapp’s given…