Innholdsfortegnelse for March 7, 2022 i The New Yorker

Lawrence Wright (“The Elephant in the Courtroom,” p. 44) has been a staff writer since 1992. His latest book, “The Plague Year,” came out in June. Camille Bordas (Fiction, p. 58) teaches creative writing at the University of Florida. Her most recent novel is “How to Behave in a Crowd.” James Somers (“The Final Frontier,” p. 16) is a writer and a programmer based in New York. Joshua Yaffa (Portfolio, p. 30), a Moscow correspondent for the magazine, is the author of “Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia.” Jana Prikryl (Poem, p. 63) will publish her third book of poems, “Midwood,” in August. She is the executive editor of The New York Review of Books. David Plunkert (Cover), an illustrator and a graphic designer, received the…

Is there a more overused prop on television than the overfull wineglass? A woman of any age enters her home, exhausted from a crisis mild or extreme, and unthinkingly self-soothes with that adult milk. Simone Finch’s new series, “Single Drunk Female,” on Freeform, brings critical thought, breezily shaped, to the phenomenon of alcoholism among young women, without hardening into preachiness. Samantha Fink (the wonderful Sofia Black-D’Elia), a recovering alcoholic in her late twenties, sulks back to her home town after a drunken display at her digital-media job leads first to her firing and then to her arrest. Securing a job at the local supermarket and managing her relationship with her emotionally unavailable mother, Carol (Ally Sheedy), prove difficult for Samantha as she struggles to maintain her newbie sobriety. “Single Drunk…

The problem with COVID tests is that they’re easy to get when you don’t need them and impossible to get when you do. When the Omicron wave was peaking, people stood in testing lines for hours, and store shelves were wiped clean of kits. The next wave may not be any easier. Is this a job for a basement inventor? Not long ago, Bo Gehring, an eighty-year-old with a nearly full head of wispy gray hair and six titanium ribs, sat in the living room of his aerie in the woods near Woodstock and discussed his attempt at a homemade solution: a portable, Breathalyzer-style gadget he calls Sarsie. “I was looking at this two-minute video simulation of airflow in a Chinese restaurant and could see in a second what needed…

The most conspicuous piece of furniture at Dept of Culture Brooklyn, a new Nigerian restaurant in Bed-Stuy, is the communal table. It’s built of solid oak and monopolizes the floor space. The small room is the site of a former barbershop; you can tell by the many outlets that still line its walls, which are now ornamented with photographs of the owner-chef Ayo Balogun’s relatives in Nigeria. The lighting is warm and dim. An antique record player spins Fela Kuti and other eminences of nineteen-seventies Afrobeat. And there, in an open kitchen, is Balogun himself, bopping to protest songs as he cooks, for a dozen patrons per seating, four courses, all inspired by the cuisine of his native Kwara State. The atmosphere he’s trying to conjure is that of a…

Squiz Hazelton, flute teacher of the young Meredith Willson, of Mason City, Iowa, had come to town with a musical show, and his methods employed a travelling performer’s inventive pragmatism. “Squiz found out I could fake, so he suggested my doubling on the banjo,” Willson wrote inhis 1948 memoir, “And There I Stood with My Piccolo.” Willson played in his high-school orchestra, and later in John Philip Sousa’s marching band; he went on to write “The Music Man,” about a musical faker so deft that he conjures an imaginary marching band for kids, and mesmerizes an entire town. Last month, “The Music Man” returned to Broadway, with Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, after two decades and two pandemic delays. Opening night featured Harold Hill levels of chutzpah: a red carpet…

In the weeks before Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine, as Russian troops took up positions along the Ukrainian border, my friends and acquaintances in Kyiv went to lengths to maintain their cool. In bars and restaurants across the city, and in endless conversations at people’s homes, I heard far less alarm about the prospect of war than I did from Washington, London, Berlin, or Paris. That changed last week, starting with Putin’s announcement that Russia was, in effect, annexing the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine. Practiced self-possession was no longer sustainable. People didn’t immediately panic—very few, at that point, packed up and left—but they did begin to talk in darker tones about what might come next, about what the Russian military machine could do to Kyiv and…

The less you know about the opening scene of “Huda’s Salon,” a new film from Hany Abu-Assad, the better. Yet all that ensues is shaped by what occurs in the first quarter of an hour. Suffice it to say that the scene unfolds in, yes, a hairdressing salon run by Huda (Manal Awad). Friendly, brisk, and loquacious, she has just the one customer, a youngwoman named Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi), who has brought her baby daughter, Lina, with her. We are in the town of Bethlehem: by tradition, hardly the safest of havens for a mother and child. As the movie begins, Reem’s problems are mild—whether to have bangs, and how to reassure her husband, Yousef (Jalal Masarwa), that she’s not interested in anyone else. Fifteen minutes later, though, for…

Vladimir Putin delivered a bitter and delusional speech from the Kremlin last week, arguing that Ukraine is not a nation and Ukrainians are not a people. His order to execute a “special military operation” came shortly afterward. The professed aim is to “demilitarize and de-Nazify” this supposedly phantasmal neighbor of forty million people, whose government is so pro-Nazi that it is led by a Jewish President who was elected with seventy per cent of the vote. Like many aging autocrats, Putin has, over time, remained himself, only more so: more resentful, more isolated, more repressive, more ruthless. He operates in an airless political environment, free of contrary counsel. His stagecraft—seating foreign visitors at the opposite end of a twenty-foot-long table, humiliating security chiefs in front of television cameras—is a blend…

The Chinese artist, activist, and filmmaker Ai Weiwei slumped in a chair at the Kettle’s Yard gallery, in Cambridge. He had a trimmed goatee and was dressed all in black, the heels of his shoes crushed to be worn like house slippers. He yawned and scratched his calf. “It’s so boring,” he said. He got up and began wandering the empty galleries, inspecting a pair of ancient-looking Chinese sculptures in glass display cabinets. The objects were part of his new exhibit, “The Liberty of Doubt.” Ai had overseen the installation from his studio in Portugal, and this was the first day he had actually seen the show in person. “Are you trying to tell which ones are real, Weiwei?” Greg Hilty, the curatorial director at the Lisson Gallery, which represents…

Dear President Biden, March 13, 2022, will mark a full two years of Covid-19-occasioned lockdown. Though P.P.P. forgiveness and student-loan forgiveness are part of the public discourse surrounding the pandemic and its fallout, too little attention has been paid to age forgiveness. As such, we, U.S. Citizens for Age Forgiveness Now!, are agitating for an executive order, to take effect on March 13th, which will officially decree that the past two years do not count toward the age of any American. As such, an individual who is currently fifty-one years old would legally become forty-nine years old. A twenty-six-year-old would become a twenty-four-year-old. A new centenarian would revert to being ninety-eight, providing inducement to live to a hundred again. In addition to the subtraction of two years from the age…

The most provocative curatorial coup in the Museum of Modern Art’s recent series of rehangings of its permanent collection has been the placement of a mural-size painting of an apparent, sanguinary race war, “American People Series #20: Die,” by the veteran American artist and, at times, political activist Faith Ringgold, alongside works by Pablo Picasso. For a museum that had long championed a teleological account of the development of twentieth-century aesthetics, this startled, especially by having the Ringgold displayed near Picasso’s touchstone of modernism “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” with which the Spaniard introduced plangent allusions to tribal African masks to European art. The two pictures were made exactly sixty years apart: “Demoiselles” in 1907, while Picasso was living in Paris, and “Die” in New York in 1967, a year of eruptive…

ACROSS 1 Film-synchronization element 6 Some summer parties, briefly 10 Pennies: Abbr. 13 Disturbance potential 15 ___ deck 16 Full of robots and hoverboards, maybe 17 First plus-size model on People’s “Fifty Most Beautiful People” list (1994) 18 Mined matter 19 Citrus-drink suffix 20 Person who may collect packages 22 X-ray units 24 Site of a famous fruit tree 26 Dark times in Lyon 27 Linebacker Manti 29 Sign of neglect 31 One of an alpaca’s eight 32 Campaign manager? 35 Anxiety over the impending workweek 36 “It’s now or never” 37 Common Market letters 38 Lead-in to-drome 39 Also 40 Like many horror-movie victims… so they think 42 Creep 44 Cacao ___ (crunchy additions to an açai bowl) 48 Makes aware 50 “Funky Cold Medina” rapper Tone ___ 52…