Innholdsfortegnelse for March 21, 2022 i The New Yorker

Gideon Lewis-Kraus (“Dangerous Minds,” p. 42) became a staff writer in 2020. He is the author of the memoir “A Sense of Direction.” Marie Howe (Poem, p. 59) has published four books of poems, including “Magdalene” and “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.” She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Rafał Milach (Portfolio, p. 32) is a cofounder of both Sputnik Photos and the Archive of Public Protests. His books include “Strike,” “The Winners,” “7 Rooms,” and “I Am Warning You.” Katia Savchuk (The Talk of the Town, p. 12), a freelance journalist, lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Zach Williams (Fiction, p. 56) is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He is working on a story collection. Ana Juan (Cover) has contributed more than twenty covers to…

Does New York City need another steak house? Furthermore, would its gastronomic horizons be brightened by the addition of an English steak house? No and definitely not, a food-aficionado friend said, brow arched, when I raised the question. Perhaps it was in anticipation of such skepticism that Hawksmoor, an upscale U.K. steakhouse group, pulled out all the stops when it opened its ninth outlet (of ten), in Gramercy Park, last year. Housed in the former assembly hall of the United Charities Building, Hawksmoor, all stained-glass windows and vaulted, ornate ceilings, recalls a Victorian library or a palatial aristocratic home. “I love the fact that basically anyone who’s ever walked through these doors has never seen this room before, because it’s been closed to the public for more than a century,”…

A hundred and six years ago, in the A Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula, the explorer Ernest Shackleton ordered his men to abandon ship. It was eight and a half degrees below zero; the wind was calm. Shackleton’s crew—twenty-eight men, forty-nine dogs, and a cat—had spent a winter stranded in the ice—“frozen,” as one sailor put it, “like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar.” Shackleton shouted, “She’s going, boys!” as ten million tons of ice pushed against the ship’s wooden sides, which were two feet thick in some places. The deck buckled. On November 21, 1915, the stern went up, the bow went down, and the Endurance slipped under. Frank Worsley, the ship’s captain, wrote down the coördinates in his diary: 68°39' South, 52°26' West.…

In 1925, Lela V. Scopes, twenty-eight, was turned down for a job teaching mathematics at a high school in Paducah, Kentucky, her home town. She had taught in the Paducah schools before going to Lexington to finish college at the University of Kentucky. But that summer her younger brother, John T. Scopes, was set to be tried for the crime of teaching evolution in a high-school biology class in Dayton, Tennessee, in violation of state law, and Lela Scopes had refused to denounce either her kin or Charles Darwin. It didn’t matter that evolution doesn’t ordinarily come up in an algebra class. And it didn’t matter that Kentucky’s own anti-evolution law had been defeated. “Miss Scopes loses her post because she is in sympathy with her brother’s stand,” the Times…

In late August of 2019, Franklin Tao, a forty-seven-year-old chemistry professor at the University of Kansas, departed China with just enough time to make it home for the fall semester. Tao is short, with a high forehead and a spiky hairline that give him the cautiously inquisitive appearance of a hedgehog. He had spent the spring and summer tending to his ailing mother in China’s interior, and visiting collaborators at Fuzhou University, on the country’s coast. Tao’s wife, Hong Peng, had booked his return trip to the United States, and, in the interest of thrift, had arranged an itinerary of almost unfeasible complexity. Tao flew from Fuzhou to Beijing, then to Tokyo’s Haneda airport, and only then realized that his connection to Chicago left from Narita airport, fifty miles away.…

“HIGHEST GAS PRICES IN HISTORY!” Donald Trump said in a statement that he issued last Tuesday. “DO YOU MISS ME YET?” The answer is no. The world could hardly be at a more dangerous juncture, with a catastrophe in Ukraine that could spiral into a wider war—perhaps even a nuclear one. One of the few blessings of the moment is that our own nuclear arsenal is not in the hands of a Twitter-happy tantrum-thrower beholden to his own vanity. At a speech in New Orleans this month, according to the Washington Post, Trump mooted the idea of putting China’s flag on American planes and sending them to bomb Russia: “Then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch.” During Trump’s time in the White House, he…

“When my agent called with the offer, I said, ‘Pass,’ thinking, I don’t want to shoot in L.A. for four months,” Amanda Seyfried said the other day, at a restaurant on the Upper West Side. “Also, I had Covid when they asked, and I was freaking out. I have incredible health anxiety. I was, like”—bratty voice—“‘My legs are itchy!’” She laughed. “Then, the day after, I realized, Oh, of course I need to do this. It’s a dream role.” Seyfried, who is thirty-six, was referring to her part as the disgraced biotech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, on the Hulu limited series “The Dropout,” created by Liz Meriwether. To play Holmes, the ex-C.E.O. of the sham blood-testing startup Theranos, Seyfried wore the onetime Silicon Valley savant’s Steve Jobsian black turtleneck, a rat’s-nest…

Patient Unknown No. 1, a seven-year-old boy, arrived at Ohmatdyt children’s hospital, in Kyiv, on the second day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He had been riding in a car with his parents and two sisters when they came under fire. Shells exploded around them, sending shrapnel ripping through glass and metal, then flesh. His parents and one sister died on the spot; his other sister was taken to a different hospital. An ambulance brought the boy, unconscious and losing blood, to Ohmatdyt, where doctors performed emergency surgery and put him on a ventilator. It was a couple of days before the staff located his grandmother and learned the boy’s name: Semyon. No one had been sleeping much in Kyiv since the start of what Vladimir Putin was calling a…

War is the worst evil that people have inflicted upon one another, at costs to themselves, since some hominid discovered the lethal efficacy of rocks. It is waged continually somewhere or other in every generation, furiously now, in Ukraine, and fitfully in the Middle East and Africa. The recurring horror has paused on a global scale—holding its breath, you may feel—only because, post-Hiroshima, nuclear weaponry bodes suicide for the next power to use it. Or so we have thought, and perhaps still think, but with shaken complacency. What never ends is the primordial emotional tug toward organized mayhem, which is playing out, yet again, in Eastern Europe in the face of widespread revulsion. Putin: Monster! But a madman? Diagnosing him as such assumes that sanity is the normative state of…

Lucky are those for whom the benefits of vigorous exercise are more or less the unintentional effects of something they love to do. I am not one of them. My friends have heard me declare that I like to swim, but what I really like is not so much moving purposefully through water as being immersed in it, like a tea bag. I like to walk, but would I do it quite so much if I had not, in a self-sabotaging form of rebellion against the Southern California car culture in which I grew up, refused to learn to drive? During the pandemic, I secretly relished the fact that my yoga classes had switched to Zoom; at home, with my camera turned off, I could look at my phone or…

Five days after Russia invaded Ukraine, as missiles pummelled Kyiv and a forty-mile-long military convoy menaced the city, a vlogger there named Volodymyr Zolkin phoned a stranger across the border in Russia to deliver some news: “Roman Gavrilovich has been captured.” The young man on the line had already heard that Ukrainian soldiers had detained his friend, and said he was still in shock that his friend had been in combat. “I served with him. I quit in January,” he told Zolkin, who was streaming the call live on his YouTube channel. “I don’t understand at all how they threw them over there. They’re not ready for war. We just dug and painted; most didn’t even know how to shoot.” “Are you thinking of doing anything to fight this in…

Only twenty-seven days remain before the first round of the French Presidential election, but it wasn’t until the beginning of March that the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, got around to formally entering the race. There were strategic reasons for the slow rollout, but, as Russia’s assault on Ukraine intensified, a showy announcement seemed inappropriate, leading Macron to cancel a rally in Marseille. The contrast between Macron’s schedule and those of the other candidates was kickoff enough. “On Monday, conservative candidate Valérie Pécresse (Les Républicains) visited the iconic Salon de l’Agriculture, a national farming fair which takes place every year in the south of Paris,” Gilles Paris noted, in Le Monde. “Communist candidate Fabien Roussel also wandered among cows, sheep, wines, cheeses, and other delicatessen producers. Emmanuel Macron for his part, spent…

ACROSS 1 “C’mon, help me out!”7 Show contempt for14 Priceline competitor16 Nation that became Africa’s largest after South Sudan gained independence17 It’s long and fishy18 Steering levers19 Wearisome walk20 Choose not to see, in a way?22 Discompose24 Galley equipment25 Ingredient in many cosmetics26 Dragon puppet of early children’s TV28 Focus of the 1965 exhibition “The Responsive Eye”29 Expand like a balloon33 Country sometimes called the Hexagon34 “Mission accomplished!”35 Runs through36 Metal bars37 Most civil38 Office job of yore39 Like the sand in Zen gardens40 Military band?41 Improve one’s balance42 He wrote the 1980 memoir “Go Quietly… or Else”47 Irving Berlin song with the lyrics “Noticing the days hurrying by/When you’re in love, my, how they fly”49 ___ Bunny (character created for the film “Space Jam”)50 Peruvian herd51 Beyond54 Potassium ___,…