Innholdsfortegnelse for April 11, 2022 i The New Yorker

Andrew Solomon (“The Unthinkable,” p. 28) is a professor of clinical medical psychology at Columbia University. His books include “Far and Away,” “Far from the Tree,” and “The Noonday Demon.” Rachel Syme (“Showtime,” p. 16), a staff writer, has covered style and culture for The New Yorker since 2012. David Baker (Poem, p. 35) teaches at Denison University. His new poetry collection, “Whale Fall,” will be out in July. Hannah Seidlitz (The Talk of the Town, p. 15) is a member of the magazine’s editorial staff. Saul Steinberg (Cover), who died in 1999, contributed to The New Yorker for nearly sixty years. An exhibition of his work, “Saul Steinberg: In the Library,” is on view at the Pace Gallery, in New York, through April 30. Amanda Petrusich (Pop Music, p.…

Does the world need more Julia Child content? The California-born, French-trained chef and patron saint of home cooks has more or less dominated culinary pop culture for decades. For the past twenty years, there has been a veritable glut of Childiana: several biographies, published collections of letters and recipes, reissues of her cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” at least two podcasts devoted to her life, and, perhaps most notably, Nora Ephron’s jaunty bio-pic “Julie & Julia,” in which Meryl Streep played Child with singsongy aplomb. One might wonder what terrain is left to cover about duck terrine. And yet “Julia,” a new HBO Max series, from the creator Daniel Goldfarb, manages to squeeze a bit more juice out of her phenomenal rise from a humble housewife (who may…

In one sense, Will Smith has spent a career preparing to slap Chris Rock across the face. In an industry that fetishizes masochism—Christian Bale’s subsisting on little more than two hundred calories’ worth of black coffee and apples for “The Machinist”; Robert De Niro’s arduous pasta regimen, which put sixty pounds on him for “Raging Bull”—Smith’s prep work stands out for its theatrical toughness. It could be said that he trains as if he were in a “Rocky” montage. To recover from playing a middle-aged dad in “King Richard,” Smith undertook workouts that included climbing the hundred and sixty flights of stairs up the Burj Khalifa; after that, he scaled the spire. For “Ali,” he trained with Sugar Ray Leonard’s former coach Darrell Foster. Foster told the press at the…

One recent Sunday evening, Alexander Shulan, the thirty-three-year-old owner of the Lomex Gallery, in Tribeca, was pacing the space, worrying about his gallery’s potential ruin. In a couple of hours, as part of the first major New York retrospective of the Swiss artist H. R. Giger since his death, in 2014, Shulan wass taging an avant-metal concert, which, fearing pandemonium, he’d decided not to publicize. He’d heard things about past Giger shows. Two fans had played football inside a gallery in New York. In Berlin, Julian Schnabel had opened an exhibition the same day as Giger’s; a handful showed up for Schnabel and thousands queued around the block for Giger. At the opening of the Lomex show, in January, hundreds had swarmed the tiny space, despite a nor’easter. Some visitors…

On October 31, 2018, I read a story in the New York Post about a Russian scientist who stabbed another Russian scientist at a research station in Antarctica. Crime is uncommon on that continent, but what made this one even more unusual, according to the Post, was that the one scientist, Sergei Savitsky, had attacked the other, Oleg Beloguzov, for giving away the endings of books. At the isolated station, run by Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, the two men had been together for many months. Savitsky was reading books from the library to pass the time, and Beloguzov kept telling him the endings; finally, Savitsky snapped and stabbed Beloguzov in the chest with a kitchen knife. Beloguzov was flown to a hospital in Chile, where he recovered. Authorities…

If anyone objects to the union of two types of anchovies in the pintxo matrimonio al ajillo at Ernesto’s, a Basque-leaning restaurant on the Lower East Side, speak now and I will eat yours for you. The matrimony of a boqueron (plump, meaty, and white, pickled in wine vinegar and olive oil) and an anchoa (a dark, skinny, salt-cured umami bomb) is holy indeed, made holier by the kitchen’s decision to mount the pair, like prostrate wedding-cake toppers, on a rectangle of delicately crisp, buttery pastry. Though the fillets are separated by a neat line of ajillo, a zingy condiment of parsley and garlic, each bite brings them together in perfect harmony. I have a feeling that none of the ingredients in the tortilla abierta con Cinco Jotas, meanwhile, are married,…

Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell, and Darren Criss, who star in the Broadway revival of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” at Circle in the Square, and Neil Pepe, who directs it, met up the other day at a West Side thrift shop called No Particular Hours (“Vintage Goods/Industrial Artifacts / Dead People’s Things”). The play, from 1975, is about three desperate characters in a junk shop; the group had planned to visit one in March, 2020, shortly before the show’s opening; two years later, there they were. The proprietor, Jerry Lerner—tall, grizzled, fisherman’s cap—let them wander, offering occasional commentary. (Of a carved statue: “I used to call that Bali Parton.”) The shop, a chockablock riot of curiosities—wagon-wheel chandelier here, helmeted mannequin head there—was a bit more festive than the “Buffalo” set, and…

On a November evening outside a sound-editing studio in Chelsea, Natasha Lyonne was sipping a can of Red Bull Sugar-Free and puffing on a Marlboro Light 72, her brand of choice. “Short, like Robert Mitchum would have smoked,” she explained. She’d spent the afternoon doing a “watch-down” of new episodes of “Russian Doll,” her macabre Netflix comedy, in which she stars as Nadia Vulvokov, an East Village video-game engineer who in the first season gets hit by a cab on the night of her thirty-sixth-birthday party. The accident is fatal, but instead of expiring Nadia finds herself in a “Groundhog Day”-like loop of reliving the same night and then dying in increasingly gruesome and unlikely ways. Lyonne cocreated the series with Leslye Headland, and for Season 2, which premières on…

My husband and I first met Trevor Matthews when he and our son, George, started kindergarten together at St. Bernard’s, a private boys’ school on the Upper East Side. Trevor was perhaps the brightest kid in the class. In first grade, he was already reading adult narrative nonfiction. He could be charming, generous, and humane. But he could also turn suddenly violent. At my son’s seventh-birthday party, Trevor bit another boy on the ear so hard that the mark was still visible when that child next went to school. Trevor terrorized the smaller kids in the class, and, if they pushed back, he would try to get them in trouble. He was shrewd in his manipulations. In second grade, he tried extracting cash from other boys by threatening to spread…

“If I look at the mass, I will never act,” Mother Teresa once said. “If I look at the one, I will.” During the pandemic, we’ve all grappled with this dynamic. Our country is on the cusp of a grim milestone: soon, a million people in the United States will have died of covid-19. Yet for many Americans this reality seems vague, abstract—a group problem for which we must take individual responsibility. We struggle to see the crisis we’re in. Part of the problem is fatigue. Another is that the coronavirus has exacted its toll unevenly. covid is relatively unthreatening to younger people, but has killed one in seventy-five older Americans; residents of long-term-care facilities make up less than three per cent of the population, but have accounted for about…

A few months ago, the C.E.O. of Poggio Labs, a San Francisco software company, sounded an alarm. “If you’re a straight guy aged 25 to 35,” he tweeted, women are judging you “based on a set of standards created by a person named tinx.” The arbiter’s full name is Christina Najjar; as a teen-ager she adopted the name Tinx, which is how her nearly two million social-media followers know her. “They’re mostly women,” she said the other day. She wore a green sweatshirt, gray leggings, and cantaloupe-colored wrist weights. “They have disposable income and want to know how to spend it. They want to have margaritas and wake up at 6 a.m. and go to a workout. They don’t want to be dicked around by fuck boys.” A former freelance…

Look, honey, we know it’s been a hard few years. It’s perfectly normal to feel uneasy about making any major life changes right now. But your stepfather and I agree that just because we’re currently standing in the shadow of an enormous tsunami still gathering momentum is no reason not to give us a grandchild. Yes, the tsunami is big. Yes, it’s scary. Yes, there’s a hundred-per-cent certainty that it will crash down in a matter of minutes and drown everyone in its path. But you know what? There’s always going to be a reason not to do something. You don’t think my generation had fears? We fought for civil rights! And women’s rights! I mean, not us specifically but our contemporaries. And things seemed dark to us, too, when…

ACROSS 1 Unkempt 7 ___ App (Venmo competitor) 11 At risk of 12 Not seriously 14 Much parodied William Carlos Williams poem 17 “Rumor ___ …” 18 Initials, say 19 Draw 20 Linguistic cousin of Manx 21 Some yoga poses 22 ___ Baker Center for Human Rights (Oakland-based nonprofit) 23 Like the title character of Camus’s “The Stranger” 25 They may go from A to A 27 ___ Narciso (fictional California city in Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49”) 28 Place for hot rolls 30 Symbol seen on the one-dollar bill 31 Ripoff? 32 Curious 35 Home wrecker? 36 One giving ten per cent 38 Stuff tight 39 ___ one’s time 41 Like smear campaigns 42 Member of the Squad, for short 43 Alternatives to yellow cabs 44 Bear…