Innholdsfortegnelse for May 23, 2022 i The New Yorker

Joshua Yaffa (“The Captive City,” p. 30), a contributing writer to the magazine, published “Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia” in 2020. Jill Lepore (Comment, p. 11) is a professor of history at Harvard. Her books include “These Truths: A History of the United States” and “If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.” Ben Taub (“In Search of the Sublime,” p. 40), a staff writer since 2017, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Ana Juan (Cover) has contributed more than twenty-five covers to The New Yorker. She is the illustrator of the children’s-book series “Fairyland.” Campbell McGrath (Poem, p. 34) will publish his twelfth book of poetry, “The Radiance Archive,” next year. Doreen St. Félix (On Television, p. 68), the magazine’s television…

In the fall, HBO will release the second season of “The Vow,” a documentary saga about the so-called “executive success” organization NXIVM, which evolved into a nefarious sex cult—an abusive sorority that used a cautery iron to brand female members with the initials of the group’s leader, Keith Raniere. How did things up in Albany go so very wrong? Answers can be found in the popular and wildly compelling podcast “A Little Bit Culty,” hosted by two former high-ranking NXIVM members, Sarah Edmondson and Anthony (Nippy) Ames. They met and were married while in NXIVM, and are jointly pursuing a new mission: to get people out of cults, and to provide an open channel where former cult members can discuss what they went through. Their podcast, now in its fourth…

Ron Howard was famished when he met the chef José Andrés on the High Line the other morning. “Are we eating at this place of yours?” Howard asked, as Andrés came barrelling over, a little bleary from travelling but revving up to his standard tempo of volubility. He steered Howard down some stairs and across Thirtieth Street to his restaurant, Mercado Little Spain. It was still closed, so Andrés hammered on the door with the assurance of a man who owns the place. A staffer opened up, and Andrés guided his guest to a booth. “You want eggs?” he asked. Sitting down, he said, “It’s been a complicated seventy days.” Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Andrés—who is built like a bull, with a trim white beard and mirthful…

Spend an hour talking with the actor and director Austin Pendleton in the lounge above Studio 54, and three slightly alarming things happen. First, the diminutive eighty-two-year-old, in the manner of a sleepy hedgehog, will gradually slouch down into the banquette, so that his head ends up where his shoulders once were. This will cause what Pendleton calls his “very excitable hair” to pouf up vertiginously. Finally, an extension cord under the table will somehow get wrapped around his ankles. Pendleton is currently performing in a play at the theatre downstairs: Steppenwolf’s production of Tracy Letts’s dark comedy “The Minutes,” which is a parody of a Midwestern city-council meeting that descends into bloody political chaos. Pendleton plays a querulous council member named Mr. Oldfield. “It’s almost uncomfortable how readily I’m…

My kingdom for a torta, a style of Mexican sandwich I’ve long believed deserves broader adulation—puffy roll, quesillo (Oaxacan string cheese), avocado, fresh chili, onion, refried beans, and a mainevent ingredient, such as milanesa de pollo (fried chicken cutlet), carnitas, or even chilaquiles with a fried egg, for a breakfast of champions. There are plenty of tortas to be found in New York City, but they’re rarely afforded the spotlight. Is it possible that their moment is nigh, thanks to Tony Ortiz, the Brooklyn-based chef behind Chile Con Miel, a self-described “online platform and brand that explores ancestral Mexican food practices through a queer lens”? Last month, two of Ortiz’s Super Tortas were added to the roster at Hungry House, a platform that explores the possibilities of takeout and delivery.…

Security (no surprise) is tight at 1 World Trade Center. “It’s a lot easier to get into the White House than it is to get in here!” Mike Bolt said the other day. Bolt, in a blazer and black pants, hair styled in a boyish coiffure, was escorting an A-list celebrity through the tower’s subterranean corridors. The entourage included a colleague of Bolt’s and the celebrity’s two hosts, who worked for a magazine upstairs. They were stopped by a pair of security guards. “This,” one host said, pausing for effect and gesturing toward a trunk on wheels, “is the Stanley Cup.” Guard No. 1: “Uh-oh.” Guard No. 2: “Whoa, pretty cool.” X-rays, metal detector, K-9 sniff-up: the trunk, plastered with airline stickers, got through with aplomb. Bolt’s blazer bore a…

There has always been something irresistible about advice in mathematical form. When, in the Book of Genesis, Joseph was plucked from prison to interpret the dreams of the Pharaoh, he offered some Biblical budgeting: To survive the seven years of famine that will come after seven years of abundance, the Egyptians must save exactly a fifth of their harvest. Sun Tzu’s military counsel in “The Art of War” depends on ratios: “It is the rule in war, if our forces are ten to the enemy’s one, to surround him; if five to one, to attack him; if twice as numerous, to divide our army into two.” Alexander Hamilton, arguing for a national bank in 1790, presented the appeal of fractional-reserve banking in quantifiable terms. “It is a well-established fact, that…

ACROSS 1 Assigns roles for 6 Co-chair of the 2021 Met Gala, along with Gorman, Eilish, and Osaka 14 Name that sounds like its second and third letters 15 Greeting on the first day of Tishri 16 Electronic-music pioneer Suzanne 17 Foundation for Black poets whose logo depicts a dog breaking loose from a chain 18 Does a pastoral task 19 “Can I go now?” 20 Otherwise 21 NBC show whose forty-seventh season began in 2021 22 Compacts 26 STEM student’s homework assignment, for short 30 Matron Mama Morton, in “Chicago” 32 Genesis figure known as Hawa in Arabic 33 “Love on the Brain” singer, to fans 34 Came to 36 Furniture-maker, e.g. 38 H.V.A.C. tube 39 Right turn from este 41 Unlikely to self-promote 42 Drink that might be…

“Every American will see where every senator stands,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, said last week, in calling for a vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act. The bill would have banned nearly all restrictions on abortion, making it the most permissive abortion bill ever to be considered in Congress. There was no chance that it would pass. In September, it passed only narrowly in the House, and along party lines. (No Republican voted for it, and only one Democrat, Representative Henry Cuellar, of Texas, voted against it.) And on Wednesday, as expected, it failed in the Senate, 49-51, short not only of a simple majority but, more important, of the super-majority of sixty votes required to overcome the inevitable filibuster. Why hold the Senate vote? The roll call…

In 2019, the octogenarian artist, poet, and educator Yvonne Pickering Carter—who once showed alongside Romare Bearden, Alma Thomas, Martin Puryear, and William T. Williams—was living alone in a big house on Wadmalaw Island, in South Carolina, which her father built. She had a ride-on lawnmower for cruising between the massive azaleas he’d planted. It had been Carter’s home for twenty years, but her daughter, Cornelia Carter Sykes, noticed that her mother was forgetting to take her medication, and so moved Carter closer to her, in Washington, D.C. Some aesthetically discerning movers tipped off Joanna White, a Charleston gallerist, who offered to show Carter’s work. Meanwhile, Selena Parnon, at the Hunter Dunbar Projects gallery, in Chelsea, came across Carter’s name in a book, which led her to White’s Facebook page,…

In this oversharing, overshared age, the psychotherapist’s consulting room may be one of the last purely private sanctums left. Sessions happen behind firmly closed doors, the sound of patients’ voices masked by the whirr of white-noise machines. The promise of confidentiality is sacred. What happens in treatment is meant to stay there. A few years ago, though, the documentary filmmakers Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg decided that it might be worth trying to peek under the Freudian slip. Kriegman and Steinberg both grew up in upper-middle-class Jewish families on the East Coast, a milieu that does not so much condone therapy as consider it a part of functional adult life, as routine as filing your taxes or brushing your teeth. Steinberg’s father-in-law is a therapist, as are both of Kriegman’s…

At 2:30 A.M., on January 10th, Paolo Pellegrin, the Italian photographer and winner of ten World Press Photo awards, was loading his gear into the back of a Toyota truck on the edge of the Namib Desert. The sky was a void except for millions of stars. With the aid of a headlamp, Pellegrin fumbled through his bag. He pulled out a small plastic vial of medicine, broke off the top, and put a drop in each eye. “I almost never forget this,” he told me. There are days when he takes no pictures, but there are no days when he can afford to miss a dose. Bag zipped, trunk closed, Pellegrin climbed into the passenger seat and gently shut his door. The driver, a guide named Anthony, shifted the…