Innholdsfortegnelse for June 20, 2022 i The New Yorker

Emily Nussbaum (“Made for Television,” p. 40), a staff writer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. She published “I Like to Watch” in 2019 and is at work on a book about early reality television. Henri Cole (Poem, p. 57) is the author of numerous poetry collections, including “Blizzard” and “Gravity and Center,” a forthcoming volume of his selected sonnets. Sheelah Kolhatkar (“The Perils of Pornhub,” p. 30), a staff writer, published “Black Edge” in 2017. Alex Ross (Musical Events, p. 70) became The New Yorker’s music critic in 1996. His latest book is “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.” Elizabeth Colomba (Cover) is a painter. Her historical graphic novel, “Queenie: Godmother of Harlem,” written with Aurélie Levy, will be out in January. Fabrice Robinet (The…

The compact East Village restaurant Nudibranch is named for the soft-bodied gastropods, a category of sea slugs, that Jeff Kim, a chef and co-founder, spied when diving off the coast of Indonesia. To Kim, a former Momofuku busser who met his co-founders at kitchens around New York, nudibranchs—of which there are more than three thousand species—slink along the ocean floor with the same pluck that food establishments must harness when navigating the city’s brackish depths. “Sea slugs are colorful and diverse and beautiful,” Kim said. “That seemed symbolic when we started brainstorming about the kind of food we wanted to create.” Nudibranchs can also be strange and are sometimes required to adapt in odd situations. When it comes to devising dishes for a post-pandemic(ish) prix-fixe menu in a time when…

Moving to France—the world’s most popular tourist destination—is a trope. From Hemingway to R. Crumb, the list of joie-de-vivre-seeking expats who’ve called the country home is long. Yet so many French citizens choose to live abroad that their government has created parliamentary seats to represent them in the National Assembly. Since 2012, eleven such M.P.s have been voted in for five-year terms by their fellowémigrés, from districts as vast as Northern Europe and Latin America. Emmanuel Itier, a Frenchman and a longtime Californian, was one of a dozen candidates running this month to represent his countrymen who reside in the United States and Canada—two hundred and forty thousand voters. “We can’t knock on every door,” Itier, who is fifty-five, said the other day, as he waited for a Lyft…

Last summer, shortly after a date to Six Flags Over Texas, a thirteen-year-old girl in Dallas was falling in love for the first time. Her father could see it in the pencil drawings she made before bed. Instead of the usual, precise studies of koi fish and wildflowers, she’d sketched herself holding the hand of a boy in a Yankees cap, and enclosed the image in a pink-and-red heart. In the fall, the girl’s father permitted her to meet the boy, a tenth grader, after school one day a week. This spring, when he learned that his daughter was pregnant, he concluded that one day a week had been too many. Within a day, his daughter, whom I’ll call Laura, came around to the idea that getting an abortion, soon,…

One night in 2017, a fifteen-year-old girl named Rachel received a WhatsApp message from a number she didn’t recognize. Rachel lived with her mother, stepfather, and siblings in a midsize town in the United Kingdom. She had just returned home from a party and was in her bedroom. “I had a really unstable home life, and I didn’t have good support around me,” Rachel told me recently, while sitting on her bed in a fluffy white bathrobe. “I was a complete mess, I didn’t trust anyone, I was in complete self-destruct mode.” The man who sent the text forwarded a nude photograph of her, the source of which she couldn’t figure out. Then he sent a link to her mother’s Facebook account and the names of other family members and…

“Man, do I have stories to tell,” James Patterson writes in his new autobiography, “James (Little, Brown). The best-selling author does serve up stories, lots of them; the book is a grab bag of anecdotes, many of which have the tone and the import of a humorous icebreaker in a Rotary Club speech. There was the time that Patterson and a fellow altar boy—Patterson grew up in a devoutly Catholic family—almost got caught with a stash of unconsecrated Communion hosts that his friend had squirrelled away for post-Mass snacking. Or the time that, as a junior in college, he went to a Broadway production of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” and the woman seated next to him began stroking his leg, distracting him from the performance. Or the time he…

Looking back at the events that led up to the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it’s hard to settle on the moment of greatest danger for the republic. A contender, as Liz Cheney, the vice-chair of the House Select Committee investigating January 6th, made clear in the committee’s prime-time hearing last Thursday, was a standoff in which Donald Trump came close to firing his acting Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen. The plan was to replace Rosen with a Department of Justice official named Jeffrey Clark, who was ready to send officials in six of the states Joe Biden had won a letter saying that the D.O.J. had uncovered voting irregularities, and that their legislatures might want to reassign their states’ electors. “This letter is a lie,” Cheney said.…

The recent housing market has brought about ruinous price increases, a bidding war over a fifth-floor walkup studio with no oven, and enough of a civic exodus for the Post to declaim, earlier this month, “LISTEN UP, NEW YORK—FLORIDA SUCKS, AND YOU’LL ALL BE BACK IN FIVE YEARS.” But that doesn’t mean deals can’t be had. Take a unit that just went on the market. It’s a newly built architect-designed twelve-bedroom in shall we say Crown Heights, with finishes by a master carpenter and three-hundred-and-sixty-degree views of Prospect Park. There are a few cons, including an absence of doors, which means the occasional no-goodnick snatching up your kids. It’s not a walkup, per se (no stairs), but there’s also no elevator; you’ll need alternative means of safe egress or else…

One day last fall, as Robert and Michelle King were being driven from Manhattan to Connecticut, to film “Evil,” their irreverent spiritual-horror series on CBS, they described the day they accidentally got engaged. “Oh, this story really makes me sound like a Catholic asshole,” Robert, who is sixty-two, said, looking at once amused and chagrined. At the time, in 1987, the couple had been dating for four years. Robert was a devout Catholic, the middle child of seven in a tight-knit Italian-Irish family; Michelle was a secular Jew, the only child of Holocaust survivors. Because Robert was set on a Church wedding, they’d scheduled an “informational” meeting with his parish priest, planning to have a tentative discussion about whether that was even possible. Instead, when Robert asked if they could…

Sometime around 2004, a fifteen-year-old singer known as Hailey Faith booked her first paying gig: a performance at Melsha’s Tap, a wood-panelled bar in the tiny town of Swisher, Iowa, which was filled, for the occasion, with supportive relatives and friends, nearly all of whom were well acquainted with both the singer and the songs she sang—nineties hits like “That’s What I Like About You,” by Trisha Yearwood, and “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” by Toby Keith. Back then, Hailey’s plan was pretty straightforward: graduate from high school, move to Nashville, become a country-music star. She is thirty-two now, having reclaimed her given last name and executed her plan: she is known—not just to her home-town supporters but also to a growing number of listeners—as Hailey Whitters, one of the most…

From the window of his bedroom, in the house in Canarsie, Brooklyn, where he lives with his corrections-officer dad, his middle-school-teacher mom, and two siblings, Gerard Renodo has what he calls a “perfect” view of the Manhattan skyline. “At night they’re really bright,” he said the other day, of the sparkling skyscrapers eight miles away, which he used to fashion out of Legos. His favorite is Herzog & de Meuron’s “Jenga Tower,” at 56 Leonard, which took shape during Renodo’s childhood (he is seventeen). “I like buildings with personality,” he said. That view is part of what inspired him to want to be an architect, and the reason he chose, for high school, the Urban Assembly School of Design and Construction, in Hell’s Kitchen, where he is now a junior…

Kevin Morby, the Kansas City rock musician, was transfixed by the elevator at Fotografiska, a high-toned photography museum in Manhattan. “What are these called?” he asked, pointing to several velvet ottomans in the spacious cab. He sat on one. “This is an awesome elevator.” He was about to set off on a world tour and was in town to play a few songs from his new album, “This Is a Photograph,” at a reception for his first photography installation, at the Ace Hotel. Morby is thirty-four, with the exuberance and the golden mane of a cocker spaniel. He wore a baseball cap and a shirt patterned with paint splashes. Ascending in the elevator, he mused, “But where does it all lead, you know? The time, and your dreams. Eventually your…

In 2004, when the French filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade released “The Staircase,” his documentary series, the title referred to a crime scene. The documentary followed the arrest, trial, and release of Michael Peterson, a novelist and a wannabe politician, after his second wife, Kathleen, was found bloodied and crumpled at the bottom of a staircase in the couple’s home, in Durham, North Carolina, in 2001. Antonio Campos, who adapted the original documentary as a scripted series for HBO, treats the staircase as a metaphor. His version, a baroque drama that reimagines not only the tragedy of the Peterson family but also the filming of de Lestrade’s documentary, depicts the transfigurative process by which facts are stacked and elevated to narrative. The resulting staircase is Escherian. De Lestrade’s documentary series, an…

ACROSS 1 Split a post?10 Discharges15 San Antonio stadium that hosts the All-American Bowl16 Drug with a palindromic name17 Show of affection?18 Sporting goods slangily known as biscuits19 Pencil in a makeup bag20 Came back in21 They may be strung using a mānai22 Miser’s accumulation23 Opposite, with “from”26 Dishes with a flat, crunchy base28 What alarms may prevent29 Person who helps you make an entrance?30 “A Shropshire ___” (A. E. Housman poetry collection)31 Tall and slim32 Dude33 Sneaky stratagems36 First ___ (seminal Shakespeare anthology)38 Went back and forth39 Muscle developed by preacher curls40 Constructions made with blocks41 First character shown in the opening credits of “The Simpsons”42 Zeroes out43 Goodwill donations, often47 Old enough to drink, say48 It’s played with two drums49 Green-energy option50 “Until next time!”51 Skating jumps with…