Innholdsfortegnelse for August 1, 2022 i The New Yorker

Luke Mogelson (“Everyone Is a Target,” p. 30) won a 2022 National Magazine Award and the inaugural Schanberg Prize for his coverage of the Capitol insurrection. His book “The Storm Is Here” will be out in September. Clare Sestanovich (Fiction, p. 54) is the author of “Objects of Desire.” She was named a “5 Under 35” honoree by the National Book Foundation in 2022. Dhruv Khullar (“Fahrenheit 121,” p. 24), a contributing writer at The New Yorker, is a practicing physician and an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. Rae Armantrout (Poem, p. 50) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Her latest collection is “Finalists.” Vinson Cunningham (The Theatre, p. 70), a theatre critic for the magazine, will publish his début novel next year. Casey Cep (A Critic at Large,…

“The Resort,” a splashy new streaming offering from Peacock and the creator Andy Siara (“Palm Springs”), feels like a slushy beach drink made in a blender using parts of other recent shows: take a dash of “White Lotus” (for the tropical hotel setting), add a shake of “Nine Perfect Strangers” (for the air of campy, unhinged mystery among the palm trees), and top it off with the likes of “The Flight Attendant” or “The Afterparty” (for their good old-fashioned, soapy murder mysteries). But just because this show is a piña colada of frothy ideas doesn’t mean it isn’t satisfying. The charm-oozing stars Cristin Milioti and William Jackson Harper play a couple on vacation in Mexico who become unwittingly embroiled in solving a crime that took place there years before. The cast…

A few weeks ago, the children’s-book A author Billy Baldwin was enjoying an afternoon ride in his outrigger canoe, beyond a floating dock in Sag Harbor, when he noticed something that caused him to reach down and release the leash around his ankle, the better for abandoning ship in a panic. A seaplane was racing in his direction, its pontoons pointed at him like torpedoes. Lucky for Baldwin, the plane’s pilot noticed him just in time to swerve. Crisis averted; harbormaster notified. That was before the recent heat wave, and the Covid resurgence, and with them the desperate exodus to the beach. But how do you get there from here (wherever you may be)? Traffc on the L.I.E. has got so bad, or so one hears, that surgeons report a…

The Bhalswa landfill, on the outskirts of Delhi, is an apocalyptic place. A gray mountain of dense, decaying trash rises seventeen stories, stretching over some fifty acres. Broken glass and plastic containers stand in for grass and stones, and plastic bags dangle from spindly trees that grow in the filth. Fifteen miles from the seat of the Indian government, cows rummage for fruit peels and pigs wallow in stagnant water. Thousands of people who live in slums near the mountain’s base work as waste pickers, collecting, sorting, and selling the garbage created by around half of Delhi’s residents. This March was the hottest on record in India. The same was true for April. On the afternoon of April 26th, Bhalswa caught fire. Dark, toxic fumes spewed into the air, and…

On most evenings this past spring, the man who lives across the street sat at his small desk, turned on the lamp, and began to write as the light faded. The white curtains in his room were seldom drawn. From where I sat, I had a clear view of him, and he, were he to look up from his writing, would have had a clear view of a house across the street, where a woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion was seated by a window, watching him write. At the moment he glanced up from his page, the woman supposed him to be contemplating the look, or perhaps the sound, of the sentence he had just written. The sentence was this: “Since then I have tried to…

For many years, Rasika Wetthasinghe, the co-owner of Queens Lanka, an extraordinary new restaurant and grocery store in Jamaica, Queens, worked as a chef for the Hilton hotel in his native Colombo, Sri Lanka. Shuttling between eight kitchens, he prepared menus that spanned the globe—Italian, Chinese, Sri Lankan. In the decade that preceded COVID, Sri Lanka’s post-civil-war economy showed promise, thanks largely to a newly vibrant tourism industry, buoyed by loans from wealthier countries—loans on which the mismanaged government eventually defaulted. Last month, after mass protests, the President fled the country and resigned by e-mail, abandoning his constituents in the face of mounting inflation, and food and fuel shortages. Wetthasinghe had already left: in 2013, he moved to Staten Island, home to thousands of Sri Lankan immigrants, where he got…

In the eighties, Houshang Touzie was working at a parking lot on West Forty-fourth Street, a new immigrant from Iran. “I don’t want to say I escaped, because I took a plane,” he said recently. “But everybody was escaping.” A few years before Touzie left, a director in Iran had seen him, then sixteen, playing pingpong at a youth center and asked, “Would you like to do theatre?” But the arts, along with Touzie’s burgeoning stage career, were wiped out by the Iranian Revolution. “We had a beautiful country under Shah,” he said. “Shah was called a dictator, but he was a pussycat. My father was more dictator than Shah, honest to God. Then religious hard-liners came to power and everything was changed. Lots of killing. Lots of imprisonment. It…

In late March, Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, was in her office in city hall, preparing for Milwaukee’s mayoral election, when an F.B.I. agent called. The agent was investigating death threats that Woodall-Vogg had been receiving since deciding to permit the use of drop boxes during early voting for the upcoming election. Drop boxes had long been used for absentee ballots in some Wisconsin communities, but their use increased dramatically in 2020, owing to the coronavirus pandemic. After President Donald Trump’s narrow defeat in the state, the boxes became a focus of conspiracy theories claiming that the election was stolen from him. Woodall-Vogg, along with other municipal clerks and election officials, was at the center of those conspiracy theories. She played me a few…

People in Ukraine sometimes describe the intensity of shelling in simple auditory terms. A place can be “quiet” or “loud.” As the volume increases, so do the chaos, misery, death, and fear. You cannot experience such fatal noise without instinctively grasping its purpose, which is to brutalize psychically as much as physically—to demoralize and stupefy. Nowhere on earth is louder today than the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, where Russia has concentrated its forces and its firepower since April, after abandoning its disastrous bid to capture Kyiv. Russian officials, far from being humbled by that ordeal, have insisted on their continued determination not only to seize Ukrainian land and resources but also to punish and terrorize Ukrainians and their supporters. “I hate them,” Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s…

A chimp with blood on its hands. A man with a nickel lodged inside his brain. A horse with a key stuck in its flank. These are the unusual sights with which the new Jordan Peele movie, “Nope,” gets under way. All three details are upsetting, and none of them, as yet, can be explained. Peele just deals them out for us, with speed and confidence, as if to demonstrate that the world around us, in case we had any doubt, is way out of whack. That chimp, for instance, is not in the wild but in a TV studio—brightly lit, with signs overhead that read “Applause.” Some abomination is afoot, in the happy human zoo. For five or ten minutes, I wondered whether the whole of the film might…

“I don’t want to say, ‘The election is over,’” Donald Trump said on January 7, 2021. He’d been given a script for a video statement on the events of the previous day, when, at his prompting, a mob had assaulted the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the electoral-vote tally. The video was meant to calm his supporters and to reassure the country that the election was, indeed, over. But, as indicated by outtakes from the filming which were shown last Thursday, at a hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6th, Trump wasn’t ready to send that message. All he was willing to say was that “Congress has certified the results”; it had done so at close to four o’clock that morning, in a building…

A few days after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, a handful of student activists from Barnard College and Columbia University logged on to a Zoom call. They were members and supporters of a group called the Reproductive Justice Collective, who were meeting for the first time with Marina Catallozzi, a professor of pediatrics at Columbia’s Irving Medical Center, and Barnard’s inaugural vice-president of health and wellness. The students wanted to push R.J.C.’s demand to make medication abortion available on campus. The procedure, which involves a combination of drugs, is approved by the F.D.A. for use within the first ten weeks of pregnancy, and will soon be available on all University of California campuses. The doctor was running late, and the mood was antsy. “I just had the worst allergy attack,…

But mice are not people, and we do not know yet if the molecular patterns hold true in us.—The Times, January 19, 2022. Of course, this was a mouse study and mice are not people.—The Times, September 9, 2020. Mice will never be people, of course, so we cannot say whether the results of this and any follow-up experiments would directly apply to us.—The Times, April 11, 2018. Mice do not, so far as we know, practice meditation.—The Times, May 18, 2017. We know that mice are mice and people are people, but an ambitious new study raises questions about this previously accepted dichotomy. Researchers at the University of Spokane observed healthy mice running on tiny treadmills, wearing tinier sneakers. In order to accumulate data on whether mice might, in…

O.K., I get it now, how the looseness and provisionality of the hot months lend themselves to an atmosphere of experimentation onstage. As the story goes, an ambitious Eugene O’Neill showed up one summer in Provincetown with a case full of plays, hoping to put his yawps up before an audience. Sky and sea and so much green make everything seem possible, I guess. Never having been a denizen of summer-stock theatre, I finally grasped its fleeting essence this July, thanks to a bracing confluence of artist and setting at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, in western Massachusetts, where I went to check out the scene. The drive east from the railroad station in Albany was all throbbing, congenial hills. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of rounded mountains going green to…

ACROSS 1 By hook or by crook8 Streaming platform that débuted Beyoncé’s “Lemonade”13 Foreshadow14 To a greater extent15 2019 Brad Pitt film whose title means “to the stars”16 Detective in a 2019 Ryan Reynolds film17 Serious threat18 Duncan who served as Secretary of Education under Barack Obama19 Oliver Twist, e.g.20 Plopped down21 Directly23 One of twenty-six on certain parts of Texas’s Katy Freeway24 Daffy Duck trademark26 Acknowledgment from the Academy, casually27 Fruity desserts28 Conflicted response to seeing a cursed meme31 ___ Sea (body of water that used to be roughly the size of West Virginia)32 Sport whose competitors toss salt into the ring before a match33 “Things were way better in my generation!”38 Cohesion39 “Pow!”40 Mobsters’ pistols42 Ecstasy, by another name43 Snap out of a reverie, say45 Ortiz of “Love,…