Innholdsfortegnelse for August 8, 2022 i The New Yorker

Tad Friend (“The Hard Sell,” p. 30) has been a staff writer since 1998. His memoir about his search for his father, “In the Early Times: A Life Reframed,” came out in May. Joy Harjo (Poem, p. 36) served three terms as the United States Poet Laureate. Her latest book is the memoir “Poet Warrior.” Calvin Tomkins (“Becoming Modern,” p. 16), a staff writer, published “The Lives of Artists,” a six-volume collection of his profiles, in 2019. Zoë Heller (Books, p. 67) has written the novels “Notes on a Scandal,” “The Believers,” and “Everything You Know.” R. Kikuo Johnson (Cover) teaches cartooning at the Rhode Island School of Design. His graphic novella “No One Else” won the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Alexandra Schwartz (The Theatre, p. 72), a…

“Surface” is a fitting title for this Apple TV+ drama, a psychological thriller that’s as slick and polished as a new MacBook. The eight-episode show, from the creator Veronica West, follows a wealthy woman named Sophie (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who wakes up every morning in a ritzy San Francisco house with a beautiful marble kitchen and a scruffy husband ready and waiting with a cup of coffee. The problem is, she doesn’t quite understand how she got there. Having survived a suicide attempt—in which she flung herself off the bow of a moving boat into the Pacific—Sophie has lost her memory, including the reason she wanted to kill herself. She tries to piece her life back together with the help of a friend and a therapist—and a few very hunky love…

Last week, six Starbucks locations in Los Angeles closed forever, because of what the company calls “a high volume of challenging incidents.” “It’s a whole thing every day,” one barista said. He went on, “People get violent with us. People steal stuff. It’s very aggressive.” “They spit on us,” another said. A common concern among baristas is having drinks thrown at them. “Better iced tea than hot tea—look on the bright side,” Ray Indolos, who spends several days each week sitting and drawing in various Starbucks around Los Angeles, said. “I’m super bummed out. Some of my favorite Starbucks are the ones closing.” At the location in the Little Tokyo section of downtown, Indolos sat at a table with two fountain pens, ink brushes, and a sketch pad spread out…

It has been a vintage year for vintage musicians. Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson both turned eighty in June, and both have been touring. Please give it up as well for Charles Lloyd, the eighty-four-year-old saxophonist who not only toured Europe this summer but is also releasing three new albums, each recorded with a different trio—“Trio of Trios.” Lloyd was recently in town, and on a steamy Sunday night he played a soldout two-and-a-half-hour show, performing with one of his trios and also with a quintet. The venue was Sony Hall, in a Times Square basement space that was once home to the showgirls of Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, back when Lloyd was a kid in Memphis. He seemed to have the passing decades on his mind when, before his…

Before the war, one could have used the western suburbs of Kyiv to study the history and aspirations of modern Ukraine. Bucha, Irpin, and smaller towns and villages formed alongside a railroad constructed in the early twentieth century. During the Soviet period, Bucha, which had a glass factory that manufactured canning jars, became a minor industrial center. In neighboring Irpin, where century-old pines dominated the landscape, the Soviets built sanatoriums and a writers’ resort. Boris Pasternak wrote in a 1930 poem, “Irpin is the memory of people and summer, of freedom, of escape from oppression.” In this century, the suburbs became a site of bourgeois ambition. Entrepreneurs and high-ranking officials built houses with forest views and in-ground pools. Developers erected high-rises that appealed to young families who were priced out…

ACROSS 1 Exfoliating treatment10 Video-art pioneer ___ June Paik13 Go on14 Person who goes on and on, say15 Prepare for air travel, like some nervous fliers16 Gymnastics great Dominique17 Chopping tool18 Doesn’t share19 New Orleans sandwiches20 Mononymous author of “The Sex Chronicles: Shattering the Myth”21 Monarch’s representative22 Writes quickly23 Haudenosaunee Nationals’ sport, informally24 Glaring omission from a slate of nominations25 Country that celebrates Boun Bang Fai26 Bundles of hay28 Heavy bird29 Singer whose EP “Heaux Tales” topped many “Best Albums of 2021” lists32 “Back That ___ Up” (Juvenile hit)33 Poke fun at34 Blown away35 Alkaline cleaning solutions37 Prefix akin to mono-38 Train at a boxing gym39 Unpaid debts41 Commotion42 Papel ___ (Mexican folk art with intricate cutouts)43 Unload emotions44 Major chemical component of weed, for short47 The lesser of two…

Do small children belong in restaurants? On a recent Saturday, I decided to test the premise of a new place that seems to invite them in: Patti Ann’s Family Restaurant and Bakery, the latest Prospect Heights venture from the chef Greg Baxtrom (known for Olmsted and Maison Yaki, both nearby), complete with stroller parking. At 5 P.M., I unleashed my brood—son, three years old, and daughter, eleven months—on its spacious, cheerful dining room. A pair of stylish high chairs materialized immediately. Crayons and activity books were dropped with the menus. “Feel free to make a mess!” a host urged genially, as my son made a beeline for shelves displaying an enticing array of picture books and toys. Baxtrom, who grew up on a farm south of Chicago, named Patti Ann’s…

Animals have been upstaging their comedic scene partners for years—consider the San Diego Zoo lady’s incontinent horned toad on Johnny Carson, Hammer the Pitbull bowling a strike on Letterman, or Tracy Morgan yelling at a parrot on “Saturday Night Live.” (“That bird is a liar!”) The only problem—sometimes the animal steals the whole show. The other evening, the human comedians Charlie Sosnick (twenty-four, wearing a nose ring and a T-shirt advertising the Lemon Ice King of Corona) and Michael Kandel (twenty-nine, goatee, button-down) discussed this dilemma at Lucky Dog bar, in Williamsburg, before their monthly comedy show, “Petting Zoo,” which features a rotating lineup of comedians attempting to perform their sets while handling exotic animals they just met. So far, the menagerie has included boas, corn snakes, a blue-tongued skink,…

The latest spectacle to mark New York’s protracted season of Sondheim celebration is Lear deBessonet’s delectable revival of “Into the Woods” (at the St. James). The show was born in the spring as a lauded Encores! production at City Center and, like Milky-White, the cow raised from the grave in the first act, has been brought back to life on Broadway. If your heart is feeling wintry while your too too solid flesh melts in the oppressive heat, if you’ve been overtaken by midsummer malaise and end-times doldrums, if you can deal with the dropping of Broadway’s masking policy and are ready to brave the BA.5 sniffles, go see it. It’s a tonic. Sure, “Into the Woods” has a body count that’s nearly as high as “Hamlet”’s, its characters victimized…

The longest-maintained temperature readings of any location on earth are in the Midlands of England. A monthly tally began in 1659, and the daily record dates back to 1772. One can imagine mutton-chopped clerics and ruddy-faced retired colonels, in the centuries since, tromping out to take those readings; some days it was hot and some days it was cold, but, until last month, the highest daily mean ever measured there was 25.2 degrees Celsius, or about 77.4 degrees Fahrenheit, in August of 2020. Then, on July 19th, as an epic heat wave swept across the British Isles, the mark was reset at 28.1 Celsius, or 82.6 Fahrenheit. If that hadn’t happened, topping the previous high by a full 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit would have seemed statistically impossible. The fact that it…

Brian Stokes Mitchell, the Broadway baritone, was strolling through the Times Square offices of the Actors Fund the other day, discussing the nineteenth century. “Back then, ‘actor’ was a pejorative term used for anybody in show business, basically,” he said, describing the circumstances of the Fund’s founding, in 1882. “People refused to bury ‘actors’ in consecrated ground.” Initially, the charity provided funeral expenses for members of the theatrical profession. Today, it offers career counselling and health-care services to people in theatre, film, television, radio, music, dance, opera, and the circus. It also operates a senior home in New Jersey and a medical clinic, in partnership with Mount Sinai, in the same building as its offices. Mitchell, famous for his performances in “Ragtime,” “Man of La Mancha,” and “Kiss Me, Kate,”…

Calling all cute guys! Guess what? I’m ready to have a new man in my life! I’ve been on my own for a while now, but I feel totally ready for a relationship. And I guess it’s time, before I get stuck in my ways. What “ways”? I don’t have any “ways”! I’m easy! Like, if you hang a towel on the bathroom doorknob after you’ve taken a shower, or forget to close the kitchen cupboards, or screw on the top of the peanut-butter jar in an uneven way, I won’t be mad. Not too mad. But don’t do it. Will you be bringing a lot of random stuff with you when you move in? Clothes and shoes and whatnot? That’s fine! I have an extra bedroom closet for you!…

This is where I came in. A spectacular historical show of art and documentation, “New York: 1962-1964,” at the Jewish Museum, addresses the exact years of my tatterdemalion arrival, from the Midwest, as an ambitious poet, a jobber in journalism, and a tyro art nut. I gravitated through the time’s impecunious Lower East Side poetry scene into the booming though not yet oligarchic art world. Artists, writers, dealers, patrons, and assorted intellectuals, alert to momentous changes in the world at large, rubbed shoulders at parties that were a lot more stimulating than those attended by my second-generation New York School coterie. It was an era of season-to-season—at times almost monthly or weekly—advances in painting, sculpture, photography, dance, music, design, fashion, and such hybrid high jinks as “happenings.” The exhibition honors…