Innholdsfortegnelse for August 22, 2022 i The New Yorker

Adam Entous (“The Biden Inheritance,” p. 30), a staff writer, was a member of a team at the Washington Post that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2018. Nicola Twilley (“The Cold Rush,” p. 16), a frequent contributor to the magazine, co-hosts the podcast “Gastropod.” She is working on a book about refrigeration’s transformative power. José Antonio Rodríguez (Poem, p. 51) is a poet, a memoirist, and a translator. His latest book is “This American Autopsy.” Nicole Rifkin (Cover), a cartoonist and an illustrator, is based in Brooklyn. Alejandro Zambra (Fiction, p. 54) is the author of several books, including “My Documents” and “Chilean Poet.” His novel “Bonsai,” translated, from the Spanish, by Megan McDowell, was published in English this month. Rachel Syme (Books, p. 60), a staff…

Most conversational podcasts have a time-tested—if increasingly tired—formula: two or three hosts gab at length about a given subject, be it soccer, silent films, skin-care products, or snack foods. (Or, in the case of certain celebrity-led podcasts, the hosts just kibbitz with their famous friends.) If you are into a topic, no matter how obscure, the odds are good that there are podcasters out there chatting about it. Still, despite the glut of talky pods, it can be difficult to find one that has real verve. What elevates a show is an undeniable chemistry between the hosts, and “Celebrity Book Club with Steven & Lily” is dripping with good chemistry. The show’s subject matter—revisiting the memoirs of the rich and famous—is fertile terrain, but it’s the giddy, urbane, and…

Earlier this summer, Elizabeth Nelson and Timothy Bracy, the woman and husband who make up the core of the Paranoid Style—the twenty-seventh-best band “right now,” according to Spin, two years ago—returned to Nelson’s home town of Northport, Long Island, to visit her recently widowed mother. It wasn’t more than a day before Nelson and Bracy made it over to Gunther’s, the bar where Jack Kerouac, an adoptive Northporter, drank himself into blustering oblivion. (“He could be a barroom terror,” Peter Gunther, the late owner, once said. “He was always broke.”) “I’ve been here a hundred times,” Nelson said. Well, maybe a dozen. She and Bracy, with a guest from the city, claimed the front corner and got to work producing a row of empty pint glasses and Amstel Lights. “The…

Sixty-seven of the ninety-four Miss America pageants have been held in Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall. The limestone arena encloses enough space for a helicopter to fly around inside (and one did, in 1970, with Miss America Phyllis George in the passenger seat). Every pageant needs a soundtrack, but how do you fill such a vault with music? With the largest musical instrument in the world, a pipe organ built in 1932 by the Midmer-Losh company, of Merrick, Long Island. The Midmer-Losh, as it’s called, was designed by Emerson L. Richards, a New Jersey state senator and an organ fanatic. An impressive cathedral organ, such as the one at St. Patrick’s, might have seven thousand pipes; Richards gave his more than thirty-three thousand. An instrument of such scale is hard to…

When my father moved back to Taiwan, my family bought a pair of fax machines. In theory, this was so he could help me with my math homework. I was starting high school, in California, and everything, from what instrument I played to the well-roundedness of my transcript, suddenly seemed consequential. In seventh grade, I had tested just well enough to skip two years of math, and now I was paying for it. I had peaked too early. In fact, I was very bad at math. Like many immigrants who prized education, my parents had faith in the mastery of technical fields—math and science—where answers weren’t left to interpretation. You couldn’t discriminate against the right answer. Faxing was cheaper than long-distance calling, and involved far less pressure. The time…

The Palazzo Priuli Manfrin, in Venice, was bought four years ago by the artist Anish Kapoor. It was constructed in the sixteenth century for the aristocratic Priuli family, but it is thanks to the efforts of a later owner, Girolamo Manfrin, that the palazzo has its storied place in Venetian art history. Manfrin was an outsider from Dalmatia—born “in the midst of mud and shit,” as one detractor put it—who amassed a fortune in the tobacco trade. He bought the palazzo, which featured a ballroom with a thirty-foot-high frescoed ceiling, in the late seventeen-eighties. Manfrin wanted to decorate his new home with “pictures of the highest quality,” but, not being a connoisseur, he had advisers find him paintings by such masters as Mantegna, Giorgione, and Tiepolo. Manfrin boasted of acquiring…

When a friend heard, recently, that I was planning a trip to City Island, which is connected to the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx by a short bridge, he asked, “Are you going to Tony’s or to Johnny’s?” At the southern tip of City Island Avenue—the main thoroughfare, which runs the length of the narrow landmass, about a mile and a half—you’ll find two mid-century-era seafood restaurants, Johnny’s Reef and Tony’s Pier. With apologies to loyalists of either (Mike Bloomberg is a known Johnny’s guy), they’re nearly identical: both counter service, with a charmingly retro system of ordering that’s similar to the one at Katz’s Deli, featuring different stations (raw, steamed, broiled, fried, frozen tiki drinks), and both with ample outdoor picnic-table seating—beware of hungry gulls. Johnny’s and Tony’s…

A drop of water from a faucet in, say, Flushing—how’d it get there? There’s your pipe, water tower, service line, water main, water tunnel, holding reservoir (Yonkers), ultraviolet disinfecting station, monitoring reservoir (Valhalla), and hundred-and-six-year-old aqueduct snaking ninety-two miles, plunging way down under the Hudson and back up again, which delivers fresh mountain water from the Catskills that departed three or so days earlier from a third, bigger reservoir. But what of the reservoirs? How’d those get there? “When I first lived in Delaware County, there was a drought,” the writer Lucy Sante said the other day. “Somebody said, if you go to the Pepacton Reservoir, you’ll start seeing church steeples poke up.” Not true, it turned out. “They burned everything and even hauled away the ashes. The only thing…

ACROSS 1 Title holders?9 “You know what, sure”15 Remove reluctantly16 “All that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel,” in a 1950 fantasy novel17 J.F.K. people mover18 Weakens19 The Brady Bunch, e.g.21 Shivering fit23 Hoot24 Mount ___ (large active volcano on Kyushu)25 Center27 Vegan substitute for gelatin28 Not old, in Oldenburg29 Well enough31 Utter34 Mine extractions35 Palliative plant36 Approach39 Web platform that the feminist scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon called “a pimp,” in a Times opinion43 Itinerary abbr.44 Get46 More reliable47 Certain bioengineering product, briefly48 Shared something?49 Rough figs.50 1990 Judith Butler work subtitled “Feminism and the Subversion of Identity”55 Congenital56 Like Odette, but not Prince Siegfried, in “Swan Lake”59 Betrothed60 Minimalist composer Arvo Pärt, for one61 Like lemon bars vis-à-vis chocolate bars62 Cut a dashing figure…

In January, 2000, during the run-up to the New Hampshire primaries, Presidential candidates in the Granite State were confronted by a young man—a recent Dartmouth graduate—wearing a red cape, orange long johns, and yellow-painted galoshes. He called himself Captain Climate, and asked any candidate within shouting distance, “What’s your plan?” All the candidates ignored him, except one. That candidate was John McCain, then the senior United States senator from Arizona. McCain went on to win New Hampshire’s Republican primary and then to lose the nomination to George W. Bush. He had been troubled enough by the shouted question that he returned to Washington that spring and held a series of hearings on climate change. At the first hearing, he apologized for not having a plan to deal with the problem,…

Nowadays, meat is murder, plastic is poison, and manufacturing a cheap cotton T-shirt requires a two-year supply of drinking water and enough synthetic fertilizer to kill a blue whale. Corporations are destroying the environment, and anytime anyone buys almost anything it gets worse. Still, corporations are people, and people can change. Adidas now has mushroom-leather Stan Smiths, for instance. The other day, a gaggle of big brands, among them Nike, BMW, Ralph Lauren, and the Kering Group, which owns Gucci and Balenciaga, gathered in a renovated shipbuilding warehouse, in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, to learn about the latest ecofriendly doodahs. On display: algae inks, crustacean superglue, yarn derived from squid DNA. “Instead of making stuff from animals or petrochemicals, like fossil fuels, can we do it with biology? Can we design…

My name is Elon Musk, and I am the C.E.O. of Tesla and the father of approximately one per cent of the current population of Earth and a hundred per cent of the future population of Mars. As you know, the human body has not been substantially updated in nearly forty years. The new Tesla Body will revolutionize, streamline, and vastly modernize the human body as we know it. Let’s start with walking: it sucks. I will make all bodies self-walking. You will simply set a speed for your feet, and they will walk forward forever until your Body stops when it encounters a hard surface. I, of course, will outfit all buildings and walls in urban areas with cushioning. To reduce drownings, any ravine or body of water will…