Innholdsfortegnelse for September 5, 2022 i The New Yorker

In April of last year, America’s largest beer company, Molson Coors, acquired a minority stake in a Wilmington, North Carolina, brewery called TRU Colors. The brewery, which was started in 2017, had yet to produce any commercially available beer. But it is what people in the corporate world call mission-driven: its stated aim is to reduce gang violence by employing members of rival gangs. The C.E.O. of Molson Coors, Gavin Hattersley, suggested that the company’s investment was connected to soul-searching prompted by the nationwide protests for racial justice in 2020. “This partnership represents an opportunity to not only invest in what we believe will be a successful business, but also in a brand with a strong social justice presence that will have an immeasurable positive impact on hundreds of lives,”…

Trelawny, the narrator of one of the linked stories in “If I Survive You” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a ravishing début by Jonathan Escoffery, introduces himself by explaining, “I hunt elderly people. I wrangle them, force them into stiff, scratchy chairs before interrogating them.” Trelawny works in Miami, in a federally subsidized senior-housing complex, where he gathers intel on residents that would justify raising their rent. The job is rewarding: free parking, good vending machines. The downsides include anonymous notes, “penciled in lowercase letters,” that invite him to die. As the action begins, Trelawny’s most elusive quarry is an energetic old-timer named Carlos, who may or may not be concealing the fact that he works at Walgreens. “I’ve always liked Carlos,” Trelawny says. “Let me just put that out there.”…

OVERHEATED Dhruv Khullar, in his excellent piece on India’s heat wave, discusses sweating as one of the body’s essential cooling mechanisms (“Fahrenheit 121,” August 1st). It’s interesting to note, too, what happens to this mechanism in extremely humid and hot conditions. The vaporization of one gram of water requires five hundred and forty calories, and that energy must come from the body. This is the miracle of sweating. But, if the air is already saturated with water, the sweat cannot evaporate, and thus it ceases to cool the body. Skin temperature, which is normally around ninety-four degrees, also plays a part in the equation. Objects warmer than that will radiate heat to the skin; at high temperatures, this means that the skin will be receiving heat from the environment by…

“This phase of my life, I’m not interested in hanging out in a hammock,” Eddie Sporn said on a recent Friday evening, while eying the train tracks in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Sporn, who is seventy-two and a former hedge-fund executive, was dressed in a matching T-shirt and cap, both bearing the words “Berkshire Flyer,” the name of the new Amtrak service between Manhattan and Pittsfield, for which he serves as an “ambassador,” meeting and greeting and generally extolling the virtues of Berkshire life, sometimes while dispensing doughnuts. “He’s, like, the schmooze master,” Sporn’s wife, Dee Dee Acquisto, said. “None of my friends in the city want me, because all I do is talk about trains,” Sporn said. As a boy, in the Bronx, Sporn used to pass his weekdays standing at…

I interviewed my Great-Grandfather I Simon because he is the oldest person in my family who is still alive. He was born in a country called America, on Earth. He said he used to be a writer. I asked him if he wrote “Spider-Man” and he said no, he wrote other things that have all been lost. My Great-Grandfather was one of the only men to escape from Earth. The rest of the people who got seats on the Escape Pod were women and children. My Great-Grandfather says they let him on because “they needed one man to row the spaceship.” I’m not sure what he means, because there are no oars on a spaceship, but that is what My Great-Grandfather told me how scary it was when Earth became…

1. WON’T STOP What an unusual winter, to last till fall,such a bad water this year, so full of elementsand hardly any specials. I imagine the temperature had a hand in it,this new kind of hot we’re having, like the cloudspressed OFF on all the buttons and seeped themselves away asocially.Early retirement in dapplement—all the branchessigned off. Leaves left; they fell well before fall. The changing of the seasons went viraland now we have Sunter, Sprummer, Wing, and Wall. 2. CAN’T STOP TOO HOT One foot in flip-flop, the other snow boot.One hatchling learns to conserve energy (someone has to)detaching its wings, hitching a ride with a stressed-out vole. Flying’s not fuelefficient. A snake sheds its skin and crawlsinto the shell with a turtle. They make room. For my part,…

“Only the anachronism has a chance to outlast the epoch,” the Austrian author Franz Werfel wrote, in the early nineteen-forties. At a time of dizzying cultural change, Werfel saw a hidden advantage in the art work that lags behind, its gaze averted to the past. Like many good aphorisms, Werfel’s saying is a dubious assertion that points to a complex truth. Perceptions of aesthetic currency—what is modern, what is outmoded—grow blurry as time passes and priorities shift. Heroes of the vanguard lose lustre, background figures begin to shine. To be anachronistic is to be outside one’s time; it does not rule out belonging to the future. Sergei Rachmaninoff, the focus of this summer’s Bard Music Festival, at Bard College, in upstate New York, was almost universally considered a throwback during…

AUGUST 31 – SEPTEMBER 6, 2022 The American artist Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-82) was in her sixties—twice widowed, and retired from decades of domestic service—when she began to transform her Atlanta home into what she called her “playhouse,” filling it, inside and out, with her found-object assemblages, enchanting soft sculptures, and colorful drawings (including “Nellie in Her Garden,” from 1978-82, above). On Sept. 2, the exhibition “Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe” opens at the Brooklyn Museum. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. MUSIC Al Foster Quintet JAZZ Perhaps the best way to appreciate the drummer Al Foster’s chameleon-like adaptability is to revisit his recordings with Miles Davis during Davis’s jazz-funk-fusion period, then bask in the bebop polish Foster bestowed on Sonny…

Some baby boomers were permanently shaped by their participation in the countercultural protests and the antiwar activism of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Others were shaped by their aversion to those movements. Justice Samuel Alito belongs to the latter category. For many years, he lacked the power to do much about that profound distaste, and in any case he had a reputation for keeping his head down. When President George W. Bush nominated Alito to the Supreme Court, in 2005, many journalists portrayed him as a conservative but not an ideologue. The Times noted that legal scholars characterized his jurisprudence as “cautious” and “respectful of precedent.” Self-described liberals who’d known him—as an undergraduate at Princeton, as a law student at Yale, or in some later professional capacity—sketched portraits of a quiet,…

When I became a father, I began to worry not only that I would die and not be able to care for my daughter but that I would die in an embarrassing way, that my death would be an abiding embarrassment for Astra—that in some future world, assuming there is a future, she will be on a date with someone, hard as that is for me to imagine, and her date will ask, “What does your father do?,” and she will say, “He died when I was little,” and her date will respond, “I’m sorry,” hesitate, and then ask, in a bid for intimacy, how I died, and Astra will feel ashamed, will look down into her blue wine, there will be blue wine in the future, and say, “He…

Memoirs, by Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The highlight of this collection of autobiographical prose is an account, almost all of it previously unpublished, of Lowell’s early life, up to the age of thirteen. It was mostly written between 1954 and 1957, in an attempt to “get well,” and further newly published material recounts the backstory: Lowell was hospitalized after a manic episode precipitated by his mother’s death, an event that left him “tireless, madly sanguine, menaced and menacing.” The episodes are propelled less by the characters, who will be familiar to readers of “Life Studies,” than they are by the poet’s images and honesty. A schoolmaster is described as “shimmering in the sunlight and chilling us,” and Lowell writes that he hopes therapy will teach him “not to…