Innholdsfortegnelse for September 19, 2022 i The New Yorker

In the summer of 2021, Sean Sherman, a forty-eight-year-old Oglala Lakota chef, opened a restaurant called Owamni, in Minneapolis. Nearly overnight, it became the most prominent example of Indigenous American cuisine in the United States. Every dish is made without wheat flour, dairy, cane sugar, black pepper, or any other ingredient introduced to this continent after Europeans arrived. Sherman describes the food as “decolonized”; his business partner and Owamni’s co-owner, Dana Thompson, calls it “ironically foreign.” In June, the James Beard Foundation named Owamni the best new restaurant in the United States. One evening in May, I met Sherman outside Owamni, which is situated in a park on the Mississippi River. Across the street, water plummeted fifty feet down St. Anthony Falls. The area was once the site of a…

Tongues in duskare bats but I tryto rememberlarks. Bushes are taken away and replaced by sounds & circuits ofmind where those sounds getlost—pavilions,mazes—so clean—crumbs all gone now—also visits toanyone oranythinggone—though we still feel wecan hear themstaccato frequenciesbefore they finally enter us for good. Then it is night. What do we know now.The wind comes up.Grief is a formwhich can shape this if you want a shape.But you can also sit herea long timewithout ever again needing a shape. Itis not easy. Icannot say I knowhow it’s done. But it’s done. Wait & itwill be completelydone. And thenthere’s no more cost & you fall neither down northru. Then—that’sit. Breathe the dry airin my heart tells me— don’t make the mistake.Breathe. Yesthe drought is everywhere out therebut in the night the stems…

Pity the plight of the gay white man. Not as notorious as his heterosexual counterpart, more socially privileged than his queer peers, he has been drained of popular sympathy by virtue of his cultural success. Take the recent film “Fire Island,” Joel Kim Booster’s adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice”: while the Bennet sisters are transformed into a gaggle of gay friends of color (mostly), the role of the villainous Mr. Wickham is given to Dex, a white seducer who deploys his Tom of Finland physique and sterling Instagram politics to prey upon his dazzled prospects. But a gay white guy as a marginalized hero, an underdog whose private tragedies we mourn? That’s a harder sell. Or so Arthur Less, the protagonist of “Less,” Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-winning 2017 novel, is…

I KNOW THE FEELING Nikhil Krishnan’s piece about the universality of emotions is a precise guide to the question of whether emotions are the product of nature or of nurture (Books, August 8th). As a psychoanalyst in the U.S. who grew up speaking Kannada, a South Indian language native to some forty-five million people, I am persuaded by Krishnan’s approach to this topic. Primal emotions are not easily dislodged by the past few thousand years of cultural trends and geopolitics. Krishnan’s comparison of languages captures humans’ unending quest to voice the unspeakable, to build bridges with one another, and to sustain authenticity whenever possible—be it through phrases or a single word. I find it heartening that we have more complex feelings in common than our languages might initially indicate. Dwarakanath…

One morning, Fisher discovered that something had been done to the water. For many years, there had been people who said that something was different about the water, but no one had really believed them. Their claims were seen as just the latest wild rumors emerging from the confused state of the country. Slowly, the city had been sinking. Its shores were overrun by mice. The foundations of churches were crowded with rats. They could be seen emerging from the graves in broad daylight. Towers had fallen. The streets were potholed and broken. Buses were parked at roadsides. Some of them had been flipped on their sides, and many of them were burnt-out shells. During the previous few days, the voices on the radio had been fading away. A sense…

In Elizabeth Strout’s “Lucy by the Sea” (Random House), the fourth of her novels concerning a writer named Lucy Barton, the title character meets a man who tells her that he loved her memoir. His wife read the book, too, and thought it was “about mother-daughter stuff,” but he disagrees. “Maybe if you didn’t come from—well, from poverty,” he explains, “your mind just goes over it, and you think it’s about mothers and daughters, which it is, but it’s really, or it was to me, about trying to cross class lines in this country.” Lucy, who will soon consider this man her closest friend in Maine, where she has gone to ride out the pandemic, feels surpassingly gratified to hear this. “Thank you,” she replies, “for getting what that…

Grief is a magnet for metaphor. Grief is—let’s fill in the blank—a maze you can’t exit. It’s the monster within that maze, feeding on your flesh. It’s a ghost, haunting the recesses of your mind. It’s a disease that inflames and enervates. It’s an oil spill, seeping into the spirit’s fragile ecology. It burns like fire and drowns like water. “The Furrows” (Hogarth), the fourth book and the second novel from Namwali Serpell, batters against the fixities of language like a moth at a windowpane. “I don’t want to tell you what happened,” the novel opens. “I want to tell you how it felt.” The narrator is Cassandra, or Cee, who recounts the story of how, when she was twelve, her seven-year-old brother, Wayne, disappeared beneath the ocean’s waves, “the…

The last time I saw David Bowie—in many ways, the ultimate rock star for my generation—who died in 2016, I was cheating on him with another pop artist. We were on a rooftop in Williamsburg. Journalists, musicians, and the like had gathered on that late-spring evening in 2006 to watch TV on the Radio perform a short set from their second album, the eclectic and catchy “Return to Cookie Mountain.” I had fallen hard for the group’s co-lead vocalist, Tunde Adebimpe, with his thick spectacles, sweet demeanor, and idiosyncratic voice. Sometimes Adebimpe sounds like a stoned drill sergeant, and at other times like a kid on the brink of adolescence. Like Bowie, he is what I call a character singer—someone who sings in the imagined voice of the character in…

SEPTEMBER 14 – 20, 2022 Standing twelve feet tall, Little Amal, a ten-year-old Syrian girl designed by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, has travelled through Europe, meeting with Pope Francis, Jude Law, and Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Inspired by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s play “The Jungle,” from 2017, about a migrant camp in Calais, France, the puppet has become a symbol of the struggles of refugees. She begins her New York walk this week—in search of her uncle Samir, from Aleppo—appearing at fifty-five events across the five boroughs. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. ART Bernd and Hilla Becher This German couple met as art students in Düsseldorf, in 1957. Two years later, they married and embarked on their lifelong project: an exhaustive, profoundly…

God gives you only one body, Deane Berg always said, so you’d better take care of the one you’ve got. A physician assistant at the veterans’ hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, she knew that spotting between periods wasn’t unusual for a forty-nine-year-old woman, but she went to the doctor anyway. Her two daughters had already lost their father to lung cancer, so Berg wanted to stick around. Just perimenopause, the doctor concluded after a cursory examination. Probably a blood clot, the nurse practitioner told her when a subsequent ultrasound showed something on an ovary. “It’s not going to be cancer,” the gynecological surgeon said before removing both ovaries on the day after Christmas in 2006. But, when Berg went for her follow-up, she read the words on the pathology…

You can’t have apples with everything,we say to our son over breakfast, but that’snot technically true. He knows this, I suspect,though his face reflects a certain understanding,as if he’s willing to negotiate. Before we moved here,I knew so little of apples, their untamed arrayof shapes & names: Ginger Gold, Honeycrisp, Crisp-in, Cortland, Cameo. Both Rome & Empire,somehow, which feels like it must be an inside jokebetween members of the committee. Fuji, Winesap. Ruby-Frost, which could be either a miracle or a plague,I can’t decide which. Paula Red is a Soviet secretagent. Envy is a deadly sin. Holstein & Ambrosiahave skin like a storm on a televised map. On the rideupstate to the orchard, I recount all the types to myselfin a private game. Select my prize in advance. Bags filledwith…

The Rabbit Hutch, by Tess Gunty (Knopf). Although there are actual rabbits in this ambitious novel, the “Hutch” of the title is the name given to an affordable-housing complex by its residents, in a post-industrial Indiana town. Gunty zooms in and out of the apartments, pushing the lives inside toward a forceful and violent climax; her central character is a gifted though troubled teen who grew up with foster families, has dropped out of high school, and calls herself Blandine. (Obsessed with female medieval mystics, she takes the name of a French martyr.) Despite offering a dissection of contemporary urban blight, the novel doesn’t let social concerns crowd out the individuality of its characters, and Blandine’s off-kilter brilliance is central to the achievement. Northern Paiutes of the Malheur, by David H. Wilson,…

In the course of a typical episode of “Drink Champs,” which can run two or three hours, a few things will happen. N.O.R.E., the bawdy Queens rapper turned podcaster, will slowly get drunk. He’ll tell his interviewees, most of them rappers and producers, how much he appreciates them—that he’s a fan as well as a peer—as he probes them about the minutiae of their careers. And his guests, who are often known for their steely, impassive façades, will break into an appreciative, almost goofy laugh. They will seem happy and free. “Drink Champs” is one of the most popular music podcasts around, despite the episodes’ exorbitant length. Its success flows partly from its A-list guests, who are drawn from hip-hop history: Grandmaster Caz, Lil Wayne, Snoop Dogg. N.O.R.E. gets…