Innholdsfortegnelse for November 21, 2022 i The New Yorker

Rebecca Mead (“Talk Therapy,” p. 46), a staff writer since 1997, most recently published “Home/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return.” Robert Moor (“Deadwood,” p. 24) is the author of “On Trails: An Exploration.” He is at work on a new book, “In Trees.” Jameson Fitzpatrick (Poem, p. 60) is the author of the poetry collection “Pricks in the Tapestry.” She teaches at New York University. Benjamin Wallace-Wells (Comment, p. 11) began contributing to the magazine in 2006 and has been a staff writer since 2015. Emily Flake (Sketchpad, p. 15), a New Yorker cartoonist, is the author of “Mama Tried” and, most recently, “That Was Awkward: The Art and Etiquette of the Awkward Hug.” Vinson Cunningham (The Theatre, p. 72), a theatre critic for the magazine, will publish his début…

“I’m looking for that old New York flavor that you don’t see anymore,” an anonymous narrator says in a YouTube clip entitled “Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop - Open 1929 and still going strong.” In shaky footage, filmed in 1991 at the Jewish-style lunch counter near the Flatiron Building, a couple of good-natured soda jerks indulge questions about their work between answering calls on a rotary phone and shovelling ice into plastic cups, dutifully maintaining a disappearing way of life. Thirty years later, the rotary phone needs a new ringer and the place is under new management, and yet: the prognosis for that old New York flavor is good. If Eisenberg’s never achieved the international acclaim of, say, Katz’s or the Carnegie Deli, it earned a cult following with its tuna melts…

Paul Banks and Daniel Kessler met in Paris twenty-six years ago, on an N.Y.U. summer-abroad program. Back in New York that fall, Kessler invited Banks to join a rock band he was starting, which they eventually named Interpol, and which became one of the biggest groups to emerge from the New York City scene in the early two-thousands. They’re still at it—a recording career longer than Elvis Presley’s. Banks is the lead singer. Kessler plays guitar. They write most of the material together. In “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of the era, Kessler says of Banks, who was just eighteen that summer in Paris, busking out by the Pompidou, “He took himself seriously, and other people took him seriously.” Kessler also remembers that Banks was always…

The other day, the keyboard player Kristian Bezuidenhout was standing onstage at Hertz Hall, on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in a state of slight panic. Around him were four instruments housed at the university’s music department, representing stages in keyboard development from the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth. On one side was a harpsichord, of the kind that Bach might have played. In the middle were two fortepianos—early-stage pianos with a light action and a crisp, characterful sound. Behind them was an 1854 grand piano, from the illustrious firm of Érard. Modern grands are well-tooled machines, fairly predictable in their behavior, even if virtuosos fuss over them and badger technicians with requests for adjustments. Older pianos, with their variegated mechanisms and idiosyncratic construction, are far more…

ACROSS 1 “The Jetsons” pooch 6 British company-name ending: Abbr. 9 Six Flags attraction 13 Athlete whose career is going downhill? 14 Manhattan neighborhood between Greenwich Village and Tribeca 15 Apt anagram of “vile” 16 Peninsula adjacent to the Suez Canal 17 Event for a biker gang? 19 Arrived dramatically 21 Grammy-winning rapper Lil ___ X 22 Cereal in a popular snack mix 23 Not bumpy 27 “That’s a ___!” (announcement at the end of a film shoot) 28 Root vegetable popular on Thanksgiving 31 Michael who played Alfred in “The Dark Knight” 32 Word before couture or cuisine 33 “Don’t Bring Me Down” band, familiarly 34 Like a trip with no out-of-pocket costs 37 U.S. 66, for one: Abbr. 38 Actor Ben of “Dear Evan Hansen” 39 Begin a…

Savvy sportswriters know that the dramas are often richer in the losing team’s locker room, but, no matter how crushing the defeat, the shortstop does not usually try to assault the second baseman. One cannot say the same about the post-midterm atmosphere among Republicans. Within hours of the G.O.P.’s dismal failure to produce a “red wave,” the knives were out for the Party’s presumed leader. “Republicans have followed Donald Trump of the side of a clif,” David Urban, one of the ex-President’s former advisers, told the Times. On Twitter, Jacqui Heinrich, a White House correspondent for Fox News, quoted a Republican source as saying, “If it wasn’t clear before it should be now. We have a Trump problem.” The specific gripe that these Republicans have with Trump is not of…

The artist Nan Goldin strode into the Met one recent Wednesday, when the museum was closed to the public. She beelined for the Temple of Dendur, in the sunlit expanse that, until last winter, was known as the Sackler Wing. “What’s the new name?” Goldin (red curls, black suit) asked, sounding battle-worn but amused. “Oh, there is no new name. The Ex-Sackler Room!” She eyed the sandstone temple, completed around 10 B.C.E. and awarded to the Met in 1967. “Talk about spoils of other societies, right?” she said. “I’m starting to realize that’s what all museums are—collections of the spoils of civilization. But I still love them.” The reason that the wing is temporarily nameless is Goldin, who is known for her louche countercultural photography. In 2014, she had wrist…

In the winter of 2002, a young American named Ryan Neil joined an unusual pilgrimage: he and several others flew to Tokyo, to begin a tour of Japan’s finest collections of bonsai trees. He was nineteen, with an athlete’s body and a sunny, symmetrical face. The next-youngest adult in the group was fifty-seven. Then, as now, rearing tiny trees in ornamental pots was not commonly considered a young man’s hobby. Neil had grown up in a small Colorado mountain town. For much of his youth, he was focussed on playing sports, especially basketball, which he approached with an almost clinical rigor: during high-school summer breaks, he’d wake up every day at five-thirty and attempt twelve hundred jump shots before going to the gym to lift weights. By his junior year,…

One morning in the fall of 1971, President Richard Nixon set out to fire J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the F.B.I., who had ruled over the agency like a potentate since 1924. The two men were longtime friends, united by their political affinities, including a bone-deep antipathy to the American left, Old and New, and a tendency todemonize their critics. Over the years, Nixon and his wife, Pat, had socialized often with Hoover and his companion, Clyde Tolson. They had even vacationed together in the fifties, at a seaside resort in La Jolla, California, owned by a pair of Texas oil tycoons who went out of their way to put their powerful guests at ease. After Nixon lost the 1960 Presidential election, to John F. Kennedy, Hoover was frankly…

The day before the midterms, in Washington, Jayme Chandler Franklin and Isabelle Redfield, the founders of the Conservateur, an online style magazine that pitches itself as a Gen-Z right-wing alternative to Vogue—think Lara Trump in a flowing magenta gown as a cover girl—met at a café a few blocks from the White House to discuss the election. Hopes were high, especially for Republican women. Marjorie Taylor Greene was a lock for reëlection in Georgia. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was on the verge of becoming the first female governor of Arkansas. Sanders was also a possible headliner for the Conservateur’s new #I’mWithHer campaign. “We’re taking back that I’m-with-her thing from Hillary,” Redfield said. They discussed other options: Karoline Leavitt, a Trump-backed House candidate in New Hampshire; Kari Lake, the Arizona gubernatorial contender;…

On Kinmen, an outlying island of Taiwan, the Chinese mainland looms so close that you can hear the construction cranes booming across the water. The island, about twelve miles from end to end, sits across the bay from the bustling mainland city of Xiamen. Whereas Xiamen is a place of gleaming high-rises, Kinmen is dotted with low-slung villages and patches of forest; it is famous for kaoliang, a sweet but fearsomely potent liquor distilled from sorghum. In the nineteen-forties and fifties, Kinmen was the scene of ferocious assaults by Communist China as it tried to seize control. The invading forces, expecting an easy victory, were met with surprising resistance, from fighters dug in behind rows of steel spikes and in cement bunkers along the beach. Frustrated, the Chinese began bombarding…

A Roman Catholic kid of my acquaintance, on his first trip to the cinema, paused to genuflect in the aisle before taking his seat. A perfectly understandable mistake. The same kind of awe consumes Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord), a young Jewish boy, as he yields to the ineffable mystery of the big screen, at the start of Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans.” No bending of the knee, but Sammy has never seen a film before, and his eyes widen, in delicious dread, at the sight of a train crash in “The Greatest Show on Earth.” For him, I reckon, that could be the title of every movie ever made. It is 1952, and Sammy has been taken to the pictures, in New Jersey, by his parents, Burt (Paul Dano) and…