Innholdsfortegnelse for November 28, 2022 i The New Yorker

Elizabeth Kolbert (“A Vast Experiment,” p. 32), a staff writer, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “The Sixth Extinction.” Her latest book is “Under a White Sky.” Philip Montgomery (Portfolio, p. 58) is a photographer and a regular contributor to the magazine. His new book of photography, “American Mirror,”examines the fractured state of the country. Helen Shaw (The Theatre, p. 86) became a theatre critic for the magazine in August. D. T. Max (Portfolio, p. 58) is a staff writer. His latest book is “Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim.” Robin Coste Lewis (Poem, p. 54) received the 2015 National Book Award for poetry.Her collection “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness” is forthcoming. Manvir Singh (Books, p. 78), a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study…

Baroque Neapolitan Crèche Below the choir of angels that’s decorating the twenty-foot-tall spruce in the Met’s Medieval Hall is a Nativity scene, crafted by Italian artisans in the eighteenth century, which calls to mind both Biblical Bethlehem and a jubilant prequel to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, as exquisite polychrome figurines of the Holy Family, the Magi, and the shepherds are joined by others representing the vibrant street life of Naples. (The Met; through Jan. 8.) Gingerbread NYC In early November, the Museum of the City of New York pulled a Paul Hollywood and hosted the first Great Borough Bake-Off, in which amateurs and professionals alike competed. (Somewhere Sinatra is singing, “If you can bake it there, you’ll bake it anywhere.”) The winners—including confectionary homages to the Staten Island Ferry,…

Rats should take notice, pigeons ponder their options: wild turkeys have returned to New England. They’re strutting on city sidewalks, nesting under park benches, roosting in back yards—whole flocks flapping, waggling their drooping, bubblegum-pink snoods at passing traffic, as if they owned the place. You meet them at cafés and bus stops alike, the brindled hens clucking and cackling, calling their hatchlings, their jakes and their jennies, the big, blueheaded toms gurgling and gobblegobbling. They look like Pilgrims, grave and gray-black, drab-daubed, their tail feathers edged in white, Puritan divines in ruffed cuffs. “There was a great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many,” the Mayflower arrival William Bradford wrote in his journal, during his first autumn in Plymouth, in 1621. Bradford didn’t eat turkey at that first…

A trombone with six valves? “I don’t know if anyone played this ever,” the Lebanese French trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf said the other day at the Met, where he was taking in a display of extravagant, even bizarre, brass instruments. Maalouf, who is forty-two, lives in Paris and was in town for a concert. He had been curious about the museum’s horn collection, which includes not just the six-valve trombone—most have none—but also a vaguely bassoon-like thing (an ophicleide!) with a bell decorated to look like a dragon’s mouth, and a tuba with two bells that resemble conjoined twins. In Maalouf’s view, much of what was on display—arcane, intestinal-looking contrivances of coiled brass—was more a tribute to the metalworker’s craft than anything a working musician might want to play. Not that…

A Svante Arrhenius was, by nature, an optimist. He believed that science should—and could—be accessible to all. In 1891, he got his first teaching job, at an experimental university in Stockholm called the Högskola. That same year, he founded the Stockholm Physics Society, which met every other Saturday evening. For a fee of one Swedish crown, anyone could join. Among the society’s earliest members was a Högskola student named Sofia Rudbeck, who was described by a contemporary as both “an excellent chemist” and “a ravishing beauty.” Arrhenius began writing her poetry, and soon the two wed. Physics Society meetings consisted of lectures on the latest scientific developments, many delivered by Arrhenius himself, followed by discussions that often lasted well into the night. The topics ranged widely, from aeronautics to volcanology.…

The Pinnacle wind-power plant extends for roughly four miles in the northeastern corner of West Virginia. Twenty-three turbines dot the spine of the Appalachians, irregularly spaced along the mountain ridges. The towers, supplied by Siemens Gamesa, rise three hundred feet, looking like giant pinwheels amid a rolling landscape of small towns and windy roads. The rotating blades can be seen from Maryland and Pennsylvania. Down below is Mineral County and its county seat, Keyser, a former manufacturing and railroad hub that overlooks a branch of the Potomac. Five full-time employees maintain the turbines. Each tower has an internal ladder. After climbing to the top, the workers can investigate errant temperature readings—the gearbox can overheat—or worrisome signals from the tower’s sensors. Once a year, the team adjusts the calibrations of the…

These days, the podcast-as-brand-extension is everywhere. If a television show, a TikTok account, or even a local pizzeria has the smallest amount of success, someone is going to ask, “Is there a podcast in here somewhere?” Not everything has to be a podcast! Sometimes, however, the rare podcast emerges from a project and it turns out to be the most thrilling arm of the enterprise. This is the case with “Every Outfit,” a garrulous talk show that grew out of an Instagram account that grew out of the HBO show “Sex and the City.” Allow me to explain: in 2016, the L.A.-based fashion writers Lauren Garroni and Chelsea Fairless started an Instagram feed documenting every outfit on “S.A.T.C.”; it became an instant smash and yielded the pair a book deal…

Say you’re a hybrid worker, the kind who spends time in Miami or New Jersey—a tech executive, perhaps, or the mayor of New York—living at the Set, a new apartment complex on Tenth Avenue for the pied-à-terre-inclined. Within a mile or so of your building, you could visit two of the world’s greatest art museums, at least twenty Duane Reades, a couple of solid diners, the High Line, the Garden, Carnegie Hall, Central Park, an aircraft carrier, a giant structure shaped like an al-pastor-taco spit, formerly used to an alarming extent for suicides, four ice-skating rinks, a total of thirty-eight Michelin stars, three farmers’ markets, some softball fields where a garment workers’ league likes to play, all of the Broadway theatres, a few community gardens, some reliable bars, and many…

Curtis Whitear, a thirty-five-year-old documentary filmmaker, was sitting in front of two monitors in his apartment in Ditmas Park recently, watching movies made by kids. He opened a file of a film made by a friend named Ash Sanders. “This is what she called ‘The Putty Movie,’” he said. She made it when she was sixteen. He clicked and the “Mission: Impossible” theme played. Two girls dressed in camouflage sneak around a house, arms aloft in victory. The soundtrack changes to nineties house music, and one of the girls sprints down a driveway and jumps on the hood of a moving car. “This whole section has such a good ambient quality,” Whitear said. Finally, dialogue: “We have something that belongs to you,” a voice says. “Recognize this?” Cut to a…

Typhoon Merbok began forming in the central Pacific Ocean during the second week of September. Fuelled by unusually warm waters, the storm system moved north and east toward Alaska, and by the time it crossed the Aleutian Islands weather buoys were recording forty-foot waves and winds of seventy-five miles an hour. On September 17th, Merbok, which had been downgraded to an extratropical storm, reached the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and the Bering Sea inlet of Norton Sound, one of the strongest storms to hit the area in fifty years. In the barrier village of Shaktoolik, Merbok wiped out a protective berm. In Golovin, streets were flooded with seawater and sewage. A house floated up a river in Nome, and a sixty-two-pound mammoth femur was unearthed near Elim. As Merbok headed north, residents…

Thomas Henry Huxley almost skipped the showdown of his life. It was the fourth day of the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was tired. He had spent the earlier part of the conference mingling, attending talks, and defending his friend Charles Darwin’s new book, “On the Origin of Species.” He was keen to escape the Oxford bustle and relax with his wife at her sister’s home, near Reading. He knew that the fourth day would be charged. Everyone did. The Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, was scheduled to appear. The son of the abolitionist William Wilberforce, the Bishop was considered one of the greatest orators of his time—part viper, part soapbox parliamentarian. He had been armed with anti-evolution arguments by one of Darwin’s…

You might describe my relationship with shrimp cocktail as delusional. If it’s on a menu, I order it. It’s almost always unexceptional, and yet I’m compelled by its raw-bar glamour, and by the slimmest chance of greatness. One night in the summer of 2021, this high-stakes calculation paid off like never before. I ordered shrimp cocktail at, of all places, a breakfast-taco window, called Mockingbird, briefly home to a pop-up oyster bar. It was the best iteration I’d ever had—the sweetness of the plump, chilled meat drawn out with salt (why is shrimp cocktail so often undersalted?) and lemon zest (a revelation), served with shaved horseradish and a fruity but balanced cocktail sauce. I’m delighted to report that the shrimp cocktail of my dreams has signed a lease. Last month,…

Most people don’t trust the news anymore, but everyone still seems to want a piece of it. Hedge funds are scooping up TV stations. Billionaires are buying newspapers and tech platforms. A few hours before Elon Musk finalized a deal to purchase Twitter, last month, a super PAC turned artists’collective launched a news network in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum. (Mission statement: “News for creative emancipation. This is journalism made by the people making culture.”) “I love things like ‘The Daily Show’ and Ali G, but we’re trying to actually make news, and be the news,” Eric Gottesman, an artist who is co-directing the project, said. He co-founded the collective, which is called For Freedoms. Its news program is more pastiche than parody: “We’re appropriating the form and aesthetic…

“In the United States,” Gertrude Stein once observed, “there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.” That was true in 1936, when she wrote “The Geographical History of America,” and it remains so today. The numbers are startling, and not only if you live someplace like the Upper East Side of Manhattan, with your hundred thousand neighbors per square mile. Add up all the developed areas in the fifty states—the cities and suburbs and exurbs and towns, the highways and railways and back roads, the orchards and vineyards and family farms, the concentrated animal feedlots, the cornfields and wheat fields and soybeans and sorghum—and it will amount to a fifth of our nation. What is all the rest? Forests, wetlands, rangeland, tundra, glaciers, barrens, bodies of water…

The big difference between “Knives Out” (2019) and its sequel, “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” is one of climate change. In many respects, the two movies are twins. Both are directed by Rian Johnson; both star Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, the sybaritic sleuth; and both present Blanc with a puzzle to solve. The first film was centered on a Massachusetts mansion, amid the rustle of autumn leaves, whereas the new one largely unfolds on a Greek island, in charring heat. The downside is a lack of shadows—a bummer for anyone who believes that murder is most foul, and most gratifying, when draped in gloom. The upside is that we get to see Craig, who rose from the waves like a dripping god in “Casino Royale” (2006), step gingerly…