Innholdsfortegnelse for December 12, 2022 i The New Yorker

Sam Knight (“Goals,” p. 34) is a staff writer based in London. His first book, “The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold,” was published earlier this year. Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 13), a staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment. She also writes a column for newyorker.com. Eren Orbey (“Life Lines,” p. 18) is a contributing writer for the magazine. Salman Rushdie (Fiction, p. 56) has written fifteen novels, including “Victory City,” which will be published in February. Meret Oppenheim (Poem, p. 50), who died in 1985, was a Berlin-born Swiss artist. Her collected poems, “The Loveliest Vowel Empties,” will be published, in Kathleen Heil’s English translation, in 2023. Anand Giridharadas (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 32) is the author of, most recently, “The Persuaders.” John Seabrook (“So…

Among au-courant gifts for expectant parents—especially those who use the term “self-care” unironically—is Heng Ou’s book “The First Forty Days: The Essential Art of Nourishing the New Mother.” It’s inspired by zuo yuezi, or “sitting the month,” the Chinese postpartum tradition of spending several weeks after a baby is born doing little but resting and tending to the body. In a section on congee, Ou describes the rice porridge as “one of the most reassuring meals you can eat.” Soft, warm, and easy to digest, it’s also a “blank canvas on which to improvise,” made with broth or water, endlessly customizable. You can find congee at many restaurants in Manhattan’s Chinatown, including, perhaps most famously, Congee Village (100 Allen St.), which opened in 1996. A more surprising place to find…

“Don’t leave home without it,” ads for American Express used to advise. Then the options expanded. Chase Sapphire. Chase Sapphire Reserve. Venture Rewards, followed by more Ventures with more Rewards. “We’ve been leading the travel space for over a hundred years,” Antonia Olimpio, the New York manager of American Express’s travel-services department said the other day. She wore a cream-colored blouse and matching pants. “Travel has changed. A two-hour delay? That’s pretty common, nowadays,” she said. “If you know that, in your back pocket, you’ve got somebody to call, that’s where we come in and show our value.” Olimpio is one of nine regional experts charged with insuring that Amex’s seven thousand travel consultants—the voices on the other end of the 1-800 number—know what’s up. Hottest table in town? “That…

Few actors have done more to promote the power of innocence than Brendan Fraser. Go back to the first wave of his fame, and to the gag that ran through his drollest roles. In “Encino Man” (1992), he was an early human, frozen solid during an ice age, defrosted by high-school kids, and invited to party down. In “George of the Jungle” (1997),he was a Tarzanesque vine-swinger let loose in San Francisco. And, in the charming “Blast from the Past” (1999), he was born in a nuclear bunker, raised on pure Americana, and eager, when he emerged after thirty-five years, to marry somebody from Pasadena. In each case, California was held up as the acme of civilization, and Fraser as a figure who knew almost nothing, bore no ill will,…

This summer, shortly before a jury in Texas ordered Alex Jones, the conspiracy peddler, to pay forty-nine million dollars in damages to the parents of one of the first graders killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there was a legal scuffle over a piece of evidence. Jones’s defense team had accidentally sent the parents’ lawyer, Mark Bankston, a digital copy of the data on Jones’s phone—a lapse that Bankston had revealed in a cross-examination of Jones. Jones’s lawyer F. Andino Reynal belatedly pleaded with Judge Maya Guerra Gamble to keep the materials out of view. Bankston said that this might be a problem. “I’ve been asked by the January 6th committee to turn the documents over,” he told the court, and he was ready to do so. “Well, I don’t…

Sam Nivola, a nineteen-year-old with wispy brown hair and dimples, came down from his Morningside Heights apartment to meet his twelve-year-old sister, May. The Nivolas are the children of actors, Alessandro Nivola (“The Many Saints of Newark”) and Emily Mortimer (“The Newsroom”), and have lately joined the family racket. In the new Noah Baumbach film, “White Noise,” they play siblings in a Reagan-era academic household led by Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, who are forced to flee their college town after an “Airborne Toxic Event.” Sam, as it happens, had just fled the Nivola home, in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, to attend Columbia. “Absolutely hate it,” he reported. “I decided to go here because it’s in the city, and I didn’t want to be in Poughkeepsie or whatever. Annoyingly, there’s a…

The Postpone Your Procrastination Diary™ “Because later is, in fact, never.” Student name: Merrick Garland Diary due date: 11/7/2022 Actual submission date: 11/18/22 Comments: Sorry! Again. —MG October 11th I don’t really remember what happened on October 1st, the day I was supposed to start keeping this diary. It’s been a lot. October 12th Got some good momentum going. On this diary, I mean. Two days in a row. I can do this. Don’t let them get to you, Merrick. You can finish what you start. You have what it October 15th At the beginning of every month, as I promised my Postpone Your Procrastination personal coach, Stu, I will make a to-do list, prioritizing what is important and realistically estimating how much time each task will take. This month,…

If you made a list of the dozen or so faces most likely to be emblazoned on a dartboard, it might overlap with the lineup of speakers at the DealBook Summit, held this past Wednesday above a high-end mall, in Columbus Circle. So when a picket line formed outside it was impossible to guess who the picketers were there to protest. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Meta, or Shou Chew, the C.E.O. of TikTok, both well-known harvesters of data and attention? Or could it have been Mike Pence, the former Vice-President and January 6th assassination target, who was in town to promote a new memoir and hint at a possible Presidential run? Or Benjamin Netanyahu, also hawking a book, who recently dodged corruption charges by being re-re-re-re-reëlected as the…

A smiling ghost came up through the floor. La’eeb, the mascot of this year’s World Cup, in Qatar, is a bodiless figure in a thobe, the white gown favored by the men of the Arabian Peninsula. He materialized during the tournament’s opening ceremony, sometime after Morgan Freeman asked Ghanim al-Muftah, a Qatari YouTuber, who was born without legs, whether he was welcome in the country—he was—and before Jung Kook, of the Korean boy band BTS, sent the mostly Qatari crowd into a conservative mode of ecstasy. La’eeb wafted across a spotlighted plain populated by previous mascots, going all the way back to World Cup Willie, a Teddy-bear lion used by England fourteen tournaments ago. For soccer fans, each iteration of the World Cup, which was first staged in Uruguay, in…

Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which had its première last month at the Metropolitan Opera, begins with a prologue marked “Dreamily, from the depths.” Woodwinds skitter about and trill; harps glissando mysteriously; strings sustain a distant dissonant chord; brass emit softly clashing tones. Over this wash of sound, the chorus sings fragmentary phrases that coalesce into a familiar sentence: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” This, we are meant to think, is the creative subconscious of Virginia Woolf as she works on “Mrs. Dalloway,” her most famous novel, in 1923. Later, we see Woolf struggling to recall that opening line, which came to her as she was waking up. Her husband, Leonard, tells her, “You’ll find it again.” “The Hours” is based on Michael Cunningham’s novel, which appeared…

ACROSS 1 Emo emotion 6 Blends 11 Peaty place 14 Fabled Voodoo Queen of New Orleans 16 Poke-bowl option 17 French toast 18 FedEx alternative 19 Brand with instant success? 20 Purchase that might include swabs 22 “And another thing…” 23 Dressage gaits 25 ___ parade 26 One of fashion’s “Big Four” cities, to locals 28 Discipline that includes Long Fist and Southern Fist styles 30 Place that lacks spirit? 33 They might get you backstage 34 War on Poverty agcy. 35 Green portrayer on “Friends” 37 Palindromic “before” 38 Try to get a discount 40 Goes through the roof 42 Memorable mission 43 Vituperate 44 Agcy. whose projects included Camp David and LaGuardia Airport 45 Sacred scroll written without vowels 46 West Coast sch. that was one of the…