Innholdsfortegnelse for December 19, 2022 i The New Yorker

The year was 1986, and I had just graduated from high school—both in real life and in the films of John Hughes. Onscreen, the high schools I attended were big and Midwestern, mostly situated in the suburbs of Chicago. In reality, if I wasn’t filming or ditching class, I went to a small French school on the west side of Los Angeles called the Lycée Français, an institution I had so rarely attended in person that when I flew back from New York for one day to accept my diploma my mother referred to it as my “honorary degree.” At the time, I was arguably one of the most recognizable high schoolers in America, but it had been a while since I had felt my age. When I left school…

In June, as the sun set on Dublin, Ohio, a well-to-do suburb of Columbus, several dozen people dressed in golf shirts and floral shifts filed into a small auditorium to listen to a talk by a new neighbor. Vivek Ramaswamy, a thirty-seven-year-old entrepreneur, had settled in the area with his wife and toddler son after making a large fortune as the founder of a biotech company. Now, thanks to dozens of appearances on Fox News to criticize “cultural totalitarianism” enforced by liberal élites, he was closing in on fame as a conservative pundit. In the past year, he had cast aspersions on Black Lives Matter and “the death of merit”; mask mandates and U.S.-border protection; public-school curricula and the actor Jussie Smollett. All the flame-throwing had established him, in the…

My daughter walked into the house with a boy named Brendan. She came into the kitchen limping a little, her mascara smeared, and lay down on the floor in front of the stove. I was dipping a cookie in icing, checking the color to see if it needed more green. Every year, in December, our block had a Christmas cookie swap, a ritual that had become one of the less disgusting parts of the holiday season. I was home a lot and took care of things, the cooking and the house stuff. Before being home a lot, I’d worked on a TV show in Los Angeles. It was shot on two gigantic stages at a movie studio in Burbank, near a building shaped like a wizard hat that you could…

God, it’s dark out. Going to plays these days is like looking at a painting by Jane Dickson, whose work chronicles an older, more dangerous, less commercially anesthetized Times Square. By the late afternoon, the palette of the street is all black sky and bright lights, neon reflected in smears on puddled pavement. In this slogging terrain, the lights of the theatre feel like promises of warmth to come. It’s nice to trudge inside, even in a gloomy mood, and warm your hands by drama’s hearth. Julia May Jonas’s very funny, often moving new play, “Your Own Personal Exegesis,” directed by Annie Tippe at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theatre, starts out at just this time of year. It’s Christmas Eve, at a church whose full name we never learn, in…

THE ART OF BONSAI As the director of an organization that promotes the art of bonsai in the United States, I was excited and pleased to see Robert Moor’s article, which demonstrated that bonsai takes skill, inspiration, and patience (“Deadwood,” November 21st). At the same time, two aspects of the article may repel rather than attract the general public to the art of bonsai. First, although the vividly portrayed apprenticeship culture is real and regrettable, participation in it is not a requirement for developing mastery, nor is that culture the norm throughout the world. Second, creating museum-quality or “million-dollar” bonsai undeniably takes enormous skill and time, but bonsai is nevertheless an approachable endeavor. The art form is readily accessible to anyone who is inspired by the natural world. Bonsai artists…

Christmas, a cold day—and lost to ourselves in a windless heavenwith all that story fallen away(peace and goodwill, a baby in the hay)we walk uphill from the world’s quarrelling, our company, weather—true cosmopolitan fetched from elsewhere,drifter-stranger, and we togetherfollowing the night’s sketchy snow for a trailto the late moon’s uplands, one step away, reach a small shore—water polished to a drumskin of ice,where each skimmed stone knocks for a doorto leave, but skips, teasing with repeats,its note multiplying birds of nowhere. It’s as if you heardcreation’s chip skidding high and clearover glacial wastes, and imagined a bird—one, then another—voiced from sound waves,shivered from the physics of touch and air. My one last throw …A stone to try this basin of iced rain,the tarn’s soundboard struck accelerandoto scatter, for luck, a…

There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCar thy’s prose—roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them. McCarthy in afflatus mode is magnificent, vatic, wasteful, hammy. The words stagger around their meanings, intoxicated by the grandiloquence of their gesturing: “God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest.” McCarthy’s deflatus mode is a rival rhetoric of mute exhaustion, as if all words, hungover from the intoxication, can hold on only to habit and familiar things: “He made himself a sandwich and spread some mustard over it and he poured a glass of milk.” “He put his toothbrush back in…

On the inaugural night of the Chippendales club, the audience’s disbelief at the sight of a half-dozen men dancing and disrobing quickly melts into delight. The financially struggling owner, Somen (Steve) Banerjee (Kumail Nanjiani), has named his Los Angeles establishment for an eighteenth-century cabinetmaker whose rococo designs, Steve claims, adorned the residence of the viceroy of India. The venture may well be the earliest of its kind: a mainstream venue for striptease, by men, for women. The visual appeal of the amateur gyrators, who swan about on a sunken stage in the center of theroom, to the Village People’s “Macho Man,” is questionable: they sport muscles and skimpy black underwear, but also mullets and long, greasy curls. Their looks may not matter much anyway; the hooting women are thrilled just…

DECEMBER 14 – 20, 2022 Some might turn to the Hebrew calendar to learn when Hanukkah falls, but rock-and-roll types need only consult New York’s concert schedule. Since 2001, the holiday’s bounty has included—with few exceptions—an eight-night stand by Yo La Tengo. This year, it’s at Bowery Ballroom, Dec. 18-25. Each Hanukkah show features an unannounced surprise opener and comedian—but the event’s star is this blue-chip indie trio, currently gearing up for the release of its sixteenth LP, “This Stupid World.” As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. ART “I’ll Have What She’s Having: The Jewish Deli” This historical exhibition doesn’t skimp on the Jewish delicatessen’s role in American entertainment—its title borrows a punch line from the movie “When Harry Met Sally,” delivered by a patron…

On the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California, between the orchards and the ocean, sits an inconspicuous warehouse, its windows tinted brown and its exterior painted a dull gray. The facility has almost no signage, and its name doesn’t appear on Google Maps. A small label on the door reads “Google AI Quantum.” Inside, the computer is being reinvented from scratch. In September, Hartmut Neven, the founder of the lab, gave me a tour. Neven, originally from Germany, is a bald fifty-seven-year-old who belongs to the modern cast of hybridized executive-mystics. He talked of our quantum future with a blend of scientific precision and psychedelic glee. He wore a leather jacket, a loose-fitting linen shirt festooned with buttons, a pair of jeans with zippered pockets on the legs, and Velcro sneakers…

The Grimkes, by Kerri K. Greenidge (Liveright). This multilayered history follows branches of a family of Southern slaveholders. On one side, there are the abolitionist sisters Angelina Grimke Weld and Sarah Grimke; on the other, stemming from their brother’s relationship with an enslaved woman named Nancy Weston, are Archibald Grimke, a co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P., and his daughter, the writer Angelina Weld Grimke. The story opens in the eighteen-twenties, with the sisters quitting South Carolina for Philadelphia, where they encountered a vibrant Black-led abolitionist movement; only much later did they acknowledge their Black relatives. Greenidge faithfully documents the sisters’ activism, but her real concern is exploring the limits of white sympathy, a story vividly animated by her nuanced biographical portraits. The White Mosque, by Sofia Samatar (Catapult). Born to an American Mennonite…