Innholdsfortegnelse for January 16, 2023 i The New Yorker

Alexis Okeowo (“The Missing,” p. 16), a staff writer, is the author of “A Story of Alabama,” forthcoming in 2024. In 2020, Okeowo was named journalist of the year by the Newswomen’s Club of New York. Rachel Syme (“Everything Everywhere,” p. 30) is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has covered style, culture, and Hollywood for the magazine since 2012. Clarence Major (Poem, p. 34) was recently inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. His forthcoming books are “Golden Gate and Other Stories” and the novel “The Glint of Light.” Helen Shaw (The Theatre, p. 70) became a theatre critic for the magazine in 2022. Pola Maneli (Cover) is an illustrator based in South Africa. Jiordan Castle (Poem, p. 55) will publish “Disappearing Act,” a memoir in verse,…

There are two ways to enter the new restaurant Tatiana, in the new David Geffen Hall, at Lincoln Center: directly from the plaza or by way of the hall’s lobby. On my second visit, I chose the latter, wending my way through a library-like array of tables and couches, where New Yorkers of all stripes sat quietly watching a live broadcast of the Philharmonic, onstage in the auditorium just yards away. This charming but sober tableau put an especially fine point on the party atmosphere on the other side of the glass doors, in Tatiana’s dining room, where Usher was blasting and blue light cast a surreal glow on pink velvet chairs and marble tables set with gold cutlery. If this scene within a fairly staid and hallowed institution sounds…

Kudos to you! You’ve decided to do your part in saving the planet by going off the grid. Not keen on relocating to Maine or Montana? Manhattan works just fine. Josh Spodek went off the grid in May in his studio apartment in the West Village. He just disconnected the circuit breaker, and now his carbon footprint is about that of three average-sized house cats. Good news! Spodek has invited you over to show you the ropes. He’s the lean guy with the spiky brown hair and brown hiking shirt. Hungry? There’s some leftovers from yesterday’s solar-powered no-packaging vegan stew, which has been sitting out overnight, and which Spodek has sniffed, declaring, “I don’t think you’ll die.” Introductions are in order. Spodek is a fifty-one-year-old executive-leadership coach and environmentalist. He…

By the time Nasenet Alme Wildmikael arrived in Germany, in 2015, she had passed through four countries by land or sea and had spent a month in a migrant prison. Wildmikael was twenty-three and petite, with full cheeks and a puff of curly hair. She had grown up in a small town in western Eritrea, the fourth of ten children. Her father died when she was young, and her mother raised the kids alone, working as a laundress. Although they had little money, she refused to let her children work. Wildmikael’s home life was happy. She loved cars and wanted to be a mechanic. But there was little opportunity for the necessary schooling, and her future was uncertain. “Even if you dreamed to have something more, you knew that you…

In “How to Lie with Statistics,” a bestselling book from 1954, the journalist (and tobacco apologist) Darrell Huff details common techniques for manipulating people’s understanding of reality, among them truncating the y-axis of a graph. A trend line starts in a chart’s midsection and moseys up and to the right—a gradual rise over time. But if you hack off empty space at the bottom and zoom in on the action, the line takes off like a rocket. The axis transforms the narrative. Throughout the pandemic, we have truncated not the y-axis but the x-axis: stopping time to pass judgment on a nation’s performance instead of waiting to consider the broad sweep of the covid-19 years. Cut the graph at the summer of 2020 and the United States is a catastrophic…

“Someone told me there’s a painting here that looks just like me,” the actor Vicky Krieps said not long ago, as she climbed the marble stairs of the Neue Galerie, on Fifth Avenue. She wore cowboy boots, a pink Lacoste sweatshirt, a green velvet blazer, and a fuzzy white beret that had belonged to her grandmother; two feathers hung, dream-catcher style, from one ear. Upstairs, she considered the Klimts. “Definitely not that one,” she said, pointing to “The Woman in Gold.” She gestured toward a small half profile of a woman dressed in black. “Perhaps I look a little like her, in the movie,” she said, glancing doubtfully at her sweatshirt. In Krieps’s new film, “Corsage,” she plays the Empress Elisabeth, who, with her husband, Franz Joseph, ruled the Austro-Hungarian…

12/3/22, 7:30 A.M. Day 1 of being embedded with the elusive writer monkeys. It’s magnificent. Monkeys and typewriters as far as the eye can see. What strikes me immediately, though, is the absence of any and all writing. Before arriving, I’d steeled myself for a deafening cacophony of tapping keys, margin bells, and the mechanical slides of carriage-return levers. But so far the only thing I’ve seen typed is “Title TK TK TK,” written by Monkey No. 3566, who then took a break to lie on the rug and listen to a podcast. Will one of these monkeys independently re-create the works of William Shakespeare? Only time will tell. What is immediately clear is that this subspecies of simian has a fondness for vintage shawl-collar sweaters, obscure jazz on vinyl,…

In November, 2013, a baby girl was found drowned on the beach at Berck-sur-Mer, in northwest France. Not long afterward, police arrested the child’s mother, Fabienne Kabou, who was charged with murder. Born and raised in Dakar, Kabou was academically bright, and had come from Senegal to France, where she pursued her studies. She had moved in witha much older man; he was the father of the girl who died. One of those who attended the subsequent trial, in the town of Saint-Omer, was the filmmaker Alice Diop. Hitherto, Diop’s work has been in documentary; now we have her first feature, “Saint Omer,” which is clearly and closely inspired by the case of Kabou, and which retains the attentiveness—the patient ardor—of a good documentary. Much of the movie is set…

Pathetic? Enraging? Ludicrous? Honestly pretty funny, but in a patience-testing, Andy Kaufman sort of way? For most Americans, last week’s marathon voting sessions to elect (or not) a Speaker of the House were all of those things. But, for connoisseurs of C-SPAN, serial failure made for riveting television, at least by that network’s normal production standards, which veer more toward vintage Soviet broadcasts than toward “Real Housewives” or the N.F.L. on Fox. The usual approach features locked-down cameras focussed tightly on individual speechmakers, a rigid mise en scène only occasionally enlivened by a wide-angle shot of the House floor, as if cutting to security-camera footage. But as the G.O.P. butted heads with its own rump faction, humiliating the Party’s nominal head Kevin Mc-Carthy through round after round of losses, C-SPAN’s…

In 1937, the novelist Evelyn Waugh moved into Piers Court, a Georgian manor house near the town of Dursley, in the Cotswolds countryside. The house, a wedding gift from Waugh’s inlaws, sits on twenty-four acres and has eight bedrooms, six sitting rooms, a wine cellar, and a croquet lawn. Waugh wasn’t a fan. “I live in a shabby stone house in the country, where nothing is under a hundred years old except theplumbing and that does not work,” he told Life magazine. His opinion subsequently soured further. In a letter to his estate agent, in 1955, Waugh wrote, “If you happen to meet a lunatic who wants to live in this ghastly area, please tell him.” Waugh moved out a year later. Sixty-three years after that, Helen Lawton, a self-described…

For nearly twenty years, Antoine Andrews has been driving a UPS route in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge. When he rings the bell of a house one afternoon, the customer greets him with a fist bump: “What’s up, bro?” When he drops off a package at Walgreens, he recognizes an elderly man in the checkout line. The man once worked in a neighborhood bar, and when Andrews used to walk in with a delivery the man always offered him a beer—“On the house!”—which Andrews would decline. As he walks out of Walgreens, he taps the man on the shoulder and says, “Nice to see you!” All day long, Andrews waves to people he knows, and they wave back. He later jokes that, when he’s on his route, “I feel…

ACROSS 1 Word before comedy or arts 5 Raise many spirits? 9 ___ Soundsystem 12 Smoothness 14 Male guinea pig 15 Site of some Greek-Turkish sovereignty disputes 16 Words to someone struggling 17 Thing that’s pulled over the bed? 18 Eats a bissel 19 Channel showing lots of pitches 20 Hobby-shop purchase 21 Bit of a trifle 22 Fudge, say 24 Masago, e.g. 25 Brass part? 26 Place to do one’s bidding 27 ___ thrusters (means of spacecraft propulsion) 28 1977 novel whose protagonist is Macon (Milkman) Dead III 31 Animal sound uttered by Doja Cat more than fifty times in a 2018 viral novelty song 32 Cast 33 Galoots 34 Triborough, nowadays: Abbr. 35 They may show stories that have been adapted from page to screen 37 Continuously improve,…