Innholdsfortegnelse for January 30, 2023 i The New Yorker

Jon Lee Anderson (“Lula’s Restoration,” p. 30), a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1998. He is the author of several books, including “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life.” Beverly Gage (“One of a Kind,” p. 24), a professor of history at Yale University, published “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century” last year. Rosanna Warren (Poem, p. 36) published the poetry collection “So Forth” and the biography “Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters” in 2020. Idrees Kahloon (Books, p. 63) is the Washington bureau chief for The Economist, where he covers politics and policy. Clare Sestanovich (Fiction, p. 52) is the author of “Objects of Desire.” In 2022, she was named a “5 Under 35” honoree by the National…

In the early nineteen-eighties, in India, an agriculturist named B. V. Rao founded the National Egg Coordination Committee (N.E.C.C.) to protect poultry farmers, not to mention consumers, from traders who bought low, ignoring rising production costs, and sold high. Among the committee’s first orders of business was rehabilitating the image of their product, an ingredient largely left out of the average Indian’s diet. Rao hired an advertising agency to devise a national campaign to drive interest in the egg. Ads enumerated its nutritional benefits and offered recipes for egg chaats and egg biryanis. A television spot featured the wrestler turned actor Dara Singh delivering a catchy jingle that went “Sunday ho ya Monday, roz khao ande”: “Be it Sunday or Monday, eat an egg.” That the campaign was incredibly successful…

Though theoretically pleasant, small talk—opening gambits, friendly chitchat, weather observations—tends to be the Rodney Dangerfield of conversation: it gets no respect. But the comedian Colin Quinn, raspy-voiced, Brooklyn-accented, and rat-a-tat loquacious, revels in it, including in his new solo theatre show, “Small Talk,” at the Lucille Lortel. A few weeks ago, after a preparatory standup set, Quinn, sixty-three and currently bearded, sat at a table in the bustling upstairs bar at the Comedy Cellar, in Greenwich Village, enjoying live music and a Diet Coke, occasionally chatting with passersby. “One of the things I’m saying in the show is that people adapt their personality to the times, for survival,” he said. In the social-media age, “the extremists set the tone,” but small talk, done right, can help. The live music got…

About a year ago, not long after Eric Adams was sworn in as the mayor of New York, an old friend and church leader named Lamor Whitehead went to an auto shop in the Bronx, to drop off a Mercedes-Benz G-Class S.U.V. that had been in a crash. Whitehead led a small church in Brooklyn called Leaders of Tomorrow International Ministries. People called him Bishop. The shop he visited, No Limit Auto Body, was operated by a man named Brandon Belmonte, who was involved in real estate. Federal prosecutors would later refer to Belmonte as “a businessman.” The Mercedes was a twenty-five-thousand-dollar job. Belmonte paid the thirteen-thousand-dollar bill for a rental replacement while the work was getting done. Whitehead wanted more. “He basically says, ‘You got to give me another…

First, there was Adam, whose creation takes center stage on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Then, fashioned out of Adam’s spare rib, there was Eve, relegated to a smaller panel. In Michelangelo’s rendition, as in the Bible’s, the first man sleeps through the miraculous creation of his soul mate, the first woman and the eventual mother of humanity. Many of our foundational myths are, in this way, stories about men, related by men to other men. The notion of female equality is, historically, an innovation. “Woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in “The Second Sex,” published in 1949. “And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning…

Republicans are, unsurprisingly, in an uproar over the discovery, in three different locations associated with President Joe Biden—his former office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a room in his Delaware home, and his garage—of documents marked as classified. But there is some confusion in the G.O.P. ranks about what the focus of their ire should be, and last week it fell to Martha MacCallum, of Fox News, to try to clear things up. She was questioning Representative James Comer, of Kentucky, who had just been speculating about the University of Pennsylvania being in the pocket of Chinese Communists. Comer had suggested, in another interview, that he was concerned not so much about classified documents ending up in a former Vice-President’s home as about whether Biden…

A. J. Liebling once wrote that “the primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.” That’s a nice first step for TikTok-ing about it, too, but if you want followers it helps to offer some bite. (See: “The food is terrible!” “And such small portions!”) Coming off a time when many reviewers have been pulling punches out of sympathy for the restaurant industry’s pandemic struggles, Audrey Jongens and Meg Radice have built an audience for the VIP List, their TikTokborn brand, in part by bringing out the brass knuckles. Their account can draw a million viewers, attracted by the comically scathing thirty-second assessments that pair familiar footage (cheese-pull closeups, overhead plate pans) with caustic “Ab Fab”-ish voiceover (“By far the worst twelve hundred dollars we have ever…

Thankyou for booking at The Bailey. You are confirmed for four people at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, January 20th. Before we welcome you to our restaurant, a few housekeeping items, to insure that your visit with us is exceptional—and to avoid misunderstandings. Owing to Covid, RSV, the apparent return of polio, inflation, the looming recession, and Donald Trump’s announcement of his 2024 run, your table reservation will be for ninety minutes exactly. We offer a fifteen-minute grace period for arrival, but the ninety minutes starts at the reservation time. To illustrate with an example, let’s say you arrive at 7:43 p.m., because your Uber driver was unfamiliar with the unmarked doors of our speakeasy concept, and you wait in line awhile to hand your coat to our coat-check person (twenty…

It comes as a surprise to learn that “When You Finish Saving the World,” a new film directed by Jesse Eisenberg, is also the first film directed by Jesse Eisenberg. Really? I could have sworn he’d taken charge before. He’s one of those actors who become de-facto auteurs, imbuing a story so richly with their manners, or their moods, that it feels like their own creation. In Eisenberg’s case, “The Double” (2013), “Louder Than Bombs” (2015), and “The Art of Self-Defense” (2019), all of them made by other directors, are galvanized by his nervous electricity. As he stares at the surrounding characters, furrowing his brow and twitching with unease, you can see their self-possession starting to waver. There you have it: Eisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Although he doesn’t appear in the…

Music can be many things, including a weapon. Among the songs that law enforcement and militaries have played, at deafening volume, to break the spirits of adversaries over the years are “Paranoid,” by Black Sabbath (Manuel Noriega, 1989); the “Barney” theme (detainees held at black sites in Iraq, 2003); Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” (cult leader David Koresh, 1993; federal agents also blared recordings of rabbits being slaughtered); and “Oops! … I Did It Again,” by Britney Spears (Somali pirates, 2013; a security official said, “I’d imagine using Justin Bieber would be against the Geneva Convention”). Now the music-as-deterrent technique has been adopted by the Slurpee sector. Franchises of 7-Eleven have been using the tactic to dissuade homeless people from loitering outside. Their music of choice? Opera—Verdi’s…

Brad Mehldau is arguably the greatest working jazz pianist. Top five, for sure. He’s fifty-two—too old to be a wunderkind, too young to be an éminence grise, although his hair is grayer and thinner than it was on the cover of “Introducing Brad Mehldau,” his 1995 début as a bandleader, which included some standards (Duke Ellington, Rodgers and Hart) and the originals “Angst” and “Young Werther.” (He was going through a lot at the time, including a heroin addiction.) He had the touch of Bill Evans and the range of Keith Jarrett, but he became known, perhaps above all, for his renditions of canonical rock songs: Radiohead, Jeff Buckley, Neil Young, and, always, the Beatles (a head-spinning solo version of “Martha My Dear”; a fifteen-minute “And I Love Her”; “Mother…

ACROSS 1 Brownstone features7 Managed somehow13 Two for the price of one15 “Allow me”16 High-school graduation requirement in some states18 Stock at a car dealership19 Engross20 Emphatic denial22 Hammer part23 Though24 Fast punch27 Mobile-game annoyances28 Haudenosaunee Confederacy nation29 ___ platter30 2021 W.N.B.A. M.V.P. with the Connecticut Sun32 Lead-in to It or Whiz35 School in L.A.36 Strong adhesive37 What the entire second season of “Roc” consisted of40 Done caring about41 Lure into a crime42 Clock setting in L.A.45 Lead-in to X or Z46 “Yay!”47 Show astonishment48 Talk yourself out of something?49 Use as a perch50 Mountain with a Koyukon name53 Dwindle55 Fir-tree dropping56 Language in which Katy Perry, Luke Bryan, and Lizzo have recorded songs57 More 4-Down than 4-Down58 Fails to attend DOWN 1 Tibetan ethnic group2 Rolled to the runway3…