Innholdsfortegnelse for May 8, 2023 i The New Yorker

Heidi Blake (“The Fugitive Princesses,” p. 32) joined The New Yorker in 2022. She is the author of “From Russia with Blood” and “The Ugly Game.” Amanda Petrusich (“Sad Dads,” p. 26) is a staff writer and the author of “Do Not Sell at Any Price.” Edward Koren (Sketchbook, p. 57), who died in April, contributed to the magazine for more than sixty years. Rebecca Makkai (Fiction, p. 60) is the author of, most recently, “I Have Some Questions for You.” Her novel “The Great Believers” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. John Kenney (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25) began contributing to The New Yorker in 1999. He has written six books, including “Love Poems for People with Children.” Alfred Corn (Poem, p. 64) published a translation of Rilke’s “Duino Elegies”…

Are we living in a Roaring Twenties redux, as was predicted when the pandemic began to wane? The other night, at the recently revived Torrisi, in Nolita’s historic Puck Building, a woman wearing a flapper headband was a bit too on the nose for my taste, but the restaurant does suggest a return to a brand of extraordinary lavishness that dissipated as the virus spread. This might be the hottest table in town. Having failed to make a reservation earlier than 11 P.M. (Exhibit A: late-night dining is back), I arrived, on two afternoons, fifteen minutes before the doors opened, to find a line snaking down the block. Twice, I succeeded in getting a pair of seats, first at the bar and then at a table in the expansive surrounding…

A standard-issue invitation arrived for a party in Washington, D.C., but with an odd addendum—odd, at least, to an out-of-towner. A small-print paragraph advised that the party had “been designed to comply with” ethics rules for congressional and executive-branch employees regarding gifts and free entertainment. Nevertheless, instructions were included should attendees feel it necessary to remit “the fair market value” of the evening’s centerpiece: a preview screening of a new HBO series’ first episode. That would be $12.50, please, payable by check. People in government—judicial branch apparently not included, ahem—didn’t always have to be so careful. Superper-snickety ethics rules were a response to the Watergate scandal, which happened to be the subject of the new show, “White House Plumbers.” It focusses on E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the…

When King Charles III was a young prince, in the early nineteen-fifties, he sometimes propelled a ride-on toy around Windsor Castle, one of several royal residences where he spent his childhood. Pedalling furiously, he hardly registered the spectacular works from the Royal Collection on the walls. “It’s just a background,” Charles later recalled. His attention was arrested, however, by one unusual portrait: of King Charles I, displayed in the Queen’s Ballroom. The sensitive and reflective prince, who was born in 1948 and who by the age of seven was being tutored by a governess in the history of the nation—and of his historic family—was fascinated by the painting. “King Charles lived for me in that room in the castle,” he later said. Titled “Charles I in Three Positions,” and painted…

Far out on the Arabian Sea one night in February, 2018, Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum, the fugitive daughter of Dubai’s ruling emir, marvelled at the stars. The voyage had been rough. Since setting out by dinghy and Jet Ski a few days before, she had been swamped by powerful waves, soaking the belongings she’d stowed in her backpack; after clambering aboard the yacht she’d secured for her escape, she’d spent days racked with nausea as it pitched on the swell. But tonight the sea was calmer, and she felt the stirring of an unfamiliar sensation. She was free. Latifa was thirty-two and petite, with a loose ponytail and intense dark eyes. Beside her was her friend Tiina Jauhiainen, a Finnish martial-arts instructor who had helped prepare for her…

When Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News last week—so suddenly that he reportedly learned about it only ten minutes before the world did—the most acute notes of regret came from young conservative intellectuals who had seen his nightly hour of programming as an interesting, and perhaps essential, experiment in what right-wing populism could be. “The Tucker Realignment,” Ross Douthat called that experiment, in the Times, adding that young conservatives “increasingly start out where Carlson ended up—in a posture of reflexive distrust, where if an important American institution takes a position, the place to be is probably on the other side.” Part of what was appealing about Carlson’s point of view to thinkers on the right was that, in his curiosity about fringe ideas and his occasional high-lighting of antiwar…

After receiving backlash for its partnership with trans actor and social media star Dylan Mulvaney, Budweiser has released a new patriotic ad featuring its signature Clydesdale horse mascot…. The ad shows the Clydesdale galloping past patriotic symbols, such as people raising an American flag and the Lincoln Memorial. —CBS News. A Zoom call. WRITER: We open on a horse. Cut to, like, a farmer. Then a welder. Then a man on a horse. Maybe a jockey. We hear a voice-over. Reciting the Gettysburg Address. ART DIRECTOR: I like that. ACCOUNT EXEC: Does that make any sense, though? STRATEGIST: Maybe let’s back up. Just to recap. We need something that appeals to our base. Sends a clear message about who we are as a beer and as a brand. American. Masculine.…

On March 25th, at the first big rally of his current electoral campaign, Donald Trump explained his role in history. In 2016, he told the crowd of supporters, he’d been their “voice.” Now it was different. “I am your warrior, I am your justice,” he announced. “I am your retribution.” Those words, ominous enough on their own, seemed more so in light of the locale. Trump hadn’t wanted to speak in “one of those fifty-fifty areas,” he explained, but somewhere his support was “close to a hundred per cent.” He chose Waco, Texas, best known for a fifty-one-day standoff outside the city in 1993, between a religious sect called the Branch Davidians and the Department of Justice. The date of Trump’s speech put it during the siege’s thirtieth anniversary. The…

Say, hypothetically, that you’re being crowned king of England this weekend. First of all, congrats! Second, if you’re feeling anxious, that’s understandable. Your predecessors are, by definition, all dead, but they loom large. One was so bad at the job that he got beheaded; others were so beloved that they’ve been mythologized for centuries. For example, King Arthur, who still gets high marks—what with the Round Table, the cool wizard friend, and the pulling swords from stones—despite the fact that he ruled a millennium and a half ago and probably didn’t exist. How are you going to compete with that? It doesn’t help that a classic musical about Arthur—Lerner and Loewe’s “Camelot”—is being revived, handsomely, at Lincoln Center Theatre, or that the guy playing him, Andrew Burnap, is thirty-two and…

At any given time, the Guggenheim may host Kandinskys, Picassos, Pollocks, Mondrians, or af Klints, but the first thing that any visitor who isn’t too boring to admit it thinks about is the ramp, and how much fun it would be to roll down. Frank Lloyd Wright imagined the museum’s six-story helix as “a curving wave that never breaks.” The building opened in 1959, the same year that the Roller Derby Skate Board débuted. And yet, for the next six decades, perhaps owing to a sense of decorum, or to a competent security crew, no one skated down the ramp. “A ramp like that—it’s breathtaking,” the professional skateboarder Alexis Sablone said the other evening. She was standing on the museum’s ground floor, a board at her hip. Converse, one of…

Last fall, the National débuted a new piece of merchandise: a black zippered sweatshirt featuring the words “SAD DADS” in block letters. The band—which formed in 1999, in Brooklyn—was lampooning its reputation as a font of midlife ennui, the sort of rudderless melancholy that takes hold when a person realizes that the dusty hallmarks of American happiness (marriage, children, a job in an office) aren’t a guarantee against despair. For more than two decades, this has been the National’s grist: not the major devastations but the strange little ache that feels like a precondition to being human. No amount of Transcendental Meditation, Pilates, turmeric, rose quartz, direct sunlight, jogging, oat milk, sleep hygiene, or psychoanalysis can fully alleviate that ambient sadness. Part of it issurely existential—our lives are temporary and…

ACROSS 1 Religious offshoot 5 The ___ (small West African nation) 11 “That ship ___ sailed” 14 Headpiece for an angel costume 15 Device with a snooze button 17 Gets a perfect score on 18 Amazed remark after seeing someone’s doppelgänger 19 “Seems perfect, right?” 21 Glowing reviews 22 “Over the Hills and ___ Away” (traditional English song) 23 Like some speakeasies and fridges 25 Sequester, as a nun in a convent 30 Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi ___ 31 Go from a bud to a flower 32 Thurman of the “Kill Bill” films 33 Coffin nails 34 “Eating ___” (1982 black comedy) 35 Crustacean known for walking sideways 36 Flightless bird of Australia 37 Pastry from Tim Hortons 38 Sotomayor on the Supreme Court 39 Swapped out 41 Vintage Ford…