Innholdsfortegnelse for May 15, 2023 i The New Yorker

Eyal Press (“The Planned Parenthood Problem,” p. 34) is the author of “Dirty Work,” which won a Hillman Prize for Journalism. He is a Puffin Foundation Fellow at Type Media Center. Alexandra Schwartz (“Gut Feelings,” p. 28) has been a staff writer since 2016. Bruce McCall (Cover), who died this month, contributed to The New Yorker for some forty years, painting more than seventy-five covers and writing more than eighty humor pieces. Olga Ravn (Fiction, p. 56) is a novelist, poet, and literary critic. Her novel “The Employees” was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. Kelefa Sanneh (Books, p. 59) has been a staff writer since 2008. He is the author of “Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.” Dhruv Khullar (Comment, p. 15), a contributing…

In 2007, Jennifer Romolini launched a column for Lucky magazine called “eBay Obsessed,” for which she trawled the resale site for obscure gems. During one of her virtual spelunking missions, Romolini came across a back issue of the erotic magazine Viva, from 1974, sparking what would become a years-long fascination with the publication, which ran from 1973 to 1980. Though Viva, which was billed as “The International Magazine for Women,” was conceived by a man (Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse), it was also an aggressively feminist project: it featured Betty Friedan and Maya Angelou, ran forward-thinking stories about abortion and birth control, and printed full-frontal male nudes intended for the female gaze. And yet it could also seem backward and sexist; a recurring feature called “Crotch Watching,” for instance,…

Among the meticulously styled celebrities at last week’s Met Gala, the annual fifty-thousand-dollar-per-plate museum fund-raiser, no one turned heads quite like a crasher sent by Mother Nature: a water bug that scampered across the red carpet, seizing paparazzi’s attention before meeting a sole-crushing demise. Thirty hours earlier, Molly Gaebe, a comedian and actor, wrestled with some ceremonial variables of her own. She lugged a rolled-up red carpet that had been stitched together from scraps into the Bell House, a performance space in Gowanus. “Here she is!” she announced. “She’s beautiful.” The occasion was the inaugural Debt Gala, a benefit for the charity R.I.P. Medical Debt, which buys people’s medical debt in order to cancel it. Outdoor red-carpet plans were foiled by rain. Puddles were forming indoors, too. Volunteers mopped and…

Bruce McCall, who died last week, was, as those of us who knew and loved him recognized, very nearly unique among artists and writers of his quality. Many creative people of original gifts live at right angles to their talent, the difference between who they are and what they make being astounding, but no one was ever more right-angled—transcendent talent to human type—than Bruce. With a paintbrush in his hand, or with his fingers on a laptop, he was the most inspired of satirists. In what used to be called a “biting” vein, he blended a wild surrealist sensibility—founded on an impeccable illustrator’s technique, always manifesting visions, dreams, impossibilities in scrupulous hyper-realism—with a sharp, sometimes caustic tone, beautifully underlit by melancholia. No one who has seen his countless covers for…

In the early two-thousands, Turkey’s Ministry of Transportation began construction on an airport in Hatay Province, in southern Turkey. The new Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had run on a platform of religious freedom, social services for the poor, and housing and development; he had promised to put an airport in every region. The plans had caught the attention of a local architect named Ercüment Kimyon. Kimyon’s family had grown wheat on one of the many small farms near the drained bed of Lake Amik, the proposed site of the airport. When Kimyon was a child, his parents moved to İskenderun, the second-largest city in Hatay. In the mid-eighties, he opened an architecture firm, designing small apartment buildings in middle-class neighborhoods. Kimyon became a board member of the local Chamber…

On my first visit to Zhego, a new Bhutanese restaurant in Woodside, the tiny dining room was full, so I took a seat on the front porch and asked if there was anything hot to drink, to offset the lingering spring chill. Cups of butter tea, cloudy, warm, and as salty as the sea, arrived quickly. The butter in the tea was made from cow’s milk, as opposed to yak’s milk, as it would be in Bhutan, a small landlocked country in the eastern Himalayas. As Sonam Tshering Singye, a co-owner and the restaurant’s sole server, explained, it’s too expensive to import most fresh ingredients, though many of the kitchen’s drygoods do come from Bhutan. Bovine origin aside, the tea was an excellent introduction to the role of dairy products…

The poet Reginald Dwayne Betts was in Brooklyn the other day, standing over a five-gallon plastic bucket filled with fibre slop. He was in town from New Haven, at his friend Ruth Lingen’s printmaking studio, helping to make a batch of handmade paper to be used in the printing of his next book. A Ping-Pong table was piled high with socks, blankets, T-shirts, long underwear, and stacks of letters, all of which had recently arrived from people incarcerated throughout the U.S. “This is our liquid slurry!” Lingen said, giving the bucket a whiff. She offered tasting notes: “Overtones of Brooklyn water and filtered sediment.” Betts, who was dressed in raw Japanese denim, a whiskey-brown fedora, and a “RUSSIA IS A TERRORIST STATE” T-shirt, tied on a black apron and poured…

I was exasperated with Prince Harry. My head was pounding, my jaw was clenched, and I was starting to raise my voice. And yet some part of me was still able to step outside the situation and think, This is so weird. I’m shouting at Prince Harry. Then, as Harry started going back at me, as his cheeks flushed and his eyes narrowed, a more pressing thought occurred: Whoa, it could all end right here. This was the summer of 2022. For two years, I’d been the ghostwriter on Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” and now, reviewing his latest edits in a middle-of-the-night Zoom session, we’d come to a difficult passage. Harry, at the close of gruelling military exercises in rural England, gets captured by pretend terrorists. It’s a simulation, but the…

If you enjoyed Ben Affleck’s “Air,” currently in theatres, but felt that it was too puffed up, here comes a lesson in deflation. Matt Johnson’s “BlackBerry” is a reminder that, in dramatic terms, rise and fall is almost always more gripping, and more morally provoking, than rise and rise. For those who were off-planet, or awaiting conception, at the dawn of the millennium, the title may need some explanation. A BlackBerry was a portable communication device, equipped with buttons so itty-bitty that they could not be comfortably deployed by anybody larger than Rumpelstiltskin. Nonetheless, for a while, owning a BlackBerry was all the rage. It could slot into a holster on your belt, allowing you to draw it like a Colt and fire off a lethal message to that guy…

The covid-19 Public Health Emergency, which has been maintained for more than three years, across two Presidential Administrations, will lapse on May 11th, bringing a symbolic and a regulatory end to a crisis that has claimed more than 1.1 million lives in the United States and disrupted nearly every aspect of American society. The expiration takes effect several weeks after President Joe Biden signed a Republican-led bill, supported by no small number of Senate Democrats, to end a separate covid-related national emergency, which had granted the government additional crisis powers, and several months after he casually remarked at the Detroit Auto Show that the “pandemic is over.” The message is clear: it’s time to move on from the plague years. Our understanding of covid often suffers from a linguistic determinism.…

A week ago, I never would’ve told you that I had a problem with not drinking. I wasn’t one of those people who got messy, cracking open another LaCroix and failing to hide their burps behind a hand. My sobriety had never caused me to commit a social faux pas, like asking friends if I could contribute less to a bill since I’d ordered only a mint tea. As many revelations do, mine began with an online quiz. I was sitting on the couch, listening to the fizz of my kombucha on the coffee table. Do you look forward to your first nonalcoholic drink of the day? I kept scrolling, trying not to think about last Friday at 4 P.M., when a “quick turnaround” e-mail appeared in my in-box…

ACROSS 1 Imaginative6 Rubbish10 ___-wren (Australian songbird)13 Summer month in Chile14 Sticky roll15 “No ___!”16 Protagonist of Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye”19 Charters?20 Author’s addressee21 Capital of the Tokugawa shogunate22 Queen who first appears in “The Phantom Menace”23 Cutting24 Base exercise26 Prefix with a double meaning?28 It’s long and soft … or long and scaly29 U.S. Open winner in 1994 and 199730 ___ run31 Excess32 Jewelry that serves as a sorority symbol?37 “Changes” singer Phil38 Cartesian conclusion39 Parrot of New Zealand40 “Bamboozled” director41 Initialism indicating an unknown42 Complaint46 “This is important to me”48 They may be turned50 Piccadilly privy51 Wheel of Fortune and the like53 Tuscan cathedral city54 Non-relatives?56 Through57 Luncheon ender58 “Doing Justice” author Bharara59 Hosp. test60 “Jimson ___/White Flower No. 1” (O’Keeffe painting sold in 2014 for $44.4…