Innholdsfortegnelse for May 22, 2023 i The New Yorker

The Korean barbecue joint near L.A. wasn’t a crime scene, exactly. But on a muggy fall afternoon two of Mexico’s top wildlife traffickers sat in the back, eating lunch and talking shop. One of their most profitable lines of business is smuggling the buoyancy bladders of an endangered fish called the totoaba. The scab-colored bladders are remarkably yucky-looking, and the effort to harvest them from the Sea of Cortez has driven the vaquita porpoise to the verge of extinction. But they taste great in soup and make your skin glow! Or so the folk wisdom has it. They’ve become costly enough in China—as much as fifty thousand dollars a kilogram—that they are often bestowed as gifts or bribes or simply cherished as collectibles, like Fabergé eggs. The traffickers, Harry and…

PLAYING WITH FOOD Antonia Hitchens, in her article about Taco Bell’s food-innovation staff, states that the company Dairy Management Inc. “was behind” the idea for Pizza Hut’s cheese-stuffed crust (“The Crunch Bunch,” April 24th & May 1st). I worked at Pizza Hut from 1992 to 1995, and I was in the Pizza Hut R. & D. kitchens on the day the stuffed-crust pizza was conceived. The credit for this invention should go to Patty Scheibmeir, who had the idea to put something tasty inside the edge of the pizza. (She even tried apple filling, as part of a combination entrée and dessert for the engineers who lurked around the R. & D. kitchens at lunchtime.) The eventual rollout of the Stuffed Crust Pizza was the result of an incredibly talented…

In the summer, opportunities to see dance—and to shake a leg—in the open air proliferate. By mid-June, the main plaza at Lincoln Center, normally a redoubt of monumental calm, will be outfitted with a dance floor. Evenings of social dancing to salsa, swing, and soul music are all part of the center’s Summer for the City programming (June 14-Aug. 12). But, if you’d rather watch than participate, the BAAND Together Dance Festival returns to Damrosch Park (July 25-29), with shared bills by Ballet Hispánico, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem. A few steps beyond the crowds salsaing the night away, American Ballet Theatre holds its summer season, at the Metropolitan Opera House (June 22-July 22). It kicks off…

Just as flowers take root in graveyards, the lavish, colorful installations of the Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson reflect nature’s beauty while revealing dark truths, particularly relating to colonialist legacies. A monumental glass peacock and a glittering flock of sculptural vultures are among the elements in her site-specific project, titled “… things come to thrive … in the shedding … in the molting …,” at the New York Botanical Garden. (Opens May 27.) The latest iteration of moma’s influential exhibition series “New Photography” unites seven photographers—Kelani Abass, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Yagazie Emezi, Amanda Iheme, Abraham Oghobase, Karl Ohiri, and Logo Oluwamuyiwa—who work in a range of international locations, but who all have ties to the energetic art scene in Lagos, Nigeria. (Opens May 28.) The Frick Collection continues its inspired…

Pale blue, the split days pure radium,bittersweet lace in the snow-white field,the red seeds ladybirds, gold husks papyrus,the fine print reading, fly away home. But we are home. Morose, angelic,your dirigibles flap their glassine wingsabove the pond, the ice boat’s matchboxtraps ignite their peacock halos. Our smoky offerings provoke, not please—eventhe green-gold coverlet, its diamondpanes unstitched, shifts from us off the bed.Live here with me? Twilight’s innamorati smudge the lawn. From the ceiling youlook down, holding Eros’ dumbstruck thunderbolt.…

Riding the brakes bumper to bumper down Thirty-fourth Street, at last we cross Second Avenue and our father toes the gas and spins the giant steering wheel, mahogany and fit for a ship, for that’s what this metallic pink-champagne-colored Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham is: an eighteen-and-a-half-foot urban yacht, and the least practical vehicle imaginable for sailing through bankrupt, crime-ridden, late-nineteen-seventies New York City. We follow the slight curve of the down ramp until we’re sucked into the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel with a whomp, and the pressure changes as the car descends, the soundscape becomes tamped down, interiorized, like when we jump into the pool and hear the thud of blood in our ears. Kneeling by the window, because there are no seat belts to prevent us, we see the…

“The Honeymooners” (1955-56), the greatest American television comedy, is—to a degree more evident now than then—essentially a series about public transportation in New York. Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) is a New York City bus driver, deeply proud to be so and drawing a salary sufficient to support a nonworking wife in a Brooklyn apartment, not to mention a place in a thriving bowling league and membership in the Loyal Order of Raccoon Lodge. His employer is the Gotham Bus Company, which seems to be the sort of private-public enterprise that, like the I.R.T., built the subways. He and his best friend, Ed Norton (Art Carney), who works in the sewers, make daily use of the subway and bus system, which was designed to whisk the outer-borough working classes into light-industrial…

In the Orchard, by Eliza Minot (Knopf). This novel, an examination of motherhood, unfolds in the course of a night and a day. Maisie, weeks after having her fourth child, lies awake breastfeeding and fretting about money. Her hormonal, sleep-deprived thoughts veer from the banal to the profound: “She couldn’t get purchase anywhere, couldn’t get traction on anything.” The next morning, her family makes its annual visit to a local apple orchard. There, a succession of encounters reminds her of the punishing unpredictability of human existence. Maisie’s contemplation of life as “a series of languishments and flourishes, of withering and blooming,” aptly describes this rhapsodic, plotless book, which nevertheless carries a stinging twist at its end. A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, by Jai Chakrabarti (Knopf). The fifteen stories…

MAY 17 – 23, 2023 The triumphant installation by the L.A. phenom Lauren Halsey on the Met’s roof, on view through Oct. 22, is clearly related to the museum’s Temple of Dendur, constructed in ancient Nubia. The faces of the sphinxes attending Halsey’s piece—“the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I)”—are modelled on members of the artist’s family, a majestic reunion of the living and the ancestral. As one of the many inscriptions on the walls of the sculpture reads, “We Are Still Here.” As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. THE THEATRE Tartuffe or the Hypocrite Molière’s 1664 lampoon of religiosity premièred to such furor that it was banned after the first performance. The original script, lost to history after the playwright…

Every Memorial Day weekend, Death of Classical presents a concert on the rolling grounds of Green-Wood Cemetery, with food, drink, and an alliterative title. This year’s festivities, “Tacos, Tequila & Tavener’s ‘Protecting Veil,’” pair mezcal tastings with the searching spirituality of Tavener’s piece for solo cello and string ensemble (May 26). Also decamping to more pastoral environs, the New York Philharmonic (June 13-16) and the Metropolitan Opera (select dates June 20-30) travel to parks across the boroughs, bearing gifts from the standard repertory (for the Phil, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; for the Met, Verdi and Puccini arias). With the Philharmonic away, Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City takes over David Geffen Hall. The pluralistic programming includes “Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower’” (July 13-14), a genre-crossing stage adaptation of Butler’s…

Last week, while Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy met to discuss the debt ceiling, Carole King walked through the rain to the Capitol to make her case for the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, a bill that would designate millions of acres in the West as wilderness and put an end to logging in these areas. “You can get members of Congress when they’re walking out,” she said of the south entrance to the Capitol. “When I came here with Representative Carolyn Maloney”—the main sponsor of the bill—“she brought Mark Meadows over to me, and he said, ‘I’ll take a look at your bill.’ I knew he wouldn’t.” King, who carried a LeSportsac backpack and an umbrella from MOMA, has periodically ventured to the Capitol over the past few decades…

Philipp Plein, the forty-five-year-old German fashion designer, is thin and muscular, with stiffy gelled hair, a stubbled jawline, and arms covered in tattoos (the word “Billionaire” in fat lettering; a cross with “Veni Vidi Vici”; a sad-faced Jesus). Since founding his eponymous clothing brand, in the late nineteen-nineties, Plein has become an effective hawker of loudly luxurious wares, beloved by customers with a taste for the extravagant, if often sneered at by the fashion establishment. His runway shows are elaborate affairs, featuring pyrotechnics and, occasionally, Jet Skis. “I’m trying to fuck your mind tonight,” he told an audience in Milan, in2015. For that show, which was opened by the rapper Azealia Banks, Plein had a roller coaster (which some of the models rode) installed on the catwalk, leading to media…

In another time, or another place, Lucy Easthope says, she would have been a fortune-teller—a woman of opaque origin and beliefs, who travelled from campfire to town square, speaking of calamities that had come to pass and those which hung in the stars. Easthope, who is forty-four, is one of Britain’s most experienced disaster advisers. She has worked on almost every major emergency involving the deaths of British citizens since the September 11th attacks, a catalogue of destruction and surprise that includes storms, suicide bombings, air crashes, and chemical attacks. Depending on the assignment, Easthope might find herself immersed at a scene for days, months, or years. “I am the collector of a very specific type of story and the keeper of a very particular type of secret sorrow,” she…

Again and again, we’ll put our shoulder to the wheel on which we’re broken. Stretched out at the heart of a replica of the stone sarcophagus we once believed to “eat flesh,” we still have a straight shot at the Strait of Gibraltar. Where we first found a shoulder to cry on. Long before the flash of an iron-rimmed wheel on a limestone pavement. Where we first had a little heart to heart. Where we first developed our sense of the straight and narrow. Threw the first stone. First rubbed shoulders with pigment traders. First made a color wheel. First thought to flush dyes through our own flesh, so as to map what lies within our hearts. First reinvented the wheel that will run straight only with a camber. First…

In the early years of our country, public men who felt maligned could end up killing over it. The duel that resulted in Alexander Hamilton’s death was prompted by a letter, in the Albany Register, by someone claiming that Hamilton had called Aaron Burr “a dangerous man, and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of the government,” and had expressed a “still more despicable opinion” (without further specifics). Instead of redressing an insult to honor through violence, Burr could have tried to sue under the law of defamation—the legal system’s attempt to channel retaliation into a court process. He was certainly familiar with it; as a lawyer, he had used it to go after critics. One probable reason he didn’t was that it was undignified for…

Whales died so I could look like “W this,” seventeen-year-old Charlotte (India Amarteifio) says matter-of-factly to her brother, Adolphus (Tunji Kasim), on their way to London, where she is to marry the king of England. The whalebone corset she’s obliged to wear—“rather delicate and also very, very sharp”—has rendered her immobile for the siblings’ six-hour stagecoach journey, while her dress, made of two-hundred-year-old lace and encrusted with sapphires, imposes its own restrictions. “I am forced into a ludicrous gown so stylish that, if I move too much,” Charlotte continues, “I might be sliced and stabbed to death by my undergarments.” She deadpans, “Oh, how joyful it is to be a lady.” Welcome back to the pop-feminist and preposterously pretty world of “Bridgerton,” where the sugariness of the eye candy pairs…