Innholdsfortegnelse for May 29, 2023 i The New Yorker

Stephen Satterfield, the host of the Netflix food-history series “High on the Hog,” was bent over the stove in his parents’ kitchen, near Atlanta. It was one o’clock on a February afternoon, and he was preparing Sunday dinner for the family. Most of the meal was canonical Black Southern food: turnip greens simmered for hours, cheese grits, biscuits baked in a cast-iron skillet. The main course was catfish, coated in cornmeal and sizzling in avocado oil. The fish, though, had a widely disputed accompaniment. With a dimpled smile, Satterfield lifted a lid to reveal a pot full of spaghetti and tomato sauce. Depending on whom you ask, this combination is either as congenial as shrimp and grits or as regrettable as a bad marriage. The food writer Adrian Miller once…

For Bragonzi, the only beautiful thing in the sad life of the boarding school in Quarto dei Mille was the soccer matches. And yet even that beauty was anguished. He realized it as early as the first match, when he saw that, once the moment came to shoot, even the best, even the oldest players suffered a kind of muscular contraction, as if forcing themselves to hold back; and, in fact, what emerged was a weak, uncertain shot, which the goalie blocked with ease. And to think that a second earlier that same forward had seemed full of confident vigor, impetuously swooping down onto the ball, defending it, rushing with long strides toward the goal area—but then… but then that feeble shot. Only at the third match did he make…

Parfit, by David Edmonds (Princeton). Widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the past century, Derek Parfit was born to a British missionary family in China, and spent most of his life at an Oxford college whose fellows have no teaching responsibilities to distract them from research. Parfit made contributions to questions about identity, future generations, and freedom, but his central project was to argue for the objective nature of morality. Edmonds’s companionable biography tracks this work while assembling a portrait of how Parfit grew from a young boy with strong moral intuitions to a kind, perfectionistic man who believed that the stakes of his mission were so high that he should devote almost all of his waking hours to it. Biting the Hand, by Julia Lee…

LINGUISTIC CONNECTION Carina Chocano, in her piece about Duolingo’s founder, Luis von Ahn, notes that many people use the app instead of indulging in social media or television (“The Language Game,” April 24th & May 1st). I began much the same way, using Duolingo as a distraction from less enriching pursuits, but I have subsequently become a devoted user. My current Duolingo streak is more than two thousand days. At the beginning of the pandemic, I used the Duolingo Classes tool to host a free French-film club, whose members would gather on Zoom every two weeks to discuss a preselected film in intermediate French. The club was open to the public, and new people joined every session, but a core group of regulars emerged. We continued until the end of…

Prayer for you out west.Where night falls only after mine.The second curtain. That enigmatic dark,and daylight so clarifying, it hurts.Prayer for the headless deer in Saratogaand the thirty lobster shells we buriedin a small Connecticut town.For the elementary-school kids rushing headfirstinto the Brooklyn twilight. For the poets who came beforeand saw the purple northeast, blizzard-fullbut no quakes, and wanted for nothing else.For the gold shops of Jackson Heightsand the dead soldiers in Mt. Auburn.For the dead who just want to remain deadand not dance into the speech of men.For the tiny churches and their sullied bells.For every gas station. For the tri-states.Yes, even for Jersey’s ease. For Café Paulette,our last meal, before the city fell.Prayer for our Hart Crane. For our bridge.The blue one. For your return to Prospect Park,where…

And then Keats’s ghost foundthat he could no longer loveFanny Brawne. He’d escapedthe body like a loveletter from its envelope, and he’d flownlike a love letter in a windstorm.He’d seen that the wordsformed from ink melted in the rain.Words, he now knew—and he’d once beensuch a devotee—didn’t matter,or didn’t matter so much as he’d believedthey mattered. Something mattered, he knew,but whatever it was he couldn’t putwords to it, or he didn’t have the heartto put words to it. He did feel love,but it was an arrow without a target.It was diffuse, like an atomizedperfume, or stars as the poor see them,who cannot afford glasses. He sawthat Fanny, as she was known,was a concept, just as he had been a concept.They each inhabited the same amountof space, like a tablespoonof butter…

Music has its seasons, and people have their needs. At some point in the autumn of 1979, I became obsessed with a few bars of Mozart. I was thirteen, fundamentally cheerful but convinced I was fundamentally melancholy, and ravenous for all the music I could get my hands on, especially music that made me tearful. My father, a man who in later life would think nothing of driving forty miles on his own to hear Bach or Beethoven, had recently seen the English pianist Clifford Curzon in concert, playing Mozart’s last piano concerto, No. 27 (K. 595). I didn’t know the piece, but I knew about Curzon. My father collected pianists and their performances. Curzon had studied with Artur Schnabel and Wanda Landowska, and, above all, Curzon was English, and…

MAY 24 – 30, 2023 Pickleball mania reaches a fever pitch with CityPickle, in Central Park’s Wollman Rink, where fourteen newly installed courts welcome amateurs and professionals alike. The tennis-adjacent game—in which two or four players volley a plastic Whiffle-like ball with paddles—has become increasingly popular in recent years, owing to its high ratio of ease to enjoyment; at the Park, through Oct. 9, pickleballers can reserve clinics, private lessons, and open play on the courts from 7 A.M. to 9 P.M. daily, via city-pickle.com.  As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. ART Jesse Duquette Instagram’s “most shadow-banned cartoonist,” Duquette first garnered attention for his comic-a-day project “The Daily Don,” which skewered the Trump Administration. In this exhibition, “Cryptids & Creepshows,” the New York artist exhibits…

An S.U.V., its windows tinted to dusk, delivered the singer Kesha to the Ruttkowski;68 gallery on Cortlandt Alley one recent afternoon. Inside the space, an Italian artist named Francesco Igory Deiana waited for her embrace. A Kesha hello goes for the neck. Deiana leaned forward, putting his tattooed hand in her tattooed hand. Not long ago, Deiana, Kesha, and their respective boyfriends had hung out on what Kesha called a “secret beach in Hawaii.” Setting aside an iced matcha, Kesha removed her sunglasses and squinted at the light. She sighed and reported on her condition: “I feel underslept and overexcitable.” There had been Dua Lipa’s Met Gala after-party the night before, at Virgo, and the next night there would be a listening party for her fifth album, “Gag Order.” Looking…

The woods I know best, love best, are made of Northern hardwoods, sugar maple and white ash, timber-tall; black and yellow birch, tiger-skinned; seedlings and saplings of blighted beech and striped maple creeping up, knock-kneed, from a forest floor of princess pine and Christmas fern, shag-rugged. White-tailed deer dart through softwood stands of pine and hemlock, bucks and does, the last leaping fawn, leaving tracks that look like tiny human lungs, trails that people can only ever see in the snow, even though, long after snow-melt, dogs can smell them, tracking, snuffling, shuddering with the thrill of the hunt and noshing on deer scat for dog treats. I make lists of finds, two-winged, four-footed, and rolling: black-throated green warblers and blue-headed vireos, porcupines and salamanders, tin cans and old tires,…

A few months ago, the writer Alice Sebold began to experience a kind of vertigo. She looked at a cup on the table, and it no longer appeared solid. Her vision fractured. Objects multiplied. Her awareness of depth shifted suddenly. Sometimes she glanced down and for a split second felt that there was no floor. Sebold and I had recently begun corresponding, a little more than a year after she learned that the wrong man had been sent to prison, in 1982, for raping her. In 1999, she had published “Lucky,” a best-selling memoir about the rape and the subsequent conviction of a young Black man named Anthony Broadwater. Then she wrote “The Lovely Bones,” a novel about a girl who is raped and murdered, which has been described as…

Everything has a history, and writers have for thousands of years tried to pull together a universal history of everything. “In earliest times,” the Hellenistic historian Polybius mused, in the second century B.C., “history was a series of unrelated episodes, but from now on history becomes an organic whole. Europe and Africa with Asia, and Asia with Africa and Europe.” For the past hundred years or so, each generation of English-language readers has been treated to a fresh blockbuster trying to synthesize world history. H. G. Wells’s “The Outline of History” (1920), written “to be read as much by Hindus or Moslems or Buddhists as by Americans and Western Europeans,” argued “that men form one universal brotherhood… that their individual lives, their nations and races, interbreed and blend and go…