Innholdsfortegnelse for June 12, 2023 i The New Yorker

Michael Schulman (“Comic Effect,” p. 34) is a staff writer at the magazine. His new book, “Oscar Wars,” was published in February. Jiayang Fan (“What Am I Without You?,” p. 18) became a New Yorker staff writer in 2016. She is at work on her first book, “Motherland.” George Saunders (Fiction, p. 56) won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for “Lincoln in the Bardo.” Most recently, he published “Liberation Day: Stories.” Marisa Acocella (Sketchpad, p. 17) is a cartoonist and a graphic novelist. Her latest book is “The Big She-Bang.” Frank X. Gaspar (Poem, p. 60) has published five poetry collections and three novels, including, most recently, “The Poems of Renata Ferreira.” Merve Emre (Books, p. 70), a contributing writer, is working on a new book, “Love and Other Useless Pursuits.”…

A few Saturday mornings ago, I made a grievous logistical error. There was a half-marathon in Brooklyn, where I live, and it was pouring rain. And yet I packed my entire family into our station wagon and set out for Staten Island: I had a reservation at a new Turkish restaurant, Zara Forest Grill, and a little traffic wasn’t going to stand in my way. The G.P.S. estimated forty-five minutes. An hour later, we’d barely gone a mile. Even in the best circumstances, a trip to Staten Island from any other borough is a commitment, a decent journey by bridge or boat. For Zara Forest Grill, in Graniteville, which is closer to New Jersey than Manhattan, it’s a commitment I’m willing to make. The following Monday, I went for breakfast,…

Andrew Janoff, a thirty-five-year-old e-commerce manager who lives on the Upper West Side, spent much of last year in a neighborhood dispute with Zabar’s, the venerable appetizing store on Broadway. That’s his version. When asked about Janoff, Scott Goldshine, the general manager of Zabar’s, said, “I don’t know who he is.” It’s an art-related dustup. On West Seventy-ninth Street, on the wall of a former Designer Shoe Warehouse, a block south of Zabar’s, is a stencil by the British street artist Banksy. Known as the Zabar’s Banksy, it is likely the last remaining public Banksy in New York, created during the artist’s monthlong residency, in 2013. The other few dozen New York Banksys have been variously covered over, defaced, sealed in private collections, or auctioned off. One evening last summer,…

“We have been planning for this,” [Paramount C.E.O. Bob Bakish] told Wall Street analysts… speaking to the WGA strike…. “We do have many levers to pull.” —Deadline, May 4th. “Tipplers”: a situation-comedy teleplay for the 18-34 demographic. INT. SALOON — NIGHT The neighborhood watering hole is populated by blue-collar denizens of an untapped metropolitan market (one background extra is Black). In walks FRANKLIN (portly, salt of the earth, non-SAG). FRANKLIN: Do not even converse with me until I have consumed my first mug of beer. Laughter from audience—they expect this kind of “’tude” from FRANKLIN. He sits before the barkeep, CHARLES (handsome, magnetic; I could play him for scale), who wipes alcoholic-beverage mugs. CHARLES: Aren’t things better down at your municipal workplace? FRANKLIN: Yes, ever since we voted to dissolve…

ACROSS 1 Leave out 5 Parking spots at a pub? 14 Update, as a kitchen 15 “Hotel ___” (Eagles song about a place where “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave”) 16 Far from frazzled 17 Embarrassing discovery at the Louvre, say 18 Some beer-garden offerings 19 Three-___ (back-to-back-to-back championships) 20 Makes more bearable 21 Stare, as into a crystal ball 23 “Some aquatic mammals at the zoo escaped. It was otter chaos!,” for example 24 Electrical device that might get mistaken for a surge protector 28 Media company based in London 31 Flitting between numerous tasks 32 Nation south of Ecuador 33 Adams who photographed Yosemite 34 ___ Maria (brand of coffee liqueur) 35 Flower at the center of a seventeenth-century Dutch market crash…

You may think that child labor was abolished a century ago, at least in the United States. That was never quite true. The Fair Labor Standards Act, passed during the New Deal, outlawed “oppressive child labor” but exempted agricultural work from many of its restrictions, which, in the decades since, has left hundreds of thousands of children in the fields. In every industry, enforcement of the law has been uneven. States have always been free to strengthen protections, which some did, but challenges to the federal standards have been rare. The Reagan Administration, in its pro-business zeal, proposed lowering the standards, but abandoned the idea under fire from teachers, parents, unions, and Democratic lawmakers armed with Dickens references. Today, however, child labor in America is on the rise. The number…

The musician S. Carey, whose first name is Sean, and who is a drummer for the band Bon Iver, goes fly-fishing whenever he has the chance. Largemouth bass in Half Moon Lake with his kids, near their home, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Cutthroat trout while on tour in Montana. He recently started organizing his solo-tour schedule around fly-fishing: a trout trip to a secret stretch of river in the Catskills (“Some places you have to be a bit closed-lips about”) was followed by a concert in Brooklyn, and then by an afternoon angling for bluegill and bass in Central Park, with two of his bandmates, Zach Hanson and Ben Lester. “I’m not, like, driven by success or fame,” Carey said. “I’d rather go fishing.” Snapping turtles stretched out along the…

The Museum of the Albemarle, on the eastern shore of North Carolina, is a spacious building the color of sand and sea glass. It’s in Elizabeth City, about as far from the Research Triangle as Baltimore is from New York City, but you can get there and back in the same day if you know how to drive fast without getting pulled over. “There are a hundred counties in this state, and I’ve spent time in every one,” Sailor Jones, a democracy activist, told me this past fall, on his way to speak at the museum. He was a skillful multi-tasker—sipping from a huge fountain Coke, tweaking a Rihanna-heavy playlist, and taking call after call on speakerphone, all while bombing his Toyota 4Runner down an empty stretch of highway…

On October 5, 1908, a hammy melodrama made its début in Washington, D.C.: Israel Zangwill’s “The Melting-Pot,” a four-act play that introduced the dominant metaphor for the American immigrant experience. The plot is thin—a New York tenement romance threatened by an Old World blood feud is mended by the salvific power of patriotism. Mostly, it’s a pretext for pontificating about a new American religion. “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!” the protagonist, a struggling Jewish composer named David Quixano, proclaims. “What is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!” The critics were…

For almost two decades, Sven Marquardt has worked as the doorman and principal sorter at Berghain, the Berlin night club. He has been as responsible as anyone for its singular admixture of interesting humans, which, along with its freethinking ethos and its killer sound system, has made it world-famous and very hard to get into. Typically posted by the entrance, dressed in black, face-tattooed, with lower-lip piercings that look like silver fangs, he has become in his own way world-notorious, too—as an embodiment of Berghain’s old East Berliner queer-punk spirit, and as the intimidating assessor of that spirit’s traces in the aspirants who stand in line. The criteria for entry are obstinately imprecise. They aren’t his alone, but for better or worse he has become their face. He has milked…

“Will I live to see its end?” your mother asks. She is sixty-nine years old and lies in the hospital room where she has been marooned for the past eight years, shipwrecked in her own body. “It” is the story that you are now writing—this beginning you have yet to imagine and the ending she will not live to see. Write as if you were dying, Annie Dillard once said. But what if you are writing in competition with death? What if the story you are telling is racing against death? In your dreams, you are always running. Running to catch your mother, running to intercept her before she reaches the end. In your dreams, your mother has no legs, no arms, no spine—no body. She is smooth and pure,…

Back and forth we go, through time, in Celine Song’s début film, “Past Lives,” and there’s not a DeLorean in sight. After a brief opening scene, in a New York bar, the words “24 years earlier” appear onscreen. For a second, I misread “years” as “hours”—a more manageable flashback—but no, Song really is grabbing us by the hand and asking us to leap before we look. The first leap takes us to Seoul, where Na Young (Seung-ah Moon), aged twelve, lives with her parents and her sister. She walks home from school with a boy, Hae Sung (Seung-min Yim), who, for once, has got better grades than she has. She could not be more annoyed. He calls her a psycho, as if that were a quality to be admired. The…