Innholdsfortegnelse for June 26, 2023 i The New Yorker

Each American President tends to find the broadcast medium that most suits his needs. If F.D.R. was the radio President, J.F.K. was the TV President, and Trump was the Twitter President, could Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—a practitioner of a paranoid, conspiratorial, and only occasionally fact-based brand of politics—be the first podcast candidate? A couple of weeks ago, after doing a town hall with the Sirius XM radio host Michael Smerconish, at a theatre in Norristown, Pennsylvania, Kennedy admitted that the podcast might be his best path forward. The format fits his message—twisted diatribes against vaccines, punctuated with wonky “have you read the study?”-style exhortations. “The same way my uncle discovered television in 1960 and realized it was going to be a new path to the White House, podcasts are a…

Early snow. Garbagetrucks in the alley pushingslush around, chewing. Gnawed by a hundredminor obligations, I drawa bath, then sit on the toilet fully clothed. I wanta therapist, I said to Meg,smarter than me. You charm them, she said. Youneed a man, someone the ageyour dad would be now. How old would you be now?I do the math and come upwith a number so low I check again. Nothingchanges. I go out and dragthe bins back to the house, then lower myselfinto the lukewarm tub. I let halfthe water out and turn the tap, mixing the originalwater with water that wouldscald me if I touched it.…

For two years, no one travelled. Countries closed their borders to other countries that had closed their borders first. When borders reopened, everyone began travelling again, in full force. There would always be another variant. Best to see the world while you could. Around this time, I developed insomnia and began driving by myself at night. The first night, I drove to a twenty-four-hour supermarket. I stood in front of the frozen-food section, occasionally opening a freezer door to grab something, then changing my mind. It was not that, in year three, I couldn’t travel, but to do so was ill-advised. My husband was an American citizen, and we lived in New Jersey. Renewing my work visa yet again seemed like a complete waste of everyone’s time, so we’d hired…

Where, in a poem, is “here”? Suppose a poem depicts a scene. When you read it, do you feel yourself transported there? Or do you feel in the presence of the poet at her desk, recalling the scene and telling you about it? For Megan Fernandes, “here” often seems to designate a city. There’s New York City, where she lives, but also Mumbai, Los Angeles, Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Nairobi, Guatemala City, Madrid, Lisbon, Palermo, Philadelphia, Miami, Venice, Dar es Salaam, White Plains, Phoenix, Zurich, Vienna, and London: twenty cities named across the forty-nine poems of her third collection, “I Do Everything I’m Told” (Tin House). The book bears the dedication “For the restless.” Fernandes, who comes from a Goan family by way of Tanzania, counts herself among them. And…

SIMON’S FAITH Amanda Petrusich writes thoughtfully about Paul Simon’s music, recognizing the influences of Christian hymns, mystical theology, Brazilian candomblé, and American baseball (A Critic at Large, June 5th). She notes his spiritual seeking and his “expansive, openended notion of God.” It’s important also to understand the mostly secular Jewish culture in which Paul, Art Garfunkel, and their friends grew up. Paul was my neighbor, classmate, and crush, from elementary school through high school, in Queens. Whether or not we really believed in a personified deity, my peers and I identified as Jewish. Our families were not strictly observant, but we grew up hearing and chanting traditional Biblical texts, prayers, and psalms, in the local synagogue on Sabbath or around the dinner table on holidays. And we could never forget…

Last summer, with the momentousness of a gender-reveal party and the exuberance of a ticker-tape parade, the United States Army announced its first combat-ready bra to the world. They called it the Army Tactical Brassiere (a.k.a. the A.T.B.). Conceived four years ago, the garment is still being tinkered with, but one day it will be a wardrobe staple for all women in the Army. David Accetta, the chief public-affairs offcer for the research division developing the undergarment, the DEVCOM Soldier Center (“DEVCOM” stands for U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command), told Army Times that, if the brassiere is officially approved by the Army Uniform Board, “we would seethat as a win for female soldiers.” Ashley Cushon, the project engineer of the team working on the item, assured me that it…

Trying to get a sense of all London theatre in one mad, weeklong dash—you can get to nine shows in seven days if you put your mind to it—is a fool’s errand. Casting my mind back, I am left mainly with an impression of people surging noisily in and out of velvet rooms. My far-and-away favorite production—and a complete surprise to me—was the musical “Operation Mincemeat,” at the Fortune Theatre, written by the collective SpitLip: David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts. The title refers to an actual 1943 war maneuver, in which British intelligence disguised a corpse as a downed pilot from the Royal Marines, complete with a briefcase full of phony documents, and set him afloat to wash up on the Spanish coast. Sober-minded accounts of…

JUNE 21 – 27, 2023 In 2019, Kenny Leon directed a free Shakespeare in the Park production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” set in the suburbs of Atlanta. One pandemic later, he returns to the Delacorte with another update on a classic, and, unsurprisingly, it’s darker fare. “Hamlet” (in previews, opening June 28) stars Ato Blankson-Wood (above) as a bereaved son trying to get a handle on his grief. In a departure for the Public, there will be no second major show; instead, the sixty-one-year-old theatre will close for modernizing upgrades. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. THE THEATRE The Comeuppance Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s unsettlingly up-tothe-moment new play, directed, with loving attention, by Eric Ting, is a mostly realistic portrayal of four high-school friends who have…

Angela Wright became the principal of Fairfield Court Elementary School, in Richmond, Virginia, in the fall of 2020, but she didn’t meet her students until a year later. At the start of the pandemic, Richmond had moved all of its twenty-two thousand students to remote learning. By the time they returned to the classroom, in September, 2021, after every other school district in the state, it had been eighteen months since they’d been inside a school building. For Wright, the posting at Fairfield Court was the culmination of a steady rise: from instructional assistant to teacher to assistant principal to principal. When her father saw her first monthly paycheck as a teacher, he asked, “Is this for a week?” “He said, ‘Are you sure this is what you want…

The wild success of the Ice Bucket Challenge, one of the past decade’s feel-good social-media sensations, obscured its origins as a form of extortion. Its source, though murky, might be traced to Norway, where early nominees were pressured to choose between jumping into a frigid body of water and taking care of the weekend’s bar tab. By early 2014, the moral ante had been upped: the penalty for noncompliance became, rather more nobly, a contribution to medical research. This structure—which incentivized bravado at the expense of charity—persisted until the spring, when American firefighters helped repackage the experience. Now a high-pressure hosing was the reward for a donation to a colleague’s cause of choice. That July, a golfer decanted water on his own head in an effort to cheer up his…

Let them eat corn dogs. Let thempeel from its sack a freezer-burnt popsicle,lime, green as an alien gem. Let them pluck from the strung garland of chips. Sugaring their lips with the fine gritof Sour Patch Kids, these strange childrenlift to their mouths those soft little bodiesand chew. They forget, for just a moment, the waterfrom which they’ve been banished.Then a pause in the guard station’s country radio—they pirouette back and begin,again, to sulk. Gawk. Let them. It’s nearly time to reclaimtheir pool. Each day, each hour,they have dragged their soaking bodiesfrom its coolness and allowed their mothersthe reapplication of lotion and the pettingof their wet, tender heads. No agony is greaterthan theirs. Never have I felt so powerful.Aren’t I magnificent,floating on my back dead center? Aren’t Ia kingdom of…

Fire Weather, by John Vaillant (Knopf). In 2016, a wildfire ripped through the oil town of Fort McMurray, in Alberta, hot enough to vaporize toilets and bend a street light in half. It was the most expensive disaster in Canada’s history. This alarming account tracks the destruction, the role of fire in industry in the past hundred and fifty years, and the disregarded alarms about the environment raised by scientists, dating as far back as the eighteen-fifties. “Climate science came of age in tandem with the oil and automotive industries,” Vaillant writes, and their futures are as linked as their pasts. The number of places facing fates similar to Fort McMurray’s is rapidly increasing, even as “our reckoning with industrial CO2” moves painfully slowly. A Stranger in Your Own City, by Ghaith…