Innholdsfortegnelse for July 10-17, 2023 i The New Yorker

Julian Lucas (The Talk of the Town, p. 15, “Galaxy Brain,” p. 32) became a New Yorker staff writer in 2021. Souvankham Thammavongsa (“The Ice-Cream Truck,” p. 37) won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize for her short-story collection, “How to Pronounce Knife.” Jamil Jan Kochai (“A Family Wedding,” p. 61) is the author of “99 Nights in Logar” and “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories.” Tayi Tibble (Poem, p. 38) is an Indigenous writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. She is the author of two poetry collections, “Poūkahangatus” and “Rangikura.” Sam Lipsyte (“A Lesson for the Sub,” p. 51) teaches writing at Columbia. He most recently published “No One Left to Come Looking for You.” Rebecca Curtis (“Roberta at the Morrison,” p. 65) is the author of the story…

You can never live the same party twice & that makes me want to cry.That makes me want to get so high that even the stars start trying it on. Searching for Te Kore until I’m fully gone. Now we can start again.Kick the night up from the earth, in our platform boots, & let the light in. This is what made me tender like a pork bone boiling in every situationI could barely sit in. On the flax mat going at god for hours & hours. On the whenua calming Ruaumoko, while the police lasso the land.In the car outside the station, my mother dependent on his rib. I had my hands out the window, weighing the air to see if it felt like a Saturday nightor a Sunday,…

This poem is happening in Paris, Francewhere it’s raining and we’re all so drunkthat it’s impossible to keep a secret.Every morning the waiters say bonjourand every morning I drink my coffeewith a kind of American sadnessthey’ve started saying hello.Hello, beautiful man I’ll never haveon Rue Charlot. Hello, woman smokingby the Seine and closing her eyesbetween drags. We’re all lost, even in Paris,and if this place won’t take my mind off youI guess I’m in love and in for more rain.You are the man on Rue Charlotsomewhere in Brooklyn, peeling an orangeand thinking of buying a suit.I would like to be an orange in that suit.I would like all the men on Rue Charlotsacross the world to put in their resignationsand stop torturing me. Let me chase fireon another street, in…

The Lost Sons of Omaha, by Joe Sexton (Scribner). This anatomy of a killing in 2020, at a Black Lives Matter protest, tries to recover the essences of two men involved, who were “reduced to grotesques” in the distorting landscape of social media. During a struggle, James Scurlock was shot and killed by Jake Gardner, who died by suicide a few months later. Thanks to duelling political narratives and outright disinformation, Scurlock became “a hoodlum who provoked his own death” and Gardner a “bloodthirsty white supremacist.” Sexton marshals a remarkable volume of investigative material to disentangle fact from fiction, even though he fears that, in this moment, we may find it hard to see the genuine tragedy, which arises from “flawed characters caught up in disastrous circumstances.” Natural Light, by Julian…

BEATING THE YIPS Louisa Thomas, in her profile of the pitcher Daniel Bard, provides a step forward for the sports community as it seeks to destigmatize mental-health issues (“Comebacker,” June 19th). As someone whose baseball career was derailed by the yips—basically, a sudden loss of control—fifteen years ago, in high school, I found Bard’s story cathartic. For an athlete who lacks access to informed coaches or staff, this affliction can be terribly isolating. Despite their goofy name, the yips can strike fear in the hearts of even the toughest and most accomplished competitors—hence the culture of silence surrounding them. Hopefully, foregrounding stories like Bard’s will help the sports community figure out a way to combat, or at least manage, the yips. With his commitment to honesty, Bard joins athletes such…

I tried peeling the kitchen wall with my fingernails, but that didn’t work, so I pressed hard with my fingers and a flake of the “stucco,” which is what I call it, fell off. I don’t know if it’s really stucco or not, or even what stucco is, precisely, but I like the snappy sound of the word, and that’s good enough for me. I popped the stucco into my mouth. Then I chewed and chewed until, finally, I was able to swallow it. Once you dislodge the first piece, the rest is easy. Over and over, I stripped flakes of stucco from the crumbling wall and ate them. “You shouldn’t be eating that!” said a voice from under the refrigerator. That had to be the kitchen god. A kitchen…

Last September, while working at his desk in Philadelphia, Samuel R. Delany experienced a mysterious episode that he calls “the big drop.” His vision faded for about three minutes, and he felt his body plunge, as if the floor had fallen away. When he came to, everything looked different, though he couldn’t say exactly how. Delany, who is eighty-one, began to suspect that he’d suffered a mini-stroke. His daughter, Iva, an emergency-room physician, persuaded him to go to the hospital, but the MRI scans were inconclusive. The only evidence of a neurological event was a test result indicating that he had lost fifteen per cent of his capacity to form new memories—and a realization, in the following weeks, that he was unable to finish his novel in progress, “This Short…

I should note straightaway that P’s parties took place every year at her house, on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, during the mild winters we typically enjoy in this city. Unlike the slog of other winter holidays spent with family, always arduous, P’s birthday, at the beginning of the New Year, was an unpredictable gathering, languorous and light. I looked forward to the commotion of the crowded house, the pots of water on the verge of boiling, the smartly dressed wives always ready to lend a hand in the kitchen. I waited for the first few glasses of prosecco before lunch to go to my head, sampled the various appetizers. Then I liked to join the other adults out on the patio for a little fresh air, to smoke a…

SHOULD THEY HEAR THIS? The day they came for the interview, I woke up too early, thinking about Bernard Loiseau. This happens when I’m nervous—not thinking about Loiseau, specifically, but thinking in my sleep, waking up mid-thought. The thought was in fact a memory. I write fiction now, mostly, but back in the nineties I worked for a magazine in New York, one that sent me to France to profile Bernard Loiseau, after he earned his third Michelin star. I was picked because I was half French and spoke the language, not because I was good. But I wanted to be good, and writing a profile was a major step for me, so I did a lot of research on Loiseau. I concluded that interviewing him would be easy: the…

After a millennium, she remains the hardest-working woman in literature. It was not enough to be saddled with a husband who had the nasty habit of marrying and murdering a new virgin every day to assure himself of spousal fidelity. Nor was it enough to produce a series of nested stories under such deadlines (truly, I complain too much), stories so prickly and tantalizing that the king postponed her murder every night to wait for the next installment. That’s to say nothing of the entirely forgotten three children she bore over those thousand and one nights. Who recalls that there was always a new baby in Scheherazade’s arms? Scheherazade has earned her rest, but she remains booked and busy, obsessively renamed and reclaimed. She is dusted off and wheeled out…

San Francisco Opera, which just finished celebrating its centennial season, occupies the War Memorial Opera House, a Roman-columned edifice designed after the fashion of the Palais Garnier, in Paris. Across the street is City Hall, another heap of aspirational Beaux-Arts architecture. No other major American city gives such prominence to its opera house; the juxtaposition of culture and power is European in spirit. When I visited last month, Pride festivities had overtaken the Civic Center area, and I thought back to the company’s most charged political moment. In 1978, the epoch-making gay politician Harvey Milk was assassinated in his office at City Hall. A lavish memorial was held for him at the Opera House, becoming part of tumultuous demonstrations on behalf of gay rights and against police brutality. Milk had…

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST THE FINALISTS “You know, the Joneses have a bike lane.”Aria Een, New York City “I see they’ve redrawn the congressional-district line.”Frank Poynton, Van Nuys, Calif. “We’re not separated. We’re perforated.”Joan Taylor Schliewenz, East Stroudsburg, Pa. THE WINNING CAPTION “All we need now is to find a port.”Darren Shickle, Leeds, England…

JULY 5 – 18, 2023 Boasting Thurston Moore as a record-label honcho and having shared bills with Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, Big Joanie feels like an honorary member of an indie world of yore. Yet this chic, politically vibrant U.K. trio’s sophomore album, “Back Home,” has a contemporary sheen. Despite a host of critical huzzahs, events conspired to keep Big Joanie away from New York stages until this year; the group débuts as headliners in the city at Baby’s All Right (July 10) and at Union Pool (July 12). As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. ART Kevin Beasley At the heart of this prodigious show of sculptures by the thirty-eight-year-old artist is “In an effort to keep,” an audio installation built inside a small, enclosed…

Not a lot of good sounds could be heard on our street. Police sirens and ambulances. Next door, a man often yelled, his shouts sometimes quickly followed by a soft thump. On our television, a movie played: a building being blown up, gunfire, and flames. We weren’t supposed to watch things like that, but my brother and I were home alone. I was ten years old and he was eight. Our parents had told us to keep the television loud so that it would sound as if there were an adult with us. They’d shown us the places we could hide together, if we felt scared. In the bathtub with the shower curtain drawn. In the closet beneath a pile of clothes. Under the kitchen sink with some pots and…

There were three floors in the wedding hall in Kabul. On the first, my uncles and I greeted guests and directed them to the staircases (for men) or the elevators (for women). On the second floor, the men sipped tea and cracked jokes and sat waiting for food. Although our guests supported various factions in the long war—the Afghan National Army, the Americans, even the Taliban—everyone seemed to be getting along. The real party was on the third floor, where my aunts and girl cousins organized dances and orchestrated the bride’s entrances. Nothing had been rehearsed, but my family seemed happy to improvise the wedding as it went along. I knew that, at some point, they were going to need me to walk down the aisle with the other groomsmen…

If you ever have to lie about your age, try to do it with as much creativity and conviction as Tennessee Williams. When he was nearly twenty-eight, the playwright submitted a handful of one-act plays to a contest for writers under twenty-five. Worried that his deception would be discovered, he changed his name and mailed the submission not from St. Louis, where he lived, but from Memphis, using his grandparents’ home there as the return address. Born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Mississippi, he first considered calling himself Valentine Sevier, after an ancestor on his father’s side whose brother was the first governor of Tennessee. But he decided to instead keep his last name and change only his first. “Mr. ‘Tennessee’ Williams got a telegram last night,” he wrote to…