Innholdsfortegnelse for August 14, 2023 i The New Yorker

EMPLOYMENT-ADJACENT HISTORY Sugar Goblin, Washington, D.C., age 5 Attended first holiday potluck with parents. The dessert table had every cake imaginable. Incapable of reason, wanted a piece of every one. When parents rightfully refused, threw a fullbody tantrum until hosts diplomatically stepped in, as if I were a tiny dictator with nuclear codes. The next day, I opened the box of cake they’d sent me home with and found that everything had congealed into a big cake ball. Suspecting treachery, threw another fit. First sign that I will stop at nothing to be ultimately disappointed. Woman (You Don’t Want) in STEM, Virginia, 14 Halfway through a six-week experiment, one of my lab partners accidentally killed all the microscopic specimens in our science-fair project, so we made up the rest of…

only women testify in this strange townone speaks of a missing childtwo speak of the tortured in the basementthree repeat what rapes and avert their eyesfour speak of the screams from the military headquartersfive speak of the executed in their own yardssix speak but are incomprehensibleseven check food supplies counting out loudeight call me a liar because there is no justicenine talk on their way to the cemeteryI’m also on my way because I know them allin this town its dead are my dead its survivors are my sisters ten speak of a survivor, a manhe’s returned from captivityhe could testify I knock on his door, a neighboropens. “It seems like he has survived, all right,”she says.“Go talk to the women.” (Translated, from the Ukrainian, by Valzhyna Mort.)…

Meera was recalling the tragedy of her first marriage. Married off to an Indian doctor in 1959, she had moved to London only to discover that her new husband, Ravi, already had a wife in the city. Ravi didn’t wait long to tell her. It was the night that Meera and he arrived in London, haggard from their two-day honeymoon in Jaipur, where an overenthusiastic bearer woke them every morning at six with bed-tea. Then, on a connecting flight from Cairo, they had dozed, their heads forming a tent against the propeller roar, and now, in Earl’s Court, the street below empty save for murmuring students and a chestnut seller with a scratchy voice, they stayed awake into the night. Ravi showed her around the sparse, drafty top-floor flat and…

Steven Millhauser, whose new collection, “Disruptions” (Knopf), is out just in time for his eightieth birthday, is the great eccentric of American fiction: a sleight-of-hand artist who from time to time seems to vanish into his own work. His first novel, “Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright”—ostensibly a biography of an eleven-year-old novelist by his fifth-grade classmate—was a minor sensation when it first appeared, in 1972, and it became a cult classic. There has never been anything like it, both a parody of literary biography and a mesmerizing evocation of a-small-town nineteen-fifties childhood. Millhauser had another brush with fame in 1997, when his fourth novel, “Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer,” won the Pulitzer Prize. But his second and third…

NARCAN AND NIGHT LIFE As an organizer for night-life harm reduction, I was delighted to read Adam Iscoe’s account of his visit to a naloxone education site at a music festival in New York (The Talk of the Town, July 24th). I wish, though, that he had had room to mention two important facts about fentanyl overdoses. First, overdoses are much more common in non-festival settings, and fentanyl contamination is exceedingly rare in the club drugs MDMA and ketamine. (It is on the rise, but not yet widespread, in cocaine.) Second, it’s worth mentioning that although preventing fatal overdoses is incredibly important, night-life harm-reduction efforts would have far more of an impact if they incorporated drug checking. This is a service in which a trained specialist uses an infrared spectrometer…

One morning this past winter, the students at a girls’ high school in Tehran were told that education officials would arrive that week to inspect their classrooms and check compliance with the school’s dress code: specifically, the wearing of the maghnaeh, a hooded veil that became a requirement for schoolgirls in the years after the Iranian Revolution. During lunch, a group of students gathered in the schoolyard. A thirteen-year-old in the seventh grade, whom I’ll call Nina, pressed in to hear what was being said. At the time, mass protests against the government were raging across the country; refusing to wear the veil had become a symbol of the movement. An older girl told the others that it was time for them to join together and make a stand. The…

Let’s say you were born into a legacy that is, you have come to believe, ruining the world. What can you do? You could be paralyzed with guilt. You could run away from your legacy, turn inward, cultivate your garden. If you have a lot of money, you could give it away a bit at a time—enough to assuage your conscience, and your annual tax burden, but not enough to hamper your life style—and only to causes (libraries, museums, one or both political parties) that would not make anyone close to you too uncomfortable. Or you could just give it all away—to a blind trust, to the first person you pass on the sidewalk—which would be admirable: a grand gesture of renunciation in exchange for moral purity. But, if you…

Has anyone bothered to thank Pepsi for its crucial little role in American culture? The year was 1947, and a young Mississippi artist named Fred Mitchell was trying to expand his horizons. He entered one of his paintings in a contest and won a cash prize of fifteen hundred dollars—close to twenty grand today—courtesy of the sponsor, the Pepsi-Cola Company. Mitchell used his winnings to sail to Europe, where he spent the next three years meeting artists and inhaling modernism. When he returned to the States, he settled in a half-empty building on a street near the southern tip of Manhattan and invited one of his new buddies, the painter Ellsworth Kelly, to join him. The street was Coenties Slip (pronounced “co-en-tees”), and during the next decade or so it…

Batman doesn’t get much crimefighting done in the Max animated series “Harley Quinn,” a bright-hued, pointedly buoyant riff on a comics franchise that’s come to be defined by its shadows. For most of the show’s run, Gotham’s best-known millionaire orphan has been in a coma, in convalescence, in a swoon over an ambivalent Catwoman, or in prison (for tax evasion, because Batman is nothing if not a problematic fave). The city is up for grabs, and every baddie is eager to make his name. Supervillainy is a kind of stardom, after all; you have to be camera-ready, create a memorable spectacle, and know your competition. Reputation is everything. That’s why, when the Joker (voiced by Alan Tudyk) is dumped by his girlfriend, Harley Quinn (Kaley Cuoco), he’s quick to spread…

AUGUST 9 – 15, 2023 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. On Aug. 11, landmark figures from across hip-hop history convene at Yankee Stadium for “Hip Hop 50 Live,” to celebrate the genre’s fiftieth anniversary. DJ Kool Herc, whose 1973 party, in the Bronx, is widely recognized as the birth of rap, joins other classicist rap heroes such as Melle Mel and Roxanne Shanté. Gangsta rap’s vanguard, Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube, stands alongside the influential Southern stars Lil Wayne and T.I., and a series of sets—“Legendary DJs,” “Queens of Hip Hop,” and “Bronx Bombers”—aims to showcase rap’s breadth. It all builds to a walk-off reunion performance from the seminal Queens group Run-DMC, honoring the formative moments of a now global culture.—Sheldon Pearce ABOUT TOWN BROADWAY |…

“Do you listen to Sudan Archives?” Most of the time, but not every time, the response to this question is one of confusion. How can one listen to the archives of a country? Sudan Archives is, in fact, a twenty-nine-year-old musician—a singer, rapper, producer, arranger, lyricist, and violinist. She creates a “fiddle-punk sound,” as she describes it, that blends folk, ambient, soul, house, and whatever other tradition she feels is available for the taking. Sudan (the name that her colleagues, her fans, and, increasingly, her intimates call her) begins composing by striking a riff on one of her five violins, which she uses differently from most other American producers. A balladeer trots out the strings, like a show dog, to heighten the atmosphere of desperation in songs that are…

As if the past were riding up to meet youas if the past could ride a horse as if the past were a horse wandering riderlessalong a dusty road as if the horse had never been ridden / They say a horse is broken when the ridercan stay on they say the past is broken when you canlet go of it I have broken with the past, she says I have erased it from my phoneI have blindered my eyes from her eyes / I didn’t know the past was made of horsesI didn’t even call it a horse until now I didn’t even call it strangeuntil I looked back on it the past was a horse crossing a deserta body draped over it this is how we get the…

The Parrot and the Igloo, by David Lipsky (Norton). This history of the idea that human actions are warming the world to cataclysmic effect opens with brief biographies of the inventors who ushered electricity, and its most troubling descendant, fossil-fuel dependency, into the world. The awareness of human-induced warming dawns in 1896 and resurfaces periodically throughout the twentieth century—in 1956, the Times imagined an Arctic so hot that it was home to tropical birds, a landscape that gives Lipsky’s book its title—before battles with skeptics and deniers begin in earnest, in the two-thousands. A consensus finally arrives with the release of the fourth I.P.C.C. assessment, in 2007, but this triumph becomes an anticlimax when governments prove unwilling to regulate fossil fuels. The Migrant Chef, by Laura Tillman (Norton). The Mexican…