Innholdsfortegnelse for August 28, 2023 i The New Yorker

“Matt Damon is a—Matt Damon is a f*g. Matt Damon is also 5’2. Eyes are blue. Coochie-coochie-coochie-coo.” “I’d never think about a girl being smart. If you told me a girl was smart, I would often think she’s not attractive.” “They want to go through that freaking Passover all the time…. Get over the Passover. It was like 3,000 years ago. Okay, the Red Sea parted. Big deal. Not the first time that happened.” —Rudolph Giuliani in audio recordings. Lima beans. Lima beans don’t even make sense. No one has ever actually eaten a lima bean. That’s a true story. You know who else is gay? Clint Eastwood. No one knows. Clint Eastwood. But it’s like a manly gay, if you know what I mean. I know this because I…

In 1977, a staff writer for The New Yorker named Jervis Anderson journeyed to Dean Street in Brooklyn, to the neighborhood now known as Boerum Hill, to interview the people who lived there. His article in the November 14th issue, titled “The Making of Boerum Hill,” portrayed the place as a microcosm of “one of the remarkable urban developments in recent times—the brownstone-renovation movement.” What drew Anderson to Boerum Hill isn’t certain. It’s possible he’d lived there when he first moved to the city from Jamaica, in 1958, to study at N.Y.U. In an autobiographical essay from 1966, he wrote, “In those early days, New York was to me Washington Square, the A train, and Brooklyn.” What seems to have fascinated Anderson about Boerum Hill was the tenuousness of the…

A TRAGEDY IN IDABEL I read with keen interest Paige Williams’s article on the McCurtain Gazette’s conflict with the county sheriff’s department (“Breaking News,” July 31st). My stepfather was mortally injured in a home invasion in Idabel, Oklahoma, the county seat, in 2004. My mother was tied up and assaulted in the same attack. I will never forget cleaning up the blood, nor will I ever forget my family’s horrible subsequent experience with local law enforcement. It launched an investigation, but failed to solve the crime. It also never treated my mother as a victim, and, weeks after the attack, it intimidated her in a way that scared my family and me into silence. For years, I lived with a strange guilt for having stayed quiet, knowing that the perpetrators…

By the time I was twenty-one, I had made two short films and was dead set on making a feature. I had gone to a distinguished school in Munich, where I had few friends, and which I hated so passionately that I imagined setting it on fire. There is such a thing as academic intelligence, and I didn’t have it. Intelligence is always a bundle of qualities: logical thought, articulacy, originality, memory, musicality, sensitivity, speed of association, and so on. In my case, the bundle seemed to be differently composed. I remember asking a fellow-student to write a term paper for me, which he did quite easily. In jest, he asked me what I would do for him in return, and I promised that I would make him immortal. His…

Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine. A staffer handed him an iPhone—in part to avoid inviting an onslaught of latenight texts and colorful emojis on Kahl’s own phone. Kahl had returned to his room, with its heavy drapery and distant view of the Eiffel Tower, after a day of meetings with officials from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. A senior defense official told me that Kahl was surprised by whom he was about to contact: “He was, like, ‘Why am I calling Elon Musk?’” The reason soon became apparent. “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important…

Kogan loved his atrocious work, especially those of his dead who left at the proper time—old, weary of life, bald, having lost lush growth in armpits and crotches, their well-worn feet knobbly and calloused, their breasts and scrotums sagging. Slowly pulling on his chain-mail gloves, he looked over a petrified body, an unread book, and formed a first superficial impression, evaluating the body according to a gauge known to him alone—whether the dead man had died at his allotted time or had failed to live to the limit set him by nature. Those who lived well beyond that limit he called “the forgotten,” and he was a little worried about himself joining their number. He did not like to dissect children and young women, preferring his reliable and lawful contingent.…

The Peacock and the Sparrow, by I. S. Berry (Atria). This crackling début thriller is narrated by a C.I.A. spy, a self-described “aging threadbare bureaucrat” stationed in Bahrain in the wake of the Arab Spring. The novel begins with a series of bombings targeting Westerners. These are blamed on the Bahraini opposition, but the station chief suggests that the spy’s informant, who has become a friend, was involved. No one is beyond the spy’s cascading suspicions, not even a Bahraini mosaicist with whom he is romantically entangled, and whom he approaches with a caution usually reserved for his work: navigating an affair is “not so different, after all, from the delicate give-and-take dance with an informant, an unending alternation between obeisance and control.” Temple Folk, by Aaliyah Bilal (Simon & Schuster).…

Has there ever been a better time to write a novel that’s all about space? Always a literal unit of power (see: private property), it now seems to be our preferred figurative metric, too: the most annoying guest at your dinner party takes up too much of it, the most diplomatic participant at your staff meeting is careful to make more of it, and everyone has an opinion about whether it matters if it’s safe. In this contested landscape, Hilary Leichter’s second novel, “Terrace Story” (Ecco), has a suitably small footprint—at under two hundred pages, it won’t strain a Marie Kondo-ed shelf—but turns out to be a capacious container for our space-related concerns. There’s real estate, of course: you’ll meet Annie and Edward, cash-strapped new parents, in a shoebox city…

TELEVISION Strikes, Game Shows, Novel Adaptations This fall television season is—to put it mildly—a weird one. The SAG-AFTRA and W.G.A. strikes have stretched on through the summer, turning Hollywood into a tense battleground for the very future of the television industry. The questions are both practical (how can the broken residuals system be fixed in the age of streaming?) and existential (how can writers and actors insure that A.I. doesn’t put them out of work and degrade the quality of entertainment for generations to come?). The studios and streamers and the W.G.A. are finally meeting about a new contract, but, as of now, there will be no fresh late-night shows, no new “S.N.L.,” and few scripted network débuts. The prime-time network schedule is thick with singing competitions, cooking battles, and…

On a hot, pollen-dazed morning this summer, I stopped by the house of Gareth John, a retired agricultural ecologist, who lives on a quiet lane above a river in Oxfordshire, to take a look at his bees. In British beekeeping circles, John, who has a white beard and a sprightly, didactic manner, is well known as a “natural beekeeper,” although he acknowledged right off the bat that this was a problematic term. “It’s an oxymoron, right?” he said. John cares for perhaps half a million bees, but he does not think of himself as keeping anything. “I wouldn’t call myself a dog-keeper,” he said. “But I have a dog.” Natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture. They believe that mainstream beekeeping—like most human-centered interactions with the natural world—has lost…

Once again I am trying to fall into the light,twice-broken and knife-scarred, recalling my childrenon Long Beach Island, loose sand in Anastasia’s dreads,Langston holding a red plastic shovelin one hand and the swordlike tailof a horseshoe crab in another,shorebirds winging above their heads. If there is another world,a poet struggles to describe ocean mistdissipating over a young father,distant and lonely, watchinghis children’s laughter run into the seathen explode at the edge of the world. What is my life but a constant enteringinto a dizzying churn of daysping-ponging like numbered ballsin a glass air machine?Then, as now, like all of us, I was brought herethrough a clumsy series of human foiblesand thus am conditioned to readthe undersides of storms edging up a coast. Someday they too will push down far enoughand…

Poets play the winter tarantella,making love in the midnight hourson a white iron bed like a dog skeletondistinguishing the essential and unessentialmoment, shared between ordinary lunaticsand screaming over a bird in an apple treeuntil an elegy has to be writtento resuscitate the relation—those who looktoward the depleted wildlife of neighborhoodswith tragic relish, to see somehow ourselvesdisappearing about ourselves. Once, in New York City, years ago,the Internet technician finally arrived.His teen-age apprentice stood in my living roomover a Tranströmer book. He said it lookedkind of cool, and he wanted to knowwhat it was. “Poetry,” I said.“What’s poetry like?” he asked. Andthe treacherous inadequacy with which onefinds oneself explaining in a few loosedeficient words something with lungsand no face, the immortal freakof language you haunt and huntwhich is the original state of…

The Moshiach came to Madison Avenue this summer. All over a not particularly Jewish neighborhood, posters of the bearded, Rembrandtesque Rebbe Schneerson appeared, mucilaged to every light post and bearing the caption “Long Live the Lubavitcher Rebbe King Messiah forever!” This was, or ought to have been, trebly astonishing. First, the rebbe being urged to a longer life died in 1994, and the new insistence that he was nonetheless the Moshiach skirted, as his followers tend to do, the question of whether he might remain somehow alive. Second, the very concept of a messiah recapitulates a specific national hope of a small and oft-defeated nation several thousand years ago, and spoke originally to the local Judaean dream of a warrior who would lead his people to victory over the Persians,…