Innholdsfortegnelse for September 4, 2023 i The New Yorker

David Grann (“The Squid Hunter,” p. 34), a staff writer, is the author of “Killers of the Flower Moon” and, most recently, “The Wager.” Patricia Marx (“Pets Allowed,” p. 28) is a staff writer. She published “You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time,” with Roz Chast, in 2020. Saul Steinberg (Sketchbook, p. 53) contributed covers and drawings to The New Yorker for nearly six decades. He died in 1999. Larissa MacFarquhar (Books, p. 65), a staff writer at the magazine since 1998, is the author of “Strangers Drowning.” Edmund Wilson (Books, p. 69), who died in 1972, was a longtime book critic and essayist for the magazine. Laurie Colwin (The Talk of the Town, p. 13), a fiction writer and a food writer, died in…

When Susan Orlean was about five years old, she wrote and illustrated a book called “Herbert the Near-Sighted Pigeon.” In her case, the early funny stuff led to the later funnier stuff. An obsession with members of the animal kingdom, domesticated and otherwise, has spurred her to write about pandas, snakes, show dogs, moviestar dogs, military mules, Moroccan donkeys, a woman in New Jersey who kept two dozen tigers, Orlean’s own chickens and turkeys (who “follow me around like puppies”), the itinerant life of a whale celebrity named Keiko, and, once more and at length, pigeons. Susan Orlean is the kind of person who did not call the police when a boyfriend showed up at her apartment on Valentine’s Day with a lion. Reader, she married him. The New Yorker,…

Having read in the program of the show called “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May” that Mr. Nichols had represented the United States on an Olympic equestrian team, we suggested last week that the partners join us at a session of the National Horse Show, at Madison Square Garden. When we met them at the entrance to the place, Mr. Nichols was quick to inform us that he hadn’t been on any equestrian team in any Olympics, and Miss May told us that whatever interest she’d once had in horses had ended when she fell off one a couple of years ago on a Central Park bridle path and twisted all kinds of ligaments in her left arm. “The horse was just walking,” Miss May said, “and I…

Every fall in recent years, the densest concentration of bald eagles in the lower forty-eight states has been found by the banks of McDonald Creek, near the village of Apgar, in Glacier National Park, Montana. Not long ago, so were we. New weather from the Gulf of Alaska had moved in the night before we got there, and the sky was soaped over with clouds, like the windows of a drive-in closed for the season. U.S. Highway 2 along the southern edge of the park was bare and wet between mounds of snow beginning their six-month residence. The bar signs were turned on by one-thirty in the afternoon. In the parking lot of a bar called Packers Roost was a pickup truck that had a flashlight, a Montana license plate,…

If people, viewed from a great height, look like ants, do ants, viewed at close range, look like people? Of course not. Ants have six legs, compound eyes, no lungs, and impossibly narrow waists, and they tend to hang around with aphids and mealybugs. Still, behavioral similarities make them excellent analogues. Ants, like humans, are into career specialization, livestock herding, engineering, climate control, in-flight sex, and war; for them, as for us, free will may or may not be an illusion. As for whether ants look to humans for insight into themselves, science has no answer. A few years ago, Marko Pecarevic, a Croatian graduate student studying conservation biology at Columbia University, met with his adviser, the urban ecologist James Danoff-Burg, to come up with a subject for his master’s…

The other day the editor of a great newspaper decided that he ought to find out if dogs are better than cats, so he sent a man up to see Albert Payson Terhune, some of whose best friends have fur. It turned out that Mr. Terhune preferred dogs, feeling strongly about the whole thing. Only women like cats, he said, and added disparagingly that this seemed to him “a very significant tip-off on the makeup of the two sexes.” This was the place, of course, for the reporter to ask Mr. Terhune if he thought dogs were better than women, but apparently he forgot to. Anyway, Mr. Terhune said next that the only real friendships he had ever made with cats were with those that thought they were dogs and…

We happen to know that a 1965 census of wild bears in New Jersey showed that there were twenty-two bears in the state at that time. A bear census in a place like Saskatchewan or Montana would be a complicated procedure, but in New Jersey the field personnel of the Department of Conservation and Economic Development outnumber the bears almost a hundred to one, so their reports to headquarters, in Trenton, provide what is probably an accurate annual count. This is particularly true if snow falls early, as it did last fall, and bear tracks can be noted before the bears go into hibernation. Since so few bears are walking around in the snow, every bearprint is distinguishable from every other bearprint, and an experienced observer can read the size,…

Walk over to what was once, and will be again (someday), the Central Park Zoo, and in the Arsenal you will find Richard Lattis, the director of the City Zoos Project, in his office. At the drop of a hard hat, he will explain to you the purpose of all the busy construction that is going on at the zoo right now, as he did for us on a recent weekday. “New York City has five zoos,” he explained. “Two of them, the Bronx and the Staten Island, are private, and the three others—Prospect Park, Flushing Meadow, and Central Park—used to be operated by the Department of Parks and Recreation. Anyway, as you may remember, there were a lot of protests about conditions in the city zoos. We made improvements…

What a wonderful time it is for the scammer, the conniver, and the cheat: the underage drinkers who flash fake I.D.s, the able-bodied adults who drive cars with handicapped license plates, the parents who use a phony address so that their child can attend a more desirable public school, the customers with eleven items who stand in the express lane. The latest group to bend the law is pet owners. Take a look around. See the St. Bernard slobbering over the shallots at Whole Foods? Isn’t that a Rottweiler sitting third row, mezzanine, at Carnegie Hall? As you will have observed, an increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments, cohabiting with them in animal-unfriendly apartment buildings and dormitories, and taking them (free!)…

Stanley Coren, a psychologist and dog trainer, is haunted by a primal scene. He pictures a distant ancestor, clothed in skins, huddled by a tiny fire. Next to the ancestor sits a dog, its pointed ears pricked for sounds of danger—sounds too faint for the man to hear. “What do you hear, my dog?” the ancestor says. “You will tell me if I should worry?” Then, Coren writes, “his rough hand reached out and stroked the dog’s fur, and that touch made them both feel content.” Coren is the author of several books about dogs—“The Intelligence of Dogs,” “What Do Dogs Know?,” “Why We Love the Dogs We Do,” and “How to Speak Dog.” He is the host of “Good Dog!,” a Canadian television show. But his most recent book,…

ACROSS 1 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” author’s first name 7 “Understood!” 12 Bad Bunny and Chencho Corleone hit whose title can be translated as “I’ll Behave Myself” 14 Princely accessory? 15 Black-and-white seabirds 16 The Big Board, briefly 17 First-responder initials 18 Eine, across the Rhine 19 Support 21 Lambs’ moms 24 “The Chi” network, for short 25 Gamble 27 Migrants 31 Vehicle designed for sightseeing 33 Racing boat at the Quebec Winter Carnival 35 -trix relative 36 A Tribe Called Quest single whose title question is repeatedly answered in the affirmative 38 Word before strip or spray 40 Charitable grp. such as Landesa 41 Small ducks 42 Pokhara residents 44 Lunar New Year 45 Many were burned in the two-thousands 46 “You ___!” 48 Actor Malek 52 Window units:…

At eight-thirty on a recent Saturday night, the line for Scarr’s Pizza, on the Lower East Side, ran up Orchard Street, rounded the corner, and ended in a churning knot of people wondering whether the wait would actually be worth it. All pizza is relative, New York pizza doubly so. A Scarr’s slice is a legendary slice, an if-you-know-you-know slice. It’s a slice that many people claim is the best in the city. I’ll say this: Any list of great New York pizza that leaves off Scarr’s shouldn’t be trusted. The slice is excellent, just this side of faultless. The crust is light and a little tangy, with a sturdy bottom that gives over almost immediately to a springy interior. The whole thing has admirable structural integrity, succumbing neither to…

We strolled up to Hunter College the other evening for a meeting of the New York Zoological Society. Saw movies of grizzly cubs, learned the four methods of locomotion of snakes, and were told that the Society has established a turtle blood bank. Medical men, it seems, are interested in turtle blood, because turtles don’t suffer from arteriosclerosis in old age. The doctors are wondering whether there is some special property of turtle blood that prevents the arteries from hardening. It could be, of course. But there is also the possibility that a turtle’s blood vessels stay in nice shape because of the way turtles conduct their lives. Turtles rarely pass up a chance to relax in the sun on a partly submerged log. No two turtles ever lunched together…

This is one of the nicest things to do in New York on a Sunday afternoon: Have a good late breakfast (something like a bowl of porridge, some scrambled eggs, some smoked herring, toast with raspberry jam would be just fine), and then put on some comfortable clothes and some comfortable shoes and go over to the American Museum of Natural History. If there are children in your family, by all means take them along. While you are there, don’t miss the redwood-tree exhibit in the Hall of North American Forests, the worm exhibit in the Hall of the Biology of Invertebrates, the early-man exhibit in the Hall of the Biology of Man, the Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri Forest in the Hall of Man in Africa, and the bird-watching…

A friend of ours went to the Beatrix Potter exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan Library and came back with this report: I arrived at the Morgan in a torrential rainstorm, took off my rain gear, and headed for the main exhibition hall. This show is entitled “Beatrix Potter: Artist and Storyteller,” but Potter was first and foremost a naturalist, and the walls of the Morgan testify to that. Beatrix Potter was born in 1866, and lived an unusually solitary life. Until her brother Bertram was born, in 1872, she had hardly ever seen another child. On summer holidays in Scotland and, later, in the Lake District, she and Bertram fell passionately in love with the natural world. In the main room you can see her precise and intensely focussed…

On a moonless January night in 2003, Olivier de Kersauson, the French yachtsman, was racing across the Atlantic Ocean, trying to break the record for the fastest sailing voyage around the world, when his boat mysteriously came to a halt. There was no land for hundreds of miles, yet the mast rattled and the hull shuddered, as if the vessel had run aground. Kersauson turned the wheel one way, then the other; still, the gunwales shook inexplicably in the darkness. Kersauson ordered his crew, all of whom were now running up and down the deck, to investigate. Some of the crew took out spotlights and shone them on the water, as the massive trimaran—a three-hulled, hundred-and-ten-foot boat that was the largest racing machine of its kind, and was named Geronimo,…

"Animal Farm,” by George Orwell (Harcourt, Brace), is a satirical animal fable about the progress—or backsliding—of the Russian Revolution. If you are told that the story deals with a group of cows, horses, pigs, sheep, and poultry which decide to expel their master and run his farm for themselves but eventually turn into something almost indistinguishable from human beings, with the pigs as a superior caste exploiting the other animals very much as the farmer did, and if you hear that Stalin figures as a pig named Napoleon and Trotsky as a pig named Snowball, you may not think it sounds particularly promising. But the truth is that it is absolutely first-rate. As a rule, I have difficulty in swallowing these modern animal fables; I can’t bear Kipling’s stories about…