Innholdsfortegnelse for October 9, 2023 i The New Yorker

On March 15, 2023, two conservative Christian lawyers asked a federal judge in Amarillo, Texas, for a ruling that they privately considered an almost impossible long shot. They demanded a nationwide ban on mifepristone, a pill used in half the abortions in America. The drug had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for more than twenty years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. During the pandemic, the agency began allowing prescriptions to be filled by mail, to accommodate social distancing. But the lawyers, from a group called Alliance Defending Freedom, were on a winning streak. Founded three decades ago as a legal-defense fund for conservative Christian causes, A.D.F. had become that movement’s most influential arm. In the past dozen years, its lawyers had won fourteen Supreme Court victories,…

Before 2015, I’d never been to Beijing, which is quite odd—an adult who’s been working a few years ought to have visited the capital for a meeting or a classmate’s wedding or simply to view the corpses of great men. For some reason, anyway. But I never did—a training session in Shenzhen, a business trip to Sichuan, but never Beijing. I never even got as far as Hebei. In 2013, I left my job at an advertising firm and started writing fiction. I wrote more than thirty short stories, a few of which were published in the local city journal, which was perpetually on the verge of folding. Then, on the sixth of November, 2015, my dad had a sudden heart attack, the result of a hereditary disease that had…

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan). In 2012, a catastrophic traffic collision in Jerusalem left a school bus filled with Palestinian children on fire for more than thirty minutes before emergency workers arrived. In this chronicle of the disaster, Thrall, a Jerusalem-based journalist, follows the father of one of the victims, and examines the response to the crash within the context of modern Palestinian dispossession. He depicts Israel’s “architecture of segregation”—encompassing checkpoints and byzantine transit rules—which needlessly complicated the rescue, leading to a delay that left “small, scorched backpacks” on the asphalt. Thrall’s account is a powerful evocation of a two-tiered society that treats children as potential combatants. The Rigor of Angels, by William Egginton (Pantheon). In this sprightly intellectual history, Egginton explores the lives…

THE MEAT OF IT Sarah Larson, in her piece about the lawyer Spencer Sheehan, who sues food companies for their deceptive marketing, relates that the descriptions of meat contaminated with rat feces in Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle” helped set up the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which led in turn to the creation of the F.D.A. (“You’ve Been Served,” September 11th). Larson doesn’t expand on this detail, and some might assume that the problem of feces in food was solved. But that is not the case. Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture acknowledges that bacteria indicating the presence of fecal matter are routinely found in meat and poultry products. Food labels, however, do not have to advise consumers that there may be traces of feces in…

If architecture is frozen music, what’s the tune embedded in the cover of the Arctic Monkeys’ latest album, “The Car”? The image, a photograph taken by Matt Helders, the band’s drummer and documentarian, shows a rooftop parking lot from high above, surrounded by modern office buildings in downtown Los Angeles. A single car, a white sedan, is parked in the lot, which is bleached by the midday Southern California sun. The four-piece British rock band was in town recently for two sold-out shows at Forest Hills Stadium. On the morning between gigs, Helders went to Fotografiska New York, the U.S. branch of the Swedish photography museum. He wanted to check out an exhibition of the work of Terry O’Neill, the British lensman who assisted in the birth of rock photography,…

The half-bearded behavioral economist Dan Ariely tends to preface discussions of his work—which has inquired into the mechanisms of pain, manipulation, and lies—with a reminder that he comes by both his eccentric facial hair and his academic interests honestly. He tells a version of the story in the introduction to his breezy first book, “Predictably Irrational,” a patchwork of marketing advice and cerebral self-help. One afternoon in Israel, Ariely—an “18-year-old military trainee,” according to the Times—was nearly incinerated. “An explosion of a large magnesium flare, the kind used to illuminate battlefields at night, left 70 percent of my body covered with third-degree burns,” he writes. He spent three years in the hospital, a period that estranged him from the routine practices of everyday life. The nurses, for example, stripped his…

“Chloe liked Olivia.” When Virginia Woolf wrote this innocuous sentence in “A Room of One’s Own,” her foundational work of feminist criticism, she opened the door to another field, still decades in the future—that of queer literary criticism. “Do not start. Do not blush,” Woolf cautioned her audience. (The published text of “A Room of One’s Own” is framed as a lecture and based on a pair of talks that she gave at two Cambridge women’s colleges in October, 1928.) “Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.” Chloe and Olivia are characters in a book that Woolf has invented, a mediocre novel by a writer she names Mary Carmichael. Ostensibly, the women are friends and colleagues, not…

The best-known version of the gospel song “I Give Myself Away,” by Pastor William McDowell, is an opulent display of religious praise. For more than nine minutes, backed by swelling instrumentation and a full choir, Mc-Dowell sings of surrendering himself in lines such as “Lord, my life is in your hands.” A stripped-down but equally powerful version of the song opens the new album “Some Mississippi Sunday Morning,” which was recorded inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison also known as Parchman Farm. Around three minutes long, with piano as the lone accompaniment, the song begins with a single vocalist repeating the line “I give myself away/so you can use me.” Midway through, another singer joins in, and then another; the language doesn’t change, but the vocals accumulate, stunning…

The Reverend Purlie Victorious Judson (Leslie Odom, Jr.), the hero of Ossie Davis’s 1961 comedy, “Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch”—revived on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre, directed by Kenny Leon—is, above all else, a hustler. You might know somebody like this: He blusters onto the stage of your life, pouring out plans before he’s properly introduced himself, energized toward some vista that only he can see. He puts an arm over your shoulder and tries to convince you that you’re on your way there together, as partners, but in his mind’s eye, you can tell, he’s up in the pulpit and you’re down in the seats. Half of what he says sounds cockamamie, but something about him—his personal history, perhaps, or a kind of animal…

OCTOBER 4 – 10, 2023 Few rappers can claim to be as skilled as Little Simz, a British Nigerian artist who has steadily grown from phenom to bellwether. Her early albums were about transitioning into adulthood, finding her way through the uncertainty of her early twenties to realize her purpose. Even then, it was clear that her path was fated—her lyricism is fluid yet rugged, casual even at its most technical, foreshadowing a future as one of rap’s most distinguished soul-searchers. In the years since she established herself as a mainstay, she has performed with brio and bravado: “Name one time where I didn’t deliver,” she raps on “Gorilla,” already knowing the answer. Not only has Simz always come through; she just keeps getting better.—Sheldon Pearce (Brooklyn Steel; Oct. 12.) ABOUT…

The Neshoba County Fair calls itself Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty, because every year the same families return, antlike, to five hundred and ninety-seven individually owned, festively painted cabins there. For a week at the end of July, even many who live nearby move to the fairgrounds, creating an instant community of twenty thousand people, three times larger than the population of the county seat, Philadelphia. The fair, founded in the late eighteen-hundreds in the remote east-central part of the state, has survived two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the coronavirus pandemic because the cabin owners could not bear to give it up. After spraying for bugs, touching up the paint, hanging porch swings, washing linens, changing light bulbs, making beds, and stocking refrigerators (some cabins have four), the families hold…

In thirteen yearsof walking the mountain pathhares have been scarce—I’ve done the math.In all this time, I’veseen maybe four or five. Droppings I’ve seenthat prove they’re here—at the crossroads, at the turn.I picture one dished earswivelling left then rightas for a satellite while the buck sitsand lifts his stone axe head,one of his sparring mittstentatively foldedtoward his angular chest,alert, at rest. Partridges (or chukars)I often run across;they take off in a ruckusGreeks likened to flatulence—like rapidly deflatingballoons. If ambulating, a matron and her broodbustle down the hill;ignoring the rudeinterloper, they willpretend to puttertill spluttering aflutter. I’m not left agogby them—but for the harealmost as big as a dog—there’s no way to preparefor the huge unlikelihood.By the time I’ve understood something drastichas happened, it boundsinto the bushy masticpursued by ghost hounds.The…