Innholdsfortegnelse for October 16, 2023 i The New Yorker

Susan B. Glasser (“Trial by Combat,” p. 26) is a staff writer and the co-author of “The Divider.” John McPhee (“Under the Carpetbag,” p. 22), a staff writer since 1965, has published thirty-two books, including “Tabula Rasa, Volume 1.” Emily Witt (“Passages,” p. 14), a staff writer, is the author of “Future Sex” and “Nollywood.” David Baker (Poem, p. 53) is a professor emeritus at Denison University. He most recently published the poetry collection “Whale Fall.” Samantha Henig (The Talk of the Town, p. 13), a freelance strategy consultant, has worked as an editor for the New York Times, BuzzFeed News, and other publications. Dan Amira (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 21), the head writer for “The Daily Show,” has written for New York, the Times Magazine, the Grammys, and the White…

Think of Justine’s on Hudson as the kind of West Village bistro where Emily (of Paris) and Carrie (of the post-pandemic City) might meet for a bottle of Sauternes on a Saturday evening. Outside are white-tablecloth four-tops convenient for surveying the expensively heeled clacking down the leafy street. Inside are gray leather banquettes, glistening brass, and a brilliant chandelier of upside-down tulip petals which would not look out of place on Carrie or Emily, as a bag—or a hat. In a way, Justine’s—named for its proprietor, the daughter of the famous Upper East Side wine importer Neal Rosenthal—harks to a different era, when the economy was a little more flush and overt extravagance a touch less gauche. But, then again, in 2023 even an upscale bistro where bottles average around…

One day this summer, Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson, two of the original members of the B-52’s, strolled into the Silverball Retro Arcade, a pinball parlor on the Asbury Park boardwalk. The band was playing a show that evening a few blocks away, at the Stone Pony Summer Stage. Fans wearing wigs and glittery underwear were already loitering on the boardwalk, taking pictures. Schneider, the band’s front man, who wore sunglasses and ajacket with a marijuana-leaf print, sighed theatrically. “Next thing you know, I’ll end up on someone’s Christmas card,” he said. Schneider has a sly, deadpan drawl that is sometimes mistaken for Southern—he was born and raised on the Jersey Shore. “These are my old stomping grounds,” he said. He was greeted by Patty Barber, Silverball’s senior vicepresident. They…

On the last morning of July, Kristen Chapman was getting ready to leave Nashville. Chapman, who is in her early fifties and wears her silver hair short, sat on a camp chair next to a fire pit outside the rental duplex where her family had lived for twelve years. She was smoking an American Spirit and swatting at the mosquitoes that kept emerging from the dense green brush behind her. Her husband, Paul, who was wearing a T-shirt with the Guinness logo, carried boxes out to the front lawn. Their daughters, Saoirse and Willow, who were seventeen and fifteen, were inside, still asleep. Chapman looked down at the family’s beagle mix, Obi-Wan Kenobi, who was drinking rainwater out of a plastic bucket. “We got him when we moved in here…

ACROSS 1 Water pipe 5 Ketch and ferry, e.g. 10 Closet pest 14 Ingredient in some balms 15 Capital city near Casablanca 16 Weapon wielded by a masked athlete 17 Light that isn’t heavy 20 Ernest Hemingway novel set during the First World War 21 Bowlers’ rentals 22 Units of magnetic-flux density 23 Try again to transmit, as an undelivered text 25 Areas shaved by barbers 26 Rap-sheet name 27 Felt under the weather 28 Class with solutions, perhaps 31 Happen upon 32 Guys with reputations to uphold, briefly? 33 Greet the day 34 Kids’ game for two or more players 35 Thoroughly searches (through) 36 Get into hot water? 37 “You’ve gotta be kidding me!” 38 Amusing back-and-forth 39 Looked to be 41 Number on a doorstep? 42 1951…

Has there been a politician both as broadly despised, including in his own party, and yet as improbably effective as Matt Gaetz? When the Florida congressman—previously best known for his unflinching support of Donald Trump’s election denialism and for being investigated over allegations of sex trafficking (he denied them, and the Department of Justice declined to bring charges)—engineered the removal of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, last week, he had the support of exactly seven other House Republicans, out of two hundred and twenty-one. McCarthy’s supporters denounced Gaetz’s faction on the floor as “chaos” agents “running with scissors.” Even Newt Gingrich, a spiritual grandfather of Gaetz’s intraparty Molotovism, later called for him to be ejected from the Republican caucus. In a sense, Gaetz was doing what Trump has…

One day in November, 1783, two Frenchmen took flight in a wicker basket tied to a big silk-and-paper bag—the first people to ascend in a hot-air balloon. A hundred years later, a group attempted to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a gas-filled balloon, but there wouldbe no successful crossing for another hundred years: in 1978, a balloon carried three men from Presque Isle, Maine, to a small town near Paris. This past summer, in New Brunswick, Canada, a middle-aged British couple gave it a shot. Deborah and Mike Scholes climbed into a ninety-foot Rozière balloon, and drifted into the clouds toward the Atlantic, vaguely toward home. Deborah, who is the pilot, tossed flower petals from the basket; Mike munched a marmalade sandwich. Airborne, Deborah, who runs a hair salon back…

“How often do men think about ancient Rome?” —Headline in the Washington Post. Each week, Man Magazine asks an ordinary man to keep a diary of a typical day. Here is our latest installment. OCTOBER 9, 2023 7:30 A.M.—My alarm sounds. I grab my phone and glance at the news. Congress is debating the Pentagon’s budget today, and I am reminded that spending on costly military ventures contributed to the Roman Empire’s economic collapse. 8:30 A.M.—I hop on the L train for my commute to work. 8:32 A.M.—It occurs to me that if the L were a subway in the Roman Empire it would be called the 50 train. I chuckle. 9:14 A.M.—I arrive at the office. Everyone is in the kitchen, where Greg’s birthday doughnuts have largely been devoured.…

Almost immediately after the cryptocurrency exchange FTX imploded last November, an agent e-mailed Hollywood buyers to reveal that the writer Michael Lewis just happened to have spent the previous six months hanging around Sam Bankman-Fried. Lewis, the agent noted, “hadn’t written anything yet,” but the recent developments had provided “a dramatic surprise ending to the story.” Nobody would have argued that point. But Lewis didn’t appear to regard this unexpected climax the way everyone else did. According to the agent, the writer had likened Bankman-Fried’s archrival, Changpeng Zhao—who had helped set in motion the bank run that brought FTX down—to “the Darth Vader of crypto” and Bankman-Fried to Luke Skywalker. This might not have been a particularly weird thing to say a month earlier. But it was a very weird…

“No. I have not ‘flipped’ on Presi-Trump,” Lin Wood recently dent assured his nearly three hundred and fifty thousand followers on Telegram. Fani Willis, the D.A. in Fulton County, Georgia, had just named Wood, a former lawyer allied with Trump, as a witness for the prosecution in a court filing. “I have no idea why,” Wood wrote. He also posted, not for the first time, a Photoshopped image of his dog, Allie, in a prison guard’s uniform. Caption: “Warden Allie guarding LINMATE #777 at Tomotley Prison.” After the 2020 election, Wood moved from Atlanta to Tomotley, a thousand-acre plantation in Yemassee, South Carolina, which he’d bought for about eight million dollars. A broker called it “the most significant property that has sold in years in South Carolina” and mentioned its…

A line snaked along Wooster Street the other day, for a designer sample sale. A few doors down and one floor up, Bill Dilworth stood in a large room filled with two hundred and eighty thousand pounds of dirt, wondering how the two days of watering that he’d just finished had affected the soil. “Just to get it back to this moist state is gratifying to me, because this is the state that I relate to, that I maintained for decades,” Dilworth, who had the knee-high rubber boots of a farmer, the trim-cut jeans of an urbanite, and the eyebrows of a mad scientist, said. He has spent the past thirty-four years caring for “The New York Earth Room,” an installation by the artist Walter De Maria which is part…

It was a more physical world, though we thought it quite advanced. There seemed nothing “terrestrial” about twisting a radio knob to some eccentric decimal point, dialling static into song. In the summer of 1985, we all knew someone, usually an older sibling, who owned a portable, cassette-playing stereo. The rest of us remained stuck catching Top Forty countdowns on AM radio, or playing, on our parents’ imperial turntables, the one or two LPs in our possession. Increasingly, we listened to music by watching it on TV, our dance parties often overseen by a strutting, tattered sprite who wore bangles like opera gloves and held the camera’s gaze with her entire being, as though locked in a dare she was not going to lose. I liked her best in motion:…

The first question that is asked in “Anatomy of a Fall,” a new film from the French director Justine Triet, is a simple one: “What do you want to know?” The line, which could stand as a motto for the whole movie, is spoken by a writer, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), in a chalet in the Alps. She is being interviewed by a graduate student, Zoé (Camille Rutherford), although their conversation is soon drowned out by a rumpus from above—specifically, an instrumental version of “P.I.M.P.,” by 50 Cent, played with a thunderous boom by Sandra’s husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), who is also a writer. Either he’s deliberately sabotaging the interview or he wants to trigger an avalanche. Of Samuel himself we see no sign, for the moment, and that…