Innholdsfortegnelse for October 23, 2023 i The New Yorker

Heidi Blake (“Hot Air,” p. 42) is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of “From Russia with Blood” and “The Ugly Game.” Daniel Immerwahr (“The Pitchfork of History,” p. 26) teaches history at North-western University and is the author of “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.” Natalie Meade (The Talk of the Town, p. 16) is a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff. Raymond Antrobus (Poem, p. 36) is the author of “The Perseverance” and “All the Names Given.” His forthcoming poetry collection, “Signs, Music,” is due out next year. Daniel Clowes (Cover), a cartoonist and an illustrator, is the author of, most recently, the graphic novel “Monica.” Patricia Marx (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25) is a staff writer.…

For lovers of bean curd—this is true love we’re talking about—silken tofu is one of the happiest things to eat. Made from soaked soybeans ground with water into soy milk, then allowed to coagulate and pressed into the desired consistency, soft tofu mimics dairy in appearance, texture, and richness while delivering a clean, impartial flavor that evokes freshness itself. Served alone, stewed in a fiery Sichuan mapo tofu or Korean sundubu-jjigae, or as the centerpiece of Japanese agedashidōfu (deep-fried and coddled in dashi and bonito flakes), silken tofu is a vegan underdog hero in the pantheon of proteins. Delightfully, there’s even more pleasure to be found, in an even softer, silkier iteration, a traditional Chinese preparation called daufu fa, or tofu pudding—which can be found extremely fresh at Paul Eng’s…

It was Sunday lunchtime in the Bois de Boulogne, and two members of the Emerson String Quartet were taking a break from their farewell tour. “It’s nice to walk somewhere without a cello on your back,” Paul Watkins, the cellist, said, in a sunlit grove of horse-chestnut trees. The night before, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the quartet had played its final concert in France—Schoenberg, Hindemith, Ravel—and Watkins and Eugene Drucker, one of the violinists, were going back to take another look. “This is an unusually leisurely pace for us,” Drucker said. “We’re playing in Milan on Tuesday, Turin on Wednesday, then back to the U.S. on Thursday.” “But then it’s really sort of a sprint to the finish,” Watkins, who was sweating slightly in a blue checked shirt and…

Alicia Johansen spent her childhood moving with her drug-addicted mom from one place to the next, trying to brace herself for the moment when the water and the electricity would get cut off. So at twenty-two, when she had a chance to run Dolittle’s pool hall, in the ranching town of Akron, Colorado, she was intent on making some money. She kept the bar open deep into the night, after the older guys who bet on horse races departed, and the truckers and the younger crowd, with the meth, drifted in. Meth, she soon discovered, helped her work longer hours. An occasional customer was Fred Thornton, a former high-school baseball star in his early thirties. Fred was sometimes a roofer and at other times unemployed and homeless. They began dating…

In the past few years, accounts of San Francisco’s unravelling—less like a tired sweater than a ball of yarn caught in a boat propeller—have spread with the authority of gossip or folklore. As the pandemic recedes, nearly a quarter of offices downtown are said to be vacant, the worst rate in the nation. Drug-overdose deaths are surging; reports of theft on downtown streets, including an almost two-hundred-percent increase in car break-ins in 2021, have crossed the national media to censorious response. “They took down the guardrails around personal responsibility,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger declared on Fox News. In May, a local pet owner claimed that her Himalayan sheepdog began “wobbling” after eating feces possibly containing opioids and marijuana. Throughout the summer, Presidential hopefuls came to town…

Staring into the mirror, on a Tuesday morning, you decide that your self needs all the help it can get. But where to turn? You were reading James Clear’s “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” and doing well until you spilled half a bottle of Knob Creek over the last sixty pages. Now you’ll never know how it ends. You tried listening to David Goggins’s “Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds,” on Audible, in your car, but so thrilling was Goggins’s prose style that you stomped on the gas and rear-ended a Tesla. Do not despair, though. Succor is at hand. Roosting on Amazon’s best-seller list is “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of…

In 1956, a group of armed Palestinian and Egyptian men ambushed a young Israeli officer in the wheat fields of Nahal Oz, a kibbutz in southern Israel, near the border with the Gaza Strip. They shot him, dragged his body into Gaza, then returned it, mutilated, to the kibbutz. The next day, Moshe Dayan, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, delivered a short but searing eulogy, standing over the officer’s grave. “The quiet of a spring morning blinded him, and he did not see the stalkers of his soul,” Dayan said. Alluding to the Biblical story of Samson, he added, “Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders?” At 6:31 a.m. last Saturday, the heavy…

The playwright Jocelyn Bioh lives around the block from the Good Year African Hair Braiding Salon, on 125th Street and Morningside Avenue, in Harlem. On a recent Wednesday morning, she sat in Nafi Namoro’s chair to get a new protective style. Her play “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” was beginning previews at the Samuel J.Friedman Theatre, and she’d decided on boho mermaid locks for the occasion. “That is a crochet style, which I don’t get super often, but I was in the mood,” Bioh said. Namoro parted Bioh’s hair with a pintail comb and intertwined strands of Kanekalon braiding hair until she’d made a perfect cornrow. Bioh, who is forty, wore a huntergreen sweater dress and an easy smile. She grew up in Washington Heights, the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants who…

We (hereafter “I”) have updatedour (hereafter “my”) Terms and Conditions. If you do not consent to them, you cannot continue to enjoy the privileges and perks of being friends with me, Patty (“In the friendship business for over sixty years!” TM). Benefits include unsolicited advice from Patty about why you should go on the keto diet; Patty’s Netflix password; long, repetitious monologues from her about whether she should paint her living room Cottage-Cheese White or Cocaine White; and an invitation to Patty and Larry’s annual Yom Kippur break-the-fast supper, at which Larry’s third cousin, the actor Pauly Shore, might stop by. If you do not wish to be bound by the new guidelines, you must return the Bundt pan that Patty lent you for one day only last year to…

It’s harvest season, but the branches of the more than eight hundred and sixty-one thousand trees that line the streets of New York City aren’t bearing much fruit. Like plumbing and public libraries, the city’s London plane trees, paperbark maples, and purple-leaf plums are an urban innovation—engineered to maximize shade and minimize mess. “The city doesn’t like fruit trees,” Marisa Prefer, a self-described “street-tree steward,” said recently, looking up at a plumless plum tree in Brooklyn. Prefer is part of an anonymous collective known as the Guerrilla Grafters, which hopes to change the city’s canopy. Their mission: “We aim to turn city streets into food forests, and unravel capitalist civilization one branch at a time.” Flash back to the springtime, when Prefer, who is nonbinary and wore double-kneed work pants…

On any given workday, downtown Manhattan teems with ambitious transplants, many of them aspiring hot shots fresh out of college. The other afternoon, Litzy Santana, a twenty-twoyear-old who graduated from TexasState in August, set up a red tent at Pier 17 for a day’s work at her dream job. White letters on her black T-shirt declared her title: “CHIEF UNO PLAYER”—as in the multicolor, match-based card game made by Mattel. Two months earlier, on TikTok, Santana had seen a call for applicants for the temporary position and responded within minutes. Soon she was in New York for the first time. “Honestly, it could’ve been in the middle of nowhere and I would’ve applied,” she said. “It’s an Uno job.” For four hours a day, four days a week, Santana had…

Demanding that your friend pull the car over so you can examine an unusual architectural detail is not, I’m told, endearing. But some of us can’t help ourselves. For the painter Grant Wood, it was an incongruous Gothic window on an otherwise modest frame house in Eldon, Iowa, that required stopping. It looked as if a cottage were impersonating a cathedral. Wood tried to imagine who “would fit into such a home.” He recruited his sister and his dentist as models and costumed them in old-fashioned attire. The result, “American Gothic,” as he titled the painting from 1930, is probably the most famous art work ever produced in the United States. The painting was also decidedly enigmatic. Was it biting satire? Grim realism? Proud patriotism? In the words of the…

One evening in November, 2021, a group of men assembled at sundown on the terrace of the Ruckomechi Camp, a safari resort on the Zambezi River. Since arriving by private plane, they had gone out lionspotting, boated down the river, and landed a giant tiger fish; now they were clinking gin-and-tonics. Hippos wallowed in the water below. The party was led by Renat Heuberger, a forty-four-year-old Swiss entrepreneur with narrow eyes and a cropped copper beard. Heuberger was the chief executive of South Pole, the world’s largest carbon-offsetting firm, and he had come to Zimbabwe to fight off an urgent threat to his company. A decade earlier, South Pole had signed a deal to sell carbon offsets from an effort to protect a vast swath of forest on the banks…

ACROSS 1 William Wallace, for example5 Jambalaya ingredient9 Play, as an Autoharp14 Colorful Hindu festival15 Image on a phone16 Pose demonstrated by a yogini17 Getting little rainfall18 Oversee19 Sell out, in a way20 Playful punch22 Best-selling 2023 memoir24 12-Down, in English25 Style of earring27 “Turn on a fan in here!”30 Outstanding work33 N.Y.S.E. news34 Letters before an alias35 Parks whose story is told in Faith Ringgold’s book “If a Bus Could Talk”36 2023 role for Ryan Gosling37 “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” director Frank40 Was on TV41 Neighbor of a Norwegian43 Furious feeling44 Completely engrossed46 Nuptial vow47 ___-J (indie-rock band whose name is a keyboard shortcut for the symbol ∆)48 Test that may require factoring polynomials53 Immature egg cell55 Prevent from leaking56 Reggie Watts’s hairdo, for short57 Joaquin’s “Walk the…