Innholdsfortegnelse for October 30, 2023 i The New Yorker

Evan Osnos (“China’s Age of Malaise,” p. 34) writes about politics and foreign affairs for the magazine. His latest book is “Wildland.” Yiyun Li (“If Not Now, Later,” p. 14) received a 2022 PEN/Malamud Award. Her latest collection of short stories, “Wednesday’s Child,” was published in September. Mark Ulriksen (Cover) is an artist and an illustrator. His art will appear in “Pawsibilities Unleashed: A Pet Portrait Exhibition,” which opens at the Disney Family Museum next month. Emma Cline (Fiction, p. 46) is the author of, most recently, “The Guest.” Steve Coll (Comment, p. 9), a staff writer, is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. His next book, “The Achilles Trap,” is due out in February. Carmen Maria Machado (Poem, p. 41) is the author of a collection of stories,…

The Spanish-born chef José Andrés—perhaps best known these days for the remarkable humanitarian work that he’s been doing with his organization World Central Kitchen—came of age as a cook in the heyday of molecular gastronomy, when the fine-dining world was enraptured by the pearls-and-foam bravado of chefs such as Ferran Adrià. The conceit at Andrés’s high-end quasi-chain the Bazaar, whose sixth location opened this summer in the Ritz-Carlton NoMad, is to graft that turn-of-the-millennium culinary modernism onto some second thing—a steak house, say, or historical Americana. For the New York outpost, Andrés turns his attention to Japan, and the seventeenth-century journey of an imperial samurai to the court of Spain. The theme is unsubtle (a towering portrait of a geisha wearing a comb and a mantilla looms over the bar),…

Dressed in jeans, a baseball shirt, and a puffer, with a saxophone case strapped to his back, Joshua Redman could have passed for a Juilliard student as he walked into the lobby of the 92ndStreet Y. It wasn’t just the clothes: Redman is as lean as any twenty-year-old subsisting on instant ramen. He’s fifty-four, though, and entering his fourth decade as one of his generation’s preëminent jazz musicians. He was at the Y to prepare for a concert celebrating his new album, “where are we”—one of two dozen as a leader or co-leader, but his first with a vocalist. The piano in the Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall needed to be tuned before sound check, so Redman was ushered to a greenroom, where he sat surrounded by photos of eminences who…

With her long-awaited memoir, Barbra Streisand offers a funny and frank look at her career, six decades in. At a whopping 992 pages, it appears that the Hollywood and Broadway legend … isn’t skimping on the details of her rarefied life. —Time. PAGE 1—Barbra chalks up her cardiovascular wellness to screaming daily at C-SPAN. PAGE 5—Barbra recounts girls’ weekend with Donna Karan full of laughter, nail care. PAGE 14—Barbra says that Track II diplomacy is the “Hello, gorgeous” of statecraft. PAGE 20—Barbra recounts anecdote featuring Shimon Peres, throw pillows. PAGE 112—Barbra says Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello is “an autobiographical masterpiece but the drawer pulls are all wrong.” PAGE 261—Barbra says that too much guitar noodling on a song can sound like jazzturbation. PAGE 290—Barbra says that being the only artist to…

In Barack Obama’s White House, there were two schools of thought about managing the United States’ bedrock alliance with Israel. Defense Secretary Robert Gates privately called the relationship “all give and no get,” and was among those who thought that Obama should approach Jerusalem with skeptical caution, according to Dennis Ross, a Middle East hand who advised Obama and later wrote an eyewitness history of U.S.-Israeli relations. On the other side, as Ross summarized it, then Vice-President Joe Biden argued for “drawing the Israelis close to us,” in part to gain greater influence, even amid bitter disputes with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. Last week, arriving for a one-day visit to Tel Aviv, President Biden descended from Air Force One…

Michael A. Cummings, a seventy-seven-year-old quilt artist based in Harlem, is the only person he knows of who has slept beneath one of his works. “I have put my quilts on my bed when I was cold,” Cummings said the other day. “When I first got to New York, I was putting layers on top of me on the bed, and I couldn’t move, hardly, because it was so heavy. But I was warm.” Eventually, his mother and his sister told him about electric blankets. Over the years, he has made some quilts for friends with babies, but none made it into a crib. “One woman I know, she just put it on the side of the baby bed, and the baby looked at it,” he said. Cummings’s work typically…

For fans of James Dean, nothing beats the moment in “Giant” (1956) when an oil well erupts. Dean raises his arms and bathes in the rich rain. Clocking in at three hours and twenty-one minutes, “Giant” chimes with Martin Scorsese’s latest movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which, not to be outdone, is five minutes longer still. Inan extraordinary sequence, near the start, we see men of the Osage Nation, stripped to the waist, dancing in slow motion, and in unfeigned joy, as a shower of oil falls upon them. It may be the one happy vision in the entire film. From here on, oil will take second place to another precious commodity that gushes with the aid of human know-how. There will be blood. Written by Scorsese and Eric…

“I’m absolutely a Luddite,” the author and columnist Brian Merchant said the other day at an outdoor café in Brooklyn. He has long, brown hair and a goatee, and was wearing a plaid shirt over a T-shirt that read “The Luddites Were Right.” On the chair next to him sat an HP printer. Merchant feels that the original Luddites, early-nineteenth-century clothmakers who raided British factories and destroyed the new machines that were replacing them, have been getting a bad rap lately. Modern people tend to see them as fools who didn’t appreciate the benefits of technology. In Merchant’s view, the Luddites saw the future all too clearly: new machinery meant that the work they had previously done in their own homes would now be done in factories, as mass production,…

“It’s rather vexing, isn’t it, not to know what flowers will come up next year?” I said to my friend Brigid, in a voice that sounded more like a character’s in a novel than my own. It was November, 2017, and my family had just moved into our house in Princeton. The trees were shedding their leaves, in a theatrical manner that was new to us—we had relocated from California to the East Coast four months earlier. “There are some roses,” Brigid said. “Those look like lilies.” “And those are hostas.” There were six or seven rose bushes, with residual flowers, fuchsia-colored, shivering on top of the near-leafless branches. Lilies and hostas, their leaves already paled and half rotted by the cold autumn rain, remained recognizable. The rest of the…

“Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” So Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” a novel that explores the many different ways in which the institution of marriage can be a site of discovery and delusion, proximity and estrangement, comfort and misery. Dorothea’s insight is informed by her own ill-advised marriage, to Edward Casaubon, a desiccated scholar and the blocked would-be author of a “Key to All Mythologies.” Dorothea’s words, which arrive close to the end of the novel, are addressed to Rosamond Vincy, the mayor’s daughter. In Rosamond’s marriage to Dr. Tertius Lydgate, a newcomer to Middlemarch, Eliot provides another illustration of curdled marital expectation, with each spouse disappointed and embittered by the other’s intransigent these two poles,…

There’s something dodgy about portrait artists, and that’s part of their allure. One way or another, they need faces. Often, they steal them and hope nobody complains. At times, they entice volunteers by appealing to their arrogance or cluelessness. Other portraitists pride themselves on treating their subjects well—befriending them, learning about them—but even a subject who feels seen may not understand exactly what she’s getting into (how many people know how they look?), and, if she is satisfied with the result, she is lucky. It’s the artist’s way that counts, not hers. Not everyone agrees—if anything, there seems to be a law that all great portraitists must be praised for their empathy. (Even Diane Arbus, who referred to the people she photographed as “freaks,” is now described as a champion…

ACROSS 1 Sweethearts, in modern parlance 5 2022 film in which Cate Blanchett plays a world-renowned conductor 8 In flames 14 Like taking up two parking spots or cutting in line 15 Genre for Fall Out Boy 16 Intend to 17 Crowd stereotypically seen with pitchforks and torches 19 Kicked, as a football 20 Intangible asset for a Broadway actor 22 Business where people deal with lots of lots? 23 Golden ___ Bridge 24 “Hey now, you’re an ___ /Get your game on, go play” (Smash Mouth lyrics) 28 Treats like a pariah 30 Mariah who holds the record for most cumulative weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 32 Insurance option that generally doesn’t cover out-of-network care: Abbr. 33 ___ & Chandon (champagne house) 34 Carefully studied, with “over” 35…