Innholdsfortegnelse for November 6, 2023 i The New Yorker

Michael Schulman (Books, p. 62) is a staff writer. His new book, “Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears,” was published in February. Dorothy Wickenden (“Last Watch,” p. 23), a staff writer, was the executive editor of The New Yorker for twenty-six years, until 2022. She is the author of “The Agitators” and “Nothing Daunted.” Michael Luo (Books, p. 71), the editor of newyorker.com, is at work on a book about the history of Chinese exclusion in America. Inkoo Kang (On Television, p. 76) is a staff writer, and became a television critic for The New Yorker last year. David St. John (Poem, p. 46) most recently published “The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems.” Simon Rich (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 21) has written several books,…

Roscioli 43 MacDougal St. There are four Roscioli restaurants in Rome, storied shops where tourists line up, pilgrims in pursuit of what has been described as the best pizza in the city, the best salumeria, the best pasta, the best seafood, the best wine. Now Roscioli has come to New York as a two-in-one restaurant in SoHo, with a sultry basement-level dining room and a more casual “upstairs” at street level. It’s a collaboration between the Roscioli family and Ariel Arce, a restaurateur with a knack for serving wine—an act that even at its most scintillating tends to be at least thirty per cent tedious—in a way that feels urgent and alive. Downstairs, Roscioli hews to a prix-fixe “dinner party” format, borrowed from Arce’s late restaurant Niche Niche. Upon arrival…

“Bob is someone who sings all the time,” Senator Robert Menendez’s wife, Nadine, told the Times in 2021. “He sings every morning, every night, and in-between while he smokes his afterdinner cigar.” Menendez, the senior senator from New Jersey, chose to sing “Never Enough,” the anthem from the P.T.Barnum bio-pic “The Greatest Showman,” when he proposed to Nadine in front of the Taj Mahal. A video of the moment is the sole post on the couple’s public YouTube channel. The Senator stands behind his soon-to-be wife, a leg propped on the bench where she sits, one hand holding hers while the other points toward the heavens. “All the stars we steal from the night sky,” he sings, in a sonorous tenor, “will never be enough for me.” Federal prosecutors allege…

The only way to tell this story is to try to tell it truthfully and to know that you will fail. On the evening of Wednesday, October 18th, with the entire Middle East in a state of mourning and outrage, I took a taxi to the information offices of the Israel Defense Forces, a heavily guarded compound in northwest Tel Aviv. Like many reporters, I’d accepted an invitation to see video evidence of the worst massacre of Jews in generations, certainly in the history of Israel—Hamas’s rampage through Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Kibbutz Be’eri, and other communities near the Gaza Strip, extending to an outdoor electronic-music festival, Nova. At last count, the attack throughout what Israelis call Otef Aza—“the Gaza envelope”—had claimed some fourteen hundred lives; thousands were wounded, and around…

In September, 2021, two months before Stephen Sondheim died, at the age of ninety-one, he attended a read-through of his then incomplete final musical. Based on two lacerating, Surrealist Luis Buñuel films, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel,” it had, at various times in its decade of development, been called “Buñuel” and a title that Sondheim announced in a television interview—“Square One,” a reference to the work’s preoccupation with recursion and stasis. Sondheim, a dizzyingly complex lyricist with an unparalleled ear for syncopation and sour-sweet harmonies, could seemingly turn anything into a musical: a 1934 Kaufman and Hart play (“Merrily We Roll Along”), a Victorian penny dreadful (“Sweeney Todd”), a Post-Impressionist painting (“Sunday in the Park with George”). According to David Ives, a comic playwright best…

ACROSS 1 Places to exchange tender for tenders5 Arc between notes9 Equivalent of spruce14 Island whose North Shore attracts many surfers15 Creature in a fringe theory about the Dyatlov Pass incident16 Accepting person?17 Concentrate at the beginning19 Not be straight with20 Makeup artists’ demonstration?22 Campaign platform23 Athlete in the documentary “When We Were Kings”24 Made a livery delivery26 Marching worker29 Cell-plan component32 It might be made of sponges33 Hollow, deep-fried bread35 Pretend player-picking process38 Romance trope exemplifed by Kat and Patrick’s relationship in “10 Things I Hate About You”41 Directive on a cover42 Esther Duflo’s feld, for short43 Thorny44 Mishap in front of a mirror46 Up to47 Mixology measures49 “Family Romance, ___” (Werner Herzog film about a family-member-rental service)51 Where some mummies are found52 “That’s enough!”58 Site that hosts many…

There were moments, last week, when—if not for the first time—Donald Trump seemed out of control. On Monday, at a rally in Derry, New Hampshire, he compared himself to Nelson Mandela; said that he had to save the country from fascists, Marxists, Communists, and “sick people”; mimed a fistfight with Joe Biden (“Poom! Poom! Poom! I’d hit him right in that fake nose!”); and went on a rant about seeing six-month-old McDonald’s containers in the streets of Washington, D.C. “Being in real estate,” he said, “I always kept clean properties, I like clean, clean, well-run, you know, tippy-top, we say tippy-top. We want them to be tippy-top. Well, our capital is the opposite of tippy-top! It’s a shithouse.” Two days later, he stomped out of a New York City courtroom,…

Recently, four European race-car drivers were squeezed into the back of a New York taxi headed to an unofficial race event in New Jersey—a showdown at a suburban go-kart track. Their first test of endurance? American traffic. “They’re using their horn a lot, but it’s not helping,” Michelle Gatting, of Denmark, said. Sarah Bovy, of Belgium, chuckled. Doriane Pin, who hails from France, said nothing. Pin, nineteen, is a rabbitlike five feet two with dirty-blond hair. Despite being barely old enough for a driver’s license in most European countries, she was last year’s Ferrari Challenge Europe champion. Pin races with Gatting, Bovy, and Rahel Frey, of Switzerland, as the Iron Dames, the only all-female endurance-racing team in the world. Race-car driving is one of the few sports in which men…

This document acknowledges that Lauren (“Talent”) has agreed to appear for a MAXIMUM of THREE (3) days and TWO (2) nights at the residence of her mother (“Venue”) during the Thanksgiving holiday, pursuant to the terms of this agreement. ACCOMMODATIONS Venue will provide Talent with complete, private access to her childhood bedroom (a.k.a. “the Pilates room”) for the duration of her appearance. It is additionally agreed that, during Talent’s visit, Venue’s New Husband (“VNH”) will abstain completely from the use of Talent’s bathroom. Venue is responsible for communicating this deal point to VNH and monitoring him daily after breakfast to insure that this stipulation is enforced. Furthermore, if this agreement is broken, and VNH uses Talent’s bathroom, Venue will not tell Talent that it’s “no big deal,” or laugh when…

Late in the summer, several hundred autoworkers jammed into the auditorium of United Auto Workers Local 12, in Toledo, Ohio, for a monthly meeting. Local 12 is the largest amalgamated union in the country, representing more than ten thousand people, including nearly six thousand at a Jeep factory in town. Typically, the monthly meeting attracts a far smaller crowd, but word of a possible strike had been circulating among U.A.W. membership. The union’s contract was set to expire three weeks later, at midnight, and negotiations between the union and representatives of the Big Three—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis (Chrysler and Jeep’s parent company)—were going nowhere. Bruce Baumhower, who is sixty-eight years old and has been president of the local for more than three decades, got up to the lectern. He…

“It is now up to you, gentlemen, to show that we were right to trust you.” So King Baudouin, of Belgium, declared (present-day Kinshasa) on June 30, 1960. It was a handover ceremony: the Belgian Congo would henceforth belong to the Congolese people. Decades Baudouin’s condescension remains startling. His great-great-uncle Leopold II had overseen what was then called the Congo Free State as his personal fiefdom—and established a system of exploitation that was monstrous even by colonial standards. But by 1960 the Belgian government could no longer ignore the wave of anti-imperialist movements that had swept much of the Now the twenty-nine-year-old monarch told the crowd—made up of new Congolese citizens, Belgian officials, and dignitaries from around the world—that independence would be “achieved through the immediate satisfaction of simple pleasures…

In terms of disasters, Rosa Lowinger prefers fires to earthquakes and anything to hurricanes. “When you walk into a hurricane damage site, that water is not just water,” she says. “That water is full of dead snakes and animals and oil slicks. And things catch on fire.” Lowinger, an art conservator in Los Angeles, was born in Havana in the midst of the revolution. Her grandparents, Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe, had fled persecution to arrive in Cuba in the nineteen-twenties; after Castro took power, the family fled again, to Miami, losing everything. Her mother had a saying: “Man plans and God laughs.” Lowinger is in the business of repair. The other day, Lowinger, who is petite and rubia and wears round glasses, was at a warehouse east of downtown…

In his youth, Barry Manilow lived on a street called Broadway in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and though he’s lived in Palm Springs for decades, he’s always considered himself a New Yorker. (“The city rhythms all undo me/So sue me!” he sings in “I Dig New York,” on his 2017 album, “This Is My Town.”) This month, his musical “Harmony,” co-written with Bruce Sussman, opens at the Barrymore—on the other Broadway. On a recent rainy Tuesday, Manilow took a spin around the old neighborhood, peering at the strange and the familiar from the back of an S.U.V. “We didn’t know we were poor,” Manilow, a youthful-looking eighty, said. He wore a black coat, spoke in a quiet, raspy voice, and took occasional drags from a vape pen. He waved it toward a…

Mitt Romney and his family are gathered inside a budget hotel room. It is January, 2008, and the New Hampshire primary is just days away. Romney, a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination, sits in a high-backed chair, clad in his usual armor: a navy-blue tie, a gleaming white shirt with cuffinks, and dress pants. His wife, Ann, is seated next to him; two of his sons and a daughter-in-law are arrayed around them. Romney’s campaign is going poorly. He lost badly to Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, in the Iowa caucuses, and in New Hampshire he appears on track to lose again, this time to Senator John McCain. “Maybe you just wait a few years?” one of Romney’s sons suggests. Romney seems to dismiss the possibility. “When this…

A dozen years have passed since “Shame,” in which Michael Fassbender played an unappeasable sex addict named Brandon, and I remember wondering, back then, what Brandon would do once the juice ran dry. Sell real estate, perhaps? Get married, raise three kids, and work on his short game on weekends? Another possibility is suggested by “The Killer,” a new film from David Fincher, in which Fassbender—still lean and staring, spookily unchanged by time—takes the role of a professional assassin. I can’t prove anything, but I suspect that he is Brandon reloaded. From picking up strangers on the subway to picking them off with a silenced rifle, through a hotel window, is just a hop and a skip. Fassbender is one of those actors who seem alone even when they’re…