Innholdsfortegnelse for November 20, 2023 i The New Yorker

Joshua Rothman (“Metamorphosis,” p. 28), the ideas editor of newyorker.com, has been at the magazine since 2012. James Somers (“Begin End,” p. 14) is a writer and a programmer based in New York. Inkoo Kang (On Television, p. 70), a staff writer, became a television critic for the magazine in 2022. Christoph Niemann (Cover; Spots) is an artist, an author, and an animator whose illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker since 1998. Claire Friedman (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 19) is a writer, a director, and an executive producer of the forthcoming scripted podcast “Trust Fall.” She is a former writer for “Saturday Night Live.” Martín Espada (Poem, p. 50) most recently published “Floaters,” which won the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry. His next collection of poems, “Jailbreak of Sparrows,” will…

Some skepticism is warranted whenever a restaurant has a Times Square address. “You know, I suggested we come here kind of as a joke,” the writer and recipe developer Yewande Komolafe told me recently, spooning out pepper soup at Lagos TSQ, a three-story Nigerian restaurant-cum-night club in midtown with an overwhelming energy. A steady flow of tourists and influencer types struck practiced poses before a wall of faux greenery. “But this food is good! It’s good good.” I had asked Komolafe, who wrote the new cookbook “My Everyday Lagos,” to bring me to one of her favorite Nigerian spots in the city. It turns out that the list is short. Nigerian cuisine is not a monolith, but its expanse of stews and fritters and braises are tied together by a…

The other day, the costume designer Dede Ayite entered the stage door of the Metropolitan Opera, which is situated within a parking garage, and navigated a labyrinth of hallways. She was looking for the chorus members of “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” who were getting into their costumes for the final dress rehearsal. As the singers paraded in and out of a hair-and-makeup room, she would give them a final once-over. Ayite, who is in her late thirties, wore a faux-leather shirt and matching pants with rose chrome Nikes. “In sixth grade, I was chosen to play Scrooge in ‘A Christmas Carol,’ and I had to put together my own top hat,” she said. “That’s technically my first costume design.” “X,” which is directed by Robert O’Hara,…

I have always taken it for granted that, just as my parents made sure that I could read and write, I would make sure that my kids could program computers. It is among the newer arts but also among the most essential, and ever more so by the day, encompassing everything from filmmaking to physics. Fluency with code would round out my children’s literacy—and keep them employable. But as I write this my wife is pregnant with our first child, due in about three weeks. I code professionally, but, by the time that child can type, coding as a valuable skill might have faded from the world. I first began to believe this on a Friday morning this past summer, while working on a small hobby project. A few months…

In your brain, neurons are arranged in networks big and small. With every action, with every thought, the networks change: neurons are included or excluded, and the connections between them strengthen or fade. This process goes on all the time—it’s happening now, as you read these words—and its scale is beyond imagining. You have some eighty billion neurons sharing a hundred trillion connections or more. Your skull contains a galaxy’s worth of constellations, always shifting. Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist who is often called “the godfather of A.I.,” handed me a walking stick. “You’ll need one of these,” he said. Then he headed off along a path through the woods to the shore. It wound across a shaded clearing, past a pair of sheds, and then descended by stone steps…

Twelve months out from Election Day, the Presidential campaign has inescapably begun with the slow, ominous, upward crank of a roller coaster. For Democrats, the opening stages of the ride were particularly grim. A Times/Siena College poll published last weekend found that, of the six swing states that are expected to decide the election, President Joe Biden trails Donald Trump in all but one—Wisconsin—and would likely lose if the vote were held today. Within the Democratic Party, the possibility of another four years of Trump was alarming on a spiritual level, and panic set in. Barack Obama’s political guru David Axelrod suggested in a post that Biden needed to decide whether a second run is “in his best interest or the country’s.” During the Biden era, polls have tended to…

The three children of Leonard Bernstein uphold their father’s legacy with waggish exuberance. In September, at the Venice première of “Maestro,” a new film depicting Bernstein’s fraught but loving relationship with their mother, the actress Felicia Montealegre, they gleefully air-conducted along to the end credits, in the irrepressible manner of their father. While the actors’ strike sidelined Bradley Cooper—the film’s director, co-writer, and star—the Bernsteins subbed in as the film’s unofficial mascots. They like to call themselves “the three-headed monster.” “A former boyfriend of mine coined it,” Jamie, the eldest, said. “Because of all the noise and the carrying on and jokes.” Jamie (blond bob, voice like an oboe) is the memoirist—in 2018, she published “Famous Father Girl”—and the mouth-piece (“I’m a yakker”). Alexander, the middle child (electric-blue shirt, expressive…

Dear Parents, Welcome to Kinderkids Nursery School! We so loved meeting you all at orientation. Also, we regret to inform you that your children were exposed to lice at orientation. Consider the “getting sick at school” Band-Aid to be hereby ripped off! Fear not—we have lice checkers coming tomorrow, and we’ll make sure to let you know if your child is a carrier and thus not welcome back at school for a week. Dear Parents, Can you believe week one is already behind us? Apologies to everyone who wasn’t allowed to join owing to parasites, but if that’s you we have some good news. You weren’t exposed to COVID. This is a notification that everyone else was. Please make sure to monitor your child. Though the symptoms may be mild,…

The night that I saw Geoff Sobelle’s “FOOD,” something went wrong—and thank heavens it did. Sobelle is a superb clown, which is another way of saying that he’s in his element when things are going side-ways. (Clowns, at least physical comedians like Laurel and Hardy or Buster Keaton, tend to choose the silly, self-defeating path, so any obstacle just makes a task clownier.) Sobelle’s one-man production, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fishman Space, takes place around a massive square table, maybe twenty feet on each side, set with dinner plates, silverware, and a white tablecloth. Thirty audience members are allowed to pull up a chair, while the rest of us sit in theatre seats banked high on three sides. Sobelle is our maître d’, and his affable, unfailingly polite…

Last Tuesday morning, a month after the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel—a day now known as Black Sabbath—Matti Leshem and Lynn Harris, married movie producers, arrived at a back-yard gathering in West Los Angeles. It was a Hollywood crowd, assembled for a sombre purpose: to receive a delegation of survivors from Israel and families of hostages being held in Gaza. Leshem, who specializes in Jewish subjects, is tall, and he wore a khaki blazer, a polka-dot pocket square, and a jockey cap; Harris had on big sunglasses, blue-jeans, and a T-shirt that read “Bring Them Home Now.” Leshem is an Israeli citizen; his cousin’s two adult children were killed at a music festival that was a target of the attack. In the weeks since, he and Harris, along with many…

With a brisk, hobbling stride, Stan Herman trotted past bird-watchers and leaf-peepers in Central Park the other day. The former longest-serving president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America was on one of his uniform-spotting tours. Wearing a military-green hoodie, khakis, and dark sneakers, he sidled up to a Central Park Conservancy worker driving a golf cart. “Have you worn the parka yet?” he asked. (Not yet.) He asked another worker, “Do the pants work for you?” She told him that she loved the multiple pockets. This past spring, Herman, ninety-five, launched the Conservancy’s new, sporty-chic uniforms, one of the latest commissions among dozens of uniforms that he has designed over the decades for all kinds of clients. “The multiple shades of loden cost more to make, but they…

On March 26, 2022, at around 8:20 a.m., a man in light-blue Nike sweatpants boarded a bus near a shopping plaza in Timonium, outside Baltimore. After the bus driver ordered him to observe a rule requiring passengers to wear face masks, he approached the fare box and began arguing with her. “I hit bitches,” he said, leaning over a plastic shield that the driver was sitting behind. When she pulled out her iPhone to call the police, he reached around the shield, snatched the device, and raced off. The bus driver followed the man outside, where he punched her in the face repeatedly. He then stood by the curb, laughing, as his victim wiped blood from her nose. By the time police officers canvassed the area, the assailant had fled,…

Last fall, the artist and musician Holly Herndon visited Torreciudad, a shrine to the Virgin Mary associated with the controversial Catholic group Opus Dei, in Aragón, Spain. The sanctuary, built in the nineteen-seventies, sits on a cliff overlooking an inviting blue reservoir, in a remote area just south of the Pyrenees. Herndon and her husband, Mathew Dryhurst, had been on a short vacation in the mountains nearby. They were particularly taken with an exhibit of Virgin Mary iconography from around the world: a faceless, abstract stone carving from Cameroon; a pale, blue-eyed statuette from Ecuador; a Black Mary from Senegal, dressed in an ornate gown of blue and gold. Moving from art work to art work, the couple discussed Mary’s “embedding.” In machine learning, embeddings distill data down to concepts.…

Spend more than a few hours in Las Vegas and you become hyperaware of the carpets. They course through hotels, casinos, theatres, and malls. They teem with triangles, circles, ogees, leaves, flowers, and teardrops. They are hideous. When I was a kid, my dad explained that they encouraged tourists to look up at the slot machines and keep gambling away their money. It’s a counterintuitive idea—flashy stuff that’s designed not to be stared at?—but apparently it’s the truth. Vegas carpets snap you out of your daydreams, thrust you back into your surroundings, and remind you what you’ve come to the desert to do. It doesn’t hurt, presumably, that they do a good job of hiding spilled beer. The main-level atrium of the Sphere, Vegas’s newest entertainment venue, is the most…

ACROSS 1 Domesticated descendant of a guanaco 6 Ramirez of “And Just Like That …” 10 Sage 14 “All good here!” 15 The boom box from “Say Anything” or the boom box from “Do the Right Thing,” e.g. 16 Passed with flying colors 17 Substance whose production is depicted on Vermont’s state quarter 19 Member of the South Asian diaspora 20 Ones sticking around the office? 22 Lead-in to man or cave 23 It may go off every nine minutes 25 Eight, for Lisa Simpson 28 Good, in Hebrew 29 Currency in Mauritius or Sri Lanka 31 The Who’s “Tommy,” for example 35 Take hold of 36 What the nose knows 37 Sophomore ___ 39 Store with a one-way traffic system 40 Go on the fritz 42 Sci-fi organization with…