Innholdsfortegnelse for December 18, 2023 i The New Yorker

In the nineteen-seventies, Bruce Ames, a biochemist at Berkeley, devised a way to test whether a chemical might cause cancer. Various tenets of cancer biology were already well established. Cancer resulted from genetic mutations—changes in a cell’s DNA sequence that typically cause the cell to divide uncontrollably. These mutations could be inherited, induced by viruses, or generated by random copying errors in dividing cells. They could also be produced by physical or chemical agents: radiation, ultraviolet light, benzene. One day, Ames had found himself reading the list of ingredients on a package of potato chips, and wondering how safe the chemicals used as preservatives really were. But how to catch a carcinogen? You could expose a rodent to a suspect chemical and see if it developed cancer; toxicologists had done…

In 1982, when Ian Marcus was nine days old, his father left work and headed home to his family on Long Island on a new moped, only to be killed by a driver who’d run a red light. “Here I was, this twenty-five-year-old widow with a baby,” Ian’s mother, Donna, told me. About a year and a half after the accident, when a bearded guy who ran a Brooklyn meat locker asked her out, “it took ten friends to convince me to go.” Her date, Dean Amelkin, arrived with a plastic train set for Ian. Before long, her son had a second dad, a second last name, and two younger sisters. The family relocated to South Florida, where Dean helped his own father run a graphics shop. Eager for Ian…

When—after I’d long hesitated, lost my nerve, thought better of it—I finally gathered the strength to ask my decreasingly lucid mother if she remembered a certain scene that still brought an ache to my grownup heart, she gave me a mystified, offended stare, a stare of virtuous indignation, and then, collecting herself, answered gently, as you might answer a very old person who, you realize, didn’t mean to say such a ridiculous thing, that what I was talking about not only hadn’t happened but could not, in any case, possibly have happened. My father, of whose face and voice I had no memory, who was preserved in my childhood recollections only as a tall form, enormous, eminent, and dark, could not have walked out of our apartment in 1969, could…

Correction, by Ben Austen (Flatiron). In the nineteen-seventies, the so-called war on crime initiated a trend in extreme sentencing that, for the federal government and sixteen states, included the near-elimination of parole. While showing how parole decisions can be erratic, biased, and insufficiently focussed on the offenders’ rehabilitation, Austen argues that the institution is nevertheless “an essential release valve.” He anchors his reportage with two inmates in their sixties, who have been imprisoned for four decades and are among the last in Illinois to remain eligible for parole. The self-knowledge and resilience of these men gleam against the harsh conditions of prison, and Austen transforms a debate often conducted on the plane of stereotype and fearmongering into a close study of real people in a broken system. The Manuscripts Club,…

Theatre has always loved a good property-in-peril story: Theban royals fighting for a throne; struggling salesmen worrying about their mortgages; Russian gentry losing their cherry orchards. Our sense of fairness is piqued when a place—Elsinore, a house in Brooklyn—might be wrested away from the person who has title to it. But what if rightful ownership isn’t possible, or is beside the point? It’s a tricky, delicate task to construct a drama around a hero who refuses to stake a claim. In “Manahatta,” now at the Public, the playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle intertwines two stories of American disinheritance: the coercive removal of the Lenape from lower Manhattan, undertaken by land-hungry Dutch settlers, and the 2008 subprime-housing-loan collapse. In both the seventeenth century and the twenty-first, contract language obscures and enables predatory…

A FORGOTTEN CRISIS I enjoyed Thomas Mallon’s review of Tobias Becker’s book about nostalgia (Books, November 27th). But, like Zadie Smith’s piece of memoir that appears in the same issue, Mallon’s article features a misleading reference to Y2K. Mallon calls Y2K a “passing apocalyptic fancy.” Indeed, in the past twenty-four years, Y2K has become a stand-in for any much hyped threat that turns out to be insignificant. In reality, however, Y2K is a rare example of a known problem that was successfully addressed in advance through the combined efforts of government and private industry. I am one of the many programmers who worked on Y2K preparation. Like my colleagues, I waited at home on New Year’s Eve, 1999, watching anxiously, and then triumphantly, as the lights stayed on in country…

“I forgot our life vests!” Matt Marsden said the other day, before stepping into a blow-up dinghy floating in the Japanese Pond at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where he was working as an event contractor. He was joined by a B.B.G. executive named Kathryn Glass, who was inspecting a new addition to the million-and-a-half-gallon body of water: twelve huge, illuminated fountains, which had recently arrived from the Netherlands. “We didn’t just go down the street to, like, Vern’s Pump Supply,” Marsden said. “We had to get a big piece of machinery that could reach out thirty feet and drop them into the water.” “Like, an excavator-size thing?” Glass asked. “Are you impressed that I pulled out that technical term? I have nephews.” “It’s not quite an excavator—it’s a telescoping material…

[The astrophysicist Shep] Doeleman said a black hole formed from folding the Earth in half could power Manhattan for a year.—The Harvard Gazette, May 13, 2022. Yes, there are trade-offs. We discovered that. Trade-offs not only in astrophysics but in life. I remember Shep became interested in folding planets in half when we were in high school. He got kicked off the tennis team for folding the tennis balls. We’d show up for practice and unfold them. You squeeze them and they pop back out. That was the moment of inspiration—that popping sound. Shep said, “Do you have any idea how much energy is being released?” To me, it seemed like only a modest amount, but he said, “Just one tennis ball, folded in half, could power this watch for…

Here are the chaffinches we saw crossing the road dividing the forest.Here are the blue-numbered logs we saw by the fast-flowing stream.Here are the voles we saw moving through leaf litter, nibbling.Here are red kites we heard high in the pines holding down their flight.Here are fruit trees that sheltered us, shedding petals and forcing out new leaves.Here are the plastic streamers that blocked our way, fluttering over the path.Here are the gradations of those gauge boards as the water reached up.Here are the meadows effusing and fermenting—spontaneously erupting.Here is the mayfly on my hand bringing itself into synch with my biorhythms.Here are the same steps redirected uphill taking so much more work—a test.Here are horses being led by riders searching the forest for an inner light.Here are resplendent blue…

In March, 1940, Edmund Carl Heine, a forty-nine-year-old American automobile executive, reached an understanding with a company then known as Volkswagenwerk GmbH. Heine, who immigrated to the United States from Germany as a young man, had spent years at Ford, first in Michigan and then in its international operations in South America and Europe, landing finally in Germany. In 1935, two years after the Nazi regime came to power, Ford fired him, for reasons that are unclear. Heine next signed on with Chrysler, in Spain, but the Spanish Civil War was tough on the car business. And so he was out of a job again. Volkswagen offered to pay Heine, who was an American citizen, to collect information on the production of airplanes in the U.S., including military planes. This…

DECEMBER 13 – 19, 2023 The snug music-and-dinner venue Joe’s Pub has a sweet-and-salty lineup for audiences who want to mark the holidays with a tweak to the season’s perpetual wonder and sincerity. Justin Vivian Bond (Dec. 19-21) and Sandra Bernhard (Dec. 26-31), master storytellers at the intersection of mordant comedy and song, share deadpan anecdotes from family life and festivities past. Julia Mattison and Joel Waggoner, the unhinged parodists behind the Instagram account Advent Carolndar, skewer holiday clichés with note-perfect mimicries of Stephen Sondheim and Christian pop (Dec. 21-22). Murray Hill, the professional nice guy whose optimism lifts the HBO series “Somebody Somewhere” (Dec. 12-16), and Eva Noblezada, who takes audiences to her own “Winter Delululand” (Dec. 18-20), round out the offerings.—Oussama Zahr ABOUT TOWN OFF BROADWAY | The…

Paul Briganti, the comedy director, was wandering the floor of the R.E.I. flagship store in SoHo, a multi-story behemoth of outdoor gear. “I never really got into camping,” he said. “My parents divorced when I was a kid, and my dad was, like, ‘You’re going to go to Cub Scouts now, and I’ll be a den leader.’” He paused by a rack of nylon Patagonia pants, rustling through them with a flummoxed air. “It was supposed to be a kind of structured activity for us, making fires and setting up tents and watching birds, but we both didn’t know what we were doing. We were just two dummies hanging out, no gas or momentum in the venture.” Nevertheless, a year and a half ago, Briganti found himself directing a movie…

Leo Reich strode onstage to the thudding beat of “Hot in It,” by Tiësto and Charli XCX. His batwing-lined eyes gleamed, and he was dressed in a contour-molding misbhv T-shirt and a pair of black short shorts whose white piping outlined his crotch. Grabbing a microphone stand and casting a mock-bashful look at the audience, he explained, “I didn’t have any time to change. I had to, like, run here straight from my dad’s worst nightmare.” It was a mild September evening at Earth Hackney, a venue in East London, and Reich was performing his standup comedy show, “Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?!” Shiny black zip-up boots endowed his steps with a peppy bounce. “I’d just like to introduce myself, for those of you who don’t know me,” he…

There’s a sadness I’m avoiding It’s why I live like this The truth is I know I can’t hide From it. I know I can’t But I can hide from you Or I somehow still think I can & what that really means is hide it From you. It’s not that I don’t trust You. I’m just scared to lose It. I’m not avoiding My sadness I’m trying To protect it. What I lost I already lost a really Long time ago. Whatever I tried to do apart From what I lost had more To do with covering it With probably some kind Of monument than “moving on” But I’m the only one who needs To know that it’s a monument Or what it’s for. Anthills Mountains out of molehills.…

In almost every TV comedy special, there’s a telling cutaway that the director felt obliged to insert. It shows spectators in the theatre rented for the occasion—usually a half row, half a dozen people—erupting in laughter at something outrageous that the comedian has just said while turning with quick, happy complicity to exchange a guilty glance for having done so. As often as not, someone in the row covers her face or offers an abashed look, before rocking back and forth with renewed delight. It is a heightened emotion and clearly meant to allow us, watching, to join in. Can we laugh at that? they ask one another, giving us permission to laugh as they laugh. It is, in a way, a version of the canned laughter that once enwrapped…

About ten years ago, the concept of “Brooklyn” seemed to be trending in Tokyo. In 2013, a chef named Makoto Asamoto opened a (since shuttered) restaurant called Fort Greene, which joined the establishments Brooklyn Pancake House and Brooklyn Parlor (on the menu: roast chicken, Brooklyn Session I.P.A.). The coffee label Brooklyn Roasting Company has set up locations in Tokyo, and a neighborhood called Daikanyama, a destination for brunch and vintage clothing, is sometimes referred to as Little Brooklyn. In the past few years, Brooklyn’s northernmost neighborhood, Greenpoint—once defined largely by its Polish and Puerto Ricanpopulations; more recently, a relatively sleepy hipster hamlet—has seen a feedback loop emerge, with a wave of new Japanese businesses. In the expansive dining room at the restaurant Rule of Thirds, panelled in blond wood and…