Innholdsfortegnelse for January 22, 2024 i The New Yorker

Leslie Jamison (“A New Life,” p. 40) has published five books, including “The Empathy Exams” and the forthcoming “Splinters.” David Means (Fiction, p. 48) has written several books, among them the novel “Hystopia” and the story collection “Two Nurses, Smoking.” Victoria Chang (Poem, p. 52) is the author of, most recently, “The Trees Witness Everything.” This spring, she will publish “With My Back to the World,” a collection of poems inspired by the art of Agnes Martin. Adlan Jackson (The Talk of the Town, p. 10) is a writer and a co-owner of Hell Gate, a worker-owned online publication covering New York City. Inkoo Kang (On Television, p. 68), a staff writer, became a television critic for The New Yorker in 2022. Simon Rich (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 18) has…

When George Motz, possibly our greatest scholar of hamburgers, announced last year that he would be opening a burger joint of his very own, New York’s center of gravity shifted—subtly, but perceptibly—toward a red brick building on the corner of MacDougal and Houston, in Soho, where he had signed a lease. The restaurant, which opened in November, has been kitted out with chrome and Formica, a retro fantasia bearing the same grand, unifying, handon-heart name, and ethos, as Motz’s first film and first book: Hamburger America. There are just two burgers on the menu at Hamburger America. The Classic Smash—in which a baseball of freshly ground beef is smeared into lace-edged flatness on a searing-hot griddle—can be ordered “all dressed,” with melty American cheese, diced onion, a few dill-pickle rounds,…

In 1532, when the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina became the law of the Holy Roman Empire, it specified that witchcraft was a serious crime, punishable by execution by fire. The Carolina was often cited in the European witch trials that followed, with crazes peaking in the second half of the sixteenth century, and again in the early decades of the seventeenth century. In Germany alone, twenty-five thousand people were executed. The Carolina is sometimes called the basis for these witch hunts, but it can also be seen as an attempt to tame them. Previously, trials could proceed on the allegations of only one accuser; the new set of laws required two. The accusers had to be deemed credible, and they could not be paid or of evil repute. There also had…

St. James’s Square, like many others in London, appears with little forewarning or fanfare. You leave the expensive ruckus of Piccadilly, cut down a narrow side street, and there it suddenly is: a holiday from the city, with a public garden islanded in its center. One gentle corner is home to the London Library, founded in 1841 by the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, who complained that the British Museum Library was giving him “museum headache.” In the early nineteen-eighties, the square was also home to the Libyan Embassy, or the Libyan People’s Bureau, as it had been renamed following Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s “popular revolution.” On the morning of April 17, 1984, a crowd of anti-Qaddafi demonstrators gathered across the street from the Embassy. A smaller counter-demonstration of Qaddafi loyalists faced…

ACROSS 1 Sheds feathers 6 Password-protected café offering 10 Swanky 14 “Your work is amazing!” 16 With proficiency 17 1942 film that ends with the line “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” 18 Lose one’s footing, in a way 19 Protagonists who can be tough to root for 20 Choice after picking an entrée 21 Manhattan’s ___ Village 22 Rip up 24 Subject of Oedipus’ kingdom 28 First reindeer named in “A Visit from St. Nicholas” 29 Like bike chains or pro bodybuilders 30 Collect, as scattered objects 32 Eye rudely 33 Object of a moth’s fatal attraction 35 ___ and hearty 36 Decade dominated by the Great Depression 38 “I’m busy right now!” 39 “The Magnificent Seven” actor James 40 Loathe 41 What fan…

The race for the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination has so far been notable mostly for the candidates’ sniping, hyperbole, and self-righteous indignation, but there has been a shared concern for the prospects of the twenty-first century. In a barb seemingly aimed at both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Nikki Haley said, “We won’t win the fight for the twenty-first century if we keep trusting politicians from the twentieth century.” Vivek Ramaswamy, whose fealty to Trump is nearly clerical, hailed him as “the best President of the twenty-first century,” even though Trump leads the three other men elected since 2000 in impeachments by a score of two to zero. Ron DeSantis posted on X, “The 21st century needs to be an American century. We cannot let it be a Chinese century.”…

We’re being watched. But when, and by whom? Kashmir Hill, the author of the new book “Your Face Belongs to Us,” took a walk around midtown the other day, to check out a few businesses that routinely capture visitors’ biometric data. She wore a red coat and white boots, and her hair was a faded purple. First up: Macy’s Herald Square. “Let’s see if Macy’s is still collecting face-recognition data,” she said. Businesses that do so are required by city law to post signs alerting visitors. She’d noticed, earlier, that the store’s signs were “very affixed to their walls.” One in an entrance vestibule, below an inflatable reindeer, stated that Macy’s “collects, retains, converts, stores, or shares customers’ biometric identifier information.” Inside, Hill approached a member of the store’s red-blazered…

Once upon a time, around 2010 or so, there lived a hardworking ant and a carefree grasshopper. The grasshopper was hopping to his heart’s content one sunny morning when the ant trudged by, bearing a large load. “Why aren’t you hopping?” chirped the grasshopper. “The summer is upon us, and the days are meant for dancing.” “I’m studying for the GRE,” said the ant. “And I strongly suggest you do the same.” “Why would I waste this sunshine toiling?” scoffed the grasshopper. “I was thinking, we should try Four Loko before it gets banned.” And then he shouted “YOLO!,” because it was during that brief period of time when people actually did that. The ant smiled smugly at the grasshopper. “It may be summer now,” she cautioned. “But winter will…

I old and pursuing a degree in electrical engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic, because he wanted both to be a radio engineer and to avoid having to read or write in school. But, as an obsessed and information-starved fan of a bunch of then underappreciated British rock bands, he got the itch to launch a fanzine. His father, an old lefty, had a mimeograph machine at the family’s Upper West Side apartment, and Robbins and some friends used it to produce about three hundred copies, twenty-four hand-stapled pages each, of a publication he christened Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press, after a 1968 song by the Bonzo Dog Band: “Do the trouser press, baby!” They hawked them outside a Rory Gallagher show at the Academy of Music, for a quarter a pop. With their…

A new piece by Joan Acocella was A reason enough to cancel plans. What had she chosen to tackle this time? Balanchine? The Book of Job? Harry Potter? Arsenic? There seemed to be no subject that she couldn’t take on. A little over a year ago, I hoped to review a book on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. No dice; Joan had claimed it. Annoyance at not being able to write turned instantly to gladness at being able to read. Now I am doubly glad. Joan died last weekend, at seventy-eight, from cancer; that essay was the last she published in this magazine. She herself might not have been so deferential. “Remember: if I do not get to review it, I will throw myself out the window with a note pinned…

In the early months of the pandemic, joggers on the Bear Creek Greenway, in southern Oregon, began to notice tents cropping up by the path. The Greenway, which connects towns and parks along a tributary of the Rogue River, was beloved for its wetlands and for stands of oaks that attracted migrating birds. Now, as jobs disappeared and services for the poor shut down, it was increasingly a last-ditch place to live. Tents accumulated in messy clusters, where people sometimes smoked fentanyl, and “the Greenway” became a byword for homelessness and drug use. On a popular local Facebook page, one typical comment read, “Though I feel sorry for some of the people in that situation, most of them are just pigs.” In Medford, the largest city along the trail, police…

The baby and I arrived at our sublet with garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet. At a certain point, I’d run out of suitcases. We had diapers patterned with drawings of scrambled eggs and bacon. Why put breakfast on diapers?, I might have asked, if there had been another adult in the room. There was not. Outside, it was nineteen degrees in the sun. For the next month, we were renting this railroad one-bedroom beside a firehouse. I’d brought raspberries and a travel crib, white Christmas lights to make the dim space glow. Next door, a fireman strutted toward his engine with a chainsaw in one hand and a box of Cheerios in the other. My baby tracked…

Intellectual property accounts for some or all of the wealth of at least half of the world’s fifty richest people, and it has been estimated to account for fifty-two per cent of the value of U.S. merchandise exports. I.P. is the new oil. Nations sitting on a lot of it are making money selling it to nations that have relatively little. It’s therefore in a country’s interest to protect the intellectual property of its businesses. But every right is also a prohibition. My right of ownership of some piece of intellectual property bars everyone else from using that property without my consent. I.P. rights have an economic value but a social cost. Is that cost too high? I.P. ownership comes in several legal varieties: copyrights, patents, design rights, publicity rights,…