Innholdsfortegnelse for February 5, 2024 i The New Yorker

John Seabrook (“The Next Scene,” p. 24) has published four books, including, most recently, “The Song Machine.” Elizabeth Kolbert (“Burn Notice,” p. 20), a staff writer, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “The Sixth Extinction.” Her latest book, “H Is for Hope,” will be published in March. Ismail Ibrahim (The Talk of the Town, p. 10) is a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff. Liana Finck (Sketchbook, p. 39), a New Yorker cartoonist, is the author of, most recently, “You Broke It!” Akash Kapur (A Critic at Large, p. 53) is a senior fellow at New York University’s GovLab and a visiting research scholar at Princeton. His latest book is “Better to Have Gone.” Sophie Cabot Black (Poem, p. 31) will publish her forthcoming poetry collection,…

Soon after settling in for the kamayan meal at Naks, a new restaurant in the East Village, you’ll be asked to get back up again. Kamayan (Tagalog for “by hand”) is a Filipino feast eaten without utensils; with this in mind, diners are led to a sink installed in the room before commencing. Many of the city’s Filipino restaurants offer kamayan, generally as a large-format sampler; at Naks, under the direction of the chef and co-owner Eric Valdez, it’s a coursed-out tasting menu that aims to offer a gastronomic tour of the Philippines—its melding of native foodways with centuries of Spanish, Chinese, Indian, and American occupation—framed by Valdez’s own biography and memories. The dishes were consistently delightful. Tiny bites of kinilaw na bat (seacucumber ceviche) glowed neon-bright with calamansi and…

The artist Suzanne Bocanegra has many stories to tell, and not just her own: her installations, sculptural assemblages, and performance pieces often unpack other artists’ work (she once sewed tiny cotton replicas of all the aprons from Jean-François Millet’s peasant paintings) or feature appearances by fellow-creators. She’s particularly interested in women working—and women in trouble. For her video piece “Valley,” from 2018, she meticulously reproduced a four-minute clip of Judy Garland’s 1967 wardrobe test for “Valley of the Dolls” by filming eight artistic titans, such as Carrie Mae Weems, reënacting the snippet. Since 2010, Bocanegra has been making a suite of “Artist Lectures” (there are four so far)—droll multimedia talks, presented onstage before an audience, ranging across her life and art history, sometimes peering into eccentric corners of Americana. In…

1. Something so obscure and pretentious that you’re the only person who’s ever seen, read, or listened to it. Use the phrases “soul-shattering,” “proudly noncommercial,” “blazingly idiosyncratic,” and “seemingly empty yet rife with meaning.” 2. Something super-successful that you can ratify in a quasi-absurdist, neo-ironic way, with language like “populist,” “ubiquitous,” “surprisingly heartfelt,” and “Taylor Swift meets Beyoncé meets Justin and Britney Beanie Babies.” 3. A choice that proves you went to Harvard, have a podcast, and accept money from your parents in order to underwrite your nonlinear explorations of identity and also grab a week in Croatia and get noninvasive microcurrent facials. 4. Any author, recording artist, or director whom you personally “discovered” by owning an iPad. 5. A piece by someone of a different ethnicity or sexuality which…

“We need a President who will re-law and order!,” Senator store Tim Scott, of South Carolina, bellowed from a stage in Concord, New Hampshire, ahead of that state’s primary last week. “We neeeed Donald Trump!” And Donald Trump, barring a major plot twist, will soon need a running mate. Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, and until recently a candidate for the Republican nomination himself, appears to be well aware of that prospect.He’s not the only one. An unseemly crowd of would-be Veeps has been campaigning in Trump’s wake, generating a phantasmagoria of MAGA abasement—rich in ambition, short on shame. There was a brief time when it seemed possible that prominent Republicans would recoil from the idea of being Trump’s sidekick. The last person to hold the job,…

New York City’s history is full of doppelgängers, look-alikes, and repetitions. Is there any experience as universal as moving here from a small town, working a crappy job, and spending half your keep to rent a shoebox apartment that you share with a roommate? Take, for instance, the story of a waiter named Joseph Moore. He moved to the city from Belvedere, New Jersey. He wasn’t on StreetEasy—this was 1857. The besthe could afford was a two-hundred-and-seventy-square-foot apartment he shared with four others. Moore is the subject of the Tenement Museum’s latest exhibition, “A Union of Hope.” On a recent Sunday, two historians who consulted on the project, Tyler Anbinder and Leslie Harris, met with Annie Polland, the museum’s president, to take a tour. The three joined up on Orchard…

The provincial government of Alberta defines a “wildfire of note” as a blaze that could “pose a threat to public safety, communities or critical infrastructure.” Last year, Alberta’s first wildfire of note broke out unusually early, on April 30th, near the tiny town of Entwistle, about sixty-five miles west of Edmonton. A second wildfire of note was recorded that same day, in the town of Evansburg. Four days later, an astonishing seventy-two wildfires were burning, and three days after that the number had grown to a hundred and nine. Some thirty thousand people had to be evacuated, and Alberta’s premier declared a state of emergency. “It’s been an unusual year,” Christie Tucker, an offcial from the province’s wildfire information unit, observed at the end of the week. The unusual soon…

Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity began, according to legend, with a Facebook post. In the fall of 2013, after President Viktor Yanukovych backed out of a deal that would have deepened the country’s relationship with the European Union, the investigative journalist Mustafa Nayyem wrote a post calling on people to gather in Independence Square, in the center of Kyiv. After three months of continuous protests, Yanukovych fled to Russia. Ten years later, Independence Square is desolate most days. Kyiv has imposed a midnight curfew. Martial law, in effect since February, 2022, when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, forbids mass gatherings. As for Nayyem, he is now the head of the federal agency for reconstruction, which is attempting to rebuild the country as quickly as the Russians are devastating it.…

On a cold night in February of 1996, John Perry Barlow found himself at a party in Davos. It was the closing event of the World Economic Forum, and the ballroom was filled with besuited masters of the universe and students from the University of Geneva. He danced with them, a little inebriated. But a thought nagged at him. Earlier that day, in Washington, D.C., President Clinton had signed a bill that would for the first time bring the Internet under a degree of government control. The Communications Decency Act (C.D.A.), part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, included a provision that would criminalize “obscene” or “indecent” content on the Internet. In Congress, the Nebraska senator James Exon, who had co-sponsored the C.D.A., issued a dire warning: “Barbarian pornographers…

The other Friday, in a Hawaiianthemed apartment complex in the San Fernando Valley (burbling miniwaterfall, tiki-hut-style patrol booth), June Squibb was puttering around her cozy two-bedroom. The actress, who is ninety-four, has lived in the complex since the early two-thousands. “They brought me out to Los Angeles from New York for the première of ‘About Schmidt,’” she said, referring to the 2002 Alexander Payne film, in which she played Jack Nicholson’s wife. “And then my agent got me ‘ER,’ and I just kept getting work.” Squibb’s robust orange tabby, Billy Bob, wandered by and rubbed against her shin. Her other feline, Mr. Rose, was dozing in the back of the apartment. “We have twenty-three spots for the cats around the house,” Kelly Sweeney, Squibb’s longtime assistant, said. “Little beds and…

As the general manager of the Jay Peak ski resort, Bill Stenger rose most days around 6 A.M. and arrived at the slopes before seven. He’d check in with his head snowmaker and the ski-patrol staff, visit the two hotels on the property, and chat with the maintenance workers, the lift operators, the food-and-beverage manager, and the ski-school instructors—a kind of management through constant motion. Stenger is seventy-five, with white hair, wire-rimmed reading glasses, and a sturdy physique that makes him look built for fuzzy sweaters. He told me recently, of skiing, “I love the sport. It’s a dynamic sport, and, if it’s properly taught, it is life-changing.” On April 13, 2016, he had finished his morning rounds and was drinking coffee withthe head of the snow-grooming department when his…

On the morning of February 24, 2022, air-raid sirens wailed in the streets of Kyiv, heralding a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. When the composer Adrian Mocanu heard the noise, he had a curious reaction. “I thought the sirens sounded like giant wolves howling,” he told me, in an e-mail. The aural illusion haunted him, and last year he created a piece called “Time of the Wolves,” which blends recordings of sirens and of wolves into a smoldering, eerily expectant electronic soundscape. The title alludes to Michael Haneke’s film “Le Temps du Loup,” in which a family wanders a contaminated landscape, and also to the Old Norse epic “Völuspá,” which contains the line “Wind-time, wolf-time, ere the world falls.” Since 2022, Ukrainian artists have been thrust into a tragic spotlight,…

ACROSS 1 Don Q competitor 8 Begin 15 Boris Johnson, for one 16 Florida ___ (popular food fish) 17 Its north and south poles are close together 19 2001 Nobel Peace Prize recipient 20 Tools for duels 21 Univ.-application datum 22 Gaze 23 First name in an 1857 decision 24 Take things badly? 26 Denizen of an underground colony 29 “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion” director Petri 30 Monogram on some designer sunglasses 31 ___ place 32 Sandals, e.g. 34 For fear that 35 Brewer’s ingredient 36 Quiescence 39 Punch 40 East Lansing sch. 43 Unique 44 Gets out of Dodge 47 “Millennium” trilogy author Larsson 49 Father of Phobos 50 Algerian city where Albert Camus’s “The Plague” is set 51 ___ Beach (Honolulu suburb) 52 Presidential middle name…