Innholdsfortegnelse for February 26, 2024 i The New Yorker

Here I am thanking you for this fine copyof Jack Spicer’s posthumous“One Night Stand and Other Poems”(Grey Fox Press, 1980),introductions by Donald Allen and Robert Duncan. It’s such a rare little bird,I was careful to purify my handsbefore sliding it out of its clear Mylar sleeve. I was careful, too, when I turned the pages,but when Jesus began making out his willand Alice in Wonderland went missing from the chessboard,the book had to be restrained from taking flightand flapping its many wings against a window pane. So now, the front cover is bent back a littlelike a clam with its shell slightly ajarthe way Spicer’s mouth could look sometimeswhen we would see him at Gino and Carloor in the park by the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul,where he would…

In recent years, as TikTok has become an increasingly powerful engine for the dissemination of culture, a new sort of pop star has emerged: one who has enormous pull on social media but gets comparatively little acknowledgment from the music press, which remains laser-focussed on a handful of millennial superstars, so much so that the more conspiracy-minded among us have started whispering, “PsyOp.” Noah Kahan is one of those artists—everything to some, inscrutable to others, with striking numbers on Spotify and TikTok, and a steady presence on the Billboard chart since the release of “Stick Season,” his third album, in 2022. Kahan, who was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist this year, is the rare figure who seems positioned to leverage viral success into something more like a…

BEEFED UP I love reading food articles, especially those by Helen Rosner, but I was troubled by her recent review of the smash-burger restaurant Hamburger America (Tables for Two, January 22nd). It strikes me as strange to run an unqualified celebration of meat-eating when The New Yorker, like so many other news outlets, dedicates many of its pages to climate change—and often notes, in those pages, the direct relationship between climate change and agriculture. Americans’ love of consuming meat not only directly causes warming by creating methane emissions (a greenhouse gas that traps much more heat than CO2 does); it also does so indirectly through the destruction of forest for pasture. Increasingly, chefs are acknowledging this reality by changing their menus. When will publications do the same, by ceasing…

On a fall day in Gainesville, Georgia, Justin Kobylka, the forty-two-year-old owner of Kinova Reptiles, was preparing to cut open two clutches of snake eggs. He was hoping to hit upon some valuable, beautiful reptiles. Kobylka is a breeder of designer ball pythons—one-of-a-kind, captive-bred snakes whose skin features colors and patterns not usually found in nature. “I think of myself as an explorer,” he told me. Nicking an egg with a pair of surgical scissors, he exposed a live hatchling in its goo. “Even when they haven’t yet touched air, you can sometimes see the tongue going,” he said, making a flicking gesture with his thumb and fingertip. We were standing in a six-thousand-square-foot climate-controlled outbuilding that housed some two thousand pythons, which were kept in individual plastic trays slotted…

In early December, 2020, Alejandro Mayorkas was called to Wilmington, Delaware, for a meeting with Joe Biden. The President-elect was choosing his Cabinet, and Mayorkas, whom Biden knew personally, had the sort of résumé that made him an obvious contender for a top role in the new Administration. Then a partner at WilmerHale, an élite white-shoe law firm in Washington, D.C., he had been a U.S. Attorney under Bill Clinton and Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security under Barack Obama. Now Biden wanted to discuss Mayorkas’s interest in running D.H.S. During their conversation, which lasted ninety minutes, Biden kept returning to the same question: “Are you sure you want do this?” D.H.S. has a sprawling portfolio, with two hundred and sixty thousand employees spread across two dozen agencies, including the Coast…

John Lewis, by Raymond Arsenault (Yale). This sweeping biography represents the first effort at a comprehensive account of the life of the civil-rights icon John Lewis. Lewis’s “almost surreal trajectory” begins with his childhood in a “static rural society seemingly impervious to change.” Arsenault frames what followed in terms of Lewis’s attempt to cultivate the spirit of “Beloved Community”—a term, coined by the theologian Josiah Royce, for a community “based on love.” As a boy, Lewis disapproved of the vengeful sermons at his home-town church; as a youthful protest leader, he adhered to nonviolence, even while being assaulted by bigots; in Congress, he rose above a culture of self-promotion and petty rivalries. Lewis, in Arsenault’s account, was unfailingly modest: watching a documentary about his life, he was “embarrassed by its…

Which were the pivotal years of the past century? An argument could be made for 1929, when the worldwide financial crash ushered in the crisis that led to the rise of Nazism (and of the New Deal) and, eventually, to the Second World War; for 1945, when the United States emerged from that war uniquely victorious—having, like Hercules, strangled two serpents in its cradle, as Updike thought—and in possession of the most lethal weapon the world had ever known; for 1968, marked by a series of assassinations and domestic unrest that announced the beginning of the end of the American bulwark empire but also, through the awakening to liberation and the softpower of the European left, of the Russian one. Other years raise their hands eagerly and ask for admittance:…

Theatre has become a slow art. It takes time to write a play, and then additional time to get someone to produce it; no wonder, then, that current events are most likely to show up in cabaret and standup. (Political theatre’s version of super-timeliness tends to be, like, the past five years.) And drama requires a certain slowness from us, too. You can casually wander out of a movie, pause a television show, check social media as you read a book, or—I don’t know—knit. But the scant hundred minutes of Sarah Gancher’s Off Broadway play “Russian Troll Farm,” for instance, have to unfold in the molasses time of unadulterated, undistracted viewing. Luckily, that fight for our scattered attention, and even the topical delay, can become part of the show itself.…

FEBRUARY 21 – 27, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. People tend to use the word “love” when they talk about the Morgan Library, which celebrates its centennial this year. Its big spring show honors another beloved institution, the British author Beatrix Potter. Those who know her only for children’s books may be surprised by the breadth of her career as an amateur mycologist, or by the beauty of botanical illustrations such as “Leaves and Flowers of the Orchid Cactus” (pictured), completed in 1886, the year she turned twenty. But her true legacy may well be in merchandising: in 1903, Peter Rabbit became the first licensed character in history, earning his creator more money than she could spend and anticipating a veritable warren’s worth of I.P.…

A few years ago, Howell Miller was in prison in New York State, walking laps around the track with a fellow-inmate he’d befriended, who happened to be a former U.S. congressman. Prior to the prison stint, Miller, a cheerful guy in his early fifties, had run a construction company and a serious marijuana operation, simultaneously. “I was a silent baller,” he told me. “Then one of my guys got caught with forty-four hundred pounds on a truck.” As Miller neared the end of a twelve-year sentence, he began hearing stories of people getting rich running weed shops: “I was thinking, Why the hell am I still in jail?” His ex-congressman friend, Anthony Weiner, told him on the track that day that the first dispensary licenses were going to be awarded…

Through no fault of our own (naturally), we were late. Our wives, you see, had decided to tag along. And although in general we didn’t bring our women to khatams, Hajji Hotak’s wife had sent each of our wives a personal invitation on Facebook, which they lorded over us, until, inevitably, we found ourselves waiting in empty living rooms or pacing back and forth on dreary porches, every few minutes shouting up the stairs or into the house, or quietly muttering to ourselves that we were late, goddammit, forever late, forever late and waiting, our wristwatches ticking as if time had no meaning, as if we weren’t hurtling toward the oblivion we had seen in the gaping mouths of boys with guns, but our clever wives—plucking and pruning and painting…

What happened in the apple orchard that so frightened the children? Something had been half-glimpsed or heard, something in the night. Rumors sparked but didn’t catch. The children kept their distance, and stayed close to the nearby school. Years passed. The school was shut down. The buildings stood. The orchard grew wild. And, one day, a tourist out walking in the area discovered a piece of bone—a child’s rib. In 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation began an investigation. Ground-penetrating radar detected what seemed to be evidence of some two hundred graves, presumably belonging to Native American children, in the land surrounding the Kamloops Indian Residential School, in British Columbia. A few weeks later, Cowessess First Nation reported signs of seven hundred and fifty-one graves around the Marieval Indian…

At Christmas, 1939, a few months into the new World War, London bookshops were very busy. The war was bringing in a public eager to learn about weapons, planes, and the nature of the country that was once again the enemy. Confidence was high and curiosity, as much as fear, prevailed. Among recent titles, “I Married a German” had gone through five editions, and the Lewis Carroll-inspired illustrated satire “Adolf in Blunderland”—featuring Hitler as a mustachioed child and a Jewish mouse who has been in a concentration camp—sold out in days. Publishers, proudly demonstrating how different the English were from the book-burningGermans, had issued a newly translated version of “Mein Kampf,” unabridged, which was selling fast; royalties were diverted to the Red Cross, which sent books to British prisoners of…