Innholdsfortegnelse for March 18, 2024 i The New Yorker

Anand Gopal (“Invisible City,” p. 28) is a contributing writer for the magazine. He published “No Good Men Among the Living,” in 2014, and is currently at work on a book about the Arab revolutions. Emma Green (“Old School,” p. 12), a staff writer, covers education and academia for the magazine. Joseph O’Neill (Fiction, p. 52) has written five novels, including “Godwin,” forthcoming in June, 2024. Jill Lepore (Comment, p. 7; A Critic at Large, p. 57) is a staff writer and a professor at Harvard. Her most recent book is “The Deadline.” Peter de Sève (Cover), an illustrator and character designer, published the monograph “Local Fauna, the Art of Peter de Sève,” in 2023. Amy Woolard (Poem, p. 32) is a civil-rights attorney. Her début poetry collection, “Neck of…

Few people in New York City understand pasta the way the chef Missy Robbins understands pasta. After years overseeing some of the city’s most electrifying pasta restaurants, she’s amply proved her mastery of the medium: the expressivity of a noodle’s form, sensual or zany; the harmony of marrying a shape with exactly the right sauce. There is artistry, too, of course, in the act of cooking pasta; Robbins might boil a dried, extruded noodle so that it still has a filament of hardness running through it, whereas she’ll let her hand-cut specimens slump with jellyfish languor. There’s no better place to experience Robbins’s touch than at Lilia, her chic Williamsburg restaurant, but in its eight years Lilia has remained impenetrably booked. When you can’t get into Lilia, you might end…

Two Thursdays ago, while Joe Biden and Donald Trump were heading back from the southern border, five spryer Presidential candidates were at a sound-stage in Hell’s Kitchen, waiting to debate the real issues. “The libertarian guys are in this greenroom, the socialists are across the hall in hair and makeup, and I believe Jill Stein is taking a nap in here,” an employee of Free & Equal, the nonprofit producing the debate, said. “We invited Cornel West and Bobby Kennedy, too, but they were holding out for a big-name moderator.” Larry King moderated a Free & Equal debate in 2012, but this time the duties fell to Caitlin Sinclair, of One America News Network; Christina Tobin, the founder of Free & Equal and a longtime activist against the two-party system;…

The first thing you notice when walking into the middle-school classrooms at Brilla, a charter-school network in the South Bronx, is the sense of calm. No phones are out. The students are quiet—not in the beaten-down way of those under authoritarian rule but in the way of those who seem genuinely interested in their work. Sixth graders participate in a multiday art project after studying great painters such as Matisse. Seventh graders prepare to debate whether parents should be punished for the crimes of their minor children. Another group of sixth graders, each holding a violin or a cello, read out notes from sheet music. A teacher cues them to play the lines pizzicato, and they pluck their strings in unison. Brilla is part of the classical-education movement, a fast-growing…

The dead turned up everywhere. Two decapitated corpses in a cesspit. The remains of a woman with a pierced skull. A child with a bullet hole in his temple. Men clustering around a ditch suggested the worst, as did women running at full speed through the dirt. With each grim discovery, Jihan Omar renewed a promise to herself: she had to find a way out. Jihan lived in Al-Hol, a detention camp in eastern Syria which could more properly be called a concentration camp. Al-Hol was created decades ago, in a stretch of scrubland about ten miles west of the Iraqi border, as a haven for refugees. But in 2019, when the U.S.-led coalition vanquished ISIS—the armed group that had briefly established a breakaway caliphate within Syria and Iraq, imposing…

The Roman god Janus was possessed of two faces, one pointing toward the future and one looking backward into the past, and it is tempting to imagine that these faces must also have worn contrasting expressions, one brighter and hopeful, the other rueful or even aghast. Supposing you knew such a person, how would you go about introducing him? Which of the two faces—enthusiastic or downcast—should be presented first? The problem poses itself immediately when it comes to “Chevengur,” Andrei Platonov’s strange tale of a Communist peasant utopia. Written in 1927 and 1928, when Platonov was in his late twenties, it both represents his high-spirited début as a socialist novelist and reads like a dissident’s political suicide note. And, in the split perspective afforded by the book’s contradictory point of…

There’s more than one way to skin a Constitution. Here are two: a court might base a decision on the original intention, meaning, and public understanding, the “history and tradition,” of a constitutional provision, or it might base a decision on a consideration of the consequences. Ordinarily, a judge might apply both these and other methods, but a strict originalist might argue that the jurisprudence of originalism is fundamentally opposed to the jurisprudence of consequentialism—that it’s best to heed the past and damn the consequences. During oral arguments at the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, for instance, Justice Samuel Alito asked about origins (“Can it be said that the right to abortion is deeply rooted in the history and traditions of the American people?”), and Justice…

Three years ago, the actor Busy Philipps and her husband, the filmmaker Marc Silverstein, decided to call it quits. The separation process involved ironing out a co-parenting agreement (they have two kids, Birdie Leigh, fifteen, and Cricket Pearl, ten) and making new living arrangements. But they procrastinated on one order of business: dealing with their stuff. A storage unit was brimming with the remains of their life together. They decided to sell most of it and donate a portion of the proceeds to abortion funds. On a recent chilly Saturday, a long line formed in front of the Cure Thrift Shop, in the East Village. Inside, shoppers poked through such items as kitchen appliances, picture frames (forty-five dollars each), and a Wii Fit set. A long table held stacks of…

Melanie Ann Donoghue, thirty-two, of Westchester County, New York, was wed on Saturday to Wordle. The bride, a project manager at a pharmaceutical-advertising agency, met Wordle, a New York Times digital game, in 2022. “All my friends were telling me he was great,” she said. “They’d been trying to get me into him for a while. But I’d just gotten out of a long relationship and wasn’t in a place to commit, especially not to a five-letter-word game.” On the Washington Square Park bench where the couple was being interviewed, Donoghue admitted that her type was more “built.” “I like bald guys, actually,” she said. “All my exes before Wordle were bald human men.” The bride’s father is a partner at the New York-based law firm Green & Ipswich, and…

ACROSS 1 Recovery practice following some B.D.S.M. play 10 Chain that dropped “Juice” from its name in 2019 15 One put out by a new flame 16 Arrive from out of town, perhaps 17 Device applied after Tommy John surgery 18 Props 19 Some E.R. workers 20 On cloud nine 22 Term in a statistics class 23 Atlas lines: Abbr. 24 Former Starbucks C.E.O. ___ C. Smith 26 “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” poet Scott-Heron 27 Adrift 30 Exercise that strengthens the glutes 31 “Origin” director DuVernay 32 Giving the finger? 34 Treated maliciously 36 Sprang about 37 Volcanic depression 38 Secure 39 Stripped-down philosophy? 40 Actress and documentarian Grant 41 Peripatetic person 43 Positions 44 High point of a European vacation 45 Exam for B-school hopefuls 46 Coach…

Sheer is hot, sheer is in. At Paris Fashion Week, which just wrapped up, everyone was going see-through: Margiela, Valentino, Armani, Dior. Saint Laurent had such a preponderance of sheer, and such a lack of undergarments, that Vanessa Friedman, the Times’ fashion critic, demanded, “Enough with the boobs.” Nowhere has sheer made as much of a splash as in the summer collection of what might be called the House of Major League Baseball. Baseball fashion has been stale. What was once avant-garde (the pantaloon, the stirrup, the male stocking, the chubby old manager inexplicably kitting up in full uniform) has become passé. Boldness was needed. The league delivered, when spring training opened, with new uniforms designed by Nike and manufactured by the apparel company Fanatics. “2024 MLB season brings latest…

The private party for the soft launch of the Poodle Room—a members-only club at the new Fontainebleau resort in Las Vegas—was lavish even by Vegas standards. On the eighty-ninth floor, the very top of the hotel, attendees sat beside long, curved windows overlooking the Strip, the lights of the city spread out below like a sequinned scarf. Servers offered “caviar pillows,” Janelle Monáe d.j.’d from a disco-ball-shaped dais, and hunks of truffes the size of Ping-Pong balls were arrayed in gold bowls. Rumors circulated that Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck would show up, likely in the secret back room. (They did.) And yet none of this could compete with the presence of a white show poodle named Josephine. As the mascot of the Fontainebleau Las Vegas, Josephine appears on the…

If Abraham Lincoln had leaned back in his rocking chair that night at Ford’s Theatre and turned around—hearing a footfall or a rustle, or glimpsing, out of the corner of his eye, a stage light glinting off the mouth of the derringer—he would have recognized his murderer. Lincoln loved theatre; in his four years as President, he attended more than a hundred plays. “This is act vee one eye,” he’d whisper to his little son Tad, reading out the Roman numerals on the playbill. And he loved Ford’s: in December, 1863, he’d sat in its Presidential Box for two consecutive nights of “Henry IV”—“pause us till these rebels now afoot/Come underneath the yoke of government”—and that November, ten days before he delivered the Gettysburg Address, he’d seen John Wilkes Booth…

Some filmmakers use the conventions of genre as guideposts as they lead viewers into strange territory, as Jordan Peele did with horror in “Get Out.” Others use the same markers to keep viewers on well-worn paths. The British filmmaker Rose Glass’s début feature, “Saint Maud,” from 2019—in which a young nurse pursues religious faith to the point of delusion—promised in its early scenes to be a modern classic of fanaticism along the lines of Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed.” But Glass pressed the action into the sensational tropes of horror and left the characters and the subject undeveloped. In her second feature, “Love Lies Bleeding,” she does something similar—but to different effect. The movie, shot from a script by Glass and Weronika Tofilska, is based on a good idea, a battle…