Innholdsfortegnelse for April 15, 2024 i The New Yorker

Luke Mogelson (“The Assault,” p. 28), a staff writer, won a National Magazine Award and the inaugural Sydney H. Schanberg Prize for his coverage of the Capitol insurrection. This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Amanda Petrusich (“The Modern Pulpit,” p. 22) is a staff writer and the author of“Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records.” Richard Brody (The Current Cinema, p. 74), a film critic for the magazine, is the author of “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.” Rebecca Mead (Books, p. 69), a staff writer since 1997, most recently published the memoir “Home/Land.” Hilton Als (Books, p. 58), a staff writer, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.He published “My Pinup” in 2022. Alexis Wilkinson…

Even if you have trouble spotting Okiboru House of Udon’s nondescript shopfront, chances are you won’t miss the line winding halfway down the restaurant’s East Village block. Okiboru doesn’t take reservations or permit takeout—a prudent move, considering its cozy quarters (eighteen slender counter seats) and the fact that hype is a potent currency among its most fervent publicists, foodie Tik-Tokers who know a ribbon of hyper-telegenic noodle when they see one. If you are lucky enough to be ushered in (one aspiring diner had been waiting for forty-five minutes), you may be tempted to start filming the moment you are seated. Three seconds is all it would take to capture and upload footage of the Altoid-like tablet that majestically blooms into a warm hand towel when deposited in water. In…

Listen, kid, when you’ve been throughthe things I’ve been through, you know some things about things. And those things … Well, they’re the things that put things in perspective. That’s the problem with kids these days: too many things, not enough good old-fashioned, homegrown, cage-free knowhow. And, trust me, I know how. While you get to ride to “school” in a graphene-coated e-limousine that runs on skim matcha lattes, I had to crawl on my belly over roads made of crushed glass. All this while dragging a giant phonograph that played my mother shouting “You’re not good enough!” on a loop. Except I wasn’t headed to school. I was headed to war. A war that I won single-handedly, because I lost the other hand on the way there. And even…

Last spring, I was in a white van rumbling down a road about fifty miles east of Bangkok, passing dusty awnings that hung over shops hawking cell phones and sneakers, when, abruptly, the vehicle stopped. The road was barricaded; the barricades were manned by soldiers in uniform. After a moment, I realized that the soldiers were actors and the barricades were props. We had reached the set of “The Sympathizer,” the director Park Chan-wook’s seven-episode HBO adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. A producer hurried me out of the van and through a crowd of background actors playing Vietnamese villagers, wearing sun-bleached trousers and thin cotton dresses. They were sitting on suitcases that carried, in the world of the show, their most important possessions—everything that they…

At the bottom right of my computer screen, just out of my direct line of vision, lurks an animated scold: a cartoon giraffe named Rafi. He is the playful icon of an app called Posture Pal, which works in concert with a wearer’s AirPods to warn against slumping while sitting at a computer. So long as I keep my line of vision trained on this text, Rafi stays discreetly out of sight. The minute I rest my chin in my hand in concentration, however—let alone sneak a glance at the iPhone that lies tantalizingly close to my keyboard—a baleful Rafi pops up, eyes wide, mouth down-turned. Sit up straight! Rafi is actually less intrusive than the animated animal featured in another posture-correction desktop app, Nekoze. This one employs a computer’s…

The matter of moral sympathy—who attracts it, who gives it, what action it inspires—can be cruelly fickle. Six months ago, Hamas-led militants killed some twelve hundred people in Israel and took more than two hundred hostages, igniting a war in Gaza, in which Israel has killed some thirty-two thousand people. But it was Israel’s fatal attack on seven aid workers in Gaza, who were part of José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen—all but one of them non-Palestinians, including a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen—that compelled the Biden Administration to issue its strongest rebuke. W.C.K. had built a makeshift jetty to bring food ashore in Gaza, where hundreds of thousands face the prospect of famine, because Israel had resisted calls to allow more aid in by land. The seven W.C.K. workers were travelling in…

Two years ago, the singer and actor Maya Hawke spent a few weeks hanging around Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, where her younger brother, Levon, was a philosophy major. She was on hiatus from filming “Stranger Things”—the Netflix show on which she plays a band geek turned monster slayer—which prompted her to reflect on her lack of formal education. After graduating from St. Ann’s, an artsy private high school in Brooklyn, she enrolled at Juilliard but dropped out after a year, when her role in a “Little Women” miniseries clashed with the school’s ban on undergraduates working professionally during term. “I had a real chip on my shoulder about it,” she said, of bypass-ing college. “I was, like, ‘Oh, did I skip a big step? And does my skipping…

In the fall of 2021, the singer and songwriter Maggie Rogers entered the graduate program at Harvard Divinity School. For anyone unacquainted with the particulars of the degree Rogers was pursuing—a master’s in religion and public life—it might have sounded as though she were abandoning burgeoning pop stardom to reinvent herself as a priest. “It’s a peace-and-justice program, it’s not a seminary,” Rogers told me over dinner in Cambridge, in early February. “I’m not from any particular religious tradition. I was not trained in any particular religious tradition.” Rogers, who is twenty-nine, was trying to make her life feel more useful and less surreal. “I woke up one day and I was famous,” she said. “I was really burnt out. I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue. I thought I wanted…

ACROSS 1 Acoustic technology used to map the seafloor 6 Beaver’s construction 9 Radiates 14 Head of a felonious family 16 Curie who was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes 17 Made money hand over fist 18 Genre of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” 19 Subj. that examines market forces 20 Flag thrower on the football field 21 Gets the shampoo out 22 A hundred per cent 23 TV’s Meredith Grey, Gregory House, and Doogie Howser 24 ___ Minella (Muppet whose name puns on a type of bacteria) 25 “Kill Bill” singer who won three Grammys in 2024 26 Place where wildflowers grow 28 Hit the slopes 29 Milky White’s species in “Into the Woods” 30 Cookware for Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas hams 34 Neil Diamond classic with the…

The 4.8-magnitude earthquake that hit near Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, on Friday morning was, in many quarters of New York City, an anecdote generator of seismic intensity. The shaking woke me up; I groggily confirmed my suspicions on X, where all the posts said, basically, “Was that an earthquake?” Minutes later, I was dressed and outdoors, recorder in pocket, to do what I do best: eavesdrop on my neighbors. It wasn’t hard. “Sarah!” the proprietor of a basement-level dry-cleaning establishment said. He was standing on the sidewalk, marvelling. “I heard the noise. Took took took took!” he said, loudly. He waved his arms as if he were shaking something—a gesture I would see many times. “I never heard anything like it. What’s that, what’s this noise? Nothing moved. Only thenoise.…

Eplastic garbage bags appear on the streets of New York City, like blackheads on a teenager’s nose. A little more than a third of each bag is food scraps: vegetable peels, moldy berries, unwanted tuna salad—organic matter that, in another city, might have been composted. About a sixth is material that should have been recycled: junk mail, plastic water bottles. The rest is what the Department of Sanitation calls “refuse.” This is the actual trash. Broken phone chargers. Cat litter. Expired pills. Nail clippings. Two or three times a week, depending on the neighborhood, large white collection trucks make their rounds, each operated by two Department of Sanitation workers, who collect the bags. In the summer, the bags reek. In the winter, they’re frozen solid. When lifted, they often…

Members of Ukraine’s 1st Separate Assault Battalion describe themselves as firemen. Their job is to rapidly deploy to areas along the front that are in danger of collapse. Lately, their service has been in high demand: the front is burning. A large-scale counter-offensive last year failed to achieve meaningful victories, and since then Russia has been on the attack. One of its priorities appears to be Kupyansk, a city in northeastern Ukraine, some twenty miles from the Russian border. According to the Ukrainian military, Russia has amassed forty thousand troops near the city, which it has been bombarding for months. In January, after Russian forces routed Ukrainian soldiers from an uninhabited settlement outside Kupyansk called Tabaivka, the 1st Separate Assault Battalion was directed to halt and, if possible, reverse the…

One day in 1993, Stephen Breyer, then the chief judge of the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which sits in Boston, was riding his bicycle in Harvard Square when he was hit by a car. He was taken to Mount Auburn Hospital with broken ribs and a punctured lung. While he was recovering, he was visited by three White House officials. They had flown up to interview him for a possible nomination to the United States Supreme Court. The vetting went well enough, and Breyer was invited to Washington to meet the President, Bill Clinton. Breyer’s doctors advised against flying, so he took the train, in some discomfort. The meeting with Clinton did not go well. According to Jeffrey Toobin’s “The Nine,” a book about the Supreme Court,…

In movies as in life, never assume. One of the joys of being a film critic is encountering surprising work from film-makers whose habits seemed all too ingrained. Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” a spectacular fantasy from a director whose previous films were realistic, is one such splendid surprise; another is Bruno Dumont’s “Li’l Quinquin,” a flamboyant three-hour-plus feature that marked a decisive break with his earlier, more dour work. “Sasquatch Sunset,” a new movie by the independent filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner, offers the same kind of unexpected delight. This scruffy but finely nuanced drama follows an unusual group of characters: four Sasquatches—mythical beings better known singly, as Bigfoot—making their way through the forests of the Pacific North-west in the course of a year. For the Zellners, the film’s sincere attention…