Innholdsfortegnelse for May 6, 2024 i The New Yorker

Casey Cep (“On Native Grounds,” p. 28), a staff writer, is the author of “Furious Hours.” Parul Sehgal (“The Phantasm,” p. 14), a staff writer since 2021, teaches in the graduate creative-writing program at New York University. She received a Silvers-Dudley Prize for literary criticism in 2023. Cynan Jones (Fiction, p. 50) is a writer from the west coast of Wales. His novels include “Cove,” “The Dig,” and, most recently, “Stillicide.” Faith Ringgold (Cover), an artist, a writer, and a teacher, is known for her pictorial quilts. She died last month. Robert Sullivan (The Talk of the Town, p. 10) is the author of, most recently, “Double Exposure.” Paul Tran (Poem, p. 32), a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, published their début poetry collection, “All the Flowers Kneeling,” in 2022. They…

In 2015, when the great glassy tower on Park Avenue between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth Streets was barely a hole in the ground, one of the project’s developers boasted that a restaurant planned for the ground floor would be “a Four Seasons on steroids.” Nearly a decade later, the Four Seasons is no more, and the restaurant in question, Four Twenty Five, is open for both dinner and power lunching. Named somewhat unimaginatively after the building’s address, it is operated by the mega-restaurateur Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and as promised it takes square aim at the upper echelons of the expense-account crowd. The kitchen is overseen by Jonathan Benno, a blue-chip chef who for a long time was the culinary No. 1 at Per Se. It’s curious to see a chef of Benno’s…

For people who never got the chance to celebrate Ramadan, the comedy series “Ramy” offers a virtual seat at the table after sundown. Co-created by the Egyptian American comedian Ramy Youssef, the show gives viewers a peek into the dirty mind of an unmarried Muslim twentysomething struggling to reconcile his duelling devotions: faith and fornication. In Season 1, during Ramadan, Ramy (played by Youssef) fasts by day and enjoys an iftar at a mosque at night. A man in line for food greets him in strangely practiced-sounding Arabic, and Ramy’s friend Mo (the comedian Mo Amer) whispers to his pal, “He’s undercover, bro. Dude’s Dominican. Straight-up Dominican. F.B.I.’s not even trying anymore.” This year, Youssef co-hosted an Eid al-Fitr banquet, the culmination of Ramadan, with his friends Hasan Minhaj, Riz…

No TV cameras are allowed in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, and so the dispatches from Donald Trump’s hush-money trial have arrived mostly via text. The human arrangement on display, in which a man in his late seventies is forced to reckon not with his alleged major political crimes (those cases will be brought at later dates, in other jurisdictions) but with more taw-dry matters, has proved delicious for the journalists in the room. Some have taken a vintage reporter’s hyper-observational approach: Jonathan Alter noted in the Times that although Trump normally wears a red tie, “for the last four days in court he’s gone with a blue one.” Others waxed more poetic: Olivia Nuzzi, of New York, wrote, “Trump is tilting his head dramatically and…

Boris Berezovsky began his eventful professional life as an obscure Sovietera mathematician. With the fall of Communism, he became, through ruthlessness and political guile, the most notorious of the post-Soviet oligarchs, amassing billions through oil, air travel, and mass media. His access to, and influence over, Boris Yeltsin reminded some of Grigori Rasputin and his hold over Tsar Nicholas II. In 1996, with Yeltsin debilitated by heart trouble and vodka trouble, Berezovsky and other oligarchs engineered his reëlection. In exchange, Yeltsin presided over bogus auctions to privatize huge state enterprises––auctions that Berezovsky and his allies “won.” Eventually, Berezovsky pushed Vladimir Putin, a mid-level K.G.B. officer, to the forefront of Kremlin politics. When Putin succeeded Yeltsin, Berezovsky had every reason to think he would be as compliant as Yeltsin––a catastrophic miscalculation.…

Aquarius Your zodiac alignment this month is governed by Venus, the planet of intuition, something my daughter Bess seems to lack. Perhaps if she weren’t an air sign she would see a pulmonologist about her goddam cough before she bursts a blood vessel in her eye. It sounds like bronchitis, which can turn into pneumonia if you don’t stay on top of it. While she’s at it, she should see an allergist, too. It could be all the dust in her apartment from those horrible sea-grass carpets that were so trendy about three years ago and now make the place look like a West Elm took over a Tommy Bahama. Leo With Saturn rising in your heart chakra, you might feel the astrological pull of stubbornness in your sixth house.…

A meal is never just a meal in a Luca Guadagnino movie; each bite is a prelude to a kiss, every feast a form of foreplay. In his shimmering melodrama “I Am Love” (2009), whose beauties range from the churches of Sanremo to the alabaster countenance of Tilda Swinton, the most ravishing image is a plate of prawns, passionately prepared and breathlessly consumed. Food is even more boldly eroticized in “Call Me by Your Name” (2017), which features suggestively oozing egg yolk and a memorably despoiled peach. And what of “Bones and All” (2022), which, being a cannibal romance, brings Guadagnino’s fixations with food and flesh to a gristly point of convergence? Let’s just say it’s his one picture that’s ideally viewed on an empty stomach. “Challengers,” Guadagnino’s irrepressibly entertaining…

Alex Garland’s new film, “Civil War,” follows two war photographers on a road trip from New York to Washington, D.C., via the blue highways of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The more experienced photographer, played by Kirsten Dunst, uses a Sony digital camera, while her apprentice, played by Cailee Spaeny, shoots a Nikon and makes old-school film negatives of a fictional civil war. A real-life road trip to Washington, D.C., via I-95, brings you past the National Archives campus in College Park, Maryland, where the archivists in the Still Picture Branch manage the actual photos of the actual Civil War and the negatives from which they were printed. Like Spaeny’s character, actual Civil War photographers developed images in the field, theirs made on glass plates coated with collodion, a syrupy chemical…

Game, it is said, recognizes game. Not long ago, two mutual admirers from different domains—Jaime Jaquez, Jr., a six-feet-seven standout rookie for the N.B.A.’s Miami Heat, and Tanitoluwa Adewumi, a five-foot-six, thirteen-year-old chess prodigy who lives on the Lower East Side—met for a skill exchange of sorts. Adewumi first won fans five years ago, as a third grader, when he conquered his category at New York’s state championships while living in a homeless shelter with his family, who had fled Nigeria as refugees under threat from Boko Haram. More recently, Jaquez, a chess devotee, sent Adewumi, a budding hoops fan, a video message suggesting that they trade tips. When the Heat came to New York, a meeting was arranged. The setting: the second-floor basketball court at Nike’s headquarters near Madison…

There are about a thousand real-estate developers in New York City. Nathan Berman is one of them, and he’s become rich doing it. But, he told me recently, “I never built a building from scratch, and never wanted to.” Instead, Berman, who is sixty-four, specializes in taking existing structures and converting them into apartments, a useful trick in a city that’s always starved for housing—and newly wary of the five-day-a-week office routine. In 2017, he converted 443 Greenwich Street, a former warehouse and book bindery in Tribeca, built in 1883, into a luxury condo; among the celebrities who now own apartments there are Harry Styles and Jake Gyllenhaal. (The building was designed to be “paparazzi-proof,” so it features an underground parking area with a valet.) It’s not much of a…

In the past several months, Taylor Swift has become culturally ubiquitous in a way that feels nearly terrifying. Superstardom tends to turn normal people into cartoons, projections, gods, monsters. Swift has been inching toward some sort of tipping point for a while. The most recent catalyst was, in part, love: in the midst of her record-breaking Eras Tour, Swift, who is thirty-four, began dating Travis Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. Whenever Swift appeared at one of Kelce’s games, the broadcasters whipped their extra-high-definition cameras toward her, sending legions of amateur lip-readers scrambling for their phones. I’m paid to give legibility to such things, and even I couldn’t help but think that we were crossing some sort of Rubicon with regard to our collective sanity. Swift was…

ACROSS 1 Pinch some dough, say6 LAX setting9 Hardly an original observation14 World capital near the Gulf of Tonkin15 Music to a massage therapist’s ears16 Messing who played the latter title characters on “Ned and Stacey” and “Will & Grace”17 ___ the Giant18 Spheres at a restaurant19 Eight-and-a-half-pound honor20 Fraction of the back forty21 “Good job!” reply22 “You Bright and ___ Angels” (William T. Vollmann novel)23 Trademark-infringement complaint?26 One attempting a comeback, maybe27 Little cut31 “I can barely remember what happened”34 Tracy, to his Hollywood friends36 Remote areas37 Gave the cold shoulder38 At home in high society, perhaps39 They may be seen floating in a bubble bath40 Grown-up pup41 Acclamation43 “… but I wouldn’t count on it”48 Chidi’s response to “It’s like, who died and left Aristotle in charge of…