Innholdsfortegnelse for May 13, 2024 i The New Yorker

Nick Paumgarten (“New Tricks,” p. 14), a staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 2000. Rebecca Mead (“Stones of Contention,” p. 42) has been a staff writer since 1997. She is the author of, most recently, “Home/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return.” Simon Rich (Fiction, p. 52) has written several books, including the novel “What in God’s Name” and the forth-coming story collection “Glory Days.” Sheila Yasmin Marikar (The Talk of the Town, p. 12) has been contributing to the magazine since 2016. Her latest novel is “Friends in Napa.” Mark Ulriksen (Cover) is an artist and an illustrator. Since 1994, he has contributed more than sixty-five covers to The New Yorker. Maya Jasanoff (Books, p. 60) is a professor of history at Harvard University. Her latest…

Cities across America have long been home to flaccid facsimiles of New York-style bagel shops, but lately they’ve been joined by a new breed: businesses undertaken by ambitious, savvy young people seeking to make the bagel their own. See L.A.’s Courage, with rustic, crusty bagels arranged in photogenic open-faced sand-wiches; Miami’s El Bagel, serving one layered with guava marmalade, cream cheese, and a fried egg; and New Orleans’s Flour Moon Bagels, which offers bagel “tartines” (plus, sometimes, a crawfish-stuffed bialy)—every city seems to have its own new-wave status bagel. You could argue that the nation-wide bagel revival has been a boon to New York’s own scene; lately, the city has been home to a growing roster of indie bagel-makers. On a recent Saturday morning, I picked up a half-dozen sour-dough…

Chase Kellebrew was in demo mode in the basement laboratory of So-Ho’s Sloomoo Institute, which bills itself as a “multi-sensory slime experience.” The institute was founded in 2019,to take advantage of the slime craze popularized by tweens on TikTok. (During the pandemic, adults joined in, drawn by slime’s apparent ability to alleviate anxiety through sensory play.) Kellebrew is barely twenty. As with many a wunderkind, he is modest about his talent: creating new slime products to appease the voracious appetites of fans—some famous, such as Jessica Alba, Drew Barrymore, and Christina Aguilera—who regard him as a master. That morning, he was unveiling some new prototypes for his bosses, Sara Schiller and Karen Robinovitz. Schiller, who has an M.B.A. and a background in hospitality, said, of Kellebrew’s work, “It’s just so…

In the late morning of April 18th, as police amassed outside the gates of Columbia University and chants of “Free Palestine!” rang across the campus, I ran into Nina Berman, a colleague at the Journalism School, where she teaches photojournalism and I serve as dean. Nina was walking toward the east lawn, where a sign declared the area a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” She has, for four decades, specialized in documenting precisely these types of events—labor strikes, Black Lives Matter protests, reproductive-rights rallies—though usually at a slightly greater remove from her place of employment. A bit of context: Just before dawn on the seventeenth, dozens of students had fanned out across the east lawn to demand that the university curtail investments in companies with ties to Israel. The campus lawns had…

ACROSS 1 Cry inconsolably5 Frequent subject of protests in the sixties and seventies10 Requester of “As Time Goes By” at Rick’s Café14 Zoom-call annoyance15 Japanese camera brand16 It’s not seen when it’s new17 “Hey, remember who you’re dealing with here!”20 N.F.L. team whose fans are known as the 12s21 Bohr played by Kenneth Branagh in “Oppenheimer”22 Distress signals23 In the future25 Research-funding source26 Portioned (out)27 Surname in an Edith Wharton title28 Jellicle Ball attendee, in a Broadway classic31 Fish that are leaf-shaped prior to metamorphosis32 Mars on the charts33 Attention to detail34 Roguish35 David ___ (Ricky Gervais’s role on “The Office”)36 Political housecleaning37 Force out of bed38 ___ of honor (member of a wedding party, perhaps)39 Soviet counterintelligence org. featured in James Bond novels41 Industry-speak42 1984 comedy with an IMDb…

In December, 2021 a few weeks after the Omicron variant emerged to spark a new, punishing phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jim Lester’s birds got sick. Lester, who owns an exhibition farm in Newfoundland, Canada, learned that the culprit wasn’t the novel coronavirus but the first known outbreak in North America of a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu, called H5N1. Hundreds of birds were infected and died. Scores more—peacocks, geese, an emu—had to be culled. They all “had personalities,” Lester said. “It was a true tragedy.” Since then, the virus has propagated down through the Americas, killing tens of millions of birds and, perhaps more concerning, infecting dozens of mammalian species: bottlenose dolphins in Florida; sea lions in Peru; elephant seals on the islands near Antarctica. Now, for the…

Forty-eight years ago, the writer Renata Adler referred to the 747 as “that slum of the air,” and flying hasn’t improved much in the intervening decades. But what about that liminal space before boarding? “You want the vacation to start earlier, right?” Leanne Fremar, the chief brand officer at JPMorgan Chase, said recently. “You’ve spent money on it, you’ve architected it and choreographed it, you want it all to be perfect. Getting there is sort of like having to take your medicine. But what if your vacation could start at the airport?” In January, with Fremar’s assistance, a section of LaGuardia (which President Joe Biden once compared to a Third World country) became the Sapphire Lounge. Warmly lit and plushly appointed, the lounge is the snazziest of four new Chase…

Charles Townley, one of Britain’s first great collectors of antiquities, was born in Lancashire in 1737. A distaff descendant of the aristocratic Howard family, he was educated mostly in France—a common path for a well-born Catholic Englishman. Elegant and intelligent, Townley was, according to an early biographical sketch, eagerly welcomed into Continental society, “from the dissipations of which it would be incorrect to say that he wholly escaped.” As a young adult, he returned to England and installed himself at the family estate, having come into a lavish inheritance. But before long he set off for Italy, in what would be the first of three visits. In a dozen years, he amassed more than two hundred ancient sculptures, along with other objects. It was a good moment for a man…

Physical fatigue is always a factor in criticism, but at the Venice Biennale, the world’s most prestigious recurring art exhibition, it picks up a few seats on the private jury of taste. The event, showcasing hundreds of artists and patronized by hundreds of thousands of people, spans two main locations: the lush parkland of the Giardini, created by Napoleon, and the cluster of retired shipyards and armories known as the Arsenale. Each day of press previews, my black sneakers gained a layer of whitish dust, as though mummified by travel, and my eyes burned with a thousand sightings of the same pink tote bag on everybody’s arm. (By the time I left, it seemed as Venetian as a Bellini.) Gravity tugs harder than usual here. No dosage of caffeine is…

David Siegel and Scott McGehee, filmmaking partners for three decades, both read and loved the Sigrid Nunez novel “The Friend” when it was published, in 2018. They took Nunez out to coffee, then optioned the film rights to the story, wrote a script, and began making plans to produce it. The novel, which won the National Book Award, is narrated by an unnamed writer in Manhattan whose friend and mentor, a more famous writer, has recently died by suicide. She inherits his dog, a Great Dane named Apollo. “The Friend” is about a lot of things—grief, memory, loneliness, goatish men, writing, teaching, kids today—but it is, fundamentally, a love story between two bereaved creatures, writer and dog, seeking consolation and companionship in a treacherous world. Siegel and McGehee had actors…

I am an arrow retriever. After a battle, it’s my job to retrieve arrows. Arrows are costly and time-consuming to make. It seems like a terrible waste—and maybe even a sin—for an arrow to fall to the ground without hitting someone. Even if the arrow kills somebody, it can be reused to kill someone else. As Randolf the Scot famously said, “Arrows don’t grow on trees.” I have retrieved thousands of arrows from battlefields and, along the way, made some good friends. I have gathered arrows that were loose on the ground, pulled them from dead soldiers and horses, and even removed one from a mouse. (The mouse lived!) My father, a rich landowner, didn’t want me to become an arrow retriever. He wanted me to become a barrister. I…

In the summer of 1856, laborers at a limestone quarry near Düsseldorf were clearing mud and chert out of a cave when they turned up a fossilized skull. It was long and elliptical, with wide sinuses and a heavy ridge over the eye sockets. The workers thought it belonged to some kind of bear, but a local schoolteacher who inspected it had a different hunch. He thought that it was a previously undiscovered kind of human being. The British geologist William King, setting the skull alongside those of chimpanzees and Andaman Islanders, agreed; he declared that it belonged to an entirely new species, which he named Homo neanderthalensis, for the Neander Valley, where it was found. What we know today as Neanderthals might have been called Engisians or Gibraltarians, if…

In the art of filmmaking, there’s a special place for movies by directors who know whereof they film. When a baseball movie is made by a former professional baseball player—for instance, Ron Shelton’s “Bull Durham” (1988)—or when, as with Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” (1986), a Vietnam War movie is made by a decorated and twice-wounded veteran of that war, there’s an implied assurance of something deeper than just research. The assurance is of a personal stake, of having the story in one’s blood, and maybe vice versa. Such movies fit within a larger genre, what one could call the lid-lifter—fact-based fictions that offer behind-the-scenes glimpses into realms that are usually inaccessible. Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” (2023) reveals how a nonfiction writer goes about her research; David Fincher’s “The Social Network” (2010) shines…