Innholdsfortegnelse for June 17, 2024 i The New Yorker

In 2009, Donald Trump fired Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, from “The Celebrity Apprentice.” “Your ‘Harry Potter’ facts were not accurate,” Trump told Blagojevich, who was under indictment at the time, for trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat the previous year. Blagojevich was found guilty, and in 2012 he began a fourteen-year prison sentence, which Trump commuted eight years later.“Seemed like a very nice person,” Trump said after the commutation, calling Blagojevich’s punishment “a tremendously powerful ridiculous sentence in my opinion.” Blagojevich emerged from prison a self described “Trumpocrat.” “I’d have just been coming home a couple weeks ago had President Trump not, you know, shortened it,” Blagojevich said recently. “I keep having this dream where I’m still in prison,” he went on. “Probably because…

It was a good year for Christmas parties. At one, I met a number of authors I had always admired. This can be tricky, but they were all lovely. The food was lovely, too, though I dropped a miniature barbecue sandwich on the new white shirt I was wearing, and will likely never get the grease stain out. At another party, the following week, I was introduced to a curator from the Metropolitan Museum. We talked about people who throw soup and oil on beloved paintings, hoping to draw attention to climate change or poor nutrition or whatever their cause is, and then I learned that he would soon be leaving on an African safari, the sort where you carry a camera rather than a gun. “Have you been planning…

I used to tell myself stories on the job, to make it feel exciting—spy stories, exfiltration stories, war stories. I used to come up with poignant little details that turned the repatriation cases I worked on into “Saving Private Ryan,” into “Johnny Got His Gun.” Repatriation—there’s such a ring to it, such drama. I imagined maimed bodies in dirty tents, nurses changing brown, bloodied gauze, bending over beds to tell the wounded, “The call came in—you’re going home.” Yet I worked in Special Consular Services at our Embassy in Paris. The Americans I helped repatriate mostly broke legs in Pigalle or crashed rental cars in Normandy. Miracles didn’t happen for them in Lourdes—people don’t talk about it, but those for whom miracles don’t happen in Lourdes tend to leave France…

The northern spotted owl is about a foot and a half high, with very dark eyes, a greenish beak, and a rim of feathers, called a facial disk, that makes it appear to be regarding the world with worried perplexity. Like most owls, northern spotteds are nocturnal, but, unlike most of their brethren, they are picky. They can live only in old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. Their diet is restricted and seems to consist mainly of flying squirrels. They’re incapable of building nests of their own, and so, to raise their young, they rely on tree cavities or on basketlike growths that are produced by arboreal infections and known, evocatively, as witches’ brooms. The spotted owl’s fastidiousness produced one of the great environmental conflicts of the twentieth century. By…

“Home” embodies the grand narrative of Black Americans at mid-century. To appreciate “Home,” Samm-Art Williams’s celebrated play from 1979, is, in part, to be drawn back in time, to the heyday of the Negro Ensemble Company, headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1967, it was a crucial hotbed for Black writing, acting, and directing talent, helping to produce names like Phylicia Rashad, Samuel L.Jackson, Esther Rolle, and Denzel Washington. Williams—who died in May, mere days before “Home”’s revival on Broadway, at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre, under Kenny Leon’s direction—was a mainstay of the company. Williams was a big man—six-six and around three hundred pounds, according to his friends—funny and kind. Like Cephus (Tory Kittles), the blithe, antic, tricksterish protagonist of “Home,” he was from a small town in…

MISSED CONNECTION As a person who is incarcerated in Pima County Jail, I found it affirming to read Sarah Stillman’s article about the replacement of in-person visits with video calls (“The Right to Hug,” May 20th). I am writing this letter from “the hole”—isolated in a cell, with no view of the outside world. For people in my situation, communicating with our family and friends is all that we have. Remote visits are not a suitable alternative to face-to-face connection. Stillman describes the technical difficulties; she could have also mentioned how hard it can be for loved ones to get verified by GlobalTel*Link (now known as ViaPath) to use its services in the first place. Although some users do get verified quickly, others sit in limbo; trying to get verified…

My wife is fond of flags. I am not. —Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, explaining why a “Stop the Steal” flag was flown outside his home in Alexandria, Virginia. My wife is fond of fast food. I am not. My wife is particularly fond of the Wendy’s Baconator. I argue that it’s less expensive to order a Dave’s Double with a side of bacon, then put your own pretzels on top. (I’m fond of the Rold Gold Tiny Twists Original.) That way, the pretzels stay crunchy. Because my wife and I own our Virginia home jointly, she is entitled to her order. It was my wife who refused to tip the delivery driver last week when her burger arrived soggy, and who wrote, “You want a tip? Here’s one: go…

Late August, your estuary, nowFlattens gray, and the erodedPilings stagger from landfallLike upside-down legs, orGeometric marks you see inGenerations of outdatedCave-wall photographs—allFinger flute and crosshatch. WhatChases the glint ofLight off the waterFlattens, too, or flatters, theChiselled horizon beneathClouds so shaved whiteThey take shape, beneath thisSky, as humps, orHulks, or afterlives of hills,As if to ask,“Where will you return?”Here, Sir Patrick SpensAnd his good lordsCapsized so deep under theSea in the rain-black, balladPassages of the Norton anthologyOf poetry in English, it’s still scarcelyEnglish at all. Or was it fourThousand miles from here, in myLoch Lomond BoulevardBedroom, in Harris County,Texas, where the squareWindows inside the flowingFoam of the wall open into wavesOf knockout roses, which inSummer are straining red,Unheard, under the fathoms ofHardly visible miles—what I wish I might have called tawnyScores…

One snowy Xmas morningshe said, “Son, come here& give me a great big hug.”She lifted him off the floor,her bright flowery perfumeon his Hopalong Cassidyoutfit, & his two cap pistolsalso. Then she sat him downin his chair, & he heard a tearin her strong voice saying“Oh, yeah, I got somethingfor you,” as she handed hima green ball with silver starsall over it. He slowly peeledoff the glossy paper, & he justheld the apple as if it weregolden. He took a small biteof cool sweet white, & smiledas he slipped the green paperinto a pocket. His Granny said,“I’m broke, but bless the foodthat can’t wait. Now, go washyour hands, & I set the table.Where’s your mama & daddy?You came here all by yourself.Even if next door’s a whistle.You still naggin’ them…

Hey, Zoey, by Sarah Crossan (Little, Brown). What, in our digital age, constitutes an affair? Texting? Swiping? How about buying an eight-thousand-dollar A.I. sex doll and hiding it from your wife in the garage? In this entertaining novel, the middle-aged narrator, Dolores, discovers that her husband has done just that. As Dolores’s marriage falls apart, she forms a strange bond with the doll, Zoey, who proves a better listener than her aloof husband (an aptly professioned anesthesiologist). Told in short scenes that crosscut the present with childhood memories, the story is as much about technology as it is about friendship and romance. Even if Zoey’s “aliveness” is “a ruse,” like that of an E. T. A. Hoffmann character, she offers Dolores both life-affirming companionship and a way to access her repressed…

JUNE 12 – 18, 2024 Edward C. Moore, an expert silversmith who oversaw Tiffany & Co.’s silver program from the eighteen-sixties until his death, in 1891, was a true maverick, bringing in new techniques and fresh talent—including the French artisan Eugene Julius Soligny, a master engraver who created the ornate swan seen here. Moore’s family donated more than two thousand items from his travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which were collected in their own dedicated gallery until 1942. They will be reunited, alongside works from the Tiffany’s archive, for “Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co.” (through Oct. 20), a new exhibition that cements Moore’s legacy as an eccentric, adventurous collector with a dynamically roving eye for beauty.—Rachel Syme ABOUT TOWN BALLET | American Ballet Theatre’s…

The first fifteen minutes of Max Katsov’s daily commute, from Rockland County to One Police Plaza, are unfailingly pleasant—the Palisades Parkway, a bagel with cream cheese. Whatever hellscape 1010 WINS is forecasting is hard to reconcile with the sun-dappled river views at a steady fifty five m.p.h. Then, near the Mobil station in Englewood Cliffs, the cars start to back up behind the George Washington Bridge, and “my day of stress,” as Katsov put it recently, begins. This was Thursday morning, around nine. On Tuesday, he had filed retirement papers, to take effect next month. He’d logged twenty-one years on the job, and made detective, third grade. There were a couple of reasons for his chosen timing: the end of the school year (he has three kids) and the looming…

Two small children jump into a bubble bath with expressions of dazed, perpetual pleasure. The taller one has hair like molded chocolate, the other’s is like a yellow ice-cream swirl. Everything—the walls, the children’s skin—looks bouncy, as though it would squeak to the touch. The bubbles are white and opaque, like globs of shaving cream. Music plays, a mixture of giggles and xylophone, with a tune you remember and words you don’t. It keeps repeating. White bubble balls appear all over the hands of the children, on their feet, on their arms. The children, once clean, materialize outside the bathtub and do a happy dance. This is “Bath Song,” a two-minute and-fifty-two-second video produced by the children’s-animation juggernaut CoComelon. In the world of babies and toddlers who watch a lot…

In the early, self-improvement phase of the pandemic, people would sometimes comment on the opportunities that lockdown presented for art and artists. They’d observe that Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” during plague times, or that Tony Kushner and Larry Kramer snatched inspiration from the AIDS crisis. It was the slenderest of silver linings, jumbled up with terror and frustration—the idea that COVID might, if nothing else, produce enduring fiction. Were the “Lear” people right? Four years after the virus began its worldwide demolition tour, the efforts of contemporary scribes of pestilence have borne fruit. A heterogeneous body of literature now attempts to catch the import of the period from roughly March, 2020, to the end of 2021. Authors have written erudite tragicomedies (“Our Country Friends,” by Gary Shteyngart), gentle ghost stories…