Innholdsfortegnelse for July 1, 2024 i The New Yorker

If you spend enough time in certain circles in Los Angeles, you might get the impression that the most popular person in town is Neal ElAttrache. Officially, ElAttrache is an orthopedic surgeon at the Cedars-Sinai Kerlan-Jobe Institute for sports medicine. Unofficially, there are people who regard him as a village miracle man. One of his patients, for instance, is Vasiliy Lomachenko, one of the best boxers in the world. After his wins, he likes to credit God. In a bout in 2018, he threw a combination of punches that yanked his right shoulder out of its socket. It hurt so badly that he bit through his mouth guard. “For a long time, I wondered if I couldbox again at the same level,” Lomachenko told me. He went to ElAttrache. The…

The party was in full swing. Evelyn could hear the sexy blare of the trad jazz almost as soon as she got off the bus at St. Mary Redcliffe and began walking over to the Steam Packet, the pub that Vincent—who was a friend of Evelyn’s older sister, Moira—had commandeered for the evening. He’d decided that they all needed a party to cheer them up, because the winter had been so bitter, and because now, in February, the incessant rain had turned the snow to slush. It was raining again this evening; the bus’s wiper had beat its numb rhythm all the way into town, the pavements were dark, and the gutters ran with water. Frozen filthy formless lumps, the remainders of the snow, persisted at the street corners and…

The Work of Art, by Adam Moss (Penguin Press). This collection of interviews, by a former editor of New York, aims to illuminate artists’ processes through conversation. The novelist Michael Cunningham describes writing first thing in the morning to avoid getting “lost in the realness of the real world”; the visual artist Kara Walker recounts beginning one project by drawing with her feet (“I can’t trust this hand not to make something very obvious”). Moss’s footnotes flag common themes, including tenacious work ethics, mentorship, and iterative revisions. His subjects’ accounts are enriched by color images of works in progress: the outline of a concerto (Nico Muhly), a line of poetry scribbled in a faculty meeting (Louise Glück). The Other Olympians, by Michael Waters (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In the nineteen-thirties,…

ORIGINAL STATES Eyal Press, in his piece explaining how progressives are turning to state constitutions to protect rights being rolled back by the federal judiciary, highlights the potential for creative arguments (“States of Play,” June 10th). State constitutions have their own unique histories, which can often lead to surprising conclusions, particularly in state courts that place great emphasis on originalism. Take Arizona, one of the harshest places in the country when it comes to punishing criminals. Its first governor, George W. P. Hunt, who also served as president of the state’s constitutional convention, believed that rehabilitation was the overriding purpose of state power. Early decisions interpreting the Arizona constitution bear this out, curtailing the use of confinement and reducing sentences because of inhumane conditions. Hunt even passed a popular referendum…

MURIEL: Thanks to all parents who participated in this year’s Books Not Phones bake sale. We reached our goal and had great fuck. MURIEL: *Fun* *great fun* Grrr autocorrect. DIANE: Thank you for organizing, Mur! Library will get much needed $. CONNOR: Chicken zit winterscroll? MURIEL: ??? CONNOR: Sari. *Isn’t it wonderful?* DIANE: Are you driving, Con? Asked you not to text and drive. CONNOR: Gnat droving, runting 2 meetgang. WINONA: Wanted to apologize for zucchini date bread fiasco. Was so popular last year. Not sure what happened. HANNAH: Zucchini date bread was my favorite! No apology necessary! WINONA: Took home almost all loaves. Even sample plate was full. MEREDITH: Was worried that I priced my fudge too high but worked out fine. HANNAH: Fudge was a best-seller! [Tina Turner…

looks like it’ll be a rainy week ahead thank you now the bodyof an unidentified boy aged between four and sevenwas in the river for up to ten days before a passer bynoticed african boy’s stomach included extractsof calabar bean and flecks of gold expert at kew gardenssays headless limbless boy likely to be nigeriangrowing number have spread throughout the world coming upgoat arrested for armed robbery prime minister’s response breakingmale torso boy five or six said to be somebody’sson boy assigned most appropriate acceptable nameafter long deliberation thought to have been in river ten daysappeal made to family of girls’ shorts boy’s bodywalking man who spotted adam to be offered counsellingsuspicious thames river boy behavior should be reportedto authorities in other news…

A worry bead.A rosary woe.A raja’s pearl.An ear-to-earJack grin, seamundoingtorso to limb.Mean trick toremind meI am not young. Hard knuckle underflesh. A sailor’s knot.A not knowing when,or how. A warningsent to send meconvalescing. LestI grow cocky in my ageand think myselfforever young. Young is neverraging at the body,that shell found on theshore. More or less the daysleft. And moreand more complaintsto threatencomplacency.Please. Who will hold my handwhen I countbackward to ten?The suna lamp above my head. I, who avoidedsurgery till now.Am I only nowold? Is old fear, and, if fear,now is the time to deal withhere. So farfrom any handsto hold.…

Just how far down did Moses go? The spiritual does not say, but one of the prophet’s namesakes—the woman who sang “Go Down, Moses” along the rivers and roads of the Eastern Shore of Maryland as she helped some seventy people escape slavery via the Underground Railroad—went as far south as she could. Harriet Tubman returned not only to the border state from which she herself had escaped; defiantly courageous, she ventured deeper into the land of bondage to liberate hundreds of others during the Civil War. Her greatest feat may also be among her least known—a raid of Confederate rice plantations on the Combahee River, in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, which liberated more than seven hundred enslaved Americans. She did not lead the raid, as some recent histories…

The N.B.A. makes for good television because basketball’s a sport that bends around stars. The players wear no face-obstructing gear—no helmets, no long-brimmed hats casting shadows—and the presence of a single great performer can guarantee a degree of success for his team. Satisfaction after a made shot, befuddlement after a miss, irritation at a teammate who keeps rushing to the wrong spot: it’s all clear as day, written on the body as much as on the face. Few things are more thrilling than the sudden onrush of protagonism that clings to a player who’s hit a few shots in a row and is about to make the story of the game about himself. The Finals, especially, are a factory for new stars. Television cameras—in the most immediate case, the…

JUNE 26 – JULY 2, 2024 What we’re watching, listening There’s a horror-movie-style excitement to the play “Dark Noon”—a brutally clownish retelling of European settlers’ push into the American West—which comes partly from the ensemble’s blistering energy, partly from the audience’s fear of being pressed into participating. The Danish writer-director Tue Biering devised the multimedia theatre piece with seven South African performers and the co-director Nhlanhla Mahlangu, and the actors (many wearing whiteface) exhort the audience like carnival barkers to join them onstage. The show’s mock gold-rush town, constructed as we watch, nods to American Western movie sets, but the knockabout frame buildings, Mahlangu has said, also recall South Africa’s apartheid-era squatter camps. Of course, the two countries rhyme in other ways, too—slavery, Indigenous removal, resource extraction, vigilantism. Everyone is…

A few miles off the highway in Hempstead, Long Island, on a gently curving street of tidy two-story homes and raked lawns, there is a sprawling ranch house with a back yard, a pool, and a large, netted enclosure, like an aviary, built to house seventeen cats. But when I drove there, on a bright, chilly fall day, I had not come to see the cats. I pulled in to the driveway, a screen door opened, and two small white dogs emerged, attached by harnesses and long leashes to John Mendola, a retired police officer in his fifties with a mild manner and a broad, kind face. (The house is his mother’s; he lives in a smaller place nearby.) He introduced me to the dogs, Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine.…

The Awards & Recognitions section of the Web site of Gilbert, Arizona, lists some of the area’s accolades: #1 Best City for Early Retirement, #2 Safest City for Trick-or-Treating, #6 Best City to Raise a Family in the West. Gilbert recently surpassed Scottsdale as the Arizona city with the highest median income, and, according to F.B.I. statistics, only one American community of its size had a lower crime rate in 2022. Although Gilbert has more residents than Boise or Salt Lake City, its official documents avoid the word “city”; the municipal government has opted to preserve Gilbert’s status as a town, one of the largest in the United States. Driving down Gilbert’s wide, smooth roads, past vast developments enclosed by white fences, you get the impression of a place that,…

Catastrophic wars can start in peripheral places: Sarajevo, for the First World War; Gleiwitz, on the German-Polish border, for the Second. The contributors to “The Boiling Moat” (Hoover Institution), a short book edited by Matt Pottinger, believe that Taiwan, the democratically governed island situated off the coast of southeast China between Japan and the Philippines, could spark a major war, possibly even a nuclear one, pitting the U.S. and its Asian allies against China. According to their estimates, more than ten thousand Americans could be killed in action in just three weeks of combat. The cost in Chinese and Taiwanese lives, both civilians and soldiers, would presumably be much higher. And that is assuming that a local war doesn’t spread to the rest of the world. Pottinger was the Asia…

Guillaume de Machaut, the master poet-composer of fourteenth-century France, served for many years as the canon of the great Gothic cathedral at Reims, where the kings of the realm were crowned. Machaut’s most famous creation, the Messe de Nostre Dame, has a singular place in musical history, because it is an early attempt at creating a comparably sublime edifice in sound—a six-movement work in four-part polyphony, lasting well over half an hour, in which austere, granitic harmony is set against delicate contrapuntal play and spiky rhythmic motion. This Mass is, in fact, the oldest extant piece of its type to have been attributed to a single composer. When, the other day, the San Francisco-based vocal ensemble Chanticleer sang it at Grace Cathedral, on Nob Hill, a suitable atmosphere of awe…