Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2, 2024 i The New Yorker

What was the name of thatbar was it really the SugarClub is it still there who werewe with running in from the coldand wind and you could stillsmoke in bars then you couldstill go home with six cartonsof smoke in your hair we allhad hair for days then ourhands got lost in it and our facesand how crowded the bar wasand hot too and I liked running andbeing useful and you and ran backto the blue Chevy Nova to stashour coats in the trunk and ranback and “Lush Life” was playingand Bowie and yelling to beheard and the lights in the barflashing because that partof the night was ending and outwe went to the street it was Hobokenit was 1983 right before Christmasand I turned left and everybodyelse went in…

The guest from America was to arrive in the late afternoon. Ursula, having arranged the welcome platter, waited until she heard a car slowing down in the driveway, its gravel rinsed all day by the rain, before drizzling some honey in broad strokes on the cheese and the nuts. From the kitchen window, she could see the cabdriver—Timothy today—place a suitcase next to the door, heavy, as demonstrated by his eloquent grimace. Likely he had entertained his fare with one of his two America-related stories: the cousin who’d done life in Sing Sing or the great-grand-uncle escaping Alcatraz on a stormy night. Visitors from America were rare, or else Timothy would have invented more credible family legends. The woman, Lilian Pang, smiled tiredly as she got out of the car…

A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit, by Noliwe Rooks (Penguin Press). This slim, engaging work of history looks back on the life of Mary McLeod Bethune, a Black educator and activist who was born to former slaves in the Jim Crow South and rose to prominence as an adviser to several U.S. Presidents. Though not a household name today, Bethune was well known and admired during her lifetime. She was a mentor to the poet Langston Hughes and persuaded business owners in Florida to invest in a “beach for Black people.” Rooks, whose grandmother graduated from Bethune-Cookman University, one of the many institutions Bethune founded, excavates Bethune’s biography to reveal valuable lessons for the present. Why Animals Talk, by Arik Kershenbaum (Penguin Press). A wealth of information is contained in this account…

The version of Catholicism favored by David Acosta, one of the two protagonists of the delightfully unhinged religious procedural “Evil,” likely doesn’t exist. David (Mike Colter), a Black man who starts the series as a priest-in-training, is often let down by the Church’s ossified white leadership. But his more progressive faith is accompanied by rather medieval forms of devotion. He battles against demons, participates in exorcisms, and chases the high of a formative vision of God, even if he can now only achieve moments of transcendence with the assistance of psychedelics. The temporal dislocation of his calling creates a sense of cognitive dissonance, but, in David’s view, dedicating himself to the Church, for all its imperfections, may be his best chance at insuring that the world doesn’t go to Hell…

REFLECTIONS ON ABOLITION I was pleasantly surprised to see Adam Gopnik, in his piece about prison abolition, mention me as an example of a prisoner capable of rehabilitation (Books, July 29th). Gopnik discusses at length the societal toll of the U.S. prison system. As someone who has spent the past twenty-five years in New York’s state prisons and has got to know many fellow-prisoners, I can testify that the current system leads to an immense waste of time and resources. There are countless people behind bars who process remorse, make positive use of their time, and work on their deficits of character. Plenty of examples can be found in the N.Y.U. Press book “Inside Knowledge”—edited by Doran Larson, a former writing teacher of mine—which weaves together the work of more…

You can view art (e.g., at a museum). You can “immerse yourself” in art (“Immersive Van Gogh,” currently at a Las Vegas shopping mall). But can you vacation in art? “To go from photographing the get away to making the getaway, it’s like art becoming reality,” the photographer Gray Malin said the other day. He was sitting behind the wheel of a blue Range Rover, dressed in a denim shirt, white jeans, and raffia loafers, cruising up the 101 to his latest work: a house he has renovated in Montecito, California, in order to rent to visitors. “How I vacation is how I want you to vacation,” he said. As an artist, Malin specializes in glossy portraits of the good life: beaches, boats, a plane landing in St. Bart’s. A…

My mother began taking me to the movies when I was a little boy of three or four. She worked at factory and other menial jobs during the day, and when she came home I was the only company she had. Afterward, I’d go through the characters in my head and bring them to life, one by one, in our apartment. The movies were a place where my single mother could hide in the dark and not have to share her Sonny Boy with anyone else. That was her nickname for me. She had picked it up from the popular song by Al Jolson, which she often sang to me. When I was born, in 1940, my father, Salvatore Pacino, was all of eighteen, and my mother, Rose Gerardi Pacino,…

Write about what you know, they say. All due respect, that’s lousy advice, far too easily misinterpreted as “write about what you already know.” No doubt you find your own knowledge valuable, your own experiences compelling, the plot twists of your own past gripping; so do we all, but the storehouse of a single life seldom equips us adequately for the task of writing. If you are, say, Volodymyr Zelensky or Frederick Douglass or Sally Ride, the category of “what you know” may in fact be sufficiently unusual and significant to belong in print. For the rest of us, the better, if less pithy, maxim would be: before you write, go out and learn something interesting. Marcia Bjornerud is a follower of this maxim, which we know because, of her…

On a humid afternoon not long ago, Bonnie Slotnick, the owner of an eponymous cookbook shop in the East Village, hiked up to the carpeted top floor of an elegant town house on West Twelfth Street. Slotnick, who is seventy and slight, almost wispy, wore a sleeveless linen shirt pinned with a small enamel carrot. The house had belonged to the late food writer Mimi Sheraton—the first woman to hold the position of restaurant critic at the Times, who further distinguished herself by wearing disguises on the job—and was freshly on the market. In advance of its sale, Sheraton’s son had emptied its four stories of almost everything but his mother’s vast collection of books on food and cooking. In the house’s eaves, where Sheraton and her husband kept cozy…

AUGUST 28 – SEPTEMBER 3, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. In the thirty-two years preceding her death, at fifty-eight, in 2004, the Filipina artist Pacita Abad—who travelled the globe, learning from Afghan embroidery, Mexican muralism, Javanese dyeing, Sri Lankan masks, and Pakistani quilts—stitched and painted some of the biggest little art in the world. Abad, while living in Boston in the early eighties, began sewing canvases into padded patches and encrusting the results, called trapuntos, with paint, beads, sequins, and an archivist’s nervous breakdown’s worth of other materials. (A detail of “European Mask,” from 1990, is pictured.) More than fifty of her works appear at a MOMA PS1 retrospective (through Sept. 2), and yet, even with metropolises of stuff adroitly squeezed in, they rarely exhaust.…

These days, earning a Michelin star requires more than just making good food and hiring attentive waiters. Alinea, in Chicago, serves a green-apple-flavored balloon dessert that actually floats. (Three stars.) Iris, in Norway, is a restaurant that itself floats—it sits in a fjord and is accessible only by boat. (One star.) One of the newest recipients of two Michelin stars is Vespertine, in Culver City, California. The restaurant is housed in a four-story building designed by the architect Eric Owen Moss that looks like a warped and rusted waffle iron. The fourteen-course menus (three hundred and ninety-five dollars per person, with beverage pairings starting at a hundred and twenty-five dollars) are constructed around narratives that are known in full only to Vespertine’s chef and creative director, Jordan Kahn. One menu…

No words can tell us how to live, but to live is to reachfor them anyway, the thought on the other hand,the brass nameplate screwed into a closed door.Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Make trouble,not sense: some things should never be made into art.The problem is we’ve been inscribing the violenceinto lines all along: banks redlining neighborhoods,city planners’ interstate slates, the racial covenantsetched into deeds. If only what we need to sayto one another would land so softly on our tongueswe could taste it. If only we had screamedand incinerated the other four precincts while we hadthe chance. Imbroglio is a beautiful word for trap.The problem isn’t only what happened, it’s how muchremains the same. There are no words are still words.…

In 1627, a professional lace-maker named Thomasine Hall boarded a ship in England and arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, to become a maidservant in the household of a man named John Tyos. Women of English origin were scarce in that part of the New World, amid the recently established and extremely labor-intensive tobacco plantations. A count conducted in 1624 recorded only two hundred and thirty adult women among the twelve hundred and fifty Europeans living in Virginia. Women were urgently needed for marital fellowship and procreation, and male settlers paid the Virginia Company the considerable sum of a hundred and fifty pounds a head for the transportation of prospective wives across the Atlantic. Females were also in demand for their gender-specific domestic skills. This was Hall’s value to Tyos. As an…