Innholdsfortegnelse for October 7, 2024 i The New Yorker

Glory be to god for septic tanks, drainage pipes:for conversions thermodynamic and of the soul.Glory be to god for this quiet, cheap hotel room:only music the mini-fridge’s vibratory drone,creaky plumbing groaning through the walls.We underestimate the perfect peace of objects.Before me was another traveller: after I leave,hundreds of others will arrive, anonymously,drink sink water from disposable plastic cups,recline on bleached sheets, stare into the voidof a generic landscape painting across the bedwhile contemplating the disaster of their lives.And, when the alarm wails hours before dawn,human cusses of angry protest join the chorusof budget appliances failing before their time.Why even look at a clock? It’s never good news.It takes the time it takes, my estimated deadline,which is likely why no employer would trust me.I’m at an age where everyone around me…

Rats can’t vomit. This may be a function of their anatomy—their stomachs are “not well structured for moving contents towards the esophagus” is how one study delicately put it—or it may have something to do with their brain circuitry, or it may be a combination of the two. Whatever the cause, the result is that rats, contrary to their popular (or unpopular) image, are fussy eaters. Even as they pick through the trash, they’re hesitant to try new foods. This makes poisoning them complicated; quite often—and quite literally—they won’t take the bait. In 1942, a Johns Hopkins biologist named Curt Richter discovered a new poison that rats apparently couldn’t taste. His breakthrough caught the attention of the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development, the Second World War equivalent…

MASS OF CONTRADICTIONS Judith Thurman’s article about my aunt, Simone Weil, repeats half-truths, exaggerations, and fantasies that have circulated for decades (Books, September 9th). The fantasy about my aunt’s “privileged” childhood is a favorite. My grandmother was not an “heiress”; rather than a “successful internist,” my grandfather was a beloved and generous G.P. The Weil children’s “luxury” childhood consisted in following their father to the different places where he was stationed as an Army physician, from 1914 to 1919. Simone’s “cross-dressing” is another fantasy, inspired, I suppose, by the pictures of Simone proudly wearing her uniform during the Spanish Civil War, but she did, in fact, wear skirts, even if she did not follow feminine fashions. Simone’s attitude toward Judaism became a Rorschach test for scholars and critics to project…

In June, 2016, Scott Sauritch, the president of United Steelworkers Local 2227, a branch based in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, drove for half an hour to a union hall in Pittsburgh, where Hillary Clinton was holding a campaign rally. Sauritch was hoping that Clinton, whom the U.S.W. had just endorsed, would talk about jobs and the steel industry. Instead, she focussed on the character flaws of Donald Trump, calling him “temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified.” As Sauritch listened, he grew frustrated: what did she plan to do for workers? Afterward, he told me, Clinton shook hands with supporters. Sauritch stood there in his union shirt, but Clinton didn’t extend her hand to him. “Hey, Hillary,” he called out, prompting her to turn around. “I’m the union president—we really need your help.”…

She slept on her bed,never woke up again.Her bed has become her grave,a tomb beneath the ceiling of her room,the ceiling a cenotaph.No name, no year of birth,no year of death, no epitaph.Only blood and a smashedpicture frame in ruinnext to her. In Jabalia camp, a mother collects her daughter’sflesh in a piggy bank,hoping to buy her a ploton a river in a faraway land. A group of mute peoplewere talking sign.When a bomb fell,they fell silent. It rained again last night.The new plant looked foran umbrella in the garage.The bombing got intenseand our house looked fora shelter in the neighborhood. I leave the door to my room open, so the words in my books,the titles, and names of authors and publishers,could flee when they hear the bombs. I became…

If every city has a culinary punch line, it’s easy to identify Los Angeles’s: Erewhon, the cultish chain of grocery stores, where a half gallon of “hyper oxygenated” water will run you an unconscionable $25.99. It started, in 1966, as a bean-sprouts-and-bulk-bins health-food stall in Boston, the brainchild of Japanese immigrants who evangelized the macrobiotic diet. Since then, it’s moved West and morphed into a slick, high-end wellness behemoth—a constant site of workaday paparazzi photos, a case study in capitalism posing as counterculture. The chain is especially famous for its “tonic bar,” which hawks vibrantly hued, supplement-laden smoothies that often double as billboards for influencers and pop stars (see Katy Perry’s pre-album release Orange You Glad I Love You) or for self-described health-care professionals pushing highly specific diets. The latter…

Stolen Pride, by Arlie Russell Hochschild (New Press). A deeply researched account of the rightward turn in Appalachia, this study focusses on Pikeville, Kentucky, a small city once flush with coal-mining jobs that sits in what is now America’s “whitest and second-poorest congressional district.” Hochschild, a sociologist, posits that Pikeville’s politics are shaped by grief about “stolen pride” and feelings of shame prompted by the region’s decline. She interviews a range of residents—including a mayor, prisoners, and recovering drug addicts—to understand each person’s relationship to these feelings. Some of her subjects experience “bootstrap pride”; others, like Matthew Heimbach, a co-founder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party, fashion themselves as moral outlaws. Taming Silicon Valley, by Gary Marcus (M.I.T.). This polemic, by a cognitive scientist and startup founder, calls for stricter regulation…

On a recent afternoon in Malibu, Chris Martin, the front man of Coldplay, was enjoying a brief pause between tour dates. “We have breaks, but only in the way that Serena Williams has a banana between sets,” he said, pulling his bare feet up under him. Martin, who is forty-seven, was wearing an emerald-green sweater featuring a picture of the earth, affixed with a tiny white button that said “LOVE.” Later on, when he took the sweater off, he revealed a blue T-shirt with the same button. I wondered, but did not ask, how many of them he owned. It felt indicative of Martin’s quintessence at this particular moment: LOVE, layered ad infinitum. Martin was in the midst of converting an old property into a studio and the de-facto Coldplay…

OCTOBER 2 – 8, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. This year’s New York Film Festival, at Lincoln Center, Sept. 27 to Oct. 14, features remarkable new films in a range of genres, such as “Oh, Canada” (pictured), a tale of bitter regret that is energized by the reunion of Richard Gere and the director Paul Schrader. Mati Diop’s imaginative documentary “Dahomey” is centered on the repatriation to Benin of twenty-six art works looted in 1892 by France. The festival also includes two new movies by the prolific South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo: “A Traveler’s Needs,” a lyrical vision of an outsider’s inspirations, starring Isabelle Huppert, and “By the Stream,” which contrasts an academic community’s alertness to abuses of power with an entrenched political conservatism.—Richard Brody…

You are at the Princess’s ball, and she is telling you a secret, but her orchestra of bears is making such a fearful lot of noise you cannot hear what she is saying. What do you say, dear? I beg your pardon. —Sesyle Joslin and Maurice Sendak, “What Do You Say, Dear? A Book of Manners for All Occasions,” 1958 I’d lean in closer and say, “Could you repeat that? The bear-itone section is a bit too enthusiastic tonight!” —GPT-4o, Advanced Voice Mode, 2024 In 1958, the year the illustrated children’s book “What Do You Say, Dear?” appeared, the leaders of a field newly dubbed “artificial intelligence” spoke at a conference in Teddington, England, on “The Mechanisation of Thought Processes.” Marvin Minsky, of M.I.T., talked about heuristic programming; Alan Turing…

Lori and Avery Schott wondered about the right age for their three children to have smartphones. For their youngest, Annalee, they settled on thirteen. They’d held her back in school a year, because she was small for her age and struggled academically. She’d been adopted from a Russian orphanage when she was two, and they thought that she might possibly have mild fetal alcohol syndrome. “Anna was very literal,” Lori told me when I visited the family home. “If you said, ‘Go jump in a lake,’ she’d go, ‘Why would he jump in the lake?’” When Anna was starting high school, the family moved from Minnesota to a ranch in eastern Colorado, and she seemed to thrive. She won prizes on the rodeo circuit, making friends easily. In her journal,…

IN THE MAIL Once [writers have] finished a new manuscript and put it in the mail, they exist in a state of suspended emotional and psychic animation… and it’s cruelty to animals to keep them waiting. —Robert Gottlieb, The Paris Review “Let’s get the complaining out of the way,” proposed Hope. “I’ve got me a pacemaker.” Farah said, “I’m losing my vision.” Bessie said, “I lost my husband.” And Bridget said, “I sent my story to a friend from my old writing class.” “And how is that a complaint?” Bessie asked her. Bridget said, “Because it feels—maybe it’s something like the actor’s stage fright.” “What I felt,” Lucinella said to Bridget,“when I sent you my water-bug story. Embarrassed.” “Water bugs! Yuck!” everybody said, and Bessie said, “But why is it…

For any author, pre-publication attention is an infinitely precious commodity. So it must have been with great delight that Craig Brown, the British satirist, learned last month that his book “Q: A Voyage Around the Queen” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) had come to the attention of that well-known influencer Donald Trump. The former President makes a brief appearance, in a chapter dedicated to the late Queen Elizabeth’s encounters with controversial foreign leaders. (Others mentioned include Bashar al-Assad, Idi Amin, and Vladimir Putin.) The monarch told a guest that she’d found Trump “very rude,” Brown writes. “She particularly disliked the way he couldn’t stop looking overher shoulder, as though in search of others more interesting.” When asked about the characterization, which was excerpted in the Daily Mail, Trump obligingly delivered the…