Innholdsfortegnelse for October 28, 2024 i The New Yorker

Jazmine Hughes (“Alpha Girls,” p. 16), a former editor and writer at the Times Magazine, has received two National Magazine Awards. David D. Kirkpatrick (“Foreign Influencers,” p. 24), a staff writer, is the author of “Into the Hands of the Soldiers,” about the Arab Spring. As a reporter at the Times, he shared three Pulitzer Prizes. Eric Drooker (Cover) is the author of graphic novels including the American Book Award-winning “Flood!” and “Naked City,” out earlier this month. Karen Chee (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 23), a comedian and a TV writer, has contributed to the magazine since 2016. Geraldo Cadava (Photo Booth, p. 9), a contributing writer, is a professor at Northwestern and the author of “The Hispanic Republican.” Deborah Garrison (Poem, p. 62) is the author of “A Working…

Before production began on the 1984 film “Beat Street,” a semi-fictional drama about the early days of hip-hop and breaking in the South Bronx, a researcher on the production team visited Ricky Flores at his apartment. Flores was a young Puerto Rican photographer from the neighborhood who had been taking pictures of the teens he grew up with—his crew. The “Beat Street” team wanted to look at Flores’s photographs to make sure they got the look and feel of the culture right. They gave him no credit, and little compensation. But Flores kept capturing images of his neighborhood, and beyond. In the days after 9/11, Flores took an iconic photograph of firefighters hoisting an American flag above the rubble of the Twin Towers. In subsequent years, he took pictures of…

At the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian’s design museum, situated in Andrew Carnegie’s 1902 mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, the warm light bouncing off the parquet floors and coffered oak ceilings can make visitors feel as if they were floating inside an enormous Scotch-and-soda. On a recent Wednesday, the opera singer Davóne Tines experienced a similar feeling of dislocation, when he beheld, in the spot where Carnegie’s dining table once stood, a painstakingly accurate re-creation of Tines’s own childhood living room, from rural northern Virginia. The display was one of twenty-five exhibits in an upcoming show called “Making Home.” “This is surreal!” Tines boomed. He had sent a slew of reference photographs to the museum’s curators in the past year, but he was seeing the cozy array of striped couch, white…

The advice flying around the last night of the Democratic National Convention this past August, at Chicago’s United Center, was to not leave your seat after 9 P.M. All day, social media and the convention hall had been abuzz with rumors that the night would end with a performance by Beyoncé. Or maybe Taylor Swift. Or maybe, in a show of interracial solidarity the world had never seen before, they would perform together. Although the superstars never materialized, the crowd was still electric as it waited for the true headliner of the night: Vice-President Kamala Harris, who would be accepting the Democratic Presidential nomination. An hour before Harris appeared, the comedian D. L. Hughley took the stage and addressed what was perhaps the most enthusiastic demographic in the arena: members…

If Glenn Horowitz comes calling, should you be flattered or alarmed? It means that you have an exceptional literary reputation. It also means that your time on earth is nearly up. Horowitz, a rare-book dealer of matchless temerity and flair, has sold the papers and possessions of more Nobel laureates than anyone else; he describes himself, with derisive pride, as “the Grim Reaper with a sack of shekels on his back.” He sold the archives of Gabriel García Márquez, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Bob Dylan, as well as books from Derek Walcott’s library, manuscripts of Seamus Heaney poems and Saul Bellow stories, spicy letters that he acquired from one of William Faulkner’s mistresses, and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish typewriter. He also sold Alice Walker’s papers for $1 million,…

In the final minutes of the last Presidential debate of the 2020 election, the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, called for an end to all federal subsidies for the oil industry. Global warming, he’d explained earlier, is an “existential threat to humanity,” adding, “We have a moral obligation to deal with it, and we’re told by all the leading scientists in the world we don’t have much time.” Then, in response to a belligerent challenge from the incumbent, Donald Trump—“Would you close down the oil industry?”—Biden said, “I would transition from the oil industry, yes.” “Will you remember that, Pennsylvania?” Trump said, hopefully. Twelve days later, Biden carried Pennsylvania and, with it, the election. In the intervening four years, here’s what has happened to the climate: average air temperatures have soared…

The year 2024 has so far included a number of trends that jumped the shark. Brat summer. Demure. Existing in the context. Another head-scratcher: singles swapping out Tinder for run clubs. The novel approach sprouted from social-media folklore, with viral posts alleging that run-club members were doing a lot more than jogging with one another. “Run clubs are the new horny singles club,” the comedian Dan Carney posted on X, in June, along with a satirical video. In the clip, a group of runners pore over a complex cluster diagram of romantic connections. Last month, NBC News reported, “Thousands of singles in New York City are flocking to run clubs to meet their soulmate, but some say they are just as rife with drama as the dating apps they wanted…

Hi, Billy’s dad! Andrew, right? Thanks for meeting on such short notice. No, don’t worry, this actually isn’t about Billy. This is about you. Are you O.K.? You see, I can tell when students’ parents do their homework for them. Please, it’s so obvious! There’s no way that Billy, a seven-year-old, chose “Chicken Soup for the Depressed Man’s Soul” for his book report, when—let’s be honest—he’s kind of dumb. I mean, the boy doesn’t understand the concept of cows. He keeps calling them “bad dogs.” Look, there’s been a noticeable decline in Billy’s homework over the past few months, which leads me to believe there’s some trouble at home. Take a look at Billy’s recent history project. I picked up the first sign of your mental downturn in this collage;…

Chop down a poplar tree. Other kinds of wood could work, too, but poplar is an especially soft one, and your task is to trim it into thin planes. These you’ll need to coat in a barrier of plaster and animal glue—naked wood is highly absorbent, and you can’t have it drinking down everything you put on it. Wait until the barrier has dried. Sand. Repeat until you have a perfectly smooth surface. Sketch your preferred silhouettes with a stick of charcoal, slather the negative space in a gluey reddish mixture, cover that in translucent gold leaf (glueless, the metal has a queasy green tinge), and burnish that with a wolf’s tooth. Now, and only now, you may pick up your brush. The Met’s new show about what happens next,…

In 1990, the Armenian actor Karren Karagulian arrived in New York City with just two hundred dollars and five tins of black caviar. His first stop was the Russian-speaking enclave of Brighton Beach. Visiting the neighborhood the other day, he pointed toward the corner of Brighton Beach and Coney Island Avenues, and recalled his early days as an immigrant. “There were people from different Soviet countries standing next to me,” he said. “One was selling an iron.” He estimated that he got about a hundred dollars per tin of caviar: “It was enough for me to survive for three months.” Karagulian is one of the stars of the new action rom-com “Anora,” and his co-star Vache Tovmasyan and the film’s director, Sean Baker, joined him in Brighton Beach. Standing under…

The Intelligence Community Campus-Bethesda, a vast office complex covered in vertical panels of maroon siding and mirrored glass, sits on a cliff overlooking the Potomac, surrounded by a forty-acre lawn and a tall wrought-iron fence. Roughly three thousand employees of various United States spy agencies work there. About two dozen of them are assigned to the Foreign Malign Influence Center—the command hub of the battle to protect the Presidential election from manipulation by foreign powers. The center, which opened in 2022, is responsible for deciphering, and defeating, surreptitious efforts to rig or tilt the American vote. The October before an election is the busy season. Jessica Brandt, a forty-year-old newcomer to the intelligence world, is the center’s first director. Before her appointment, last year, she’d spent her career writing research…

In the past few years, a secretive consortium of technologists and investors has spent almost a billion dollars to purchase about ninety square miles of farmland on the eastern reaches of San Francisco Bay. The intention is to create a bespoke suburban oasis. In circles where the terraforming of Mars is a question of when rather than why, a planned community on the order of a Levittown or an Irvine ranks as a relatively modest ambition. The mythology of Silicon Valley originates with secession—in 1957, the “traitorous eight” left one semiconductor outfit to start a competitor—and the contemporary standard-bearer of this tradition is the venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan. In a pep talk delivered a decade ago to graduates of an élite startup incubator, Srinivasan condemned the Paper Belt, by which…

Before the gig economy consumed a third of the workforce, it was mostly musicians who worried about gigs. There are debates about the origins of the word—some believe it derives from an eighteenth-century term for horse-drawn carriages that may have doubled as stages for performers, while others contend that it was adapted from a Baroque dance called the gigue. But the “gig,” as shorthand for a casual, one-off paid performance, entered the popular lexicon during the Jazz Age of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. There was a mystique to the gigging musician wandering the big city in search of work, because this work was creative, improvisational, at times transcendent. Young people who came of age before the twenty-first century, Franz Nicolay argues in a new book called “Band People: Life and…