Innholdsfortegnelse for November 11, 2024 i The New Yorker

Ed Caesar (“Syria’s Empire of Speed,” p. 30), a contributing staff writer, most recently published “The Moth and the Mountain: A True Story of Love, War, and Everest.” Charles Bethea (“The Home Front,” p. 38), a staff writer since 2018, received a 2021 Mirror Award. Joy Harjo (Poem, p. 44) served three terms as U.S. Poet Laureate. Her books include the poetry collection “Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light” and the memoir “Poet Warrior.” Greg Jackson (Fiction, p. 58) is the author of the short-story collection “Prodigals” and the novel “The Dimensions of a Cave.” Naomi Zeveloff (The Talk of the Town, p. 19) has reported for outlets including NPR and The Atlantic. This is her first contribution to The New Yorker. Barry Blitt (Cover) has been a contributor since…

In May, at a prison colony in the Siberian city of Omsk, a lawyer paid his weekly visit to his client, the Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza. They sat together in a small room, separated by a pane of glass. Kara-Murza, who had been poisoned in 2015 and 2017, presumably by Vladimir Putin’s secret police, was serving the second year of a twenty-five-year sentence for his public opposition to the invasion of Ukraine. The lawyer had news to deliver: Kara-Murza had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for columns he had written for the Washington Post. The news, Kara-Murza recalled, “sounded like something from a different planet, from some kind of a parallel reality.” He was pleased, of course, though he assumed that he would never collect the prize in person. Like…

Willie Nelson, the ninety-one-year-old singer-songwriter, who has brought comfort and heartbreak and joy to his fans with a hundred and fifty-three albums, thirteen books, and more than a couple of arrests for marijuana possession, will soon publish his first-ever cookbook. The concoctions in “Willie and Annie Nelson’s Cannabis Cookbook: Mouthwatering Recipes and the High-Flying Stories Behind Them” include Shirred Eggs with Asparagus & Fennel (17.6 milligrams of THC per serving), Vegan Cannabis Butter (212 milligrams of THC per tablespoon), and Buttermilk Fried Chicken (no THC). The stories veer from recollections of a Christmas he spent in the Alps with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson to an account of a harsh winter, in Tennessee, when he bought seventeen weaner pigs at a quarter a pound, then sold them at…

Go with the flow like a dead fish. If you don’t like where the flow is going, stop the flow like a beaver does with wood. Laughter is the best medicine, unless you laugh like a hyena, in which case you should laugh like a hamster. (Hamsters don’t laugh.) Pursue your goals with passion and determination like a mountain lion stalking a household pet. Remember that it’s all about the journey, not the destination. So enjoy the views along the way like a mountain lion watching a household pet’s owner heading off to work. No matter what life throws at you, always keep one foot on the ground like a pink flamingo and your head buried in the sand like an ostrich. This may sound impossible, but you can do…

ACROSS 1 Vocal or muscle quality 5 New alum 9 Dominated, in sports lingo 14 Mouth-related 15 Goal of meditation, perhaps 17 The ___ Piper of Hamelin 18 “That’s the way it is, unfortunately” 19 “I swear!” 21 Welcome with open ___ 22 Eminem’s genre 23 Something to set before going to sleep 24 Suddenly lose it 25 Slowly enter (into) 26 Peg in a golf bag 27 Twistable treat that débuted four years after Hydrox 29 Cousin of a croc 30 Sidestep 31 Really enjoy 32 Suspenseful ending to a season 34 U.S. President between Johnson and Hayes 35 Mideast military officials 36 “Rizz” for “charisma,” e.g. 37 Lasso 38 What Simba is at the beginning of “The Lion King” 41 Section of the GMAT, the LSAT, and the…

Residents of New Hampshire, where Presidential hopefuls often court diners at greasy spoons, have come to expect high-level politico drop-ins. Not long ago, a doctor’s office in Portsmouth prepared itself for a visit from the Vice-President. A half-dozen staffers stood at attention in the waiting room, ready for duties both Hippocratic and patriotic. A white woman with blond hair who was several months pregnant entered and checked in with the receptionist: she, Kamala Harris, was there for her scheduled appointment. The letdown was palpable. The patient rolled her eyes. “I was, like, ‘Why would the Vice-President go to a doctor in Portsmouth?’” Harris, a thirty-two-year-old resident of nearby Seabrook, said recently. Generally, she goes by Kamii. Some Presidents have plenty of name duplicates. There are more than a hundred George…

The Manhattan organization with the coolest name, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York, also has the coolest motto, which it shares with the Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths: “By hammer and hand all arts do stand.” The society was founded, in 1785, by twenty-two local craftsmen, whose trades included tanning, silversmithing, ship-joining, stonecutting, coach-making, and chandlery. Since 1899, its headquarters have been at 20 West Forty-fourth Street, in a building that had previously been a school for boys. Not long ago, Victoria Dengel, the executive director, pointed to a large leaded-glass arched window above the entrance and said, “We restored the building’s façade a few years ago, and the Rambusch Decorating Company, which was founded in 1898, took that window completely apart and re-leaded…

Before Marai al-Ramthan started the job that made him rich and got him killed, he was a sheepherder. A handsome and resourceful man in his thirties, he lived in southern Syria, in the scrubby area near Jordan, and had family on both sides of the border. There is a long tradition of petty smuggling in the region. His surname is derived from Ar-Ramtha, a city on the northern edge of Jordan which grew prosperous through the illicit transit of goods in and out of the country. Until the civil war in Syria began, in 2011, a group of Jordanians known as bahhara (or “sailors”) were licensed to drive taxis across the border. There were about eight hundred such drivers, and everybody understood the real purpose of their journeys: to return…

The wreck was like a bug on the wall, a jumbly shape splayed on the abyssal plain. It was noticed by a team of autonomous-underwater-vehicle operators on board a subsea exploration vessel, working at an undisclosed location in the Atlantic Ocean, about a thousand miles from the nearest shore. The analysts belonged to a small private company that specializes in deep-sea search operations; I have been asked not to name it. They were looking for something else. In the past decade, the company has helped to transform the exploration of the seabed by deploying fleets of A.U.V.s—underwater drones—which cruise in formation, mapping large areas of the ocean floor with high-definition imagery. “We find wrecks everywhere, just blunder into them,” Mensun Bound, a maritime archeologist who works frequently with the company,…

Sometimes, when Tucker Carlson is in the shower, he takes a quiet moment to reflect on whether his haters may be right about him. I know this not firsthand but because he recently mentioned it to a few thousand fans in Rosenberg, Texas. He said, “I have been through this process for so many years, where they call you something”—in his case, a very incomplete list would include “venomous demagogue,” “crypto-Nazi blowhard,” “anti-science ignoramus,” and “a dick”—“and I actually do try to take stock. Like, am I that person?” These reveries always lead him to the same conclusion: he’s clean. It is the haters who are wrong. That night, in Rosenberg, the epithet he lingered on was “extremist.” He drew out the syllables in a derisive growl, followed by his…

“Did he say fight?” Drew Miller asked me. It was July 13th, and we were in rural Colorado, near an outpost of Fortitude Ranch, a network of survivalist retreats that Miller has constructed in anticipation of civilizational collapse. News of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump—the first one—had just pinged: a young man named Thomas Crooks had shot at Trump from a rooftop near a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, striking his right ear. Trump had stood, with blood on his face, and shouted to his crowd, “Fight, fight, fight!” The shooter’s motives were unknown, but Republicans were blaming Democrats. “File charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination,” Representative Mike Collins posted on X. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene accused the “evil” Democratic Party of attempting “murder.” Miller’s phone began…

“Jacob Javits of New York is the first United States senator to become fully automated,” the Chicago Tribune announced in 1962 from the Republican state convention in Buffalo, where an electronic Javits spat out slips of paper with answers to questions about everything from Cuba’s missiles (“a serious threat”) to the Cubs’ prospects (dim). “Mr. Javits also harbors thoughts on medical care for the elderly, Berlin, the communist menace,” and more than a hundred other subjects, the Tribune reported after an interview with the machine. Javits may have been the first automated American politician, but he wasn’t the last. Since the nineteen-sixties, much of American public life has become automated, driven by computers and predictive algorithms that can do the political work of rallying support, running campaigns, communicating with constituents,…

In 1921, Charles E. Ives, a wealthy co-proprietor of the New York life-insurance firm Ives & Myrick, launched a bid to rebrand himself as an American Beethoven. He sent copies of his Second Piano Sonata, titled “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860,” to hundreds of musicians, critics, and patrons across the United States. The first movement, “Emerson,” begins with a kind of axe-swinging gesture: an octave B gets smashed into dissonant splinters. Fractured impressions of Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau ensue. Most of the recipients dismissed the composer as a crank, but a few were spellbound by his transcendentalist conjurations, and a cult began to grow. In 1939, the pianist John Kirkpatrick played the “Concord” at Town Hall, eliciting critical awe. In 1947, Ives’s Third Symphony, a stately mashup of Christian hymns, won…