Innholdsfortegnelse for November 25, 2024 i The New Yorker

Jennifer Gonnerman (“The Big Spin,” p. 26), a staff writer, received a National Magazine Award in 2021 for her New Yorker article “Survival Story,” about a city-bus operator during the pandemic. David Sedaris (“A Long Way Home,” p. 14) has contributed to the magazine since 1995. His most recent essay collection is “Happy-Go-Lucky.” Javier Mariscal (Cover) is a co-author of the graphic novel “They Shot the Piano Player,” due out in English in December. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (Fiction, p. 46) published the story collection “American Estrangement” in 2021. Aimee Lucido (Puzzles & Games Dept.), a crossword constructor, wrote the children’s books “Emmy in the Key of Code” and “Pasta Pasta Lotsa Pasta.” David Lehman (Poem, p. 50) has contributed poetry and prose to the magazine since 1990. His latest poetry collection…

The advent calendar was, according to most historians, invented by a solemn bunch of German Lutherans in the eighteen-hundreds, and it was fairly dull business: each day in the run-up to Christmas, someone got to make a festive chalk mark on the wall. In the centuries since, though, advent calendars have had a secular glow-up: they are now not so much about Awaiting the Nativity as they are about Getting Delightful Stuff in December Generally. The It calendars of the season have their own cult followings—and tend to sell out by Thanksgiving. You can find luxurious advent offerings in almost every category: caviar, macarons, chili oils, Japanese snacks, fountain-pen inks, rare teas, Swarovski crystals, puzzles, natural wine, La Mer creams. It’s a capitalist free-for-all, and no industry is immune. And…

In 1868, horse-drawn carriages delivered the ten-thousand-odd components of a giant pipe organ from the factory of Henry Erben, near Manhattan’s Five Points neighborhood, to St. Patrick’s Basilica, on Mott and Prince. The parish, then largely Irish, was still grieving the loss of so many young men from the Fighting 69th at Bull Run and Antietam. Moneyed interests were moving uptown. Erben’s organs, meanwhile, were regularly shipped thousands of miles, to Havana, Caracas, the Western frontier. For an immigrant neighborhood in a young country that had just survived a great rupture, the purchase of a cathedral organ to rival Europe’s finest was a source of pride. A wave of Italians followed the Irish. (The Erben organ appears in “The Godfather: Part III.”) Then came Dominicans and Chinese. The organ remained…

Ordinarily, I hate staying at someone’s house, but when Hugh and I visited his friend Mary in Maine we had no other choice. There weren’t any hotels on the small island where she lives in the summer, and she’d seemed so genuine when she extended her invitation that we really couldn’t refuse. Mary and Hugh went to college together a hundred thousand years ago, back when tuition was affordable and you could study things like acting without bankrupting yourself. Her auburn hair had turned mostly white since I’d last seen her, fifteen years earlier, and she wore it in an untidy bun. There was another old classmate of Hugh and Mary’s at the house that weekend. Luckily, his girlfriend was there as well, thus there were two of us who…

Judging by how commonly birth con-is practiced in the United States, trol it ought to rank among the least controversial of subjects. In surveys, ninetynine per cent of women of reproductive age report having used contraception in their lifetimes. Catholics avail themselves of it at about the same rate as other Americans. Evangelicals do, too. Given the fact that heterosexual Americans, like humans in general, tend to be fans of non-procreative sex, this is not so surprising. Nor is it new. In the nineteenth century, lots of people tried to game their gametes, especially anyone lucky or wealthy enough to have a discreet private physician; or who could read between the lines of newspaper ads slyly offering “rubber goods for men” or “married women’s friends” or “French periodical pills”; or…

In the first few days after the reëlection of Donald Trump, one heard across the fruited plains and the canyons of the great cities a noisy welter of accusation, self-laceration, celebration, and rationalization. There were also conspicuous assurances of normalcy that went like this: The sun went down in the evening and came up in the morning. Democracy did not end or even falter; the election was democracy, after all. The once and future President would surely dispense with his frenzied campaign threats and get down to the mundane task of governing. Making America great yet again required sobriety and competence, and Trump and his councillors would undoubtedly recognize that obligation. For the titans of business, the new Administration promised untold prosperity: regulation would ease, tax rates decline. Elon Musk…

From the ferry to Cherry Grove, a historic queer enclave on Fire Island, the Belvedere Guest House looks like a plate of meringues. Closer up, pastel gates and an ornate fountain hint at the compound’s high-camp interior. As a rule, the guests are all men. But this year an artist and onetime Guggenheim-grant recipient named Samantha Nye persuaded the Belvedere’s owners to let her rent the grounds for a four-day film project—a lesbian takeover of the inner sanctum. Several weeks before the shoot, in the waning days of the regular season, Nye walked two freshly thawed cakes to a community center situated a few blocks from the Belvedere, to serve at an afternoon casting call. She was looking for ten to fifteen lesbians over the age of sixty for a…

It may be bright and getting brighter on Broadway these days, but Off Broadway the shadows are lengthening. Desperation-level real-estate pressures are pushing established theatre companies out of spaces that have long been part of the city’s fabric—I keep going to shows and realizing that I’ll never be inside a certain venue again. It’s particularly gutting that the scrappy Soho Rep is leaving Walkerspace, a tiny storefront conversion in Tribeca, its home since 1991. Several of the most important shows of the past decades premièred in the sixty-five-seat shoebox, including Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fairview” and Anne Washburn’s “10 Out of 12.” To bid the cramped, magical old space farewell, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Cubanborn performance artist Alina Troyano have co-written the elegiac farce “Give Me Carmelita…

Hunkered down in a West Side restaurant the other night, the writer and director George C. Wolfe and the choreographer Camille A. Brown reminisced about how they’d met. Wolfe, who is a puckish seventy years old and had on a fuzzy blue sweater, couldn’t quite remember. “It was in 2018, I believe,” Brown said. She is forty-four, and had long dreadlocks and gold hoops in her ears. She reminded Wolfe that he had hired her that year to choreograph his film “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Now the two are working together on the upcoming Broadway revival of “Gypsy,” starring Audra McDonald as the first Black Mama Rose. Wolfe weighed in on how it was going: “Robin Wagner, the brilliant set designer, had this saying: ‘“Collaboration” is a word that directors…

The National Security Agency’s new podcast takes its name from the clandestine organization’s own nickname, No Such Agency, and its hosts—Cam Potts, Christy Wicks, Brian Fassler, and John Parker—are all N.S.A. employees. They were the winners of a talent search that was, given the nature of spycraft, held in-house, the house being a giant campus in Fort Meade, Maryland, where the specifics of what the employees do for the Defense Department is, to put it mildly, secret. The podcast, which is only seven episodes old, is the opposite of some of America’s top podcasts: in contrast to “Call Her Daddy” or “The Joe Rogan Experience,” where guests share details about their sex lives or shards of climate denialism, respectively, “No Such Podcast” feels scripted, with four people in a secure…

I hate to say I told you so, but here I we are. Kamala Harris’s loss will go down in history as a catastrophe that could have easily been avoided if more people had thought whatever I happen to think. Take immigration. It’s a major issue, and I believe that the Harris campaign should have tacked to the left on it instead of trying to beat Republicans at their own messaging. Except I also think that Democrats should be trying harder to appeal to conservative rural voters who worry that immigration is out of control. Doing both of these things at once would have been so simple. And yet. I hate to sound smug, but this was totally predictable if you happen to share whatever my exact world view is.…

In the beginning was the mob, and the mob was bad. In Gibbon’s 1776 “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the Roman mob makes regular appearances, usually at the instigation of a demagogue, loudly demanding to be placated with free food and entertainment (“bread and circuses”), and, though they don’t get to rule, they sometimes get to choose who will. Gibbon was a sort of conservative radical—contemptuous of Christianity and attached to freethinking Epicureanism, but fearful of social disorder—and by “the mob” he meant the lumpenproletariat of any big city, his own London as much as his remembered Rome. What do you do when two mobs are shouting at each other during a public election? So Mr. Pickwick is asked in Dickens’s “Pickwick Papers,” set in the eighteen-twenties. “Shout…

In the new FX/Hulu series “Say Nothing,” life as an armed revolutionary during the Troubles has—at least at first—an air of glamour. Dolours and Marian Price (Lola Petticrew and Hazel Doupe, respectively), two teen-age sisters born and raised in Belfast, are confronted almost immediately with the clash of expectations versus reality. The pair are still novice militants when they decide to devise their own mission, entering a local bank sporting nuns’ habits and guns and announcing their intent to “liberate” funds on behalf of the Irish Republican Army. The heist doesn’t go smoothly. A stern-faced woman refuses to coöperate, calling the sisters’ disguises “sacrilege”; a visibly panicked Marian implores her to lie down, sweetening the request with a “pretty please.” In the end, the stunt nets the I.R.A. just thirty-eight…

ACROSS 1 Contemplate 6 PC’s “brain” 9 Plastic-pipe material, for short 12 Religious or cultural renegade 15 Whopper purveyor 16 Bakers’ inner circles? 17 Alma mater for Francis Ford Coppola and Alexander Payne 18 Naval officer below a lieutenant: Abbr. 19 Heroine of a Thomas Hardy novel 20 Poems often featuring natural imagery 22 Target for a Bioré strip 23 Acts the social butterfly 24 Nursery-rhyme boy with a rhyming name 28 Gig for some clowns 29 “Warrior” actor Nick 30 Hit playfully 33 Memorial Day weekend event, familiarly 34 Fusilli noodles, shapewise 35 Track assignment 36 Grp. that advises the President on foreign-policy matters 37 Like a wallflower 38 Croquet alternative 39 Entrée that Panda Express calls its “signature dish” 42 Crush 44 Ingredient in many purportedly healthy cookie…