Innholdsfortegnelse for December 9, 2024 i The New Yorker

The Sonoran Desert, which covers much of the southwestern United States, is a vast expanse of arid earth where cartoonish entities—roadrunners, tumbleweeds, telephone-pole-tall succulents—make occasional appearances. It was in this iconic, Looney Tunes landscape that dozens of philosophers gathered in the winter of 2022 at a three-thousand-acre dude ranch on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, as if inhabiting a thought experiment of their own design. Between archery practice and lassoing lessons, they met in an adobe structure, where there was talk of “inconsistency relations” and “the concept of entailment.” “How does ‘probably’ work?” was unanimously agreed to be one of the more polarizing questions a person could ask. They were there to attend the Ranch Metaphysics Workshop, an annual conference conceived of nearly twenty years ago by Laurie Paul, a…

Did I want a selfie? Javier Milei, the President of Argentina, was offering. So many of his supporters wanted them; the Internet is full of pictures of him with ecstatic fans, regional leaders, and such international fellow-travellers as Elon Musk. In his office, he adopted his customary pose, his face angled toward the good light, his lips pursed, two jaunty thumbs up. The stance seemed naggingly familiar, and then I realized that it recalled the psychotic character Alex from Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.” “Naranja Mecánica?” I asked. Milei’s eyes sparkled, and he nodded, cackling, then obligingly resumed the pose. For Milei, a self-described “anarchocapitalist” determined to remake his country, this punkish presentation is not incidental to his success. His supporters refer to him as the Madman and as the…

There’s some sort of holdup. Every day, they expect to fly out, and every day they are told it will be “another twenty-four hours.” They’re staying in a hotel with a swimming pool. It’s not really hot enough for swimming. It’s not quite pool weather. It’s, like, seventy-five or something. Still, they spend most of the day poolside—there isn’t anything else to do. The plastic sun loungers next to the pool face those towers—those three towers that look like spikes pointing at the sky, with a few blue spheres impaled on two of them. István opens his eyes and sees them there, in the middle distance, pointing at the empty sky. Usually in the afternoon a sort of light sleep comes. Sounds in a spaceless world take on an abstract…

Valley So Low, by Jared Sullivan (Knopf). In 2008, a landslide at a coal-powered electricity plant in Kingston, Tennessee, released more than a billion gallons of toxic coal-ash slurry into nearby neighborhoods. This tense investigative chronicle of what Sullivan, a journalist, calls the “single largest industrial disaster in U.S. history in terms of volume” focusses on the workers who cleaned up afterward. Many were told by their supervisors that their exposure to the slurry was safe, and were denied access to protective gear. Hundreds have developed cancer and other ailments; more than fifty have died. As Sullivan follows the court case filed by some of the affected men, the book becomes a legal thriller—a story of “simple, hardworking” Davids fighting the Big Energy Goliath who poisoned them. The Impossible Man,…

FAMILY MATTERS I was excited to see my home town of Cheverly, Maryland, represented in Emma Green’s article (“The Family Plan,” November 18th). Green perfectly captured the communal spirit of our little town. The author is off base, however, when she conflates “this world in Cheverly” and “the conservative turn toward family.” In my experience, Cheverly’s population is overwhelmingly left-leaning. What’s more, the fact that Cheverly is a wonderful place to live and have kids (or not have kids) is no more thanks to its liberal citizens than it is to its conservative ones. What makes Cheverly so family-friendly has very little to do with what its residents think about abortion and a whole lot to do with the one thing we all have in common: a belief that a…

Children who share only one parent are half siblings. Children who have been bisected via a tragic logging accident are also half siblings, but in a different way. A great-aunt is someone with whom you communicate exclusively via Facebook. A great aunt is someone who catches you blazing that sticky icky after Thanksgiving dinner and doesn’t tell your parents. Your extended family includes grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. It also includes Enzo, your cousin’s cousin’s cousin, who owns the Italian place down the street and proudly displays a signed photo of Bernadette Peters above the cash register. Every time you walk by with your dog, he gives you a wink and screams, “Proud home of preferred manicotti of Bernadette Peters!” Enzo, too, is family. Sometimes your aunt is your mom’s…

Heartbreak cures are as old as time, or at least as old as the Common Era. Around the year 1 C.E., the Roman poet Ovid followed up “The Art of Love,” his dating manual in verse, with an antidote titled “Cures for Love.” Among the recommendations are to pick up a hobby (“cow bulls into submission”), distract yourself with a new partner (“as they split off into many a stream, mighty rivers lose muscle”), and, if possible, take a trip at once: “Don’t fake an excuse, either, for sticking around. Don’t check the calendar. Don’t keep looking over your shoulder back at Rome.” This past summer, I did the bidding of the ancients and booked a seat on the Berkshire Flyer—Amtrak’s seasonal train from Penn Station to Pittsfield, Massachusetts—to get…

No matter how the wind and the stars carried the newsThe slaves knewSherman was comingAll they had to do was wait:As they sang the Spiritual “Why can’t I Wait on the Lord?”They had the patience to know He may not comeWhen you call HimBut He always comes on time My great great grandmother was a slave holding insideHer the first of our family to be bornFreeSherman came burning the hateAnd greed freeing my ancestorsMy great great grandmother who had never seen her own faceCarried her free baby and a sterling silver hand mirror away Cornelia whom we called MamaDear was the firstTo be born free MamaDear married Watson and birthedThree sons and a daughterMamaDear gave her youngest son the sterling silver mirrorWhen he graduated from Fisk University We forget the…

The other day, at a Nigerian restaurant called Safari, in Houston, Texas, I peeled back the plastic wrap on a ball of fufu, a staple across West Africa. Made from a steamed root vegetable or grain—in this case, yam—that’s been pounded and hydrated until it’s soft and slightly stretchy, reminiscent of rising bread dough, it falls under a pan-African category known as “swallow,” most often served as a starchy accompaniment to soup or stew. This was not my first time eating fufu. With confidence, I tore off a small piece and began to roll it between my palms. Suddenly, I heard a voice behind me. “Unh-unh. Mm-hmm. What are we doing?” The voice belonged to Kavachi Ukegbu, a Houstonian whose mother, Margaret, a Nigerian immigrant, opened Safari in 1994. After…

What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. The centerpiece of the exhibition “Dueñas de la Noche: Trans Lives and Dreams in 1980s Caracas” (through Jan. 25), at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, is “Trans,” a bittersweet documentary, from 1982, by Manuel Herreros de Lemos and Mateo Manaure Arilla. It depicts a group of women who made their own community out of an emotional need and also for survival: health care, if it existed at all, was dicey, and violence was no stranger. More than forty years separates “Trans” and “ALOK,” the director Alex Hedison’s sensitive portrait of Alok Vaid-Menon (pictured), a nonbinary author, poet, and comedian, streaming as part of NewFest36’s virtual encore series (through Dec. 25). To watch Alok move through the world is…

The saga of my Jewish conversion began twenty-five years ago, when I got engaged to my first husband. He’d grown up in an Orthodox family, and his parents, my future in-laws, were devastated that he was marrying a non-Jew; under religious law, a child is born a Jew only if the mother is Jewish, so any kids we had would not technically be Jewish, either. An Orthodox rabbi pleaded with my fiancé one night not to marry me, then vomited all over the sidewalk—possibly from too much alcohol, but the point was vividly made. I remember feeling elated to realize that I could solve the problem by converting. It turned out not to be so simple. For decades, through our marriage and divorce and my subsequent remarriage, I lived like…

How you used to come when called.Blood-in-Me. Best-of-All.I liked when you’d show up wetlike wet marble, or liver.Keeping nothing in us thento commend ourselves to God:our minds wandering during sex,bird shapes shifting in the reeds.No-Grave-to-Visit.No-Sheets-on-the-Bed.I drank from youas a goat from the trough.Boulders blushed in the rain. Like stars, there are saints nowfor almost everything.Red-One. Drowned-One.Even the dog knows his nameand how to do “down.”Each morning at the old pondhe swims himself tired.Little-Blue-Sultan.Four-Chambered-Heart.Drugs don’t make you stay dead,you told me once. But thenthe drugs made you stay dead.…

What do people do all day? My daughter loves to read Richard Scarry’s book of that title, though she generally skips ahead to the hospital pages. Once we’ve read about Doctor Lion, Doctor Dog, and Nurse Nelly four or five times, she’s ready to go back to the beginning. She never tires of studying the various professional activities of the residents of Busytown: Farmer Alfalfa and Grocer Cat, Blacksmith Fox and Captain Salty, homemakers and construction workers, police officers and firefighters, bakers and engineers. The literature of work begins in childhood but doesn’t end there. Novelists have long attended to labor, from the mills of Charlotte Brontë’s “Shirley” and the mines of Émile Zola’s “Germinal” to the more recent portrayal of Target loading docks in Adelle Waldman’s “Help Wanted.” In…

“All Life Long,” the title of the most recent album by the composer and organist Kali Malone, is taken from a poem by the British Symbolist author Arthur Symons: “The heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,/ All life long crying without avail,/ As the water all night long is crying to me.” The poem appears as an epigraph in W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk,” which is where Malone found it. Beneath Symons’s lines, Du Bois supplies musical notation for the opening phrase of the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” The topic, then, is sorrow, songs of sorrow, sounds of sorrow. Malone’s album, a hushed, meditative collection of pieces for male vocal quartet, brass quintet, and organ, is steeped…