Innholdsfortegnelse for January 20, 2025 i The New Yorker

The summer at the drop-off, the summerwhen the boat floated to shorewith no one on it, the summera stranger on the streetspat in my face,every summer whenmy sisters were my comfort,my sisters to whom I confessedmy regrets. My sister who wouldsay: Just breathe, just asmy other sisterwould say: Just listen.I listened for them both,and when I answered the phonethe call didn’t comefrom either of them andI was on the floorlike someone trying to find safetyaway from smoke.I must have been breathing, of course,although I no longer had sisters.And now my sisters are at the airportwith no one to calm them or claim them,and they are alone with strangers,and no remedy occurs to me,to take an Uber, to call a taxi—and I am walking in what might bethe wrong directionwith others…

CHANCE AND SCIENCE As a medical student, I greatly enjoyed Rivka Galchen’s piece about Hugh Herr and Matthew Carty’s work developing a new kind of prosthetic limb (“Leg Work,” December 16th). When I read about how Herr’s getting lost on Mt. Washington in the cold and having the lower halves of his legs amputated as a result led him to want to “devote his life to something worthwhile,” I couldn’t help but think of the role that chance plays in medical innovation. This brought to mind a discovery made by Ambroise Paré. Paré, who lived from 1510 to 1590, worked on the battlefields of France, and was taught to cauterize gunshot wounds with boiling oil. When, one day, Paré ran out of oil, he concocted an ointment from the materials…

It was below freezing the other Friday morning, in Long Island City, when the author Jhumpa Lahiri walked into a nondescript brick building beneath the Queens Boulevard overpass. She was wearing a long white wool coat and maroon suède boots. “That’s her!” someone said, springing up from a bench. As Lahiri took off her coat, she was given a nametag that read “BookOps” over the logo of the New York Public Library. The N.Y.P.L. had just acquired Lahiri’s papers, among which are school book reports, an Italian rail ticket with scribbled ideas for a novel, and a piece of fan mail from the director M. Night Shyamalan, in which he shared that he’d cried after reading “Interpreter of Maladies.” Lahiri is only fifty-seven—on the young side for selling her archive—but…

BLEB “Bleb” is worth eight points in Scrabble. Thought you might like to know. I have known the word since Wednesday, June 11, 1958, when I learned it from a company physician at Time Incorporated, in Rockefeller Center. He said I should have been hospitalized four days ago, but there was nothing much to do about it now, go back to work. I went back to work, writing two weekly sections of Time called Milestones and Miscellany. Each filled just one column on a three-column page, and writing them was the entry-level job of new young writers. Milestones were squibs about births, deaths, and marriages, bits of information culled from newspapers and the wire services. Miscellany was a stack of ten or eleven one-sentence news items to which I added…

On a Thursday morning last May, about a hundred people gathered in the atrium of the Ohio capitol building to join in Christian worship. The “Prayer at the Statehouse” was organized by an advocacy group called the Center for Christian Virtue, whose growing influence was symbolized by its new headquarters, directly across from the capitol. It was also manifest in the officials who came to take part in the event: three state legislators and the ambitious lieutenant governor, Jon Husted. After some prayer and singing, the center’s Christian Engagement Ambassador introduced Husted, asking him to “share with us about faith and intersecting faith with government.” Husted, a youthful fifty-seven-year-old, spoke intently about the prayer meetings that he leads in the governor’s office each month. “We bring appointed officials and elected…

When I look out of this upstairs window I notice my motherWalking out—actually reeling slightly by now in her old age withHer pure white hair beneath the twin colonnades of fading palm fronds,A homemade sail. She tacks slowly as a boat in a light wind, from one sideOf the gravel driveway to the other, & I could almost believeThe scene is Mediterranean, for there are still two unshattered, antiqueFrench teacups on this sill, but my mother has no rudder, no keel,And no idea of how far out at sea she is. She is just going outTo get the mail—which is at the end of a half-mile walk throughPalms, cypresses, & orange trees. In Italy, outside the little hill townsSuch as Montone, a row of cypresses always meant a cemeteryAnd the…

Rosarita, by Anita Desai (Scribner). In this hushed, exacting novel, a woman from Delhi resettles in San Miguel de Allende, where she is forced to reckon with her past by an older stranger who claims to have known her late mother. The story follows the transplant as she skeptically trails her mysterious new guide across the supposed sites of her mother’s youth in a foreign land. Throughout their journey, the past’s influence on the present grows ever more pervasive, and the woman’s failure to escape her upbringing emerges as a failure to truly know it. The more she discovers of her mother’s life, the more haunting its opacity becomes. Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd (Atlantic Monthly). The narrator of Boyd’s novel, a le Carré-esque spy thriller, is Gabriel Dax, an acclaimed…

The sci-fi series “Severance” styles itself as a tidy allegory for the misery of the modern office drone. Most of the employees on the “severed” floor of the secretive biotech firm Lumon have undergone a procedure that separates their work selves (the “innies”) from their at-home selves (the “outies”), so that the outies haven’t the slightest clue what the innies do all day, and vice versa. But the innies have no idea what they do all day, either; they spend their shifts grouping numbers into categories on a computer screen, to uncertain effect. (Could they be killing people? Maybe!) When the innies clock out, around five, their consciousness shuts down; their next memory is of the following morning, at the dawn of a new workday. The Apple TV+ show, created…

JANUARY 15 – 21, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. For nearly two decades, De La Soul (pictured) was one of hip-hop’s most important acts and among the most under-acknowledged. In the late eighties and nineties, the seminal Long Island group built a jazzy, experimental career on irreverent wit and outsider charm with a four-LP run that has rarely been matched. Though the group’s impact isn’t limited to those albums, they define its identity; years of label disputes made that early music inaccessible to generations of listeners. In 2023, De La’s right to its full catalogue was restored, but the rapper Trugoy, a founding member, tragically died shortly after. At Lincoln Center, the remaining members honor a shared legacy, making good on their storied history amid…

Early this week, the National Weather Service started sending out alerts in Los Angeles about a “life-threatening and destructive” windstorm set to begin on Tuesday afternoon. The threat of fires had been implicit—the conditions for them were good, as is often the case in the area. The Palisades Fire began as a brush fire on Tuesday morning; by the end of the day, it was rapidly approaching three thousand acres in size. Even if you were far from the flames, you couldn’t help but feel uneasy. The wind had been gusting violently all day. I kept plans to meet my dad for dinner. Driving over, I saw palm fronds sliding across the road, and lawn furniture tumbled about. We met at six-thirty at a German beer bar in Highland Park,…

On the night of the U.S. Presidential election, Yinon Magal, the host of a popular talk show on Israel’s Channel 14, burst onto the set wearing a “TRUMP 2024” baseball cap. “I’m a journalist first and foremost,” he told the studio audience. “So I won’t tell you who I’m supporting—Donald or Trump.” His fans gave him an obliging laugh; a father and son sitting beside me snickered loudly enough to be captured on camera. (Before the taping, a studio manager had advised the crowd to react generously, “or Yinon will kick you out.”) The Trump bit was just a preamble; the show’s real focus was a scandal involving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. An hour earlier, Netanyahu had called his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, into a private meeting and fired him.…

Every week at “Saturday Night Live” is just like every other week. The weeks are the same because they’re always fuelled by hard work, filled with triumphs and failures and backstage arguments, and built around a guest host—Jennifer Lopez, Lizzo, Elon Musk—who often has no idea what he or she is doing. Over the past fifty years, the job of Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator, has been to make the stars look good, and to corral the egos and talents on his staff in order to get the program on the air, live. Since the début of “S.N.L.,” in 1975, he has fine-tuned the process, paying attention to shifting cultural winds. What began as an avant-garde variety show has become mainstream. (Amy Poehler has characterized the institution that made her…

Thadeus had never offered to take Johnny Mac out for a meal before. This is new, Johnny Mac says, grinning. For twenty-five years, Johnny Mac worked as a tenant-rights lawyer. He is a fount of varied and surprising knowledge. Thadeus orders a burger, fries, and a Coke, just like Johnny Mac. Remember around 2015, 2016, when I was poet-in-residence at N.Y.U. Langone? Thadeus asks. The cancer ward. A section of the cancer ward. Johnny Mac smiles. Not firsthand, but I’ve heard from the others. This is Thad with the hundred and one stories about cancer! What others? Who’ve you been talking to? Ed? Johnny Mac says. Lidell? Ed is dead now—has been dead for three years. Lidell, who knows where he is. He disappeared from the meetings around 2018. Rumor…

Zora Neale Hurston was a philosemite. She believed that the Jews had been victims of stereotyping that started with Moses and that was promoted by the Bible and fed to children in Sunday school. Among other things, it produced the fiction of the Eternal Jew, a type unchanged since the time of the Pharaohs. In fact, Hurston thought, the Jews had evolved, just like everyone else. And they had come to believe, long before other people did, in liberty, individualism, and the rights that define liberal democracies. The Jews were Americans thousands of years before there was an America. The story of the Jews was extremely important to Hurston, as important as her mission, far better known, to preserve and to celebrate the style, speech, and folklore of the African…

On November 28, 1924, Raymond A. Dart, a professor at the University of Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, was getting ready to attend a friend’s wedding when a pair of South African Railways workers staggered up his driveway with two large crates. The crates contained fossils that had been found at a limestone quarry some two hundred miles to the southwest, in the town of Taung. Although the wedding was being held in his own home—and his wife begged him to leave the boxes alone—Dart tore off the stiff collar he was wearing and rushed to find some tools. When he levered off the lid of the second crate, he later recalled, “a thrill of excitement” shot through him. At the top of the pile was a rock that appeared to be…