Innholdsfortegnelse for March 17, 2025 i The New Yorker

Carrie Battan (“Lip Service,” p. 36) began contributing to the magazine in 2015 and became a staff writer in 2018. Zach Helfand (“Where’s Elvis?,” p. 12), who joined the magazine in 2017, became a staff writer in January. Beverly Gage (Books, p. 51), a history professor at Yale, received a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for her book “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” Yiyun Li (Fiction, p. 44) was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, for her story collection “Wednesday’s Child.” Her memoir, “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” is due out in May. Patrycja Humienik (Poem, p. 40) will publish her début poetry collection, “We Contain Landscapes,” later this month. Laura Lane (The Talk of the Town, p. 11) has contributed to The New Yorker…

We live in stressful, isolating times. And so it makes sense that a new crop of “wellness clubs” promising serenity, and instant community, would rise in N.Y.C. There’s Bathhouse, in Flatiron and Williamsburg, which specializes in Aufguss classes, or guided sauna sessions. (A day pass begins at $40.) There’s Akari, a members-only Japanese-inspired “neighborhood sauna” in Williamsburg, where it costs nearly $200 a month to mingle in dry-heat rooms. (It’s sold out; in late spring, a second location will open in Greenpoint.) Moss, a five-story private club that will open this year near Bryant Park, bills itself as a place to “gather in the shared pursuit of intelligent leisure,” where one can spend $600 a month (plus a $2,000 initiation fee) unwinding in thermal pools and hammams. Perhaps the buzziest…

People have been talking about Whoopi Goldberg’s shoe collection. Goldberg owns two hundred and eighty-eight pairs—including, but not limited to, heels, sneakers, pointy-toed flats, Birkenstocks, Converses, wedges, boots, platforms, Crocs, flip-flops, and loafers. Several sources say that, if you win Goldberg’s favor, she may give you a pair right off her feet. Past beneficiaries include a former “X-Factor” contestant, the comedian Whitney Cummings, and even a few audience members of “The View.” A visit seemed in order. “What do you want to know?” Goldberg said one recent afternoon, in her gravelly voice. She was in the lower-Manhattan headquarters of her company, Whoop, Inc., after a live taping of “The View,” where she has been a co-host since 2007. She had on a billowy leopard-print top worn open over denim overalls…

When, exactly, was America great? For as long as Donald Trump has touted the MAGA slogan, he has been cagey about the answer. But recent weeks have suggested a few possibilities. One is the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, when tariffs, crony capitalism, and hard-and-fast racial hierarchies were the stuff of American politics. Another is the postwar Red Scare, when the federal government was weaponized against the American left. Trump has long vowed to root out “radical left lunatics” and “Marxist equity” from the bowels of the state. Most members of his Administration now seem to share that commitment. The DOGE overlord Elon Musk proclaimed that U.S.A.I.D. is—or was?—“a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists” and deserved to be destroyed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has similarly promised to rid…

It may be a lazy critic cliché to write that an artist’s life was itself a work of art, but we are dealing with a man who let a wounded stork convalesce in his bed while he slept on the floor. As a teen-ager, he became a sailor and voyaged from the south of Russia to India and Egypt. Later, he made extra rubles boxing at the circus. He talked his way into Picasso’s studio by pretending to be a blind musician. Picasso kicked him out, but the same trick fooled Kaiser Wilhelm II into giving him a gold watch, which he promptly sold. His motto was “Life into art,” but only a fraction of each—just enough to fill a K.G.B. file—forms our view of Tatlin. We can imagine how…

The United States, for much of its history, was less an engine of scientific progress than a beneficiary of it. Pasteur, Koch, Lister, Mendel, Curie, Fleming—the giants who midwifed modern medicine were not Americans but Europeans. During the Second World War, the balance shifted. President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Scientific Research and Development and tapped Vannevar Bush, a former dean of M.I.T., to lead it. In the span of a few years, the agency spurred development of an antimalarial drug, a flu vaccine, techniques to produce penicillin at scale, and, less salubriously, the atomic bomb. Bush became a champion of state-sponsored research, helping to establish the National Science Foundation and to modernize the National Institutes of Health. As he wrote, “Without scientific progress, no amount of achievement in…

In all the time that the sitcom “Night Court” has been on the air—for nine seasons beginning in 1984, and now again, in an NBC reboot that’s in its third season—the show’s star John Larroquette never visited an actual night court. That changed on a recent Wednesday, when Larroquette was in town. He arrived on a street corner near City Hall just before 5 P.M. and eyed 60 Centre Street, the classical Roman-style courthouse with Corinthian columns and a sweeping staircase. “It isn’t that one,” Greg Gomez, a public defender who had agreed to show him around, said. “That’s the nice courthouse you have in your opening credits.” Gomez gestured across the street toward 100 Centre Street—the criminal courthouse, a cheerless Art Deco building the color of cinder blocks. Larroquette…

Recently, at the Joyce Theatre, I attended a war. The war was a dance, “Gigenis: The Generation of the Earth,” directed by the British dancer and choreographer Akram Khan, loosely inspired by the story of Queen Gandhari, from the ancient Hindu epic the Mahabharata, who miraculously produced a hundred sons only for them all to be killed in battle. “Gigenis” was danced by seven exponents of Indian classical traditions (including Khan), accompanied by seven musicians. Khan, whose family is from Bangladesh, was trained both in the Indian classical dance form Kathak and in contemporary Western techniques. As a child, he performed in Peter Brook’s legendary 1985 theatrical adaptation of the Mahabharata, and he has since made several dances on themes or stories from the epic. Working with his London-based company…

The old film studios had house styles: M-G-M’s was plush and sentimental, Warner Bros.’ stark and intense. A fledgling independent-film collective, Omnes Films, goes a step further, having not only a house style, of loosely structured and finely observed microdramas, but also a house theme: finality and the making of memories. These traits marked the first feature by the Omnes co-founder Tyler Taormina, “Ham on Rye,” about high-school classmates’ dispersal after graduation, and his third, “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” about an extended family’s last holiday in its matriarch’s house. The new Omnes feature, “Eephus,” is the first to be directed by Carson Lund, who was Taormina’s cinematographer on those films and now brings his own perspective to the Omnes style and theme. Lund’s subject is baseball, his premise is…

In January, 2000, early internet startups (Pets.com, Epidemic.com) made up about twenty per cent of Super Bowl ads. That year’s game was known as the Dot-Com Bowl. Then the dot-com bubble burst, sending the Nasdaq tumbling more than seventy per cent by October, 2002. Twenty years later, Super Bowl LVI was called the Crypto Bowl, and featured ads from Coinbase, Crypto.com, and FTX. Soon, FTX was bankrupt, and Bitcoin was sputtering. This year, the Super Bowl was all about artificial intelligence, as Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Salesforce ran ads showing off their A.I. tools. Is history repeating itself? “It is such a bad sign,” Ed Zitron, an A.I. skeptic and the host of the tech podcast “Better Offine,” said the other day. Zitron, who has blue eyes and a British…

Frankie Carattini, who mans the velvet rope at the new Greenwich Village club People’s, has been a night-club doorman since 2018. He left his previous gig, at the piano bar the Nines, because he thought he had more to offer than saying yes or no. His duties at People’s are fancier. “I guess I am creative director, director of guest services, chief vibe officer,” he said. Before the new place opened, he took its owners, Emmet McDermott and Margot Hauer-King, on a research tour of the city’s hot spots, scoping out the door action. Their first rendezvous was Zero Bond. McDermott, a film producer, said that he and Hauer-King (the daughter of the restaurateur who created London’s Wolseley group) had recruited Carattini because he had “this kind of X factor.”…

Throughout the day Oh, dear God,May I not have thrown away theTop to the sour cream. Dear Lord,Look at all those ants. Oh, Jesus,Where did all that water in theBasement come from? Blessed Mary, mother of God,What happened to my hat?It was my favorite hat.Mary who is without sin,Grant by your mercy that somedayI will be able to just call it upLike I do my phone. At the workplace Dear God Almighty,Why hasn’t that idiot Liam been fired? Oh, Christ,I was just about to sign outFor the day,And now somebody sends me this. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,Is this guy boring. Almighty God,Who sees and knows all things,And for whom all things are possible,May this guy keel over of a heart attackOr something. Sweet Jesus,Did that meeting have a point? At…

The original idea was an assignation. On a dreary Wednesday in September, 1960, John Updike, “falling in love, away from marriage,” took a taxi to see his paramour. But, he later wrote, she didn’t answer his knock, and so he went to a ballgame at Fenway Park for his last chance to see the Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams, who was about to retire. For a few dollars, he got a seat behind third base. He spent the following five days writing about what happened next: Williams, after enduring a sorry little ceremony to say goodbye, came to bat for the last time, in the bottom of the eighth inning, and hit a home run—low, linear, perfect. “It was in the books while it was still in the sky,” Updike…

ACROSS 1 Bratty talk 5 Thrown out, briefly 9 Very close pals, for short 13 Apple manufacturer? 14 Bills in Barcelona and Bologna 16 It can be knitted or mopped 17 ___ Lane (Melbourne street named for a rock band) 18 Daughter of Padmé Amidala 20 Poem that inspired an N.F.L. team name 22 One of only three in Delaware 23 More state-of-the-art 24 Creatures that cause a big stink? 25 They might be designed specifically for twins 28 Doctoral students’ hurdles 29 Mrs. ___ (Angela Lansbury’s “Beauty and the Beast” role) 30 Message when stepping away from the keyboard 33 One of the Gilmore girls 34 Protagonist of the Metroid video-game series 35 Botanical ingredient in some shampoos 36 Whichever 37 ___ curl 38 Too good for 39 Reply…