Innholdsfortegnelse for March 31, 2025 i The New Yorker

It wouldn’t be right to say that the steak house is making a comeback, since it never really went away, but there’s something in the water, and in the air, and in the newspapers, and in the pits of everyone’s stomachs. It feels, if not promising, by any means, at least narratively cohesive: the rise of trad wives and “quiet luxury,” the demise of vaccines, the return of Donald Trump and his taste for, among other dubious things, well-done meat. Of the various new steak houses opening in New York right now, the most exciting, by a long shot, is La Tête d’Or by Daniel, the latest restaurant from the indefatigable chef and restaurateur Daniel Boulud. As a steak house, it is inherently and intensely American, though dressed up in…

The invitation read, “Down to do some jujitsu with a jazz-poet and redefine your concept of dignity?” Sure is a lot going on there, pal, but, O.K., why not? The day arrived, and the recipient found himself at a Brazilian-jujitsu gym near Wall Street, donning, for the first time in his life, the loose-fitting martial-arts uniform known as a gi. The word “TRIAL” was written on the gi’s belt, denoting the novice’s provisional status. To the other fighters, he was the Trial Guy. The jazz poet, already on the mat, practicing chokes from the mounted position, was Alabaster DePlume, a forty-four-year-old recording artist from Manchester, England. He plays saxophone (jazz) and speak-sings his lyrics (poet) to often-improvised accompaniment. The approach and even the sound can bring to mind Van Morrison’s…

“There is no good way to say this”—when the police arrive, they inevitably preface the bad news with that sentence, as though their presence is not ominous enough. The first time I heard the line, I already knew what was about to be conveyed. Nevertheless, I paid attention to how the news was delivered: the detective insisted that I take a seat first. I sat down at the dinner table, and he moved another chair to an appropriate distance and sat down himself. No doubt he was following protocol, and yet the sentence—“there is no good way to say this”—struck me as both accurate and effective. It must be a sentence that, though nearly a cliché, is not often used in daily conversation. The second time, having guessed the news…

ACROSS 1 Seem to indicate5 Like watching ___ dry10 Grad14 Folder on a desktop, e.g.15 Liable to make mistakes17 Curve in a river18 Molecules that combine to form proteins19 Horizontal line on a map: Abbr.20 HBO crime drama that topped Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time” list21 Decided to compete in23 Concealed24 Place atop25 Fib that spares someone’s feelings30 “Hamlet” or “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”31 Like the inside of a toasted marshmallow32 Gives approval for33 Online addresses, in brief34 Cheers (for)35 Word aptly found within “devilish”36 Toucan ___ (Froot Loops mascot)37 Baubles on some bracelets38 Rogers of classic children’s television39 Estimates by sight alone41 All lathered up42 Rage43 “Oh, are we not allowed to joke about that yet?”45 Category for the works of Piet Mondrian, Mark…

The first person to head the Environmental Protection Agency, which was created by President Richard Nixon, in late 1970, was an up-and-coming Republican politician named William Ruckelshaus. Ruckelshaus, known to his friends as Ruck, came from Indiana, where, during a single term in the state’s House of Representatives, he had managed to get elected majority leader. On being chosen to lead the E.P.A., he moved quickly to establish the new agency’s credibility. Just a week into his tenure, he warned the cities of Cleveland, Detroit, and Atlanta that they could be sued for polluting their own waterways, and over the next few months he took action against several major corporations, including U.S. Steel. In an interview with Time a year into the job, Ruckelshaus described his strategy as focussing on…

Carol Leifer, the prolific sixty-eight-year-old comedian and television writer (“S.N.L.,” “Seinfeld,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Hacks,” etc.), has many skills. One, perhaps unsurprisingly, is delivering funny speeches, a gift for which she’s now giving back, with a book titled “How to Write a Funny Speech … for a Wedding, Bar Mitzvah, Graduation & Every Other Event You Didn’t Want to Go to in the First Place,” co-written by Rick Mitchell. Another talent: dancing, which might come as a surprise to those who’ve heard the rumors that the rhythm-challenged “Seinfeld” character Elaine is based on Leifer, who dated Jerry Seinfeld in the late seventies. The other day, Leifer—“schlubbed out,” as she put it, in a white hoodie and glasses—sat in her office in front of a cue card for a Bob Hope…

Reliable news coverage has never been more important than it is now. Journalists must remain vigilant and rigorous in the face of a second Trump Administration. To help them do so, we are releasing an updated version of Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style.” Please refer to the following examples when writing and reporting, for as long as that’s still allowed. Use the serial comma. In a series of three or more terms, add a comma after each term except the last. For instance: He held office from 2017 to 2021, from 2025 to 2029, and then as a reanimated, disembodied head from 2029 to 2061. Put statements in positive form. Use the word “not” as a means of denial or in antithesis, never as a means of evasion. This…

Last season, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins had a Broadway hit at Second Stage’s Hayes Theatre with his Tony Award-winning “Appropriate,” a knock-down, drag-out comedy in which a quarrelsome white Arkansas family reunites for one last night on their decaying plantation estate. The set—a dimly lit, dilapidated mansion—represented both the family’s material connection to its slave-owning past and an American House of Usher, a place of palpable rot, subsiding slowly into the humid landscape. Now Jacobs-Jenkins is back at the Hayes with “Purpose,” another thrilling battle royale in which, once again, a fractious family clashes over the course of a long night in a stately home. This interior, though, designed by Todd Rosenthal for the director Phylicia Rashad, is warm and welcoming and bright, an orange-walled great room backed by a…

In May of 2023, about two dozen small paintings were discovered in a box in the attic of a two-hundred-year-old clapboard mansion in Milledgeville, Georgia, where the writer Flannery O’Connor lived between the ages of eight and twenty-one. They were her work. The house’s most recent occupant, Louise Florencourt—lawyer, pack rat, and protector of her cousin Flannery’s legacy—had died the previous summer, at ninety-seven. Relatives, academics, and acolytes duly sifted through the decades of family debris. The other day, Bruce Gentry and Sarah Gordon, the current and the former editors of the Flannery O’Connor Review, and retired professors of English at Georgia College & State University, in Milledgeville, poked around the house with a visitor. The college put the works on display this month. On the way over, the two…

You’d think that William H. McRaven, the former commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, would be most famous for directing Operation Neptune Spear, the 2011 raid that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden. But he sees it differently. McRaven, a sixty-nine-year-old retired four-star admiral, said the other day, “I’m best known for telling people to make their bed.” McRaven was at the New York Aquarium in Coney Island to talk about his second children’s book, a sequel to his 2021 title, “Make Your Bed with Skipper the Seal.” That volume was a spinoff of a commencement address he gave in 2014, at the University of Texas, sharing wisdom gained during basic training to become a Navy SEAL: “If you want to change the world, start off by…

When my daughter was ten and a half months old, she qualified as “wasted,” which UNICEF describes as “the most immediate, visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition.” My wife and I had been trying hard to keep her weight up, and the classification felt like a pronouncement of failure. Her birth weight had been on the lower end of the scale but nothing alarming: six pounds, two ounces. She appeared as a dot on a chart in which colored curves traced optimal growth; fifteenth percentile, we were told. She took well to breast-feeding and, within a month, had jumped to the twentieth percentile, then to the twenty-sixth. We proudly anticipated that her numbers would steadily climb. Then she fell behind again. At four months, she was in the twelfth percentile.…

When Pauline Kael joined The New Yorker’s staff as a movie critic, in January, 1968, the world of cinema was undergoing drastic change. The previous year, much of the film establishment had reacted with bewilderment—and even condemnation—to “Bonnie and Clyde,” which mirrored sixties politics with its story of heedless youth caught in America’s web of violence. In Kael’s famous New Yorker review (which she’d written as a freelancer), she had hailed it as a sign of Hollywood’s rejuvenation. But, three years into the job, she felt that the industry was backsliding. In January, 1971, after a week in which she deemed no new releases worth reviewing, she channelled her discontent into a startling article, “Notes on Heart and Mind,” which, true to its title, is a batch of journal-style riffs…

How might a mid-century New York City Mob boss spend his nights? Frank Costello, the acting head of the Luciano crime family, prefers to stay in, with his wife and their two adorable dogs. No guns and no molls, except the ones that pop up on TV, in a trailer for the 1949 gangster classic “White Heat,” starring a viciously leering James Cagney. (“It’s your kind of Cagney… in his kind of story.”) Vito Genovese, Frank’s sometime friend and longtime rival, is having a more eventful evening, overseeing the murder of his wife’s ex-husband. The violence is compounded by a redundant frenzy of crosscutting, double-underlining the difference between Frank, a man of domestic leisure, and Vito, a jealous and vengeful killer. The contrast is already night and day—or, rather, heads…