Innholdsfortegnelse for April 14, 2025 i The New Yorker

Jay Graber, the C.E.O. of the upstart social-media platform Bluesky, arrived in San Francisco the Sunday after Donald Trump’s reëlection and holed up in a hotel room. She’d spent the previous days road-tripping down the West Coast from her home, in Seattle, stopping at beaches and redwood groves along the way, and in San Francisco she’d hoped to remain half in vacation mode. But now Bluesky was seeing a surge in new users, and it was looking as if she’d need all hands on deck. “There was momentum,” Graber recalled recently, adding, “It was just picking up day by day.” Since launching, in early 2023, Bluesky had positioned itself as a refuge from X, the site formerly known as Twitter. For nearly two decades, Twitter had been considered the internet’s…

The Brazilian Supreme Court, a wide, low, glass-faced building with swooping colonnades, sits near the national legislature and the Presidential palace, on a vast paved expanse known as the Three Powers Plaza. It is as public a place as you can find in Brasília. Still, few people seemed to notice when, on November 13th, a middle-aged man dressed like the Joker parked near the court, walked a few paces away, and set off an improvised explosive device inside his car, igniting a fireball that rose above the pavement. He made his way to the front of the court, where a sculpture of blindfolded Justice sits holding a sword across her lap. The man reached into a backpack, removed a cloth, and threw it at the statue, apparently intending to set…

Let the house burn again;Already I outlive the New World,The last dog dead, one cowRemnant in the gleaning wind Of leaf-fall and each child leftFor elsewhere. To stayPast those I buried; I do not knowWhat more to spend— The government of manBy man brings no one home.No longer do I wantTo be upon this hill, This place of so much windWhere I keep writingPast the end. I have brokenEach sentence, halved Then half again, each wordSimpled down like old oxenKept as if to coverThe whole field, turn By turn. Now the wordsCome less, the clouds so fastAnd not what I thoughtI thought. For what Have I survived:To save each house,A door sprung open, plain,Willing each hinge To work, verseBy verse to outlast,Outlove whatever it isYou bring forth.…

The Crossing, by Richard Parker (Mariner). “American history did not begin in the Northeast. It began in the Southwest,” Parker asserts, in this sweeping history of El Paso, his home town. The account, which starts in the sixteenth century, is one of both endless conflict and cross-cultural accommodation. “El Paso is where Native, Spanish, European, African, Jewish, and Arab cultures fought, bled, died,” he writes, but it’s also where they forged a “vibrantly diverse” society that became a model for the country. Although Parker was moved to write the book after a white nationalist murdered twenty-three people at an El Paso Walmart, in 2019, he strikes a hopeful note: “This isn’t just where America began. If we’re lucky, it can show America how to begin again.” Powers of Reading, by Peter…

Patrick Schneeweis was never the voice of a generation, but perhaps he was the voice of a tendency. To a small but fervent and far-flung community of listeners, he was known as Pat the Bunny, an anarchist punk troubadour from Vermont whose desperate—and sometimes bleakly funny—folk songs were about young people who wanted to smash the system, although they often settled for getting smashed themselves. In one of them, “Fuck Cops,” he yawped about how everything was going to hell: When I dream of the future, I see an arm full of holes Empty pockets, and a bleeding noseHacking up a lung filled with blood and tarOn a sidewalk next to my spangeing jar Starting in the early two-thousands, Schneeweis began to build an audience. His songs circulated on burned…

MENOPAUSE STRUGGLES I was surprised by the narrow focus of Rebecca Mead’s article about menopause (“If You Can’t Stand the Heat,” March 10th). In reviewing several recent books and mentioning others, Mead writes about the symptoms of menopause, and then goes on to concentrate almost exclusively on hormone-replacement therapy for women in their fifties and sixties. Perhaps that is indicative of the limited cultural perception of menopause. Last year, at the not so “crone” age of twenty-seven, I entered surgical menopause. Like many women, I am unable to supplement estrogen. Mead mentions only glancingly the women who might be ineligible for H.R.T.—and doesn’t mention at all those who are into menopause in their twenties, thirties, and early forties. She writes about the cancer risks of H.R.T. without mentioning the women…

One Sunday morning in May, 2023, I arrived at a literary agent’s Manhattan apartment, bearing a lemon tart, to attend a brunch in honor of the author Sayaka Murata. I rang the doorbell. There was a long pause before anyone answered, and a longer pause before I was buzzed in. When I reached the top of the stairs, the agent, Nicole Aragi, with whom I was previously unacquainted, came to the door wearing orange plush tiger slippers. “Elif, the brunch was yesterday,” she said. “But come in and have a cup of tea.” Aragi and her partner, the editor John Freeman, who has published Murata in both Granta and Freeman’s, ended up inviting me to join them on an afternoon outing they had planned with Murata to the Museum of…

Extinction is a part of nature. Of the five billion species that have existed on Earth, 99.9 per cent have vanished. The Late Devonian extinction, nearly four hundred million years ago, annihilated the jawless fish. The Triassic-Jurassic extinction, two hundred million years ago, finished off the crocodile-like phytosaur. Sixty-six million years ago, the end-Cretaceous extinction eliminated the Tyrannosaurus rex and the velociraptor; rapid climate change from an asteroid impact was the likely cause. The Neanderthals disappeared some forty thousand years ago. One day—whether from climate change, another asteroid, nuclear war, or something we can’t yet imagine—humans will probably be wiped out, too. The difference with humans is that we’ve been taking a huge number of species down with us. Starting about three hundred thousand years ago, we learned to hunt…

“I don’t have time,” I toldmyself, “to kill myself: I haveto write a paper on Rimbaud.” Which evenat the time I thought funny.Those were the days I could hardly tellthe difference between hospital and classroomand walking the dog at 1 a.m.seemed the only way to preserve an illusionof balance. Which it did.Well, that was a long time ago.Such different tempi now:as Joel prods the slow,private smolder in the pile of damp brush, releasingwisps of blue smoke to waver in air,the mountain stream pelts over stones, wrinkling silver, frothing lace,ripping laughter out of its own current whilesilently moss pries the terrace flagstones apartand cloud shadows race across the meadow, chasedby slashes of sunlight. In the daffodil spearsthrusting up through dead leaves,each stalk swells with the pulse of a blossom-to-be.…

APRIL 9 – 15, 2025 From the start, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s history has been a cycle of struggle and triumph. Founded by the dancer Arthur Mitchell, in 1969, the company thrived, until it didn’t, and it shut down in 2004; in 2012, Virginia Johnson led it back to stability. Now, under the artistic direction of the former D.T.H. dancer Robert Garland, the company’s season includes a 1996 work by William Forsythe, “The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude,” a ballet that exalts everything that the art form, and the dancers, can achieve: lightning speed, knife-edge precision, expansive physical range, rigorous geometries. Also on the program are Balanchine’s “Donizetti Variations”—a work that combines brilliance and an infectious bubbliness—and a new work from Garland, “The Cookout.” ABOUT TOWN HIP-HOP | As a teen-ager,…

It is “the Policy of the United States to end the use of paper straws.”… [Justice] Department components shall take appropriate action to identify and eliminate any portion of policy or guidance documents designed to disfavor plastic straws. —Memo from the Office of the Attorney General of the United States, March 11, 2025. It is the policy of the United States to end the use of Dijon mustard. Mustard is yellow and made in America and not in France. France is a stupid place. The Justice Department and components will identify and eliminate any mustard that isn’t yellow French’s Mustard, although henceforth the name “French’s” will be eliminated in favor of the word “Normal.” This policy enforces not only the use of yellow mustard but also the elimination of such…

At ten o’clock on a Wednesday night, he gets a call from his aunt’s number. It’s late to get a call from his aunt, but his mother is often with his aunt, and it’s not unusual for her to call at that hour. But it’s his aunt on the line, her voice pained, then disintegrating. And that’s it; he feels a plummet and a deletion commensurate with the space his mother occupied in his life. Nothing will fill it. He knows this from his father’s death. He’ll go around with another amorphous blank, until he himself becomes one in the consciousnesses of his children. There are immediate tangible demands that require a clarity of mind that eludes him. Normally, he prides himself on precisely this kind of ability. His work,…

In Praise of Floods” (Yale), a study of rivers by the late political scientist James C. Scott, arrives after a year of catastrophic floods. Last spring, heavy rainfall lifted parts of the San Jacinto and Trinity Rivers, in East Texas, at least a dozen feet above the flood stage, forcing thousands to evacuate their homes. In September, during Hurricane Helene, the French Broad River surged into commercial corridors in Asheville, North Carolina, wiping out restaurants, breweries, stores, and dwellings. In October, in Spain, the Magro, Júcar, and Turia Rivers overflowed their banks in the region around the city of Valencia, leading to the deaths of two hundred and thirty-two people. Scott wants us to look past disasters such as these. Focussing on the human costs of flooding, he argues, is…

The Frick Collection, on East Seventieth Street, is, by so many miles, the finest small city museum—less self-consciously eccentric than London’s Sir John Soane museum, broader in scope and more distinguished than Paris’s Jacquemart-André—that its return after a few years away for renovation is a rare blessing in a time short on them. The collection never had any set program, beyond housing Old Master pictures bought by the industrialist Henry Clay Frick with the nudging of the era’s shrewdest tag team: the art historian Bernard Berenson and the dealer Joseph Duveen. But, walking through the place ahead of its official opening, on April 17th, one is reminded—both by one’s eyes and by the new director, Axel Rüger—that the collection does bend toward a point. With scarcely any nudes or still-lifes,…