Innholdsfortegnelse for April 28, 2025 i The New Yorker

On January 29th, two weeks after Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, I crossed into Gaza as part of a twelveperson medical mission. After traversing southern Israel in a U.N. convoy, we followed an Israeli military escort through a maze of concrete barriers. Then we got out of our vehicles and lugged suitcases full of essentials—gauze, antibiotics, catheters, trauma shears—through a metal blast door. We passed a no man’s land of razor wire where, improbably, dandelions grew. Finally, we climbed into a van with a shattered windshield and drove to Khan Younis, a city of several hundred thousand in southern Gaza. Our driver swerved to avoid craters; almost every structure we passed was damaged. At one intersection, a minaret stood over a ruined mosque. Still, the city was alive.…

Representative Andy Ogles, a Republican from Tennessee, recently started making videos from his office on Capitol Hill. Ogles, a Freedom Caucus member in his second term, often films himself in front of a reproduction of “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” the painting by Emanuel Leutze. “What you have here is a moment in time that comes along once in a century,” he says in a clip called “The Case for Trump 2028,” in which he proposes that the President run for a third term. In another video, he walks through his office, with a chyron introducing him as “Judge Impeacher/Congressman.” Ogles recently filed articles of impeachment against several judges who have blocked executive orders issued by Trump. “Political hacks and their decisions belong in my SHREDDER,” he writes in a post…

It’s 2003, and Cat Power exists in rarefied air. The word “chanteuse” is bandied about, an exotic label for an American singer-songwriter on an indie label. And, yes, Cat Power—a.k.a. Chan Marshall—is beguiling. But the Francophone descriptor fails to conjure the dust her voice kicks up, the grit and moan that hang in the air after each song. As Hilton Als noted in a review that August, a Cat Power show can be shambolic, with Marshall flipping through channels that only she is privy to, occasionally landing on a song. For the listener, the journey is both thrilling and desultory, like hanging out sober while your friend trips on mushrooms. Richard Avedon’s accompanying portrait discards any notion of Cat Power’s caprice; there’s no bewilderment or confusion on display, no underlying…

Out of guilt or amnesia, we tend to treat wars, in retrospect, as natural disasters: terrible but somehow inevitable, beyond anyone’s control. Shaking your fist at the fools who started the First World War and condemned millions to a meaningless death seems jejune; historians teach us to say that the generals did their best under impossible conditions. Mournful fatalism is the requisite emotion, even when mad fury would be more apt. Efforts at de-escalation are cast as weakness or cowardice, while those who lead nations into catastrophe are praised for their “strength of character,” or for stoically accepting what was supposedly unavoidable. We rarely honor those who turn back at the brink. John F. Kennedy’s compromise during the Cuban missile crisis is an exception, though only because prudence and caution—our…

In the past seventy-five years in America, the nutritional bar has gone from niche to mainstream. In the fifties, Bob Hoffman, of York, Pennsylvania, known as “the father of weightlifting,” and an early manufacturer of barbells, hawked a product called Hi-Proteen Honey Fudge. Made from soybean flour and peanut butter, it was touted as offering “strength and endurance,” without “commercial” sugar—“not candy, just a good health, energy and body building food.” In 1969, Pillsbury attempted to capitalize on Americans’ excitement about the moon landing by releasing Space Food Sticks, a grocery-store adaptation of a product developed for astronauts: compact tubes made with corn syrup, vegetable oil, and sodium caseinate, a derivative of cow’s milk, meant to be consumed through a helmet port. By the turn of the century, the form…

FORMULA FOR SUCCESS Dhruv Khullar writes astutely about how the Trump Administration has upended bipartisan support of scientific research (Comment, March 17th). The robust scientific and technological infrastructure of the U.S. is one of the reasons we have the strongest economy in the world. The federal government produces intellectual property that, in the long run, generates extraordinary returns for American businesses and a huge number of jobs for Americans. Decades ago, the Department of Defense funded university researchers who were figuring out ways to have computers “talk” to one another. Their projects led to the development of the internet, laying the foundation for today’s trillion-dollar digital economy. The Human Genome Project, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and GenBank, which was developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory,…

Dear members of our university community: Over the past weeks and months, our institution has been under unprecedented attack. Many on our campus and beyond are fearful, and are looking to us for leadership. I would like to take this opportunity to reassure each and every community member of my deep and unwavering commitment to the safety of our endowment. To students, faculty, and staff who may be wondering, Will our endowment be called names?, the answer is no. Will our endowment be shouted at, as it sits quietly in various financial institutions? Of course not. Will our endowment face law-enforcement raids as it goes about its business, accruing further wealth? Let me be clear: No. As your president, I will physically throw myself between federal law enforcement and the…

Minnesota, I hardly know you anymore.Who knows when grief ends—if ever. The two who preoccupied mehave turned and gone through the door.The land grand, the land wide, the land gold.I knew them here. They were strongand the man adored the woman.They waved to me from a red barnwith hay inside, and there was an auburn field,yes, I am sure of that, then, perhaps,a bank of blue-brown trees. And didn’t I seea man on his knees? Didn’t I see that?Such is the powder-blue business of heaven.Beautiful woman, ample as the country,you stood and sighed at a simple sink.Whatever her wish, he attempted to fulfill it.A golden woman with a golden look.O God, the wheat and the oak and the loon!The substantial suburbs, then the land,open and bright and empty.There was much…

When I run into an ex on the wayto the D.M.V., it’s fall,or maybe spring, I can’t say, but it’s one of those days you goback to school, or skip school in some smallrevolt. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and oh if I’m telling the whole story, you’llhave to know he looks a hell of a lotbetter than when we dated, so I’m all having a moment, questioning my pastdecisions, the spiral of my life,on Eighth Avenue between Fourth and Fifth Street, and the fact that maybe part of whyI dumped him had to do with the red Chevyfestooned with plastic animal figurines— the dash, the hood, and the shelf behind the back seatswhere in a taxi you’d find a box of Kleenex—you’d see it and think Who drives that…

When the writer Amanda Hess was twenty-nine weeks pregnant with her first child, her doctor, looking at an ultrasound, “saw something he did not like.” He suspected a rare genetic condition; Hess underwent an amniocentesis and then an MRI. She sought out a second opinion—which augured catastrophe and, it turned out, was completely wrong—and a third, steadying one. Her son was eventually given a diagnosis of Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, which puts babies at higher risk for hypoglycemia and certain cancers and makes their little bodies grow fast; often, their tongues become too large for their mouths, requiring corrective surgery. Extensive testing showed no genetic or environmental cause for her son’s condition, yet Hess felt somehow culpable. “I worried over what I had done to trigger it, over the dark secret of…

Long before Richard II ran afoul of mutinous nobles, and almost two centuries before Shakespeare wrote Richard’s portrait in majestic verse, the King took refuge in the Tower. Near the beginning of his reign, when he was only fourteen years old, he retreated there during the Peasants’ Revolt, as enraged farmers beheaded his advisers down below. Now the tragedy “Richard II,” directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring the “Wicked” heartthrob Jonathan Bailey, is at London’s Bridge Theatre, right across the Thames from young Richard’s bolt-hole. If his boy self had stood at one of the Tower’s high windows long enough—say, for around six hundred and fifty years—he would have looked out at another teeming mob, lining up, still eager to see him die. Hytner’s version of Plantagenet England seems less…

APRIL 23 – 29, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. In the nineteen-seventies, U.C.L.A. attracted a critical mass of young Black filmmakers whose independent films, with their bold and intimate attention to Black lives and history, earned them the collective nickname the L.A. Rebellion. Starting April 25, Film at Lincoln Center offers a selection of the movement’s major works, such as Haile Gerima’s “Bush Mama” and Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust,” along with recent successors. One of the most acclaimed movies to emerge from the group, Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” (pictured), plays April 18-24 at Film Forum, in a new restoration. It’s a sharply observed, lyrically romantic drama of a young paterfamilias in Watts whose harsh job in a slaughterhouse leaves him embittered and…

It is sometimes said that democracy wants education. Also: strong foundations make for good buildings. And: the more larnin’, the more votin’. So, the other night, when three New Yorkers showed up at the Old Stone House, a re-created 1699 farmhouse turned community center in Brooklyn, to take part in a social art project in which they would each write out a copy of the Constitution—or as much of the Constitution as they could in two hours—nothing less than the fate of the nation seemed to be at stake. One participant, upon sitting at one of the four tables in the house’s great room and eying the Uniball pen and xeroxed Constitution before her, cleared her throat with a vehemence that seemed to augur spitting. Morgan O’Hara, an eighty-four-year-old conceptual…

Mexico’s most important venue for political theatre is the mañanera—the press conference that takes place each weekday morning in the Treasury Room, a vast Italianate hall in the Presidential palace. It took its current form in 2018, under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—a pugnacious, swaggering populist known throughout Mexico as AMLO. López Obrador framed his daily encounters with the media as an exercise in openness. Over time, they became a stage from which he could lambaste his enemies, advance his initiatives, and curate his public image. AMLO’s mañaneras began at 7 A.M. and often stretched on for hours, with guest speakers, musical interludes, and endless Presidential monologues. Because he was perennially at war with the press, they were often his primary mode of communicating with the Mexican people. López Obrador’s…

I have never been honest with myself. It’s an attribute that has always disturbed me. I can’t accept even the most basic truths. What I am good at is coming up with excuses; it’s easy for me to invent excuses. And Giuseppe Trevisani, wonderful guy, is my favorite excuse of all. Many years ago, Trevisani, a translator, wrote an ending to a short story that, when I read it at the age of sixteen, led me to believe that the evil I felt inside me might actually be the mark of an exceptional character. I’m saying this now, today, to set things straight, but I honestly know nothing about Trevisani: if he’s dead or alive; if he was born in Treviso, as his last name would suggest, or in some…

Crumb, by Dan Nadel (Scribner). In this diligently researched biography, the graphic novel finds its forebear in the cartoonist Robert Crumb. The book chronicles Crumb’s aberrant life and career, from his early success as the “cartoon voice of the underground” in the nineteen-sixties, when his visual style became emblematic of the counterculture, through his illustrations of the Book of Genesis, in the early two-thousands. Nadel balances admiration for Crumb’s craft with critical evaluations of the artist’s racist caricatures and overt misogyny. What emerges is a complicated and occasionally grotesque portrait of an artist whose “id was out on the page,” and who, Nadel argues, laid the groundwork for a range of successful graphic masterpieces, including Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home.” When the City Stopped, by Robert W.…