Innholdsfortegnelse for May 26, 2025 i The New Yorker

Lean harder on the accelerator,Just a little further, just a littleFaster, through the hellgate to the highway,With all its molten rubber and melting Asphalt sinking sharp and gumming the lungs.Yesterday bleeds in the rearview mirrorAs tomorrow’s fires fan out everywhere,Orange-yellow echinacea rot Purpling in the fat bulb where the void spreads,Like a film fuming at its reel, the screenSurviving as mere abstract brightness, oneNot intended for eyes, a light for light, Light’s light, see now how beautiful it is,This shrinking ring of gold, the story gone,Leaving a knowledge that fades uniquelyBack into the black sulk of burning things…

As soon as she touched down in Scotland, she believed in fairies. No, as soon as the rock and velvet of Inverness rushed up to her where she was falling, a long way through the hagstone hole of a cloud, and she plunged down into the center of the cloud and stayed there. You used to set a child out for them, she thought, and was caught in the arms and awoke on the green hillside. “Sco’land,” she heard her mother say, in a voice weak from lack of iced tea—they were barely alive after five hours on the runway in Chicago and another ten in the air. “It’s not the first real day,” her husband kept reminding them. After a short stay in Inverness that night, they would go…

Why do we read the memoirs of aging entertainment tycoons, long after the entertainments that made the tycoon a tycoon have largely been shelved and forgotten? The easy answer is that they offer brushes with celebrities. Yet in books like Barry Diller’s new memoir, “Who Knew” (Simon & Schuster), the actors are treated in a by-the-way manner, like addled accessories to the tycoon’s ambition, or, at best, like coddled children who squabble and sleep in the back seat while the tycoon, dad-like, drives and navigates. What such books really offer is a glimpse into the micro-mechanics of consumer capitalism, in forms that are still eccentric enough to be entertaining. At the supermarket, seeing that Lindt has introduced a lime-flavored chocolate bar, we might assume that it’s a playful experiment in…

NUCLEAR ENERGY NOW As a retired environmental scientist, I recognize the need to consider all forms of electricity generation, including the newly resurgent nuclear, the subject of Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent piece (Books, April 14th). I appreciated Kolbert’s discussion of the potential dangers nuclear plants might pose as a result of human oversight or error, but I would add that not all of their risks arise from the facilities themselves. We should also consider those associated with the mining of the uranium that powers them. The Four Corners area of the Southwest is pockmarked with abandoned uranium mines—according to the E.P.A., there are over five hundred on Navajo lands alone—which have caused many devastating health issues. The most egregious example of damage done by such a mine is that of the…

In 2007, Jayson Dobney, an Iowan with a master’s degree in the history of musical instruments, from the University of South Dakota, moved to New York to be a curator in the department of musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For decades, there had been whispers in guitar circles of a vast trove of twentieth-century guitars, in private hands, somewhere in the tri-state area—an El Dorado of coveted Strats and Les Pauls and Martins of impeccable provenance. Even in Vermillion, South Dakota, Dobney had heard the rumors. Coming east, he wanted to learn more, especially because the Met’s instruments department, for all its heirlooms (the world’s oldest piano, three Stradivarius violins, a Mayan double whistle), possessed almost nothing from the twentieth century. In 2011, Dobney put together an…

Like most civilians in Sudan, Wanis and his wife, Intisar, were unprepared when war broke out in Khartoum. The first day of fighting, April 15, 2023, was a Saturday. They’d planned to visit a cousin of Wanis’s who was undergoing treatment for diabetes at a hospital in Bahri, a neighborhood on the eastern side of the sprawling capital. Intisar and Wanis lived in Ombada, a western suburb; to visit the cousin, they’d have to cross the Nile, which bisects the city. While preparing to leave, they learned that there had been clashes at the airport between Sudan’s Army and a paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces. Wanis worked as a courier at the airport, and wondered if the fighting would put his job in jeopardy. The R.S.F. soldiers, who followed…

Each morning, stand before a steamy mirrortalking to your reflection. Your book of poemsis being printed there. Your breath refractsinto lines of poetry before it doubles backsplitting into multiple echoes & directions. The most important & unimportant poetrytranspires when water & mirror separate youinto layers. Where some of it is steamin the morning, some of it is clear as glass,the future arriving. Thus, the poems may also reflect the perspective of glassyou will pass throughout the day, as ifa twin haunted your peripheral vision.You sit smoking when the beloved driftstoward the shower. The window is open, a path always there. Listening feels real& surreal when you look at it like a color no one has named. Outside, the machinesbreak down an old building to builda newer building; sunlight climbs between…

Valley of Forgetting, by Jennie Erin Smith (Riverhead). This stunning immersion into decades of Alzheimer’s research in Colombia follows a keen doctor, Francisco Lopera, as he and a team look at an extended family genetically predisposed to contracting the disease young, in their mid-thirties and forties. As Smith closely tracks both the scientists and their subjects, she captures the courage of those who dedicate their own suffering to science in pursuit of a precarious hope. In her handling, flat questions about the ethics of medical research are rendered in rich dimension—including, for example, whether to reveal results to study participants who were found to have the genetic mutation that may cause early-onset Alzheimer’s. The Lost Orchid, by Sarah Bilston (Harvard). The main character of this wide-ranging history is Cattleya labiata,…

The Biblical figure of Salome, Princess of Judea, who dances before Herod Antipas and demands the head of John the Baptist as a reward, infiltrated late-nineteenth-century culture as an agent of extreme decadence—“the goddess of immortal Hysteria,” as the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans called her. In Oscar Wilde’s play “Salomé,” written in French in 1892, the princess goes so far as to kiss the prophet’s lifeless lips. In 1905, Richard Strauss used Wilde’s play as the basis for his opera “Salome,” which titillated audiences all over Europe and horrified the board of the Metropolitan Opera. To a degree, the character exemplifies the misogynistic fin-de-siècle trope of women as vampiric beasts. Yet Wilde’s implicit identification with Salome complicates matters. Hedwig Lachmann, the German poet whose incisive translation of “Salomé” became the libretto…

MAY 21 – 27, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. The actress, singer, artistic director, writer, and puppeteer Alva Rogers—who has posed for Lorna Simpson, and starred in Julie Dash’s film “Daughters of the Dust” (1991), a fascinating evocation of Gullah culture in South Carolina—wrote and stars in “The Harlem Doll Palace,” part of HERE’s Dream Music Puppetry Program, under the aegis of the master puppeteer Basil Twist. In a three-story Harlem brownstone, Aunt Len (Rogers, pictured) keeps a “dollection”—a collection of dolls that love her and want to keep her from harm, including death. As Len, Rogers conveys the wisdom of the artist as visionary—which Rogers projects through the musicality of her voice and her large, expressive eyes that see everything, especially the intimacy of…

On a cold evening in March, a month and a half into the second Trump Administration, a crowd gathered in the Terrace Theatre at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C. Warren Buffett, the billionaire C.E.O. of Berkshire Hathaway, was hosting a screening party for “Becoming Katharine Graham,” a new documentary celebrating the career of the Washington Post’s legendary publisher. Guests included Bill Gates, Bill Murray, the former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar, and Bob Woodward, who, along with Carl Bernstein, broke the stories of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal that came to define the paper’s golden age. I had passed the Watergate Hotel on my way to the party. It sits alongside the Kennedy Center, on the bank of the…

The Cabinet confirmation hearings have been agonizing for congressional Democrats, who have watched in horror as DonaldTrump has pushed through one outlandish candidate after another. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the vaccine skeptic nominated for Secretary of Health and Human Services, was among the most hair-raising. “Vaccinating children is unethical,” he has written. Unable to prevent Kennedy from becoming the country’s top health official, Democrats could only use his hearing to showcase their values. Liberals stand for science. The G.O.P. stands for drinking bleach, freaking out about Satanist pedophiles, and blaming wildfires on Jewish space lasers. To Elizabeth Warren, Kennedy was an “anti-science conspiracy peddler.” Vaccines, 9/11, 5G networks, pasteurization, fluoride, AIDS, lab leaks, electoral theft, assassinations—“he’s nuts on a lot of fronts,” the New York Post’s editorial board concluded. The…