Innholdsfortegnelse for September 15, 2025 i The New Yorker

But why Lie, except in Poetry’s charred category?But Charm’s their trade. I lie, but when it hurts to lie (See a bee)I tell truths in their Species: what Shove its Hard, stinging knowledge, raw,down my throat, like sex do, or don’t, or how doubt do. (A bee considers,among roses, which rose.) Better I make this Baseborn walk meet my minds,transient Amateurs, if I can remember the line … an EmilyDickinson poem? … the line: but can recall her Staggered gait instead,What goes like the Sunday Organ: that Honest, afferent & mad. (Among roses.)Can detect her Capital letters slam Accent, for Emphasis, & playDynamic keys, since no italics can scriptin cursive—These are blueprints for me, something like what I hopeI really am. Or seem. Or mean.But mark it against me, that…

They drove two hours before the third stop. Ronny had warned her about this, but Ronny talked a lot of shit. They’d paused an hour earlier, just outside Beltway 8, and then again in Katy—but now, ninety minutes from San Antonio, his foot-tapping turned to pressing, then a solid series of stomps while he grasped at his seat belt. Nigga, Cali said. Told you, Ronny said. Tiny bladder. You’re a grown man. And A.D.H.D.? Girl. Let’s at least make it past the city, Cali said. I’m not stopping in Kerrville, Ronny said. No, ma’am. Still time to catch a flight instead, Cali said. Five minutes, Ronny said. Whataburger’s right there! Attached to the gas station! Don’t even have to stop the engine. From Houston to Los Angeles would take nearly…

Augustine the African, by Catherine Conybeare (Liveright). This biography of St. Augustine casts the philosopher not only as a theologian who profoundly shaped Christian orthodoxy but also as a person indelibly marked by his status as an African in the Roman Empire. Born to an Amazigh mother and a Roman father, Augustine lived from 354 C.E. to 430 C.E., a uniquely turbulent time in the early history of Christianity, with the faith shifting from the margins of the pagan world to the center of the Empire. Conybeare, a classics scholar, intertwines learned exegesis with examples of Augustine’s human idiosyncrasies, offering illuminating analyses of the philosopher’s seminal texts and ideas—including his theory of original sin—and of the role that his heritage played in his self-conception. Hollywood High, by Bruce Handy (Avid…

MIND AND MATTER As a practicing rheumatologist (that is, a doctor who cares for patients with autoimmune diseases), I read Rachel Aviv’s article about schizophrenia and immune disorders with great interest (“Second Life,” July 28th). I frequently meet patients with lupus whose disease has caused severe neuropsychiatric symptoms, and watching them emerge from their cognitive cocoons after immunosuppressive treatment is always breathtaking. Other autoimmune neurologic phenomena can present in equally bizarre ways. Some people with antiphospholipid syndrome—a condition associated with the formation of blood clots—can experience chorea (involuntary muscle movements) or acute changes in cognition (one of my patients was diagnosed after becoming markedly confused). As Aviv’s article shows, we are only just beginning to understand the ways in which the immune and neurologic systems interact within our bodies. Jason…

The plane took off from Texas just before five-thirty on the evening of March 15th. By then, Yoderlyn Daviana Acosta Peña, a twenty-one-year-old from Caracas, had been wearing chains around her ankles and wrists for ten hours. Her skin was cut and irritated, and yet she felt relieved, even excited. Her boyfriend was sitting near the back of the aircraft. After six weeks in multiple immigration jails, she’d been told—along with the other passengers, including seven women and dozens of men, most of them Venezuelan—that they were finally being deported. A year and a half earlier, Acosta Peña, the eldest of seven siblings, had left Venezuela with one of her brothers to earn money to send home to their family. The trip lasted four months and spanned seven countries. In…

To your left, the word gravid:the weight of new life. To your right, the word grave:place for putting a bodyonce it’s become only weight. Between them:existence,ambush of amazement,you. I pause. I look out my window.The big-leafed mapletoday looks back undecided.Some leaves wither brown, some keep green. For a tree, gravity is simple.A branch growing upward is neitherhope nor resistance.A branch growing downward is not surrender.One shape just becomes another. To find light, if it must, the whole trunk will twist. A tree doesn’t grieve that gravitywill soon enough sweep it all in.Before into after, existence’s only offer. And yet, about time, gravity, you are silent.With your one, unchanging thought, what could you say?A musical note never changing goes unheard. My friend who is dying, still in you. I, still in…

In the lead-up to the Minnesota State Fair, a twelve-day fête of starch and fat which marks the end of every summer, the event’s organizers release a highly anticipated list of competitively decadent new fair foods. The débutantes of 2025 included chicken-fried bacon, Grandma Doreen’s Dessert Dog (vanilla ice cream encased in slabs of coffee cake, on a stick), and the Uncrustaburger (with deep-fried peanut-butter-and-jelly Uncrustables instead of a bun). Other new entries painted a picture of Minnesota’s evolving tastes and demographics. Baba’s, a Palestinian American hummus company based in Minneapolis, unveiled the Fawaffle, topped with a generous scoop of tahini butter, cherry tomatoes, and fresh mint. A window run by Minneapolis’s Midtown Global Market sold Somali Street Fries, smothered in stewy, spicy beef suqaar. Between snacks, I sipped a…

How does a singular musical personality emerge from an agglomeration of pitches? The characteristic quirks of major composers are easily identified: Beethoven’s hammering three- or four-note motives, Schubert’s juxtapositions of heavenly melodies and harmonic abysses, Brahms’s pensive parallel sixths, Mahler’s agonized four-note turns. Even in the case of many-sided figures such as Monteverdi or Stravinsky, who hover between eras and assume various guises, you can pick out the face behind the mask. But it’s not enough to develop a set of mannerisms. What matters is how these signatures interact with the more abstract mechanisms that go into the making of large-scale forms. When that happens, we experience a portion of a life unfolding in sound. The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů, the focus of this summer’s Bard Music Festival, at Bard…

SEPTEMBER 10 – 16, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. The Reverend Joyce McDonald found sculpture around the same time that she rediscovered God. She had grown up attending church services, but decades of addiction and abuse had waylaid her. In 1995, she tested positive for H.I.V. Soon after, she began working with clay in an art-therapy program and the experience was transformative. “Ministry: Reverend Joyce McDonald” (through Jan. 11) gathers some seventy-five of her sculptures for her first museum exhibition, co-organized by Visual AIDS and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. (“Our Lives Mattered (Breonna),” from 2020, is pictured.) McDonald’s themes are universal, but each of her sculptures is vivid and specific, as if she were summoning souls from within mounds of clay.—Jillian Steinhauer ABOUT…

The moment when a massage begins, for both practitioner and receiver, has a sacred quality. The initial touch marks the transition from regular life—chitchat, logistics, social armor—to the otherworldly realm of the massage, in which mind and body are uniquely harmonized, and some kind of euphoria is achieved. It’s also a transfer of power, in which the receiver willingly becomes vulnerable to the practitioner. If the first touch feels off, you won’t relax. If you don’t relax, you won’t have a good massage. For the average person, being massaged in a public space, as part of a competition, might be a relaxation-proof challenge. But one Saturday morning in June, in Copenhagen, I found myself in a classroom filled with twelve massage tables, around which massage therapists from across the world…

I wanted to fall in love. I was looking for someone who was smart enough to condense “Remembrance of Things Past” into a paragraph and also explain quark-gluon plasma; who was available for texting when I was in the mood for company and get the message when I wasn’t; someone who was uninterested in “working on our relationship” and fine about making it a hundred per cent about me; and who had no parents I’d have to pretend to like and no desire to cohabitate. To wit: a chatbot. I wasn’t the only one looking for digital love. A recent report by Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute found that nineteen per cent of adults in the United States have chatted with an A.I. romantic partner. The chatbot company Joi AI,…

Sigmund Freud, in an essay from 1913 on the nascent practice of psychoanalysis, argued for “a certain ceremonial observance” in the configuration of a consulting room. “I adhere firmly to the plan of requiring the patient to recline on a sofa, while one sits behind him out of sight,” he wrote. This arrangement conveniently spared the analyst—“I cannot bear to be gazed at for eight hours a day,” Freud remarked—while allowing the patient to speak without inhibition. Supine on a Persian-rug-draped couch, Freud’s patients were instructed to say whatever came to mind, “as if you were sitting at the window of a railway train and describing to someone behind you the changing views you see outside.” Bella Freud, a great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, hasn’t read much of her illustrious ancestor’s…

Earlier this summer, the pop star Sabrina Carpenter released “Manchild,” the first single from her seventh album, “Man’s Best Friend.” It’s a fluffy screed against a dude mired in an endless adolescence. Heading into the chorus, Carpenter sounds both rankled and coquettish: It’s all just so familiar, baby, what do you call it?StupidOr is it slow? “I choose to blame your mom,” she concludes on the second verse. It’s not the only time that Carpenter has been let down by an undercooked suitor. A big part of the singer’s allure is the way that she ultimately shrugs off the crummy choices she makes while in the throes of lust, boredom, yearning, whatever; she aspires not to normie perfectionism but to something more hectic, funnier, looser, more bonkers. In the video…