Innholdsfortegnelse for January 27, 2025 i The New Yorker

In “The Great Depresh,” Gary Gulman’s documentary-style comedy special about his lifelong struggle with depression, a camera crew follows him to his childhood home in Peabody, Massachusetts. “A happier kid you couldn’t find,” his mother recalls. “Always had a smile on his face.” Gulman, combing through keepsakes in the living room, picks up a copy—the copy—of “The Lonely Tree,” a book he wrote in second grade. (First sentence: “There once was a tree that no one liked.”) Sitting next to his mother, he says, “To anybody with just a small amount of psychology knowledge, you would know this was a cry for help, an allegory.” She didn’t get it then, and it’s not clear that she fully gets it now. He laughs and pats her arm, but he doesn’t seem…

If I eat every petal of chive blossomand hibiscus, marigold and rose, if I swalloweach dahlia and begonia whole, will youspare the Musch Trail in Topanga? I don’tknow what to do if it burns. If I makelike a wildfire and erase this palmful of lavender,will you leave my favorite meadow tasselledin white sage and black mustard? May I pleasekeep that shaded creekside nook I namedQuail Holler? Listen, the twisted manzanitasthat gnarl through the state park with theirwaxed auburn bark already recall fleshburned to the third degree. Right now,Chuck and Gail’s house still standswith its Spanish tile, twin writers’ sheds,and framed Sylvia Plath drawing, the flamesstopped by the choppers’ water bombshalf a block from their gate. I’ve stoppedphotographing the striped sunsets’ mineral bleedbecause I don’t even want to think the wordbeautiful…

American Oasis, by Kyle Paoletta (Pantheon). For many Americans, the cities of the Southwest are beautiful but slightly terrifying vacation destinations. In this elegant book, Paoletta, who is from New Mexico, argues that these desert cities’ histories of survival make them ideal models for other American metropolises. Through a series of sensitive portraits of the region’s biggest cities—including Albuquerque, Phoenix, El Paso, and Las Vegas—Paoletta demonstrates how South-westerners’ centuries of experience with extreme heat, water scarcity, and “stitching a complex social fabric” from groups of Native Americans, Hispanics, Anglos, and immigrants can impart lessons for other cities facing similar challenges. Before Elvis, by Preston Lauterbach (Grand Central). This book considers the influence on Elvis Presley of Black musicians, especially the gospel and R. & B. pioneers of the nineteen-forties and…

ENTERING PARADISE It’s always good to read a full and searching essay on the durable interest of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” such as the one Merve Emre recently published (Books, December 23rd). However, when Emre asserts that “There was inequality in Eden before the fall, but there was no misogyny,” she seems to be pointing to a distinction without a difference—one that many generations of critics sensitive to gender have identified. Mary Wollstonecraft, for instance, summoned Milton into “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” to note the subtle yet pernicious misogyny in his description of Eve’s creation, in Book IV. With unapologetic sarcasm, Wollstonecraft wrote that when Milton “tells us that women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace, I cannot comprehend his meaning, unless” he meant that…

“Are you awake?” So runs the perpetual 3 A.M. question of the sleepless to the seemingly slumbering partner. “No!” the partner replies, turning over and away, indicating both the fact of being awake and the state of being still asleep, unavailable for conscious activities. The insistent insomniac, desperate for a chat, usually sighs, accepts the verdict, and slumps back into sleeplessness. (Carrying on with the conversation is a path toward divorce, not the desired diversion.) The exchange, muttered by countless couples in countless beds, reminds us that sleep is not a neat off-and-on switch but a fully human and fiendishly manifold activity: social, complex, and governed by as many psychological intricacies as any other natural act. We can be asleep and still sense that something is stirring around us, or…

My grandmother rarelycalled us by our real namesbut you knew when she meant you.I was the youngest girlso I had the most names. Yesher sentences had alwaystrailed off into little mysteries to mebut when she was dying and the doctor asked herwhat month it wasshe said Novemberand I thought oh, good,so she isn’t dyingshe knows it’s November.But she didn’t know the year.And she didn’t know the President.The doctor left. It was just me,my brother and my grandmother and the CNN anchor sayingJFK was killed fifty years agothis month,my grandmother sayingdo they know who shot him yet,my brother saying no,and death pulling its drawstring,closing us all inside.…

There was a general sadness that day on the ship. Dani was walking listlessly from cabin to cabin, delivering little paper flyers announcing the talent show at the end of the month. She had made them the previous week; then had come news that the boys’ ship would not be attending. It almost wasn’t worth handing out flyers at all—almost as if the show had been cancelled. The boys’ ship had changed course; it was now going to be near Gibraltar on the night of the performance—nowhere near where their ship would be, in the middle of the North Atlantic sea. Every girl in school had already heard Dani sing and knew that her voice was strong and good. The important thing was for Sebastien to know. Now Sebastien would…

Washington still cherishes a belief that it was long a place of bipartisan comity, of after-hours socializing during which fences were leapt and mended and the gears of the republic were lubricated with alcohol and bonhomie. There is an element of truth to the legend. Until the late nineteen-fifties, all U.S. senators occupied a single Senate Office Building, affectionately called the S.O.B. They saw a lot of one another. But, as they and their ever-growing staffs spread out over Capitol Hill (they’re now in three different buildings), senators became less likely to R.S.V.P. in the affirmative to any Washington social invitation. As Neil MacNeil and Richard A. Baker point out in their 2013 history of the Senate, “Since the 1960s, with the greater availability of highspeed jet aircraft, senators have…

JANUARY 22 – 28, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. New York City Ballet’s two choreographers in residence, Justin Peck and Alexei Ratmansky, work in contrasting modes: Peck has a knack for tapping into a generational mood (often of malaise); Ratmansky tends to look inward, to the world of the imagination, or to ballet’s past. In its winter season (at the David H. Koch, Jan. 21-March 2), the company presents several mixed programs that include such works as George Balanchine’s “Firebird” and “Sylvia: Pas de Deux,” Jerome Robbins’s “The Cage,” and Christopher Wheeldon’s “From You Within Me” (pictured). Two premières, Peck’s “Mystic Familiar” (Jan. 29), with the dancers in sneakers, and Ratmansky’s suite of dances “Grand Pas” (Feb 6.), from the late-nineteenth-century dance “Paquita,” together create…

Fame is fickle, and no one knows this better than millennials. Once, they were everywhere—in television laugh tracks for “The Big Bang Theory,” in breathless think pieces about social-media narcissism, and acting the fool in 360p YouTube comedy videos. Then—poof! Gone like yesterday’s avocado toast. Here at BuzzCrunch, we once published more than seventy-five millennialrelated listicles per hour. Now no one cares about millennials or thinks about them at all. Crazy, right? But what happened to these millennials who once lived large in our hearts and in our online conversations? We’ve hunted them down for old times’ sake. Many of them are dead. Millennials are now very, very, very old. Although some of them are desperately hanging on to life, trapped in cubicles and still trying to pay off their…

Shortly before 3 P.M. on a Tuesday in late September, David Lammy, the British Foreign Secretary, sat down at the blond horseshoe-shaped table of the U.N. Security Council chamber, in midtown Manhattan. It was High Level Week for world leaders at the General Assembly. Outside, on First Avenue, the traffic was unbearable. Lammy, who is one of Britain’s most prominent Black politicians, entered office this past July, when the Labour Party, under Keir Starmer, swept to power after fourteen years of Conservative government. His schedule in New York was heavy and mixed: hurried conversations with Najib Mikati, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, about the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel; a U.N. summit to address the global health risks posed by antimicrobial resistance; a “fireside chat” with the actor Benedict Cumberbatch…

There are awards for the year’s best films but not for its best TikTok videos. That’s too bad, since 2024 yielded several tiny masterpieces. From @yojairyjaimee, a flawless, minute-long re-creation of some bizarre 2009 stage patter by Kanye West (who now goes by Ye). From @accountwashackedwith50m, twelve seconds of chocolate-covered strawberries, filmed from the vantage of a saxophonist in an R. & B. band. From @notkenna, seven seconds of a dog made to look, with preposterously low-budget effects, as if it were flying on a broomstick. Such Internet gems are what the poet Patricia Lockwood has called “the sapphires of the instant”; each catches the light in a strange, hypnotic way. Just don’t stare too long. If every video is a starburst of expression, an extended TikTok session is fireworks…