Innholdsfortegnelse for February 10, 2025 i The New Yorker

The way your Elon Musk plays, moves, and communicates offers important data about his development. Although every child is different, recognizing where your Elon Musk is on the curve can help you identify potential problems early and allow for intervention, under the guidance of your pediatrician and the federal regulatory agency. Social/Emotional Milestones By this age, your Elon Musk should be able to wave hello and goodbye and point to Cabinet employees he plans to fire. He should be able to hug stuffed toys, recognize the people who care for him, clap when a judge dismisses an insidertrading lawsuit, and blow kisses. If, at this age, your Elon Musk can show affection only through the social-media platform he owns, consult a pediatrician about whether he may be suffering from an…

In the barbershop it’s hard to tell an argument from a discussion. Men in the barber’s chair tend to speak softly—especially if they’re getting a shave. Those sitting in the chairs along the walls waiting their turn for a cut or a shave or both tend to speak loudly— sometimes shouting. I’m in a chair, waiting my turn for a cut. I’m listening, not talking. The manicurist doing fingernails is in conversation with a man getting his nails trimmed and polished. It’s about what a mess the world is in. The guy in Max’s chair says life is unfair. Death. Destruction. Disease. Viruses. He says the world is going to hell in a handbasket. My professor in college said people have always believed the world was about to end. Sure,…

When I broke Kenny’s bedroom door, I was in the middle of a crazy argument with my girlfriend. Kenny and his wife, Cathy, were away, and, actually, I didn’t ruin the door, but I damaged it and hurt my hand. This was the girlfriend I’d run after in a panic-stricken, wild breakout that destroyed my first marriage and led to a nervous breakdown. Time in the breakdown lane. It turned out to be a kind of walking collapse, in the sense that pneumonia is sometimes “walking.” So I walked around pretty much like shattered pottery glued back together haphazardly, all the while drinking, with a teeth-gritted determination to hang on to my girlfriend and survive. Not that pottery can drink or walk. But I could and did, and one of…

In Defense of Partisanship, by Julian E. Zelizer (Columbia Global Reports). In this concise treatise, Zelizer argues that the solution to the dysfunction in American politics lies not in third-partyism, bipartisanship, or a strengthened executive branch but, rather, in an improved two-party system. He lays out the case for why such a system still represents “the best way to organize and direct the deep tensions that always exist within the electorate.” Tracing the Democratic and the Republican Parties from their births through the congressional reforms of the nineteen-seventies (which ushered in the era of intense partisanship we know today), Zelizer dissects what has gone wrong and provides a clear and accessible blueprint for further changes—including ending the filibuster and eliminating the debt ceiling. Shattered, by Hanif Kureishi (Ecco). On Boxing Day, 2022,…

MIND YOUR WORDS Manvir Singh, in his essay about how language shapes thinking, cites several examples of time being understood “spatially” (“Talk Sense,” December 30th & January 6th). He uses these examples to argue that the way we talk about time changes the way we conceptualize it. There are instances in English, however, that present something of a counterargument. Shakespeare sometimes used “behind” to mean “in the future”—a speed bump for modern audiences. “Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind,” Hamlet complains. “Glamis, and Thane of Cawdor! The greatest is behind,” Macbeth hopes. In Shakespeare’s day, “before” and “behind” were natural opposites in time as in space. At some point, we flipped the metaphor, putting the past at our backs and the future ahead of us. “Behind” got retired as…

The first challenge is deciding what to call her. She is encircled by famous surnames—men jousting over her identity. A lustrous scion of fin-de-siècle Vienna, she was born Alma Maria Schindler, the daughter of the operetta singer Anna Bergen and the landscape painter Emil Schindler. She hoped to make her way as a composer, but that dream ended when, in 1902, at the age of twenty-two, she married the musical titan Gustav Mahler. After Mahler’s death, in 1911, she had an affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka, then was briefly married to the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. Her final husband was the writer Franz Werfel, whom she followed into exile, first in France and then in the United States, where she settled in Los Angeles. She lived until 1964, the…

In a pair of fluorescent-lit rooms on both sides of the Atlantic, the guinea pigs awaited their fate. They were not literally guinea pigs. Two were lightly sedated, extremely fluffy white rabbits resting on pee pads; the other was Nick Green, a sixty-four-year-old part-time administrator at the University of Cambridge who reclined, hands clasped atop his patterned sweater, on the starched sheets of a hospital bed. All three were hooked up to machines that provided a readout of their vital signs, and all three were prepared to have a syringe of manufactured blood injected into their veins. There were, of course, some differences. In their metal cages in Baltimore, the rabbits were pampered with fleece blankets and fresh hay, water, and pellets, which were served in front of a screen…

Along Interstate 71, in a flat stretch of Ohio, an otherwise modest billboard proclaims that “HELL IS REAL.” The type, set against a black backdrop, is white, except for the “H,” which is painted a red that in certain lights flickers orange. The sign is meant to give passing drivers an eschatological jolt, and it has become a much photographed landmark—enough of a fixture that it has its own listing on Google Maps. The simplicity of its message and the vulgarity of its medium make it an exemplar of religious expression in this American moment, as if God (or maybe Satan) placed an ad. Yet its stark certainty feels like a transmission from an earlier, less complicated world. What is Hell, these days? “New and Collected Hell” (Farrar, Straus &…

FEBRUARY 5 – 11, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. With his cinematic analyses of complex institutions, Frederick Wiseman has redefined nonfiction filmmaking. “Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution,” a forty-film retrospective of his work, at Film at Lincoln Center (Jan. 31-March 5), includes three life-and-death stories—“Law and Order” (1969), “Missile” (1987), and “Near Death” (1989)—that are high points in his artistry. In “Law and Order,” Wiseman embeds with police in Kansas City, Missouri, and witnesses officers’ horrifying brutality. In “Missile” (pictured), Wiseman films at an Air Force base where officers learn complex systems for launching intercontinental ballistic missiles—a chillingly abstract vision of the end of the world. “Near Death,” a supreme masterwork, running nearly six hours, is set in the intensive-care unit of Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital,…

At the end of the fifth season of “Million Dollar Listing New York,” which aired in 2016, Fredrik Eklund, a Swedish adult-film actor turned real-estate broker, was in the grips of a professional crisis. He was desperate to become the listing agent for a new condominium project called 1 Seaport, and had spent weeks fanatically courting its developers at the Fortis Property Group. “I can’t sleep without this building,” Eklund said. “I’m obsessed.” 1 Seaport was to be the first all-glass residential skyscraper ever built on the lower-Manhattan waterfront—sixty stories of upscale urban living, at the edge of the financial district. A Fortis executive made Eklund a deal. If he could sell twenty of the eighty planned units before construction began—if he could sell them in just eight weeks—Eklund would…

I was thinking of a daughter, therein the crush of a summerwhat can save her from. You know the one: that thick season from which she’ll feel everythingthat follows, follows. She isn’t wrong to get in the car with the older boy;in a sense she must,because she wants to. Headlong dive into the backseat. Headstrong is the word her father uses before disappearingback to his office. For him, the one suffices. Not me: voluble as our girl, as I ever was though I have made a study of restraint,and practiced plenty,posed at the closed piano when no one’s home. Some nights when she’s returned to me, I for a secondthink: Changeling! Of course it’s her; it’s only thatas her resemblance to me—to a versionI can remember and recognize as self—grows,…

In 1975, a rape victims’ advocate named Linda Reinshagen shared a story with a reporter from the Chicago Tribune. A man on the South Side had pulled a woman into an alley where he raped and badly beat her. A witness called the cops; the victim could be heard screaming from the alley when patrolmen arrived at the scene. “The police caught the rapist running down the street with his pants down,” Reinshagen said. “Then they made the victim stand in the rain without her clothes while they argued over which hospital to take her to.” Once the victim did reach a hospital, she was not examined or treated for sexual assault. When an attending physician filled out a police report, next to the blank space for “rape” he entered…

In “Hugh Jackman LIVE, from New York with Love,” the Oscar-nominated, multiple Tony Award-winning Marvel mega-super-über-ultrastar can’t seem to get over the fact that he has his own show at Radio City Music Hall. “Look at us, Gussy!” he called to a childhood friend in the audience the night I saw it. “Who would have thought it?” At some point, as Jackman performs twenty-four shows there in the next ten months, his surprise may fade. Yet this is a key aspect of Jackman’s charisma: a kind of sweet humility that constantly refreshes itself. Though the actor has starred in five Broadway productions, shredded box-office records as the X-Men’s vein-popping Wolverine, performed a whole other autobiographical retrospective (“Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway,” in 2011), and even hosted four Tony ceremonies at…