Innholdsfortegnelse for May 27, 2024 i The New Yorker

In a corner of the Maurice M. Pine Free Public Library, in Fair Lawn, New Jersey—between shelves of current nonfiction and foreign-language DVDs, and near a six-foot-tall globe donated by local Rotarians—the gray carpeting is flecked with sequins. The flotsam of a drag-queen reading hour? The recent Barbra Streisand memoir, hemorrhaging fabulousness? Nope. These sequins herald the entrance to the office of the library’s director, Adele Puccio, who collects previously worn wedding dresses and then loans or gives them to any bride who needs one. Puccio currently has more than fifty such dresses, most hanging on racks in her office. “It’s a lot,” Puccio, a practical woman who had on a floral blouse and clear-framed eyeglasses, said. “It’s a little hard to maneuver in here.” Matching needy brides with used…

Nine months into the pandemic, Nick Thompson, a marketer at a tech firm in Chicago, got a message on LinkedIn inviting him to apply to be a contestant on a Netflix reality show called “Love Is Blind.” Thompson, a Midwesterner with bright-blue eyes and a sheepish smile, didn’t watch much reality TV, although he’d caught a bit of “The Bachelor” so that he could join a betting bracket at his office. He was more of a fan of W.W.E. wrestling, so much so that he’d once trained to become a wrestler himself. “For, like, a day,” he said, laughing—he’d busted his ankle, then quit. The format of “Love Is Blind” sounded outlandish: fifteen men and fifteen women were gathered in Los Angeles, where they were ensconced in individual “pods” and…

The possibility that the zero gave birth to the universe,that all our somethings come from nothing, the fearof being alone like that, children of chance, orphansdown to our atoms, is mother to the idea of god. God is a dress we slip over solitude, a maskfor oblivion to wear, a rule-giver in a worldwhere no flower or bear cares that we are hereor what we do. I prefer a theology of silence, the eschatologyof the shrug, a religion of holding my wife’s handfor now. But, if the industry of the church is what it tookto give me bells ringing Sunday mornings,to which crows sometimes rise and deer turn,I’m grateful for a sound that pulls me out of myself,lifts my head toward sun and clouds, into the upand all, the blue,…

Who’ll take pity on the breast man? If such a creature still exists, that is. The targets of his fixation have demurred in the face of changing tastes. The new millennium’s Everyman, if we’re to believe his representation in mass culture, no longer sniffs for cleavage like a truffle pig on the hunt. Take Jimmy Kimmel, who used to be the patron saint of drunk, red-blooded, horny guys watching television. His early-aughts Comedy Central production “The Man Show” flaunted a cast of “juggy girls” and ran its closing credits over footage of, as the tagline went, “girls jumping on trampolines.” Kimmel has since suited up in the tasteful, white-collar interest of ribbing Donald Trump on late-night TV and at the Oscars. “The Man Show” aired its final episode in 2004,…

Earlier this year, the singer and songwriter Billie Eilish, who is twenty-two, became the youngest two-time Oscar winner in history, collecting the Best Original Song award for “What Was I Made For?,” a delicate existential ballad that she co-wrote for the film “Barbie.” (She also won in 2022, for “No Time to Die,” a moody and portentous Bond theme.) Incidentally, Eilish is also the youngest person ever to have a clean sweep of all four of the main Grammy categories (Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Album of the Year), which she achieved in 2020, for her début LP, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” At that year’s ceremony, moments before Album of the Year was announced, Eilish can be seen…

NOT FOR FREE Louis Menand, in his essay about threats to academic freedom, overlooks one key factor (A Critic at Large, May 6th). The books that he reviews focus on how, during the past several decades, Congress and the Supreme Court have shaped institutions of higher education into arenas of tolerance—changes that have in turn inspired ire in our contemporary political climate. But there is a far more pernicious force working to erode universities’ academic freedom: the exorbitant expense of college, which has changed how students relate to their educations. As an administrator who has worked in universities in both the U.S. and the U.K., I have seen firsthand how, with spiralling tuition fees, students have increasingly come to view themselves as customers. With average tuition in the U.S. now…

In my dreams, the baby could talk. A one-day-old, apparently understanding the conversation going on around her crib, suddenly weighed in with a factual correction; a three-day-old, still in the hospital, piped up to agree that the surgical procedure being recommended was both unnecessary and outlandishly expensive; an infant, evidently inferring the entire universe from first principles, observed that soon she would be able to refer to her mother’s sister’s fiancé as her uncle. In the months before my partner’s due date, I experienced so many variations on this recurrent dream that it finally took a turn for the meta. In that version, when our newborn began to talk, I turned to the assembled family members and exclaimed, “The dreams were prophetic!” Awaiting the birth of a child is a…

III I was born in the month of the Blood Wolf Moon.My mother said icicles shook the treesas she and my father traipsedalong the black sheet sidewalkto their convertible. Her timed contractionsstretched out, hours long, until almost midnight.After how many miscarriages.Hospital bedside, my aunt and unclesmiled over the crib. Or was that justa photograph? Tell meabout departure. Tell me how often she left the newborn, jettedaway on Pan Am, tied up the ribbonsof her satin toe shoes.I am not one to antagonize her.I bow low to her voice. She who crossedthe Iron Curtain, searching for the babyphotos inside stamped envelopes.Memory’s sleight of hand.I don’t remember how she vanished,or when, tiptoeing into the capeof night, wrapped in ermine, in mink,flabbergasting audienceswith every pirouette. Frozen, perfect,the star blazing onstage. IX For the…

The two sisters were growing old now, but they went on gazing toward Palm Springs from this windblown prairie town as though to Mecca. Each was a widow, Mildred thrice over—her last husband had died after decades of work as a brakeman for the Burlington Northern—and now the sisters, if not on public assistance, were close to it, and, despite their uncertain compatibility, forced to live together in the same house, the house where they had grown up, with a brother whose success had once been the town’s biggest story. Now Cooper lived in Palm Springs, within walking distance of the former home of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, and had among his conveyances a helicopter, with a portrait of him twirling a lariat painted on the side, which he…

The Great American Novel is a long-dead cultural aspiration, extinguished by a healthy realization that the country is too big and too varied to generate any singular, definitive volume. American novelists tend, in our time, to earn public recognition of greatness in a steady, incremental (one is almost tempted to say un-American) way: through the long-term production of many books that arrive with a certain regularity and are roughly on the same scale, one to the next. For writers as different as Alice McDermott, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers, the greatness classification comes more from accrual than from explosion. Even so, some younger novelists with exceptional gifts seem to have a romantically persistent notion of the single-book catapult. Now in his mid-forties, but still boyishly author-photo’d, Garth Risk Hallberg continues…

There’s something awful about a lost picture. Maybe it’s because of a disparity between your original hope and the result: you made the photograph because you intended to keep it, and now that intention—artistic, memorial, historical—is fugitive, on the run toward ends other than your own. The picture, gone forever, possibly revived by strange eyes, will never again mean quite what you thought it would. “Here There Are Blueberries”—a new play at New York Theatre Workshop, conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman and written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich—begins with the discovery of a well-curated album of photographs. It’s not just one misplaced dispatch from a former world but whole pasted-together pages of them, carefully arranged in order to tell a story. The album was found in the nineteen-forties,…

MAY 22 – 28, 2024 Kelela, starting with her 2013 mixtape “Cut 4 Me,” has been the mononymous force at the center of an R. & B. mutation, delivering a sleek, sharp-edged upgrade with an embrace of electronic music. She has spent the past decade building upon a reputation as a futurist—from the high-powered début album “Take Me Apart” to last year’s “Raven.” The latter, which ended a five-year hiatus, was inspired by the early-pandemic renewal of the Black Lives Matter movement, which stoked in the artist a desire to, as she put it to Billboard, “create a more liberatory model for myself.” That vision led to a more ambient sound, in pursuit of egalitarian dance-music practices. A remix album, “RAVE:N,” only furthers this fantasy of an all-inclusive club.—Sheldon Pearce (Blue…

Kris Hansen had worked as a chemist at the 3M Corporation for about a year when her boss, an affable senior scientist named Jim Johnson, gave her a strange assignment. 3M had invented Scotch Tape and Post-it notes; it sold everything from sandpaper to kitchen sponges. But on this day, in 1997, Johnson wanted Hansen to test human blood for chemical contamination. Several of 3M’s most successful products contained man-made compounds called fluorochemicals. In a spray called Scotchgard, fluorochemicals protected leather and fabric from stains. In a coating known as Scotchban, they prevented food packaging from getting soggy. In a soapy foam used by firefighters, they helped extinguish jet-fuel fires. Johnson explained to Hansen that one of the company’s fluorochemicals, PFOS—short for perfluorooctanesulfonic acid—often found its way into the bodies…

Natural Magic, by Renée Bergland (Princeton). Although Charles Darwin and Emily Dickinson are not known to have ever crossed paths, this study finds meaning in their shared enchantment with the natural world. In the eighteen-thirties, as “natural philosophy” began to be reframed as “natural science,” emotion and wonder were eclipsed by objectivity and mastery. Darwin and Dickinson resisted this binary: Darwin saw his theory of natural selection as an occasion for humility, relating humans to other species; Dickinson, whose poetry reflects her extensive scientific education and interest in Darwin’s ideas, depicted the natural world with both botanical specificity and attention to its splendors. Bergland links their thinking to an earlier tradition of “natural” (as opposed to supernatural) magic, which emphasized the interconnectedness of life and valued emotion as a form…