Innholdsfortegnelse for September 16, 2024 i The New Yorker

In June, the small left-wing magazine Jewish Currents summoned its donors and close confederates to a private event in a penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Kathleen Peratis, a stylish human-rights advocate who co-chairs the publication’s board, pressed refreshments on the guests with the warm, fluttering anxiety of a doting Jewish grandmother. This particular crowd, especially since October 7th, isn’t often the beneficiary of such Jewish hospitality, and a few attendees sparred amiably about who among them was the most despised within the broader community. The magazine’s most prominent contributor is Peter Beinart, an observant Jew whose public opposition to a Jewish state has rendered him a moral hero to some and a turncoat to others. A few years ago, Beinart recalled, he turned on his computer…

For many people, the 2016 election was a catastrophe. For Max Boot, it was a betrayal. He’d been a movement conservative: a loud voice for the Iraq War, an editor of The Weekly Standard, and an adviser to the campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio. Boot took heart when Republicans initially closed ranks against Donald Trump’s candidacy. Trump is “a madman who must be stopped,” Bobby Jindal said. “The man is utterly amoral,” Ted Cruz agreed. Rubio called him “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the Presidency.” For Rick Perry, he was “a cancer on conservatism.” Then, one by one, they all endorsed him, and he won. Trump’s election shook Boot’s world view. Was this what Republicanism was about? Had Boot been deluded the whole…

COLLECTED STORIES It was wonderful to reread Donald Barthelme’s story “Chablis” in the magazine’s archive issue (Fiction, August 19th). In 1988, when I was in medical school, in Houston, I rented a garage apartment behind a house that turned out to be occupied by Barthelme and his family. The morning after I moved in, there was a knock on the door. I opened it to find Don standing in front of me, holding a heavy wooden chair over his head. He said that the chair was for me. The next morning, there was another knock. Don was standing there holding a wicker chair over his head. This is going to be a great place to live, I thought. His wife, Marion, had decided that this one was the right one…

Even though the atmosphere is madeto fail your feelings, I expected weatheron the day we buried my brother, the pine boxlight, too large for what was left of him.Before the burial, I joined my motherand the body in the roomthat used to be mine,all the clocks wrongfrom an outage in the night.Wires bedevilled by rain, too lateto get to my brother through the machineshe used to breathe.He was already gone, already weather, alreadylanguage my mother neededfor the coroner. Sister, brother, mother,no father, 1970, surprisein her voice as she recalled his birth.We all felt fatherless, or rather the fatherlessnessof our heavenly father and the debtsthat makes due, what followswhen the son must die and becomeatmosphere, though on the day we buried himit was all wrong. Sunny, cloudless,everyone sweating and shedding their…

For a few months, I stayed with my aunt’s friend in Midtown, back when she could still afford to live there. Now it’s filled with condos, and they’re all a trillion dollars a month. But, in those days, she owned the house, and also a coffeehouse a few blocks away. I was too broke to pay rent, so every morning saw me behind the counter. This was the arrangement. I’d just broken up with my ex—a doctor with legible handwriting, an ungenerous top—because he was moving to Austin and I wasn’t down to do that. Margo lived with her young son, Walter. Sometimes he went by Walt, the name his father called him, but his father was gone. My aunt had introduced the two of them to me as her…

The Missing Thread, by Daisy Dunn (Viking). This engaging book, by a classical historian, surveys three thousand years and argues that women were more integral to the development of the ancient world than prevailing narratives suggest. Dunn’s subjects include Pandora, whom Greek mythology identifies as the “first woman”; Locusta, the toxicologist who helped Agrippina to poison Claudius; Fulvia, a late Roman politician who raised an army after her daughter was scorned by a lover; and the scores of anonymous Etruscan women who maintained a thriving quasi-matriarchy until the Roman ascendancy. “Women are everywhere that antiquity raises its head,” Dunn writes. “They are the authors of our history.” Life as No One Knows It, by Sara Imari Walker (Riverhead). In this treatise, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist posits a new account…

Of all the many cultural products that the United Kingdom has exported to the United States—Aston Martins, Doc Martens, Burberry coats, Cadbury chocolates, a lingering and historically incongruous fascination with the Royal Family—my favorite by far are first-rate fantasy novels for children. To be clear, it’s not that no such work is produced here at home. My own childhood—which is to say, my own intellectual, aesthetic, and moral formation—would have been gravely impoverished without the likes of L. Frank Baum and Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle and Ursula K. Le Guin. But the U.K., oh my. Who knows what historical factors or contemporaneous living conditions have conspired to set so many brilliant minds of that relatively small country to the task of conjuring magical realms? Maybe it all began with Geoffrey…

SEPTEMBER 11 – 17, 2024 Several of this season’s finest theatrical offerings can be found in the fall international festivals, where runs are short but intensity is high. Japan Society’s “Ningyo! A Parade of Puppetry” includes a remounting of “Dogugaeshi” (Sept. 11-19), Basil Twist’s masterpiece, from 2003, which employs sliding painted screens to magical effect, as well as a visit from Japan’s astonishing National Bunraku Theatre (Oct. 3-5). The multi-venue “Crossing the Line” festival also has a stunning lineup: the mega-hit “One Song,” Miet Warlop’s physical-endurance spectacle, will be at N.Y.U. Skirball (Oct. 3-5), and Tiago Rodrigues’s violent drama “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists,” about a Portuguese family with a tradition of conscientious murder, comes to bam (Nov. 13-17).—Helen Shaw ABOUT TOWN CLASSICAL | Anthony Roth Costanzo’s rambunctious,…

I spent the summer of 2011 as an undergraduate researcher at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, in Colorado. My job was to collect burying beetles—necrophagous critters with wing cases the colors of Halloween—using traps made out of coffee cans and chicken flesh. Behavioral biologists are fascinated by burying beetles because of their biparental model of care: males and females prepare meaty balls from carcasses and then coöperatively raise larvae on them. I was a matchmaker, charged with setting up pairs of beetles and watching them co-parent. That summer was a dream. I lived in a community of more than a hundred scientists, students, and staff. The research station, based at the site of a deserted mining town, was a magnet for weirdos and plant lovers, naturalists and marmot chasers, flower…

“The World’s Longest Yard Sale” was founded in 1987, Sale” was founded in 1987, two years into Ronald Reagan’s second Presidential term, and currently runs for six hundred and ninety miles, from Addison, Michigan, to Gadsden, Alabama. The event is widely known as the 127 Yard Sale, because most of it takes place on U.S. Route 127, which cuts through six states like a lightning bolt. For four days, starting on the first Thursday in August, thousands of people set out their wares, eager to be unburdened by what has been taking up space, gathering dust. Professional pickers arrive with box trucks or flatbed trailers and come from as far away as California and France. Regulars book hotel rooms well ahead of time or, ever thrifty, sleep in their vehicles.…

Apachurrado. Hat run over by a truck. Heart run over by unrequited love.Estrenar. To show off what’s new gloriously.Engentada. People-overdose malaise.A estas alturas. Superb vista with age.Encabronada/o. A volatile, combustible rage.Susto. Fear that spooks the soul away.Ni modo. Wise acceptance of what fate doles.Aguante. Miraculous Mexican power to endure conquest, tragedy,politicos.Ánimo. A joyous zap of fire.Divina Providencia. Destiny with choices and spiritual interventions.Nagual. Animal twin assigned at birth.Amfibio. Person with the gift of global perspective due to living betweenborders.Alebrije. Amfibio with wings from geographical travel.Ombligo. Buried umbilical. Center of the universe.Toloache. Love concoction made with moonflower and menstrual blood.Tocaya/o. Name double. Automatic friend.Amiga hermana. Heart sister closer than kin.Un pobre infeliz. The walking wounded maimed by land mines of life.Un inocente. Mind askew since birth; blameless.Chupacabrón/a. Energy vampire disguised in…

Pain, it has been said, is the great censor, the eater of words. Pain shatters language; it remains untranslatable—not just anti-narrative but pre-narrative, calling us back to our first sounds. In the canon of illness writing, there are those accounts—Alphonse Daudet’s “In the Land of Pain” and Christina Crosby’s “A Body, Undone,” to name two—which closely observe how pain shapes a life, how it exists both within and alongside the self as antagonist and intimate companion (Nietzsche called his chronic pain his dog). Typically, however, writers do not sit long with their pain; they busy themselves with the history, the social meanings of sickness. Pain, on its own, seems to have no plot; as Emily Dickinson wrote, it “has an Element of Blank.” Perhaps it is a great anatomist of…