Innholdsfortegnelse for September 23, 2024 i The New Yorker

At Paquita, a tea shop in the West Village, Billy Corgan, the Smashing Pumpkins’ fifty-seven-year-old front man and main songwriter, asked if there was a pu-erh, a fermented Chinese tea, that he could try. “I’m a tea snob,” he said. In Paris recently he had a pu-erh that had been fermented for sixty years. “It was like I was drinking pure earth!” The server suggested a sticky-rice puerh. Corgan tipped the brim of the Cubs baseball cap that sat atop his gleaming pate. “I’ll try that,” he said. The artist’s entourage on that sunny morning included his two children, Augustus and Clementine, eight and six, and the Pumpkins’ tour manager, who sat close by. The kids were travelling with the Pumpkins on the band’s stadium tour with Green Day, the…

If New York has taught me anythingit’s indifference. I have an eternal feelingand forget it in a week. Nothing lasts.I walk and am overcome by orangespiled high in a cart. By kids playing street ballin Tompkins while the small park dogs cheer.Getting caught up in a stranger with a crow tattooor a butcher, unloading rosy carcasses on 9th Street.We all roll on, each with our little tragedies,our shrunken attentions. At Lucien,I order half a dream chicken, I mean reallythe severed bird of my dreams, and accidentally dipmy black hair in the triangle of my neighbor’smartini glass. I smell like vermouth for the eveningand the next day bargain for fifty samosasat the deli, stack them in my freezeruntil it looks like my childhood.And there are paintings, yellow and otherwise.And a carton…

On the Autobahn outside Frankfurt. November. The fields were covered in a thin sheet of snow. Chunks of gray sludge clung to the wheel guards of trucks. Tires ripped along the road. I had my thumb out. I was wearing an overcoat that I’d got from an uncle who was twice my size; it fit me like a house. When a car pulled up, it felt like a bright moment of luck, but then the driver got out and pointed a gun at me. Polizei. He was wearing a dark-green leather jacket, and I remember him being shorter than me, stocky and overpowering. He was bald, and maybe that reminded me of my father. His eyes were full of aggression. He stood with his gun pointing at my face, and…

SCHOOL’S OUT I want to thank Alec MacGillis for reporting on the closure of the Dr. Walter Cooper Academy—also known as School 10—in Rochester, New York (“The Last Day,” September 2nd). I live around the corner from School 10, and, until it closed, a highlight of my routine was walking my dog over there in the mornings. I was friendly with the crossing guard and the families who live nearby and walked. In all weather, smiling staff members were outside greeting kids, who poured off buses and cheerfully shouted things at me like “Your dog is so cute!” A school like that is a source of pride for anyone who lives near it. As MacGillis makes clear, the Rochester City School District is responding to real, widespread problems. But it…

What does conspicuous consumption smell like? On a December afternoon in 2013, the Parisian perfumer Francis Kurkdjian was scheduled to meet with the renowned French crystal manufacturer Baccarat at the company’s chandelier-crammed headquarters, near the Arc de Triomphe. The C.E.O. at the time, Daniela Riccardi, had commissioned Kurkdjian to create a limited-edition fragrance to mark the company’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. Baccarat planned to produce two hundred and fifty diamond-cut crystal flacons of the new perfume, priced at three thousand euros each, and wanted the scent to reflect the quality and opulence of its vessel. Kurkdjian (pronounced “cur-zsan”) is a fifty-five-year-old of Armenian descent, with close-cropped hair, smooth manicured hands, and Clooneyesque salt-and-pepper stubble. During three decades in the luxury-fragrance industry, he has created such hits as Narciso Rodriguez for Her, Burberry…

They don’t make them like Pamela Harriman anymore. On balance, that’s probably a good thing. Not that there isn’t much to admire or, at least, marvel at in the life of the mid-century paramour turned Democratic Party power broker—her talent for keeping strategically chosen lovers as lifelong friends, her zest for reinventing herself, her unquenchable optimism about her party’s prospects, her capacity for leading a remarkably consequential public life without ever holding an actual public post, or even really a job, until she was seventy-three. But Harriman’s path to power—greased by aristocratic privilege, fuelled by sexual alliances, and, for both reasons, not exactly transparent—isn’t one you’d recommend to an ambitious woman today, either for her own sake or, not to sound too stuffy about it, for democracy’s. Sonia Purnell’s new…

After love, money is perhaps the novel’s favorite subject, especially the novel in its most hopelessly (or, depending on your taste, endearingly) bourgeois form. Whether handled with Trollope’s irony or Fitzgerald’s romanticism, money in fiction challenges love’s delusion that our lives are defined by anything other than the hardest of practicalities, and that’s one reason money versus love is a venerable theme. But what if the two ostensibly opposing forces collapsed into each other, forming a sort of black hole? That would be enough to drive anyone around the bend, which is just what happens to Brooke Orr, the protagonist of Rumaan Alam’s fourth novel, “Entitlement.” Alam is best known for “Leave the World Behind” (adapted into a film by Netflix), in which a Black couple bearing news of a…

SEPTEMBER 18 – 24, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. In the Museum at F.I.T.’s new exhibition, “Africa’s Fashion Diaspora” (Sept. 18-Dec. 29), the curator Elizabeth Way demonstrates how the African diaspora, which extends from the continent to Brooklyn and the rest of the world, is associated with not so much a singular aesthetic as a different aesthetic. This wonderful survey includes such scintillating game changers as Madame Willi Posey—the mother of the artist Faith Ringgold, represented here by a flowing tunic from the early nineteen-seventies—and the incredible innovator Ann Lowe, who created the wedding dress of a young woman named Jacqueline Bouvier, for her marriage to John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. congressman, on that long ago morning in Rhode Island.—Hilton Als ABOUT TOWN DANCE…

There are places in California that can make a person feel in tune with geological time, newly alert, on the brink of something cosmic. Walnut Creek, an affluent suburb east of San Francisco, is not one of them. Nestled in the foothills of stately Mt. Diablo, the city’s quaint downtown is buffeted by chain retailers and big-box stores. On a recent summer morning, I took the train there to meet Grant Petersen, the bicycle designer, writer, and founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works. Petersen has become famous for making beautiful bikes, using materials and components that his industry has mostly abandoned, and for promoting a vision of cycling that is low-key, functional, anti-car, and anti-corporate. He has polarizing opinions and an outsized influence. Sensing that it would be uncouth to arrive…

even though it is only early September& in the strip mall with the Target where I went to get a sympathy cardfor my sister-in-law whose mom died & wound up instead getting a six-packof sympathy cards because lately my friends’ parents keep dying I noticedthat the newly shuttered Bed Bath & Beyond next to the also vacatedBuy Buy Baby had just reopened as a Halloween City, & it is alwaystoo soon for retail holidays, candy in bulk turning up in the seasonalaisle in late August right after school supplies are moved to clearance.Sacred time is indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable, wrote Eliade& I’m not sure what qualifies as sacred when I am profane, or, rather, historical,or just not-transcendent but I still refuse to be intimidated by timeeven when, at the head…

Twenty Years, by Sune Engel Rasmussen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).This foreign correspondent’s account of the two decades following the American invasion of Afghanistan uses a kaleidoscope of individual stories to portray how the country was “hollowed out” by “waste, fraud, price gouging, and profiteering.” Two subjects in particular come to the fore: Zahra, an Afghan refugee who returns from Iran after the Taliban is ousted; and Omari, a Talib, who is as motivated by religion as he is by the brutality of the U.S. military. As Rasmussen interweaves the war and his subjects’ stories, he shows how historical events intrude on the quotidian, and examines a foreign intervention in which, he writes, “lessons were rarely learned, mistakes often repeated.” The Wisdom of Sheep, by Rosamund Young (Penguin). This meditative book reflects on…

If, on a cool weekend morning in autumn, you happen to be watching “College GameDay,” on ESPN, don’t worry about figuring out which of the broadcasters behind the improbably long desk is Pat McAfee. He’s the one with the roast-pork tan, his hair cut high and tight, likely tieless among his more businesslike colleagues. The rest of the on-air crew—Lee Corso, Rece Davis, Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard, and, newly, the former University of Alabama coach Nick Saban—tend to look and dress and talk like participants in an old-school Republican-primary debate. McAfee, though, favors windowpane checks on his jackets and a slip of chest poking out from behind his two or three open buttons. If the others are politicians, he’s the cool-coded megachurch pastor who sometimes acts as their spiritual adviser.…