Innholdsfortegnelse for September 30, 2024 i The New Yorker

The actor Sebastian Stan glanced approvingly at the neon signage and old-school menus at the Pearl Diner, in the financial district, the other day. He’s lived in and near New York since he was twelve—around the time Donald Trump swapped his first wife, Ivana, for Marla Maples—and has watched the city evolve. “It’s funny. It’s changed, but it’s also the same buildings,” he said. “And then you’re, like, ‘The buildings are there, but you are not the same.’” Stan took off a white ball cap and ordered coffee with cream; he was jetlagged, fresh from the Deauville American Film Festival, where he’d received the Hollywood Rising-Star Award. “Rising” is a stretch for the forty-two-year-old, who’s appeared in a dozen Marvel projects, but Stan has lately reached a different echelon. In…

One of the few Jewish dynasties in American politics is the Levin family of greater Detroit. They may not have the national name recognition of the Cuomos or the Kennedys, but in Michigan politics, from generation to generation, they have been impossible to miss. The federal courthouse in Detroit is named for Judge Theodore Levin, who served from the mid-nineteen-forties to the volatile end of the sixties. The Port Authority building fronting the Detroit River is named for Carl Levin, who represented Michigan in the U.S. Senate for three dozen years and was eulogized in the Times, in 2021, as the “scourge of corporate America.” Carl’s brother Sander (Sandy) Levin, now in his nineties, retired from the House of Representatives in 2019, and was succeeded by his son Andy Levin,…

Lily wants to live in the old days. Her mom, Debra, says, No, you don’t, because in the old days all women did was cook and sew and die in childbirth, but Lily still wishes she could travel back in time. Her older sister, Sophie, says, Stop, you just hate school, and that is true. Lily hates sixth grade. However, Lily hates other things, too, like parties and kissing games and boys keeping score. Guess what? Sophie says. There were parties in the old days, too. Sophie is more pragmatic than Lily. Debra says so on the phone late at night. Lily is more anxious, Debra says. Then Lily thinks, Am I? She sits up in bed and strains to hear her mom’s voice downstairs. “Yeah,” her mom says. “Yeah,…

All republican governments live in fear of the man on the white horse. A republican government, like ours, is a system of rules designed to prevent any one person or faction from hijacking the democratic decision-making process. The person on the white horse doesn’t respect the democratic decision-making process, is not a product of that process, and has no stake in its survival. The person on the white horse rides into town and says, Who needs rules? Let me take care of everything. And the public, glad to simplify life, or possibly dazzled by the promise of a glorious future, lets the rider take charge. Rules that no one enforces are just so much paper. But republican governments also live in fear of the man on the street. Political decisions…

In 2013, a mysterious producer named Sophie released “Bipp,” a minimalist club track that sounded like it had been formed on another planet and squeezed through hyperdrive before arriving on ours. “Bipp” was black space latticed with radically strange objects: a rubbery squelch of a bass beat, a melodic line like a laser coated in latex, percussive punctuation marks that seemed to morph from plasma into steel. Sophie continued releasing singles, each one accompanied by a 3-D rendering of a ladderless slide. The objects looked the way the songs sounded, like uncanny candy—slick, chemical, jaw-breakingly hard. At the time, not much was known about Sophie. She was associated with the collective PC Music, which specialized in the aggressively, gleefully synthetic. With the producer A. G. Cook, Sophie put out a…

GEOLOGY ROCKS I enjoyed Kathryn Schulz’s review of the geologist Marcia Bjornerud’s autobiography, “Turning to Stone” (Books, September 2nd). As a retired geologist, I can personally attest to the value of thinking about deep time when assaulted by daily annoyances. It is perhaps inconsistent with this perspective that I take issue with a small detail in Schulz’s otherwise lucid article: in the penultimate paragraph, in reference to the human mind’s ability to “represent scales of existence wildly different from its own,” she lists, as an example, “the dark side of the moon.” I understand the idiomatic appeal, but, in literal terms, the moon does not have a dark side. We only ever see one side of the moon—it is tidally locked to the Earth—but both sides receive roughly equal amounts…

of dying, from hemlock unbeknownstto me in my garden.Unbeknownst, I picked a prettyhemlock bouquet,mistaking it for wildcarrot, inhalingenough of its noxious powdersto drop a donkey but not a god,and not a philosopher,who must drink it as a potion from a cup. A poet? Who knows.Who can claim to be a poet?My Socrates told me to nevermake that claim, it paints you as a hotdog, a peabrain. Nonetheless,I sickened from the bouquet,my legs heavy, my lungs flimsy and sad.On the third day I rose and returnedto the garden, where I snipped a rose. Unbeknownst, a thornsnagged me, and another, and another.…

In pearly grays the stars of my parents’ dayClimb pixels of noir stairwells, in my haven.Or, shades of my own time: luminous MastroianniThe gay broadcaster fired by Fascisti, radiantLoren the betrayed and worn-down mother of six.It’s the day Hitler arrives by train to Rome.The movie shows real newsreels. Evil charactersNever scared me—desirous Joan FontaineA sly killer in “Ivy,” Charles Laughton breedingHuman-animals in “The Island of Lost Souls,”Monsters, velociraptors. It’s the joyful facesIn certain crowd scenes that can make me hideOr hide my eyes at something deeper than art.The right-wing hip-hop star makes me rememberMy mother teaching us kids about the badOr good politics of actors. Adolphe MenjouWas bad, Edward G. Robinson was good.Did it ever matter? Did Maurice ChevalierCollaborate with Nazis, or not? For her,His haircut settled the question. In…

Life and Death of the American Worker, by Alice Driver (One Signal). This intimately reported chronicle focusses on the migrant workers who staff Tyson Foods chicken plants in Arkansas. Their jobs, Driver reports, come with significant physical risks: they suffer from carpal-tunnel syndrome, chemical poisoning, and U.T.I.s (thanks to limited bathroom breaks). Because many workers process more than a hundred birds per minute, accidents are common: an average of twenty-seven workers a day are hospitalized, and some undergo amputations. According to Driver, Tyson intimidates workers who speak up, and the conditions at their plants devolved further during the pandemic. (Tyson representatives denied many of the claims in the book.) Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, by Katherine Bucknell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A masterly biography of the author of “Goodbye to Berlin” and “A…

The first thing that strikes you about Mia Farrow in Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” now at the Booth, is her voice. Farrow is playing a naïve, rather unfulfilled empty nester named Sharon, who lives in a huge house in Iowa and spends her days dreamily phoning a faraway son. Speech tends to drift out of her, as airy and capricious as dandelion fluff. When Sharon is surprised, Farrow squeezes her voice into an adorable whistling squeak. Every time she says “Oh?” in ditzy confusion—if, say, she’s just found her new tenant rolling a joint in the kitchen—it sounds like someone sat on a rubber duck. The central joke in Silverman’s odd-couple bauble, originally from 2015 and directed here by Jack O’Brien, is that Sharon’s new roommate is Patti LuPone. Technically,…

SEPTEMBER 25 – OCTOBER 1, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. As a student at Sarah Lawrence, in the nineteen-sixties, Meredith Monk began making work that was sound-based—Monk’s focal point has always been the voice, and she has done brilliant work around breathing and repetition, while forging a path that stripped theatre of distracting artifice. Now the ever astonishing eighty-one-year-old vocalist, composer, theatre-maker, and performer has created “Indra’s Net” (at the Park Avenue Armory, Sept. 23-Oct. 6), which takes its title from a Buddhist metaphor for infinite interconnectedness and includes sixteen vocalists, a sixteen-piece chamber orchestra, and two video installations. As always, Monk emphasizes the joy and the necessity of the collective, the sweet and enlivening feeling of your comrade’s breath grazing your neck and changing…

When Adam Dressner was twelve, he moved with his father to a two-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of a building in the Peter Cooper Village housing development, in Manhattan. His dad has moved out, but Dressner, now forty-four, has left only three times: to go college, graduate school, and law school. In the summer of 2009, before starting as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell, he went to the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum and emerged a changed man. He loved making art as a kid, but gave up on painting after a failed foray into oils. Now, with the assistance of “Oil Painting for Dummies,” he threw himself into the medium again, only to discover that an eighty-hour workweek left little time for the easel. Shortly…

Rasmus Munk, the celebrated Danish chef, has such memorable eyes—they are a piercing blue, and often bloodshot—that when a waiter at Alchemist, his restaurant in Copenhagen, served me an eyeball, I recognized it immediately. The iris was flecked with brown and rimmed with red, and the eye stared up at me unwaveringly, at least until I picked up a long-handled spoon and dug in. It had a gleaming gelatinous surface and was both salty and creamy, with a surprisingly nubby texture and a distinct taste of—what was it?—shrimp. Alchemist, which opened in its current incarnation in 2019, in a waterfront warehouse district of the city, is one of the most sought-after reservations in the fine-dining world. Less than a year after opening, it was awarded two Michelin stars for a…

Luigi Ciotti was pacing by the open gates of a low concrete building in Turin. He had been waiting for an hour. In front of him was a wide street smelling of diesel and flanked by the bollards that keep Italians from parking where they shouldn’t. With his shrewd eyes, flowing white hair, untucked black shirt, and black pants, Ciotti could have been a theatre director waiting for his lead to show up. Rather, he was a priest. He chatted with three bodyguards, who stood just behind him, their eyes fixed on the road. Finally, a Fiat 500 approached. As soon as the car cleared the gates, the security detail slammed them shut. In the back of the vehicle was a young woman in a pink Converse sweatshirt and leopard-print…

When my parents moved from Lima, Peru, to the United States, in 1980, they brought with them the basics: three children, several suitcases of clothes, some books, and a small but cherished collection of vinyl. We were not a particularly musical family—no one played an instrument, no one sang—but the records came with us because it was simply inconceivable that they would not. Like most family record collections from those years, ours was diminished by the arrival of CDs, by garage sales and the occasional cull. Through it all, though, my parents’ Peruvian LPs remained—it’s not surprising, I suppose, that a record of the criollo singer Eva Ayllón didn’t sell at an Alabama garage sale in 1992—and those were the ones I eventually inherited, or appropriated, depending on your point…

When Alan Hollinghurst published his scandalizing début, “The Swimming-Pool Library,” in 1988, the lives of gay men were hardly virgin territory for the English novel. Some years earlier, as a graduate student at Oxford, Hollinghurst had written a master’s thesis on “the creative uses of homosexuality” in three of his more guarded forebears—E. M. Forster, Ronald Firbank, and L. P. Hartley—though there the emphasis, naturally enough, fell on “the stimulating effects of constraint.” “The Swimming-Pool Library,” by contrast, was a work of revolutionary candor that laid bare, in exquisite prose, the cut and thrust of queer existence in early-eighties London. Its attitude toward the euphemistic delicacy of a previous era is nicely encapsulated in a moment from a novel that Hollinghurst came out with three decades later, “The Sparsholt…

The opening minutes of “La Maison,” a new succession drama on Apple TV+, offer up an irresistible depiction of the pride that goeth before a fall. Vincent Ledu (Lambert Wilson), the graying head of a Parisian fashion house that bears his name, is about to receive France’s highest civilian honor, but his grasp of his craft is slipping: a wealthy Korean bride whose patronage he urgently needs is proving resistant to his usual charms. After storming out of their meeting, he runs into his younger brother, Victor (Pierre Deladon-champs), whom he exiled from the firm years ago. “Vincent Ledu descends from Olympus to play salesman,” Victor says coolly. “Precisely,” Vincent replies. “And now I’m heading back up.” A day later, when a video goes viral of Vincent calling his…