Innholdsfortegnelse for November 18, 2024 i The New Yorker

Rachel Maddow (“Reprise,” p. 31) received a duPont-Columbia Award for her podcast “Bag Man,” about Spiro Agnew. Her latest book is “Prequel,” on the fight against fascism in the U.S. Kelefa Sanneh (“Reprise,” p. 44) has been a staff writer since 2008. He is the author of “Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.” Rebecca Mead (“Color Instinct,” p. 20), a staff writer since 1997, most recently published “Home/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return.” Timothy Snyder (“Reprise,” p. 33) is a professor of history at Yale University. His latest book, “On Freedom,” came out in September. Kira Garcia (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 27) has contributed humor to The New Yorker since 2015. Camille Rankine (Poem, p. 22), the author of the poetry collection “Incorrect Merciful Impulses,”…

At the charmless lower edge of Herald Square is a small brick building with a slice shop on the ground floor and a separate entrance that leads to the building’s upper levels. An unobtrusive little sign reads “Sendo.” The sushi restaurant, up a flight of stairs behind an unmarked door, takes no reservations and has only twelve counter seats. All the secrecy and understa-tedness might make a person think she were in for something rarefied and, most likely, terribly expensive. Happily, Sendo offers something more reasonable. It bills itself as a “Tokyo-style” sushi-ya and offers three omakase options, the priciest of which costs just forty-seven dollars. Dinner might run as little as thirty minutes, but, with a few glasses of sake and some à-la-carte nigiri or hand rolls added on,…

So, you’ve suffered a political defeat with no practical recourse. What to do? Logic would say: accept it and move on. Another option is to hold on to it forever. What better opportunity to discover reserves of pettiness, of grudge-holding, of curmudgeonly endurance? New York has long been a haven for the champions of lost causes: the retired cop who has been smoking in parks and airports for twenty years to protest a Bloombergera cigarette ban; the bodega-association president who refuses to move on from plastic bags, despite a citywide prohibition. Recently, a group of old men assembled outside the Trump hotel on Central Park West to agitate for more public toilets. (Among their chants: “Two, four, six, eight, we just want to urinate!”) Or take a case of intra-governmental…

It was wrong to treat Donald Trump as a series of absences. The standard critique has always been that he lacks something that we imagine to be a prerequisite for high office: breeding, or grammar, or diplomacy, or business acumen, or love of country. And he does lack all those things, as well as pretty much any conventional bourgeois virtue you can name. Trump’s skills and talents go unrecognized when we see him as a conventional candidate—a person who seeks to explain policies that might improve lives, or who works to create the appearance of empathy. Yet this is our shortcoming more than his. Trump has always been a presence, not an absence: the presence of fascism. What does this mean? When the Soviets called their enemies “fascists,” they turned…

Two and a half years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which for nearly fifty years had guaranteed Americans’ right to make their own decisions about abortion, voters reëlected Donald Trump—the President who had packed the Court with the Justices who took that right away. Many observers expected women voters to lead a defeat of Trump, in what some had called the “Hell hath no fury” election. But although there was a sizable Democratic advantage with women on November 5th, it appears to have been smaller than it was for either Joe Biden, four years earlier, or Hillary Clinton, in 2016. Exit polls indicate that the majority of voters, including fifty-three per cent of white women, spurned Kamala Harris, a female candidate who had made the restoration of…

Eight years ago, at the dawn of the Donald Trump era, Toni Morrison spoke for many liberals when she described his election as a reaction to the “collapse of white privilege.” In an essay called “Making America White Again,” published in this magazine, Morrison argued that in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s Presidency many white people felt driven to “keep alive the perception of white superiority.” And she lamented “how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump.” This vision of Trump as the leader of an aggrieved white America took hold broadly during the early years of his term, boosted by the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, scarcely six months after he took office. Some of…

On the morning after Donald Trump was elected President for the first time, in 2016, the White House was a funereal place. For weeks, Barack Obama and his inner circle had worried about Hillary Clinton’s campaign—the failure to visit crucial battleground states with sufficient frequency, the snooty crack about “deplorables,” James Comey’s last-minute letter to Congress about her e-mails. But, for all the troubling signs and missteps, they were optimistic that, in a tighter-than-expected race, America would elect the first woman to the Presidency. A legacy, a continuity, would prevail. Trump’s shocking victory shattered those assumptions, and that day, as many young, stricken staffers crowded into the Oval Office, Obama tried to raise their morale and convince them that the election of an aspiring autocrat did not spell the end…

The rapper Eve, who has just published a memoir, stopped at Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books, in Philadelphia, for a caffeine boost the other day. While she waited for a matcha latte, she nearly bumped into a large in-store display of the book’s cover, which features a sultry picture of her in a lowcut black blouse that reveals her famous paw-print chest tattoos. In the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, Eve was a member of the Ruff Ryders, a hip-hop ensemble, led by DMX, whose music videos were full of motorbikes and pit bulls. In her hit with the group “What Ya Want,” she declared herself “the illest, vicious pit bull in a skirt (grrrr).” At the bookstore, Eve, who is now forty-six, scanned more corgi than pit bull, wearing…

It wasn’t on my list of likely occurrences that a nostalgic and sentimental holiday movie would provide some of the year’s sharpest characterizations on film and also boast a strikingly original narrative form. But this paradoxical blend turns out to make perfect sense in “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” a finely crafted and achingly romantic memory piece, directed by Tyler Thomas Taormina. It’s set sometime in the two-thousands in the fictional Long Island town of the title, where members of a large Italian American family, the Balsanos, come together to celebrate the holiday. Written by Taormina and Eric Berger, who both grew up on Long Island and have been friends since middle school, the movie checks the genre’s boxes—long-awaited reunions and poignant separations, hearty festivity and romantic intimacy—but it does…

On the bright and beautiful Wednesday morning after Election Night, downtown Washington, D.C., seemed a bit out of sorts. Shops were boarded up; eight-foot temporary fencing surrounded the White House grounds; haggard commuters said things like “Not great!” into their phones. But the White House itself, despite an ungainly wooden construction project out front, looked as stately and gorgeous as ever. A group of visitors who had registered weeks earlier for a tour, perhaps hoping to bask in electoral glory, filed through security. In the windowed East Colonnade, a video kiosk welcomed them. “I’m Jill Biden, the First Lady of the United States,” the video said. A man in a suit showing a couple around pointed toward the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. Presumably referring to Melania Trump’s renovation of the Rose…

When Donald Trump ran for President in 2016, the pro-life movement helped carry him to victory. He promised to appoint Justices who would overturn the constitutional right to an abortion established in Roe v. Wade. He followed through, and they delivered, with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the decision was politically toxic for Republicans. After the Party performed poorly in the 2022 midterms, Trump blamed the losses on prolife candidates. According to Gallup, six in ten Americans describe Dobbs as a “bad thing,” and the percentage of people who say they’re pro-choice is the highest it’s been in decades. In order to win the election in 2024, Trump sidelined the pro-life movement. At the Republican National Convention, Trump’s allies all but removed abortion…

If nothing else, it was an insult to historians. At the change of each Administration, C-SPAN conducts a broad survey of Presidential scholars, asking them to rank every Commander-in-Chief across ten aspects of leadership. The 2021 survey, published less than six months after the January 6th mob attack on Congress, ranked Donald Trump among the worst Presidents in U.S. history. Never before had a modern President had his name down in the dregs among feckless forgotten Whigs (poor William Henry Harrison’s term lasted only thirty-two days) and impeached scoundrels like Andrew Johnson. Given the shocking, violent end of Trump’s first term, that scalding snap judgment in 2021 was no surprise. The following year, the Siena College survey of Presidential scholars also listed Trump among the worst Presidents ever. In this…

Last weekend, with the testing of liberal democracy days away, I found myself in Charleston, South Carolina, and decided to go out to Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began, and the last greatest threat to the possibility of something recognizably like a free country took place. Charleston is a city with a double consciousness, even more acute than most American places: it is among the prettiest and most welcoming of cities, with a unique density of charming houses—antebellum in appearance, though almost all postbellum in creation—that makes even the nicest parts of Beacon Hill, in Boston, or Society Hill, in Philadelphia, seem meagre. The houses turn shyly away from the street, their verandas or porches facing sideways, as though keeping a secret. It was also, of course, the commercial…

On Election Night, my mother used to bring out her Singer skirt marker and plonk it on the coffee table in front of the television while we were watching the returns. Then she’d take off her shoes and climb on top of the table. Hemlines change about every four years, and taking up or letting down skirts is such a boring chore that it’s the kind of thing best done while watching television. But it also requires a fair bit of attention—squinting to thread a needle, tying a knot and tucking its tail into a seam—so it’s even better done while watching something on television that you have no real interest in watching. My mother liked the idea of not having to keep track of time, liked the indexing of…

As several friends and I knocked on the front doors of registered Democrats’ homes around Allentown, Pennsylvania, the weekend before the election, and in Northeast Philadelphia on Election Day, there were moments that felt emblematic. The white couple whose toddler, wearing a rainbow “Girl Power” T-shirt, blew kisses to us from her doorway before the family headed out to vote for Kamala Harris. The middle-aged Latino man who turned away from the Eagles game on his TV to inform us that he was looking forward to having a female President, because “men can’t get anything done.” The woman of Central American descent who said that she’d never felt like an outsider until Donald Trump was elected in 2016, at which point people began making pointed comments, in her presence, about…

To get a sense of what an art form is all about, study the refreshments. Book readings: the refrigerated black trays of carrots and chewy-plastic cheeses. Gallery openings: the flutes of warmish bubbles, dispassionately sipped. How you’re supposed to consume food and drink at these events mirrors how you’re supposed to consume the art—pensively, daintily, the brain signing off on the senses’ input. The New York Tattoo Convention, held during three days in October, just gives you candy. Beer and coffee sold at the front, tacos and burgers in food trucks outside, but free candy for all—bowls of it, spread across hundreds of tables. Yes, this was around Halloween. But we are talking about a community where people dress up in permanent ink costumes that could be a butterfly or…

ACROSS 1 Subject of a wild anecdote 9 Dorm mentors, for short 12 Etymological relative of “bodega” and “apothecary” 13 Part of a sword 14 Constant 15 “Same here!” 16 Shoe that shares its name with an animal 17 Name that’s also a Spanish word for a seasoning 18 Postal phrase with a two-letter abbreviation separated by a slash 19 Hat material 21 Component of most rushing plays in football 22 Marvel villain who asks a museum director, “How do you think your ancestors got these? You think they paid a fair price?” 26 Beauty influencer and co-founder of the life-style brand FORVR MOOD 29 Start to appear? 32 Sport originally known as hotdogging 35 Mauna ___ (Hawaii’s highest peak) 36 Future resident 37 Big names 40 Climbing support? 42…