Innholdsfortegnelse for February 17-24, 2025 i The New Yorker

Problem: Moving wall of spikes starts inching across room toward victim, stops midway; straining sounds. • Cat toy stuck between moving wall and floor? • Electric motor disconnected from solar panels? Problem: Victim of aborted wall migration begins screaming that you are crazy, to let him out of there. • Tell victim moving wall was a joke, offer to get him piece of chocolate cake, glass of milk. Problem: Victim does not like chocolate cake or milk. • Provide victim with any type of snack or beverage he wants (within reason). • Re-start moving wall of spikes. • Tell victim, via Spike-rophone, that maybe you are crazy, but now it’s he who is going to die; laugh. Problem: Moving wall of spikes completes migration across room, but victim is not impaled. • Safety tips…

Mike White’s first job as a television writer, in the late nineties, was on the teen soap opera “Dawson’s Creek.” It was a sentimental show, leavened by sharp, self-conscious dialogue; the titular character, Dawson Leery, was a film buff who worked at a video store, which meant that he could analyze the show’s various narrative devices at least as well as viewers could. One of White’s main tasks was to prolong the sense of romantic anticipation that sustained the show, and for a time he enjoyed solving this puzzle. But it didn’t last. “I quickly couldn’t keep interested,” he said recently. “I always, whether intentionally or not, started burning down the house.” It was a sticky spring afternoon in Phuket, Thailand, and White had summoned a few dozen actors and…

1943-2024 I turned myself into myself and was Jesus.I turned Jesus into a business and wasThe pastor of a megachurch. I turnedThe church out. I’m Whitney Houston.I’m Sam Cooke. I got a squall on me.You want to see where it comes from.I am Black and comely. I am comeTo send fire on the earth … not to sendPeace, but a sword. My sword. AllThe myths are only as true as one womanCan be to another. It’s true. I’m so fineYou already know what I look like naked.You dream it every night. Everybody’sA clock, but I’m Jesse Owens. I gotNo respect for a stopwatch. I got noRespect for a stop sign. I inventedThe traffc light. I am the light of the worldWhen the sun shines and the peopleOf California breathe air…

My father drives the boat back to the cape.The wind is cold as we hike up the cliffto the wilderness around the temple.My father comes here every year, and sometimeshe invites me. He captures all on film: leafless fig trees,then the marble column engraved with Byron’s name.Graffti from 1810! he exclaims, as if it is the first time.Elegant, he says. How can something destroyed be so elegant?My father is the descendant of a nomadic tribe.First his ancestor settled, then he became Muslim.Being oppressed is our type of fun, he told me whenI was a child, and then: Never ask me about that again.Now I’m an adult, restraining the impulseto elegize what is still alive. And yet this is whatI will remember him as, I decide: the black camera steadying his…

Land Power, by Michael Albertus (Basic). In the past few centuries, land has changed hands on major scales: from nobles to commoners during the French Revolution, from Native peoples to European settlers in North America, and from the wealthy to the poor in China, Russia, and Mexico. This sweeping study examines the results of such shifts, which, the author argues, are what set countries on diverging developmental paths and produced a host of modern social ills. The seizure of land by settlers, for instance, entrenched racism, and collectivization under Communist regimes led to environmental destruction. But Albertus is optimistic. Better policies, he insists, show the power of land as “a tool for forging a more just and sustainable world.” After Lives, by Megan Marshall (Mariner). In this slim volume of…

SAFE HANDS In Michael Schulman’s account of meeting up with the actor Monica Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez in “A Complete Unknown,” the recent Bob Dylan biopic, there is some discussion about the guitar that she uses in the movie, the very same guitar that we, at Lark Street Music, in Teaneck, New Jersey, agreed to rent—it was a 1923, not a 1929, Martin 0-45—when the movie’s props department came knocking (The Talk of the Town, January 13th). We were assured that, when Barbaro was not using the instrument, it would be guarded like a nuclear football. What a shock, then, to read that Edward Norton—who plays Pete Seeger, once the moral conscience of American music—frequently grabbed the guitar from Barbaro on the set, and even intimated that she might…

The birds left Bavaria on the second Tuesday in August. They took off from an airfield, approximated a few sloppy laps, and then, such are miracles, began to follow a microlight aircraft, as though it were one of them. The contraption—as much pendulum as plane—reared and dipped as its pilot, a Tyrolian biologist in an olive-drab flight suit and amber shooting glasses, tugged on the steering levers. Behind him, in the rear seat, a young woman with a blond ponytail called to the birds, in German, through a bullhorn. As the microlight receded west into the haze, the birds chasing behind, an armada of cars and camper vans sped off in pursuit. The birds, three dozen in all, were members of a species called the northern bald ibis: funny-looking, totemic,…

Hell Week had come for the Marching Colonels. It was late July in eastern Kentucky, and a hazy sun hung over Bourbon County High School. In the parking lot behind the band room, the asphalt was hot enough to melt chewing gum. The woodwinds were gathered there in a ragged circle, waiting for the metronome to set the tempo, while the trumpets and trombones stumbled around on the football field below. Inside the school, the leader of the drum line, a knobby fifteenyear-old named Jacob Guy, scowled at the boys slouched in front of him, thin necks bent over bulky instruments. “I’m not getting any effort from anyone right now,” he said. “We’ve been over this. Count out loud! If someone isn’t marking time, it’s five pushups!” The band had…

Seth Poppel is the guy you call if you need access to a famous (or infamous) person’s high-school yearbook, stat. In September, it took Poppel and his son Jared only a few hours to locate Ryan Wesley Routh’s—Routh is the alleged foiled golf-course assassin of Donald Trump—and sell his adolescent portrait to the Daily Mail for about a hundred bucks. Of course, they also have a copy of Trump’s yearbook, in which a candid bears the honorific “Ladies’ Man.” The first floor of Poppel’s house, in Seattle, is home to some eighteen thousand yearbooks; he and his wife, Danine, advertise their holdings as “the original and largest library of high school yearbooks of the stars.” Perusing it, you can learn a lot. Katie Couric and Blake Lively were cheerleaders, sure—but…

Harold Wallace Ross, who founded The New Yorker a century ago, had a rule that no one should ever write about writers, because writers are boring, except to other writers, and he figured the same was true about editors—only it was more true, because no one should even know an editor’s name. That didn’t stop William Shawn, who became the editor of the magazine after Ross’s death, in 1951, from naming one of his kids Wallace, for Ross. It didn’t stop Ann Beattie from naming her car Roger, for her New Yorker editor, Roger Angell. And for all I know there are Chihuahuas and nieces and motorcycles at large named Bob Gottlieb, the magazine’s editor from 1987 to 1992; Lady Evans, the titled name of Tina Brown, its editor from…

My friend Sukrit invited me to India. His mother lived in Delhi. He said I should get out of England and give my eyes something new to look at. He wouldn’t be there—he was trapped in a biology lab at Stanford—but his mother would look after me. I could stay as long as I liked. The invitation confused me. I could not imagine why I would go to a country that was not my country, to live with a mother who was not my mother. I pawed at the idea, then dismissed it. I did not want to go east; I wanted to go west. I was waiting for my family to reclaim me. I don’t know where the hope lived or what it lived on. I had been estranged…

Gatesville, Texas, a prison town a hundred miles north of Austin, has six correctional facilities, five of them housing female inmates. On the widely spaced campuses, each surrounded by towering chain-link fences topped with razor wire, women in white uniforms can be seen mowing grass. In the spring, nearby pastures fill with wildflowers unseen by the inmates. On a nice day, you might hear the guards taking target practice. The Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit is a single-story red brick complex set on a hundred acres. It used to be called Mountain View, for the modest green hills on the horizon. In the fall of 2014, Ronnie Lastovica, a Catholic deacon, assisted in a Mass for the prison’s general population. Afterward, an officer told him, “There’s an offender on death row…

I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being. Sometimes we live for years with yearnings that we cannot name. Until a crack appears in the sky and widens and reveals us to ourselves, as the pandemic did, because it was during lockdown that I began to sift through my life and give names to things long unnamed. I vowed at first to make the most of this collective sequestering: if I had no choice but to stay indoors, then I would oil my thinning edges every day, drink eight tall glasses of water, jog on the treadmill, sleep long, luxurious hours, and pat rich serums on my skin. But, only days in, I was spiralling in a bottomless well. Words and warnings swirled and spun,…

Back in my footloose twenties, I lived for a year in Costa Rica, where I worked at a school in the central highlands and worked even harder, by reluctant necessity, at overcoming my lifelong horror of crawly things. Before the Costa Rican tourism board comes after me, I will say, in defense of that part of the world, that I have never lived anywhere else so ecologically magnificent. Every day, I commuted to work on a trail lined with ferns and bromeliads and the enchanted fortresses of strangler figs, while twotoed sloths lolled overhead and butterflies as big as greeting cards opened their dull-brown wings to reveal a blue as brilliant as the cloak of the Virgin Mary. At night, the moon cast shadows of avocado trees along the dirt…

The first time he tried to kill red, he brought a box cutter. The wounds were almost fifty feet long combined—clearly, he didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Not that the failed painter Gerard Jan van Bladeren had much of a plan when he visited Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in the spring of 1986, but later, when asked why he’d done it, he was emphatic about hating abstract art. He seems to have hated it for the same reasons that lots of people do: it was lazy, childish, ugly, offensively simple, meant nothing beyond what it literally was. Which, given that the canvas he chose—Barnett Newman’s “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III”—is literally a hundred and forty square feet of red oil paint, flanked by two thin stripes,…

It is customary for a person in a situation like mine—preparing to hold forth on “Saturday Night Live”—to divulge which performers would make his ideal cast. The gist of the exercise is to admit particulars of taste, or, more harrowingly, depending on how much the show informed his early identity, to paint a personality portrait before going on to issue judgments. Like so many other once cool, now kooky members of Generation X, the venerable comedy cabaret is fifty years old. Half a century is just long enough for individual details to age into overarching symbols, for casts and one’s preferences among them to amount to a generational statement. So, just for the record, here goes: For his dead-eyed gaze and surprisingly precise physicality, for his ludicrous, barking way of…