Innholdsfortegnelse for March 3, 2025 i The New Yorker

In March, Judy Collins, the ethereal, blue-eyed folksinging legend, will celebrate her eighty-fifth birthday with a concert at Town Hall and the release of a book. “I tell people that I’m eighty-five and it’s the new twenty-seven,” Collins said on a recent morning. Her hair is now short and white, her vibe eternally beatific. She showed a visitor around her sunny, colorful, maximalist Upper West Side apartment, where she has lived for fifty-five years, full of evidence of a robust and Zelig-like life. In a hallway, a photograph of Collins on the set of “Sesame Street,” with the Muppets (“I sang an aria with Snuffeupagus”), and gold and platinum records, framed; in the dining room, an Al Hirschfeld portrait of Collins in “Peer Gynt” at the Delacorte, in 1969, wide-eyed…

Who was he, why was he the one assignedTo drive me from the house to the cemetery? The two of us in his Buick or Packard or someColonial make, De Soto, Pontiac, Plymouth. I don’t remember who had died, what auntOr uncle or cousin we were going to bury. I don’t know why he spent the hour-long driveLecturing a twelve-year-old about the faults Of Peggy Lee, whose singing he denounced.I barely knew who she was. Maybe he’d heard That I was “musical.” I do rememberThat was the year new cars were all bright colors: Two-toned vermillion and baby blue, heraldicWing shapes with edgy arabesques of chrome. Some other uncle explained that ten years afterThe war it was to hell with black and khaki, People want spices. On the road to…

Between the ages of fourteen and fifty-four Nadia does not for a single minute not have an admirer or a boyfriend or a better half. Then Drew, her husband, disappears forever. Each minute of the next six months is a thicket. The thickets contain police officers, undertakers, insurance agents, attorneys, claims adjusters, benefits counsellors, human-resources workers, notaries, friends. Unforeseen names—Emmaline Cortez, Omar Eaton, Dalary Mason, Clyde Bender—become very important then very unimportant. Somewhere in there her two daughters fly in from and back to their respective lives, in Chicago and Asheville. In early January, Nadia emerges from the last thicket. She drives up to Montreal. Her consciousness has changed—it, the consciousness, has made her more optically alert. She notices, first, that a beautiful spare brownness has befallen the forests; and,…

The World After Gaza, by Pankaj Mishra (Penguin Press). This swirling intellectual history places the Israeli regime’s invocation of the Holocaust to justify its assault on Gaza in a provocative global context. Noting that, “for an overwhelming majority of the world’s population,” decolonization—rather than the Holocaust—was “the central event of the twentieth century,” Mishra draws parallels between militant Zionists, Hindu nationalists, and even white supremacists, stressing the way that “siege mentalities come to be mutually intensifying.” He fears that the “survivalist psychosis” of Israel’s leaders may portend “the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world.” Instead, he urges, we must seek “affiliations that cut across politically defined borders” and a recognition of “indivisible suffering” and shared humanity. Cold Kitchen, by Caroline Eden (Bloomsbury). Primarily unfolding in the kitchen of an Edinburgh apartment,…

Given the number of murders that have taken place at White Lotus resorts since the HBO series began, in 2021, one wonders why visitors continue to flock to them. It’s clear that at least some of the guests at their Thailand property—the setting of the third season, which premièred on February 16th—haven’t done their research: Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), a compulsively plugged-in finance guy, only learns of the hotel’s phone-free “digital detox” policy when he and his family arrive. But being at “the antipodal, opposite end of the Earth,” initially a torment to him, is exactly the appeal for other travellers. Some of them decide to stay forever. Faced with one of these long-term residents, Timothy recalls an ominous adage: “Anyone who moves to Thailand is either looking for something…

CUTTING ROOM Michael Schulman’s piece about Charlotte Zwerin was an important reminder of the overlooked role of women editors in the history of film (“Charlotte’s Place,” January 27th). The first great documentary, Dziga Vertov’s silent city-symphony “Man with a Movie Camera” (1929), slyly undercuts its title—and its male director—by observing the painstaking labor of its editor, Elizaveta Svilova, Vertov’s wife. She is shown whirring through the reels, cutting out celluloid strips of scenes, and placing them on a light box to figure out how to rearrange them. The camera stops, as if in thrall to her, and lingers over a few frames, before the image comes to life again. Brian GibsonAnnapolis Royal, Nova Scotia In 1989, I attended the première of Zwerin’s “Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser,” at the New…

Brick Lane, in London’s East End, is famous for its bustling commerce, from sari shops to graffiti-splashed vintage-clothing stores. At 9 a.m. on a recent morning, however, nearly all the storefronts were shuttered. One exception was Morley’s, a takeout friedchicken restaurant, where bright lights were shining behind closed glass doors that had been covered with translucent paper, and a hubbub of voices could be heard coming from inside. Seated at a white plastic table in the center of the small shop was Amelia Dimoldenberg, the creator and star of “Chicken Shop Date,” a popular You-Tube interview show. Despite the earlyhour and the raw winter weather, she was dressed as if for a night at the club, in an asymmetrical one-sleeved top made from clingy metallic jersey, and a matching skirt…

Take measurements to determine the size of it.How lavish the jacket and sleeves, the inseam.Appraise from shoulder to shoulder its width.Measure neck, chest, waist. NoteIts dimensions on brown paper. OtherwiseIn the green field of your imagining.When and where you will wear your suit.Consider. RunningAn errand in town, as if for another?(Knowing to hide in plain view as a kind of candor.) Jumping the broom or another revelationOf a grand joy? Which design to espouse?Three-piece with jacket and pants ideal for winter?Vest for keeping cool where there isNo winter? Dress of preposterous numberOf buttons? Make the pattern. ChooseYour fabric. Pin the paper blueprint to yourCloth. Cut along the edges of the paperPattern pieces, then cut again along the flanksOf your green field’s imagining.…

Robert Frost presented himself as a simple man. Not for him the literary circles of London or the stilted dinner parties of Brahmin Boston. Nor was he at home in academia. He dropped out of college twice, citing a need for independence, and although he spent his middle and later years teaching at universities, he was constantly fleeing them, retreating to farms in rural New England. He didn’t read book reviews—or so he claimed—and he didn’t write them, preferring instead to let his poems find their natural audience, which turned out to be a wide one. He mocked literary critics and shunned intellectual debate, though he was a great talker and loved to tell stories. His ideal days, he said, were spent in the countryside, going on long, solitary walks…

FEBRUARY 26 – MARCH 4, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. The opera “Moby-Dick,” adapted from Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, with music by Jake Heggie, a libretto by Gene Scheer, and direction by Lenny Foglia, premièred in 2010; now at the Metropolitan Opera (March 3-29), the production reaches new heights, with sailors climbing masts and ropes that extend up to the rafters. The principal vocalists—including the tenor Stephen Costello, as Greenhorn (the stand-in for Ishmael), and Brandon Jovanovich (pictured), as Captain Ahab—and a robust chorus are bolstered by the Met’s orchestra. Will the famous whale continue to elude the audience as it has Ahab? “We may see a little bit more of it this time,” Foglia hinted, coyly. ABOUT TOWN INDIE ROCK | As Father John…

On the way down I saw nothing. The water was a blur of teal fringed with rusty shadows, darkening, about twenty feet below, to a sickly emerald. I followed a rope strung between a buoy and a stake in the seabed, pausing occasionally to pinch my nose and adjust my sinuses to the pressure. Just beyond the thermocline, where the temperature abruptly drops, a hand emerged from the murk and grabbed me by the wrist, dragging me the last few inches to the bottom. The silt was as soft as tapioca pudding. It swallowed my hand, then my arm and shoulder; the deeper I pushed, the more I suspected that it might go on forever. Finally, I touched wood, feeling a chill colder than the water’s as I ran my…

Societies do collapse, sometimes suddenly. Nevertheless, prophets of doom might keep in mind that their darkest predictions have been, on the whole, a little premature. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a lepidopterist, and his largely uncredited wife, Anne, published a best-seller called “The Population Bomb.” For centuries, economists had worried that the world’s food supply could not possibly be expected to keep pace with the growing mobs of people. Now there was no postponing our fate. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich wrote. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” This was the received wisdom of the era: a decade earlier, an only slightly flippant article in Science estimated that in November, 2026, the global population…