Innholdsfortegnelse for March 10, 2025 i The New Yorker

Few celebrities have lived so much of their lives in the public eye as Drew Barrymore has. She appeared in commercials as an infant, achieved global fame after starring in Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.” at the age of seven, and became notorious for her battles with drugs and alcohol before she even hit her teens. A few years ago, the actress launched “The Drew Barrymore Show,” and it was on an episode of that program that she underwent a usually private transition in the glare of public scrutiny. During an interview with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler, Barrymore suddenly peeled off a pin-striped suit jacket as she exhaled and fanned herself, announcing, “I think I’m having my first hot flash!” Aniston gamely ad-libbed, exclaiming, “I’m so honored!,” and laying the back…

The town of Rock Springs sprouts out of a vacant landscape of sandstone cliffs and sagebrush in southern Wyoming. It is a fading former mining town, where herds of deer now meander through the streets. A century-old sign overlooking the railroad tracks downtown reads “HOME OF ROCK SPRINGS COAL.” The mines closed decades ago. In the late nineteen-eighties, workers began filling the honeycomb of underground tunnels beneath the town with a cement-like grout, to prevent cave-ins. Ominous crevasses––evidence of “subsidence,” in geological parlance––recently opened in a one-acre park situated between a Catholic church and a former Slovenian community hall. State officials concluded that more grout should be injected. But, before that happens, there’s another pressing need: understanding what else lies beneath the surface. On a chilly morning this past July,…

She promised that the climbing would be easy. “Even for you,” she said. “How long?” “An hour. Or maybe two hours. Or maybe three.” “Give or take?” “Yes, that’s right.” Paul had told her two weeks earlier, on their last outing to Point Reyes Station, that he was leaving, packing up. She would be able to come to Ireland to visit him, he said now, and they should start making plans for that. “I’ll be at my folks’ house, at least at the beginning, and they really would love to meet you in person. It’ll be great when you come.” “It’s sad they never came here,” Geraldine said. “They could have visited anytime. They said they would.” “No money, I suppose, and too far.” They were still a mile or…

IF A TREE FALLS Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in his recent Comment, notes that the response to the second Trump Administration’s policies has been more muted than it was in 2017 (February 3rd). Though counteractions may be less visible nationally, many communities are far from sitting on their hands. In Minneapolis, on February 1st of this year, thousands of immigrants and their neighbors took to the streets to assert their opposition to Trump’s deportation agenda and their dedication to protecting one another. That same day, the city of St. Paul reaffirmed its commitment to a 2004 ordinance that limits the extent to which municipal employees have to coöperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Local acts of resistance like these have always been and will always be meaningful. Isabelle WattenbergSt. Paul, Minn.…

There would be debate about who struck the match that lit the fuse that spiralled around campus, but the sequence of events was plain enough to everyone who saw it burn. On October 9, 2023, two days after Hamasled fighters from Gaza invaded Israel, killing twelve hundred people and taking more than two hundred hostages, Claudine Gay, the new president of Harvard University, exchanged e-mails with a small group of colleagues to draft a suitable response. Should they call the attacks “violent”? (Too charged, they decided.) Should they denounce a letter, signed by more than thirty student groups, which called Israel “the only one to blame”? The matter seemed delicate, and the administrators took time to work over their language. That night, they published a statement so widely dismissed as…

The silence, the thoughtsthat come with it, the sinkingsuspicion that something moreis wrong with me than anyoneknows, including myself, includingthe doctor who hooked me upto the EKG machine and saidthat though my heartbeat was irregular,the irregularity was normal.It was nothing to worry about.The doctor told me there are two kindsof people: unhealthy people who refuseto get help, and healthy peoplewho always think they’re dying.Nobody’s in between. But I’ve metso many kinds of people:people who stretch beforethey get out of bed, peoplewho walk through life unstretched,people who think their bodyis a house and people who don’tthink of their body at all.People who peel their carrots,people who don’t. People whostand on the roof and let the windmake them cry. People who are afraidto cry. People who step on all the leaveson the…

For bakeries in New Orleans, the first few months of the year are among the busiest. As the rest of the country stares down the barrel of January, sobered by New Year’s resolutions, the city is just easing into Carnival, the season of revelry and indulgence that lasts from Three Kings Day (also known as Epiphany) to Fat Tuesday, which immediately precedes the start of Lent. The weeks are marked by parties, by parades, and by pastry, most specifically king cake: a wreath-shaped confection made with a yeasted dough—the kind you’d use for brioche or sticky buns—and finished with white icing and a shower of crystallized sugar that’s dyed purple, green, and gold. King cake is rooted in religious tradition—it’s a Catholic custom that’s believed to have been adapted from…

CONTEMPORARY MUSIC Leading Ladies, K-Pop Stars As the memoirist Michelle Zauner, of “Crying in H Mart” fame, returns to her musical project Japanese Breakfast (National Sawdust; March 19), she sets the tone for a spring concert slate of renewal and reëmergence. Trevor Powers, who brought his Youth Lagoon project out of retirement in 2023, shares glowing new music built around unearthed home videos, at Warsaw, on April 24. After losing his wife and creative partner, Mimi Parker, to cancer, ending the band Low, Alan Sparhawk wades through distorted solo songs of grief at Elsewhere (April 2). Wide-ranging jazz acts manifest the genre’s myriad paths. The L.A. soul and hip-hop producer and composer Adrian Younge, co-founder of Jazz Is Dead, arranges a ten-piece orchestra at Sultan Room (March 4-5). The British…

Family, here’s some big news: I have just launched a Matreon account, and I’m inviting you to be a part of this exciting community! I know what you’re thinking: Mom, why should I pay for all the great content I’ve been enjoying for free all these years? Because Matreon puts creators like me first! Matreon is changing the way domestic work is valued. Matreon is where I’m able to unleash my wildest ideas, powered by the people who love what I do, even if they don’t ever say, out loud, that they love it. What do you get by becoming a paid subscriber? Fun stuff like daily clues to where I keep the car keys, what the latest streaming passwords are, and the code to the lockbox where I stash…

My younger brother was afraid of thunder,lightning. My father bought a recording of storms,put it on the stereo, and rocked on the love seatwith my brother over and over,until the sound meant comfort, warmth.Much later, my brother became obsessed with meteorologyand dreamed of becoming a weatherman.When I finally connected the early fearwith the later passion,we were looking down at my father in his coffin.Not my father but his body. More like an echoof his flesh. No weather on his face.I’d seen him often in a suit but never wearing a vest.Pajamas would have made more sense.The soft rain of the talking all around uswas a cocoon I wanted to live inside.I heard the metronome of my heartand thought of Quakers waiting for silenceto open its mouth. Of the hopejust below…

The Many Lives of Anne Frank, by Ruth Franklin (Yale). This book depicts the rich texture of Frank’s life, and the “complicated genesis” of her published diary, while also exploring her afterlife as a “figurehead against prejudice,” one whose story has been edited, censored, commodified, and appropriated. Franklin, an award-winning biographer, details how Frank’s legacy was formed, and sometimes deformed, by her father, Otto, who survived her. Otto’s role as the keeper of Frank’s memory is “perhaps the most confusing—and most contested—aspect of Anne’s story,” Franklin writes. With sensitivity and assiduous research, she constructs a vivid cultural history that advocates for a reëvaluation of Frank, not as a symbol or a saint but as a human being and a literary artist. Ends of the Earth, by Neil Shubin (Dutton). In…

The first moments of Samuel D. Hunter’s new play, “Grangeville,” now at the Signature, take place in the pitch dark. Out of the blackness, a man’s voice—nasal, strongly Midwestern, a little plaintive—asks what seems like a silly question: “Is it late over there?” He doesn’t really get an answer. The pause crackles; we hear the glottal static of an international phone call. The response, when it finally comes, is clipped. “This bill isn’t itemized,” a different voice says. After some time, pale light dawns on the two men talking: Jerry (Paul Sparks) and Arnold (Brian J. Smith), estranged middle-aged half brothers from tiny Grangeville, Idaho. Jerry, a down-home, aw-shucks guy, has never left Grangeville, and now, with his marriage falling apart, he’s returned to the trailer where he and his…