Innholdsfortegnelse for March 24, 2025 i The New Yorker

Rebecca Mead (“Steal, Adapt, Borrow,” p. 40) joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1997. Her latest book is the memoir “Home/Land.” Amanda Petrusich (“Betting on the Future,” p. 18) is a staff writer and the author of “Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records.” Joyce Carol Oates (Fiction, p. 54) won the 2024 Raymond Chandler Award. Her next novel, “Fox,” comes out in June. Andrew Marantz (“You Mad, Bro?,” p. 30) is a staff writer and the author of the book “Antisocial.” Jill Lepore (“The Book of Ruth,” p. 24), a staff writer, is a professor of history and law at Harvard. Her most recent book, “The Deadline,” received a PEN America award for the art of the essay.…

“Not every reader will find my work enjoyable,” the two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward said, but she writes in the faith that those who are at least receptive to her writing will be able to follow it and find meaning in it. She also extends this type of trust to her fellow-writers: “Sometimes being bewildered is just part of reading,” she said. Ward recently joined us to discuss a selection of laborious novels that she enjoyed, not despite their bewildering qualities but because of them. Her comments have been edited and condensed. Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir This is the second in a series about necromancers in a faraway galaxy, after “Gideon the Ninth,” which follows a knight who’s from one of many houses that serve a…

Early on the morning of April 30, 1943, a floating body was discovered off the southern coast of Spain. Retrieved by a fisherman, it was brought to the city of Huelva and identified as Captain William Martin, of the British Royal Marines. A briefcase chained to the corpse contained documents indicating that the Allies planned to advance on Greece and Sardinia—intel that the Nazi-sympathizing Spanish authorities passed on to the Germans. Surprise, Nazis! It was all a British-intelligence ruse, known as Operation Mincemeat. Back in London, operatives had obtained the cadaver of a homeless man who’d died from eating rat poison, concocted a fake identity for him, lined his body with phony love letters from a made-up fiancée (plus a receipt for a diamond engagement ring), and dumped him from…

April 1—A. R. Gurney’s “Love Letters,” with Lauren Boebert and Kid Rock April 3—Vocal group Up with Goebbels April 4-5—3-D Ghost-Gun Show April 6-7—(Musical workshop) Sing! Sing! Sing! On Your Federal Co-Workers! April 12-13 — Crypto, Change-O: A Magical Illusion Spectacular April 15-16 — Clarence Thomas R.V./ Camper Show April 17 — An Evening with Stephen Miller (formerly “Stephen Miller and Friends”) April 18-19—CPAC Celebrity Pickleball Tourney April 21—Big Balls: The TED Talk April 22 — Game-Show Night! (“Alt-Fact Jeopardy!”/“Win Jill Stein’s Money”/“Kennedy Family Feud”) April 24-25—Joey Critters Reptile Revue April 26-May 3—Con Con May 4—Free and Fair Audience-Votes Talent-Show Night (Dancing with the Tsars) May 5-10 — Pete Hegseth’s Five-Day Advanced Mixology Seminar (SOLD OUT) May 11-13 — Gay-Conversion Band Camp May 15—(One night only!) Ted Nugent reunites with…

ACROSS 1 Lead-in to present or potent 5 Perform better than 10 Generous serving of cake 14 Houseplant holders 15 Be moody 16 Seep 17 Easy mode? 19 San ___, Puerto Rico 20 Bounds along 21 Only playing card represented by a vowel 22 Play with Lego bricks, say 23 “Crescat scientia; vita excolatur,” for the University of Chicago 25 Freundin: German:: ___: French 27 Envision 28 Like crudo or carpaccio 29 Night mode? 32 Chatted online: Abbr. 34 Commercials, billboards, etc. 35 Setting for parts of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License” music video 36 Pieces of décor that can make rooms seem more spacious 38 Manage artfully 42 Poke-bowl protein option 43 Not joking, for short 44 Crime-movie genre 45 Eco mode? 50 Thurman who starred in the Broadway play…

Last Saturday evening, a recent Columbia University graduate student named Mahmoud Khalil was greeted in the lobby of his apartment building, in Morningside Heights, by four plainclothes agents from the Department of Homeland Security. They said that his student visa had been revoked and that he was being arrested, with a plan to deport him. Khalil, a Syrian-born Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent, had been a leader of the pro-Palestine protests that consumed Columbia’s campus life last year. He called his lawyer Amy Greer, and she spoke with one of the agents. When Greer told him that Khalil did not have or need a student visa, because he is a permanent U.S. resident with a green card, the agent said that D.H.S. had revoked his green card, too. When Greer…

Not long ago, President Trump let loose on Truth Social about his frustration with new environmental consumer-product standards—lousy water pressure in showers, weakly flushing toilets. He ordered his new E.P.A. administrator, Lee Zeldin, to tackle the problem, including overturning President Biden’s ban on most non-L.E.D. light bulbs. Earlier, he’d complained, “The bulb that we’re being forced to use, number one, to me, most importantly, the light’s no good, I always look orange.” Might light bulbs be the rare topic on which New Yorkers and Trump agree? Maybe when it comes to the Brooklyn Bridge, which recently emerged from a multiyear effort to modernize its lighting. (The city is calling it a “glow-up.”) The result, as some unhappy neighbors and bridge-crossers will tell you: a blindingly bright bridge, its color washed…

If you haven’t heard of Ruth Stout, you haven’t spent much time in the Home and Garden section of a bookstore lately, and you haven’t been listening to gardening or homesteading podcasts, either. Stout, who died nearly half a century ago, lived most of her life in the shadow of her far more famous brother, the writer Rex Stout, the creator of the fictional detective Nero Wolfe. Alexander Woollcott, who for years wrote this magazine’s Shouts & Murmurs column, was convinced that he was the inspiration for Wolfe—like Wolfe, he was famously fat—and even took to calling himself Nero. “It was useless for Stout to protest,” The New Yorker reported in a Profile of Stout in 1949. “Nothing could convince Woollcott that he had not been plagiarized bodily.” Nero Wolfe,…

As a teen-ager, long before I lived in New York, I felt the city urging me toward it. N.Y.C., with its art and money, its drugs and fashion, its misery and elation—how tough, how grimy, how scary, how glamorous! For me, one of its most potent siren calls was “Chloe’s Scene,” a piece written for this magazine, in 1994, by the novelist Jay McInerney, about the then nineteen-year-old sometime actress, sometime model, and all-around It Girl Chloë Sevigny. Despite not having done much at that point besides be young, hang out downtown, and have an innate sense of style, Sevigny seemed to be the font from which absolute cool flowed. The kind of culture-making that she represented was “secret, alternative, not commercial—everything one wants to be,” McInerney wrote. She was…

John Barelli worked in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s security department for thirty-eight years and served as its chief from 2001 until 2016. These days, he drops in every now and then from his home, on the Lower East Side. On one such visit, he cut the figure of a retired financier—striped button-down, navy slacks, loafers. He sat at a table in the Petrie Court café and talked about an incident that he recounts in his 2019 book, “Stealing the Show: A History of Art and Crime in Six Thefts.” The caper in question was more Monty Python than “Thomas Crown Affair.” And—until now—its outcome has been a mystery. On March 13, 2005, three accomplices entered the museum’s American Wing. Two of them began arguing, distracting the guards, thereby allowing…

In the fall of 1965, a twenty-nine-year-old Georges Perec published his début novel. Short and strange, “Things: A Story of the Sixties” follows Sylvie and Jérôme, a young Parisian couple who work in the burgeoning field of market research, and exist in a permanent frenzy of hyper-specific material desires. They want to furnish their apartment with fitted carpets, a black leather sofa, tartan-upholstered benches, “allegedly rustic tables.” They favor apparel that seems posh and British. Throughout the novel, the two characters are fused into a single entity—we never hear them speak—and they move through a world spangled with commercial temptations, insistently and precisely identified. Like many before them, Sylvie and Jérôme mistake their pursuit of taste for a pursuit of knowledge, and believe themselves to be acquiring a kind of…

In early 1947, the playwright Tennessee Williams wrote to the producer Irene Selznick because Elia Kazan, who had been tapped to direct the Broadway première of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” was balking. Who else could direct “Streetcar”? Williams rejected the suggestion of Tyrone Guthrie out of hand. “He is English,” he wrote. “This is an American play with a peculiarly local or provincial color.” Nearly eighty years later, the English director Rebecca Frecknall’s highly physical, modern-dress “Streetcar,” which has arrived at BAM from the West End, is not the British production that would put Williams’s mind at ease. Ease is in itself a particularly Southern quality, but it’s nowhere to be found in the show’s stripped-down set, nor in the director’s expressionist interventions. As Frecknall did in last year’s “Cabaret…