Innholdsfortegnelse for April 7, 2025 i The New Yorker

Joan Didion (“What We Knew Without Knowing,” p. 40), the author of “The Year of Magical Thinking” and other books, died in 2021. “Notes to John,” a collection of journal entries addressed to her late husband, will be published by Knopf this month. Adam Iscoe (“The Marriage Plot,” p. 12), who has been contributing to the magazine since 2021, received last year’s Carey McWilliams Award for political reporting. Inkoo Kang (On Television, p. 70), a staff writer, has been a television critic for the magazine since 2022. Cynthia Ozick (Poem, p. 44) is the author of, most recently, “In a Yellow Wood: Selected Stories and Essays.” She began writing for The New Yorker in 1977. Barry Blitt (Cover) received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. H. C. Wilentz (The…

The Hip-Hop Beat Machine as the Soul of Community Hip-hop beat-makers are usually unseen. A central function of their work is to produce scenery as set designers for rap’s theatre of flamboyance. Nevertheless, the producer is fundamental to what hip-hop is. In essence, the earliest rap was turntablism; the merry-go-round—a technique, created by DJ Kool Herc, of clipping the rhythm breaks in soul records—led to sampling, the art of repurposing a portion of a recording to create a new one. As rap grew into a commercial juggernaut, the rapper’s standing rose as the beat-maker’s declined. It often feels as if the beat-maker’s recognition rarely aligns with his outsized impact. In “Straight Loops, Light & Soul” (viewed at www.eliaswilliams.com/straightloops), a black-and-white series by the Queens-raised photographer Elias Williams, the focus is…

The actress Leslie Bibb cuts a figure like the aerodynamic swoosh of a Brancusi, or a gazelle. She is five feet nine, with a blinding smile and blond hair styled in a knifelike bob—glamazon features that pair oddly with her singsongy voice. You might cast her as a cheerleader (which she played on the WB show “Popular”), or a flight attendant (the horror flick “Flight 7500”), or a country-club belle (“Palm Royale”). But Bibb, who is fifty, doesn’t like to be pigeonholed. “Somebody looks at you, puts you in a category,” she said recently. That, she thinks, is a big theme this season on “The White Lotus,” in which Bibb, Carrie Coon, and Michelle Monaghan play three gal pals vacationing in Thailand whose friendship fractures as each twosome gossips about…

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, on September 3, 1964, he called it one of the “most far-reaching conservation measures” ever approved. The bill established fifty-four wilderness areas, most in the American West, which, together, encompassed more than nine million acres. As the act famously put it, in these areas “the earth and its community of life” were to remain “untrammeled by man.” Homes, roads, cars, and even bicycles would therefore be prohibited. There was, however, a gap in the law, one big enough to drive an earthmover through—or, really, several hundred. To win passage of the measure, which had gone through more than sixty drafts in the course of eight years, its sponsors agreed to a compromise. For the next twenty years, mining claims would still be…

Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne met in the late fifties, when she was working at Vogue and he at Time. They married in 1964, and in 1966 they adopted a baby girl, giving her a name from the Yucatán: Quintana Roo. Together, Didion and Dunne lived out one of the most collaborative literary marriages in American history. Last week, after two years of preparation, the New York Public Library opened the Didion-Dunne archive to the public. Among its three hundred and thirty-six boxes of material is a thick file of typewritten notes by Didion describing her sessions with the psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon, beginning in 1999. Addressed to Dunne, the entries are full of direct quotations and written with the immediacy of fresh recollection. Didion was concerned about Quintana and…

Every era produces its own emblematic array of knuckleheads and butterfingers: Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops. The Three Stooges. The 1962 Mets. Beavis and Butt-head. Wayne and Garth. In Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War classic, “Dr. Strangelove,” the fools wield apocalyptic weapons rather than custard pies. Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, grows so feverish and paranoid about a Communist plot “to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids” that he goes “a little funny” and orders a thermonuclear strike on the Soviet Union. But such fantastical heedlessness is the province only of comic fantasy, no? In the initial months of Donald Trump’s second Administration, the qualities of malevolence, retribution, and bewildering velocity have obscured somewhat the ineptitude of its principals. This came into sharper view with…

The accidental inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, in a secret group chat of senior U.S. ofcials has been described as a breach of national security without historical precedent. This is not the case. 1252 B.C., eastern Mediterranean, Saturday night ODYSSEUS: O.K., we’re in. DIOMEDES: In where? ODYSSEUS: Troy. We’re inside the walls. They bought it. MENELAUS: By the golden toenails of Athena, we’re in Troy? In a freaking horse? ODYSSEUS: Sh-h-h. Keep it down, dummy. If they hear us inside this thing, we’re screwed. MENELAUS: Says Mr. Cunning, who always has to have the bright ideas. NEOPTOLEMUS: Says the dope who couldn’t hang on to his wife in the first place. Hey, she’ll always have Paris, right? MENELAUS: To Hades with you, Neo. No wonder you…

On January 8th, in an ornate hall of the United States Capitol, five Republican senators stood behind President-elect Donald Trump as he talked to the Capitol Hill press. Four listened impassively, but John Thune could hardly stand still. As Trump began describing a “lovefest” in Greenland over his plans to annex it, Thune turned away, as though distracted by oncoming footsteps. He crossed his arms, stared at his feet, rocked from side to side, moved his hands in and out of his pockets, and fidgeted with his suit jacket as Trump spewed falsehoods: that the diversion of water for “a tiny little fish” had kept Los Angeles from putting out fires; that illegal immigrants were mainly murderers or mental patients; that China was “running the Panama Canal.” After Trump left,…

On February 14th, a letter went out from the Department of Education to educational institutions that receive money from the federal government, which most do. The letter gave schools fourteen days to eliminate “the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions.” Such discrimination, it warned, violates the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The letter (addressed “Dear Colleague,” often a sign that what follows won’t be especially collegial) came from the desk of the acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, a man named Craig Trainor. It stressed that the new anti-discrimination policy encompasses much more than the race-conscious admissions programs recently declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (forty-five years after the Court declared…

ACROSS 1 With 59-Across, say goodbye 4 Carry out 9 Spiral-like fingerprint pattern 14 Music genre that originated in the eighties 15 Chutzpah 16 Roker who played Helen on “The Jeffersons” 17 Olympic track great Shelly-___ Fraser-Pryce 18 “This is ridiculous!” 20 Shifts over to guard an open player, in basketball 22 Strong 23 French for “already” 24 Palindromic precept 25 Capital of Shaanxi, China 27 Mario ___ (racing-game series) 28 Comfortable state 32 Channel that aired “Half & Half” 33 Right away 35 R. & B. singer Isley 36 Best case? 39 ___ Code (opera podcast with a punny title) 40 To a sufficient extent 41 “___ with me” 42 Letters often followed by “S” 43 Bifurcate 44 Arabian Peninsula country 46 “Nickel Boys” actress Aunjanue ___-Taylor 48 Smack…

Fernando Mateo, a co-founder of United Bodegas of America, has been worried about the future of the venerable staple known as the bacon, egg, and cheese. It used to go for two or three dollars, but costs have spiked. “We kept thinking, What can we do to bring down the prices?” he said on a recent Wednesday, as he set out to take a casual egg census in the Bronx. Amid avian-flu outbreaks and soaring egg prices, he wanted to spread the word about a U.B.A. policy shift: swapping out fresh eggs for liquid ones, the kind that come in a carton. “When you go on a cruise ship, that’s what they give you,” he said, trying out his spiel at his first stop, La Bonita Grocery, at 183rd and…

The other day, Kevin McDonald, the curly-haired actor-comedian best known as one of the Kids in the Hall, the beloved Canadian comedy troupe, invited a few people to a rehearsal in a tiny hotel room in lower Manhattan. One guest’s knock had a rhythm similar to “shave and a haircut.” McDonald knocked back “two bits,” then opened the door. “I had to do the callback,” he said, looking pleased. “And I did shave today.” McDonald, who lives in Winnipeg, was in town to perform his rock opera in progress, “Kevin McDonald Superstar,” at the SoHo Playhouse, with friends like his fellow-comedians Dave Hill and Janeane Garofalo. McDonald’s curls are now gray, and he was wiry and energetic in an oversized hoodie. The hotel room was angular and spare—one bed, one…

There’s a sense of occasion to the new “Othello” now at the Barry-more, on Broadway—Denzel Washington, one of our last true movie legends, is playing the titular role, and Jake Gyllenhaal, no slouch in the stardom department himself, appears as his evil saboteur, Iago. Producers are charging north of nine hundred dollars for orchestra seats, the kind of ludicrous, norm-busting event pricing that somehow drives demand; the sidewalk outside buzzes with excitement. Inside the theatre, though, it’s another story. In Shakespeare’s oddly comic tragedy, jealousy is the prime mover. As the Venetians and the Ottoman Turks squabble over Cyprus in the background, the men before us quarrel over everything—a woman, a job, a handkerchief. Iago, a veteran soldier, hates Othello, his general, a Moor who fights for Venice: Iago’s missed…