Innholdsfortegnelse for April 21, 2025 i The New Yorker

A couple of weeks after President Donald Trump was reëlected, a group A of college presidents gathered for an event at the Penn Club, a stately building with wood-panelled rooms, in midtown Manhattan. Over drinks, Tania Tetlow, the president of Fordham University, in New York, told me about another college president, whom she had become friends with after taking her role, in 2022. The president confided to Tetlow that every morning they would lie in bed wishing they had cancer so that they wouldn’t have to go to work. We spoke about the difficult experiences of university leaders over the past year and a half—calling the cops on protesters, getting hauled before Congress, protecting students who felt scared of one another. “To be held personally and professionally responsible for the…

In the first two years after the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, the number of abortions performed annually in the United States went up. On the face of it, this might seem perplexing. After all, many states seized the opportunity presented by the Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to enact daunting new restrictions on abortion: twelve adopted near-total bans, and four more imposed gestational limits of six weeks, a point at which many people may not yet realize they are pregnant. Yet, suddenly, the U.S. was seeing an increase in abortions—from about nine hundred and thirty thousand in 2020 to more than a million in 2023. The best explanation for this apparent paradox was that providers and activists in states where abortion…

THINKING OF THE CHILDREN Gideon Lewis-Kraus, in his article “The End of Children,” quotes the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk as saying, “The childless are the ones that are destroying the country” (March 3rd). But it’s the policies of Kirk’s own political party that are devastating the future of the U.S., particularly as it concerns children. Gun violence has been the leading cause of death for children between the ages of one and seventeen since 2020; on average, seven young people die by gunfire every day. Yet the G.O.P. continues to oppose gun control. Republicans, by allowing an anti-vaxxer to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services, will also be responsible for the many kids who may die from preventable diseases. To add to this grim scenario, the Party’s recent…

Carlin Casey first considered the idea of human starvation when he was seven years old. Back then, in 1992, his mother, Mary, read aloud to him and his little sister, Karina, from an unusual bedtime story, Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl.” The family led a life of relative abundance. At their pueblo-style home in California’s Coachella Valley, Mary blasted Madonna in the kitchen as she made her kids burgers or big plates of spaghetti, lighting candles and burning essential oils (“for the vibes,” Carlin told me). Curled up in bed, listening to his mother describe Anne Frank’s privations, Carlin wondered, what was it like to experience a hunger so cutting? “Now, when I look back on it,” Carlin said recently, “I think maybe that was my mom’s way…

Legions those summers of your childhood,windshields thick with silhouettes on road tripspast clay counties toward the English coast.The new air is empty, and who knewwe’d miss even what afflicted us? We knew,and paid the price for June’s green candlesin bites pulsing under ice cubes, gambledflesh on the bridge toward pleasure.How modest, after all, safety’s promises,the ground beneath us not giving out,not even that. Last night, a ship blinkedas it charged into the bridge, taillights eastboundafter graveyard shifts, tumbled moonsput out by the tide. Long ago, the Britishfailed to take the fort, and Francis Scott Keywrote a poem. All that happens happenssomething like this despite the lens pointedat soil or heaven. We two were oftenindulgent with our gifts: a chest madeof trimmings from the Hardy tree, tokensfrom the Queen, a heyday…

The Maverick’s Museum, by Blake Gopnik (Ecco). Albert C. Barnes was born into poverty in 1872, in Philadelphia, and went on to make a fortune as the inventor of a topical antiseptic and to amass a staggering collection of modern art. Gopnik’s animated biography chronicles Barnes’s lifelong campaign to make art accessible to the working class, a democratizing impulse that found its greatest expression in the Barnes Foundation, which opened in 1925 to display his acquisitions. But the collector was also known for his irascibility, and Gopnik touches on the contradictions between his high-mindedness—Barnes was a stalwart defender of Black rights and culture—and his temper. Ultimately, Gopnik figures that “Barnes’s public cruelties might be just about balanced by private kindnesses.” The Franklin Stove, by Joyce E. Chaplin (Farrar, Straus &…

“Music is no longer a matter for the few,” Kurt Weill declared in 1928, the year he wrote “The Threepenny Opera.” In Weill’s opinion, composers educated in the classical tradition had lost touch with the broader public and sunk into obscurantism. They should make their music “simpler, clearer, more transparent,” and they should address contemporary concerns. Seldom has an artist followed his own credo so faithfully. From “Threepenny” to “Lost in the Stars,” from Berlin to Broadway, Weill forged mass art on modern themes. The feat was all the more impressive given that the composer had to win over an entirely new audience after his flight from Nazi Germany, in 1933. Of the countless twentieth-century figures who attempted the hazardous leap from Europe to America, Weill was one of very…

APRIL 16 – 22, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Whitney White has directed several of New York’s most formally audacious productions—she helmed the incantatory première of “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” by Aleshea Harris, and was nominated for a Tony last year, for Jocelyn Bioh’s riotous “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.” She’s always busy: her production of “The Last Five Years” just opened on Broadway. Yet, somehow, White is also starring in her own long-gestating “Macbeth in Stride,” a pop and rock-and-roll song cycle, directed by Tyler Dobrowsky and Taibi Magar. White (pictured) appears simultaneously as a band’s front woman, the show’s chief explicator of Black female ambition, and Shakespeare’s Lady M herself, who decides—over a driving downbeat—that she has had enough of…

Charlie Duncan could very well be the oldest man in Georgia. “I’ll be one hundred and six in May,” he said the other day at Benton House, a seniorliving facility in the town of Woodstock. With that much mileage, he’s survived a few things, one of them being the stock-market crash of 1929. Duncan, who still has his hair and his wits, and tooled around behind the wheel of a PT Cruiser until a fender bender last year, was ten years old when the market crashed. At the time, his family had a farm in nearby Hickory Flat. “Cotton, corn, peanuts, sweet potatoes,” he recalled, leaning back in his recliner, beneath a framed certificate from the United Square Dancers of America and a proclamation from the county, which recently designated…

At the Pace gallery in Chelsea in early April, the artist and musician David Byrne was in a stairwell, lying on the floor and drawing on the wall with a black acrylic marker. Byrne, who is seventy-two, wore a buttoned-up navy polo shirt, a white wristwatch, and railroad-striped overalls. (“I thought, I have to dress like an artist today,” he said.) He finished inking a foot, said, “O.K., we’ve got hands to draw,” stood, and admired his creation: a mural showing a family of four with humanoid bodies—soft curves, rumpled clothes, neatly folded hands—and skyscrapers for heads. Byrne, who lives nearby, had been drawing in the stairwell all day. He was working from sketches he’d made, which Nate Kamp, an exhibition manager, projected onto the walls. Byrne finished the hands…

1. PUMPERNICKEL: The king. Strong flavor, but not too strong. Dances with, rather than fights against, the cream cheese and the lox. (Or whitefish, if that’s your thing. I don’t judge.) 2. PLAIN: Not as fierce a “dancer.” More submissive to the lox. Kind of kinky. Maybe you like that. 3. POPPY-SEED/SESAME: When they’re out of plain. 4. EGG: Too cakelike to be a proper bagel, but possibly it reminds you of the challah your nana hand-fed you when she nursed you through polio. 5. SALT: You’re someone who really likes salt. 6. ONION: You’re someone who really likes onions. 7. GARLIC: Do you actually even like bagels? 8. EVERYTHING: “I can’t decide what kind of distracting shit I want on my bagel, so why don’t I add every kind…

1 A stag traverses the road and vanishesin the dusk; I ponder tuskless elephants, zebra stripes, a toucan’s curved beak;I worry about skirmishes over avocados, ruminate on methane seas on oneof Saturn’s moons, and, despairing at how a chromium plume extendsunder a mesa, contaminating an aquifer, at how plutonium pits proliferate,I stride with weights tied to my ankles, raise my hands, find weights strappedto my wrists; but, when I gaze at a haloed moon, say to myselfthis light has no special consequence, the apricot trees prognosticate nothingthough they bud, my breath deepens, and, in this darkening nest of night,the weights dissolve into the midnight air. 2 Gathering lichen off an oak, Anna’s hummingbird— along the street, we encounter sweet gums, ginkgoes, magnolias— artichokes in this yard, agaves in that— not…

One morning at Potawatomi day camp, the summer before I became a bat mitzvah, I thought I needed to use the bathroom right in the middle of swimming lessons, but as soon as I was out of the pool I realized I didn’t have to go anymore. That was new for me, and weird. I stopped to think for a second. Just stood there by the lifeguard platform, thinking. If I went back in the water and the need returned, I’d have to get out again, and that would draw attention, but then again the need might not return, and using the bathroom meant lowering my swimsuit then pulling it back up my body all wet, and I was trying to decide which one of the options would be less…