Innholdsfortegnelse for May 12-19, 2025 i The New Yorker

Eric Lach (“Three Guys from Queens,” online only) has contributed to the magazine since 2008 and became a staff writer in 2020. He reports regularly on New York City. Jordan Salama (“Tight Quarters,” p. 46) is the author of the books “Stranger in the Desert: A Family Story” and “Every Day the River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena.” Julian Lucas (“Now You See Her,” p. 40), a staff writer, has been contributing to the magazine since 2018, covering books, the arts, and the politics of history. Ian Frazier (“Pigeon Toes,” p. 28), a staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 1974. He is the author of “Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough.” Gillian Laub (Portfolio, p. 64), a photographer and a filmmaker, has been contributing photographs…

8 Extra Pl. If you ever had the pleasure of eating at Momofuku Ko, the wonderful, ambitious, and sometimes compellingly bizarre tasting-menu restaurant that closed in 2023, it can be a little disorienting to visit Kabawa, a new fine-dining Caribbean spot occupying Ko’s former space in the East Village. The dining area, once decorated in severe tones of black and gray, has received a warm makeover, with bright paint and tropical mosaics. But the large open kitchen is the same, as are the seats around a sweeping U-shaped counter. One of the things I remember most clearly from Ko was the peculiar way that certain smells rolled around the boxy venue like billiard balls. At Kabawa, the aromas include fresh yeast and a perpetual bouquet of toasty curry leaves. The…

Meet up with the actor Ed Helms for a stroll through Central Park on a cloudless spring day, and he might let loose with some slightly dire news. “Walking over here, I was drippedon,” he said, deadpan but with a hint of burgeoning hysteria. “I hope it was from an air-conditioner.” “Random Things Falling from the Sky” wouldn’t be a terrible alternative title for Helms’s new book, “Snafu”—based on his podcast of the same name—which recounts the biggest screwups of the past seventy years, like Biosphere 2, or our government’s efforts to weaponize the weather in Vietnam or to turn cats into spies. At least one Helms fan, on hearing the title “Snafu,” has reflexively responded, “God bless you.” In Central Park, Helms, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, explained…

On a sunny day in late March, Michael Matteo, Jr., lounged on a grassy berm beyond the right-field fence at Clover Park, a minor-league stadium set amid the sprawling strip malls of Port St. Lucie, Florida, about an hour up the interstate from the tony confines of Palm Beach. On the field, a New York Mets split squad was comfortably beating the St. Louis Cardinals in a spring-training matchup. The temperature was in the low seventies, cool for South Florida; that morning, the stadium’s elevator attendant took comfort in knowing that at least the cold weather wouldn’t frizz her hair. Back in Brooklyn, where Matteo lives, it was “thirty-five degrees and raining,” he said, sounding pleased. In the bright Florida sky, a few contrails fluffed into clouds. Matteo, who wore…

In my neighborhood, everyone knows the corners where migrants wait for work. I live in Jackson Heights, Queens, where you can’t so much as step out the door without hearing a language other than English. Newcomers arrive in waves and settle like layers of sediment. On my block, there’s a contingent of elderly Polish ladies who have been living in their century-old co-ops for decades. A few blocks over in one direction is Calle Colombia, the official nickname for a corner of Eighty-second Street since 2009; countless times, I’ve walked past a street vender guarding tall stalks of sugarcane that she feeds through a machine to make juice. A few blocks over the other way, Bangladeshi men, their beards dyed orange, hawk prayer rugs and other religious goods from overturned…

What aspects of living are meant to be done in a living room, exactly? Not eating, which takes place, at least theoretically, in the dining room or in the kitchen; not sleeping or having sex, which takes place in the bedroom. (And, unless you live in an old East Village tenement, I won’t even mention bathing.) What the living room is for, ostensibly, is gathering. It’s the most public-facing of a home’s spaces, and, as such, it bears a particular burden: that of showcasing to others who the occupants are. The quilt you drape on your couch, the paintings you hang on your walls, the tchotchkes you select for your mantel—all are about as important to your adult self-conception as heavy eyeliner and chunky boots are to an emo teen’s,…

The New Yorker is not, by any definition, a fashion magazine, but it is—and nearly always has been—a magazine concerned with fashion. The publication’s mascot, Eustace Tilley, is, after all, defined by accessories: his gleaming top hat, crisp white gloves, and dandyish monocle are all totems of both persnickety good taste and the febrile effort behind chasing it. He is equal parts fashion critic and fashion victim, squinting at the world through an eyepiece that was already passé by the time he was created. In other words: it is a very good joke, and one that set the enduring tone for the magazine’s dual-minded approach to writing about consumer goods. From the start, The New Yorker’s fashion-and-beauty reportage has walked the thin runway between seriousness and silliness, enthusiasm and exasperation,…

ACROSS 1 Seem to last forever 5 Catty? 11 Pretends to be someone else 15 Fountain drink 16 “A person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write,” per E. B. White 17 Jump 18 Basis for many newspaper horoscopes 21 League whose 2024 champions were the New York Liberty 22 Alcohol at an omakase restaurant 23 The teens, e.g. 26 Swiftie’s idol, cutesily 30 Sonneteer’s “before” 31 Attraction represented in yellow in this puzzle 36 Rage 37 Teen-age sleuth Drew 39 State whose largest cities are linked by the so-called 3-C Highway 40 Island nation northeast of Fiji 42 “That ___ say …” 43 Signs of chemistry, idiomatically 45 Word with man or friend 46 Some Bordeaux wines 48 Sites…

April in Paris has nothing on May in New York. Spring happens to the city as everything happens here: not at all, then all at once. The forsythia skims the crosstown buses as they swerve through Central Park, and the daffodils dare dogs, from every tree bed, to do their worst. Magnolias unfurl their petals to flaunt their fancy two-toned manicures. Cherry trees blush all over town. On Park Avenue, the tulips are out, orderly and abundant, as they are at corner delis and bodegas, cooling their stems behind heavy plastic curtains. Long strands of pollen drift down from sidewalk oaks, dusting parked cars greenish gold. Birdsong, jackhammers, and sneezes, the sounds of the season. Now the fauna stirs and molts. From Wakefield to Tottenville, members of the native population…

The rehearsal space for the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra is three levels below a parking garage, amid a labyrinth of dingy hallways and exposed ceiling pipes. The room has the air of a high-school gym: scuffed wood floor, unyielding lights, and a big analog clock. One recent afternoon, something new and peculiar showed up there. Behind the bassoons and in front of the trumpets was an odd trapezoidal object, reminiscent of a baccarat table, its surface strung with strings like the innards of a piano laid bare. “I don’t know that the cimbalom has ever been used here before,” Chester Englander, the instrument’s owner and player, said, as musicians filed into the room. They were about to rehearse “Antony and Cleopatra,” the opera composed by John Adams, which is making its…

Lord knows what the gaggle of tenth graders chewing French fries and puffing Marlboro Lights made of the small septuagenarian woman who approached them at Jackson Hole, a burger joint on Ninety-first and Madison, claiming to be a magazine writer. Surely they knew nothing about Lillian Ross, the legend, who had written famous portraits of Ernest Hemingway and John Huston. (Who were they, anyway? Like, old guys?) Ross was fifty years into her career at The New Yorker, where she’d helped perfect the form of the Talk of the Town piece, with its cool, friendly eye and its limber, syncopated rhythms. For whatever reason, the Jackson Hole girls let her in on their chatter, as they planned their weekend and commiserated over a pop quiz in French class. “I was…

One of the first jobs that George Bichikashvili had in America was securing some street-parking spaces in the Bronx for Con Edison, at ten dollars an hour. Bichikashvili, who is from Tbilisi, Georgia, didn’t understand why anyone would pay for this. “You just take up four spots of parking and sit there until they tell you to leave,” he said. But a job was a job. On the morning of November 18, 2022, Bichikashvili pulled a blue Chrysler minivan onto St. Theresa Avenue, in Pelham Bay. As directed, he parked atop a Con Ed manhole, set out some orange cones, and settled in. He wore a safety helmet and a neon work vest. The morning was beautiful. He watched the sunrise in the rearview mirror. Winter was creeping in. His…

In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. Before doing so, however, he sat around with the boys in the bar and thrashed out what exactly he meant to create. The same is true, pretty much, of Harold Wallace Ross, who begat The New Yorker. Until the first issue was published, on February 21, 1925, the magazine was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Yet the spirit of Ross, aided by his wife and co-begetter, Jane Grant, had been busy. A prospectus for their forth-coming project came out in the fall of 1924. It kicked off with a sturdy pronouncement: “The New Yorker will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human.” As opposed to…

In recent decades, as food has claimed pop-culture status, culinary autobiography has become a familiar genre. It tends, for example, to include a tour of formative foods. Julia Child’s revelatory taste of sole meunière, Anthony Bourdain’s first oyster—these experiences initiate gourmands and shape their obsessions. By contrast, the New York restaurateur Keith McNally’s new memoir, “I Regret Almost Everything,” is light on memorable meals. What it has instead are memorable walls. The walls belong to the playwright Alan Bennett, whom McNally met in 1968 as a young actor in the West End production of Bennett’s play “Forty Years On.” Bennett enlisted the teenage McNally to scrape old paint off a plaster frieze in his sitting room; when McNally returned a year later, he was astonished to see the walls’ transformation.…

New York City and roller-skating go way back. In 1863, a part-time inventor named James Leonard Plimpton filed the first American patent for quad skates. Plimpton, who struggled with weak ankles, loved to skate but hated to wobble; his newfangled creation featured four squat, spread-out wheels, an innovation that allowed even novice skaters to conquer balance. Plimpton’s skates were a sensation, and he opened one of the city’s first must-visit roller rinks. Many fashionable rinks have dotted the city since—Empire Roller Skating Center in Brooklyn, the Roxy in Manhattan, Skate Key in the Bronx—but most are now closed. And yet Plimpton’s spirit lives on at Xanadu, a lively roller rink-slash-night club-slash-music venue that opened last summer in Bushwick. The spot has earned a cult following for its boisterous, disco-ball-illuminated, d.j.-spun…

Kathy Hochul, New York’s awkward and publicity-shy governor, has recently found herself in a public beef with Sean Duffy, Donald Trump’s new Transportation Secretary. Duffy has been grandstanding over New York’s congestion-pricing program, which Trump has threatened to kill. In March, he showed up to call the subway a “shithole.” He announced that he was taking over the reconstruction of Penn Station. He has been making the rounds on the local morning shows to insist that, before congestion pricing, New Jerseyans could find a “roundabout way” into the city that avoided tolls, which would involve a five-hour detour through Albany. He also rode the B train two stops with Eric Adams and then taunted Hochul in the Post, saying, “She doesn’t ride the subway.” Hochul’s comeback, through a spokesperson: “Secretary…

Last fall at the Philharmonic, I was seated near a guy reading the New York Post. As often happens when I see the notorious tabloid in public, I tried to read it discreetly, out of the corner of my eye. The header said “Israel Under Attack.” The two articles below—flagrantly contradicting the banner under which they appeared—were about Israeli air strikes on Lebanon and Iran. I squinted and tried to skim both pieces until the lights went down. That page was pure Post: New York’s most dastardly, least self-conscious daily newspaper chooses heroes and villains and sticks to its own story, new information be damned. The paper deals in overstatement and unsubtle deception, and its bold headline fonts make it a kind of small-scale, endlessly serialized work of public art.…

Early on in Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides,” a woman in her twenties, Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao), tries to escape her boyfriend, Guo Bin (Li Zhubin). Lord, how she tries. It’s 2001, and the two are alone on a bus, parked somewhere in Datong, a coal-mining city in northern China. Whenever Qiaoqiao tries to get up and bolt for the exit, Bin hurls her back down into her seat—up and down, up and down, eleven times in a row, until Qiaoqiao, in tears, finally breaks free on the twelfth attempt. You may wonder how the director and actors choreographed this wordless clash of wills: How many throwdowns would suffice? Did Jia, a master of on-the-fly realism, instruct Zhao and Li to improvise—to run through the action again and again, in…