Innholdsfortegnelse for June 9, 2025 i The New Yorker

Every summer in France, an exodus takes place. It invariably begins in early July, when public school lets out, kicking off les grandes vacances. This year, the last day of school is July 4th. On July 5th, the country’s airports, highways, and ferry terminals will swell with outbound travellers. Among them will be many of France’s 7.3 million immigrants, who constitute some ten per cent of the population, and the descendants of immigrants, who account for many millions more. Nearly a third of children born in France in 2023 had at least one parent born abroad. The exodus is a charged moment, an annual transmigration of people, money, goods, gifts, expectations, and yearnings nurtured through the long European winter. The ritual is colloquially known as le retour au bled, “the…

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,”…

“Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” (at the Met through October 26th) is a heartbreak of a show, brilliant in concept, design, and execution. Curated with great feeling and insight by Monica L. Miller, the chair of Africana Studies at Barnard College, with Andrew Bolton, the head of the Met’s Costume Institute, “Superfine” does something exceedingly rare in the history of costume-based exhibitions: it privileges Black male beauty without requiring the guys to earn their keep as props for female models or for ideas about masculinity. There have been shows dedicated to the dandy before, most notably “Artist, Rebel, Dandy,” at the RISD Museum, in 2013, but this is the first I’ve seen in which the culture of race—and its effect on self-presentation—is the show. It comes as a shock, too, to…

In the four and a half decades since its founding, the Library of America has issued not only the pillars of our national literature but such populist fare as the lyrics of Cole Porter and a volume devoted to “Peanuts.” This is certainly the right move—the jazzy and the colloquial are the very lifeblood of our culture. Still, it’s curious that it has taken until 2025 for these gatekeepers to anoint Margaret Fuller with a book of her own. Chalk it up, perhaps, to Fuller’s blurry role in the canon. Although her brief life is richly documented, she often fails to come into focus. A sworn enemy of marriage who longed for a husband and child, a Transcendentalist who made a beeline for revolutionary Europe, an incurable gossip and an…

AMERICAN CRUELTIES I’m grateful to Jonathan Blitzer for his recent article about Trump’s cruel and illegal deportations to El Salvador (Comment, April 28th). I have a Salvadoran godson who has been in the black hole of President Nayib Bukele’s jails for more than three years. No charges, no hearings, no evidence. He has not been allowed to send letters or to receive visits from anybody, including lawyers. My family and I have tried, through multiple channels, to get him out, without success. This grotesque mockery of justice is what President Trump is trying to normalize, and it is hard for me to understand how we as a country have fallen so far so fast. How does emulating a dictatorship, like that in El Salvador, prove that America is “great”? Kathy…

Stephen Malkmus likes tennis. He recently moved to Chicago, with his wife, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and tries to play at least once a week. Not long ago, he passed through New York while on tour—not with Pavement, his longtime band, or with the Jicks, his other longtime band, but with the Hard Quartet, his latest project, which is almost always described, with indeterminate irony, as an underground supergroup. The supergroup convened beneath the bubble at the McCarren Park tennis courts, in Brooklyn, where Malkmus, fifty-nine, was finishing up an hour-long hitting session with Hutchins and a few old friends. His three bandmates, arriving for lunch, not tennis, milled around by a net post amid discarded layers and spare gear. They looked out of place on the court: Matt Sweeney, in…

What did she eat for breakfast?Why were her feet so clean?Why are the yellow irises so luscious this spring?When was the last time you touched her?Where did she stash the pills?Were there rivers in her dreams?Did she like figs? Olives?Why wouldn’t she cut her hair?Did she get a nose job in high school?What made her such a bad cook?What will you miss most about her?Was she breathing when they found her?Who was that married man she was once crazy about?Why was she always saying, Don’t tell anybody?How did you disappoint her?Why did she let the chickens shit all over?Why did she stick a single gladiolain every bouquet of zinnias?Why did she finger her ailments like a rosary?Explain cosmic inconsequence.Why did she hold her fork in her fist?Why couldn’t she apologize?Did…

I sing for clouds, constant rains, a fern chorusof things forgotten, ginger flowersof sadness my mother bore, enormoushollows of the family’s past, my father the dutiful son come to run the storeby the volcano, called by his fatherpromising a new life, its open doorthat swung shut after barely a year. They left, me still a newborn in their arms,wailing in complaint for the swift travel,headed to Kahuku, the new truck farms,old plantation, and its steel sugar castle. I grew to six there, a boy barefooton dirt and gravel roads, green temple mossby the graveyard. There were shorebirds in suitsof slanting rain, a gray-brown surf pebble-tossed, not fit for swimming, a tired sandspit’s driftthat marked the margin of all our dreaming.And what was that? The green folds of cliffschanted our imagined…

Marketcrafters, by Chris Hughes (Avid Reader). This economic history argues that America’s prosperity is the product not of an undisturbed free market but, rather, of the hard work of functionaries. Hughes profiles a range of government technocrats working in eras of tumult—including the Great Depression and the energy crisis of the nineteen-seventies—to support the notion that setting clear objectives and giving skilled, intelligent people resources and flexibility will bear fruit. An especially strong section dissects the implementation of the CHIPS Act, a simple policy aimed at bringing semiconductor manufacturing to the U.S., which successfully increased domestic investment in the industry. Children of Radium, by Joe Dunthorne (Scribner). At once a family history and an account of the author’s piecing together of that history, this lively memoir centers on Siegfried Merzbacher,…

JUNE 4 – 10, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. The American painter John Singer Sargent became famous for making women look beautiful, so it made sense that for years he actively pursued the most famously beautiful woman in Paris, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau—then Paris’s leading Belle Époque It Girl—to sit for him. When Sargent’s “Madame X” débuted at the Salon, in 1884, the public hated it. The winds of time have shifted its reputation from disgrace to masterpiece—and it is now the focus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Sargent & Paris” (through Aug. 3), which explores Sargent’s decade in the French city. (“The Birthday Party,” from 1885, is pictured.) The show is a perfect summer escape, full of popsicle-saturated colors in cool dark…

Sparks flew, a wing bent, and the landing gear snapped off as the silver Lockheed Electra 10-E plane smashed into the runway at Luke Field, outside Honolulu. The pilot’s only stroke of luck was that the aircraft, which contained nearly a thousand gallons of fuel, didn’t explode. The thirty-nine-year-old Amelia Earhart and her crew of two navigators, Fred Noonan and Harry Manning, crawled out of the wreckage, unsettled but otherwise unhurt. They had meant to depart on the second leg of a gruelling voyage: a round-the-world flight that had begun in Oakland, California, and would continue westward, with two dozen or so stops, before ending up back in Oakland. People close to Earhart knew that she wasn’t fully ready for a challenge of this magnitude, and so a work-around had…

But there, isn’t that a knock on the door, yes, it definitely is, and there, there’s another knock, and I can’t remember anyone knocking on my door in a long time, the last person to do it was Jatgeir, but that stopped when that woman moved in with him and turned everything upside down, so it’s been years now since he knocked on my door, but I guess it could be Jatgeir, and I’d probably better open the door then, but there are dirty dishes in the sink, and they’ve been there for several days, not that I use so many dishes, but, still, there might even be a little mold, and when’s the last time I aired out the place, no, not since I can remember, so it smells…

Late on a Sunday night in June of 2023, a woman named Carlishia Hood and her fourteen-year-old son, an honor student, pulled into Maxwell Street Express, a fast-food joint in West Pullman, on the far South Side of Chicago. Her son stayed in the car. Hood went inside. Maxwell is a no-frills place—takeout-style, no indoor seating. It’s open twenty-four hours a day. Hood asked for a special order—without realizing that at Maxwell, a busy place, special orders are frowned upon. The man behind her in line got upset; she was slowing things down. His name was Jeremy Brown. On the street, they called him the Knock-Out King. Brown began to gesticulate, his arms rising and falling in exasperation. He argued with Hood, growing more agitated. Then he cocked his fist,…