Innholdsfortegnelse for June 16, 2025 i The New Yorker

Earlier this year—Valentine’s Day weekend, to be precise—I found myself sitting on the floor of a loft in downtown Los Angeles with eight other adults, learning how to fake an orgasm. We had been told to make three “oo” sounds punctuated by a sharp inhale. Next, we bit our lower lips and exhaled on the letter “V.” “Vuh, vuh, vuhhhhhhh,” we harmonized. After a few rounds of this, I started feeling out of breath. A scene from “Barbarella” in which Jane Fonda’s character, strapped into an orgasmatron by a mad scientist, nearly expires from pleasure flashed before my eyes. At the front of the room was our conductor, Yehuda Duenyas, a lithe fifty-one-year-old in a pewter-colored sweatshirt that matched his graying fauxhawk. After our final exhale, he leaped up from…

BY THE PEOPLE Adam Gopnik, in his survey of recent Civil War literature, asks whether the conflict was, after so much death and suffering, worth it (Books, April 28th). He writes that “we accept mass dying with enormous aplomb” and that we view it as “the price of the history that seemingly rewards us now.” In addition to the eight hundred thousand dead, another casualty of the Civil War that’s often overlooked was civil liberties. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the conflict—first unilaterally, and then with the accession of Congress, after Chief Justice Roger Taney stated that only the legislative branch has the authority to take such action. Americans seem to accept wartime intrusions on our civil liberties with the same equanimity with which we accept thousands of soldiers…

On May 9, 1954, on the set of the CBS game show “What’s My Line?,” the week’s “mystery celebrity” strolled past a panel of blindfolded judges and, to a roar from the studio audience, wrote her name on the chalkboard: Gertrude Berg. A zaftig woman with warm, expressive eyes and a dumpling nose, Berg was dressed with Park Avenue flair, in a regal fur stole and three strands of pearls. Onscreen, a caption displayed the name she was better known by, that of a fictional character who, for a quarter of a century, had been as iconic as Groucho Marx and as beloved as Mickey Mouse: the irresistible, Yiddish-accented, malaprop-prone Bronx housewife Molly Goldberg, hollering “Yoo-hoo, is anybody?” into her tenement airshaft, the social network of its day. The past…

I want a face like that of the man who sets up his small table, chair, and worn typewriter in a corner of the bus terminal in the center of the enormous city and types the letters of the illiterate. They stand next to him, in a posture of awkward confession, carefully giving him the words. They pay him by the sheet, and for the stamp on the envelope, and the envelope. Because they cannot read what is on the page after the letter is finished, they do not know about the mistakes he makes and lets go without correction, or the corrections he makes to their grammar. He has done this for many years, near the man who polishes shoes, near the woman who sells boiled peanuts. His face…

Throughout her childhood, Constance called the gorse that grew on the hillsides above her house “honey-bottle,” and gathered fistfuls of it despite the spines, so that her hands would smell of it, a smell that seemed to combine oatmeal and hot metal and sun. The smell was somewhat a solace when it came to her devastating shyness, a shyness that so galled her mother that when Constance retreated into sniffing her fingers in public her mother could hardly restrain herself from swatting her daughter’s hands from her nose. Her older sisters had no such inhibitions and considered Constance a minor mortification, while she understood their high spirits to be a manic display of an unhappiness that their mother viewed as a necessary part of their social success. She agonized through…

Apocalypse, by Lizzie Wade (Harper). In recent decades, technological advances have transformed the field of archeology, allowing for the sequencing of ancient DNA and the tracing of long-ago migrations. Drawing on a trove of data, Wade zeroes in on what she terms “apocalypses,” moments in history when “rapid, collective loss” has forced a society to radically change its way of life. “Change” is the key word: Wade argues that certain examples—the climate disasters that displaced Mayans, the fallout from the Black Death—show that nothing has ever fully ended. Nor do apocalypses result in uniformly negative change; as she points out, numerous egalitarian political movements were born of catastrophe. The End Is the Beginning, by Jill Bialosky (Washington Square). Told in reverse chronological order, this affecting book relates Bialosky’s experiences caring…

JUNE 11 – 17, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. John Cazale was one of the indelible character actors of the nineteen-seventies, but his career was tragically brief. He acted in only five feature films—all Oscar nominees for Best Picture. He played Fredo Corleone in the first two parts of “The Godfather,” as well as antsy sidekicks in “The Conversation” and “Dog Day Afternoon” (pictured) and the guy who doesn’t go to Vietnam in “The Deer Hunter,” which came out eight months after he died, of cancer, in 1978. He was forty-two. To celebrate Cazale’s ninetieth-birthday year, Film Forum plays all five of his films, June 13-19. It’s a chance not only to revisit a string of stone-cold classics of the New Hollywood but to pay…

You pronounce John T. Jobbagy’s last name with the accent on the first syllable: “Joe-bagee.” The two “b”s sound like one and the “g” is hard. It’s not the kind of name you run into every day. Like all surnames ending in “agy,” “Jobbagy” is Hungarian. The family has worked in Manhattan’s meatpacking district for a hundred and twenty-five years. As his forebears did, Jobbagy arrives at work at four in the morning. He makes the two-mile trip from his apartment, in Stuyvesant Town, by car and does not drive much beyond that. His Lexus is twelve years old and has about eighteen thousand miles on it. Jobbagy runs J.T. Jobbagy, Inc., whose packinghouse is near the corner of Little West Twelfth Street and Washington Street, by the far western…

r/Advice u/Skinny_Kyle_82381 Uncomfortable Immigrant Situation Immigrants keep taking my wife for up to twenty-four hours, and no one is helping! Police won’t do anything. I’m asking this community for advice on this situation!! I feel powerless! She’s the mother of my children, and she keeps getting kidnapped! Please help me end this nightmare!! The most recent example: last night, my wife got called in to her real-estate job for an all-nighter, which anyone who knows the real-estate game will tell you is fairly common. So she put on a dress and lipstick and started walking to her office. But then I noticed a red flag: a Mini Cooper pulled up down the block, and she got in the passenger side! I was able to get a decent look at the…

In March, an exhibition of works by Jenny Saville, the British artist known for her large-scale figurative paintings, went on display at the Albertina Museum, in Vienna. The day before the opening, Saville visited the galleries to inspect the completed hang. The show, titled “Gaze,” included several works in which Saville had sought to explore the fractured experience of life in the digital era. “I have had a fascination for quite a while now with how we live these different realities,” she explained. “If you sit on a bus or take the subway, everybody’s on a device. So you’ve got this sort of mundane, lived reality, and then this screened reality. If you’ve got twenty people on the subway train, those twenty people are probably all over the globe, or…

In 1969, Vivian Gornick was assigned by the Village Voice to write about the “women’s libbers” gathering in downtown Manhattan. Gornick set out never having heard of women’s liberation. She returned one week later a convert. What happened in the interval was the dawning of what second-wave feminists called feminist consciousness: the growing conviction that how things were for women were not how they had to be. Often, this insight arose in conversation with other women, in consciousness-raising groups. Comparing notes on the parts of their lives once thought too personal to merit political analysis—love, sex, housework, marriage, motherhood—they found their “symptoms of private unhappiness,” in Gornick’s words, “so powerfully and so consistently duplicated among women that perhaps these symptoms could be ascribed to cultural causes as to psychological ones.”…

The afterlife of the great American movie moguls is uncertain. Way back when, you might one day be on the cover of Time, the next day lost to time. Some who were once famous and feared, like Harry Cohn, of Columbia Pictures, have vanished into the sands. Sam Goldwyn persists only after having been made into a Yogi Berra, good for sideways wisdom—“Include me out,” and so on. But Irving Thalberg, the head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the nineteen-twenties and thirties, left a lasting echo, in part because he died young enough to be remembered romantically, but mostly because he was the model for the title character of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel “The Last Tycoon” (1941). Indeed, Kenneth Turan’s “Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation,”…