Innholdsfortegnelse for August 4, 2025 i The New Yorker

Hearings before the Commerce Committee of the Arizona House of Representatives normally draw a modest crowd of lobbyists in suits. On March 19, 2024, a throng of people in more casual attire appeared. They wore matching green T-shirts adorned with the message “Save Our Tips.” The slogan caught the eye of Analise Ortiz, a Democrat on the committee. She assumed that the visitors were bartenders and waitstaff who had come to voice opposition to a bill that could lower their salaries. The bill was called the Tipped Workers Protection Act, a name that disguised its true purpose. The legislation, if approved, would place an initiative on that November’s ballot to amend the Arizona constitution so that employers could pay tipped workers twenty-five per cent less than the state minimum wage,…

One night, not long after a cease-fire between Israel and Iran took hold, I was sitting at the bar of a crowded restaurant north of Tel Aviv, a place buzzing with high-spirited talk and laughter, jokes shouted over bottles of wine. All at once, every phone in the room lit up with alerts. One read: BREAKING: The I.D.F. has identified a ballistic missile launch from Yemen toward Israeli territory. The Israeli Air Force is operating to intercept the threat, the I.D.F. said. The news came with a map scarred with a blob of angry red, covering nearly all of central Israel—including, as far as I could tell, the bar where I sat with a burger and a beer. For a moment, everything seemed to pause. Starting on June 13th, with…

She was a busy little item. There was a doll to be fixed up and chastised with a hairbrush that was twice its length. Also a coloring book and a packet of markers, which she took out of the soft plastic sleeve and spilled all down herself so she was in the footwell and up again seventeen times between the Walkinstown roundabout and Newlands Cross. Ivor waited for her to settle, but she was too excited to settle, and he finally said, “Wiggle in there into the back and be quiet.” She looked over at him. “Hop in, go on.” It was her first time sitting in the front seat. “Or put the things back there. Just throw them in and be quiet.” The child clambered arse about face, then…

With minimal ingenuity, any historical period can be made to dissolve into the ones around it. Take the rock revolution—that great shift which, emerging in the mid-nineteen-fifties and established by the mid-sixties, definitively separated the Broadway-and-jazz-based tunes that had previously dominated popular music from the new sound. The break ravaged record companies and derailed careers. In the fifties, the wonderful jazz-and-standards singer Beverly Kenney performed a song she’d written called “I Hate Rock ’n’ Roll,” and then—perhaps for other reasons, but surely for that one, too—took her own life. But listen closely and you hear continuities stronger than any rupture. The second song that the Beatles sang to the American public was a Broadway ballad from “The Music Man.” Chuck Berry, their hero, worshipped Nat King Cole, with Berry’s great…

In early July, while shopping at a farmers’ market on the east side of Los Angeles, where I live, I bought a few packages of raw chicken thighs from Jose David Ruelas, of Garcia Ruelas Farms. As Ruelas, who is known for telling customers to “have an eggcellent day,” bagged my purchase, he asked, “Would you like some frozen water with that?” I stared at him blankly until he gave me a conspiratorial wink, and I realized what he was refusing to say. Barely a month had passed since ICE had launched its vicious campaign against L.A.’s immigrants, particularly those from Latin America, with masked agents snatching unsuspecting people from Home Depot parking lots, hotels, and local farms. Nowhere seemed out of bounds: one day as I was leaving my…

IN TUNE Nick Paumgarten’s behind-the-scenes report on the Met’s recent acquisition of a trove of special vintage guitars brought back memories of a summer day fifty years ago, when I stopped into Manny’s, a guitar shop on West Fortyeighth Street, to buy a Martin D-28 (“Guitar Heroes,” May 26th). I sampled a few, and none sounded right. Eventually, the salesman went upstairs to bring down another. It was magical, its tones like those of a vintage model. I said I’d take it, but then he told me that it wasn’t for sale—he just wanted to test my ear. The salesman informed me, sotto voce, that this guitar was a special order, crafted from aged wood, for Paul Simon. I slipped the salesman some crisp Benjamins, and he phoned Martin, claiming…

The Dissected Graces in Florence.Their torsos are sliced openRevealing their livers &Hearts & kidneys.Intestines spill out of their perfectlyMade glowing wax skin. Their faces are peaceful;They wear pearls;They lie on beds of silk. They made these wax girls toTeach us about God.The eighteenth-centuryScientists declared thatThe body is the mind of God.The insides of the women show theDivine power of healing.Guts are holy. In Antonello da Messina’s CrucifixionPainting, I am the one on the right.I am hanging like that,My back is arched like that,I am facing the real God,I am unknown and will be forgotten,But I am there, too, and my body isOpen to all the pain of life. He ties me to the bed& leaves me there.I am revealed.This is my preservation.…

Moderation, by Elaine Castillo (Viking). In this biting novel, a fiercely independent young woman named Girlie works as a content moderator for a virtual-reality platform, Playground, that is at once a game-like diversion and an immersive therapeutic tool. Its inventor imagined that people would one day be prescribed alternate realities to help them recover from P.T.S.D. and depression—but, before he could see this vision to fruition, he died, possibly by suicide. As Girlie learns more about the inventor through the platform’s co-founder, she finds herself falling in love at the same time as she becomes ensnared in a corporate conflict over Playground’s future. Castillo explores the wonders and limitations of technology while skewering its stewards’ appetite for power. Via Ápia, by Geovani Martins, translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches…

On the last day of the first weekend of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, a brief storm struck. We had gone into the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance, on Williams College’s campus, for a matinée of “Camino Real”—a rare revival of Tennessee Williams’s oddest play, from 1953—under a lid of hot gray clouds; we emerged into a fresh, cool summer’s day. We might never have known there had been a violent deluge if various phones in the theatre hadn’t set off their awooga awooga klaxons at once. But even sirens can’t disrupt the bizarre logic of “Camino Real,” which is itself a sustained series of alarms. Williams’s title is deliberately confusing; we are at the “end of the Camino Real and the beginning of the Camino Real,” a character says…

JULY 30 – AUGUST 5, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. The hitmaking director Sam Pinkleton—lately of Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!”—stages two projects downtown simultaneously, both by exemplars of queer mayhem. One, a remounting of the comedian and performance artist Morgan Bassichis’s exquisitely funny “Can I Be Frank?,” at the SoHo Playhouse (through Sept. 13), re-creates a standup “rant” by the little-known, groundbreaking comic Frank Maya, who died at forty-five, in 1995, of complications from AIDS. The other, “ta-da!,” by Josh Sharp, at Greenwich House Theatre (through Aug. 23), is a new work from the “Dicks: The Musical” star that includes an attempt to memorize two thousand PowerPoint slides. Wise New Yorkers will see anything that catches Pinkleton’s eye; there is no surer guarantee of silliness…

In Kingston after the storm, the yardcools, the grass slippery underfoot,leaves dripping—the air heavy with fatigue.I move to the low branch of the coolie plum tree,straddle it and wait for the wind to clearthe growing anticipation of gloom.And there he is, sculpted pale woodgleaming with cold sweat, stern prophecyin each inflection, the dark root tendrilsmangrove growing out and into soilyou know now, what death looks like,the economy of movement, the soul givingas if straining against some terror lurkingthe voice turning his syntax into a final plea,I remember, I remember, I remember when.They could not have known, they who rolledunder the incense of his sound, could nothave known what even he did not truly knowevery strained word a holy benediction.Tonight, I watch again and again, the garishlight, the stoic faces of…

In mathematics, you often have to deal with the problem of division by zero—an undefined gesture toward infinity. Charting the wealth gap between white and Black Americans over time poses a similar problem. It’s not that African Americans arrived with almost no property; it’s that they arrived as property themselves. The whole calculation is a category error. For two centuries—first under British rule, then under an American flag that proclaimed liberty and justice for all—Black people in the United States were enslaved. The Revolution’s soaring promises of inalienable rights and universal equality were never meant to include them. It took a civil war before African Americans were finally recognized as citizens. Only after the abolition of slavery does it become possible to begin a meaningful statistical series—and what it reveals…