Home//The New Yorker/August 7, 2023/In This Issue
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023Comment: A Nation AflameIn Israel, the saying goes, there are four seasons: election, war, strike, and summer. These bleak, blazing days in the country are a result of the first. Last year, elections brought to power the most extremist government in its history. Israel has no written constitution, but until last week the authority of the government and the Prime Minister was limited by the Supreme Court’s ability to overturn decisions and appointments that it deemed “extremely unreasonable.” Now the Knesset, with its right-wing majority, has passed a law eliminating this power, and legal experts warn that a rise in cronyism and corruption is likely. As Mordechai Kremnitzer, a scholar of constitutional law, wrote in the liberal newspaper Haaretz, “Limiting the judicial review will encourage the government to make unacceptable decisions, both in…5 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023The Way: Role of a LifetimeJonathan Roumie, the forty-nine-year-old actor who plays Jesus Christ in “The Chosen,” a popular crowdfunded TV series about the New Testament’s protagonist, ascended the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral for noon Mass. Before he could make it through the sanctuary’s nine-ton bronze doors, he was spotted by fans. “We just want a picture with Jesus!” one woman said.Roumie politely obliged. The fan, it turned out, was among the thousands of pilgrims who’d travelled to Texas a few summers ago to be extras in Season 2’s Sermon on the Mount episode.“Oh, my heavens, my husband is going to just die,” she said, posing with Roumie.“You have touched our hearts in ways they have never been touched before,” her friend added.Roumie headed for the pews. The son of an Egyptian father and…4 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023Poems: FugitiveRed begonias stricken by frost—listen: they nail plywood sheets and complete the garage decking—swarmed by mosquitoes, you wander hot, thirsty, disoriented in a palm forest—you have bloodied your hands on barbed wire—after a snowfall, you inhale starlight while standing in an orchard—you have had three operations to repair a torn elbow—green mist rising from leafing willows—running across a dune of white sand, you discover a pile of oryx bones—they stack elephant tusks in a pyramid and set them on fire—you have staggered out of a house in flames and lived to say this—you have been thrust by rifle butt to a river and heard someone shout, “Swim!”—the grass turns to yellow-gold stalks—minutes replete with the noise of honeybees—minutes replete with river gold—asleep, she rides the waves of her breath onto…1 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023Fiction: Yogurt DaysThe week I started middle school, my mother told me she would be late picking me up on Thursdays. On Thursdays, she said, she would be taking frozen yogurt to Benjamin, a boy whose family lived out near the Air Force base. I’d never met the boy but had overheard my parents talking about him. I gathered he was very sick, possibly dying. Is it cancer? I asked. Something like cancer, my mother said. She said that frozen yogurt was one of the few things he liked that he could digest. I guessed his mother couldn’t leave him alone long enough to drive to our part of town, where the yogurt shop was.That my mother would cross Phoenix to bring yogurt to a sick boy didn’t surprise me. She was…20 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023Books:Taste Of CherryWhen the author Ann Patchett was five years old, her family broke apart. Her mother divorced her father, married the man with whom she’d been having an affair, and moved Patchett and her sister from Los Angeles to Nashville. Patchett gained four new siblings and an additional parent. Years later, when she was twenty-seven, her mother remarried again. “I suffered from abundance,” she writes in “My Three Fathers,” a 2020 essay for this magazine. As a girl, she would fly back to L.A. for a week every summer to see her birth father. Often, they’d go to Forest Lawn cemetery. “We would bring a lunch and walk the paths through the exemplary grass to see where the movie stars were buried,” Patchett writes. She adds that the scent of carnations…11 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023The Theatre:Lover Boy“Orpheus Descending,” a great big louche mess of a play by Tennessee Williams, from 1957—revived at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, directed by Erica Schmidt—kicks into gear when a good-looking kid called Valentine Xavier (Pico Alexander) slinks into the Torrance Mercantile Store, in a small town in Mississippi. I say “called,” not “named,” because he seems like the type of guy who’s had to shed his given name like a skin, and maybe a handful of others after that, continually improvising. Self-created and just turned thirty, he’s decked out in a snakeskin jacket, carrying a much loved acoustic guitar.Val’s an odd guy, shrouded in put-on mystery and spouting high-flown, lyrical talk.In search of a job, he produces a reference letter that’s off-puttingly candid: his former employer at…7 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023Goings On: Goings OnAUGUST 2 – 8, 2023The vital and necessary exhibition “Africa Fashion” (at the Brooklyn Museum, through Oct. 22) gives viewers the opportunity to examine garments—and attendant conceptions of self-presentation—that amount to a very particular way of being that doesn’t necessarily exclude colonial influence. African designers ranging from Kofi Ansah to Imane Ayissi took ideas from Europe, and from the rest of the world, to make their remarkable work, just as the world has for so long taken from Africa. All this is enhanced by the influence of clothing, objects, and hair styles indigenous to each designer’s home region. Africa is not one place, and the curators Ernestine White-Mifetu and Annissa Malvoisin provide the space to embrace its multiplicity.—Hilton AlsABOUT TOWNPOP MUSIC | If the sugar-rush bliss of Carly Rae Jepsen’s…5 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023Billion-Dollar Jogger: Trump’s GuyDrew Findling stepped out of his black Mercedes-Benz on a sticky recent morning in North Atlanta, wearing black shorts, a black shirt, black shoes, a black hat, and black shades. He was preparing to go for a run. “I can run any pace you want,” he said, “unless you’re trying to break the 10K record.” Findling, who is sixty-three, belongs to the Athletics Hall of Fame at nearby Oglethorpe University, where, he said, he once clocked a 4:37 mile during a cross-country race. But he’s better known as the man representing Donald Trump as he faces likely charges of election interference in Georgia, and as the #BillionDollarLawyer. The late Young Dolph, one of Findling’s many hip-hop clients, bestowed the nickname in 2017, after he’d summoned Findling to meet him at…4 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023London Postcard: Side HustleBryan Adams, the Canadian rock singer, was at the Atlas Gallery, in London, the other day, attending an art opening. The art on display was his own; since the late nineties, he has had a side career as a portrait photographer. He got into it because he found himself fascinated by the people who took his picture for album covers and magazines. “I was always watching what the assistants were doing,” he said, “and how it wasn’t just showing up and getting your picture taken.” He has shot assignments for British Vogue and German Vogue and for Harper’s Bazaar. His subjects have included his friends and colleagues (Morrissey, Lindsay Lohan, Judi Dench, Ben Kingsley), British military veterans, and homeless street venders. In 2001, he was commissioned as Canada’s official photographer…4 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023American Chronicles: Hidden DepthsWhen Carey Mae Parker didn’t show up for her son’s sixth-birthday party in Hunt County, Texas, in 1991, her family was puzzled but not entirely surprised. Parker was young and had a turbulent life, and they assumed she’d appear eventually. But she never did. Parker’s daughter, Brandy Hathco*ck, was five at the time. She and her two siblings had spent time in foster care; later, they moved in with their grandfather. The household was chaotic, fractured by abuse. “I hadn’t heard the term ‘intergenerational trauma’ until pretty recently, but as soon as I heard it I knew, O.K., that’s exactly what I’ve experienced,” Brandy told me.Brandy was initially led to believe that her mother had abandoned the family, but as she got older she began to reconsider. Maybe Parker hadn’t…31 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023Profiles: Bodies of WorkThirty years ago, when Lisa Yuskavage and Matvey Levenstein were young painters trying to establish themselves in the East Village, they got a message on their answering machine. An acquaintance who had invited the couple to a party wanted to let them know that people felt Yuskavage was “too much,” and that, on second thought, they’d rather she didn’t come.Yuskavage was already depressed. She’d recently had her first gallery show—abstracted depictions of women folded over like swollen seashells, painted in what she later called “dark, slimy” colors. “I walked into that opening and I absolutely hated the show,” she recalled recently. “I wanted to take it all down and get out of there.” She confessed her dismay to the painter John Currin, a former classmate at the Yale School of…33 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023Books:The Children’s CrusadeWhen the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, on May 17, 1954, it was big news. The Times gave the story banner headlines and ten pages of coverage. The case had been before the Justices since 1952, and it was common knowledge that a decision had been in the works. Many people probably anticipated the outcome, although maybe not that the opinion would be unanimous. Everyone, though, had the same question: Now what?There is a reason for all the Hogwarts-like trappings that surround the Supreme Court—the super-secret conferences, the ban on cameras, the fact that the Justices read their opinions from a dais, that they never hold press conferences, that they wear black robes. All this gravitas masks the reality that the Court’s powers…20 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023Tables for Two: Café MarsHumor might be the hardest thing for a restaurant to get away with. Plenty of attempts can be found, especially at billionaire-bait tasting-menu spots, where caviar in an ice-cream cone is hailed as the pinnacle of whimsy. The new Café Mars, in Gowanus, bills itself as “an unusual Italian restaurant,” and I was worried, heading in, that I would feel coerced into surprise or amusem*nt as each dish hit the table. I don’t know what I was so afraid of. “Unusual,” in Café Mars’s case, doesn’t mean predictable trompe-l’oeil or edgy for the sake of edgy. The flavors are familiarly Italianate, but they come in unexpected combinations, in weird and wondrous shapes and textures.The restaurant’s space was previously home to an Italian deli; decades before that, it was a pasta…2 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023Anti-Perfectionism: Waste NotThe Li sisters, Margaret and Irene, have a saying: “If it is delicious in general, it will be delicious in a dumpling.” Cheddar-scallion-potato dumpling? “It’s our love letter to the pierogi, and all Eastern European forms of starch wrapped in starch,” Irene says. Dumplings made from leftovers? God, yes. In June, Margaret and Irene published their second cookbook, “Perfectly Good Food,” a guide to zero-waste cooking, which includes recipes for such delectables as Cream-of-Anything Soup, Fridge-Cleanout Fried Rice, and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Vegetable Paella.Some forty per cent of the food grown in America is thrown away, much of it from people’s kitchens. And food is expensive! The book advocates a jazzy, contingency-driven approach to household thrift. A recipe might call for any crunchy vegetable, the meat of your choice, or thinly sliced…4 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023Personal History: Dreaming in BabylonThe first time I left Jamaica, I was seventeen. I’d graduated from high school two years before, and while trying to get myself to college I’d been scouted as a model. And so I found myself at the Wilhelmina Models office in Miami, surrounded by South Beach’s finest glass windows with all my glass hopes, face to face with a famous one-named model who was now in her sixties. When her gaze halted at my dreadlocks, I shouldn’t have been surprised at what came next.“Can you cut the dreads?” she asked, as she flipped through my portfolio, her soft accent blunting the impact of the words.Back home in Kingston, hair stylists would leave my dreadlocks untouched, tied up in a ponytail with my good black ribbon, deciding that the problem…32 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023A Reporter at Large: The Making of a MutinyOn May 20th, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, stood in the center of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, and recorded a video. The city once housed seventy thousand people but was now, after months of relentless shelling, nearly abandoned. Whole blocks were in ruins, charred skeletons of concrete and steel. Smoke hung over the smoldering remains like an early-morning fog. Prigozhin wore combat fatigues and waved a Russian flag. “Today, at twelve noon, Bakhmut was completely taken,” he declared. Armed fighters stood behind him, holding banners with the Wagner motto: “Blood, honor, homeland, courage.”More than anyone else in Russia, Prigozhin had used the war in Ukraine to raise his own profile. In the wake of the invasion, he transformed Wagner from a niche mercenary outfit of former professional…54 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023Books: Briefly NotedRhythm Man, by Stephanie Stein Crease (Oxford). This propulsive biography places the drummer and bandleader Chick Webb at the epicenter of the early Swing Era. Despite the spinal tuberculosis that stunted his height at four feet and ended his life at thirty-four, Webb’s strength on the drums reshaped the jazz rhythm section as he “battled” other bandleaders, such as Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. Crease pays close attention to the details of the recordings of Webb’s band, contextualizing their shifting sound against a backdrop of changing racial dynamics. She also incorporates eloquent testimonies to Webb’s musicianship and generosity from his contemporaries: after their performances, he “would compliment his sidemen’s best solos by singing them, note for note.”Last Call at Coogan’s, by Jon Michaud (St. Martin’s). Based…2 min
The New Yorker|August 7, 2023Pop Music:EvolutionThese days, it’s not uncommon to hear moviegoers, exhausted by new releases based on toys, comic books, or films they’ve already seen, lament the disappearance of a middle ground between blockbuster and avant-garde: stories that are character-driven but not too opaque or ponderous, that are neither blind to suffering nor drowning in pathos, that aren’t fusty or overly youth-obsessed. That same void exists, to a lesser degree, in the music industry. It’s easy to find records that feel raw and challenging, or, conversely, records that have been focus-grouped and smoothed into oblivion. It is much more difficult to find music that explores whatever might lie in between.On “Natural Disaster,” out this month, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist Bethany Cosentino takes an unexpected swing at normie rock and roll. The album’s…6 min
