The Magazine
July 11 & 18, 2022
Reporting
Profiles
Emmanuel Carrère Writes His Way Through a Breakdown
France’s renowned author, known for his penetrating portraits of murderers and disaster victims, trains his eye on his own emotional collapse.
Personal History
The Truth About My Father
My mother was a white woman. Until I was sixteen, I believed that, on my father’s side, I was descended from the enslaved people who had crossed the Atlantic in chains.
Fiction
Fiction
Arrivals
“At a stoplight, you idle under a billboard, and what towers above you is a portrait of your boyfriend’s face. You do your best not to stare.”
Fiction
Call Me Ishmael
“There was no woman, there was a corner, and a corner was no place for a woman to stand, any more than a decent house was any place for her to live.”
Fiction
Peking Duck
“I tell the truth in Chinese, I make up stories in English. I don’t take it that seriously.”
Fiction
A King Alone
“That was probably part of why he gave people rides. How grateful they were in a world where almost no one would stop to help a stranger.”
Road Trips
Road Trips
In the Beforetime
“I could sense in my bones that the worst had happened, yet a road trip allowed time and space for disbelief. Disbelief is a kind of hope.”
Road Trips
Mine Field
“We are in a moment when a scenic drive, a little road trip through a purportedly protected landscape, is still theoretically possible.”
Road Trips
Night Driving
“What if this strange officer who has refused to say why he stopped me shoots me? What if he says I jumped out and pursued him to the back to attack him?”
Road Trips
Wide World of Disney
“We went to Disney World not out of some ironic feeling for Disney and what Disney represents but because we wanted to ride Space Mountain.”
The Critics
Books
Cristina Rivera Garza’s Bodies Politic
Scrutinizing gender, history, and authority, the Mexican-born writer has found an unsettling yet playful way to write about desire.
The Art World
A Frequently Misunderstood American Master
The Yanktonai Dakota painter Oscar Howe, who died in 1983, is the subject of a remarkable retrospective at the National Museum of the American Indian.
Books
The Rediscovery of Halldór Laxness
A long eclipse for Iceland’s greatest novelist has been followed by a continuing renaissance.
Books
The Many Confrontations of Jean Rhys
In her life and in her writing, the author of post-colonial works such as “Wide Sargasso Sea” met adversity—inflicted and self-inflicted—with an unflinching eye.
The Talk of the Town
Jeannie Suk Gersen on the Supreme Court after Roe; masters of their medium; the blacklist, podcasted; what would Dalí think of it?; the shape of speech.
Signage Dept.
The Wes Andersons of Sign-Making
Carlos and Miguel Cevallos, octogenarian brothers from Ecuador who live together and wear a suit and tie every day, hand-letter posters and signs for the pupuserías of Roosevelt Avenue and the trendy ice-cream shops of Manhattan.
Masterpieces
DALL-E, Make Me Another Picasso, Please
The creators of an artificial intelligence that can produce almost any art work imaginable—from “cheeseburger lamp” to “the rest of mona lisa”—sift through their latest requests for original images.
Hoopla Dept.
Selling Lies with Jon Hamm
The actor meets up with the writer John Mankiewicz to prep for the propaganda-themed première party for their podcast, “The Big Lie,” in which Hamm, as a Commie-fighting G-man, plays a different kind of man in a hat.
Comment
The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Have Asserted Their Power
But what if their big and fast moves, eviscerating some constitutional rights and inflating others, are bound for collision?
Cartoons
1/13
“O.K., Belinda, America wants to know . . . How. Will. You. Settle!”
Cartoon by Lars Kenseth
Puzzles & Games Dept.
Poems
Poems
The Dead
Goings On About Town
Night Life
Arturo O’Farrill’s “Fandango at the Wall”
The jazz maestro and his eighteen-piece Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra reunite with musicians from Veracruz, Mexico, to play a concert of son jarocho, at Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier I.
Tables for Two
Evelia’s Tamales, from Pushcart to Brick and Mortar
Evelia Coyotzi, who started out selling her homemade tamales on a street corner in North Corona, Queens, has opened a storefront restaurant nearby, offering tortas and tortillas in addition to the main draw.
Mail
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