The author as a baby, with his parents and his older brother in New Jersey.
“Give me three numbers, baby.” My mother made this request often so often, in fact, that when I try to remember her voice this is what I hear. I can see her, too. She’s in the kitchen, sitting at the white Formica table, the green wall phone behind her, the phone she’ll soon pick up to place her bet. She’s smiling, because this moment is capacious: everything’s possible. It’s a moment in which—unless you’re a pessimist, and my mother is not—Fortune is on your side.
She’s dressed for the occasion, in a f lower-print top and stretchy yellow slacks, as if to advertise her innocence before breaking the law. Of course, for a long time I didn’t know that what my mother was doing was illegal. She certainly didn’t look like a criminal, sitting there with her blond hair intricately coiffed. The stylist had made it look like a sfogliatella, a kind of Neapolitan pastry that we often had in the house. My mother’s hair possessed the same golden hue, the same artful construction of multilayered swoops. Plus, the glossy lacquer of Aqua Net was not unlike the sugar on the pastry. That this delectable human might want my advice made me feel giddy.
I don’t recall her ever asking my brother for numbers. My brother was older, more confident, more defined as a person. Perhaps, as such, he lacked mystery. So my mother looked to me, the quiet one.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der August 05, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der August 05, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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The Puppet Masters - Compulsion, complicity, and the art of Bunraku.
The National Bunraku Theatre, in New York recently for the first time in more than thirty years, presented an evening of suicides. The performance, at the Japan Society, consisted of excerpts from two of the company’s most celebrated productions. In the Fire Watchtower scene from “The Greengrocer’s Daughter,” by Suga Sensuke and Matsuda Wakichi, from 1773, the titular character sacrifices herself to save a temple page boy she loves. In a scene from “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki,” by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, from 1703, two lovers are driven to take their own lives. Both plays were inspired by real events, and Chikamatsu’s was followed by a wave of double suicides that led to a ban on further performances. This mirroring of life and art is all the more astonishing given the fact that the actors are not people but puppets.
The Convert - The sudden rise of J. D. Vance has transfixed conservative élites. Is he the future of Trumpism?
Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate had punctuated an astounding rise. Born in the small manufacturing city of Middletown, Ohio, he was raised by a drug-addicted mother and his beloved Appalachian-born grandmother, Mamaw. He worked his way up through storied American institutions: the Marine Corps, Yale Law School, Silicon Valley. “Hillbilly Elegy,” the best-selling memoir Vance published in 2016, made him famous, and his denunciations of Trump as “cultural heroin” for the white working class even more so. A few years later, he was a senator from Ohio, the Republican Party’s most effective spokesman for Trumpism as an ideology, and—both improbably and inevitably—the VicePresidential nominee. “If you think about where he came from and where he is, at forty years old,” the conservative analyst Yuval Levin, a Vance ally, said, “J.D. is the single most successful member of his generation in American politics.”
SONGS OF WAR
Early on in “Blitz,” Rita Hanway (Saoirse Ronan), a London factory worker, puts her nine-year-old son, George (Elliott Heffernan), aboard a train. Rather, George puts himself aboard; he twists angrily free of his mother’s grasp—“I hate you!” he cries—and tears off down the platform.
STAR-CROSSED
“Sunset Blud.” and Romeo Juliet,” on Broadway.
A PIECE OF HER MIND
Does the Enlightenment’s great female intellect need rescuing?
EACH MORTAL THING
What other creatures understand about death.
From the Wilderness
One morning in the rainy season, I went to bed at 6 a.m. after working all night and was on the verge of falling asleep when I was startled by the sound of my father’s voice coming through the air-conditioner next to my bed.
THE BIG DEAL
Joe Biden's economic policies are starting to transform America. Will anyone notice?
THE LAST MILE
The aid workers who risk their lives to bring relief to Gaza.
TAKE ME HOME
The filmmaker Mati Diop turns her gaze on plundered art.