In my dreams, the baby could talk. A one-day-old, apparently understanding the conversation going on around her crib, suddenly weighed in with a factual correction; a three-day-old, still in the hospital, piped up to agree that the surgical procedure being recommended was both unnecessary and outlandishly expensive; an infant, evidently inferring the entire universe from first principles, observed that soon she would be able to refer to her mother’s sister’s fiancé as her uncle. In the months before my partner’s due date, I experienced so many variations on this recurrent dream that it finally took a turn for the meta. In that version, when our newborn began to talk, I turned to the assembled family members and exclaimed, “The dreams were prophetic!”
Awaiting the birth of a child is a very strange experience. Life is full of momentous events, but, as a rule, they either happen with no warning whatsoever—someone you love is killed in a car accident; you step into a café and meet your future wife—or occur on a foreordained day: you graduate from college; you get married; you gain your citizenship. Having a baby is not like this, a fact that becomes increasingly obvious toward the end of a pregnancy. At thirty-four weeks, your baby is almost equally likely to be born in seven days or in two months. This presents all kinds of practical problems: How are you supposed to schedule parental leave? For what date should the grandparents buy plane tickets? How long do you have to meet a work deadline or to find curtains for the nursery? If, in your famished late-pregnancy state, you eat all the snacks in the bag you packed for the hospital, will you have time to replace them?
Denne historien er fra May 27, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra May 27, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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THE FRENZY Joyce Carol Oates
Early afternoon, driving south on the Garden State Parkway with the girl beside him.
UPDATED KENNEDY CENTER 2025 SCHEDULE
April 1—A. R. Gurney’s “Love Letters,” with Lauren Boebert and Kid Rock
YOU MAD, BRO?
Young men have gone MAGA. Can the left win them back?
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS BETTING ON THE FUTURE
Lucy Dacus after boygenius.
STEAL, ADAPT, BORROW
Jonathan Anderson transformed Loewe by radically reinterpreting classic garments. Is Dior next?
JUST BETWEEN US
The pleasures and pitfalls of gossip.
INHERIT THE PLAY
The return of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Ghosts.”
LEAVE WITH DESSERT
Graydon Carter’s great magazine age.
INTERIORS
The tyranny of taste in Vincenzo Latronico’s “Perfection.”
Naomi Fry on Jay McInerney's "Chloe's Scene"
As a teen-ager, long before I lived in New York, I felt the city urging me toward it. N.Y.C., with its art and money, its drugs and fashion, its misery and elation—how tough, how grimy, how scary, how glamorous! For me, one of its most potent siren calls was “Chloe’s Scene,” a piece written for this magazine, in 1994, by the novelist Jay McInerney, about the then nineteen-year-old sometime actress, sometime model, and all-around It Girl Chloë Sevigny.
