In the autumn of 2020, while stargazing on his balcony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Teju Cole was inspired to start taking photos of his kitchen counter. He decided that the daily migrations of his pots, pans, spoons, and graters paralleled the revolutions of celestial bodies, and began to track them in a “counter history.” A year later, he published the results as “Golden Apple of the Sun” (2021), a book-length photo essay that magnifies his solitary domestic experiment until it seems to encompass the world. Cole writes about the hunger he suffered as a boarding-school student in Nigeria, Dutch Golden Age still-lifes, slavery and the sugary recipes in an eighteenth-century cookbook, and why “the later a photograph is in a given sequence, the heavier it is.” Somehow, from this kitchen sink of memoir, art history, and observant boredom emerges a spectral portrait of the pandemic’s collective solitude, “this year of feeling buried in the dark earth like bulbs.”
This story is from the October 16, 2023 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the October 16, 2023 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
COLLISION COURSE
In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.
NEW CHAPTER
Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?
STUCK ON YOU
Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.
HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG
Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
REPRISE
Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?
Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.
COLOR INSTINCT
Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
THE FAMILY PLAN
The pro-life movement’ new playbook.
President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
