Tag: onecolumnnarrow
“Woman, Frog, and Devil,” by Olga Tokarczuk
January Wojnicz, a retired civil servant and a landowner, was a splendid man, as they said in Lwów, handsome and dignified. As a man of fifty-plus, he had dark hair with hardly any gray and thick stubble; he shaved with great tenacity, leaving only his magnificent mustache, which he cared for and curled with the use of a pomade, the base ingredient of which was tallow. As a result, his son, Mieczysław, forever associated the smell of rancid fat with
Rachel Syme Goes Behind the Scenes of a Short-Lived Broadway Musical
Chavkin also began collaborating with artists outside the TEAM, including Dave Malloy, the writer and composer of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.” That musical, based on an excerpt of “War and Peace,” was an immersive “electropop opera” about a naïve socialite (Natasha) and a lonely intellectual (Pierre, originally played by Malloy) in nineteenth-century Moscow on the eve of a looming astronomical event. For the show’s first staging, at the nonprofit theatre Ars Nova, in 2012, Chavkin
The Detroit Pistons Were My Father’s Second Family
One night, when I was a sophomore in college, my father came to see me play basketball in Philadelphia. It was 1984. I was on the team at St. Joseph’s, and he was the general manager of the Detroit Pistons. He and my mother were long divorced, and I saw him only two or three times a year, when he came to town for a Pistons game or to scout a player. I had lost my starting spot at the
The British Museum’s Blockbuster Scandals
Charles Townley, one of Britain’s first great collectors of antiquities, was born in Lancashire in 1737. A distaff descendant of the aristocratic Howard family, he was educated mostly in France—a common path for a well-born Catholic Englishman. Elegant and intelligent, Townley was, according to an early biographical sketch, eagerly welcomed into Continental society, “from the dissipations of which it would be incorrect to say that he wholly escaped.” As a young adult, he returned to England and installed himself at
The Battle for Attention | The New Yorker
On a subway train not long ago, I had the familiar, unsettling experience of standing behind a fellow-passenger and watching everything that she was doing on her phone. It was a crowded car, rush hour, with the dim but unwarm lighting of the oldest New York City trains. The stranger’s phone was bright, and as I looked on she scrolled through a waterfall of videos that other people had filmed in their homes. She watched one for four or five
Can Turning Office Towers Into Apartments Save Downtowns?
There are about a thousand real-estate developers in New York City. Nathan Berman is one of them, and he’s become rich doing it. But, he told me recently, “I never built a building from scratch, and never wanted to.” Instead, Berman, who is sixty-four, specializes in taking existing structures and converting them into apartments, a useful trick in a city that’s always starved for housing—and newly wary of the five-day-a-week office routine. In 2017, he converted 443 Greenwich Street, a
Peter Attia’s Quest to Live Long and Prosper
Some of my earliest memories are of summers with my grandparents, in New Delhi. I spent long, scorching months drinking lassi, playing cricket, and helping my grandparents find ripe mangoes at roadside markets. Then I’d return to the U.S., my English rusty from disuse, and go months or years without seeing them. At some point, my India trips started to feel like snapshots of loss. My grandfathers died suddenly, probably of heart attacks. My Biji, my father’s mother, fell and
What Is Noise? | The New Yorker
“Noise” is a fuzzy word—a noisy one, in the statistical sense. Its meanings run the gamut from the negative to the positive, from the overpowering to the mysterious, from anarchy to sublimity. The negative seems to lie at the root: etymologists trace the word to “nuisance” and “nausea.” Noise is what drives us mad; it sends the Grinch over the edge at Christmastime. (“Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!”) Noise is the sound of madness itself, the din within our
Battling Under a Canopy of Russian and Ukrainian Drones
Members of Ukraine’s 1st Separate Assault Battalion describe themselves as firemen. Their job is to rapidly deploy to areas along the front that are in danger of collapse. Lately, their service has been in high demand: the front is burning. A large-scale counter-offensive last year failed to achieve meaningful victories, and since then Russia has been on the attack. One of its priorities appears to be Kupyansk, a city in northeastern Ukraine, some twenty miles from the Russian border. According
Park Chan-wook Gets the Picture He Wants
Last spring, I was in a white van rumbling down a road about fifty miles east of Bangkok, passing dusty awnings that hung over shops hawking cell phones and sneakers, when, abruptly, the vehicle stopped. The road was barricaded; the barricades were manned by soldiers in uniform. After a moment, I realized that the soldiers were actors and the barricades were props. We had reached the set of “The Sympathizer,” the director Park Chan-wook’s seven-episode HBO adaptation of the Pulitzer