The New Yorker – June 19, 2023 issue: Roz Chast’s “Fireworks Megastore”. The artist discusses stumbling across surprises while shopping, and rebelling against efficiency.
In September 21, 2021, my mother sent a message to my extended family’s WhatsApp group: “Neeti had a heart attack and suddenly passed away—too tragic!” Neeti was a daughter of her sister, and someone I’d known all my life. But my cousin and I inhabited different worlds. I was born and raised in suburban New Jersey; she was a lifelong Delhiite. To me, Neeti and her identical twin, Preeti, exuded an urban glamour. At weddings, they sported chic, oversized sunglasses and matching, pastel-colored Punjabi-style outfits. Their faces looked a lot like my mom’s: long, with prominent cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes.
Earlier this year, in a helicopter above the Mexican border, a team of Texas state troopers searched for people crossing into the United States. As they flew over a neighborhood west of El Paso, the radio crackled with the voices of Border Patrol agents on the ground below, calling out migrants who were evading them.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (June 09, 2023) – Inside the $4-billion credit repair industry. Plus, the mycologist who wants us to learn about the magic of mushrooms and the cringe comedian perfect for this moment.
Taqwanna Clark, a credit-repair agent in Houston and the founder of Credit Lift Inc.Credit…Eli Durst for The New York Times
Desperate to improve their ratings, Americans now spend billions on “credit repair” — but the industry often can’t deliver on its promises.
By Mya Frazier
When Taqwanna Clark went to buy a video camera at Fry’s Electronics in Houston, she asked if they had a layaway plan. The cashier instead handed her an application for a store credit card. She applied. “Instantly, it came back declined — like, No!” she says. “Denied, denied — you know, your credit is not good enough.” Clark was 30 and working as a security guard at the Port of Houston. On weekends, she performed as a rapper in the local club scene, under the name T-Baby. She wanted the camera to shoot music videos, to promote her music career. “If I can’t afford a $200 camera,” she recalls thinking, “then I’m in a bad way with this credit thing.”
Merlin Sheldrake, author of the best-selling book “Entangled Life.”
A vast fungal web braids together life on Earth. Merlin Sheldrake wants to help us see it.
By Jennifer Kahn
One evening last winter, Merlin Sheldrake, the mycologist and author of the best-selling book “Entangled Life,” was headlining an event in London’s Soho. The night was billed as a “salon,” and the crowd, which included the novelist Edward St. Aubyn, was elegant and arty, with lots of leggy women in black tights and men in perfectly draped camel’s-hair coats. “Entangled Life” is a scientific study of all things fungal that reads like a fairy tale, and since the book’s publication in 2020, Sheldrake has become a coveted speaker.
This minor fact is one of the major things I learned at my very awkward dinner interview with Robinson and Zach Kanin, creators of the cult Netflix comedy series “I Think You Should Leave.” Robinson ordered drunken spaghetti with tofu — spicy — and, almost immediately, the spaghetti started to make his voice hoarse. He insisted, however, that this had nothing to do with the spice — in fact, he said, his food wasn’t spicy enough. I asked our server if she could go spicier. She brought out a whole dish of special chiles. Robinson spooned them enthusiastically over his noodles.
The counter-offensive is getting under way. The next few weeks will be critical
Trailed ten days early with a blood-stirring video in which Ukrainian troops asked God to bless their “sacred revenge”, Ukraine’s counter-offensive is under way. For weeks its armed forces have conducted probing and shaping operations along the 1,000km front line, looking for weaknesses and confusing the Russians. Now Ukraine is testing enemy defences with an intensity not seen for months, with attacks against the occupiers in a series of positions in the east and south. The apparent demolition of the Kakhovka dam on June 6th, if it was indeed Russian sabotage as Western military sources believe, would be clear evidence that they are already feeling the pressure.
No one shows off a new gadget quite like Apple. But the device that Tim Cook unveiled on June 5th was billed as something more significant. The Vision Pro, a pair of sleek glass goggles, represents “an entirely new spatial-computing platform”, said Apple’s boss, comparing its launch to that of the Macintosh and the iPhone. Apple’s message is clear: after desktop and mobile computing, the next big tech era will be spatial computing—also known as augmented reality—in which computer graphics are overlaid on the world around the user.
Can hard-core gamers learn to play well with others? By Spencer Kornhaber
Playing a prerelease version of Diablo IV, the latest installment in a 26-year-old adventure series about battling the forces of hell, I faced swarms of demons that yowled and belched. My character, a sorcerer, shot them with lightning bolts, producing a jet-engine roar.
Inside the desperate effort to rescue America’s pastime from irrelevance By Mark Leibovich
Where in the name of human rain delays is Juan Soto?
The stud outfielder is late. Everyone keeps checking their phones—the antsy Major League Baseball officials, the San Diego Padres PR guy, the handful of reporters, and the assorted hangers-on you encounter around baseball clubhouses. Everyone is wondering when the Padres superstar will show up. He was supposed to be here half an hour ago, just after this baseball players’ sanctum opened and we were allowed to join them in their most elemental of baseball activities: waiting around.
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (June 5, 2023) – A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, the economic consequences of the global collapse in fertility, Scotland’s holiday from reality (10:10) and the business of the rapper, Bad Bunny (18:10).
Populism can unravel quickly. But its effects are long-lasting
Scotland was the first part of Britain to get high on populist referendums. In 2014, two years before the Brexit vote, the Scottish independence campaign exhorted people to ignore the experts and revel in a glorious national renewal.
The New Yorker – June 12, 2023 issue: The artist behind the cover for the June 12, 2023, issue, Sasha Velour, is a gender-fluid drag queen, author, television and theatre performer, and visual artist. In 2017, she was named the winner of the ninth season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
Robert Redford, Gwyneth Paltrow, Paul Rudd, and Angela Bassett now disappear into movies whose plots can come down to “Keep glowy thing away from bad guy.”
Lawyers tried to use the independent-state-legislature theory to sway the outcomes of the 2000 and 2020 elections. What if it were to become the law of the land?
An extreme version of the theory could give state legislatures the power to award Electoral College votes however they see fit. Illustrations by Golden Cosmos
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (June 4, 2023) – California is the place where the future happens, for good and ill. That’s part of its magic. Read our first-ever California Issue to find out what roads the state will take us down next.
Inside: A fight over a parking lot that explains the housing crisis; the future of California’s power to shape national policy; how the state is adapting to a warming world — and more.
From reparations to tax revolts, the Golden State tries out new ideas all the time. What roads will its latest experiments send us down?
By Laila Lalami
I remember my first glimpse into the future. In August 1992, when I arrived in California as a student, I discovered during orientation that the university required all incoming students to have something called an email account. To access it, I had to call up a text-based mail client on Unix, using a series of line commands. If I needed a file that sat on a university computer in New York, I could use file transfer protocol to download it in Los Angeles, the whole process taking no more than a few minutes. That’s brilliant, I remember thinking.
For a while this winter, seemingly every text message that Buffy Wicks received asked if she was running for Congress. Representative Barbara Lee, of California’s 12th District, which includes Oakland, had announced that she would enter the race for Dianne Feinstein’s soon-to-be-vacated Senate seat. This decision by Lee, who is 76, created a rare opportunity for the next generation of California Democrats to vie for federal office. And Wicks — a 45-year-old State Assembly member who lives in Lee’s district and was last re-elected with 85 percent of the vote — seemed like a natural candidate.
What might change the world’s dire demographic trajectory?
In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution the world’s population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not a surge in deaths, but a slump in births. Across much of the world the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, is collapsing. Although the trend may be familiar, its extent and its consequences are not. Even as artificial intelligence (ai) leads to surging optimism in some quarters, the baby bust hangs over the future of the world economy.
It certainly wasn’t fair. Nor was it entirely free. But, like it or not, the victory on May 28th of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey’s presidential election is a fact. For the next five years Turkey, Europe and the wider world will have to deal with a prickly and authoritarian populist. That is bad news on many fronts: economically, democratically and regionally. And yet pragmatists have a duty to search for chinks of light in the gloom.
That compounds the problems of shrinking workforces and rising bills for health care and pensions
“Adam is a special child,” says the voice-over, as the camera pans across abandoned classrooms and deserted maternity wards. “He’s the last child born in Italy.” The short film made for Plasmon, an Italian brand of baby food owned by Kraft-Heinz, a giant American firm, is set in 2050. It imagines an Italy where babies are a thing of the past. It is exaggerating for effect, of course, but not by as much as you might imagine. The number of births in Italy peaked at 1m in 1964; by 2050, the un projects, it will have shrunk by almost two-thirds, to 346,000.
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (May 29, 2023) – Three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, why Donald Trump is very likely to be the Republican nominee for president, how to fix Britain’s National Health Service (09:55) and companies’ “away days” are getting unnecessarily creative (17:15).
The New Yorker – June 5, 2023 issue: Masha Titova’s “The Music of Art”. The magazine publishes its first synesthetic, collaborative, and interactive cover. By Françoise Mouly.
The pop singer’s trial for copyright infringement of Marvin Gaye and Ed Townsend’s “Let’s Get It On” highlights how hard it is to draw the property lines of pop.
When the critic Joanna Biggs was thirty-two, her mother, still in her fifties, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “Everything wobbled,” she recalls. Biggs was married but not sure she wanted to be, suddenly distrustful of the neat, conventional course—marriage, kids, burbs—plotted out since she met her husband, at nineteen. It was as though the disease’s rending of a maternal bond had severed her contract with the prescribed feminine itinerary. Soon enough, she and her husband were seeing other people; then he moved out, and she began making pilgrimages to visit Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave.
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