CULTURE
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Should We Be Worried About Bird Flu?
[ad_1] In December, 2021, a few weeks after the Omicron variant emerged to spark a new, punishing phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jim Lester’s birds got sick. Lester, who owns an exhibition farm in Newfoundland, Canada, learned that the culprit wasn’t the novel coronavirus but the first known outbreak in North America of a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu,…
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War in Gaza, Shibboleths on Campus
[ad_1] A philosophy without a politics is common enough. Aesthetes, ethicists, novelists—all may be easily critiqued and found wanting on this basis. But there is also the danger of a politics without a philosophy. A politics unmoored, unprincipled, which holds as its most fundamental commitment its own perpetuation. A Realpolitik that believes itself too subtle—or too pragmatic—to deal with such…
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The Day Ram Dass Died
[ad_1] I woke up every thirty minutes the night before Ram Dass died. Stretching my perception through the big divider that separated his study—where I lay on a narrow couch—from his bedroom, I’d count the seconds between the short, ragged breaths churning through his sleep-apnea machine. Four years later, I still have no idea why I was chosen to watch…
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“The People’s Joker” Is an Outlaw Vision of the Superhero Movie
[ad_1] “The People’s Joker,” directed by Vera Drew, is the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen—because, unlike studio-produced films in the genre, it responds to the filmmaker’s deep personal concerns. There’s a noble history of directors transforming commercial assignments into personal statements, but it usually doesn’t extend to superheroes. First, the characters’ canonical identities admit of only slight shifts, and…
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How Should Reporters Cover Donald Trump?
[ad_1] Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our twice-weekly News & Politics newsletter. The New Yorker staff writers Jelani Cobb and Steve Coll joined Tyler Foggatt last May to discuss the ways in which Donald Trump maneuvers around facts and controls narratives when confronted by journalists. At last year’s CNN…
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When the World Goes Quiet
[ad_1] The narrator of Eliza Barry Callahan’s “The Hearing Test” is an artist in her late twenties named Eliza who lives in New York City. She wakes up one morning in August with a buzz in her ear that’s accompanied by the sound of “perpetually rolling thunder.” “It’s like God adjusting his piano stool but never getting around to the…
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In Praise of the Benediction
[ad_1] My husband’s parents had invited a revered pastor—or moksanim, in Korean—to participate in our wedding. “He’s known for his benedictions,” my husband said. I didn’t know someone could specialize in benedictions, the brief blessings given at the end of a service. I wondered what made his special. Was it the tone of his voice? The way he lifted his…
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Restaurant Review: Caribbean Staples Made “Healthy as a Motha”
[ad_1] I’m not sure what “healthy” really means, when it comes to describing food. Is it food that’s low calorie? Low fat? Nutrient dense? Minimally processed? It’s one of those fuzzy, qualitative terms that speaks more to a feeling than to anything else: an ambient virtuousness whose parameters are porous and ever-shifting, encompassing and discarding fad ingredients and findings from…
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Daily Cartoon: Thursday, March 28th
[ad_1] A city landmark prepares for the end of the month. [ad_2] Source link
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The Enchanting Archaeological Romance of “La Chimera”
[ad_1] The Italian writer and director Alice Rohrwacher may be the most quietly mischievous time traveller at work—or at play—in contemporary cinema. Her films, although typically set in or near the present day, are suffused with an almost primordial air of fairy-tale enchantment. You can seldom be sure exactly when the action is taking place, in part because Rohrwacher focusses…
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