The Magazine
April 8, 2024
Reporting
Dept. of Gastronomy
The Hottest Restaurant in France Is an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet
Les Grands Buffets features a seven-tiered lobster tower, a chocolate fountain, and only what it considers traditional French food. Gourmands are willing to wait months for a table.
Annals of Psychology
So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit
What happens when a niche clinical concept becomes a ubiquitous cultural diagnosis.
Letter from Roraima
The Brazilian Special-Forces Unit Fighting to Save the Amazon
As miners ravage Yanomami lands, combat-trained environmentalists work to root them out.
A Reporter at Large
How Chinese Students Experience America
COVID, guns, anti-Asian violence, and diplomatic relations have complicated the ambitions of the some three hundred thousand college students who come to the U.S. each year.
The Critics
Pop Music
Vampire Weekend Doesn’t Want Your Defeatist Grousing
The band’s new album, “Only God Was Above Us,” is a treatise on inheritance, decay, generational dissonance, and the delicate idea of choosing optimism.
A Critic at Large
Scooter Braun and the Twilight of the Music Manager
Colonel Tom Parker made Elvis an icon; Brian Epstein bled for the Beatles. But these days the all-powerful backstage hustler looks more and more like a relic of the past.
Books
How Captain James Cook Got Away with Murder
When he died, admirers believed that he deserved the “gratitude of posterity.” Posterity, of course, has a mind of its own.
Books
Amitava Kumar and the Novel of the Translated Man
In “My Beloved Life,” a father is resurrected by his children, and an ordinary life transcends its station.
The Theatre
“The Who’s Tommy” Plays the Old Pinball
The 1993 musical’s already bizarre story, derived from Pete Townshend’s beautiful 1969 album, is even less clear in Des McAnuff’s reanimation for Broadway.
The Talk of the Town
Jonathan Blitzer on Texas’s border showdown; a St. Patrick’s Month detour; Polaroid oratorio; the Lou Gehrig of seat venders; Mannequin Pussy.
Hot Dog Dept.
The Lou Gehrig of Beer Guys
Reggie Duvalsaint, who is seeking to become the first seat vender to work at all sixty M.L.B. and N.F.L. stadiums, explains why he quit banking for hawking.
Free Speech Dept.
Mannequin Pussy, Set Loose from Big Tech Jail
The members of the punk band muse on the nature of profanity and describe how their name got shadow-banned by TikTok and Amazon’s Alexa.
Aftermath
Dervish’s Post-St. Patrick’s Day Pilgrimage
An Irish band crisscrosses the Bronx to pay respects at the grave of Michael Coleman, a Sligo fiddler who revived the genre.
The Boards
David Van Taylor Revives a Late Friend’s Passion Project
Jamie Livingston had a Spidey sense for when to take a photo; a new oratorio featuring his one-Polaroid-a-day habit opens at PAC NYC.
Comment
Joe Biden’s Texas Showdown
In some ways, Greg Abbott, as the governor of a border state, poses a more acute political problem for the President than Donald Trump does.
Shouts & Murmurs
Shouts & Murmurs
Our Environmental Pledge
Because we are so dedicated to the future of this planet, our C-suite will no longer use the company’s private jets to drag-race in the sky.
Cartoons
1/15
“It’s so hard to get a job as a white man with a terrible personality these days.”
Cartoon by Ellie Black
Fiction
Fiction
“Bozo”
I wanted to invite him to my place, to ask when his shift was over. But he probably got questions like that every night.
Puzzles & Games Dept.
Poems
Goings On
The Food Scene
Caribbean Staples Made “Healthy as a Motha”
HAAM, in Williamsburg, veganizes Dominican and Trinidadian food without diminishing it.
Goings On
Harrowing Melodrama in “A Different Man”
Also: Emotion experiments in “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show,” the art of Sonia Delaunay, Reyna Tropical’s electro-cumbia, and more.
Mail
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