Search Results for: new yorker

Nora Ephron on her uncle Hal, an inheritance, and working on a famous screenplay:

My husband and I had recently bought a house in East Hampton, and the renovation had cost much more than we’d ever dreamed. There was nothing left for landscaping. I went outside and walked around the house. I mentally planted several trees. I ripped out the scraggly lawn and imagined the huge trucks of sod I would now be able to pay for. I considered a trip to the nursery to look at hydrangeas. My heart was racing. I pulled my husband away from his work, and we had a conversation about what kind of trees we wanted. A dogwood, definitely. A great big dogwood. It would cost a small fortune, and now we were about to have one.

I went upstairs and looked at the script I’d been writing. I would never have to work on it again. I was just doing it for the money and, face it, it was never going to get made, and, besides, it was really hard. I switched off the computer. I lay down on the bed to think about other ways to spend Uncle Hal’s money. It crossed my mind that we needed a new headboard.

Thus, in fifteen minutes, did I pass through the first two stages of inherited wealth: Glee and Sloth.

“My Life as an Heiress.” — Nora Ephron, The New Yorker (Oct. 2010)

See also: “My First New York.” New York magazine (March. 2010)

[Fiction] A husband, feeling sick, leaves his father-in-law’s party early:

At this point, the husband realizes that he doesn’t want to spend the night reading Rousseau in bed, alone. He thinks about going downstairs to the hotel bar. It’s the kind of thing he never does—but ten minutes later there he is, sitting at the bar, reading his book. The husband is not trying to pick anyone up. His wife will be back in an hour or two, and besides, who would dream of picking someone up with Rousseau? Of all the authors you could try to pick someone up with, Rousseau is probably the worst. Or maybe Kant. The husband orders a hot toddy. The bartender, an attractive young woman with crinkly black hair, brings him the drink and they exchange remarks about it. Is that what you wanted? Yes, it’s perfect, the husband says.

“Another Life.” — Paul La Farge, The New Yorker

See more #fiction

How the upcoming Mexican presidential election could impact the drug war in cities like Guadalajara:

Weary of pantallas, I tried to get to the bottom of a single bust—the ‘historic’ meth-lab raid in Tlajomulco that confiscated some four billion dollars’ worth of drugs. Were the drugs seized really worth that much? Well, no. The more experts I consulted, the lower the number sank. Maybe it was a billion, if the meth was pure. Then was it really fifteen tons of ‘pure meth.’ as widely reported? Well, no. There had been some confusion. There were precursor chemicals. A lot of equipment—gas tanks, reactors. Maybe it was eleven pounds of pure meth. Eleven pounds? Nobody wanted to speak on the record, but the spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office in Guadalajara, a young man named Ulises Enríquez Camacho, finally said, ‘Yes, five kilos.’ Eleven pounds. The fifteen tons had been methamphetamine ready for packing, according to the Army. But it was not ‘a finished product,’ and there had been only five kilos of crystal. In the U.S., where meth is often sold by the gram, that amount might be worth five hundred thousand dollars. So the reported value had been inflated by a factor of eight thousand?

“The Kingpins.” — William Finnegan, The New Yorker

More by Finnegan

[Fiction] A family prepares for their father’s business trip:

Their Da was going away again, that’s all it was. Both boys had said nothing about it, but were awake at five and thumping downstairs and straight out to the garden, Jimbo still wearing pajamas and Shawn in yesterday’s clothes, probably no underpants—some objection he had at the moment to them, as if they were practically nappies and grownups never wore them. The first fight began as soon as they left the house: she has a memory of dozing through whole cycles of shouts and squealing and that odd, flat roar Shawn has started to produce whenever he truly loses himself and just rages. No tantrums for Shawn, not anymore. He is seven now. He has the real thing. He has rage.

“Wasps.” — A.L. Kennedy, New Yorker

See more fiction

How rhetoric from an evangelist talk-show host led to the resignation Mitt Romney’s openly gay national-security spokesman:

Fischer’s attack against Grenell started on Friday, April 20th, with a post on Twitter. ‘Romney picks out & loud gay as a spokesman,’ he tweeted, soon after learning of the hire. ‘If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.’ The next Monday, Fischer opened his show—which is broadcast, he likes to say, on ‘the most feared radio network in America!’—by telling his listeners that he had ‘kicked up a dust storm in the Twitterverse.’

“Bully Pulpit.” — Jane Mayer, New Yorker

More from Mayer

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Michael Hastings, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Paul Ford, VICE, fiction from The New Yorker, plus a guest pick from Matt Cardin.

[Fiction, 2012 Pen/O. Henry Winner] A son recalls an exiled life with his father, mother, and a maid:

At the Magda Marina, he spent his time sunbathing and reading fat books: one on the Suez Crisis, one a biography of our late king, with his portrait on the cover. Whenever Father acquired a new book on our country—the country my parents had fled, the country I had never seen, yet continued to think of as my own—he would immediately finger the index pages.

‘Baba, who are you looking for?’ I once asked.

He shook his head and said, ‘No one.’

But later I, too, searched the indexes. It felt like pure imitation. It was not until I encountered my father’s name—Kamal Pasha el-Alfi—that I realized what I was looking for.

“Naima.” — Hisham Matar, The New Yorker (2011)

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New Yorker, This Land Press, The New York Times, GQ, New York Magazine, a fiction pick from Five Chapters, plus a guest pick from Ester Bloom.

A story of love and revolution in Cuba. William Morgan was a free-spirited American drawn to Cuba to help Castro fight, only to grow disenchanted with his embrace of communism:

One day in the spring of 1958, while Morgan was visiting a guerrilla camp for a meeting of the Second Front’s chiefs of staff, he encountered a rebel he had never seen before: small and slender, with a face shielded by a cap. Only up close was it evident that the rebel was a woman. She was in her early twenties, with dark eyes and tawny skin, and, to conceal her identity, she had cut her curly light-brown hair short and dyed it black. Though she had a delicate beauty, she locked and loaded a gun with the ease of a bank robber. Morgan later said of a pistol that she carried, “She knows how to use it.”

Her name was Olga Rodríguez.

The Yankee Comandante — David Grann, The New Yorker

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Stories from Guernica, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Village Voice, and Mother Jones, plus fiction from Joyland and a guest pick from writer John Fram.