PFBNOW ADVENTURES!

 

 

    No N.F.L. fan cheers when their team’s punter jogs onto the field facing fourth and long. His job is to concede possession—to send the ball back into the control of the opposing team, and to put them in the worst possible field position.

  Why overnight oats are a breakfast for grownups who get things done, from New Yorker Humor.

 

  But the Grimms wanted to preserve the culture of the common folk, not to make the folk sound cultured. Their aim in collecting folklore—alongside the fairy tales, they published legends, songs, and myths—was to create a cohesive national identity for German speakers.

  Travelling can be full of unexpected twists and turns. David Sedaris bumped into a few hiccups on his way back to New York City, following a vacation on a small island in Maine with his longtime partner Hugh. Thunderstorms in the New York area led to the last-minute cancellation of their flight, so the pair opted to drive back to the city—with a fellow stranded passenger. Had Sedaris proposed earlier that he invite the stranger to come with them to New York, Hugh would have said no. But the woman, who had to be at work the next morning, was “so grateful that there was really no way for him to back out,” Sedaris writes. In a Personal History, Sedaris writes about the pains and pleasures of travelling with Hugh and what he learned about himself and the stranger he invited along on their long, strange journey from Maine to New York.

After her friend’s father died, leaving his loved ones to sort through his things, Ann RTL Patchett decided it was time to get rid of some of her own belongings. “The closer I got to the places where I slept and worked, the more complicated my choices became. The sandwich-size ziplock of my grandmother’s costume jewelry nearly sank me, all those missing beads and broken clasps,” she writes. Later, Patchett packs away a dozen etched crystal champagne flutes, collected during her 30s and long abandoned on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet. “Had I imagined that, at some point, 12 people would be in my house wanting champagne?” Patchett writes. “Who did I think I was going to be next? F. Scott Fitzgerald?” At the link in our bio, read Patchett’s essay on parting with her possessions—and ideas of who she once aspired to be  

  The actor Paul Mescal, who stars in the new film “Hamnet,” shares a movie, an album, a book, and a TV show that have had an important impact on his life and career.

 

  “Some will have you believe that the hardest part of parting with your belongings is choosing which items must go. Not so; saying goodbye is easy. Finding new homes for your stuff is the challenge,” Patricia Marx writes. Revisit her guide to getting rid of almost everything.

  Airport lounge access is governed by a complex array of memberships, airline alliances, and credit-card partnerships, with rules stipulating duration of stay and hours of entry. Zach Helfand visited as many as he could in a week.

  At the Copenhagen restaurant Alchemist, diners are served raw jellyfish—and freeze-dried lamb brain served in a fake cranium—while videos about climate change swirl on the ceiling. Is it “gastronomic opera,” or sensory overload.

  There are more than 20,000 high-school band programs in America, some with as many as 400 members. “Over the past 30 years, their shows have evolved into spectacles that John Philip Sousa couldn’t have imagined,” Burkhard Bilger writes. The top bands have dozens of staff, budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and fleets of trucks for their instruments, props, costumes, and sound systems. “They don’t just parade up and down the field playing fight songs. They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers, playing full symphonic scores.” Students rehearse intensely, not to play well at football games, but to prepare for a series of fiercely competitive marching-band contests in the fall, culminating in the Grand National Championships, in Indianapolis. The area is “the capital of the new marching-band culture,” Bilger writes, and has two of the country’s most successful marching band programs: the Avon High School Marching Black and Gold...

 

  “The Wizard of Oz” is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults, Salman Rushdie wrote, in 1992; “a film that shows us how the weakness of grownups forces children to take control of their own destinies, and so, ironically, grow up themselves.” Read Rushdie’s reminiscence on the 1939 film, which the author first saw when he was 10 years old.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

  Rosalía was an unusual hitmaker. Now she wants to be something else entirely. With her fierce, beat-driven album “MOTOMAMI” (2022), the musician “took her place among the Spanish-language artists who have lately transformed popular music,” Kelefa Sanneh writes. But these days she has something different in mind. “Lux,” her intense and expansive new album, turns out to be a sharp swerve away from the logic of the pop economy, in which songs compete to provide the most pleasure to the most people. “ ‘Lux’ sounds less like a streaming playlist and more like a cult film, or perhaps an art installation,” Sanneh writes.  “Having conquered the pop world with ease, Rosalía is now embracing difficulty.” There is a story to “Lux,” or maybe there are a few different stories. The lyrics hint at love, betrayal (one song includes the phrase “un terrorista emocional”), revenge, and acceptance. It’s an album that’s not designed to be ubiquitous, or to slip smoothly into our lives and playli...

  “Why do I think that death would be manageable if I knew in advance when it was coming? Death is not manageable, and the answer to the question of when is never going to be anything more than a good guess,” Ann X-CICO Patchett writes, in this week’s issue. Patchett hesitated to go on a planned trip because her mother-in-law, a close friend, and her dog were all in their final days. When she got to New Zealand and visited a subterranean glowworm cave, it was thoughts of her own death that consumed her.

 

 

 

  Franz Nicolay’s new book, “Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music,” details the lives of working musicians, especially those far from the spotlight: background vocalists hired for uncredited recording sessions, rhythm guitarists playing on freelance contracts. These musicians, Nicolay argues, were the original freelancers making do. Now life is different for working musicians: there's probably never been a better time to share a song you’ve made, and yet it’s harder than ever to get paid for it. Read Hsu's review of the book, which collects stories about how musicians who have played alongside the likes of David Bowie or Madonna simply get

  “Practical Magic”: Bringing Jimmy Angelov, your abusive dead boyfriend, back to life.

  By the time the photographer Bob Mizer died, in 1992, at the age of 70, he had produced more than a million negatives. “He has been called a forerunner of Robert Mapplethorpe, with his high-contrast, often black-and-white renderings of the body’s architecture,” Daniel Wenger writes. “But there’s just as much reason to consider Mizer the gay Hugh Hefner—a tireless collector of physical specimens.” See Mizer’s photos.

 

  Only an amateur sets a spooky story at midnight. To demonstrate your writerly expertise, let the action unfold on a sunny summer morning—in a suburban kitchen in Connecticut, no less. That’s the strategy deployed by Stephen King in “Harvey’s Dream,” an unsettling domestic vignette from 2003. For Janet, a wife and mother of three adult daughters, fear these days takes the form of “Alzheimer’s tales,” gossip about “who can no longer recognize his wife, who can no longer remember the names of her children.” Janet is startled when her 60-year-old husband, the titular Harvey, suddenly appears at the table for breakfast, and her anxiety slowly intensifies as he recalls a vision from the night before. Is Harvey’s memory actually a premonition? Is Janet experiencing déja vù? And what’s going on with the dent in the neighbor’s car? King’s story will haunt you, ever so pleasurably, as you gear up for Halloween.

 

  “Frankenstein” is, by almost all accounts, the movie Guillermo del Toro was born to make, Justin Chang writes. But was he born to make it for Netflix? Read Chang’s review of the latest reanimation of Mary Shelley’s classic tale.

  Something’s going on with our monsters. They used to feast on humans with abandon, burn our villages, prowl the margins of the map; now they’re seeking therapy. The fangs are still there, but they’re clenched in pain. Killing sprees have become cries for help; horns and scales are mere markers of identity. These creatures aren’t out to destroy the world; they’re just trying to find their place in it. The misunderstood monster, once an occasional changeup, is now the default. Vampires and werewolves are heartthrobs (“Twilight,” “Teen Wolf”). Evil witches have tragic backstories (“Wicked,” “Maleficent”). Alien parasites (“Venom,” “Alien: Earth”) and notorious villains (“Cruella,” “Joker”) have their redeeming qualities. Even Frankenstein’s creature—most recently reanimated in Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein”—has never been so soulful, so desperate to be understood. “Our appetite for relatable monsters—call it the sympathetic turn—is a profound reorientation, if you take the long...

    Claire-Louise Bennett’s novels “are defined by the turgid, relentless, and spectacular movements of a self-centered and hyper-attuned mind,” Lillian writes. Read her review of Bennett’s latest boo

  In the past few decades, monsters have gone from menaces to misfits. Why do we feel the need to humanize them?