Innholdsfortegnelse for November 26, 2018 i The New Yorker

The reporter Marie Colvin grew up near Oyster Bay, Long Island, but for most of her career she lived in London, where she was assigned to the foreign desk of the Sunday Times. Starting in the mid-nineteen-eighties, she was deployed to conflict after conflict—in Beirut, Chechnya, East Timor, Kosovo. In Sri Lanka, in 2001, she lost her left eye to grenade shrapnel, and thereafter she wore an eye patch. In Libya, during the Arab Spring, she landed a critical interview with the deposed despot Muammar Qaddafi. In 2012, Colvin ventured into Syria. After she reported that Bashar al-Assad’s forces were slaughtering civilians in the ravaged city of Homs, the media center where she was working was bombed, allegedly by the regime, which had discovered her location. Colvin died instantly, at…

Stories about North Korea aren’t typically funny. After all, how does one make light of the conditions of people living in one of the most impoverished places on earth, under the thumb of a repressive regime? When the Korean playwright Hansol Jung set about answering that question, in 2014, she came up with “Wild Goose Dreams,” a digital-age love story, currently playing at the Public Theatre. Set in modern-day Seoul, the play depicts an unlikely romance between Nanhee, a thirtysomething North Korean defector, and Minsung, a middle-aged South Korean who works at Samsung and sends the bulk of his income to his wife and daughter in the United States. The pair meet on a dating Web site called Love Genie, expecting little more than a drunken one-night stand, which is…

In October, 2010, an Italian religious historian named Alberto Melloni stood over a small cherrywood box in the reading room of the Laurentian Library, in Florence. The box was old and slightly scuffed, and inked in places with words in Latin. It had been stored for several centuries inside one of the library’s distinctive sloping reading desks, which were designed by Michelangelo. Melloni slid the lid off the box. Inside was a yellow silk scarf, and wrapped in the scarf was a thirteenth-century Bible, no larger than the palm of his hand, which was falling to pieces. The Bible was “a very poor one,” Melloni told me recently. “Very dark. Very nothing.” But it had a singular history. In 1685, a Jesuit priest who had travelled to China gave the…

We lived on the ground floor. The doorman Earlsat in the lobby. From our living roomthrough the wall we could hearEarl’s explosive sneezes loud and clear.The knob of our apartment’s front doorwas big and brass, and Earl would vigorouslygrasp and twist it, and with rag and smelly polishnoisily buff that knob until it gleamed.It always gleamed. I knewthat brass polish was poison.From our side of the doorthe knob would visiblyturn as Earl twisted it, apparentlyof its own accord,untouched by human hand.Visitors didn’t understand.Who was out there?What ghostly messengerwas rattling away unseenon the other side of the door?Who, sent from where, was trying to get in?The only polite thing was to ignorethe uncanny energy.A lifetime later, it is clear to me,or at least less murky:I understandEarl as a harbingerfrom an undiscovered…

“SWITCH,” the show that Rashaun “S Mitchell and Silas Riener brought to the Joyce last month, came like a summer rain: pure, cool, and sweet. When Merce Cunningham died, in 2009, Mitchell and Riener were star dancers in his company, and at the Joyce, even a decade later, they were able to remind us—concretely, in the flesh—what a huge change Cunningham made in the theory and the practice of modern dance in the second half of the twentieth century: how much cleaner and more serious he made it look. That would have been enough. You caught your breath. Here it was, still alive! In addition, the concert recalled a time that many of us have probably forgotten, or never knew, when dance was not yet almost by definition a political…

“Season of the Century” is the slogan that the Los Angeles Phil-harmonic is using to tout its centennial season. The phrase is emblazoned on a sign outside Disney Hall and on street banners across the city. The double meaning is apparent: not only is this season intended to celebrate the orchestra’s past hundred years; it aims to make history itself. Ordinarily, such marketing effusions don’t withstand scrutiny, but the L.A. Phil’s 2018-19 season invites superlatives. The ensemble has commissioned pieces from more than fifty composers, ranging from such venerable figures as Philip Glass and Steve Reich to young radicals on the fringes. It is launching a slew of theatrical events and collaborations with pop and jazz artists. It is honoring African-American traditions and exploring the experimental legacy of the Fluxus…

PICTURE THIS In Joshua Rothman’s piece about image manipulation in the digital age, the photo-forensics expert Hany Farid discusses “various milestones in the history of image manipulation” (“Afterimage,” November 12th). Among the examples he cites is “the transposition, in a famous photograph from the eighteen-sixties, of Abraham Lincoln’s head on the body of the slavery advocate John C. Calhoun.” This is indeed a vivid example of image manipulation, but it is not photographic. I’m an associate curator in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; several years ago, while doing research for the exhibition “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” I viewed the images of Lincoln and Calhoun at the Library of Congress and discovered, to my disappointment, that these works aren’t photographs—they’re mezzotints, a type…

According to a philosophy known as “compassionate carnivorism,” the most ethical way to eat animals is to kill them yourself, as humanely as possible, thereby fully acknowledging their sacrifice for your sustenance. Does shooting fish in a barrel count? There aren’t barrels, per se, at the first U.S. outpost of Zauo, a novelty restaurant chain with thirteen locations in Japan, and there certainly aren’t guns, but there are open tanks crowded with live fish, and dinky little rods with which you, the diner, are meant to catch them. On a recent evening, as I stood, like Donald Trump, Jr., on safari, posing for a photo with the rainbow trout I’d snagged in roughly two minutes, using a hunk of amberjack as bait, I couldn’t help but feel uneasy. I grimaced…

American offices are shrinking fast. Since 2010, the average amount of floor space per employee has dropped by thirty-three per cent, to a hundred and fifty square feet. That’s about equal to the footprint of a Ford F-150—and try showing your slide deck in a Ford F-150. Everyone’s going open floor plan for the collaborative synergies, and because it’s cheap. But behavioral scientists have found that the cozier offices get the more territorial we become. Caste systems develop among co-workers. Conflicts break out over conference rooms. Recently, an upstart martial-arts league called Karate Combat set up its own office, of sorts, in downtown Manhattan, on the hundred-and-second floor of One World Trade Center. This venue, too, was a downsize. Typically, fighting leagues, like U.F.C., stage events in big arenas. Not…

In 2008, I fell in love with a robot. The object of my affection was a darling red Roomba vacuum cleaner. The size and shape of a chunky Frisbee, it bustled to and fro across my apartment of its own volition, enabling me to eat my cake and drop it on the floor, too. I worried that the neighbors downstairs might be bothered by the noise, but, actually, I didn’t worry that much. It was the hum of industry and the sound of the legs of the yellow table being bashed. I marvelled at my Roomba’s work ethic and adored its lack of self-esteem. Studies have demonstrated that humans are disposed to ascribe emotions and intentions to anything that moves, including a piece of balsa wood controlled by a joystick,…

It was too early for there to be so much light, so that when I woke my first thought was of snow. We had pulled the drapes before sleeping but they did almost nothing to darken the room, the snow caught scraps from street lamps and neon and cast them back up. It was bright enough to see R. still sleeping beside me, cocooned in the blanket I had bought after the first night we spent together, when I woke shivering to find him bound tight in the comforter we were sharing, swaddled beside me. He repeated the word all that day, apropos of nothing, swaddled, swaddled, he had never heard it before, the sound of it made him laugh. He would sleep for hours still, if I let him…

Michelangelo doesn’t want a fiefdom in the Balkans; he wants cold, hard ducats. It is 1506, and “Il Divino” is in Constantinople at the invitation of Bayezid II. The Ottoman ruler has commissioned a bridge across the Golden Horn, an immortal structure to secure the great destiny of his continent-straddling capital. Glory awaits the artist in this Oriental Rome, but the promised reward of a Bosnian village threatens his cherished independence. In a fit of pique, he hurls a caged monkey across his quarters. His companion Mesihi—a courtier-poet tragically enamored of the moody, musky Florentine—holds back uncomprehending tears. Will Michelangelo’s provincial insecurity spoil this chance to vanquish his competitors, taste the liberating pleasures of transcontinental homoerotics, and bind two worlds with an unprecedented feat of artistry and engineering? Bayezid really…

In the second season of the Australian series “Please Like Me,” our millennial hero, Josh (Josh Thomas, the show’s creator), visits his mom, Rose, at a psychiatric hospital, carrying a gift box of bonbons. In the cafeteria, he’s drawn into a high-stakes competition for the last piece of candy, as patients vie to tell the most outlandish first-sex story, in a wave of bubbly one-upmanship. Finally, they turn to the silent Hannah (played by Hannah Gadsby, who is best known to American audiences from her Netflix special, “Nanette”). “I was raped,” she says. The table panics. “Oh, Hannah, I’m really sorry,” Josh says. “If Mum had known, I’m sure she wouldn’t have asked.” “No, I don’t mind,” Hannah deadpans. “I just knew, the whole time you were talking, I was…

Lynn Nottage has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for her socially conscious dramas “Ruined” and “Sweat.” But she has a knack for satire, too. Her 2004 play, “Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine,” follows a high-powered publicist who winds up back in the Brooklyn projects where she grew up—and pregnant—after her husband makes off with all her money. Cherise Boothe (above) stars in Lileana Blain-Cruz’s revival (starting previews on Nov. 19, at Pershing Square Signature Center), the first of Nottage’s three-play residency at the Signature. DANCE Twyla Tharp Dance Joyce Theatre Tharp is going back to the early years, between 1965 and 1971, her incubator period, during which she performed in lofts and developed that inimitable Tharpian style: folksy, smart, loose-limbed, funny, complicated. Before she embraced Broadway and the ballet…

Not long ago, Donald Trump acquired a reproduction of a painting that appears on postcards in gift shops around the capital, depicting a younger, more slender version of himself, with an I-date-models grin, drinking Diet Coke at a private club with Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon, and a bunch of other Republican Presidents. In the painting’s dreamscape, Trump is almost pretty. The artist’s intention was to flatter. He told the Washington Post, “I wanted to make everybody look as good-looking as they can, and try to shed the pounds where I need to.” For Robbie Conal, a street artist who has been plastering American cities with devastating political portraits since the Reagan Administration, the motive is catharsis and revenge. Conal is small and cheerful, with white hair that sticks out from…

THANKSGIVING I’ll start with my second-favorite holiday: Thanksgiving! It’s a day when various factions of human clans unite and have a feast. This is to remember when some old Caucasian men had a feast with the people who were already on this land, whom they subsequently slaughtered. Thanksgiving is only my second favorite because of all the slaughtering. FOURTH OF JULY This day commemorates when a bunch of Caucasian men in wigs told some other, fancier Caucasian men in fancier wigs that they wanted to do their own thing from now on. People eat processed meat while wearing the colors of this new thing’s flag, which, coincidentally, are the same as the colors of the old thing’s flag. But watch out—there are bombs! VALENTINE’S DAY Humans pair up periodically, originally…

For eighteen years, Jan Scheuermann has been paralyzed from the neck down. She is six feet tall, and she spends all day and all night in a sophisticated, battery-powered wheelchair that cradles her—half sitting, half reclining—from head to toe. In effect, the chair has become an extension of her body. To navigate the world in it, Scheuermann manipulates a cork-tipped joystick with her chin. She can move in this way with remarkable agility, but her height, combined with the bulk of the chair and the unrelenting nature of gravity and matter, can limit her. Over the phone, though, it is possible to not ever think of her paralysis. She has a soft voice, a wry sense of humor, and a warm, gentle manner. Sometimes when she speaks she pauses to…

The poem saidthat sunlight back there is the only thingI likeLet’s pour it back into starter beds or leave it on the sill for neighbors orfor laterA grassy smell in the kitchenLidocaine floatsthe fringed tulips in a crease and that’s the morningThere’s so much to look forward toBig bowls of cerealA tonal shift in the fertilizerLater automatic ramen and a CokeYou can start anywhere it doesn’t really matterFlowers on the tablebreathe sugarThe skylight in the dosage doesn’t…

Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins). Two families, living on the same plot of land in New Jersey more than a century apart, are linked in this novel by a sense of turmoil. In the eighteen-seventies, an unhappily married science teacher, whose Darwinian convictions are thwarted at work, lives in awe of his brilliant neighbor, the real-life naturalist Mary Treat, who corresponds with the great scientific minds of the day. In 2016, a woman struggles to keep her family together, in the face of her daughter-in-law’s suicide, her daughter’s radical leanings, and her husband’s blithe optimism. Looming large in both narratives are crumbling homes, despotic leaders, and a country on the brink of irreversible change. “I suppose it is in our nature,” Treat says. “When men fear the loss of…

John Doyle’s sober revival of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” (at the Classic Stage Company) couldn’t be more timely, though whether that timeliness enhances or diminishes its message I can’t quite decide. The play, which Brecht wrote as a refugee in Finland, in early 1941, describes the rise of Hitler through the parable of a gangster in Chicago during the Great Depression. Brecht had fled Germany in 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire. He saw that disaster was coming, and, as the play’s title makes clear, felt that it might have been averted if more of his countrymen had seen it, too. Brecht, who was waiting to immigrate to the United States, intended “Arturo Ui” for an American audience, but, according to his biographer Stephen Parker,…