Innholdsfortegnelse for December 17, 2018 i The New Yorker

By many lights, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is a silly project. Recently, Bruce Dickinson, the lead singer of Iron Maiden, called it “an utter and complete load of bollocks.” He said, “It’s run by a bunch of sanctimonious bloody Americans who wouldn’t know rock and roll if it hit them in the face.” Evidence, if you want it, can be found in the hall’s failure to enshrine the MC5, who may have been the first real rock-hitting-you-in-the-face band. (They’ve been nominated this year, for the fourth time, but, with the induction announcement likely coming this week, oddsmakers have put their chances below those of better-selling and less face-hitty acts like the Cure and Stevie Nicks.) It was fifty years ago that the MC5 released their proto-punk anthem…

When “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played before the first game of the 2018 N.F.L. season, between the Atlanta Falcons and the Philadelphia Eagles, the defending champions, in September, Michael Bennett knew that he was being watched. Football fans, and sportswriters, were waiting to see if the narrative of another year would be dominated not by division rivalries but by the debate over players who protested racial inequality during the national anthem. Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback who had begun the protests, in 2016, was the star of a new Nike commercial that was set to air during the game. (The tagline: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”) But Kaepernick had been out of the league since the end of that season—he has sued the owners,…

Julia Louis-Dreyfus was not feeling relaxed. In a few weeks, she would be receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, in a televised ceremony at the Kennedy Center, and she was anxious about her speech. “It’s, like, ‘If you’re so fucking funny, get up onstage and prove it!’” she said one morning in Los Angeles. She was sitting in a white bathrobe, having her makeup done, in a room at the Glendale Hilton, where she was shooting an episode of her HBO series, “Veep.” Louis-Dreyfus has nine Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Golden Globe, and she shares with Cloris Leachman the record for the most Emmys accumulated by an actor: one for playing Elaine Benes, on “Seinfeld,” the role that made her a star; one for her performance…

You’ll be better tomorrowAnd the next and the next. Our window crammed with bees,Geese cavorting on the hill A green pond where we floatedNever dreaming such a fate Might befall one of usMad dance of tumors This serous thing, spelled differentlyBut pronounced like the cloud Cirrus—papa made me seeLifting me high in afternoon heat A pallor stroking the inner skyLigaments striated A high interiority picked with iceFinicky music we dare not hear. The men with OdysseusPacked their ears with wax One or two tore out their tonguesRight there on the Cretan coast.…

Only Jesus made his father more famous. Harper Lee’s father was actually named Amasa, but, by the end of his life, he was answering to “Atticus Finch,” a reflection of how closely the character was modelled on him and how wildly well known his fictional doppel-gänger had become. When “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published, in 1960, it instantly—and seemingly irrevocably—entered the canon of American literature; it won the Pulitzer Prize, was adapted into an Oscar-winning film, sold tens of millions of copies in more than forty languages, and was eventually assigned to half a century’s worth of middle-school students—some of whom were themselves named Atticus, or had pets named for his daughter, Scout, or her friend Dill, or their strange neighbor, Boo Radley. “To Kill a Mockingbird” is now…

The cyclone of exuberance that is Yo-Yo Ma tore through the Washington, D.C., area at the end of November. The cellist is in the middle of a sprawling tour called the Bach Project, which involves performances of Bach’s six solo-cello suites in thirty-six places, on six continents. Classical music has taken to attaching the word “project” to undertakings large and small. If two or more Brahms symphonies are played, it becomes a Brahms Project. The Bach Project, though, is deserving of the name. Most of Ma’s concerts are slated for large spaces capable of accommodating thousands. Each is accompanied by a Day of Action, in which Ma meets with local artists, community leaders, students, and activists, exploring how culture can contribute to social progress. In Washington, the venue was the…

HEAVY METALS Sam Knight’s article on proteomics presents exciting research possibilities for humanists, but it would have benefitted from a more critical discussion of the conclusions drawn by the scientists spearheading these new methods (“Hidden Traces,” November 26th). For instance, Gleb Zilberstein and Pier Giorgio Righetti concluded from the “traces of gold, silver, lead, and arsenic” they found on Johannes Kepler’s papers that the author must have been an alchemist. But how can we be certain that Kepler—and not any of the hundreds of people who may have handled these manuscripts after him—was the one who had metals on his hands? Such a hasty conclusion overlooks basic facts about how early-modern manuscripts were circulated. Taking a few molecules of metal as evidence that Kepler was an alchemist seems analogous…

“The lineage goes George, Henry, George, Henry, George, Henry—and I’m George.” So said George Steinbrenner IV, son of Hank and grandson of the Boss, on a recent afternoon at dusk. “My firstborn son would be Henry IV,” he added. He was walking into Central Park from Columbus Circle and talking about his emergence, at the age of twenty-two, as a person of prominence in the family business, which, as he described it, is not the Yankees but ownership writ large: baseball teams, thoroughbreds, race cars. “All the figures that I idolized as a kid, starting with my grandfather, were on the sports-business or sports-ownership side,” he continued. “And, especially when I started going to IndyCar races, the owners were the ones I looked up to more so than the drivers.…

My music belongs to me and it is awesome. My music is way better than your music,your music is trash, garbage stenchof a hot summer night behind the dumpsters at Taco Bell,rancid, but I’m there, too, drinking beersin the parking lot with the windows downand the radio tuned to a baseball gamewe are following as casuallyas the stars’ erratic flight plan—that musicis my music, all of it, ballgame, laughter of friendsand the crack of frosty six-packs,asphalt returning the day’s heat to the sky. My music is so much better than your musicI pity you—almost I would pity youif I were not disgusted by your chump-change music.My music will beat your music to a pulp.My music will turn your music into a car washrun by infants—their tiny handscan’t even hold the…

To see, to remember, to comprehend. It all depends on where you stand. The first time I came to Hammars, I was barely a year old and knew nothing about the great and upheaving love that had brought me there. Actually, there were three loves. I organize, catalogue, and number. I am the same age now that my father was when I was born. Forty-eight. My mother was twenty-seven; she looked both much younger and much older than her years back then. I don’t know which of the three loves came first. But I’ll begin with the one that arose between my mother and my father in 1965 and ended before I was old enough to remember anything about it. I have seen pictures and read letters and heard them…

Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor (Knopf). This engaging examination of religious practices takes the form of a tour of the British Museum, of which the author is a former director. MacGregor addresses big questions—Where did monotheism originate? How does religion relate to politics?—by exploring a range of artifacts, such as a lion-headed human figure from Ice Age Europe (“the earliest-known representation of something beyond human experience”); an Aztec knife used for human sacrifice; and a smartphone app that helps Muslims determine which direction to face in prayer. The book doesn’t fully deliver on its argument that religion is making a comeback, but its juxtaposition of various cultures asserts a shared human need: “Religion offers an architecture of meaning in which people may find shelter and hope.” After…

Is there a more pessimistic work of American art than “Network”? The Sidney Lumet movie, which came out in 1976, begins with the threat of suicide, ends with murder, and offers hardly a shred of comfort or hope in between. That’s why I love it: like its protagonist, the news anchor turned doomsday prophet Howard Beale, it has simply run out of bullshit. The outlines of the story—a lone hero stands up to corporate greed, decrying entertainment addiction, political impotence, and the breakdown of trust and decency—seem to promise a classic tale of moral redemption, Mr. Smith Goes to Television. But instead of Jimmy Stewart we get Peter Finch, as Beale, whose incendiary catchphrase—“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”—has endured as a mantra…

In 2012, Kevin Beasley, then a grad student at Yale, drove to the outskirts of Selma, Alabama, to buy a century-old motor (above) that had powered a cotton gin for thirty years, during both the Jim Crow and the civil-rights eras. At the Whitney Museum, Beasley sequesters the still operational one-ton machine in a soundproof glass box and transmits the audio into the adjacent room—a politically conscious twist on the late Robert Morris’s 1961 piece “Box with the Sound of Its Own Making.” The show opens Dec. 15. NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Ikue Mori The Stone at the New School It’s hard to imagine New York’s experimental music scene—with its fertile mashup of avant rock,…

Winds from the east, and a mist coming in, rolled over Brooklyn Heights the other day, bringing Emily Mortimer, the British actress, to the door of a coffee shop. Finding a seat, she recalled a song from “Mary Poppins,” the 1964 Disney film, in which Mrs. Banks, the mother of Jane and Michael, wears a “Votes for Women” sash and sings cheerfully of throwing off “the shackles of yesterday.” (“Take heart, for Missus Pankhurst has been clapped in irons again!”) “There’s a part where she goes”—Mortimer paused, then began to sing—“‘Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid.’” She beamed. “It’s just so perfect!” That early Technicolor rendering of a plucky suffragette, enthusiastic about her cause but forgetful of her children, has sparked debate…

It’s almost as if you can’t be a pop diva these days unless you have a dedicated fan base with a quirky name—the Arianators for Ariana Grande, the Beyhive for Beyoncé, the Barbz for Nicki Minaj. But, long before these squads were even a twinkle in a music-label exec’s eye, there were the Lambs, or the Lambily (a portmanteau of “lamb” and “family”): devotees of Mariah Carey, who has been writing and performing mega-hits since the early nineties. On a recent Wednesday, Carey was in town to promote “Caution,” her fifteenth studio album. An onstage interview, to be broadcast online, had been scheduled at the Brooklyn headquarters of the music-media company Genius, situated on a somewhat desolate block near the Gowanus Canal. Natalie Guevara, Genius’s head of communications, had alerted…

Stephen Lawlor and David Hunt have witnessed a lot of bullying. Among the principal victims, in their experience, are young, first-time mothers, who are sometimes so intimidated that they’re unable to eat. Isolating their tormentors in a separate group isn’t a solution, Hunt told me: “They just knock the crap out of each other.” The bullies and victims we were discussing are cows. Lawlor milks about three hundred Holsteins on a farm in County Meath, Ireland, an hour northwest of Dublin. The farm has been in his family for four generations; his calf barn, which is long and narrow and made of primeval-looking gray stone, was a horse stable in his grandfather’s time. He, Hunt, and I were standing in a more recent structure a few feet away, a hangar-size…

The last film made by Alfonso Cuarón, five years ago, was “Gravity,” in which Sandra Bullock floated through space, evading debris caused by a Russian missile strike and hitching a ride on a Chinese reëntry capsule. By contrast, Cuarón’s new film, “Roma,” is in black-and-white, and the star, Yalitza Aparicio, has never acted before. Most of the story is set in Roma, a pleasant suburb of Mexico City, in 1970 and 1971, and the special effects are largely confined to dog mess. The earlier movie cost a hundred million dollars; the new one, reportedly, a tenth of that sum. Let us hope that such dizzying career moves become culturally commonplace, and that Metallica will soon reform as a piano quartet, with a series of lunch-time concerts at the Frick. Aparicio…