Innholdsfortegnelse for January 14, 2019 i The New Yorker

Amos Oz (Fiction, p. 48), who died last month, was an Israeli novelist, shortstory writer, and essayist. His many works include “Where the Jackals Howl,” “The Same Sea,” and “A Tale of Love and Darkness.” This is the first time that “All Rivers,” published in Hebrew in 1965, has appeared in English. Elisabeth Zerofsky (“The Illiberal State,” p. 40) has contributed to the magazine since 2012. This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Jake Halpern (“A Night at the Museum,” p. 30) received a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for “Welcome to the New World,” a twenty-part series in the Times. He is adapting the series into a book. Margaret Talbot (Comment, p. 13) has been a staff writer since 2004. James Wood (Books, p. 65) teaches at Harvard.…

In 2015, the tech entrepreneur Oliver Luckett disrupted his own life and moved to Iceland. He had just sold his company theAudience, which he co-founded with Ari Emanuel and Sean Parker—it helped celebrities such as Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron build fan bases on social media—to a conglomerate in Dubai. Before that, he had been the head of innovation for Disney, where he did the same thing for Buzz Lightyear and Cinderella. “I kind of felt that I had won L.A.,” Luckett, who is forty-four, said the other day. He had first visited Iceland to work with Björk, and he thought it would be a good place to recharge: “I was just ready to be on a cold volcanic island and chill out.” Instead, he wound up launching a company…

A few years ago, the National Academy of Medicine convened a panel of sixteen leading medical experts to analyze the scientific literature on cannabis. The report they prepared, which came out in January of 2017, runs to four hundred and sixty-eight pages. It contains no bombshells or surprises, which perhaps explains why it went largely unnoticed. It simply stated, over and over again, that a drug North Americans have become enthusiastic about remains a mystery. For example, smoking pot is widely supposed to diminish the nausea associated with chemotherapy. But, the panel pointed out, “there are no good-quality randomized trials investigating this option.” We have evidence for marijuana as a treatment for pain, but “very little is known about the efficacy, dose, routes of administration, or side effects of commonly…

Tova, a simple name, a popular name, not quite suited to a young poetess. The same could be said of her body: too big. Admittedly, only slightly too big. A girl with a mother’s body. On her hips and her shoulders an emphatic surplus layer, not without tenderness. The flesh of her arms too full. She wasn’t an ethereal girl. I don’t remember the color of her eyes. The strange thing is that the color of her trousers I remember very well; they were made of some coarse fabric, a little tattered, with a color somewhere between dark blue and dark gray. I don’t know what to call this color; maybe it doesn’t have a name. But I can see it even now, without the slightest effort. I see it…

THE TV PRESIDENT What is perhaps most surprising about Patrick Radden Keefe’s Profile of Mark Burnett, the producer of “The Apprentice,” is that it made me agree wholeheartedly with Donald Trump about the potential perils of immigration, illegal or not (“Winning,” January 7th). Burnett, a native Brit, acknowledges coming to the U.S. illegally, with “no money, no green card, no nothing.” He then took a habitually failing businessman and turned him into a pretend savant for TV. Afterward, Rupert Murdoch, a native Australian, gave Trump an even larger audience—the loyal viewers of Fox News, and the readers of the New York Post. Trump has called immigration the enemy of great cultures. Given all that Burnett and Murdoch have done, through Trump, to destroy American culture, I am inclined to…

The other day, Nicole Perlman, a notably female writer of blockbuster genre films, who lives in the Bay Area, was in Los Angeles for meetings. After work, she stopped by the Museum of Jurassic Technology, home to a collection of esoterica that she likes to visit for inspiration and movie research. “I got a book here about the history of sundials,” Perlman said. “The project didn’t get made, but it involved ancient puzzles in the ‘Indiana Jones’ style, water clocks, and the mechanisms behind them.” Perlman is thirty--seven and gentle, with short springy curls that look like party-popper confetti. In 2014, she became the first woman to write a Marvel Studios movie, “Guardians of the Galaxy”; its audience was forty-four per cent female—a record. “Captain Marvel,” the brand’s first superheroine…

After the 1976 Presidential election, James E. Carter, Jr., was not content with mere victory. The bombastic peanut-farming mogul turned politician would pace the Lincoln Bedroom into the wee hours, sending telegrams in which he, using arbitrary capitalizations and quotation marks, raged against “Geriatric” Gerald Ford. Observers speculated that Carter was attempting to discredit his vanquished opponent because he did not have a fulsome mandate, having won only 50.1 per cent of the popular vote. Or perhaps it was simply his instinct to lash out when he was alone; his wife, Rosalynn, had bucked tradition by initially staying behind in Atlanta with their young daughter, Amy, much to the curiosity of Americans, who wondered if theirs might be a marriage of convenience. “Let Carter be Carter” was the common refrain…

The ways of the European Parliament in Strasbourg are inscrutable to the American visitor. Political parties bearing maddeningly similar names—the Sweden Social Democrats and the Sweden Democrats; the German Social Democrats, the German Free Democrats, and the German Christian Democrats—form coalitions whose names elude all meaning. The design of the immense campus, a cylindrical tower abutted by an ellipse, is meant to represent the transition of Western civilization from centralized power to democracy. An exhibition of photographs in the pillared courtyard reveals the body’s aspirations to be the arbiter of international statecraft: the parliament’s former president Nicole Fontaine poses with Yasser Arafat, the Dalai Lama, and the leader of a delegation of female Afghan refugees. Yet it is rare to hear Europeans express any measure of reverence toward the body;…

I was born to watchthe beavers’ chewingflood the pond.Fated to bear witnessto such confidentaccretion, my life was bitten down into a pointthat pointed towardthe dome, its whole shorn forestbrought to thatch,incredibly, by teeth.There is a seal that spends each morningblunting its incisorson the ice—rasping open breathing holesthat close if notroutinely shaven back— until one day its teeth,now dull and domed,stop breaking through,the animal beatingits soft enamelon the ceiling as it drowns. There can be noproceeding from.There is only gnawingthrough the visible,wearing downthe center between living and its damages, untilthe center’s broken doorstops granting us admissionto our lives.The beavers graft anotherlayer on the dam. They slap their tailsso loud a soundlike falling diceskitters the smooth,unfrozen surface of the pond.Or what had been the pond before it overflowedits banks and drownedthe meadow…

Russia Without Putin, by Tony Wood (Verso). Critiquing the West’s obsession with Vladimir Putin’s “cool calculation and prickly machismo,” this book offers a more searching appraisal of the institutions that buttress his Presidency, the aspirations that galvanize his supporters, and the forces that drive his capitalist economy. In Russian society today, “respect for profit-making” trumps all; cognates like glamur have been invented to describe excesses of consumption, even as the working class still struggles. Wood argues that Russia’s recent aggressive actions on the global stage are better explained by the country’s rattled pride during the post-Cold War realignment than by Putin’s fundamental character. I Am Dynamite!, by Sue Prideaux (Tim Duggan Books). This vibrant account of Friedrich Nietzsche’s life is a searching portrait of the philosopher and a keen…

Philip Venables’s “4.48 Psychosis,” which is based on the late Sarah Kane’s 2000 play and runs through Jan. 12 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, is a marquee offering at the Prototype Festival, a two-week showcase that sets the pace for contemporary opera in New York City. The piece externalizes the private agony of depression: a cast of identically dressed women gives voice to the protagonist’s despair through vocal glissandos, eerie harmonies, and claustrophobic gasps against a backdrop of buzzing and fractured sounds. ART “Andy Warhol” Whitney Museum Almost everything on display in this splendid, though inevitably too small, retrospective, organized by the museum’s senior curator, Donna De Salvo, feels, even now, definitively new. The show hits the most famous points—the Marilyns and the Elvises, the Jackies and the…

On the eighth day of the government shutdown, the Trump Administration was dogged by reports of yet another investigation. New Jersey’s attorney general, Gurbir Grewal, was looking into whether Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster had hired undocumented housekeepers—including a Guatemalan woman who told the Times that she had illegally entered the United States from Mexico and often made the President’s bed. Trump’s troubles with New York’s legal authorities are well publicized. Less well known are the dozens of legal actions against the Administration in which its neighbor across the Hudson has participated, “everything from the travel bans to DACA to family separations,” Grewal said not long ago. New Jersey has one of the largest populations of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., an estimated five hundred thousand. Grewal, who took…

Last year, Martin Kesselman, a color consultant to homeowners and decorators, did something controversial. He made a new white. The shade, created with the British paint company Farrow & Ball, is called Elliyah (it was named for Kesselman’s then ten-year-old daughter), and is available through INCOLOUR, his showroom in Chinatown. “I got a lot of criticism for coming out with it,” Kesselman said recently. “‘The color guy has his own white. How ironic and arrogant is that?’ But when I opened the showroom it got a lot of attention.” Does the world really need another white? Benjamin Moore has a hundred and sixty-four versions of it, all of which Kesselman sells. But he believes that Elliyah is different: “Whatever the light, natural or artificial, it’ll read like a true white—bold…

A few years ago, in the Frankfurt airport on the way home from Greece, I bought a copy of Virginia Woolf’s “The Common Reader,” which includes her essay “On Not Knowing Greek.” I already had the book at home, but I was impressed that anything by Woolf was considered airport reading. When I was about ten years old, my father, a pragmatic man, had refused to let me study Latin, and for some reason I assumed that “On Not Knowing Greek” was about how Woolf’s father, too, had prevented his daughter from studying a dead language. I pictured young Virginia Stephen sulking in a room of her own, an indecipherable alphabet streaming through her consciousness, while her father and her brother, downstairs in the library, feasted on Plato and Aristotle.…

things got terribly ugly incredibly quicklythings got ugly embarrassingly quicklyactually things got ugly unbelievably quicklyhonestly things got ugly seemingly infrequentlyinitially things got ugly ironically usuallyawfully carefully things got ugly unsuccessfullyoccasionally things got ugly mostly painstakinglyquietly seemingly things got ugly beautifullyinfrequently things got ugly sadly especiallyfrequently unfortunately things got uglyincreasingly obviously things got ugly suddenlyembarrassingly forcefully things got really uglyregularly truly quickly things got really incrediblyugly things will get less ugly inevitably hopefully…

During my training as a hematologist at U.C.L.A., forty years ago, a senior faculty member introduced the program of study by citing a verse from Leviticus: “The life of the flesh is in the blood.” For the assembled young physicians, this was a biological truth. Red cells carry oxygen, required for our heart to beat and our brain to function. White cells defend us against invasion by lethal pathogens. Platelets and proteins in plasma form clots that can prevent fatal hemorrhages. Blood is constantly being renewed by stem cells in our bone marrow: red cells turn over every few months, platelets and most white cells every few days. Since marrow stem cells spawn every kind of blood cell, they can, when transplanted, restore life to a dying host. In a…

Almost a hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf wrote an essay, prickly with barbs and wounded pride, about the latest American fiction. She couldn’t really bring herself to admire Theodore Dreiser, Ring Lardner, or Sinclair Lewis, and she couldn’t really bring herself to admire America—where “there is baseball instead of society,” and where, instead of an old land that has moved people to emotion for endless seasons, there was this peculiar new country, with “its tin cans, its prairies, its cornfields flung disorderly about like a mosaic of incongruous pieces waiting order at the artist’s hands.” But she offered this backhanded praise: Americans, she wrote, “are doing what the Elizabethans did—they are coining new words.” They knew how to force the language to adapt to their needs. By contrast, “one may…