Innholdsfortegnelse for February 11, 2019 i The New Yorker

Oliver Sacks (“The Machine Stops,” p. 28), who died in 2015, was the author of many books, including “Musicophilia,” “Gratitude,” and “The River of Consciousness.” A final collection of his essays, “Everything in Its Place,” will be published in April. Ian Parker (“Unreliable Narrator,” p. 30) began contributing to the magazine in 1994 and became a staff writer in 2000. Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Poem, p. 58) is the author of, most recently, the poetry collection “Lighting the Shadow.” Elias Muhanna (The Talk of the Town, p. 17), a professor of comparative literature at Brown University, has contributed to The New Yorker since 2014. Pascal Campion (Cover), an illustrator, is an art director for animation studios in Southern California. Han Zhang (The Talk of the Town, p. 19) is a…

“We complain about America, but Middle Easterners are secretly flattered that America devotes so much attention to regime change in our region,” Karl Sharro said the other day, testing out new material. “It’s like a crush. Now that Trump is taking troops out of Syria and threatening to invade Venezuela, it feels like America is going back to its ex, and we are jealous. Latin America is looking sexy again. What’s wrong with our oil? What’s so great about their oil, anyway?” Sharro, who is Lebanese-Iraqi, lives in London, where, officially, he is an architect at a commercial firm called PLP. Unofficially, he is Karl reMarks, a Twitter comedian with a large following and an acid take on Middle Eastern politics. He was in town recently to promote his first…

Each day, on the set of her show “Better Things,” the director and actor Pamela Adlon retreats to a small room while the cast and crew eat lunch. She turns off the lights, shuts down her phone, removes her pants and her bra, and lies face down on a couch. Often, she falls asleep.Adlon is a single mother of three daughters, as well as one of the few showrunners who direct, produce, write, and star in their own series. This makeshift sensory-deprivation room is often the only opportunity she has to generate new ideas. One afternoon in September, during the filming of the show’s third season, Adlon was directing a scene in which her character’s increasingly absent-minded mother, Phyllis, who lives next door (as Adlon’s mother does in real life),…

Dan Mallory, a book editor turned novelist, is tall, good-looking, and clever. His novel, “The Woman in the Window,” which was published under a lightly worn pseudonym, A. J. Finn, was the hit psychological thriller of the past year. Like “Gone Girl,”by Gillian Flynn (2012), and “The Girl on the Train,” by Paula Hawkins (2015), each of which has sold millions of copies, Mallory’s novel, published in January, 2018, features an unreliable first-person female narrator, an apparent murder, and a possible psychopath. Mallory sold the novel in a two-book, two-million-dollar deal.He dedicated it to a man he has described as an ex-boyfriend, and secured a blurb from Stephen King: “One of those rare books that really is unputdownable.” Mallory was profiled in the Times, and the novel was reviewed in…

THE PURSE The car says this to her: “Cindy, listen, I know you’ve got to get over to 1133 Hollister Avenue by 2 P.M. for your meeting with Rose Taylor, of Taylor, Levine & Rodriguez, L.L.P., but did you hear that Les Bourses is having a thirty-per-cent-off sale? And, remember, they carry the complete Picard line you like—in particular, that cute cross-body bag in fuchsia you had your eye on last week. They have two left in stock.” They’re moving along at just over the speed limit, which is what she’s programmed the car to do, trying to squeeze every minute out of the day but at the same time wary of breaking the law. She glances at her phone. It’s a quarter past one and she really wasn’t planning…

Almost Nothing, by Eric Karpeles (NYRB).This absorbing biography aims to rekindle interest in the Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski (1896-1993), whose career was for decades stymied by history’s tumult. As a Soviet prisoner of war, he gave lectures on Proust and wrote a history of French painting, and, in 1940, was one of only a few hundred survivors of the Katyn massacre, in which some twenty-two thousand Polish officers were killed. After the war, exiled in Paris, he advocated for a free Poland and wrote two searing memoirs, but only in old age was he able to devote himself to his paintings, which Karpeles analyzes with acuity and grace. Czapski called painting both “prayer” and “defeat,” after a lifelong “apprenticeship of looking.” Making Music American, by E. Douglas…

ONE WORD: PLASTICS Carolyn Kormann mentions a number of efforts to reduce plastic pollution in her article on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: the nationwide ban on microbeads, California’s restrictions on plastic straws, and Lego’s introduction of a “new plant-based form of plastic” (“The Widening Gyre,” February 4th). It’s true that Lego now uses a plant-based polyethylene plastic for a small percentage of its pieces, but it’s misleading for Kormann to compare this to banning microbeads and straws. “Plant-based” does not mean “biodegradable.” In this case, it means that the ethanol used in production comes from sugarcane rather than from petroleum. Lego’s new plastic is otherwise similar to that used in traditional polyethylene products, and will break down into the same kind of microplastic as that currently swirling in…

Leegrid Stevens and Erin Treadway are a husband-and-wife team who make theatre together, he as a playwright and she as an actor. Both Texas natives, they met in the costume shop at Southern Methodist University, and started a company called Loading Dock Theatre. Past productions include “The Dudleys,” a family drama told in the style of an eight-bit video game, and an adaptation of Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” reset in an investment bank and staged in their former apartment, in downtown Brooklyn. Last winter, they premièred a onewoman sci-fi odyssey called “Spaceman.” Stevens (a pen name for Steven Gridley, who wanted his early family dramas to be un-Googleable by his family) had become interested in space travel after reading an article in The Space Review which argued that NASA could revive…

There’s constant, loud sniffling that is no longer confined to a single cubicle. Everyone is carrying around a paper towel for touching door handles, and a few employees have started wearing surgical masks. Instead of saying “Bless you” when someone sneezes, people flee the room. Attendance at meetings has dropped to just you. Your co-workers are avoiding the drinking fountain and the vending machines. Instead, they’re stockpiling water and food under their desks and defending their stores with surprising force. Someone who says he’s from what sounds like the “Center for Febreze Control” has left a lot of strange, garbled voice mails. There’s an unpleasant odor in the office that’s only a few notches down from the stench of death. When you look out the window, you see a lot…

In a throat, a note is forming. A puff of air, a pulse of the lungs, rushes up the windpipe and through the vocal cords, parting them like a pair of lips. As the cords begin to vibrate, they’re stretched taut by muscles to either side, raising the pitch. The diaphragm pumps more air, rocketing the note up the vocal tract, making its walls hum like the barrel of a woodwind. The sound ricochets back and forth as it rises, gaining resonance with each rebound, till it bursts into the hollow chamber of the mouth, the ringing cavities of the sinuses, and careens off the palate into the open air. The human voice is the world’s most astonishing instrument, it’s often said. It’s capable of everything from a trill to…

Years ago I went to Noho Starwith some poets & Cecil Taylor.Noho Star is closed now& Cecil died yesterday. I walkedto Union Square & watched blackmen playing chess. Rubbing their jawswhile the afternoon light poureddown the gentle rooks of their fingershanging above a queen or pawn.Cecil Taylor sat across the tablefrom me. Wearing leather gymshorts, rainbow-striped kneesocks,a fringe vest, & a face so musicalI could hear the notes blunting& banging as he low-laughed & lookedlike a lion who had bitten offthe ancient secret of a soft roar. Iliked him right away. Said yes whenhe asked me if I would sharea dessert with him. I in an ivorydress that was vintage, the kindmy mother would have worn,with chiffon sleeves—the shiningair made the loose dresscling to me. The way a specialmusic clung…

If, as John Ruskin wrote,“to compose is to arrange unequal things,”the poet Shane McCrae is a shrewd composer of American stories.His poems often piece together, for striking effect, swatches of material from divergent sources: word salad from one of President Trump’s speeches, a letter from an ex-slave, lines of poetry from Sylvia Plath and T. S. Eliot, and echoes from McCrae’s tormented childhood. He is a prospector for speech rhythms, collecting his material wherever he can.But American attics are full of old boxes of diaries and letters; and testimony, no matter how arresting, is not itself poetry. What makes McCrae’s compositions so ingenious are their marvels of prosody and form, learned from the English Renaissance poems that he read in libraries when he was just starting out. The result is…

The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is too often reduced to a pop-culture cliché—her likeness appears on products from tote bags to cake toppers. Starting Feb. 8, the Brooklyn Museum reaffirms her complexity, in the exhibition “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving.” Her indelible self-portraits on canvas are joined—for the first time in the U.S.—by a selection of the Tehuana garments and jewelry with which the artist cannily constructed her public persona—a reminder that, in Kahlo’s case, style was substance. NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah Blue Note The trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah was born in 1983, a fact worth noting when it comes to appreciating why the sonic permutations of hip-hop—the genre…

On a freezing Friday night, a group of partygoers in winter coats huddled under a heat lamp at the entryway of House of Yes, the night club, event space, and self-described “temple of expression” in Bushwick. The evening’s event was House of Love, a monthly party for the sexually adventurous. Costumes were mandatory, but most patrons had just come to dance with their friends. (“This party is Rated R … not X. If you know what we mean,” the invitation read.) Tickets had sold out, as they usually do, but first one had to get past the consenticorn. The consenticorn, a kind of dancefloor monitor, wore a long fur coat and a light-up unicorn horn, and stood before a table bearing free New York City Department of Health-brand condoms, ready…

The other day, in the kitchen of an event space called Fitzcarraldo, in Brooklyn, a visiting chef named Douglas McMaster was putting the final touches on a meal of what he called “supernatural peasant food.” McMaster is a zero-waste chef, meaning that his meals produce no trash. At his restaurant, Silo, in Brighton, England, he buys ingredients directly from farmers, to avoid grocery-store packaging, and returns peels and trimmings in the form of compost, creating what he calls a “closed loop.” His recipes strive to incorporate the whole vegetable. “So, like, these carrot tops, for instance,” he said, pointing to a plate of charred carrot disks. “Ten per cent went into that oil, ninety per cent went into the treacle”—a dark sauce made from vegetable scraps.“We maximize our resources to…

My favorite aunt, Auntie Len, when she was in her eighties, told me that she had not had too much difficulty adjusting to all the things that were new in her lifetime—jet planes, space travel, plastics, and so on—but that she could not accustom herself to the disappearance of the old. “Where have all the horses gone?” she would sometimes say. Born in 1892, she had grown up in a London full of carriages and horses. I have similar feelings myself. A few years ago, I was walking with my niece Liz down Mill Lane, a road near the house in London where I grew up. I stopped at a railway bridge where I had loved leaning over the railings as a child. I watched various electric and diesel trains…

How will the singers of the futureFirst half of his life lived in Spanish: the long syntaxof las montañas that lined his village, the rhymeof sol with his soul—a Cuban alma—that swayedwith las palmas, the sharp rhythm of his machetecutting through caña, the syllables of his canariosthat sung into la brisa of the island home he leftto spell out the second half of his life in English—the vernacular of New York City sleet, neon, glass—and the brick factory where he learned to polishsteel twelve hours a day. Enough to save enoughto buy a used Spanish-English dictionary he keptbedside like a bible—studied fifteen new wordsafter his prayers each night, then practiced themon us the next day: Buenos días, indeed, my family.Indeed más coffee. Have a good day today, indeed—and again in…

Ben Hecht, the greatest of American screenwriters, produced, near the end of his career, a garrulous autobiography,“A Child of the Century,”in which he tells us the following: In 1910, at the age of sixteen, he left the University of Wisconsin after attending for three days and took a train to Chicago. He had fifty dollars in his pocket. Having slept on a bench in the Chicago railroad station, he tried to go see a show at the Majestic Vaudeville Theatre, only to be accosted by a distant relative, Manny Moyses, a liquor salesman “with a large red nose.” Moyses pried him loose from the ticket line and brought him to meet a client who also had a red nose, the publisher of the Chicago Daily Journal, one John C.Eastman. The…

“Enter the Pineapple!” Nick Cannon, Mariah Carey’s ex-husband, shouts.As Salt-N-Pepa’s “Whatta Man” thumps over the loudspeakers, the mystery contestant struts onto the stage, his head concealed by a bulbous pineapple mask. His Hawaiian shirt hangs open, revealing fake abs. A plastic parrot bobs on his shoulder. Two mock bodyguards strut behind him. A chyron pops up, reading “Pineapple.Weakness: Ripens Quickly.” Ripening quickly also happens to be the weakness of a lot of reality competitions, particularly those based on gimmicks as extreme as that of “The Masked Singer,” a Gaga-glittery pageant on Fox that has become a surprise hit. But just because something is dumb fun doesn’t mean it’s not fun. Based on the South Korean series “King of Mask Singer,” “The Masked Singer” is a reality show in which contestants…