Innholdsfortegnelse for March 4, 2019 i The New Yorker

The robots are coming. Hide the WD-40. Lock up your nine-volt batteries. Build a booby trap out of giant magnets; dig a moat as deep as a grave. “Ever since a study by the University of Oxford predicted that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence over the next fifteen to twenty years, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the future of work,” Andrés Oppenheimer writes, in “The Robots Are Coming: The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation” (Vintage). No one is safe. Chapter 4: “They’re Coming for Bankers!” Chapter 5: “They’re Coming for Lawyers!” They’re attacking hospitals: “They’re Coming for Doctors!” They’re headed to Hollywood: “They’re Coming for Entertainers!” I gather they have not yet…

As a child growing up in Pueblo, Colorado, Jeremy Laintz travelled widely with his father, an aeronautics engineer at Lockheed Martin, who sometimes took his four kids along on business trips. Family vacations included tours of aerospace facilities and, on one occasion, a trip to watch a space-shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral. Laintz’s mother managed a bakery, and Laintz, the youngest child in the family, recalled enjoying a warm home life. He played soccer and football, and spent summers hunting and fishing on a ranch that his family owned in North Dakota. As a teen-ager, though, he slipped into trouble—he was arrested first for driving under the influence, and then, in his late teens, for felony car theft. He spent a year in prison, where he learned to weld, and…

When Peter Todbaum and I were twenty-five, and three years clear of Yale, I lost track of him for a short while. I had been living in New York City, working as an assistant at F.S.G.and writing short stories that no one wanted to publish, when he got back in touch. He had acquired an agent and was going to Hollywood. He wanted me with him, as co-writer on a stack of ideas he promised me he’d already developed and vetted with his representation, and which needed only my hand. Mine alone! I, Alexander Duplessis, was the writer he needed! Not Robert Towne or Herman J.Mankiewicz! I alone could grok and conjugate Todbaum’s sensibility, and, besides, he had a place picked out for us in Burbank. We’d shack up together…

Bluff City, by Preston Lauterbach (Norton). Ernest Withers produced some of the most arresting photographs of the civilrights movement, intimately capturing the Little Rock Nine, the Emmett Till trial, and police beatings of black protesters. But it later emerged that he was also working as a paid informant for the F.B.I. This biography tries to square Withers’s seeming betrayal with the moral clarity of his images. Lauterbach analyzes the extent of Withers’s F.B.I. participation and pans out to examine the ideologies of Martin Luther King, Jr.; Stokely Carmichael; and the Memphis black-power agitators whom Withers informed on. Lauterbach sees them all as responding differently to the same oppressive system and asks, forgivingly, “Is it our task now to decide how a black person should have navigated a racist world?”…

The music at the beginning of “Merrily We Roll Along,” Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s famously reviled and doggedly reworked 1981 show, is so bright and bold and joyous that you can’t help feeling swept up in its optimism, anticipating greatness, much as the three artists at the center of the story did when they were young and starting out. Then you discover, as they did, that fate has other plans. “Merrily,” adapted from George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1934 play, traces, in reverse chronology, the friendship between Mary Flynn, a writer; Frank Shepard, a composer and producer; and Shepard’s collaborator Charley Kringas, a lyricist. When the musical opens, the friends are in their early forties, jaded and estranged from one another; as it unspools, time recedes, and year…

BALLET AFTER BALANCHINE I was struck by the irony that an article intended to address the history of misogyny within New York City Ballet exonerates its original offender: George Balanchine (Dancing, February 18th & 25th). Joan Acocella hints at Balanchine’s indiscretions, writing that his “career was marked, even shaped, by serial infatuations,” but this characterization minimizes his predatory behavior, which is widely known. Most famously, he fired Suzanne Farrell and her husband, after she refused his romantic advances, and attempted to destroy their careers. Farrell was twenty-three years old. Balanchine was sixty-five. Genius and charm do not excuse such actions. Janie McDermottBaltimore, Md. Acocella casts doubt on whether George Balanchine chose Peter Martins to succeed him as the company’s artistic director. As someone who served as Balanchine’s personal assistant…

For many years, Kathleen Lorna Middleton lived at 69 Carlton Terrace, in the North London suburb of Edmonton. The house, which faced one of the main roads leading out of the city, had a small plaque to the left of the front door: “Miss Lorna Middleton, Teacher of Pianoforte and Ballet.” Middleton was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1914. She was a talented dancer as a child and had friends who went to Hollywood, but, during the Depression, Middleton’s parents, who were English, lost everything and moved back to London. Middleton, who had small hands, buck teeth, and a pronounced New England accent, opened a school for dance and music in the front room of No. 69 and called her students the Merrie Carltons. Middleton played the piano, swivelling on…

Leaves crackle beneath our feet—tinder, kindling—as we walk by the brook, the crab-apple treea crimson pointilliste nimbus.You want to hold each wounded soul in your hands.Autumn flares. The damaged, the human berserk,find their way to you. I don’t know how you sleep.In the Gorgon’s blood, one drop is poison, the other heals.Fevered autumn, autumn I adorecroons an old song. We stroll the roadscuffng dust. And come upona garter snake lying motionless,its tail, we guess, nicked by a passing car.When we nudge it, it flips to its back in an agonized S,squirms, but can’t advance. Its belly gleams.We edge it into the grass. Do we stop seeingwhen we walk away? The brook prattles on.Home’s far off. Dusk settles, slowly, among leaves.That’s not mercy, scattering from its hands.…

A lonely woman romances a large aquatic creature who’s fleeing her town’s sadistic scientists. It’s the kind of story—a collision of fairy tale, pulp, and the dredgings of the unconscious—that produces an eerie familiarity. Those who flung (unsubstantiated) allegations of plagiarism at Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film, “The Shape of Water,” included the maker of a recent Dutch short, the son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Zindel, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who directed and cowrote “Delicatessen.” But Rachel Ingalls, the author of the 1982 novella “Mrs. Caliban,” about an affair between a housewife and a green-skinned sea dweller, was conspicuous for her absence. She often is. Ingalls, whose works are frequently out of print, has been unjustly neglected, and she is also constitutionally self-effacing. In a rare interview, she explained…

In Hulu’s “PEN15,” Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine, who are best friends and the show’s co-creators (with Sam Zvibleman),play versions of themselves at thirteen, entering seventh grade, in 2000, delusionally convinced that this will be “the best year ever.” To look authentically adolescent, the actresses, who are both around thirty, go full “21 Jump Street”: they bind their breasts, wear braces, and adopt the halter-topped, cargo-panted fashion of the late nineteen-nineties. All the other kids—the protagonists’ crushes, their geeky buds, their rich-girl nemeses—are played by real teens. It’s a risky tactic, one that could easily feel gimmicky or unconvincing. (Or queasy, considering that the boys they crush out on and, in some cases, make out with are actually prepubescent—an issue the show skirts with trick camerawork.) In early episodes, “PEN15”…

The Broadway jukebox musical, like the VH1 “Behind the Music” special, has become a rite of passage for music legends from the Four Seasons to Cher. Now the Temptations are getting the “Jersey Boys” treatment, in “Ain’t Too Proud” (starting previews on Feb. 28, at the Imperial), starring Jawan M. Jackson, James Harkness, Derrick Baskin, Jeremy Pope, and Ephraim Sykes (above). Expect backstage drama (egos, drugs, lawsuits) to keep the action moving and Motown earworms (“My Girl,” “Just My Imagination”) to make it go down smooth. ART McArthur Binion Lehmann Maupin CHELSEA From prehistoric artists in the caves of Lascaux to Jasper Johns in nineteen-sixties New York, certain painters have discovered that their hand is more than a tool—it’s a subject. At seventy-two, Binion joins their ranks, incorporating rows…

Even before my own medical education, I learned an essential truth about doctoring from my parents, both physicians: that being a physician involves much more than handing out diagnoses and treatment; it involves playing a role in some of the most intimate decisions of a patient’s life. This requires a considerable amount of human delicacy and judgment, no less than medical judgment and knowledge. If there is a serious, perhaps life-threatening or life-altering condition, what should one tell the patient, and when? How should one tell the patient? Should one tell the patient? Every situation is unique, but, for the most part, patients want to know the truth, however dire it is. They want to hear it delivered with tact, though, and with a sense, if not of hope, then…

Eco-Pillowsfloat above the standard queena dream in off-white Oh! You can buy these samepillows in the lobbypoked through with goose feathers The noise in the hallway is not quiet noise A towel draped over the TV can’t stare back & even though it’s not my home I move the furniture around A Visa cardslides open the key lockat a cruising altitude of thirty thousand feetair-conditioning & Xanax are the same thing Alive all the time I think I’m going to be sick Afraid of early checkoutthe Continental breakfast & neighborsthrough the walls or room service24 hrs/day Afraid of room service & Starlight mints The soft whirrup-whirrup of an ice machinethe soft whirrup-whirrup Large foam takeout spacecraft containers overflow the garbage in the bath You can’t call anyone from this phone…

The Enlightenment is under very bad weather right now. The French eighteenth-century movement that once was seen to have bathed Europe in the light of reason—fighting for science against superstition, and for liberty against bondage—has become the villain of many a postmodern seminar and of even more revisionist histories, from left and right alike. The Enlightenment’s supposed faith in reason—its desire to be sure that every “passion’ll/soon be rational,” to adapt the enlightened Ira Gershwin—is held responsible for racism, colonialism, and most of the other really bad isms. Enlightenment order is now understood as overlord violence pursued through other means. Its true symbol is not some peaceful Temple of Reason but the Panopticon—the all-surveying, single-eye system of Jeremy Bentham’s ideal prison. Where pre-Enlightenment Europe was sporadically cruel, post-Enlightenment Europe was…

More words may have been written about Jasper Johns than about any other American artist who isn’t Andy Warhol. Critical verbiage spumes in the wake of a sixty-some-year career (Johns is eighty-eight) that began with revolutionary paintings of flags, targets, sets of numbers, and maps—or, per a standard paradox, paintings that virtually are those things. Many of the writers, who now include Alexi Worth, a contributor to the catalogue of a show of recent work by Johns at the Matthew Marks Gallery, remark with some ratio of awe and exasperation on the artist’s taciturnity. He doesn’t—will not, don’t waste your breath asking him—discuss his works. This rankles, because what he makes seems positively to pant for discussion. Johns is a riddler, even—or especially—when his themes are blatant. In the present…