Innholdsfortegnelse for April 1, 2019 i The New Yorker

The authoritarian leaders taking power around the world share a vocabulary of intolerance, insult, and menace. Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected President of Brazil on promises to end crime, right the economy, and “make Brazil great,” has spent his career gleefully offending women, black people, environmentalists, and gays. “I would be incapable of loving a homosexual son,” he has said. “I would prefer that my son die in an accident than show up with some guy with a mustache.” As a national legislator, he declared one political rival, Maria do Rosário, “not worth raping.” Immigrants are “scum.” The United Nations is “a bunch of communists.” He supports the torture of drug dealers, the use of firing squads, and the empowerment of a hyper-aggressive police force. “A policeman who doesn’t kill,”…

I don’t want to be a spice store.I don’t want to carry handcrafted Marseille soap,or tsampa and yak butter,or nine thousand varieties of wine.Half the shops here don’t open till noonand even the bookstore’s brined in charm.I want to be the one store that’s open all nightand has nothing but necessities.Something to get a fire goingand something to put one out.A place where things stay frozenand a place where they are sweet.I want to hold within myself the possibilityof plugging one’s ears and easing one’s eyes;superglue for ruptures that are,one would have thought, irreparable,a whole bevy of non-toxic solutionsfor everyday disasters. I want to waitbrightly lit and with the patienceI never had as a childfor my father to find me openon Christmas morning in his last-ditch, lone-wolf drivefor gifts. “Light…

It is easy to forget just how variable the climate of the earth has been, across the geologic time scale. That is partly because the extent of that variability is so difficult to imagine. A world entirely covered in ice, from pole to pole—the so-called snowball earth—is something we find it hard to get our heads around, even though the longest and oldest period of total or near-total glaciation, the Huronian glaciation, lasted for three hundred million years. A world without ice is also hard to visualize, though it is by comparison a much more recent phenomenon: perhaps only thirty-four million years ago, crocodiles swam in a freshwater lake we know as the North Pole, and palm trees grew in Antarctica. The reality is that our planet oscillates between phases…

I have not stopped thinking about the I title story of Amy Hempel’s new collection, “Sing to It” (Scribner). Is it a short story, really? Or a poem? Here it is, entire: At the end, he said, No metaphors! Nothing is like anything else. Except he said to me before he said that, Make your hands a hammock for me. So there was one. He said, Not even the rain—he quoted the poet—not even the rain has such small hands. So there was another. At the end, I wanted to comfort him. But what I said was, Sing to it. The Arab proverb: When danger approaches, sing to it. Except I said to him before I said that, No metaphors! No one is like anyone else. And he said, Please.…

KEEPING WITH TRADITION In Leo Robson’s insightful essay about the American novelist John Williams and the buttoned-down literary traditions he represents, Robson claims that Leslie Fiedler was “the first critic to use the word ‘postmodernism’ in a literary connection” (A Critic at Large, March 18th). Robson is referring to Fiedler’s essay “Cross the Border—Close the Gap,” which was delivered as a speech in 1968, and which many consider to be the début of the term. Nevertheless, one can find Randall Jarrell using the adjectival form of the word in a 1947 essay, “From the Kingdom of Necessity,” when commending Robert Lowell’s work as “essentially a post-or anti-modernist poetry.” A year later, John Berryman wrote that Jarrell had “described Lowell’s poetry as ‘post-modernist’; and one certainly has the sense that…

High levels of pollen from trees, particularly birch and maple. Medium-high levels of leaf spores that will clog your lungs. Very high levels of flower pollen from bees shaking their pollen-covered bee butts to the hot new single from the Beetles. Experts predict that this intense pollen surge will only subside once a lawsuit for copyright infringement makes it through bee court. This seems like it shouldn’t take too long, since the Beetles’ songs—“I Wanna Hold Your Wing,” “Come Together (In the Hive),” and “Let It Bee,” e.g.—show a clear resemblance to existing musical work. A large bird will dive-bomb you, screeching “Open wide!,” and you, more out of shock than out of a desire to comply with the bird’s command, will open your mouth. The bird will fly directly…

So Spring blossomed in spite of itself.Uniform skirts up-rolled high by wild girlscurbside, smoking. Still, two of us, heads together, translating. Our selves as Stoicteens, thinking Marcus, Marcus A.!So: month of rose pagodas, of lilacs impetuous, blue. Twigs spill fromher dropped text, as she fleestranslation class, the nun’s query. He demanded her name first. Juststeps from the bus stop. Sunset:shade before ancient dark. Blossoms beneath her, beneath the shock-light ofstaggered street lamps coming on. Leda’sZeus, his suit & tie, swan’s hiss in her ear. She told me only. The great wings ofaloneness closed in us, we learned howthe passive voice was magnified: “The soul is dyed with the color of its thoughts.” Powerless to move, she became pasttense of strength once standing tall at her father’s grave. His name in…

The boys rooted for Griff, even though he was a miserable bully who jimmied and pried at their weaknesses and made up weaknesses if he couldn’t find any, such as calling you a “knock-kneed piece of shit” even if your knees had never knocked your whole life. He tripped them and laughed at the ensuing pratfalls and slapped them around when he could get away with it. He punked them out, dragging them into dark rooms. He smelled like a horse and made fun of their mothers, which was pretty low given the general motherlessness of the student population. Griff stole their desserts on multiple occasions—swiped from trays with a grin—even if the desserts in question were no great shakes; it was the principle. The boys rooted for Griff because…

Milk of Paradise, by Lucy Inglis (Pegasus). This sweeping history explores our millennia-long relationship with Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy. Prized in antiquity for its ability, as Homer wrote, “to quiet all pain and strife, and to bring forgetfulness of every evil,” opium has always hovered on the line between essential household medicine and dangerous drug. Deftly tracking opium’s path along global trade routes, Inglis illuminates various cultures and industries that have sprung up around it, from the Chinese opium den to the contemporary pharmaceutical manufacture of opioids. Taking aim at the failures of modern drug policies, particularly the criminalizing of addiction, she advocates a more nuanced appreciation of the substance that has always “held humanity’s hand.” The Twice-Born, by Aatish Taseer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Raised in New…

Showtime’s “Billions,” a late-night snack of an antihero drama, set among finance weasels in New York and Connecticut, is the rare series that the term “guilty pleasure” suits nicely. The show has barbed dialogue and a blind-item documentary interest in the lives of the ultra-wealthy, but at heart it’s a pleasingly amoral caper series, a Wall Street fever dream, scored to ironic pop songs—more pulp than grit, with a streak of camp. Last week, in the San Francisco Chronicle, the critic Allie Pape called the show “prestige trash,” which pretty much nails the tone: it’s dirty fun, without the self-seriousness that drags down so many of its cable-drama peers. Over the course of four seasons, “Billions,” which was created by Brian Koppelman, David Levien, and Andrew Ross Sorkin, has also…

In recent years, New York theatre has become “woke.” A number of Trumpera producers on and off Broadway have taken on diversity, telling as many stories about people of color and women as possible. Positive political action is always a good thing. But it may not be the best thing for art. The last time the American theatre was so interested in the marginalized was in the mid-to late seventies, just as Vietnam and the Black Arts Movement—founded, in 1965, by the poet Amiri Baraka in the wake of Malcolm X’s assassination—were becoming history. Today, one would be hard pressed to remember many of the playwrights, let alone the plays, produced during that first “woke” period. Liberals, as Kennedy Fraser observed in this magazine, in 1978, are as subject to…

Around 1840, the French realist Paul Delaroche saw a daguerreotype and declared that painting was dead. But new technologies just keep making the world’s oldest medium stronger. The American artist Gina Beavers scours Instagram and the Internet for images to use in her emphatically physical work, whose ultimate subject is painting itself. “Corn Nails” (above, from 2019) conjures both #foodporn and the flamboyant still-lifes of the Flemish baroque. “Gina Beavers: The Life I Deserve” opens at MOMA PS1 on March 31. NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Choker Rough Trade NYC As the streaming era drives more artists to concision, Choker remains unafraid to take his time. The song “Rocket,” from his 2018 album, “Honeybloom,” sprawls out…

For a long time, when I thought of the pop star Justin Bieber, if I thought of him at all, the person who came to mind was a teen-age boy, with side-swept bangs and oxford shirts and hoodies, seemingly incubated in a middle-class suburban mall. But as Bieber matured, and as his music developed from crooning ballads to experiments with E.D.M. and hip-hop, his behavior became more volatile, and his cherubic looks changed, too. Last spring, studying images of Bieber on the Daily Mail’s Web site, I realized that he was no longer a boy but a man, and perhaps even a very attractive one—a strange and slightly disturbing thought. But Bieber wasn’t just handsome; he looked interesting. One photograph, taken shortly after his arrival at the Coachella festival, contemporary…

Manu fled Egypt a little bit at a time. First, he flew to Cyprus, because he knew a travel agent who helped him get a visa. Manu spent a few days in Larnaca, and he got a tattoo in Nicosia, and then he returned to Cairo. The next stop was Saudi Arabia. Visas were easy to get for Egyptians performing the ‘umrah pilgrimage, and Manu had a relative in the country. It may have been the first time in history that a gay man was going to Mecca as part of a plan to escape a Muslim country, but Manu wanted his passport stamped. At the Great Mosque of Mecca, he sat alone in the courtyard from midnight until dawn, because he liked the way it looked at night. His…

In the mid-nineteen-seventies, a cabal of scruffy-looking men, outfitted in denim and plaid, were writing world-weary songs that blended the nihilism of rock with the earnestness of country music. At the end of 1975, the filmmaker James Szalapski made a documentary about them, called “Heartworn Highways.” It centers loosely on the songwriter Guy Clark and also features Townes Van Zandt, David Allan Coe, Rodney Crowell, Gamble Rogers, Steve Young, members of the Charlie Daniels Band, and Steve Earle, who was twenty years old at the time. Their musical point of view—belligerent but wounded—felt a little like outlaw country, a genre that had recently formed in opposition to the slick Nashville scene, but their songs were talkier, more cerebral. They seemed indebted, in subtle ways, to the folk revival of the…

Apologies to Andrea Dworkin, who did not like book critics and who, fourteen years after her death, from myocarditis, at fifty-eight, is being subjected to a round of us again. “I have never written for a cowardly or passive or stupid reader, the precise characteristics of most reviewers,” she wrote in the preface to the second edition of “Intercourse,” the work that presented her alienating theory of heterosexual sex as a violation, “a use and an abuse simultaneously,” and “the key to women’s lower human status,” among other descriptions. “Overeducated but functionally illiterate, members of a gang, a pack, who do their drive-by shootings in print,” reviewers seemed to deny her the authority of her personal experience of rape, prostitution, and domestic violence, which they did not understand, and…

You can get drunk on Tintoretto, the subject of a rare and wonderful retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. I did the other day, and came away convinced that the sixteenth-century Venetian may or may not be the greatest of painters, but he’s the only one for me right now, supercharging my faith in art as a means to invigorate the world. I’ve sobered up a bit since then, but the effect lingers. It’s not because Tintoretto created masterpieces. He did at times—often on a grand scale, in vast canvases peopled with gesticulating, soaring, tumbling figures—but perfection wasn’t his game. What excites is what he was: a born rebel with a lowdown drive in service to a staggeringly resourceful intelligence. From humble roots—the oldest of three…