Innholdsfortegnelse for April 15, 2019 i The New Yorker

For Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton, the hosts of the “Boomer and Carton” morning sports-talk program, on WFAN, 660 AM, in New York, the big back-from-vacation week, right after Labor Day, was always a giddy one. You had your pennant races, the first week of N.F.L. games, and the inventory of guy-talk riffs that had piled up over the break. On Wednesday, September 6, 2017, Carton, the manic one, woke up at 3 a.m. He liked to be at the station by four; he rarely slept more than a few hours a night. Carton and his wife and four children had just moved into a new apartment, in Tribeca, and he had that heightened awareness one has of one’s surroundings when passing the first night in a new home. On…

Some time before Brooklyn was incorporated into New York City, in 1898, it was dubbed the City of Churches. Houses of worship remain thick on the ground in the borough. In the part of Brooklyn where I live, churches outnumber grocery stores, pet shops, and nail salons together. There’s the Institutional Church of God in Christ (red brick, stained glass) and the Revelation Church of God in Christ (a converted movie theatre); the French-Speaking Baptist Church, founded by Haitian immigrants; the Zion Shiloh Baptist Church, whose members come from all over the metropolitan area, parking their cars in a long row; and the Ileri Oluwa Parish, where congregants of Nigerian descent worship shoeless and in long white robes. And there are the Catholic places. Queen of All Saints Church and…

Trees lined Vesper Street, San Fernando Valley,the 50s. Maybe they were sycamores,or arroyo willow or hemlock. Maybe they are still standing, along Vesper.Between two of them that livedon our small property, whatever they were, whatever the leaf shape, fruit or nut,my father and I added to the neighborhoodthe scent of cheap discount Rawlings leather and the smack of ball to mitt,of playing catch, of a boy and his father,of the easy, effortless toss back and forth. He was a young man—and a young man when he lefthis life, and ours. The boy I was I am still, in those minutestossing the ball back and forth, catchit’s called. Want to play catch? he would say. Or I would. Then, with leatheron our hands, we walked to the street, betweenwhatever trees they…

Nothing has changed more in the past couple of decades than attitudes toward the crisis of incarceration in America. What was largely an invisible civilization of confinement—millions of men and women locked up for, cumulatively, millions of years—is now a commonplace concern. Everyone running for the Democratic nomination pays lip service to the need to address mass incarceration, and what were once essential political instincts—to side with the police and the prosecutors in every instance, to “get tough on crime”—have become, at the very least, negotiable. We have gone from “Lock ’em up!” to “Lock ’em up?” to “Set ’em loose!,” all in a relatively short time. One reason for these changed attitudes is the great crime decline, a falling arc that meant that, for the first time in decades,…

In the Criterion Collection edition of “All That Jazz,” Bob Fosse describes the origins of the movie, which he wrote and directed shortly after having a heart attack, in 1975. Initially, Fosse says, he’d intended to adapt a novel about a woman whose husband was dying, “and her problems—with the children, her problems about money, her sex problems, etc.” The screenplay was “a lovely piece of material,” he explains, but “it was just so down… this real, what we used to call ‘kitchen drama.’ You know, it was very heavy.” Fosse realized that, to make art about death, he needed to use “the tools I can use best, which is song and dance.” The result was one of the best portraits of workaholic creativity ever made—a glitzy, funny, and unapologetically…

WOKENESS ONSTAGE In Hilton Als’s review of “White Noise,” the new play by Suzan-Lori Parks, he writes that New York theatre, perhaps to its detriment, has become “woke” (The Theatre, April 1st). Politicized interest in marginalized people, he says, serves to discourage playwrights from evoking the specifics of discrimination and oppression. The piece clarified for me why I dislike using the term “woke”: it condenses many possible understandings of injustice into a single position, as if there were only one way to be aware of racism and its effects. But Als’s proposal for an antidote to “woke” art—to “sing, freely and loudly, about being human”—strikes me as abstract and overly generalized, like the term “woke” itself. Sonya MichelSilver Spring, Md. Als seems to have decided what sort of playwright…

Yes, there was the abundance of nightfall—the sky with a parachute scar,the spoon clinking on glass.But no one could trace, like a hymn,the blue-vanishing trail of an apple-throwarc. Things like thishappen— a hula-hoop pivotingbeauty, a wonder thrownlike a firework into the crowd.Some say it was onlyan arrow, meaning— an error.Others swear they could hunt downthe deepest of sighs.That the transformationfrom an apple into a questionwas inevitable—that the answer was no more than a boyoffsetting fire with sci-fianimation—I mean—what would you choose?The possession of Europe andAsia/the greatest of warriors’ rivers and tongues—the green in their night-visionmaps/a doorbell and how it ringsnight.…

By the time I left the cathedral it was already dark, mizzling, the kind of rain that looks like mist but drenches you in minutes. I walked quickly, head down. In the marketplace, the Friday-night bonanza was well under way, girls in tight dresses and vertiginous heels, teetering along in noisy groups, watched by boys who pretended in difference and turned back to their mates, laughing. How did girls walk in those things? I could barely manage in the heels I was wearing, and they were now here near as high. Mind, I don’t normally wear heels. Jeans and trainers, that’s me. Only, that afternoon I’d felt the need to make an effort, because I’d been supervising the hanging of my paintings in the Galilee Chapel. My first solo exhibition.…

First, by Evan Thomas (Random House). This timely biography of Sandra Day O’Connor, enriched by access to private archives, is a poignant reminder of a less polarized era in American politics. Thomas argues that the self-described “cowgirl from Arizona” became the first woman on the Supreme Court because of her innate ability to “marry ambition to restraint.” Her rulings were marked by pragmatism: although she found abortion “personally abhorrent,” she voted to reaffirm it as a constitutional right, in 1992. Valuing direct communication over memos, she cajoled her fellow-Justices into attending weekly lunches. “She liked real-world solutions,” Thomas writes, “and she was fairly flexible about how to get there.” Making China Modern, by Klaus Mühlhahn (Harvard). In order to understand China’s ascent, this history suggests, one should examine not…

In 1978, when the car that T. C. Cannon was driving ran off a road outside Santa Fe, killing him, the world lost more than a talented young artist. Cannon, just thirty-one at the time, might soon have made an improving difference in American artistic and even political culture. He may yet do so, if we take to heart “T. C. Cannon: At the Edge of America,” a retrospective full of exciting surprises at the New York branch of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. (The artist’s long obscurity—I knew nothing of him until now—was partly a consequence of a problem with his estate, which has been resolved.) Born to poor Native American farmers in Oklahoma, Cannon caught fire as a painter while still a teen-ager, gravitating to…

Arthur Miller wrote “All My Sons” as a Hail Mary pass, after his first Broadway play, “The Man Who Had All the Luck,” closed in four performances. But “All My Sons,” which opened in 1947 and tells the story of an airplane-parts manufacturer wrestling with his complicity in a series of wartime pilot deaths, established Miller as postwar America’s moral tragedian. A Roundabout revival, directed by Jack O’Brien (in previews and opening April 22, at the American Airlines Theatre), stars Annette Bening and Tracy Letts (above). NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. James Carter Organ Trio Birdland It’s been nearly thirty years since James Carter hit the scene as a rough and tough tenor with a heart…

On a drizzly Sunday at the end of March, a white-and-yellow moving van occupied a space in front of 77 East Third Street that had long been reserved—and carefully delineated with traffic cones—for gleaming Harley-Davidson choppers. From August, 1969, until that day, the six-story lightly gargoyled Renaissance Revival apartment building with a first-floor brick façade was the New York City headquarters of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. Its distinctive front door, between two Doric columns painted with sevens, depicted a motorcycle-helmeted skeleton gleefully wielding a pitchfork atop a bed of flaming skulls. A plaque read “IN MEMORY OF BIG VINNY 1948-1979: ‘WHEN IN DOUBT, KNOCK ’EM OUT.’” That day, the Post’s front-page headline was “HELL FREEZES OVER: Yuppiçs Bouncç Snowflakç Bikçrs Out of East Villagç.” After fifty years, the Hells…

Twenty-six years ago in these pages, Harold Brodkey took brutal stock of the work of the late John O’Hara, whose reputation, over which O’Hara had obsessed, was already in decline. “Literary immortality is a curious notion,” Brodkey wrote, in a tone of detached sagacity that surely surprised those who knew him, for if any writer could give O’Hara a run for his money in the ego department it was Brodkey. With a coroner’s acumen, he catalogued the ways in which O’Hara’s work, once touted (most insistently by O’Hara himself) for the Nobel Prize, had grown dated and flat, before concluding, rather menacingly, with this one-sentence paragraph: “I think anyone who spends his life working to become eligible for literary immortality is a fool.” There weren’t very many American writers who…

In its ability to induce paralyzing existential depression, the fiction of Halle Butler is perhaps matched only by those Black Friday news stories in which grandmothers get trampled in front of stacks of fifty-five-inch TVs. When I first read “Jillian,” Butler’s début, which was published in 2015 and concerns a woman’s contemptuous obsession with a delusional co-worker, my normally sanguine temperament evaporated about halfway through, and was replaced, for several stressful days, by a blistering hostility that made me afraid to speak, lest I accidentally tell a good friend that I wished she were dead. Reading Butler’s latest novel, “The New Me” (Penguin), about a young woman living in Chicago and working as a temp, I reached that point before the end of the second paragraph: In the windowless back…

In the summer of 1956, the mighty Duke Ellington and his frequent collaborator Billy Strayhorn found themselves in Ontario, where Ellington’s band was performing a couple of concerts at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. The pair stuck around to catch some of the plays and were so moved by what they saw and heard onstage that they set to work on a twelve-song suite inspired by the Bard. The resulting record, “Such Sweet Thunder” (1957)—the title is taken from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”—is a sensual, undulating, and thoughtful album, one that testifies to the value of great artists’ being driven by the work of other great artists to create something new. And although none of the songs on “Such Sweet Thunder” directly address “King Lear,” you can hear in the tunes…