Innholdsfortegnelse for April 29, 2019 i The New Yorker

The volcano sat like a pointed cap at the head of the island. But this we knew only from photos, since, whenever we were near enough to see the volcano, it was covered in mist and clouds. The clouds suggested rain, and rain suggested that Celeste would not enjoy the hike, but so, frankly, did Celeste’s dislike of hikes, and, anyway, I had convinced myself the weather would coöperate. “Coöperate” is an interesting word in this context, because it implies a natural alignment of interests—mine and the volcano’s—and the history of humans and volcanoes, as I understand it, does not encourage confidence in this direction. But the volcano was there, and so we had to climb it. That was how things shook out for me. Once, Celeste had spent the…

EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE Nicola Twilley, in her insightful piece about the overlooked dangers of indoor air pollution, writes that “a ‘very unhealthy’ designation for outdoor air is rare” in the United States today (“Home Smog,” April 8th). This is true, but it is important to recognize that toxic outdoor air persists, especially in historically marginalized parts of the country. Fresno County, California, where a large percentage of the population is Latino, has one of the highest concentrations of fine particulate matter in the nation, owing to the area’s topography—the surrounding mountains trap air pollutants—and to various pollution sources, such as the city’s dumps and meat-rendering plants. Research conducted by the University of Chicago has found that air-pollution levels have remained effectively unchanged in Fresno since 1970, even though…

Here at Clumsen Industries, we’ve been manufacturing plastic dining utensils for more than sixty years. We believe that no one should have to settle for a company that can’t deliver the goods. So, when you’re looking for the very best in disposable cutlery, you’d be wise to go with one of our competitors. They are all better than us. Nobody wants to have a family cookout ruined by second-rate flatware, and that is exactly what will happen if you trust Clumsen. Our products are shit. The forks are bent, the spoons have holes, and the knives are scissors we broke in half. Take it from me, Bob Clumsen—we stink. Dixie is just one of dozens of companies that sprint laps around us. They have pride in what they produce, in…

I like a private life, it’s true.Sometimes it’s so private if I say something that’s even a little bit arguably privateI feel disdain for myself. I remember how cruel people were to my mother when she was going blind,how even one of her doctors lied disdainfully,keeping part of her diagnosis private.Privacy is a kind of power, that must be obvious. Who cares? one of my friends said.I tell everyone everything about myself, she said.And that’s when I knew she was the onewho told my secret. I am baring to you my privacynot by admitting all the shameful things I’ve done,especially those when I thoughtI was being moral, uncompromising, right. The one man I heard speak about the power of transparencycaused so much suffering I shudderwhen I hear his name.Right now,…

What everybody knows about John Hersey is that he wrote “Hiroshima,” the one widely read book about the effects of nuclear war. Its place in the canon is assured, not only because it was a major literary achievement but also because reporters haven’t had another chance to produce an on-the-scene account of a city recently blasted by a nuclear weapon. Yet Hersey was more of a figure than that one megaton-weighted fact about him would indicate. Born in 1914, he had an astonishingly rapid ascent as a young man. Because he was a quiet, sober person who lived an unusually unflamboyant life by the standards of celebrated American writers, it’s easy to miss how much he achieved. By the time Hersey reached his mid-thirties, he had worked as an assistant…

The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell (Hogarth). This mesmerizing début novel tells the history of Zambia through three families whose lives—and blood—commingle across more than a century. The narrative is long and dense, but it rarely drags, thanks to Serpell’s eclectic blending of literary traditions, from the Victorian novel to magical realism and Afrofuturism. The revolving cast is full of striking characters, including a girl with unnaturally fast-growing hair and an Englishwoman who is literally blind to her beloved’s race. Serpell’s master storytelling may provide a remedy to a problem remarked on by one character: that “most Westerners don’t even know whereabouts in Africa we are.” Midnight in Chernobyl, by Adam Higginbotham (Simon & Schuster). When, on a spring night in 1986, “ethereal blue-white light” exploded above the Chernobyl…

The Polish-German sculptor Alicja Kwade makes art out of stone and steel, but her real materials are time and space. One past project was inspired by wormholes, and “ParaPivot,” her new installation, on the roof of the Met (through Oct. 27), suggests parallel solar systems. As you walk amid the big polished spheres, some of which are suspended overhead, don’t think about gravity—think of the fact that, while you’re at the museum, you’re also on a sphere spinning through space. DANCE New York City Ballet David H. Koch In the first week of the season, the company dances two alternating programs of works created for it in the twenty-first century, in addition to William Forsythe’s “Herman Schmerman,” from 1992. Forsythe’s subversion of balletic conventions—courtly manners, gender roles, hierarchy—began a…

On a Saturday evening last month, two judges walked into a bar—O.K., a restaurant: Bella Blu, on the Upper East Side, where the pre-theatre crowd was fuelling up for “The Lehman Trilogy,” at the Park Avenue Armory. The play tells the story of Lehman Brothers, from the firm’s founding, in 1850, by a trio of Bavarian-Jewish immigrants in Montgomery, Alabama, to its collapse, at 1:45 a.m. on September 15, 2008, when it filed for bankruptcy in the Southern District of New York, triggering the global financial meltdown. Enter the judges, James Peck and Shelley Chapman. The case was assigned to Peck’s docket. Several years later, he retired, and Chapman took over. Between them, they have presided over many thousands of Lehman-related hearings, involving more than a trillion dollars in claims.…

The first time Wiley Maple encountered the Streif, the world’s most fearsome downhill, he was twenty-one years old. Typically, downhill racers take a couple of training runs in the days leading up to the event. Before each one, they inspect the course, which entails side-slipping down while visualizing the line that will deliver them to the finish in the least amount of time. As a member of the U.S. Ski Team, Maple had side-slipped, and then skied, most of the World Cup’s other majestic, gnarly downhills, but this track—which descends an unremarkable and not particularly tall forested alp called the Hahnenkamm, in Kitzbühel, Austria—seemed to represent a whole new level of inhospitable. The thought of hurling himself down the narrow, steep, snaking flume of ice and shadow made him queasy.…

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” the philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, in 1654. According to Screen Time, a recent addition to the iPhone’s operating system that purports to help users deal with the addiction to screens which the iPhone is designed to foster, my typical daily phone activity includes ninety minutes of texting, one hour of reading, another hour of e-mail, yet another hour of social media, and about seventy “pickups,” meaning that I check my phone about four times per hour. I carry my phone around with me as if it were an oxygen tank. I stare at it while I make breakfast and take out the recycling, ruining what I prize most about working from home—the sense of control,…

The future-facing idiom of the Bauhaus, the German design school founded, in 1919, by Walter Gropius, is now antique, but its distinct vision of modern life is not a thing of the past. A relatively small repertoire of photogenic artifacts sometimes stands in for the entire Bauhaus phenomenon. It is easy to call to mind the iconic Wassily chair, a tubular steel frame that looks like an oversized paper clip; or the Barcelona coffee table, a glass square whose lethal corners seem designed to dent an ankle or a toddler’s forehead. In the nineteen-nineties, when modern furniture came back into fashion, Bauhaus chairs were unearthed in attics and storerooms, their caned seats brittle, their metal frames pitted from neglect. The first vintage-modern shops began to spring up, often in places…