Innholdsfortegnelse for May 13, 2019 i The New Yorker

For many years, Maxim Osipov lived with a gnawing sense of frustration. He had always thought of himself as a writer, but, as a student in the waning days of the Soviet Union, he trained as a cardiologist and worked for three years in a busy Moscow clinic. In the early nineties, when Russia was in the throes of economic transition, he started a publishing house, which specialized in translating medical textbooks, and, in 1994, he left his hospital job to run it full time. The company proved successful, yet life was somehow less than complete. Osipov, a humorous and energetic man with a baritone voice like thick honey, was in his early forties when he realized that he was a doctor who didn’t practice medicine, and a writer who…

In a long alleyway in Red Hook, Brooklyn, not far from the East River, Tracy Morgan sat on a director’s chair, his feet dangling high off the ground. He was surrounded by a languid swarm of crew members, who brought him water, fussed over the orange jumpsuit that was his costume for the day, and kept him shaded from the sun. Morgan has a plush love seat for a nose and a protrusive mouth that tugs the rest of his face forward, but his eyes are the key to his knack for physical comedy—he controls their focus with gonzo precision. Sometimes he looks upward and grins, mimicking the innocent gaze of a child; at other times, he tucks in his chin and offers a stare that lands about a yard…

Sara came into the blaze late, the boys already leaping froglike across the deck, the girls gone bald in silicone caps. In the afternoon sunlight the pool was harsh; she’d left it only this morning in the soft plum dawn. The other team was lined up around the eastern gutter, doing its cheer, a slow solemn clapping that built into syncopated yips and the pounding of feet on metal. The noise made pocks of confusion across the surface of the water. The diving coach turned to see her coming across the wet deck. You’re late, he yelled over the other team’s noise, but he looked relieved. She shrugged, and took off her anorak to begin her stretching, but he grabbed her hand and lifted it to examine the bloodied knuckles.…

When Henry James remarked, in his preface to “The Portrait of a Lady,” that “the house of fiction has … not one window, but a million,” he could not have anticipated the genre of fiction to which we have given the inexact term “science fiction.” Still less could he have anticipated the sort of literary-humanist science fiction associated with Ted Chiang, whose début collection, “Stories of Your Life and Others” (2002), garnered multiple awards in the science-fiction community, and contained the beautifully elegiac novella “Story of Your Life,” which reëxamined the phenomena of time and memory in terms of language. (The novella was the basis for the Academy Award-nominated film “Arrival.”) Other stories in the collection reinterpreted the Biblical Tower of Babel, imagined an industrial era powered by Kabbalistic golems,…

FARMERS’ MARKETS John Seabrook commendably charts the many challenges of using A.I. in farming, and also the potential advantages (“Machine Hands,” April 15th). One significant benefit, which the article only briefly mentions, is that advanced farming techniques could slow the effects of climate change. Agriculture produces around a quarter of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, and yet it is often neglected in debates about how to combat global warming. Greater investment in research and development is critical for finding ways to feed a growing population on a hotter planet. Joe Cerrell Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation London, England DIGNITY BEHIND BARS Adam Gopnik, in his review of Emily Bazelon’s “Charged,” surveys a set of new books that humanize the millions of people imprisoned in the U.S. (Books, April 15th). Recent…

As scilla prinks out, purple, from half-thawed clods and the cardinal flings his ribbon of song in two high arcs, then trails the vibrato among the boughsMay unclenches. But not enough. Buds grip fetal leaves. Each night scatters frost. On sidewalks we tread on broken sky.You are sick, and far away. The world is in flux said Anaximander: worlds are born, appear, and disappear. We perish, even the godsfade. Spare me the industrial daffodils poking through scraps of snow. The season will have its hard birth, and we will be draggedinto light. For how many years has that ill corroded your gut? Whirlwinds, typhoons break out of the cloud, the tearing makes thunder, the crackagainst black makes the flash. So natural philosophy began. You watched glaciers slide and crash at…

I wanted to curl upin the comfortable cosmic melancholy of my past,in the sadness of my past being passed.I wanted to tour the museum of my antiquitiesand look at the sarcophagi there.I wanted to wallow like a water buffalo in the cool,sagacious mud of my past,so I wrote you and said I’d be in town and could we meet.But you think my past is your present.You wouldn’t relent, you wouldn’t agreeto dinner or a cup of coffee or even a bag of peanutson a bench in North Beach.You didn’t want to curl up or tour or wallow with me.You’re still mad, long after the dayshave turned into decades, about the ways I let you down.The four hundred thousand ways.Maybe I would be, too.But people have done worse to me.I don’t…

The Parisian, by Isabella Hammad (Grove). In this début novel, a young Palestinian arrives in France at the outbreak of the First World War, to study medicine. Lodging with a professor, he experiences culture shock and an infatuation with his host’s daughter, but when he realizes that they see him as an object of curiosity, he leaves and mixes among Paris’s Arab intelligentsia. On his return to Palestine, he finds himself indelibly marked by his travels, set apart even as he participates in his homeland’s upheavals. Hammad uses the features of historical novels to cut through the familiar dichotomies of West and Near East, placing his protagonist in a rich web of families, political intrigues, and cultural exchanges, and subtly reconfiguring the literary tropes of “home” and “abroad.” Feast…

In her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag wrote, “The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.” A case in point is the haute-couture ensemble above, designed by Giorgio Armani for the 2018 fall/winter season. This sartorial confection is just one of two hundred and fifty items, made between the seventeenth and the twenty-first centuries, on view in the Met Costume Institute’s exhibition “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” opening on May 9. NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. David Murray with Saul Williams Birdland Back in the eighties and nineties, it might have seemed as if every new dawn also brought a…

I worried about ringing the doorbell. Then I noticed two ragged rectangles of dried, blackened adhesive on the door frame, one just above and one just below the button. I deduced that the button had been taped over at some point but was now safe to use. I pressed as gently as I could, and, when the door opened, I was greeted by a couple in their early sixties and their son. The son has asked me to identify him only as Mark, his middle name. He’s thirty years old, and tall and trim. On the day I visited, he was wearing a maroon plaid shirt, a blue baseball cap, and the kind of sound-deadening earmuffs you might use at a shooting range. Mark and I sat at opposite ends…

Garry Winogrand once defined a photograph as “what something looks like to a camera.” Keep that in mind when viewing “Garry Winogrand: Color,” a fiercely pleasurable show, at the Brooklyn Museum, consisting mainly of hundreds of digitally projected Kodachrome slides, most from the nineteen-sixties. Winogrand, the all-time champion of street photography, died in 1984, at the age of fifty-six. He is most famous for his hyperkinetic shots of unaware—or wary too late—pedestrians, taken with high-speed black-and-white film. The relatively long exposures required by color film steered him to subjects more static: people seated rather than walking, or at a beach instead of on the street. Winogrand sometimes carried two cameras, often with a 28-mm. wide-angle lens: one loaded with black-and-white film and the other with color. But, in every case,…

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to notice that when I go to conventional Broadway musicals I often look to the supporting actors to help me determine how I feel about the story being told. That’s because they, unlike the stars of the show, don’t have to carry the weight of all the tremendous machinery and are freer to discover the surprises that their characters and the plot may yield. The dancer who steps out of line or the sidekick with special comedic oomph: the performers who disorder the order are what can make an overwhelming, arena-style Broadway spectacle more fun to watch. The musicals “Beetlejuice” (directed by Alex Timbers, at the Winter Garden) and “Tootsie” (at the Marquis, under the direction of Scott Ellis)—both based on…