Innholdsfortegnelse for May 20, 2019 i The New Yorker

The Wallace Collection, on Manchester Square, in central London, contains art works that were gathered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by successive Marquesses of Hertford. The museum, occupying a Georgian mansion, opened to the public in 1900, and is particularly known for its fine eighteenth-century French paintings—among them a small and delicate work by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, which is known in English as “The Souvenir.” It shows a young woman carving an initial into a tree trunk. She is wearing a gown of pink satin, its color enhancing the blush of her cheek. At her feet lies a letter that, presumably, was written by the lover whose initial she is inscribing. She looks dreamy yet determined: the woman is caught in a reverie, but she is also making her mark.…

To grasp the significance of what the twenty-first-century folk-singer Rhiannon Giddens has been attempting, it is necessary to know about another North Carolina musician, Frank Johnson, who was born almost two hundred years before she was. He was the most important African-American musician of the nineteenth century, but he has been almost entirely forgotten. Never mind a Wikipedia page—he does not even earn a footnote in sourcebooks on early black music. And yet, after excavating the records of his career—from old newspapers, diaries, travelogues, memoirs, letters—and after reckoning with the scope of his influence, one struggles to come up with a plausible rival. There are several possible reasons for Johnson’s astonishing obscurity. One may be that, on the few occasions when late-twentieth-century scholars mentioned him, he was almost always misidentified…

It wasn’t his job to explain it over and over, to sit the families down and say, “The husband/the brother/the son you knew is no more, it’s only machines breathing for him now, and you wouldn’t be letting him go, because he’s already gone.” He was the surgeon, not the organ-donation person, not the social worker, not a friend. His job was to say it once. Once was often enough—families would unplug a loved one within a few hours. But certain people required extra attention. TV shows he’d heard of (TV shows his own wife watched) had led some to believe that desperate cases were never that desperate, that all you had to do, really, was to keep asking the surgeon, and the surgeon, because you kept him focussed…

The artist and scholar Holly Herndon describes the laptop as “the most intimate instrument that we’ve ever seen.” It doesn’t just facilitate the creation of art—it’s a device that connects us to the world, a surface that’s as familiar as our own flesh, a thing that we entrust with our secrets and memories, a machine that we fall asleep cradling. Herndon makes experimental pop music, the result of tinkering and testing, as she chases ideas about the tech-obsessed present. That her experiments occasionally produce songs that are club-friendly can feel like an accident, a bug rather than a feature. In 2015, Herndon released “Platform,” an album that contemplates surveillance by sampling the sounds of everyday life—a refrigerator door, a Skype session. On the track “Home,” an unconventional breakup song, she…

France in the World, edited by Patrick Boucheron, Stéphane Gerson, et al. (Other Press). The hundred and thirty-one short essays that make up this provocative history of France cover a striking array of topics: the Chauvet cave paintings, the transformation of French Guiana into a penal colony, Chanel No. 5. The aim of this disparateness is to replace a nationalist narrative of linear progression, from the Gauls to now, with a web of surprising transnational connections. France’s role in the early Renaissance is linked to its military expansion in Naples; the fervor surrounding the visions of St. Bernadette of Lourdes, in 1858, is seen in terms of viral news, foreshadowing the global spread of the 1968 protests. What You Have Heard Is True, by Carolyn Forché (Penguin). This memoir…

FOLLOW THE LIGHTS I spent this past winter working as a northern-lights guide in Bettles, Alaska (population: twelve), and I agree with James Lasdun that photos of the phenomenon are generally far more impressive than what is visible to the naked eye (“Glow,” April 29th). However, the lights occasionally dance so rapidly that their beauty is nearly impossible to capture in a photograph. Whenever I was out with guests and a corona formed above our heads, it felt like sitting under a lampshade of falling light. People would shriek and burst into tears. I would, too. But on L.C.D. screens these displays often appeared only as over-exposed lime-green smudges. After four months in the Arctic, I realized that, when your jaw drops, it’s better to drop your camera as…

I’m sorry, exhausted, except for funds.I wrote a check, the date October 18without the year, to Theresa Monrosefor a hundred dollars, I did not writethe amount longhand.My conversation with friendsis something like the way I wrote that checkwhen I try to tell what I owe them.I don’t get it right, I leave off years,the everyday debt made clear by sayingsomething like thank you,in a handwritten letter.Yes, I believe everyone’stime of day or night is different.I’m sure a poet I love,who demanded punctuality,never bounced a check.When he died, age 66,at the Altenburgerhof Hotel,he did not pay his bill.I guarantee the world will payfor his empty Zimmer a hundred years.I can’t get Siegfried’s Funeral March out of my ears.…

Not the Snoo or the Dock-A-Tot orthe Moses basket or the bassinet orthe Rock ’n Play with vibration or theco-sleeper sidecar or the cradle or the crib orthe car seat or the stroller, no, if you area small, new human, the full-grownhuman body is the best place to sleep.Dinghy floating on top of its oceanliner, the way we must look like adult and pupsea lions, beached and snoozing, or elsean asp on a heat rock, or a couple of grubs,you on me like a stone on a stone,how it’s almost like it wasonly now you can fall from meand we don’t share any organsthough we must long to, or should I sayI long to, and from this delicate positionI have learned what my body is for,from an eleven-day-old! You, my…

The majestic beauty of a harp evokes a visual and sonic mysticism that makes it at once inviting and intimidating. With Brandee Younger at the helm, the instrument gains a bit of soul, as she tends to the legacies of such harpists as Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane while breathing fresh life into its repertoire with her own compositions. Her radiant playing is as cogent on hip-hop and R. & B. albums as it is set against classical and jazz backdrops. On Blue Note’s stage, May 21-22, she’ll manifest her own starry vision of the harp’s potential. DANCE New York City Ballet David H. Koch George Balanchine the modernist faces off with Balanchine the classicist on alternating programs. “Symphony in Three Movements” exemplifies the angular energy and spare lines…

Aging, like bankruptcy in Hemingway’s description, happens two ways, slowly and then all at once. The slow way is the familiar one: decades pass with little sense of internal change, middle age arrives with only a slight slowing down—a name lost, a lumbar ache, a sprinkling of white hairs and eye wrinkles. The fast way happens as a series of lurches: eyes occlude, hearing dwindles, a hand trembles where it hadn’t, a hip breaks—the usually hale and hearty doctor’s murmur in the yearly checkup, There are some signs here that concern me. To get a sense of what it would be like to have the slow process become the fast process, you can go to the AgeLab, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, and put on agnes (for…

Amy Klobuchar, Camp Fire girl, was kicked out of fourth grade at Beacon Heights Elementary School, in Plymouth, Minnesota, for wearing pants, and not just any pants but superfly, pink-flowered bell-bottoms. “Amy Klobuchar,” the principal told her, “at Beacon Heights School you wear dresses.” When Julián Castro was in seventh grade, in San Antonio, he poured Elmer’s glue into a school aquarium to see what would happen to the fish, and his mother—a Chicano activist who once ran for city council—set him straight about the consequences of cruelty. Cory Booker’s parents fought against housing discrimination, braving the bared teeth of a real-estate agent’s Doberman pinscher, and when they moved with Cory and his little brother into an all-white neighborhood in New Jersey his father said that the Bookers were “four…

A dead or missing girl is such a common device in crime fiction that its use now prompts raised eyebrows. In “Dead Girls,” Alice Bolin writes about television series, like “Twin Peaks” and “True Detective,” in which “the victim’s body is a neutral arena on which to work out male problems.” The girl is merely an opportunity for the detective to confront and to redeem his own capacity for violence: confront it by discovering the identity of the culprit (often an authority figure, not unlike the detective himself) and redeem it by capturing and punishing the culprit. The violence redoubles; her loss is just the means to his gain. Women novelists have been ingeniously dismantling this convention of late, both within the crime-fiction genre (Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl”) and outside…

At a recent conference on belief and unbelief hosted by the journal Salmagundi, the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson confessed to knowing some good people who are atheists, but lamented that she has yet to hear “the good Atheist position articulated.” She explained, “I cannot engage with an atheism that does not express itself.” She who hath ears to hear, let her hear. One of the most beautifully succinct expressions of secular faith in our bounded life on earth was provided not long after Christ supposedly conquered death, by Pliny the Elder, who called down “a plague on this mad idea that life is renewed by death!” Pliny argued that belief in an afterlife removes “Nature’s particular boon,” the great blessing of death, and merely makes dying more anguished by…