Innholdsfortegnelse for May 27, 2019 i The New Yorker

The supernatural pervades the season, starting with Jim Jarmusch’s zombie drama, “The Dead Don’t Die” (June 14), which features a cast of Jarmusch veterans (including Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, and Bill Murray) and newcomers to his cinematic universe, such as Danny Glover and Selena Gomez. Ari Aster’s “Midsommar” (July 3) is set in a village in Sweden, where a vacationing American woman (Florence Pugh) believes that she has stumbled upon a macabre cult. Movies set in the entertainment world are soon to be prominent. “Rocketman” (May 31), a drama about Elton John’s rise to fame, stars Taron Egerton, as the singer-songwriter, alongside Jamie Bell, who plays his collaborator Bernie Taupin; it’s directed by Dexter Fletcher. In “Late Night” (June 7), directed by Nisha Ganatra, Emma Thompson plays a talk-show host…

Last fall, the singer-songwriter Mac DeMarco crouched backstage at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, in Colorado, chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. He’d taken the red-eye from Los Angeles after attending the funeral of a friend, the rapper Mac Miller, who’d overdosed days earlier. “I met him on tour in South America,” DeMarco said. “I didn’t really know his music. I don’t think he really knew my music, either. But we jelled.” He went on, “He called me, like, three times a day. It was easy. I don’t encounter friendships like that often.” He looked around. “I can’t keep doing shows the way we’re doing shows,” he said. “If I keep drinking a bottle of Jameson every day, to get loose, I’ll be fucking dead, too.” Winter came, then spring. DeMarco emerged with a bunch…

David Milch, the television writer, lives with his wife, Rita Stern Milch, on a peaceful block in Santa Monica, in a cozy stucco bungalow camouflaged by a lush cottage garden. When they moved there, five years ago, from a much larger house a few miles away, where they had raised three children, Milch was about to turn seventy. A survivor of decades of serial addiction-recovery-relapse-recovery—and also of heart disease, childhood sexual predation, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and bipolarity—he remained in command of prodigious gifts. Starting in the early nineteen-eighties, when a former college roommate who wrote for “Hill Street Blues” introduced him to Steven Bochco, the series’ co-creator, and he began writing for the show, too, Milch earned a reputation as one of the most original and intellectually fluent figures in the…

Seven years have passed, seven and a halfsince we last parked up beside the white hotel—in a hire car, then—and holding hands descendedthe steep path lined with pale birchesinto the gorge, neither of us knowingwhether passing families in bright waterproofsdid or didn’t presage our future together. Love was molten, blazing. Amazing we’d leftthe rented room long enough for this,clothed and everything, separately scarfed, in searchof backdrops to pose against, or roughdrafts with which to gauge one anotheras the words swam and swapped and shook themselveslike dogs coming out of the river. The fosse that day, after weeks of rain,brimmed and foamed and hid the Whin Silland its usual zagged path in a pounding-downof polar-bear spume, ropy and ripplingbut somehow standing still through sheerinsistence, sheer abundance. This wasinfinity’s house, house of…

Nearly every Saturday afternoon in 2016, Robbie Mullen, a twenty-four-year-old warehouse worker, met with a group of neo-Nazis at the Friar Penketh, a lively pub in Warrington, in the North of England. The men belonged to an extremist group named National Action. Seated at a round table upstairs, they discussed until closing time their dark, shared politics: a hatred of Jews and of ethnic minorities; an expectation that a race war would soon engulf Britain. Mullen, who has a meaty build and a pallid complexion, was not much of a drinker. He nursed pints of Pepsi while the others, emboldened by lager, grew more voluble. In December, 2016, the U.K. government designated National Action a terrorist group, and banned it. Under British law, being a proven member of a terrorist…

The Flight Portfolio, by Julie Orringer (Knopf). This gripping, tender novel fictionalizes the experiences of Varian Fry, an American journalist who, in Vichy France in 1940, risked his life by smuggling some of Europe’s imperilled artists, writers, and thinkers—including Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt—to safety. Orringer has Fry alternately luxuriate in the thrill of heroism and torture himself by wondering whether he’d “care less about saving human beings if those human beings couldn’t write a perfect novel or make an enduring painting.” His choices become even more fraught when a man he loved in college appears with a request that threatens his mission, throwing into conflict Fry’s long-buried desires and his responsibilities to history and to his wife, back in New York. Dawson’s Fall, by Roxana Robinson (Sarah Crichton…

Every time I see a fair-to-middling production of a brilliant play by the irreplaceable Sam Shepard, who died in 2017, at the age of seventy-three, I leave the theatre with conflicted feelings. On the one hand, I want you to experience the extraordinary power of Shepard’s alternately disciplined and unwieldy language—language that pulsates with a unique imagination—but, on the other, I don’t want you to see and hear what Shepard brought to the American stage in less than ideal circumstances. You might get the wrong idea about what he was up to, what he worked so hard to say. Directors and actors tend to latch onto the more obvious effects in Shepard’s writing, including the types of characters he returned to time and again: disgruntled drunk dads, battling spouses and…

LEAVING THE COMMUNITY I relate to Guinevere Turner’s ambivalence in calling the “communities” in which she grew up, the Lyman Family, a cult (“The Others,” May 6th). I was raised not in isolation, as Turner was, but in New York City, within the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Although the Chabad community may seem like a relatively modern Hasidic Jewish sect that is integrated into American society, this perception is far from the truth. The school that my brothers and I attended did not teach the English-language alphabet; we studied the Bible, the Talmud, and Jewish law in Yiddish instead. We also weren’t taught any math or science, lest our impressionable minds be polluted by secular knowledge. Despite immense communal resistance to outside education, I decided, at the age of twenty-three, to…

Thank you for your purchase of SpoilerAlert, the only genetic-testing kit that tells you how and when you will die, and then, after you’re dead, invites relatives who’ve never heard of you to your funeral. We hope that you are pleased with the results you received last week. There is so much to celebrate! Let’s review the highlights. After analyzing your Spit ’N Smile sample every day for a week, our intern, Adele, was able to rearrange the letters of your amino-acid sequence to confirm that you have a variant of porcine stress disorder, and also to form the anagram “Mike is evil. I like IKEA.” Other great news: you have a negligible chance of developing dandruff or childhood rickets, and your resistance to primary lung cancer is so off-the-charts…

The church I grew up in was so big we called it the Repentagon. It was not a single structure but a thirty-four-million-dollar campus, built in the nineteen-eighties and spread across forty-two acres in a leafy, white neighborhood ten miles west of downtown Houston. A circular drive with a fountain in the middle led up to a bone-white sanctuary that sat eight hundred; next to it was a small chapel, modest and humble, with pale-blue walls. There was also a school, a restaurant, a bookstore, three basketball courts, an exercise center, and a cavernous mirrored atrium. There was a dried-out field with bleachers and, next to it, a sprawling playground; during the school year, the rutting rhythm of football practice bled into the cacophony of recess through a porous border…

They were drifting on her stepfather’s boat in the middle of an otherwise empty man-made lake encircled by large tract houses. It was early autumn and they were drinking Southern Comfort from the bottle. Adam was in the front of the boat watching a changeable blue light across the water that was probably a television seen through a window or a glass door. He heard the scrape of her lighter, then saw smoke float over him, unravel. For a long time he had been speaking. When he turned to see what effect his speech had had, she was gone, jeans and sweater in a little pile with the pipe and lighter. He said her name, suddenly aware of the surrounding quiet, and put his hand in the water, which was…

Modern medicine can be seen as a quest to understand pathogenesis, the biological cause of an illness. Once pathogenesis—the word comes from the Greek pathos (suffering) and genesis (origin)—has been established by scientific experiment, accurate diagnoses can be made, and targeted therapies developed. In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, there were all kinds of theories about what was causing it: toxicity from drug use during sex, allergic reactions to semen, and so on. Only after the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus helped lay such conjectures to rest did it become possible to use specific blood tests for diagnosis and, eventually, to provide antiviral drugs to improve immune defenses. Sometimes a disease’s pathogenesis is surprising. As a medical student, I was taught that peptic ulcers were often caused…

The Shed, Manhattan’s newest arts complex, sits on the south side of Hudson Yards, a colossal real-estate development that aspires to be a city unto itself. Some twenty-five billion dollars has been spent to erect an array of office towers, condominiums, and shopping arcades in lower midtown, west of Tenth Avenue. The main buildings resemble skyscrapers that have been expelled from other cities and deposited here, their mismatched angles gesturing in an aesthetic void. Corporate lobbies are done up in billionaire-supervillain décor: pyramid-block walls, skeletonic hanging globes, gold-dusk lighting. An outdoor structure called the Vessel offers stair-climbing exercise for tourists who haven’t yet been worn out by their trek along the High Line. The landscaping on the central plaza has the soulless neatness of a digital architectural rendering. Several stone…

This year’s DanceAfrica festival, at BAM May 24-27, is focussed on Rwanda. Although some of the events invoke the country’s 1994 genocide, the emphasis is on rebound and healing through tradition. The headlining act, Inganzo Ngari, a popular Rwandan folkloric troupe founded in 2006, performs crop rituals and a big-wigged warrior dance alongside the Brooklyn-based BAM/Restoration Dance Youth Ensemble, a festival mainstay whose spirited members (including Adia Clarke, pictured above) never fail to bring down the house. MOVIES All Is True Kenneth Branagh does Shakespeare, again. This time, he’s not adapting one of the plays but, rather—fully armed with a false nose and other props—taking on the role of the playwright himself. We find the Bard at the dusk of his career, leaving London—where the Globe Theatre has burned…

When the Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee was a graduate student in mural painting, she happened upon hand-dyed hemp rope in a Gujarat market. With no formal training in sculpture or textiles, she devised an ingenious process of knotting the fibre into towering volumes that merged the bodily and the botanical—sui-generis works that put a modernist twist on an ancient material. The artist, who died in 2015, at the age of sixty-five, is the subject of the retrospective “Phenomenal Nature,” at the Met Breuer, which also includes her later forays into ceramics and bronze. (Opens June 4.) In the late nineteen-seventies, the beloved children’s-book author Maurice Sendak embarked on a new wild rumpus—designing costumes and sets for ballets and operas. The Morgan Library, whose archives Sendak often turned to for inspiration,…

For Americans living through turbulent times, Canada can seem like a refuge. The Montreal chef David Mc-Millan figures it doesn’t hurt for Canadians to have a getaway plan, too. Since 2012, he’s owned a lakeside cabin in the Laurentian Mountains, accessible only by boat. It’s equipped with solar power, fishing rods and rifles, and enough dried provisions to last a year. McMillan, who has three young daughters, told me, “If anything is weird, I could grab everybody and head up there.” The cabin was an inspiration for “Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse,” McMillan’s second cookbook with Frédéric Morin, his partner in five Montreal restaurants, includinging Joe Beef. Published late last year, and co-written with Meredith Erickson, a cookbook author who was one of Joe Beef ’s first servers, the new…

A man hands me his business card and asks for mine.How should I know my business? The worldis my business, and the world is none of my business. These words are shadows of thoughtsshaped nothing like those thoughts.Am I a distortionist? My grief is the square root of my laughter,my laughter that of my grief.Perhaps a mathematician? Maybe there is life on the other side of death.Maybe there is life on this side of death.Shall I start a detective agency, specialize in missing persons? The man who is all business, who keeps himselfon the short leash of a necktie, pumps my handand invites me to dine. With its strict dress code, the restaurant keeps a sports jacket at the coat check.Whose life hasn’t been that jacket,hung in shadow, furred with…