Innholdsfortegnelse for June 3, 2019 i The New Yorker

Can cool be reverse-engineered? The other day, Chloë Sevigny, the actress and director, rode her bicycle from the Flying Squirrel Pilates studio, in the East Village, to the SoHo headquarters of Warby Parker, the direct-to-consumer maker of eyeglasses, to review the launch plan for a collection that she designed. She wore track pants, loafers, a leather jacket, and no helmet. “I just go very slow,” she said. “I was thinking, I have to invest in a helmet, but how can I make it cool? I mean, impossible.” Eyewear presents less of a challenge. Sevigny’s collection, called Crystal Overlay, features thin, vaguely cat-eye frames in such shades as “canyon tortoise,” “rose water,” and “pomegranate with Riesling.” The line was inspired by a pair of $145 gold-rimmed glasses called Tate—“nutmeg crystal,” in…

Pregnancy! A time of wonder and anticipation. And paranoia. First comes the visit to your doctor, where you receive the (hopefully) happy news. Then comes the Talk, which goes something like: “Remember to take it easy for the next nine months. Pamper yourself. Get lots of sleep. And don’t eat any deli meats, or you could murder your baby.” O.K., this might not be exactly what the doctor says, but it’s what many women hear. Daily life takes on a frightening new dimension. Is there toxoplasmosis on the cat’s butt? Is the hair salon full of poisonous fumes? Complicating things is the gap between the official recommendations and what people actually do. The handout says stick to “one small cup” of coffee and stay away from alcohol. But we all…

1. It’s, you know, the part that repeats,the bit you’re supposedto remember, the bit that bears repeating, the part that meanssomething neweach time, something different, and the same thing, too,the thing you can’t forget,that gets stuck in your head. So, like, childhoodis endless and overalmost as soon as it begins? Yeah, like that. Ten yearsshrinks like the pagesof a water-damaged book. No, the pages don’t really shrinkor shrivel, they crinkle, get kindacrisp and brittle, but time’s like that, a wrinkle,and suddenly you’ve beenmarried as long as you were ever a kid,ever awash in the interminableThursday of your first ten years, when three months was an aeon, when,like, childhood was endlessand over as soon as it began. See what I did there? Shiftedthe refrain into the middle.Yeah, time is like that,…

An unusual punctuation mark fastens together the title of Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s second book of poems, “Lima :: Limón” (Copper Canyon). It looks like twin colons, and functions, often, like an equal sign, allowing linguistic traffic to flow back and forth between apparently opposed, though weirdly interchangeable, states—the lime and the lemon. It also calls to mind the symbol used to bridge analogies in formal logic. Analogy is relatively rare in poetry next to the usual strategies of comparison, like metaphor, simile, and juxtaposition, and yet it’s central to Scenters-Zapico’s work. Her title comes from an old song by the Spanish singer Conchita Piquer, whose upbeat tune belies a gloomy warning: girls who do not find husbands in time, by the age of thirty or so, will become irredeemably bitter, like…

QUIET, PLEASE I began reading David Owen’s article about noise pollution and its effects on human and animal health just as my BART train entered the Transbay Tube between downtown San Francisco and West Oakland (“Volumetrics,” May 13th). The usual screeching soon began. Since developing a moderate case of tinnitus, several years ago, I have learned to carry earplugs whenever I might be subject to painfully loud sounds—which is often. One can choose not to attend sporting events, for example, which bombard spectators with piercing songs, chants, and sound effects, but traffic, construction, and a thousand other noise sources affect almost everyone. As Owen points out, an increase in noise is also taking a devastating toll on bird and marine life. I hope we learn to keep quiet before…

The aunts here clink Malbec glassesand parade their grief with musky, expensive scentsthat whisper in elevators and hallways.Each natural passing articulatesthe unnatural: every aunt has a sonwho fell, or a daughter who hid in rubblefor two years, until that knock of officersholding a bin bag filled with a dressand bones. But what do I know?I get pedicures and eat madeleineswhile reading “Swann’s Way.” When I tellone aunt I’d like to go back,she screams It is not yours to want.Have some cream cheese with that, says another.Oh, what wonder to be alive and seemy father’s footprints in his sister’s garden.He’s furiously scissoring the hyacinths,saying All the time when the tele-researcher asks himHow often do you think your lifeis a mistake? During the procession, the aunts’ wailsvibrate: wires full of crows in…

I heard her upstairs in the studio, in the kitchen, late at night when I was in my room. Afternoons, there was no sign of her. Some days I thought that she—Agnes—must have left the city, gone back to the town where her husband lived, perhaps to recover some of her belongings. She’d told me she would be staying for only a day or two while she sorted things out, at most a week. But then I would hear her sounds again around the apartment. There was nothing I could object to, nothing that interfered with my days. The rent was already so low, and the arrangement had been that she might use her studio when she was visiting the city. Besides, it would be pointless to look for another…

Germaine, by Elizabeth Kleinhenz (Scribe). “I don’t know why I am the way I am,” the feminist intellectual Germaine Greer once said. “I don’t think it’s interesting.” Yet this brisk, diverting biography makes the issue seem worth pondering. Born in Australia in 1939, Greer established herself in the sixties, in England, as an academic and a media personality. Her book “The Female Eunuch” (1970) made her a star, with its diagnosis of “the problem of female identity” as women’s incomprehension of their own bodies, libidos, and souls. Kleinhenz ably evokes Greer’s dazzling, maddening mind, but doesn’t really wrestle with her controversial views (including, recently, transphobia). Ultimately, her vivid life predominates. There are savage feuds, a famous prosecution for obscenity, and myriad liaisons, including one with Fellini. The Age of…

Summer doesn’t officially start until the June 21 solstice, but try telling that to the first three-day weekend of the season. Wave Hill, a twenty-eight-acre garden overlooking the Hudson River in the Bronx, is usually closed on Mondays. It makes an exception for Memorial Day, when it plans an hourlong tour. (A field of April’s fleeting flower glory-of-the-snow is pictured here with daffodils.) Other upcoming events to consider are Frog and Toad Day (June 9) and Pollinators Weekend (June 15-16). NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Uri Caine The Stone at the New School For the past thirty-plus years, the pianist Uri Caine has been the perennial M.V.P. of the downtown music scene—an astonishingly versatile improviser and…

Bill Nye, the climate-change activist and science educator, appeared on “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” recently. “The planet’s on fucking fire!” Nye shouted. “This is an actual crisis!” Kyle Kashuv, a high-school senior who has more than three hundred thousand Twitter followers, claimed to be outraged, but not about the climate-change message. “Dear Bill Nye,” he tweeted. “Cursing like a middle-schooler on XBOX Live doesn’t make me respect you—it makes you look like a joke.” Kashuv would know. Just a few years ago, he was a middle schooler himself. He then attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. In early 2018, he survived the mass shooting at the school; after that, he became a student activist. Unlike the other well-known activists from Parkland, Kashuv is a fierce…

Decades ago, Ron Winnegrad, a perfumer, developed a map to help his fragrance students learn how to identify smells. “I call these cities, and then these are the streets,” he explained, pointing to labelled lines on a flowchart in his office, at International Flavors & Fragrances, in midtown. Each choice leads to another, until the smeller dead-ends at a base note: amber, oakmoss, musk. “If you smell something woody, the first thing you should ask is ‘Do I see dirt?’ ” he said. If the answer is yes, look around for leather or peanut shells or moldy towels; if it’s no, look for pencil shavings or butter. “Scent is a skill you have to hone,” Winnegrad said. “Once you stop, that skill will atrophy.” Winnegrad, who is eighty-one, lives in…

On a chilly, wet day in late November, I visited the Central Cemetery, in Vienna, where several of the most familiar figures in musical history lie buried. In a musicians’ grove at the heart of the complex, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms rest in close proximity, with a monument to Mozart standing nearby. According to statistics compiled by the Web site Bachtrack, works by those four gentlemen appear in roughly a third of concerts presented around the world in a typical year. Beethoven, whose two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday arrives next year, will supply a fifth of Carnegie Hall’s 2019-20 season. When I entered the cemetery, I turned left, disregarding Beethoven and company. Along the perimeter wall, I passed an array of lesser-known but not uninteresting figures: Simon Sechter, who gave a counterpoint lesson…

The first person to receive an e-mail from the whistle-blowing organization Football Leaks was António Varela, a columnist at Record, one of Portugal’s three national sports newspapers. The message arrived early in the afternoon of September 29, 2015. Varela, a precise, watchful man in his early fifties, clicked on a link, which took him to a blog entry that had been created at 5:17 a.m. that day. “Welcome to Football Leaks,” it read, in Portuguese. “This project aims to show the hidden side of football. Unfortunately, the sport we love so much is rotten and it is time to say ‘enough.’” Below was a collection of previously unseen documents involving Sporting Lisbon, the eighteen-time winner of Portugal’s national league. “Contracts in Portuguese, contracts in English, contracts in French,” Varela told…

“Tuca and Bertie,” a new animated series on Netflix, was created by Lisa Hanawalt, an illustrator for the dark Hollywood satire “BoJack Horseman.” Like “BoJack,” it’s set in a trippy universe full of visual puns and talking animals—mostly birds, although there are also chain-smoking trees and gossipy cats, not to mention a breast that pops off one character’s chest, puts on a flowered hat, and wanders away in a huff. The heroines of the show, a sweet, loopy friendship sitcom, are a raunchy toucan named Tuca (voiced by Tiffany Haddish) and her best friend, an anxious parakeet named Bertie (Ali Wong). Childlike in style, with adult themes, the series plays out through a scrim of surreal frames, showing ordinary actions—from baking to sex—through odd filters, from retro video games to…