Innholdsfortegnelse for June 24, 2019 i The New Yorker

On August 7, 2013, the Australian vlogger Troye Sivan fixed his bright-blue eyes on his camera and pressed Record. Sivan, a goofy, self-confident eighteen-year-old, had amassed nearly half a million YouTube subscribers in six years, with videos such as “Funny Halloween Costume Ideas” (in which he put on an orange wig, held up a bagel, and declared, “I’m the Ginger Bread Man!”) and “Life’s Unanswerable Questions” (in which he wondered, “If there was an earthquake on Mars, would it be called a Mars-quake?”). His new video, filmed in his family’s home, in Perth, was more confessional. “This is probably the most nervous I’ve ever been in my entire life,” he said. Three years earlier, he explained, he had told his family that he was gay. “It feels kind of weird…

Because the night I gave birth my husband went blind.Hysterical, I guess you’d call it. Because there’d been too many peopleand then there was no one. Only this small creature her tiny cryno bigger than a sequin. Because I’d been pushing too many hours.Even with her soft skull plates shifting, the collar of my bones too slender.When I reached down I could feel the wet wisps of hair of this being livinginside me, but her heart was weakening. The midwife told me not to pushon the way to the hospital, but I pushed anyway. This was California in the seventies and I’d have pushed until I died.The doctor asked for permission to cut my perineum. So polite, as though he were requestingthe pleasure of the next dance. Then he slid…

Before my hysterectomy, when I was forty-four, I had more than enough information about what was the matter with me: peer-reviewed studies of cervical adenocarcinoma, multiple medical opinions, knowledgeable advice from friends and acquaintances. After the surgery, I found myself in a wasteland of desperate, incoherent blog posts, trying to understand my condition now that, technically, nothing was wrong with me at all. Three months after my uterus and fallopian tubes were removed, along with what was left of my cervix, I went to see the senior gynecological oncologist at a prestigious institution. I asked her about all the postoperative symptoms I hadn’t expected and couldn’t resolve. The most immediately pressing one was what the Internet had taught me to call—clinically, impersonally, at a safe distance from my mortification—anorgasmia. One…

HIGHER POWERS Jia Tolentino makes important observations about the connections between drug use and the experience of faith, but she overlooks crucial distinctions (“Ecstasy,” May 27th). First, she equates faith with individual spiritual growth, but faith, as it is understood in most religious traditions, involves a perceived relationship with a divine being. Second, the experience of faith usually involves some participation in a collective tradition and a community. By suggesting that one’s experience of faith, like the act of taking Ecstasy, should be “discrete and limited,” Tolentino recasts faith simply as a form of self-exploration and self-care. Emma PolyakovAssistant Professor of Religious and Theological StudiesMerrimack CollegeNorth Andover, Mass. Like Tolentino, I grew up religious in Houston and attended a Southern Baptist school for many years. In eighth grade, I…

The Manhattan Bird Alert tweeted an invitation to bird-lovers earlier this year for a public hearing about a proposed new Parks Department rule. At stake was the public’s right to feed birds and other park wildlife. “It is my therapy,” an older man named John Waite said, to warm applause, citing forty years of feeding birds and squirrels. He was one of several dozen people who’d shown up at the Pelham Fritz Recreation Center, in Harlem. Each was given two minutes to make a case before four Parks Department employees. A dark-haired woman named Roxanne Delgado, who founded a group called Friends of Pelham Parkway, went next. “I saw a squirrel sitting on a pile of garbage dumped on the parkway,” she said. “It’s only us feeders feeding them, because…

Beneath Augusta National, the world’s most exclusive golf club and most venerated domain of cultivated grass, there is a vast network of pipes and mechanical blowers, which help drain and ventilate the putting greens. The SubAir System was developed in the nineteen-nineties, by the aptly named course superintendent Marsh Benson, in an effort to mitigate the effects of nature on this precious facsimile of it. When the system’s fans blow one way, they provide air to the densely seeded bent grass of the putting surface. This promotes growth. When the fans are reversed, they create a suction effect, and leach water from the greens. This promotes firmness. The professionals who arrive at Augusta every April to compete in the Masters Tournament, the event for which the club is known, expect…

In the spring of 1989, the Daily Telegraph sent Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson to Brussels to cover what was then the European Economic Community. Johnson, who was twenty-four, knew the city well. His father, Stanley, had been one of the first British bureaucrats appointed to work at the European Commission after the United Kingdom joined the bloc, in 1973. Johnson, his parents, and his three younger siblings moved to Belgium when he was nine years old, joining a sleepy community of expats. Johnson was a clever boy. He learned to speak French without an accent. When Johnson returned, his father invited an experienced Brussels correspondent, Geoff Meade, to lunch at the family’s large house near Waterloo. Meade and his wife, Sandra, were having drinks when a taxi pulled up.…

This year we celebrate the two-hundredth birthday of Walt Whitman; and by “we” I mean all of us who take conscious pleasure in speaking American English. Whitman invented a poetry specific to this language and open to the kinds of experience, peculiar to democracy in a polyethnic society on a vast continent, that might otherwise be mute. Public events commemorating the bicentennial include three summer shows in New York—at the Morgan Library, the New York Public Library, and the Grolier Club—that touch on the story of his life. There are books, manuscripts, prints, photographs, audio and video elements, and relics—at the Public Library, a lock of his hair, and, at the Grolier, snips that may be from his beard. The shows are excellent of their kind: informational and evocative,…

In 2001, Spike Lee launched an attack on the trope of the “magical Negro,” that wise, kindly genie summoned from the tarnished lamp of American history to help white protagonists solve their problems and discover the meaning of life. Lee was blasting several movies of the time, including “The Green Mile” and “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” which were set against the lurid backdrop of the Jim Crow-era Deep South, as if to imply that fictional, feel-good interracial friendships could redeem the very real horrors of the past. The following year, Sue Monk Kidd published her début novel, “The Secret Life of Bees.” The book, which takes place in 1964, is narrated by a lonely white fourteen-year-old named Lily Owens, the daughter of a cruel South Carolina peach farmer. Along…

Instead of drive-in movies, New York, with its foot-traffic culture, offers cinematic sit-ins—outdoor screenings at public parks and spaces around the city. The Detective Russel Timoshenko Soccer Field (pictured above), on Staten Island, will host “The Avengers,” on June 29; Rooftop Films presents such notable independent productions as “Black Mother,” “Beach Rats,” and “Bisbee ’17” at eighteen sites; and Films on the Green screens thirteen French movies, modern and classic, by female directors. THE THEATRE Dying City Second Stage Christopher Shinn directs this revival of his 2008 drama, about a Manhattan-based therapist (a compellingly cagey Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who receives an unexpected and unwelcome visit from the identical twin brother of her late husband, who died a year earlier in Iraq. Alternating scenes flash back to her last night…

On a recent Saturday, at Bob’s Steak & Chop House at the Omni Berkshire Place, on East Fifty-second Street, Shaun Cassidy, the sixty-year-old performer, writer, and producer, ordered an Arnold Palmer “with more Arnold than Palmer.” He wore a crisp slate-blue suit, a pocket square, and a white shirt with the top buttons undone—a genteel update of his late-seventies look, when, as a teen heartthrob, he appeared on a popular poster wearing a revealing satin jacket. Beside him was a box of 3-D slides taken by his grandfather at the 1955 movie première of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!,” which stars Cassidy’s mother, Shirley Jones. Jones, then twenty-one, had ridden to the première with her parents, in a surrey with a fringe on top; on Saturday, at age eighty-five, she would…

Two rival civilizations are battling for supremacy. Civilization A is stronger than Civilization B and is perceived by Civilization B as a grave threat; its position, however, is more fragile than it seems. Neither side hesitates to employ espionage, subterfuge, and surveillance, because the rules of conduct—to the extent that they exist—are ill-defined and frequently contested. But the battle lines are clear: whoever controls the technological frontier controls the future. In Liu Cixin’s science-fiction trilogy, “Remembrance of Earth’s Past”—also known by the title of its first volume, “The Three-Body Problem”—Civilization A is a distant planet named Trisolaris and Civilization B is Earth. Life on Trisolaris has become increasingly difficult to sustain, so its inhabitants prepare to colonize Earth, a project made possible by their vast technological superiority. Using higher-dimensional…

Every year the Perseids came, splashing down from the top of the sky, and every year we begged our parents to let us go down to the lake by ourselves to see them. Every year they said no, and we sat on the narrow beach at the end of the ferry parking lot, our parents, my sister and I, and some of our girl cousins, whichever of them had come with us that year. The lake would be black, and the sky blacker. If there were waves, the curl of the foam was gray. The summer colors of our clothes were bleached out as if we were in an old movie, and we sat there waiting for the next shooting star, the next, the next. We’d read about the Perseids…

Spring, by Ali Smith (Pantheon). Like its predecessors, this book, the third installment of the author’s Seasonal Quartet, was written in response to current events. Taking place in the shadow of Brexit and the Trump Presidency, the narrative follows three characters—an elderly man mourning the death of a friend, a beleaguered detention-center employee, and a mysterious child intent on securing justice for asylum seekers—whose lives intersect on a train platform in Scotland. Smith sees spring as the “great connective” between disparate groups and insists on the power of empathy and small acts of heroism to spur societal change. Although her vision sometimes verges on the polemical, she succeeds in eliciting compassion for her characters, and she deftly incorporates insights about literature and art into a work that feels entirely…

In 1991, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the mystical showman of the musical avant-garde, was commissioned to write a string quartet for the Salzburg Festival. Being Stockhausen, he offered up the “Helicopter String Quartet,” in which musicians play while flying around in helicopters. The work doubles as a scene in the composer’s seven-part operatic cycle, “Licht,” written between 1977 and 2003. The idea of spending state funds on helicopter music did not sit well with the Austrian Green Party, which attacked the project as wasteful. Under political and financial pressures, Salzburg withdrew, and the première took place at the Holland Festival, in Amsterdam, in 1995. I was there, and found the experience striking but ultimately monotonous—a lot of frantic tremolo competing with the whirr of rotor blades. This spring, the Holland Festival staged…

In the third episode of “When They See Us,” Ava DuVernay’s bleak, beautiful drama about the Central Park Five, Linda McCray (Marsha Stephanie Blake) visits her son Antron in a juvenile-detention center. “I feel like everybody in the world hate me, Mom,” Antron (Caleel Harris) tells her. “I know it feels like that,” she says, then adds, fiercely, “But I love you enough to make up for everybody.” As music rises, Linda tells her son that she is always with him: “You cry, I cry. You mad, I’m mad. You scared, I’m scared. You free, I’m free.” The camera cuts to autumn leaves—and to the day of Antron’s release from prison, seven years later, as the child actor is replaced by a handsome adult, embracing his mother. “Hi, baby,”…