Innholdsfortegnelse for July 1, 2019 i The New Yorker

Elevator pitch: What if you woke up tomorrow morning and were the only person on Earth who remembered the Beatles? John, Paul, George, Ringo: forgotten. Marmalade skies: gibberish. You scribble down all the lyrics you remember, pass off the songs as your own, and get a huge record deal. Everyone thinks you’re a rock god. You know you’re a phony. This scenario is the premise of “Yesterday,” the new film from Danny Boyle, a sort of reverse bio-pic in which the subjects are erased from history, leaving a yellow-submarine-size hole. To play Jack Malik, the struggling singer-songwriter who goes from anonymity to Malikmania, Boyle cast the British actor Himesh Patel. “Yesterday” is his first film. Hours before its première, at the Tribeca Film Festival, Patel, who is twenty-eight, stepped out…

For those who want their hearts broken, the story of Zohar and Gabi Ilinetsky, the parents of one-year-old twins, is a world to live inside. Zohar: twenty-seven, confident, and voluble, a construction project manager proud of his work. Gabi: fastidious, attentive, academic, an early-education specialist who used to work at a preschool. They met in Israel, where he grew up, and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, her childhood home. While dating, they would speak often about the parenting styles that they hoped to have. “We’re old-school people,” Zohar told me recently. “My friends now are waiting until thirty-five to start thinking about kids, but always we knew we were going to get married. We knew we were going to have children.” To their delight, Gabi gave birth to…

The light in the restaurant was golden light, heavy light—an outdated sort of light, honestly, popular in the nineties but now a remnant of a kind of gaudy, old-school pleasure it was no longer fashionable to enjoy. It had been five years, maybe more, since George had been to this place. It was true that the food was not very good. Big steaks, creamed vegetables, drizzles of raspberry coulis over everything, all the food you ate back then because caring about what you ate wasn’t yet part of having money. Still, he liked the fleshy Mayan shrimp on ice, the gratifying emptiness when the meat popped from the socket. He wiped his fingers, tight from lemon juice and shrimp, on the napkin in his lap. “More bread?” Kenny asked. It…

Spying on the South, by Tony Horwitz (Penguin Press). Years before Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park, he rambled across the South as a newspaper correspondent, giving a sober account of the region and of slavery’s supporters. Horwitz, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, was spurred by America’s current divisions to follow Olmsted’s path from Maryland to the Texas-Mexico border. Blending travelogue, reportage, and history, he describes melancholic towns rife with drug addiction and unemployment, conversations with Alamo reënactors and Second Amendment diehards, and the continuing prevalence of racism. While cotton has ceded supremacy to oil, Horwitz finds that Olmsted’s utopian, democratic ideal of “cosmopolitan intimacy” remains elusive. Native Country of the Heart, by Cherríe Moraga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This memoir about the author’s mother, Elvira Moraga, a working-class…

The other day, on one of those transit-soured Saturdays now so common in New York, I showed up late to the theatre. When I asked the public-relations representative for my tickets, she looked stricken. “Vinson Cunningham?” she said. “I—I’ve already signed you in.” There was someone in my seat, and he’d used my name to get there. I spent the first act of the show in a make-shift seat behind the orchestra, fighting back distraction. Who was this person? How had he known that there were tickets in my name for this show, on this afternoon? By intermission, I’d worked myself up into a kind of panicked anger. I walked to the seat that should have been mine, and sitting there was, indeed, a guy who looked just enough like…

PRESENCE OF MIND I’m still shaken after reading Mark Singer’s tender and forthright Profile of David Milch and his experience with Alzheimer’s disease (“Hello, Darkness,” May 27th). Milch’s capacity for honest self-reflection even as time and physiology take his talents away is unprecedented, instructive, and deeply moving. In his undefended vulnerability, Milch offers those who are a few steps behind him a lesson in possibility. Corey FischerKentfield, Calif. Reading Singer’s piece made me uncomfortable; the interview with Milch felt exploitative. As a speech pathologist, I know how vulnerable people with Alzheimer’s can be. I don’t see the value of asking a man to comment on how his brilliance is slipping away. We’re told that Milch’s family and his work still give him fulfillment, but there is little in the…

On the outskirts of Chinatown, in the area of the Lower East Side known as Dimes Square—named for the Canal Street café that slings nouveau health food for scraggle-chic locals—another business was recently preparing to open shop. This one was not selling baggy nineties-style skatewear or narrow seventies-style men’s neckwear but, rather, a pricklier sort of merchandise: cactuses. Carlos Morera and Max Martin, the proprietors of the Los Angeles-based Cactus Store, were arranging their wares—which included squat and bulbous specimens, abloom with pink flowers; furrowed Yoda-like varieties, fuzzed with chalky bristles; and tall columns with menacing spikes. A young woman in a kerchief was methodically pressing soppy green moss into the soil of a small garden in front of the greenhouse that houses the shop. “Audrey is our plant communicator,”…

1. Once, my very best darling, the seaand the land were all one mass and the light was confused and hadn’t founda place to rest. And, Megan, love, my sister’s eyes were not yet there to hold it alltogether since she hadn’t yet been born so when the world dropped out from under us and no one,not the on-calls with their CAT scans, not the sovereign souls who monitorthe twilit room where newborns come to die or live, when no one could tell us if youwould be one of the lucky ones able to walk and speak and only this, the oneunstinted blessing fate had given us to give you was a sister in whose eyes you werethe sun and moon, it meant we all no matter what befell us…

The only single women widows now or bridesHalf married to the breeze. We lie to stay together.We lie to make do. We lie to break the truthApart. We lie to shake fruit from the trees.My mother favored the worker bee, her love buzzedWith stickiness & sting. I’m here about the widowAfraid of butterflies. A widow knows ruin may beAs comprehensive as “rain,” a kind of coverFor the dirt about the dead. Nature does not destroyOnly change. Get down on your knees & prayAnd get up quickly & live to celebrate that.Falling is the first & most important skill in many things.How to fall without breaking as well as how to break.Tell me what you pray when you are broken or break.…

For most of history, one essential, immutable difference between men and women was that men could hide the fact that they had created a child and women could not. Pregnancy and childbirth showed the world who the mother was; paternity could only be assumed. Years ago, I saw a female standup do a routine in which she swaggered across the stage like a dude, telling the audience, “Yeah, I don’t have any kids”—pause—“that I know of.” It still makes me laugh. New parents are often told how much their babies look like the father. The research on whether most do or do not is ambiguous, but the fancy persists, in part because, consciously or unconsciously, people think that emphasizing the resemblance will set a man’s mind at ease, thus fortifying…

Teyana Taylor has cultivated a fierce presence that can snatch all the attention in a room. Since her formal introduction to the world, on the MTV show “My Super Sweet 16,” in 2007, she’s only amplified her artistic prowess, as a dancer, a model, and an actress. Her bewitching album “K.T.S.E.,” from last year, presented a versatile singer with a superstar’s stature. Standing on the shoulders of such icons as Janet Jackson and Grace Jones—the latter of whom joins her for the Pride Island celebration, at Pier 97, June 29-30—Taylor is magnificence personified. THE THEATRE Dropping Gumballs on Luke Wilson A.R.T. /New York Theatres The playwright Rob Ackerman used to work as a prop guy for TV ads, and he based this comedy on an all too true event:…

There may be no one in the arts with a harder job than that of a modern-dance choreographer. When a writer can’t figure out what to say next, she can turn off the computer and go take a nap. A choreographer, by contrast, is working not with a computer but with, say, ten or fifteen human dancers, who, if she finds herself stumped, will stand there and stare at her—and maybe, when she’s not looking, roll their eyes at one another—until she gets the rehearsal moving again. Which she’d better do, fast. To keep the company in business, with the bookings secured (typically, a year in advance) and the tickets selling, she needs to come up with at least one new work per year, plus, ideally, an important revival. Modern-dance…

The Toronto Raptors had been in possession of the 2019 N.B.A. championship trophy for only a few days before the hoop fanatics among us mopped up the Moët, swept away the confetti, and looked to the future. After we studied the grim MRI results—Kevin Durant’s ruptured Achilles, Klay Thompson’s torn A.C.L.—it dawned on us that the era defined by the Golden State Warriors could be facing its senescence. What would the new era look like? So much would depend on draft night. The intensity and the granularity of speculation that led up to the draft ceremony, at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, last Thursday night, had no limit. “Is ‘Space Jam 2’ a Way for LeBron James and the Lakers to Get Around Their Salary Cap Troubles?” one headline in…

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s centennial season, which recently ended with incandescent performances of Meredith Monk’s opera “ATLAS,” has no peer in modern orchestral history. More than fifty new scores shared space with classics of the repertory. Fully staged opera productions alternated with feats of avant-garde spectacle. The L.A. Phil, colossal in ambition and experimental in spirit, has redefined what an orchestra can be. It was a season in which Andrew Norman added a new work to the canon, in the form of his shimmering soundscape “Sustain”; in which Benjamin Millepied devised exhilarating, cinematic choreography for Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”; in which the brilliant young director Yuval Sharon staged John Cage’s “Europeras 1 and 2” at a Hollywood movie studio; in which an array of artists paid tribute to Yoko Ono;…