Innholdsfortegnelse for July 22, 2019 i The New Yorker

Shortly after Jakub Józef Orliński, a young Polish countertenor, made his début at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, in a 2017 production of Cavalli’s “Erismena,” he was celebrating with several other singers when he got a phone call from one of the event’s organizers. An ensemble scheduled to appear the next day on a live broadcast of “Carrefour de Lodéon,” a French radio program, had dropped out. Would Orliński jump in and perform? Orliński, who was twenty-six at the time, was in high spirits, having played the role of Orimeno with goofy, irrepressible energy. He’d made his first entrance by leaping onto a chair, launching into a jaunty aria, and then—exhibiting a skill singular among opera singers—throwing himself into a sequence of break-dancing power moves. Orliński said into the phone, “Of course…

One day in early June, Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California, tapped the glass of the bakery case at a Blue Bottle coffee shop on a non-iconic block in Beverly Hills. No one seemed to know who she was—another polished professional woman, grabbing an afternoon coffee—which was fine by her. She had chosen the spot, presumably for the anonymity. A few minutes later, her body woman delivered her a cookie: caramel chocolate chip, covered in a light snowfall of flaky salt. As Harris broke off small pieces and popped them in her mouth, we talked about her early life, rummaging through the layers for identifying details. The child of immigrant academics who divorced when she was young—her mother, a cancer researcher, came from India, and her father, an economist,…

Sushila was walking in the park when she saw Mateo and his male assistant sitting on a bench. As she approached them, she noticed that Mateo was dishevelled in his black suit; in fact, he was very drunk, which was unusual for him at that time of day, late afternoon. She greeted him, kissing him on both cheeks, and he asked if she would sleep with him. Why hadn’t they slept together? he went on. They could do it right now, at his place, if she had time. He had always found her sexy but had been too nervous to mention it. They had known each other for at least eighteen years, but he had never spoken to her in this way. She was surprised and tried to seem amused.…

The Impeachers, by Brenda Wineapple (Random House). In 1868, Andrew Johnson, an avowedly racist Southerner, became the first President to be impeached. This absorbing account focusses on his Republican critics, led by the Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Their main charge was Johnson’s attempt to “violate a law made by the Congress,” but his real transgressions, they argued, were his opposition to granting political rights to black people and his increasingly erratic conduct. Wineapple ponders impeachment’s legal, political, and constitutional aspects, and also its essential meaning. Then, as now, she writes, the possibility of impeachment “implies that we make mistakes, grave ones, in electing or appointing officials, and that these elected men and women might be not great but small.” Leaving the Witness, by Amber Scorah (Viking). Raised as a…

PAR FOR THE COURSE Nick Paumgarten superbly describes the cultlike underbelly of Augusta National—the prudish, humorless attitudes of its leaders and the self-satisfaction of its patrons (“Unlike Any Other,” June 24th). But, year after year, the Masters golf tournament has been a stage for human drama and remarkable achievements under pressure. In my view, the artifice, exclusivity, and privilege that exist behind the scenes do not spoil the captivating power of one of the greatest sporting events in the world. Don GreifNew York City I am a golfer now in my seventh decade. Augusta National has always seemed to me an unattainable fantasy, the Mecca of the golfing universe. Reading Paumgarten’s chronicle of its excesses, I was troubled to realize that I have chosen to ignore its many defects,…

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It’s “Besame Mucho” coming throughrevolving doors. It’s 2018, the futurefar from songs we danced toleft inside me. A waiter standsto take my order. O waiter,bring me fresh plums on a plate. He’d refuse to eat. Patiently,his caretaker urged, “We want youto be well; if you won’t eat, she’ll kill me.”He smiled, “Then we’ll have to go to your funeral.”He could do that—Southern charmerto the end. To find him open the kitchen cabinet:Coca-Cola, a bag of Cheetos,the salt inside the shaker he would fill;a half jar of Skippy peanut butterstill intact. I don’t want it.It’s more than I can fathom!—the whole of the kitchen. The futurefilled with “Besame Mucho” and blintzeshe stored in the freezer. Thaw little pancakes …Flicker flicker …I am speaking of his flashlights in the drawer.…

It’s as if you’d woken in a locked cell and foundin your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentencein a language you don’t know. And you’d be sure this sentence was the key to yourlife. Also to this cell. And you’d spend years trying to decipher the sentence,until finally you’d understand it. But after a whileyou’d realize you got it wrong, and the sentence meantsomething else entirely. And so you’d have two sentences. Then three, and four, and ten, until you’d created a new language. And in that language you’d write the novel of your life.And once you’d reached old age you’d notice the door of the cellwas open. You’d go out into the world. You’d walk the length and breadth of it, until in the…

“Almost all books of aphorisms, which have ever acquired a reputation, have retained it,” John Stuart Mill wrote in 1837, aphoristically—that is to say, with a neat if slightly dubious finality. (“How wofully the reverse is the case with systems of philosophy,” he added.) We prefer collections of aphorisms over big books of philosophy, Mill thought, not just because the contents are always short and usually funny but because the aphorism is, in its algebraic abbreviation, a micro-model of empirical inquiry. Mill noted that “to be unsystematic is of the essence of all truths which rest on specific experiment,” and that there is, in a good aphorism, “generally truth, or a bold approach to some truth.” So when La Rochefoucauld writes, “In the misfortune of even our best friends, there…

Roberto Burle Marx (1909-94) was a Brazilian polymath whose highest calling was designing landscapes, most famously the mosaic path that swirls along two miles of Copacabana Beach, in Rio de Janeiro. “Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx,” at the New York Botanical Garden, includes paintings, drawings, and textiles, but its fragrant centerpiece is an immersive tropical oasis (pictured), designed in homage to Burle Marx by his American protégé, Raymond Jungles. On view through Sept. 29. THE THEATRE Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise The Shed Cooked up by the director Chen Shi-Zheng and the “Kung Fu Panda” franchise screenwriters, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, this martial-arts musical concerns itself with a harebrained tale of competing Queens clans fighting over … it’s unclear what. The production certainly looks as…

In the spring of 2011, the brothers Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels were the talk of Carteret County, on the central coast of North Carolina. Some people said that the brothers were righteous; others thought that they had lost their minds. That March, Melvin and Licurtis stood in court and refused to leave the land that they had lived on all their lives, a portion of which had, without their knowledge or consent, been sold to developers years before. The brothers were among dozens of Reels family members who considered the land theirs, but Melvin and Licurtis had a particular stake in it. Melvin, who was sixty-four, with loose black curls combed into a ponytail, ran a club there and lived in an apartment above it. He’d established a career…

It matters that the first patients were identical twins. Nancy and Barbara Lowry were six years old, dark-eyed and dark-haired, with eyebrow-skimming bangs. Sometime in the spring of 1960, Nancy fell ill. Her blood counts began to fall; her pediatricians noted that she was anemic. A biopsy revealed that she had a condition called aplastic anemia, a form of bone-marrow failure. The marrow produces blood cells, which need regular replenishing, and Nancy’s was rapidly shutting down. The origins of this illness are often mysterious, but in its typical form the spaces where young blood cells are supposed to be formed gradually fill up with globules of white fat. Barbara, just as mysteriously, was completely healthy. The Lowrys lived in Tacoma, a leafy, rain-slicked city near Seattle. At Seattle’s University of…

In 1946, not long after she fell in love with Pablo Picasso, Françoise Gilot made a painting called “Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple.” Two flat, angular figures sit at a table. The woman placidly clasps her hands in front of her as the man—bald, blocky, with one dark, piercing eye shown in profile—thrusts the fruit into her mouth. Temptation, knowledge, punishment, exile: these are things, in Gilot’s version of Genesis, that come from man, even if it is woman who will be blamed. The same year, Gilot moved in with Picasso. A friend warned that she was headed for catastrophe. “I told her she was probably right, but I felt it was the kind of catastrophe I didn’t want to avoid,” Gilot recalls in her remarkable 1964 memoir,…

The most bizarre exhibition in town this summer bears on the prevalence, lately, of “curating” as an honorific for the organizing of practically anything by just about anyone. “Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us,” at the Swiss Institute, re-creates a show that the revolutionary, for good and ill, Swiss curator-as-auteur Harald Szeemann (1933-2005) mounted at his home, in Bern, in 1974. About twelve hundred objects, cunningly arrayed, document the life and work of Szeemann’s paternal grandfather, Étienne, who was a hairdresser with a peripatetic career in Europe. Most of the items—furniture, family photographs, a lethal-looking early permanent-wave apparatus, advertisements, religious kitsch, wigs, tools, mannequin heads, letters, no end of tchotchkes—belong to the Getty Research Institute, in Los Angeles, where a Szeemann archive and his personal library occupy more than half a…