Innholdsfortegnelse for July 29, 2019 i The New Yorker

Last month, in Minneapolis, I climbed the stairs of a row house to find Al Franken, Minnesota’s disgraced former senator, wandering around in jeans and stocking feet. It was a sunny day, but the shades were mostly drawn. Takeout containers of hummus and carrot sticks were set out on the kitchen table. His wife, Franni Bryson, was stuck in their apartment in Washington, D.C., with a cold, and he had evidently done the best he could to be hospitable. But the place felt like the kind of man cave where someone hides out from the world, which is more or less what Franken has been doing since he resigned, in December, 2017, amid accusations of sexual impropriety. There had been occasional sightings of him: in Washington, people mentioned having glimpsed…

There once lived, at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America, a travelling man of Indian origin, advancing years, and retreating mental powers, who had developed an unwholesome, because entirely one-sided, passion for a certain television personality, the beautiful, witty, and adored talk-show host Miss Salma R., whom he had never met: an infatuation that he characterized, quite inaccurately, as love. In the name of this so-called love, he christened himself Quichotte, for the opera “Don Quichotte,” and resolved to be his “beloved”’s knighterrant, to pursue her zealously right through the television screen into whatever exalted high-definition reality she and her kind inhabited, and, by deeds as well as by grace, to win her heart. The truth was that Quichotte had almost no friends anymore—no social…

This Land Is Our Land, by Suketu Mehta (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This timely defense of global migration offers an overview of its many material benefits and refutes nativist talking points. But its core is a passionately argued rejection of closed borders. Humanizing the current exodus from the Global South, Mehta portrays individual migrants and shows how inextricable their journeys are from the political, economic, and ecological consequences of colonialism, global capitalism, and cheap fossil fuel: “They are here because you were there.” Mehta, who came to the U.S. as a child, forty-two years ago, is both an immigrant and thoroughly American, and who he means by “they,” “you,” and “we” shifts throughout the book—a telling sign of assimilation’s power and its limits. Eric Hobsbawm, by Richard J. Evans (Oxford).…

THE WOMAN WITHIN As a woman with recurrent cancer—and now without breasts, a uterus, a cervix, ovaries, or fallopian tubes—I believe that I have the authority to say that you are more than the sum of your body parts. And so I cannot give in to the anger that Sarah Manguso and Darcey Steinke seem to feel about the loss of “privileged, fertile womanhood,” as expressed in Manguso’s review of Steinke’s book about menopause (Books, June 24th). Thanks to a newfound sense of freedom, the past few years have been the happiest of my life: every second counts as my world morphs, and I with it. My breasts, youth, and fertility carried enormous, overwhelming power that separated me from myself. If I feel any rage about losing those things, it…

I’ve been keeping track of which countries most of my cell-phone calls come from, and the United States of America is way behind. Slovenia is in the lead, but lately the Lithuanians have been giving the Slovenians a run for their money—or, considering the warnings that we’re constantly getting about the danger of answering such calls, maybe I should say a run for my money. Yes, I’m aware that Melania Trump is from Slovenia, and I want to make it clear that I’m not in any way casting blame on her. She has enough on her plate as it is. Also, any number of countries besides Slovenia are ahead of the United States when it comes to the origins of my cell-phone calls—Madagascar, for instance, and Sierra Leone and Bosnia…

Listen. We are crowds now. We gather in the eardrum of.The scaffolding grows.As if the solution.There is not a soft part of us.Except for the days in us.We let the pieces fall where they may.The visible in its shell gets smashed.The desperation rethe gorgeous raw material—earth—the sensation oflast night, storms spilled, plumed, odor oflooking for the various directions.I have seennothing. It is deafening. It shakes with laughterwith ways of looking. It rattles. Listen. How much is it nowthe thing I want?The soft wind is it recompense?But I was trying to tell you about us now.How we finally realized we made no difference.And the visible we love. Its notes its intervals.Over which the sunlight still proceeds shivering with precision.With the obligation of precision.The visible whose carapace we love.And how our love…

Stripped of a sense of well-being,we downed our water from small disposable bottles.Casting the plastic to streetside,we poured high-potency energy tonics or Cokedown our throats, because this time in historyhad sapped us so thoroughly andwe were desperate.Straws, plastic caps, crushed cans,in a three-block walk you could fill a sack. As if we could replenish spirits quickly,pitching containers without remorse—who did we imagine would pick them up?What did we really know of plastic spirals in the seabigger than whole countries,we had never swirled in one ourselves,as a fish might do, a sea urchin, a whole family of eels,did we wish to be invincible, using what we wanted,discarding what we didn’t, as in wars,whole cities and nations crumpledafter our tanks and big guns pull out? How long does it take to be…

If you’re fortunate enough to have seen, in the course of your theatregoing years, many different types of performance—plays, cabarets, showcases, immersive theatre, and so on—what stands out, no matter the genre, is the performer’s degree of moral commitment to the work at hand. I don’t mean “moral” in the sense that it’s the actors’ job to tell us whether they agree with the ethics of a given piece (though some do that, too). Rather, what you look for is just how committed players are to connecting with the audience through their craft, the skills that allow them to exhibit and illuminate the awfulness and the lushness of what it means to be a person in the world. Blanche Du-Bois, that expert on the human heart, has told audiences for…

When we sense that an art work is “preachy,” we tend to tune out. Don’t tell me what to think, Americans spontaneously respond. It’s strange, then, that the most dynamic, dangerous, and riveting moments of “The Rolling Stone”—a new play by Chris Urch, directed by Saheem Ali, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse—are a pair of sermons, delivered by a young Ugandan pastor named Joe (the intense, convincing James Udom). The seats at the Newhouse are set in a tight semicircle around the stage, an arrangement well suited to Joe’s unnervingly direct appeal, which is rambunctious and fun in one instance, vilely bigoted in the next. When Joe asks the audience—which might as well double as his congregation—to step forward and accept salvation, you’re almost tempted to drop your Playbill and…

Langston Hughes’s “The Black Clown,” from 1931, specifies that the speaker appear in “the white suit and hat of a clown,” establishing minstrelsy as his point of entry to American life. In Michael Schachter and Davóne Tines’s music-theatre adaptation, at the Mostly Mozart Festival July 24-27, Tines doesn’t wear the costume but exorcises the degradations it represents, drawing strength from twelve singers and dancers (including Jamar Williams, Hailee Kaleem Wright, and Jhardon Dishon, above) and the bittersweet strains of vaudeville and the blues. ART “Apollo’s Muse” Metropolitan Museum This absorbing exhibition celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11’s moon landing, largely through photographs. Chronologically organized, it begins before the advent of photography, when Galileo’s seventeenth-century drawings (based on his observations through a homemade telescope) shattered the Western world’s image of…

The summer I was eighteen, I visited a parking lot forty-five minutes north of town and got behind the wheel for what I hoped would be the first real rite of my adulthood. I was tall, gangly, excitable. Less than a week earlier, following a brief stretch of test-taking at the Department of Motor Vehicles in San Francisco, I had received my learner’s permit. Learning in those days seemed easy. Tests were easy. Doing—when the matter arose at all—was hard. Behind the wheel, I made a show of adjusting the mirrors, as if preparing for a ten-mile journey in reverse. I surveyed the blank pavement ahead of me and slowly slid the gear-shift from park into drive. Cars had been my first passion. As a two-year-old, I’d learned to recognize…

Herman Melville seems to have got the idea to write a novel about a mad hunt for a fearsome whale during an ocean voyage, but he wrote most of “Moby-Dick” on land, in a valley, on a farm, in a house a-dither with his wife, his sisters, and his mother, a family man’s Walden. He named the farm Arrowhead, after the relics he dug up with his plow, and he wrote in a second-floor room that looked out on mountains in the distance and, nearer by, on fields of pumpkins and corn, crops he sowed to feed his animals, “my friends the horse & cow.” In the barn, he liked to watch them eat, especially the cow; he loved the way she moved her jaws. “She does it so mildly…

When Ed Sheeran, the British singer-songwriter, moved to London, at the age of sixteen, he was less of a sensation at open-mike nights than at hip-hop clubs and comedy shows, where his folkie, earnest guitar strumming elicited curiosity. Later, after he moved to Los Angeles, Jamie Foxx invited him to perform at a night he was hosting. “It was like eight hundred black people,” Foxx said, in an interview. “He pops out with his little red hair and a ukulele.” Sheeran, who comes across as a caricature of a cheerful, unassuming Brit, received a standing ovation. Sheeran, in his unlikely rise to global pop superstardom, has enjoyed success as a fish out of water. A naturally emotional singer and a highly proficient songwriter, he has persisted not only because he…

“Years and Years,” created by Russell T. Davies, as a joint production of the BBC and HBO, might best be described as dystopian realism. A messy, audacious blend of a Jason Katims family drama, like “Parenthood,” and a tense political thriller, in the tradition of “24,” the series is set in a horrifying potential version of right now—which is to say, it opens shortly before Donald Trump is reëlected. By the end of the first episode, a nuclear bomb has gone off near China. The world should end, but it doesn’t—and that same trauma recurs again and again. In the course of six episodes, “Years and Years” keeps leaping forward, forcing us into the future, as the economy crumbles, the ice caps melt, authoritarianism rises, and teen-agers implant phones into…