Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2, 2019 i The New Yorker

The recent legalization of human composting in Washington State has left many feeling squirmy and distracted. So let’s take a moment to air our concerns about this novel form of eco-burial. Please feel free to unburden yourself of any knee-jerk thoughts typically ascribed to fourteen-year-old boys. This is a safe space. Yes—you in the back, in the red shirt? “Would you start by briefly outlining the process of human composting for us?” Of course. The brainchild of Katrina Spade, the founder and C.E.O. of the Seattle-based startup Recompose, human composting is an accelerated form of decomposition by which a corpse is placed in a vessel with wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. Oxygen is pumped in to increase thermophilic, or heat-loving, microbial activity. After a month, a corpse will yield about…

One day in the early sixties, Saul Zucker, a pediatrician and anesthesiologist in the Bronx, was treating the child of a New York assemblyman named Alexander Chananau. Amid the stethoscoping and reflex-hammering of a routine checkup, the two men got to talking about polio, which was still a threat to the nation’s youth, in spite of the discovery, the previous decade, of a vaccine. At the time, some states had laws requiring the vaccination of schoolchildren, but New York was not one of them. In his office, on the Grand Concourse, Zucker urged Chananau to push such a law, and shortly afterward the assemblyman introduced a bill in the legislature. The proposal encountered resistance, especially from Christian Scientists, whose faith teaches that disease is a state of mind. (The city’s…

They were a restless tribe.They did not sit in sunlight, eating grapes together in the afternoon. Cloud-watching among them was considered a disgusting waste of time. They passed the days in an activity they called “thought-provoking,”as if thought were an animal, and they used long sticks to poke through the bars of its cage,tormenting and arousing thinking into strange behaviors. This was their religion.That and the light shining through the stained-glass ancestors. They preferred the name of the treeto the taste of the apple. I was young and I wanted to prove myself, but the words I learned from them transmuted me.By the time I noticed, the change had already occurred. It is impossible to say if this was bad. Inevitably, you find out you are lost, really lost;blind, really…

A physical book is good for much more than reading. In our house, we have several large art books propping up a movie projector. A thin paperback is wedged under a couch leg in a spot where our old floors are especially uneven. One summer we pressed wildflowers between the pages of a gigantic book about the Louvre, and later used it to flatten out a freshly purchased Radiohead poster. I am not the first person to choose a large, sturdy book as an impromptu cutting board: the cover of the Exeter Book, a tenth-century repository of Anglo-Saxon literature, bears knife marks from what looks like chopping. Stains on its ancient vellum suggest that, like the big atlas of Vermont in our living room, it was also possibly used as…

APEX PREDATOR Brooke Jarvis, in her review of “The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator,” by Timothy C. Winegard, writes that singular-factor histories often suffer from myopia (Books, August 5th & 12th). I appreciate this point, especially given Winegard’s account of slavery in the Caribbean. It’s true, as Jarvis explains, that, among Caribbean nations, “those colonized by the English, the Dutch, and the French tend to have populations that are of majority African descent; only the former Spanish colonies have significant populations descended from Europeans.” It’s misleading, however, to center this narrative on mosquitoes, as Winegard does, by pointing to the claim that the Spanish were more resistant to mosquito-borne diseases than colonizers from elsewhere in Europe were. When the Spanish expanded their empire in the Americas, they…

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, at the age of twenty-five, was sent by France’s Ministry of Justice to study the American penal system. He spent ten months in the United States, dutifully visiting prisons and meeting hundreds of people, including President Andrew Jackson and his predecessor, John Quincy Adams. On his return to France, he wrote a book about his observations, “Democracy in America,” the first volume of which was published in 1835. Many of the observations have weathered well (he noted, for instance, how American individualism coexisted with conformism). Others have not. For example, Tocqueville, who was the youngest son of a count, was deeply impressed by how equal the economic conditions in the United States were. It was, at the time, an accurate assessment. The United States was…

in summer, all those bodiesgathered around the oneblue pool, small in comparisonwith the extension of our adolescentlegs kicking madly at nothingbehind us, cobalt noodles underour sun-drunk arms keeping usafloat. How many Airheadsdid we feed ourselves with chlorinebloated fingers? How manyOtter Pops consumed? It’s not thatI wanted the boys yet,sharp clavicles and too-long trunksdripping a trail everywhere they wentor even the lifeguard on dutywho maybe was looking my way,maybe not, I didn’t know, his eyeshidden as they were behindOakley shades, biceps sculptedby all the rescuing he wasn’tdoing. No, lust began with the teen girlson the grassy knoll, lined upas neatly as hot dogs on a grilland flipping to the same timer. Theirbreasts filling out colorful triangles,hoops still glinting in their ears as ifthey might not swim at all or else werenot…

At what point did it no longer seem possible to satirize the world we live in? Was it when the Commander-in-Chief called himself a “very stable genius”? The “covfefe” tweet? Or the news alerts that seem to make the very idea of jokes unserious or unseemly? Satire reveals truth through exaggeration. The task becomes more difficult when everyone agrees that reality has gone too far. The funny, ravenous, and strange novels of Nell Zink look at American culture from the fringes, following activists and misfits as they contend with the absurdities of the modern world. Her first book, “The Wallcreeper,” tells the story of a woman who leaves her husband to commit ecoterrorism while taking on a string of deadbeat lovers. In “Mislaid,” a white lesbian passes as black in…

It’s been only five years since Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” was seen on Broadway, but there’s a reason actors are drawn to it: the play traces the life of an extramarital affair, but in reverse chronology, from the bitter end to the fizzy beginning. When it first opened, in 1980, Raul Julia and Blythe Danner were the illicit lovers and Roy Scheider the cuckolded husband. A new revival (in previews, at the Jacobs), directed by Jamie Lloyd, features Charlie Cox, Zawe Ashton, and the “Avengers” star Tom Hiddleston. ART “Garry Winogrand: Color” Brooklyn Museum Winogrand once defined a photograph as “what something looks like to a camera.” Keep that in mind when viewing this fiercely pleasurable, if somewhat flawed, show, consisting mainly of hundreds of digitally projected Kodachrome slides, most from…

In late July, in a brief window between professional appointments, Iggy Pop drove to the mouth of Biscayne Bay, so that he could bob in its tropical waters. In 1995, he had bought what he described as “a very seedy condo” in Miami, and he has had a home in the city ever since. The extremity of the place—it is both environmentally tenuous and aesthetically vulgar—seems to suit Pop, who, in the late nineteen-sixties, as a member of the Stooges, helped invent and refine punk rock, a genre of music so menacing and physically savage that it is sometimes shocking that Pop has made it to the age of seventy-two. After he moved to Miami, he started swimming every day. “I didn’t know anybody,” he said. “I’d go to the…

Her mother had been a beauty, a green-eyed blonde who wore a long braid down her back in high school and then college (Vassar ’57), in New York (Katie Gibbs ’58), and her job in the typing pool at Westinghouse, before she was asked (actually, told) to adopt the more stylish updos of the time. She refused, her boss accusing her of hysteria though the origin of the word (do you know this?) is the once-belief that the uterus could reach up its bloody hands and grip the throat. Constance addresses the mostly silent women, many from her department, who have gathered in the Antlers Bar on Elm, near the Loop, for the new Storytelling Wednesdays, the audience’s silence not silence but agitated, bored distraction as Constance closes with a…

In Montparnasse, by Sue Roe (Penguin). This history of Surrealism opens in Paris in 1911, when artists and writers, seeking fertile ground beyond Cubism, were trading the hills of Montmartre for the boulevards of Montparnasse. Amedeo Modigliani, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, André Breton, and Guillaume Apollinaire began to explore the idea of the unconscious and the question “What is art?” Many answers followed, including the anarchic iconoclasm of Dada and the “exploratory marvels” of Salvador Dali. Roe proves a sure-handed guide on the quest for “something more real than reality” and excels in documenting clashes both serious and silly—as when Breton demanded that René Magritte’s wife remove a necklace bearing a cross. A Primer for Forgetting, by Lewis Hyde (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Roaming from ancient myth to contemporary…