Innholdsfortegnelse for September 16, 2019 i The New Yorker

Even in the dark I liked to look at it, though the sea was never truly dark, even now in the off-season it caught the light of the moon, which hung high and almost full, and of the signs of the few restaurants and hotels that were open in the new town, so that the whole harbor shimmered with points of light. It had been months since I had seen the sea, a year, and I was hungry for it; I had stepped to the edge of the terrace to check my phone but found myself staring at the sea instead. You could lose yourself in it, that was what I liked, it was beautiful but also it was like looking at nothing, the sight of it drowned out thinking…

WHO DEFINES CULTURE? Louis Menand, in his review of Charles King’s book about the growth of cultural anthropology, explores why people “no longer solicit the wisdom of anthropologists” (Books, August 26th). His answer is that there has been a “swing back toward biology” to explain cultural phenomena. As an anthropologist, I see it differently. The defining shift was not from culture to biology but from science to literature. Anthropologists decided that their field was not a science, and that it should not make scientific claims. A generation of self-styled postmodern anthropologists, fearing that categorizing human groups was inherently oppressive, insisted that anthropology become a form of literary criticism. (See especially George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer’s influential book, “Anthropology as Cultural Critique,” from 1986.) One result was the fragmentation…

I woke up on Tuesday as a bug, and my boyfriend did not want to work through it. “We have to break up,” he said, and I could feel the floating organ on my back, which had taken the place of my human heart, start to break. “Can we try to make it work?” I pleaded, though it came out as a series of garbled clicks. I should have seen it coming. He smelled different, you know? Clean and fresh, and there was little to no feces on him that I wanted to ingest. Isn’t that strange? When someone who once smelled like home suddenly repulses you with his lack of a feces scent? Love is brutal. He said that, ever since that morning, I’d had “wandering eyes.” In fact,…

It was a man I’m sure of it.Though I never saw himI felt him rise, climbing upThrough me until I bentTo a devotion not my own.I felt him in my belly, lowIn my hips. I carried himLike I carried my own children.I have no idea if he was oldOr young, what his faceWould have been had he flesh.He did in me whatever an ember doesBurning slowly until all of a pieceWhat it feeds on falls to ash.Sometimes I miss what he taught meTo see, the hunger it gave me.I think he must wait now justBeside my body, believing I’llOne day fall back to my knees.If he had hands, they would beThe kind of hands I open for.…

After leaving Raxruhá, aftercrossing Mexico with a coyote,after reaching at midnightthat barren New Mexico border,a man and his daughterlooked to Antelope Wellsfor asylum and were arrested. Afterforms read in Spanishto the Mayan-speaking father,after a cookie but no water, afterthe wait for the lone busto return for their turn, after boarding,after the little girl’s temperature spiked,she suffered two heart attacks,vomited, and stopped breathing. Aftermedics revived the seven-year-oldat Lordsburg station, after she was flownto El Paso, where she died,the coroner examinedthe failed liver and swollen brain. ThenJakelin’s chest and head were stitched upand she returned to Guatemalain a short white coffinto her mother, grandparents,and dozens of women preparingtamales and beans to feed the grieving.In Q’eqchi’, w-e means mouth.…

In his fifty-four years among the living, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn wrote twenty-nine books in just about every conceivable genre—folktales, travelogues, novels, cookbooks, translations, dictionaries of proverbs—none of which can compete, in terms of sheer Dickensian horror and pluck, with the story of his own life. He was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lefkáda (one of the Ionian Islands, at the time still under British control), to an Ionian mother named Rosa and an Irish father, Charles, who was stationed there as a staff surgeon in the British Army. Their youthful romance reputedly grew into love when she nursed him back to health after he was set upon and stabbed multiple times by her brother, who viewed their liaison as a stain on the family’s honor. They married…

When, back in 2002, Simon Rattle began his seventeen-year tenure as the music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, he opened his inaugural program with Thomas Adès’s 1997 work “Asyla,” which mixes grand Romantic gestures with four-on-the-floor dance beats. Rattle thus announced his intention to modernize an ensemble famed for its almost occult command of the core repertory. That night’s performance of “Asyla” was only fitfully persuasive; the players seemed less than convinced by the music. Throughout his term, Rattle met with resistance from the orchestra—even from younger musicians who had pushed for his appointment. He succeeded in his mission all the same. Kirill Petrenko, the forty-seven-year-old Russian-born conductor, who replaced Rattle in August, shows no interest in picking up where his predecessor left off. The main work in his first…

The personal and professional partnership of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner is celebrated in the film series “Two Free Women,” running Sept. 12-16 at Lincoln Center. The retrospective includes a film of Tomlin performing Wagner’s one-woman play “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” from 1991, and a documentary by Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill, from 1986, on the rehearsals for the play’s Broadway opening. Tomlin’s movie acting is also spotlighted, in screenings of “Nashville,” “9 to 5,” and “The Late Show.” ART Alvin Baltrop Bronx Museum This quietly wonderful retrospective presents the Bronx-born photographer, who died in 2004, as more than a sensitive documentarian: Baltrop was also the unseen protagonist of his stunning pictures. More than two hundred small, mostly black-and-white prints (some of them worse…

On June 29, 2018, Wanna Thompson, a freelance music journalist, was in an Uber with her boyfriend, headed into downtown Toronto to watch a podcast taping. Thompson had spent part of the day listening to new music by Nicki Minaj, including a typically braggadocious track called “Barbie Tingz.” (“I’m still fly, just bagged a white guy, /Ritchie-like guy and I still eat Thai.”) Thompson, who was twenty-six, could recite most of Minaj’s lyrics by heart. Minaj, like Thompson’s mother, is from Trinidad, and Thompson admired her as one of the few female rappers to become mega-famous. “I was a hundred per cent a fan,” she told me recently. But, listening to the new stuff, Thompson worried that Minaj’s musical progression had stalled. From the car, she tweeted to her fourteen…

The political deployment of imagery from Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” began in Texas, in the spring of 2017, at a protest against the state’s ongoing campaign to restrict abortion rights. The TV adaptation of the book would soon begin streaming, on Hulu. The show stars Elisabeth Moss as the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Offred, a woman stripped of her job, her family, and her name in a near-future American theocracy called Gilead. Offred is a Handmaid, forced to live as a breeding concubine; each month, she is ceremonially raped by her Commander, a man of high status, in the interest of rebuilding a population that has dwindled owing to secular immorality, environmental toxicity, and super-S.T.D.s. Like all Handmaids, she wears a scarlet dress, a long cloak, and a…

Five Days Gone, by Laura Cumming (Scribner). In the fall of 1929, the author’s mother, as a three-year-old, was kidnapped from a beach in Lincolnshire, and held for five days. Who took her and why are the mysteries that drive this vivid memoir, in which our contemporary eagerness for transparency clashes with Victorian ideals of secrecy and restraint. Gradually, as the author visits those who knew her mother as a girl, it becomes clear that many were aware of the truth of her disappearance, yet chose to keep it to themselves. Cumming, an art critic, anchors her story to references from art and literature, exploring the shaping of identity and what makes us “belong” to the people and places that call us their own. This Land, by Christopher Ketcham (Viking). In this…

In many great dramatic texts, talk pins us to specifics. Tics of speech sprout up, as if organically, from the political contingencies and the geographical facts that give rise to character. A wonderful feature of the theatre is that, from one production of a work to the next, those verbal bursts can attach to new applications, sending their signals off to meet new satellites of place and time. The word “revival” becomes literal: let’s make this thing live again, but differently. Yet in the latest revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” written in 1978 and now on Broadway at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, the director, Jamie Lloyd, declines this opportunity, to disorienting effect. Instead of setting Pinter’s love-triangle-told-backward amid freshly suggestive surroundings, Lloyd strips the production bare, leaving the play…