Innholdsfortegnelse for October 14, 2019 i The New Yorker

In June, 1994, at a pro-choice conference in Chicago, twelve black women gathered together to talk. One, Loretta Ross, was the executive director of the first rape crisis center in this country. Another, Toni Bond, was the executive director of the Chicago Abortion Fund. A third, Cynthia Newbille, was the leader of the National Black Women’s Health Project, which was among the first national organizations to be devoted to the wellness of black women and girls. After the first day of the event, which was hosted by the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance and the Ms. Foundation, the group met in a hotel room. “We did what black women do when we’re in spaces where there are just a handful of us,” Bond, who is now a religious scholar, recalled. “We pulled…

The chains of begats and births, the chains of namesAre meaning itself. The chains of deaths and doings. The black rain fell on Osamu Shimomura.On the walk home it turned his white shirt black.“My grandmother got me quickly into a bath.It likely saved me from death by radiation.” Tougaloo’s Ernst Borinski would not discussHis family, killed by Nazis: “An area IHave liquidated, for my mental health.”His grave at Tougaloo a kind of shrine.Salma begat Obed and Obed begat Boaz.Underground river of passion and retrenchment. Thank you, Elliot, Simon & Hazel, for wantingTo talk with me about my dying some day—Catfish had been so cold when you touched his body.A compliment for me, that conversation.It almost doesn’t matter what we said.I thought of Milford, your great-grandpa, that timeI asked him, did…

As societies change shape, novels change form. Because the novel is such a deeply mimetic and attentive host, it begins to sound like its guests. A hierarchical society that placed faith in marriage reproduced itself in stable novels that end securely in imagined marriage, gently offstage. But a society in which women were chafing at the limits of domestic harness reproduced itself in turbulent novels that begin with an inquiry into such marriages rather than ending with the promise of them. The novel of adultery, which dominates the second half of the European nineteenth century, might also be called the novel of unhappy marriage, its formal restlessness driven by the trapped restlessness of its heroines. That tragic adulterer Effi Briest, sparkling, young, and unhappily married to a dashing older aristocrat,…

STAR POWER Although Michael Schulman is right to highlight the dark side of fandom, it is worth noting that many celebrities have mobilized their fan bases to help make the world a better place (“The Force Is with Them,” September 16th). As an admirer of Misha Collins, who plays the angel Castiel in the television series “Supernatural,” I have been impressed by his ability to inspire generosity in his “minions,” as his fans are known. Collins founded Random Acts, a nonprofit that raises money for relief efforts, schools, and the L.G.B.T.Q. community, to which his fans contribute enthusiastically. He also created the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt, whose registration fees are partially used to fund charitable initiatives. People from more than a hundred countries participated in this year’s activities. Collins’s endeavors…

Lots of good-natured sunshine everywheremaking the snow glitter—quitelifelike, I thought, niceto see that again; my handswere almost warm. Someprinciple is at work, I thought:commendable, taking an interestin human life, but to be safeI threw some snow over my shoulder,since I had no salt. And sure enoughthe clouds came back, and sure enoughthe sky grew dark and menacing,all as before, exceptthe losses were piling up—And yet moments agothe sun was shining. How joyful my head was,basking in it, getting to feel it firstwhile the limbs waited. Like a deserted hive.Joyful—now there’s a wordwe haven’t used in a while.…

This matter of the face mask, for instance. Well, just a half mask, a green gauze mask, of the kind that medical workers wear. Not a full-face mask—that would be ridiculous. Even before the floods, landslides, and firestorms of the past several years, Luce (sometimes) wore a gauze mask. Not in public! Just at home. When it seemed to her that the wind “smelled funny,” “smelled wrong.” Especially from the south. There are industrial cities to the south. Her town, Hazelton-on-Hudson, is a hundred miles from New York City, and far fewer from the notorious power plant, with its majestic white plumes of poisonous smoke that are sometimes visible to those who search the sky with binoculars whenever there is an air-quality alert. This mask, acquired at a medical-supply store,…

Princess of the Hither Isles, by Adele Logan Alexander (Yale). In this absorbing biography of the pioneering black educationalist and suffragist Adella Hunt Logan, her granddaughter, a historian, draws on journals, letters, family memories, and occasional imaginative license. Logan, born in 1863 into a mixed-race family, spent her career at the Tuskegee Institute, where she became close to Booker T.Washington. Outspoken and fair-skinned, she struggled both with the black education movement’s resistance to female ambition and with the racist assumptions of suffragette leaders. In 1895, having passed as white to attend a suffragist convention, she was told to stay away when Washington gave a speech later that year, lest an audience of black men take her for a white woman. Such humiliations ultimately exacted a heavy mental toll, but Logan’s…

How much, honestly, does anybody like—as in, want to pay for and sit and listen to—freestyle rap? Even among rap fans (I’m one of them!), who’s taking the long way home on the odd chance of catching a bunch of kids huddled in a circle, getting ready to rhyme? It’s time to tell the truth about the relative merits of this minor art. Though, if the new improvised rap show on Broadway, “Freestyle Love Supreme”—at the Booth, directed by Thomas Kail and created by Kail, Anthony Veneziale, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton”—is any indication, it may be too late. Freestyling, unless it is immaculately funny and uncannily anchored in the specifics of the moment—if it includes, say, a description of something somebody’s wearing, the better to prove genuine…

The Union Square Greenmarket (pictured) opened, in 1976, with seven farm stands. Today, during peak season, dog-walking locavores and food-minded tourists mingle with some hundred and forty purveyors of fruits and vegetables—not to mention buffalo-milk ricotta, gourmet fungi, dahlias the size of dinner plates, and only-in-New York honey harvested on local rooftops from Crown Heights to Chinatown. The market is open year-round on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, from 8 to 6. DANCE New York City Ballet David H. Koch The last week of the fall season offers a little bit of everything, including several masterpieces of the repertoire: Jerome Robbins’s “Dances at a Gathering,” Merce Cunningham’s “Summer-space,” and George Balanchine’s “Serenade” and “Symphony in C.” Two new works, by Lauren Lovette (a company member) and by Edwaard Liang (a…

It takes a strong philosopher to assume control of a preposition and propel it into a foreign language. That is what Friedrich Nietzsche did with the word über. In German, it can mean “over,” “beyond,” or “about.” You are reading an essay über Nietzsche. As a prefix, über is sometimes equivalent to the English “super”—übernatürlich is “supernatural”—but it has less of an aggrandizing effect. Nietzsche altered the destiny of the word when, in the eighteen-eighties, he began speaking of the Übermensch, which has been translated as “superman,” “superhuman,” and “over-man.” Scholars still debate what Nietzsche had in mind. A physically stronger being? A spiritual aristocrat? A kind of cyborg? “Overperson” might be the most literal equivalent in English, although it is unlikely that DC Comics would have sold many comic…

I glanced down at my left thumb, still resting on the Tab key. What have I done? Had my computer become my co-writer? That’s one small step forward for artificial intelligence, but was it also one step backward for my own? The skin prickled on the back of my neck, an involuntary reaction to what roboticists call the “uncanny valley”—the space between flesh and blood and a too-human machine. For several days, I had been trying to ignore the suggestions made by Smart Compose, a feature that Google introduced, in May, 2018, to the one and a half billion people who use Gmail—roughly a fifth of the human population. Smart Compose suggests endings to your sentences as you type them. Based on the words you’ve written, and on the words…

The mid-nineteenth century was a time when very many Western people began to doubt the historical truth of the Bible. Was it really the case that we were all descended from Adam and Eve, whom God created in his own image and placed in a beautiful garden and then, by reason of their sins, banished from there? Did their descendants compound their wickedness, to the point where God decided to drown them all, in a huge flood? And did he, afterward, seeing the destruction he had wrought, make a covenant with the one surviving family, that of Noah, promising that he would never again raise his hand against his creation? “While the earth remaineth,” he decided, according to the King James Bible, “seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and…

The ghazal, a traditional Arabic poetic form, was carried into English in the nineteen-sixties, and enjoyed a vogue among American poets several decades later. It is intricate and tangled—the word “ghazal” relates to the Arabic word for “thread”—but it tends to throw into relief a single word, repeated deterministically at the ends of stanzas, like a dead end in a maze. The opening poem in Reginald Dwayne Betts’s third book of poetry, “Felon,” is “Ghazal”: From inside a cell, the night sky isn’t the measure—that’s why it’s prison’s vastness your eyes reflect after prison.My lover don’t believe in my sadness. She says whisky,not time, is what left me wrecked after prison. The word “prison” punctuates every couplet of the poem. “Ghazal” is fourteen fresh beginnings, fourteen attempts at starting over,…

Celebrity is as potent a force in classical music as it is in any other sector of the entertainment industry. Opera companies have been relying on lustrous names to fill seats since the seventeenth century. The scandal surrounding Plácido Domingo—more than twenty women have accused the superstar tenor of sexual harassment or misconduct, which he has denied—makes one wonder whether it would be possible to do without the star system, or, at least, to depend upon it less. There are celebrated singers, soloists, and conductors who find satisfaction in their work without preying on those around them. But human nature is too often warped by power and fame. Several events at the beginning of the fall music season demonstrated the virtue of projects that are driven not by celebrity allure…