Innholdsfortegnelse for October 28, 2019 i The New Yorker

On a Sunday night in June, the twenty-nine-year-old astrologer Aliza Kelly was preparing to broadcast an Astrology 101 live stream from her apartment, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A glittering SpectroLED light panel made the living room feel like a tiny movie set. “My manager took me to get these lights at B&H,” she said. A windowsill was lined with gifts from clients—an illustrated zodiac, a white orchid. Kelly sat cross-legged on a taupe ottoman, wearing cat eyeliner and large hoop earrings, greeting people and waving as they appeared in the online chat room. “That is one of my favorite things, as a Leo and as a person—building community,” she said. It was a little before eight-thirty, and some of the fifty-two participants—who had paid between $19.99…

Serena was out in the garden in the early morning, before her two sisters got up. It was the best time. Reflected off the estuary water, the light seemed a blond powder, sifted through the summer air onto grass that grew waist-high, its mauve seed heads heavy with dew that soaked her skirt. She dipped to wash her arms in it, even her face—she was fanciful and ecstatic, and she loved long grass. Earth smells and the pungency of privet and balsam were still acute at this hour, unmingled; the shadows were as bold as in a child’s picture book; swifts and house martins tracked across the pale sky overhead, shrilling in thrilled anticipation. Everything was to come! This unknown day! The garden was so much more lovely now, Serena…

My first memories of life are in a public-housing project. My parents, then college students, had two kids, and then quickly three, and soon found subsidized housing in a new high-rise in Philadelphia, with brightly colored plastic doors and gray concrete terraces, where we lived for three years. At the tail end of the great period of the fifties Western, all the kids on the concrete balconies played at “Davy Crockett” and “Gunsmoke,” riding hobbyhorses and firing cap guns up and down their gray length, a form of play as alien now as Homeric poetry. This was the heyday of urban redevelopment, when city planners, doing what was then called “slum clearance,” created high-density, low-cost public housing, often on a Corbusian model, with big towers on broad concrete plazas. In…

MACHINE OPERATIONS I was delighted to read D. T. Max’s article about my own discipline, general surgery (“Dr. Robot,” September 30th). Max is not wrong to be captivated by the elegance of the da Vinci robotic-surgery system, which is a triumph of engineering. But, as Max acknowledges, the question that must guide the analysis of any medical breakthrough has still not been fully answered: Does it help patients? Minimally invasive surgery offers clear benefits—including less postoperative pain and fewer complications—and robotic surgery allows for greater precision than laparoscopic surgery. But, in most cases, robotic surgery takes significantly longer to perform than open or laparoscopic surgery, and time under anesthesia in the operating room is incredibly expensive. Thus, robotic surgery costs patients and the health-care system much more money—and there have…

When white phosphorus touches skin, it can burn through to the bone. As the particles ignite, they emit a garlic-like odor and melt everything in their path. Adam Driver, Marine lance corporal, 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, Weapons Company, 81st Platoon, was aware of these effects when he looked up at the California sky, during a drill exercise, one day in 2003, and saw a cloud of white phosphorus exploding above his head. The only thing to do was run. Driver had joined the Marine Corps the previous year, when he was eighteen. After high school, he’d been renting a room in the back of his family’s house, in Mishawaka, Indiana, and mowing the grass at a 4-H fairgrounds. He had vague ambitions of being an actor and had auditioned…

There were ideas long before there were light bulbs. But, of all the ideas that have ever turned into inventions, only the light bulb became a symbol of ideas. Earlier innovations had literalized the experience of “seeing the light,” but no one went around talking about torchlight moments or sketching candles into cartoon thought bubbles. What made the light bulb such an irresistible image for ideas was not just the invention but its inventor. Thomas Edison was already well known by the time he perfected the long-burning incandescent light bulb, but he was photographed next to one of them so often that the public came to associate the bulbs with invention itself. That made sense, by a kind of transitive property of ingenuity: during his lifetime, Edison patented a record-setting…

Several years ago, I bought a smartphone and soon came to love it. Being able to send an e-mail, look up a fact, or buy something no matter where I was meant a previously unimaginable gain in productivity. Every time I got an e-mail, the phone emitted a ping and I would deal with what-ever it was, priding myself on my efficiency. Texts arrived with the tones of a French horn and were similarly dispatched. Soon, I was reaching for the device every time it made a sound, like Pavlov’s dog salivating when it heard a bell. This started to interfere with work and conversations. The machine had seemed like a miraculous servant, but gradually I became its slave. I’d always prided myself on my will power. Like most people…

One man, standing on another man’s shoulders, serves as a third man’s perch. When this human tower topples, all three hit the ground in perfect rolls. The Australian troupe Circa (above, in “Humans”) tilts acrobatic daring toward thematic dance theatre, often with canonical classical music. In “En Masse,” in Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, at the Gerald W. Lynch, Oct. 23-25, the music is Schubert lieder and “The Rite of Spring.” The performers climb upon and hurl one another through the end—and the beginning—of humanity. NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Billy Hart Quartet Village Vanguard What the Billy Hart Quartet has going for it, besides a veteran drummer whose C.V. is as rich in mainstream work (Stan…

Bird-eyed Aaron Burr was wanted for murder in two states when he presided over the impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase in the Senate, in 1805. The House had impeached Chase, a Marylander, on seven articles of misconduct and one article of rudeness. Burr had been indicted in New Jersey, where, according to the indictment, “not having the fear of God before his eyes but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil,” he’d killed Alexander Hamilton, the former Secretary of the Treasury, in a duel. Because Hamilton, who was shot in the belly, died in New York, Burr had been indicted there, too. Still, the Senate met in Washington, and, until Burr’s term expired, he held the title of Vice-President of the United States. The…

Though twice I forgot themin that apartment between two lives,when I was—well,what was I doing?—it is well to consider the flies and their flights, the soft stumbleof the moth fly,or the pixel drifting upfrom a peach so soft it’s tornby its stone,or the soot fly, or the evening hoverfly, the sweat fly, the deer fly,or the laser flightof the corpse fly, which from miles away hears your breathingpauseand soon too soon homes in. * Though mostly it is houseflieswe notice,taking off backward(swatters must compensate)as if they’d suddenly remembered something. * Magnets, magnets!shrilled my landlady,when I got back from weeksof doing what I was doing.She meant, of course(I had forgottento tie my trash),maggots. * Precise in their prissy,hand-wringing way, flies are by our lightsfilthy, walking in shit, though light, light on…

Crisis of Conscience, by Tom Mueller (Riverhead). This trenchant examination of whistle-blowing is based on interviews with more than two hundred people who have exposed wrongdoing in areas such as national security, finance, and health care. Whistle-blowers emerge as “prickly and doctrinaire”—under ordinary circumstances, stubborn to a fault—but this is what enables them to place conscience above institutional pressures, often at great personal cost, legal protections notwithstanding. The book went to press before a whistle-blower’s complaint triggered a Presidential impeachment inquiry, but Mueller notes that, under the current Administration, the federal government has seen a surge in leaks and whistle-blowing, which, amid our present troubles, he sees as both a “symptom and a potential cure.” The Collector of Leftover Souls, by Eliane Brum, translated from the Portuguese by Diane Grosklaus…

“My love-play to the world,” Tennessee Williams called “The Rose Tattoo,” which was first mounted on Broadway in 1951—the production made Maureen Stapleton a star—and was later adapted into a film with an Academy Award-winning performance by the larger-than-life Anna Magnani. Williams wrote the play in a swoon of romantic gratitude for his great love, Frank Merlo. Merlo, a Sicilian-American, first entered Williams’s life as a conquest in Provincetown; some years later, a chance encounter on a Manhattan street brought him back into it, more or less for good. In his memoirs, Williams, “too long accustomed to transitory attachments,” recalls his initial reluctance to commit and his subsequent realization that, with Merlo, contentment could finally be his. The next day, Williams tells us, he came home to find “little Frankie”…