Innholdsfortegnelse for November 4, 2019 i The New Yorker

When does uncertainty become the worst condition of all? This fall, more than three years after Britain voted to leave the European Union, no one was sure what form Brexit would take, what kind of relationship we would have with our nearest neighbors, or whether the whole thing could still be called off. Theresa May, the first Conservative Prime Minister with the job of taking the United Kingdom out of the E.U., had been forced to step down at the end of July. The second, Boris Johnson, did not seem trustworthy. There was a departure time—11 P.M. on October 31st—which the government tried very hard to convince people was real. On September 1st, it launched a hundred-million-pound public-information campaign called “Get Ready for Brexit.” TV spots showed sparkling European…

The boys were crouched in the dirt, the marbles pinging between them. Earl Lovett’s biggie oily marble was blue and white, like the earth seen from the heavens. He’d already won twenty marbles by the time he noticed the music. Back home in Ellenwood, there was always singing or music playing. All day, every day. The music was constant noise for Earl, something easy for him to relegate to the back of his mind. So his marbles smashed straight while the other boys’ jigged. Even Earl’s cousin, Brent, who had taught him to pitch that summer, couldn’t keep up with Earl’s streak. He’d gotten so good, he wondered if he could grow up to be a marble player. His father was always going on about finding a trade. Then the…

MEANINGS OF “GILGAMESH” Joan Acocella, in her review of Michael Schmidt’s “Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem,” captures the timelessness of this ancient story (Books, October 14th). She points out that the poem has been studied for “only seven or eight” generations, as opposed to about a hundred and fifty for the Iliad and the Odyssey. The comparative recency of the scholarship, she writes, means that there is no “real tradition” for reading “Gilgamesh.” This may be true, but it is worth noting that, in Waldorf schools all over the world, fifth graders have been studying this epic as a standard part of the curriculum since the movement’s founding, in 1919. In my classroom, students read a version of the poem and, using Popsicle sticks as styluses, pressed wedge-shaped cuneiform…

I. THE FOOTBALL Before Robert Boback got into the field of cybersecurity, he was a practicing chiropractor in the town of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, twelve miles northwest of Pittsburgh. He was also selling used cars on eBay and flipping houses purchased at police auctions. The decision to branch out into computers came in 2003, after he watched a “60 Minutes” report by Lesley Stahl about pirated movies. For years, while digital piracy was devastating the music industry, Hollywood had largely been spared; limitations on bandwidth curtailed the online trade in movies. But this was changing, Stahl noted: “The people running America’s movie studios know that if they don’t do something, fast, they could be in the same boat as the record companies.” Boback was thirty-two years old, with a Norman Rockwell…

I came from something popularly known as “nothing”and in the coming I got a lot. My parents didn’t speak money, didn’t speak college.Still—I went to Yale. For a while I tried to condemn.I wrote Let me introduce you to evil. Still, I was a guest there, I made myself at home. And I know a fine shoe when I see one.And I know to be sincerely sorry for those people’s problems. I know to want nothing morethan it would be so nice to have and I confess I’ll never hate what I’ve been givenas much as I wish I could. Still I thought I of all people understood Aristotle: what is and isn’t the good life…because, I wrote, privilege is an aggressive form of amnesia… I left a house with…

One of the stranger things about the history of movie-making is that women have been there all along, periodically exercising real power behind the camera, yet their names and contributions keep disappearing, as though security had been called, again and again, to escort them from the set. In the early years of the twentieth century, women worked in virtually every aspect of silent-film-making, as directors, writers, producers, editors, and even camera operators. The industry—new, ad hoc, making up its own rules as it went along—had not yet locked in a strict division of labor by gender. Women came to Los Angeles from all over the country, impelled not so much by dreams of stardom as by the prospect of interesting work in a freewheeling enterprise that valued them. “Of all…

In 1994, Rachel Feinstein (pictured) cast herself as Sleeping Beauty, spending her nights (and days) inside a storybook house she built for a group show in lower Manhattan. Her sculptures remain fairy-tale fanciful, but their contexts have become higher profile: this summer, the artist unveiled a new work on the grounds of Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire, England. On Nov. 1, the Jewish Museum opens “Maiden, Mother, Crone,” Feinstein’s first museum exhibition in the U.S. CLASSICAL MUSIC New York Philharmonic David Geffen Hall It’s hard to believe that neither the Swiss conductor Philippe Jordan nor the German violinist Julia Fischer has appeared with the New York Philharmonic in more than a decade. In the intervening years, both have built and burnished their reputations as some of the most sought-after and exciting…

The artists Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue were in Philadelphia last week, at the Icebox Project Space, staring up at the “Non Binary Goddexx”: an eighteen-foot inflatable Tyvek sculpture with one massive breast, a hairy nipple, a slight mustache, and inconclusive genitals that, at regular intervals, released a gush of “fluid fluid” into a bucket. Mitchell looked concerned: “They’re not spewing enough!” “We may need to top her up,” Logue said. She smirked, and clarified, “The Goddexx goes by ‘she’ or ‘they.’” The ambiguously gendered giant is one of doz ens of pieces that Logue and Mitchell created for the latest iteration of Killjoy’s Kastle, their breathtakingly elaborate, impressively deranged, and surprisingly popular lesbian-feminist haunted house. More than five thousand people saw the version they erected in West Hollywood in…

A few days after Suzy Batiz learned A that she’d made Forbes’s 2019 list of America’s richest self-made women, she lay down on her kitchen floor and wept. Batiz, whose net worth is estimated at more than two hundred and forty million dollars, grew up poor. She describes her family as “Irish potato-famine people” on her father’s side and “cotton pickers from Arkansas” on her mother’s. For most of her life, she was driven by an intense desire to make money. “I really believed that money was going to get me out,” she said. Not just out of Arkansas and generational poverty, but out from under her oppressive religion, her mother’s low expectations, her father’s alcoholic volatility, her childhood sexual abuse, her suffocating first marriage, her tumultuous second marriage, and…

I foresaw my own undoing in the slow, clumsy flightof pelicans over Lake Maurepas, out beyondThe fishermen in their peeling boats, in a skyiridescent as the inside of an abalone shell.My mother was crabbing at the end of the pier,dropping her steel net full of chicken gutsInto the murky water, shimmering in July heat.Angels want humidity and are drawn to Pass ManchacTo sit at tables at Middendorf’s, splintering clawswith nutpicks and swilling pitchers of Jax. I saw themAs clearly as I saw her in her black swimsuit,etched against the vanishing horizon. WhatIs an angel to a mother, what is a mother to a pelicandoing the slow windhover over shoals of rotting shells?I suffered sunburn fever. I didn’t know its name.I held my tiny hand palm out to block the light,But…

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, what will you talk about? Your grandchildren? The far-off scents and tastes of your own childhood? Your first love? Or that time when you walked into Umberto’s Clam House and shot Crazy Joe, only you didn’t whack him right, so he runs outta there, more like stumbles, and you follow the guy and finish him off on the sidewalk, you know, pop pop, close the deal? The sorry fate of Joe is one of the many events recalled for us by Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), in “The Irishman,” as he sits in a nursing home and summons up remembrance of kills past. The director of the movie is Martin Scorsese, returning to the rich soil that he has tilled…

Artificial Intelligence, by Melanie Mitchell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Without shying away from technical details, this survey provides an accessible course in neural networks, computer vision, and natural-language processing, and asks whether the quest to produce an abstracted, general intelligence is worrisome. Although recent advances are staggering, Mitchell emphasizes the limitations of even advanced machines. A program called AlphaGo has bested one of the world’s best Go players, but its intelligence is nontransferable: it cannot think about anything except Go, let alone steal someone’s job. Mitchell’s view is a reassuring one: “We humans tend to overestimate AI advances and underestimate the complexity of our own intelligence.” The Accusation, by Edward Berenson (Norton). In 1928, after a young girl went missing in the town of Massena, New York, the town’s Jews…

In days of old, when most people didn’t live to be old, there were very few notable works about old age, and those were penned by writers who were themselves not very old. Chaucer was around fifty when “The Merchant’s Tale” was conceived; Shakespeare either forty-one or forty-two when he wrote “King Lear,” Swift fifty-five or so when gleefully depicting the immortal but ailing Struldbruggs, and Tennyson a mere twenty-four when he began “Tithonus” and completed “Ulysses,” his great anthem to an aging but “hungry heart.” One might think that forty was not so young in Shakespeare’s day, but if you survived birth, infections, wars, and pestilence you stood a decent chance of reaching an advanced age no matter when you were born. Average life expectancy was indeed a sorry…

On the night I went to see the Public Theatre’s revival of “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,” it happened to be the birthday of the work’s author, Ntozake Shange, who died last October. The audience learned of this occasion just after the actors took their bows. We’d already been prodded into solemn joy, thrilled by song and dance, and, toward the end of the evening, ushered into the state of bright, shattering anguish that the play’s title promises will surely come. As cheers and little sobs filled the air, the performer Adrienne C. Moore informed us about the happy and slightly disconcerting coincidence, and led us in a moment of silence. Those ripe, quiet seconds, with their intimation of Shange’s presence through art, recapitulated…