Innholdsfortegnelse for November 11, 2019 i The New Yorker

This fall, Tribeca became Manhattan’s latest art destination as multiple galleries decamped there from Chelsea. The essential nonprofit Artists Space returns to its roots—it was founded in the neighborhood, in 1972—inaugurating its new home on Cortlandt Alley with an adventurous show of works by Danica Barboza, Jason Hirata, Yuki Kimura, and Duane Linklater (opens Dec. 6). Few painters have achieved the pop-culture stature of Kehinde Wiley, whose fans include President Barack Obama. The Brooklyn Museum pairs a 2005 canvas by Wiley with the neoclassical French picture it’s based on, Jacques-Louis David’s “Napoleon Crossing the Alps,” from 1801 (opens Jan. 24). Wiley’s equestrian subject has a spiritual ancestor in a majestic ancient terra-cotta figure excavated in Niger, in 1985; it’s a highlight of “Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of…

On a winter night a hundred years ago, Ellis Island, the twenty-seven-acre patch of land in New York Harbor that had been the gateway to America for millions of hopeful immigrants, was playing the opposite role. It had been turned into a prison for several hundred men, and a few women, most of whom had arrived in handcuffs and shackles. They were about to be shipped across the Atlantic, in the country’s first mass deportation of political dissidents in the twentieth century. Before dawn on December 21, 1919, the prisoners were roused from their bunks to be packed onto a barge and transported to a waiting vessel, the Buford, which was berthed in Brooklyn. The Buford was an elderly, decrepit troopship, known by sailors as a heavy “roller” in rough…

The whole business led my wife to suggest a conference with our dear friends Pam and Becky, who were discreet and worldly and kind. She wrote them: Hey wonderful people! Can we drag you over for dinner Wednesday? Short notice—but there’s something we’d like to talk over with you. I prepared the meal—cucumber soup, grilled chicken breast, and a lentil-and-scallion salad. Cooking had been Viki’s thing, not mine, but I’d been stuck at home for months and the kitchen had become a place of recreation. Also, my relationship with my body had changed. Pam and Becky arrived on the dot, at seven. My illness had made me very small and very light, and they embraced me gently. “He looks so young,” Becky said to Viki. “Where’s Molly?” Our daughter, Molly,…

One Day, by Gene Weingarten (Blue Rider). This absorbing snapshot of America draws on more than five hundred interviews about a randomly chosen day in 1986, a quiet Sunday just after Christmas. A nursing student goes in for a heart transplant; two fishing buddies survive a helicopter crash; a girl defies her religious mother to play Nintendo. Weingarten relates these events, and the stumbles and joys of dozens of other people, with compassion and humor. He finds that experiences of thirty-three years ago have shaped our lived reality today, and reflects that “we are more connected—to one another, and perhaps even to any single point in time—than we know.” The Art of Return, by James Meyer (Chicago). Blending criticism, memoir, and theory, the author explores the enduring influence of the…

On November 9, 2016, I was alone, driving in the rain from Massachusetts to New York, weeping and muttering to myself before falling silent for long, baffled miles. I had made the reverse trip the day before, to report on an Election Night party at Wellesley College that had been planned to celebrate the historic victory of the school’s alumna Hillary Clinton. As I drove now, I kept the radio on for bitter company. Hillary conceded and Donald Trump declared victory; the morning d.j.s were giddy with surprise as they parsed the news. Eventually, I found myself listening to an interview with the playwright and director Richard Nelson, whose play “Women of a Certain Age” had opened at the Public Theatre the previous evening. Nelson explained that the play was,…

THE WRITE TOOL John Seabrook, in his piece about predictive-text technology, wonders what the world would be like if artificial-intelligence programs learned to write as well as humans (“The Next Word,” October 14th). He suggests that people “would stop writing, or at least publishing, because all the readers would be captivated by the machines.” Roald Dahl’s 1953 story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” imagines a remarkably similar world. The Grammatizator can reproduce the styles of all working authors, who have been paid to let the machine take over their careers, and to never again write anything of their own. The story’s narrator refuses to stop writing and go into creative silence. He ends the story with a plea: “Give us strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve.” Ed AllenVermillion, S.D.…

I am here before the nurse brings my mother breakfast.I study her body. Try to remember if I ever caught my motherin the dream I had the night before where the hem of hergown flew through a silver tunnel without end. Her skinwent right through my hands whenever I was close enoughto save her. She slipped through her name, her name I could not stopcalling until I sat up alone in my crib. Embarrassed, she tells meshe remembers how she phoned me last night to let me knowshe was in the morgue. She laughs as the nurse, whose feet squeakin Minnie Mouse Crocs, arrives with tea. We watch the nursewith eyes that will never remember her face. Thank herfor the toast that is thicker than my mother’s hand.That morphine is…

All night, my psyche comforts itselfwith you. It delights in watching your body travel through landscapes so lush even the bidetis painted with twisting gouache flowers. They frame a lady who rides an elephant,while a gentleman stands holding up a lotus toward her saddle. Then we are in a city, climbingup a brownstone into the home of people you love. I step behind you, smiling quietly into our bodies’clement warmth. Except, instead of the usual deflecting skirt, in my dream I’ve dressed you in mildly tailoredpants. Next, we are in a building, in a bazaar, in a city inhabited by people subtle and endlessshades of a dark cinnamon. We walk through room after room, then stop when we comeacross two leather chairs with frames carved from mangrove and mahogany.The goatskin…

“Liberalism made the modern world, but the modern world is turning against it,” an article in The Economist lamented last year, on the occasion of the magazine’s hundred-and-seventy-fifth anniversary. “Europe and America are in the throes of a popular rebellion against liberal élites, who are seen as self-serving and unable, or unwilling, to solve the problems of ordinary people,” even as authoritarian China is poised to become the world’s largest economy. For a publication that was founded “to campaign for liberalism,” all of this was “profoundly worrying.” The crisis in liberalism has become received wisdom across the political spectrum. Barack Obama included Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018) in his annual list of recommended books; meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has gleefully pronounced liberalism “obsolete.” The right accuses liberals of promoting selfish…

In the pilot of “Evil,” a forensic psychologist and lapsed Catholic named Kristen (Katja Herbers) lies in bed, frozen in terror, her eyes open wide, as a demon—black and shrivelled, with bright-green eyes and long claws—taunts her. He ducks under her nightgown and says, “Hey, you got a scar down here. What is that, a Cesarean?” He skitters into a corner of her bedroom and urinates as she looks on, humiliated and paralyzed. The next night, however, Kristen foils the demon, who has introduced himself as George. She tapes a sign on the ceiling above her bed, and, after George slices off one of her fingers, she stares up. “I can’t read it!” she says in relief—he’s only a night terror, since, she explains, Wernicke’s area, the part of the…

The producer and rapper Channel Tres’s home town may be Los Angeles, but the creative DNA of the Midwest—the soulful dance music of the Detroit icon Moodymann, in particular—forms the hypnotic backbone of his sound. Tres seemed to appear from nowhere in 2017, when his pulsing début single, “Controller,” landed on the Internet; even then, the cool stylishness of his blend of hip-house and G-funk was undeniable. He will traverse his concise but enthralling catalogue in a pair of shows at Brooklyn Steel, Nov. 8-9. ART Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Neue Galerie The psychic torment of Kirchner’s life aside, there’s nothing not to love about this overview of the German Expressionist painter, whose uninhibited palette is played up here with the seductive use of flamingo-pink and Prussian-blue walls. Chronologically arranged, the…

This season of Oscar hopefuls offers a batch of stories spotlighting misunderstood heroes and antiheroes, including “Uncut Gems” (Dec. 13), starring Adam Sandler, in a frenzied dramatic role, as a jewelry dealer in New York’s diamond district whose effort to sell smuggled goods is both sparked and complicated by his heavy sports-gambling debts. His desperate quest to raise funds involves his wife (Idina Menzel), his girlfriend (Julia Fox), a ruthless mobster (Eric Bogosian), and the pro basketball player Kevin Garnett (playing himself); the script, co-written by Ronald Bronstein and the film’s directors, the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, daringly intertwines the drama with real-life sporting events. In Marielle Heller’s drama “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” (Nov. 22), Tom Hanks plays the children’s-television luminary Fred Rogers, who is being profiled…

Isabelle Huppert, the French movie star, marched across the little bridge from Madison Avenue into the Met Breuer, opened and shut her handbag for a security guard, and disappeared into a stairwell. The filmmaker Ira Sachs tried to keep up. “The stairwells here are famous,” he called out. Up a few flights, Huppert frowned at a taped-off door. “This floor is closed,” she said, then continued upward. They emerged into an uncrowded gallery, containing a retrospective of the Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins, known for her photo-realistic renderings of spider webs, star fields, and desert floors. Sachs had wanted to show them to Huppert, he said, because “I felt that there was a relationship to the infinite.” The theme put him in mind of his new film, “Frankie,” set amid the…

The first concussion in the year of concussions was delivered by the right fist of a man whose name I either don’t know or can’t remember. You could say it was a mild concussion, and I always will, but many experts say that there’s no such thing. You have a concussion or you don’t. You can’t be mildly pregnant. But a brain injury is not a baby. We know what a baby is. I didn’t lose consciousness, or even my footing. When it was over, I skated away, with a ludicrous grin but without every item of my equipment or all of my wits. I had a sudden headache and a sense already of an alteration in the fabric of the world beyond the confines of my skull. Teammates leered…

At 7:30 A.M. on a frosty March Saturday in downtown Cincinnati, the director Todd Haynes was on the sixteenth floor of the corporate law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, and he was already, as he puts it, “in the weeds, dealing with every little piece in every shot in every scene.” The firm’s lawyers and secretaries had been banished for the weekend, and the maze of cubicles and passageways was cluttered with cameras, cables, extras, and a drowsy crew. Haynes, a trim, boyish fifty-eight, with dishevelled brindle hair, was standing at the epicenter of his newest drama: a small corner office, whose west-facing windows looked out on skyscrapers and a sliver of the Ohio River. It was from here, in 1999, that Robert Bilott, a partner in the firm and…

Charles Wright’s massive new volume of selected poems, “Oblivion Banjo” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is assembled from nearly fifty years of his “small words,/Out of the wind and the weather.” The poems are banked impressions, like snowdrifts after a blizzard, or deposits left by a receding tide. In them, “places swim up and sink back, and days do,” leaving behind their residue. Amid the ordinary gains and losses of the calendar year arrive the vivid envois of the past: a country drugstore, the “kamikaze Fiats” of Rome, a statue of Dante under alpine snow. Wright was born in 1935, in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee. He attended Davidson College and the University of Iowa and served in the Army, in Italy. He taught for many years at the University of Virginia, publishing…