Innholdsfortegnelse for November 25, 2019 i The New Yorker

In 2010, Dani Rozman had just graduated from the University of Wisconsin. He was so deliberate and thoughtful that his friends claimed it was inevitable that he’d end up a history professor with a closet full of cardigans. But Rozman went to Argentina instead, and wound up in Mendoza, the hub of the country’s wine scene, working at a startup that helped wealthy people realize their wine dreams—you could buy a vineyard from afar, have someone else farm it, design the labels, and receive cases of “your” wine to show off at dinner parties. One summer, Rozman went to Itata, at the southern tip of Chile’s wine-producing region, to work the grape harvest at a local winery. He had the impression that winemakers were like the clean-cut guys in…

The sidewalks of north Park Slope must be among the narrowest and most uneven in Brooklyn. They crash against the stoops of landmarked brownstones and split over the roots of oak and sycamore trees, menacing the ankles of pedestrians. Baby strollers compete for space with dogs of all sizes, shoals of high-school students, and shopping carts from the Park Slope Food Co-op. Here comes one now, rattling catastrophically, like Max Roach whaling on the high hat. It’s pushed by a Co-op member, who is accompanied by another, in an orange crossing-guard vest: a walker, in Co-op parlance, who will return the cart after the shopper has unloaded her groceries at her house or her car, or hauled them into the Grand Army Plaza subway station. It is against one of…

Autumn is the season for Native America. There are the cool nights and warm days of Indian summer and the genial query “What’s Indian about this weather?” More wearisome is the annual fight over the legacy of Christopher Columbus—a bold explorer dear to Italian-American communities, but someone who brought to this continent forms of slavery that would devastate indigenous populations for centuries. Football season is in full swing, and the team in the nation’s capital revels each week in a racist performance passed off as “just good fun.” As baseball season closes, one prays that Atlanta (or even semi-evolved Cleveland) will not advance to the World Series. Next up is Halloween, typically featuring “Native American Brave” and “Sexy Indian Princess” costumes. November brings Native American Heritage Month and tracks a…

In the summer of 2010, at a block party in downtown Manhattan, a sixteen-year-old named Patrick Morales did something that had become a habit for him: he charged his way to the front of the crowd and began to rap. Given his talent and charisma, the intrusion was welcome. In the audience was a Harlem producer named Eric Adiele, who later said that Morales struck him as “this kind of rapping … New York Bart Simpson.” At the party, once the background music stopped, Morales—who is half Puerto Rican and half Irish, and goes by Wiki—continued to rap. Adiele approached Wiki about collaborating. (“I make beats, you’re not corny,” Adiele, who goes by Sporting Life, told him.) Eventually, the pair, along with another rapper, named Hak (Hakeem Lewis), formed a…

PERSPECTIVES ON AGING Arthur Krystal’s meditation on the pains and opportunities of growing older was thoughtful and comprehensive, but, while reading, all I could think of was how many elderly people buck the trends that he writes about (A Critic at Large, November 4th). Picasso, for example, painted until his death, at the age of ninety-one, and his late work was pretty good. Although infirmity is unwelcome, and, for many of us, likely inevitable, we should keep aiming to get the most out of life—or die trying. I’m a septuagenarian, and I still go skydiving with my peers. When asked why I continue to do so, I say that I’m fairly healthy and am searching for the meaning of life—like many of us are, at all ages. Let’s not overthink…

Twice a month, when my daughter, Ella, spends the weekend with me, my apartment turns into a cooking school. Ella is thirteen and started to make cookies and scones a few years ago. She moved on to tarts, fresh tagliatelle, and, lately, croissants. Early on Saturdays, before heading to our local green market, we have impassioned conversations about her dinner plans. Pork adobo with citrus and coriander, she asks me, or red lentils simmered Ethiopian-style, with fresh tomatoes and berbere? And then she’s sure to ask if she can bake. I’m already thinking of the scabs of flour I’ll be scraping off my counter on Monday morning, and of how much pâtisserie I’ll have consumed, but I give in. I love watching the skill and authority of her fingers in…

Dear Mr. Jackson, Thank you for your music, and thank you for reading this far in a letter, if it reaches you, from a stranger. Though we have never met face to face, I could say that I’ve known you since I was a teen-ager growing up in Pittsburgh, Pa., in the fifties, born fifteen years or so before you were born, Mr. Jackson, and I wanted to be you, or rather wanted with all my soul, a soul real to me as the faces of people in my family, to sing like you would sing the music we both inherited and you would keep alive in the eighties, nineties with your talent and gifts. Listening to your voice, I hear the old music again—the Dells, Diablos, Drifters, Flamingos, Spaniels,…

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, by Jung Chang (Knopf). Famed for their marriages to leading political figures, the three Soong sisters were born in Shanghai in the late nineteenth century, and were among the first Chinese women to be educated in America. Ching-ling married Sun Yat-sen, whose revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty; May-ling married Sun’s successor, Chiang Kai-shek; and Ei-ling married a finance minister in Chiang’s Nationalist government. This richly researched history shows how these cosmopolitan, headstrong women exploited their proximity to power. Ching-ling’s support for the Communists, who eventually defeated the Nationalists in a civil war, left a permanent rift in the family. She had long despised Chiang for reasons both ideological and personal. The Season, by Kristen Richardson (Norton). Sharply observed and oddly timely, this history of…

Midway through the dead-hearted new Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show,” there’s a scene that flirts with the unruly potential the series wastes. In it, Alex Levy, a beloved morning-TV anchor played by Jennifer Aniston, hosts a swank karaoke benefit for a Broadway charity. Naturally, she and her news-director nemesis—a smiling cobra played by Billy Crudup—end up singing a duet of Stephen Sondheim’s “Not While I’m Around.” Watching them, a minor character marvels, “What the fuck is going on?” His companion answers, “I don’t know, but it’s weird and fascinating and I’m super into it.” That’s basically what I was hoping for with “The Morning Show,” the star-crossed series set at a fictionalized “Today” show, in the midst of the #MeToo crisis: something flawed but electric, full of odd,…

It took the American artist Liza Lou five years, from 1991 to 1996, and thirty million beads to complete her life-size sculpture “Kitchen” (a detail is pictured)—both a labor of love and a feminist critique of undervalued domestic labor. It’s on view, starting Nov. 22, in “Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019,” an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of more than eighty pieces by some sixty artists, from Robert Rauschenberg to Simone Leigh, who have experimented with unorthodox materials and hands-on approaches. CLASSICAL MUSIC Splinter Reeds Uptown Underground The bicoastal new-music series Permutations hosts the New York début of Splinter Reeds, a Bay Area reed quintet—a grouping, distinct from the conventional woodwind quintet, that integrates a saxophone and a bass clarinet for a more closely related blend of instrumental voices.…

For the table to be round.For the teapot to be bottomless.For your elders to compose the menu. For the waiter to recite the order back.For the fish-maw soup to be ladled at the table.For red vinegar to bloom in it, a submerged flower. For the bright lights and immaculate tablecloth.For the extra order of Singapore noodles.For the white blossoms on Chinese broccoli. For your mother to warn you which sauces are hot.For your brother to turn the lazy Susan just when you need it.For the cloth napkin to slide to the floor. For rice in a hexagonal lacquered box.For the hill of bones on your tiny plate.For the Wash ’n Dri packet after the lobster. For the sea bass to give up its spine without resistance.For your aunt to serve…

You were alreadylosing your eyesightlast winter in Romewhen you paused in the doorwayat nine o’clock on a Saturday morningand a baker swept byon a shiny bicyclewaving a cap and singingunder his breath,you didn’t know bakers worewhite aprons dusted with flourand floated around the citylike angelson a freshly baked day,you weren’t sure whymorning haltedup and down the streetas you stood in the doorwayand a baker winged byon a weekend morningso new and pristinethat you looked into the skyand for one undiminished instantof misplaced timeyou saw brightness,brightness everywhere,before a shadow crossedthe rooftopsand it was blotted out.…

The mustache had to go. A classic nineteenth-century handlebar, it was far too recognizable, so William Monroe Trotter shaved it off. In addition to the disguise, he arranged to take a cooking class in his boarding house, evincing a sudden interest that would have surprised his wife, mother, and two sisters. Then he spent six weeks skulking around New York, searching for a ship that would hire him, finally finding work as a scullion on a small steamer headed across the Atlantic. Seaman’s papers carried him as far as Le Havre, where, to his dismay, the captain informed him that crew members were not allowed to disembark, so he devised a ruse that involved delivering a letter to shore. Once there, having left all his possessions behind and still dressed…