Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2, 2019 i The New Yorker

When Beck was a child, his mother would take him and his brother to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and ask them to choose a favorite and a least favorite piece. “I remember thinking, That’s a lot of pressure,” he said last month, in the atrium of the museum’s Ahmanson Building, a few weeks before the release of his new album, “Hyperspace.” He often picked Millard Sheets’s “Angel’s Flight,” an American oil painting from 1931, as his favorite. It shows two dark-haired women on a small balcony overlooking Bunker Hill, in downtown L.A. “Bunker Hill is the neighborhood in all the old noir films,” Beck said. “It was very picturesque, kind of seedy, post-Victorian. Then the nineteen-sixties came, and the city dynamited it—they just blew the whole hill…

He was walking back up the street from the seafront when he looked up and saw the woman coming at him. He’d been watching the leaves. Ex-Hurricane Ophelia was heading toward Dublin and the leaves were blowing the wrong way. They were passing him, dashing by him, rolling up the hill. The curfew would be starting in half an hour. He’d been giving out about it earlier, before his wife left for work. Do they think there’s a civil war? It’s only a bit of weather. But, actually, he liked the drama of it. Even now, walking home—striding, he was striding, a man on a mission—he felt involved, ready, ahead of the coming catastrophe. It was doing him good. He was carrying drugs in a paper bag, but he felt…

As the lovely New York spring of 1977 turned into the worst kind of New York summer, I did two things over and over again: I watched Robert Altman’s mid-career masterpiece “3 Women,” at a theatre in midtown, and I read Joan Didion’s astounding third novel, “A Book of Common Prayer.” Released within weeks of each other that year, when I was sixteen, these two revelatory pieces of art shared a strong aesthetic atmosphere, an incisive view of uneasy friendships between women, a deadpan horror of consumerism, and an understanding of how the uncanny can manifest in the everyday. Reading and watching—it wasn’t long before Altman’s and Didion’s projects merged in my mind, where they constituted a kind of mini-Zeitgeist, one that troubled, undid, and then remade my ideas…

The German record label Edition of Contemporary Music, or ECM, which recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, first made its name with elegant, atmospheric jazz albums that turned away from the melee of the post-bop avant-garde. Its most famous product, from 1974, was Keith Jarrett’s “The Köln Concert,” which, to its creator’s chagrin, became a mellow soundtrack to innumerable make-out sessions and coffee-house transactions. ECM also established itself as a purveyor of classical minimalism, with best-selling disks devoted to Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt. The label’s austere design aesthetic—block letters, black-and-white photography, sparse notes—was consistent to the point of self-parody. Circa 1999, no sophisticated stereo stand was complete without an ECM CD showing, say, a picture of a collapsed stone wall. Stock images aside, ECM is one of the greatest labels…

RADICAL INJUSTICE Adam Hochschild, in his piece about America’s deportation of radicals, a hundred years ago, points out that the “most violent anarchists were largely Italian-American” (“Obstruction of Injustice,” November 11th). He cites an attack on Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the perpetrator of which is presumed to have been Carlo Valdinoci, who was associated with a cell of anarchists in New Britain, Connecticut. As a counterpoint to the example of Valdinoci, my greatuncles, Joseph and Erasmo Perretta, lived in New Britain during that time of anti-immigrant fervor. The brothers were accused of murder in June, 1918; convicted, after forty-two minutes of deliberation, in October; and hanged, after lost appeals, on June 27, 1919. The Hartford Courant reported that because “both [were] anarchists” the state did not require “a decided…

Those who take on risk are not thoseWho bear it. The sign said to profit As they do, trade around the oneParticular. Let them credit what you hunt, Let future perform. Results are for yourChildren anyway; returns can be long To notice, and when wrong, will rightUnless the drawdown is steep, or of your own Doing. If only to have known then the now:The thesis did not revert, never worked; You did not moveExcept to the already— And as the prodigy breaks from the pack,Disrupts into the new for just one more Click above the dial, the dealDownriver is how you will get paid, Later, further. Out beyondWhere you just see. Trust the flow Is what he said, sort out the secularAs each day reconciles you Into a morning of…

We are from the borderlike the sun that is born therebehind the eucalyptusshines all dayabove the riverand goes to sleep therebeyond the Rodrígueses’ house. From the border like the moonthat makes the night nearly dayresting its moonlighton the banks of the Cuareim. Like the windthat makes the flags dancelike the raincarries away their shackstogether with ours. All of us are from the borderlike those birdsflying from there to heresinging in a languageeveryone understands. We came from the borderwe go to the borderlike our grandparents and our childreneating bread that the Devil kneadedsuffering in this end of the world. We are the bordermore than any river and moreway morethan any bridge. (Translated, from the Portuñol, by Laura Cesarco Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval.)…

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (New Directions). With an immense cast and wide-ranging erudition, this novel, the culmination of a Hungarian master’s career, offers a sweeping view of a contemporary moment that seems deprived of meaning. In eastern Hungary, a famous scientist known as the Professor renounces his comfortable life for a hut on the outskirts of town—only to be bothered by the news media, his daughter, and a Fascist biker gang. Meanwhile, the town expectantly prepares for the return of a scion of its long-absent aristocracy from Argentina, hoping that he will bring prosperity with him. When his arrival proves disappointing, inexplicable events begin to beset the town. What Is Missing, by Michael Frank (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The odd triangle…

It’s rare for good fiction to come with a credo, rarer still for that credo to be worth remembering, but “Only connect,” the maxim at the heart of E. M. Forster’s masterpiece “Howards End,” lodged long ago in the cultural mainstream. It sounds like a political slogan, something to print on a T-shirt; its true meaning, though, is personal. The phrase occurs to Margaret Schlegel, Forster’s iconoclastic, oddball heroine, as she reflects on Henry Wilcox, the widowed businessman she has decided to marry. Wilcox is orderly and good-humored, but he has cultivated a worldly persona while neglecting his soul. Like Freud, Margaret can see that sex—or its repression—is at the root of the problem: Wilcox fears the dark, disruptive power that “bodily passion” might unleash. His self is split; her…

The New York-born playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis writes in tender, funny strokes about the loud-mouthed and the down-and-out, from Rikers Island inmates (“Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train”) to a retired cop (the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Between Riverside and Crazy”). His new play, “Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven,” in previews at the Atlantic Theatre Company, is set in a women’s halfway house. John Ortiz directs a cast featuring (from left to right) Liza Colón-Zayas, Elizabeth Canavan, and Elizabeth Rodriguez. ART “Garry Winogrand: Color” Brooklyn Museum Winogrand once defined a photograph as “what something looks like to a camera.” Keep that in mind when viewing this fiercely pleasurable, if somewhat flawed, show, consisting mainly of hundreds of digitally projected Kodachrome slides, most from the nineteen-sixties. Winogrand, the all-time champion of street photography,…

Roger McNamee started his career in 1982, as a twenty-six-year-old analyst at the investment firm T. Rowe Price. The personal-computer revolution was just beginning. He invested in Electronic Arts (now a leading video-game maker) and Sybase (a pioneering database firm), among others, eventually running one of the most successful funds in the industry. In 1991, he partnered with the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where he listened to pitches for Netscape and Amazon. He invested in those companies, too, and a few years later he cofounded Silver Lake Partners. The businesses in Silver Lake’s portfolio now produce two hundred and thirty billion dollars in annual revenue and employ three hundred and seventy thousand people. In the early two-thousands, McNamee helped create a private-equity firm, Elevation Partners, which invested two hundred and…

Earlier this year, the Parole Preparation Project put out a call for volunteers, and more than a hundred people applied. Many were law students and lawyers, but there was also a Planet Fitness employee, a pediatric I.C.U. nurse, a professor of philosophy, a software engineer, a waiter, and a translator. Parole Prep invited them to an orientation, and, one Wednesday evening last April, some eighty people assembled in a lecture hall at New York University School of Law. Most were in their twenties or thirties. Three-quarters were female. A few people carried reusable water bottles; one older woman walked in with a cane. Michelle Lewin, who is thirty-two years old and the executive director of Parole Prep, stood at the front of the room, wearing a loose-fitting brown dress and…