Innholdsfortegnelse for December 9, 2019 i The New Yorker

Reality being what it is right now, doesn’t an alternative sound tempting? That’s what I was thinking the other day, in my apartment, when I adjusted the Velcro straps on my Oculus Quest, a chunky virtual-reality headset made of black plastic, rubber, and a few billion transistors. The headset blocks all ambient light from the wearer’s eyes—the razzle-dazzle happens inside. I looked as if a gerbil’s casket had been plastered onto the upper half of my face. There was a faint new-car smell. I pressed the Power button and found myself in the center of a computer-rendered 3-D glass geodesic dome with a million-dollar view of mountains. Sensors in the V.R. headset tracked my movements and instantaneously rejiggered the mise-en-scène. Gazing up, I saw stars; turning full circle, I…

On August 11th, two weeks after Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent soldiers in to pacify the Indian state of Kashmir, a reporter appeared on the news channel Republic TV, riding a motor scooter through the city of Srinagar. She was there to assure viewers that, whatever else they might be hearing, the situation was remarkably calm. “You can see banks here and commercial complexes,” the reporter, Sweta Srivastava, said, as she wound her way past local landmarks. “The situation makes you feel good, because the situation is returning to normal, and the locals are ready to live their lives normally again.” She conducted no interviews; there was no one on the streets to talk to. Other coverage on Republic TV showed people dancing ecstatically, along with the words “Jubilant Indians…

When I was about halfway between twenty and thirty, I lived in a large, run-down house that other people thought was romantic. There was a claw-foot tub with squeaky knobs, and philodendrons that draped over the bannisters. The door to my bedroom was at least twelve feet tall. I installed a coatrack over the top, and whenever I needed to retrieve a jacket, or a towel, I stood on my desk chair, swivelling uncertainly. There were six of us in the house. We were all about the same age, and at some point during the summer—I had moved in at the beginning of March, when the mornings were still cold, veins of ice glittering over the front steps—this became claustrophobic, unbearable. The house smelled of sweat and bike tires and…

Serotonin, by Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this novel of midlife collapse, Houellebecq reprises his attack on the ideological pretensions of contemporary Western society. A misanthropic agronomist, after discovering the infidelity of his girlfriend (whom he already despised), abandons Paris—“infested with eco-friendly bourgeois”—for Normandy, where he once lived and loved happily. But the countryside proves just as bleak: free trade has devastated agriculture, farmers are resorting to violence, and insipid liberal notions of progress have stripped the world of eros and beauty. Houellebecq indulges in his trademark offensiveness, but the misogynist jabs feel pro forma. More notable is the specificity of his satire—he has a degree in agronomy—and the seriousness of his engagement with the economic asperities of provincial France in…

LITTLE ENGLAND Isaac Chotiner, in his exploration of the United Kingdom’s problematic relationships with Europe and the Commonwealth, rightly emphasized the shift in the country’s global position during the mid-twentieth century—which resulted from its loss of empire and its struggle to establish a new identity for itself—as a reason for its current populist predicament (A Critic at Large, November 18th). I believe that the U.K.’s problems with Europe are also due to the demise of another feature of postwar British politics: the welfare state. Although the days of the sun never setting on the British Empire were over, we were nevertheless able to offer our citizens a social safety net that we hoped would be the envy of the world. The conservative political revolution of the nineteen-eighties, in both the…

What work will you leave behindI ask the tailorWho has sewn the button upon my shoeI can walk again Yesterday everything felt so hopelessNow I have the energy to sit in the sunAll of the damned seething bathsNow I am finally on my own When I go places I call herAnd unload my fashionable happenstanceI used to stop in the street and pick up an acornThere were so many things I used to do In the middle of the fireI went and thought to mention it to the ghostI have already burned, it saidIts face was like my father’s but was different What work will you leave behindI asked myself while in the rainOh, this and that, it answered meAnd handed me the stars, then the moon…

Side effects include dry spells, dry coughs, dry eyes & crying,Photosensitivity, blurred vision, trouble sleeping, trouble with gravity,Cold feet, weight gain, weight loss, hair loss, blood lust & blood loss,Memory loss, loss of appetite, bellyaches, headaches, heartaches,Backaches, bruises, blueness, redness, whiteness, discoloration,Itching, wrinkling, slouching, lying, backbiting, a taste for metal,A taste for meddling & mixed messaging, a taste for witches’Brews brewed by the motherfuckers who slew all the witches.Side effects include blockages & blockades, a block-Head-of-State-Your-business-as-usual, a block-head-strong-arm-of-the-law,A block-head-shot-gun-point-and-shoot, down-fall-out shelters.Side effects include nausea, dizziness, numbness, dumbness,Dementias, deletions, leeches, letches, hexes, hoaxes, hocus-pocuses,And, if there is justice, spiritual, moral, federal, state, & local charges.…

You go out to dance—or to nod your head—with the promise of mystery. You might hear the most enchanting tune ever, and never discover what it was. A band at least tells you its name. D.j.s keep secrets; their selections are often hidden from view, and return to you in fragments—a hellish bass line, a sped-up vocal, drums that reprogram your bodily rhythms. So much of the ritual of dance music involves trying to recover a moment that just whizzed past you, a couple of fleeting minutes that were part of a d.j.’s hours-long mix, a few steps along a continuous journey. Your only clues are how it felt. The London producer Burial makes music about dance music—about that search for something life-changing. He began releasing singles in the early…

For the first few centuries of its existence, the Vienna Boys’ Choir performed only for the imperial court. Nowadays, the well-drilled ensemble, having traded its cadet uniforms for jaunty sailor suits, is more inclusive: its trebles hail from all over the world and entertain audiences on five continents. At the boys’ annual holiday concert at Carnegie Hall, on Dec. 8, they apply their plangent sound to a grab bag of holiday-themed tunes that include “Adeste Fideles,” “Let It Snow!,” “O Holy Night,” and other duly polished chestnuts. NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Mary Halvorson The Stone at the New School Jimi Hendrix died too soon to win a MacArthur “genius” grant, but Mary Halvorson, a guitarist with…

The other day, I had a White Lady, followed by a Love Thrill and a Hanky Panky. They made a great team. All three were supplied to me by Federico, at the Savoy Hotel, in London. Enter the lobby, make a left, trot up the stairs, and you come to the American Bar, a longtime shrine at which many parched pilgrims have sought relief. The suave and bearded Federico is one of the high priests who, clad in white jackets, serve behind the bar, and I watched in reverence as he aerated the egg white that would soften the blow of my White Lady. I took a sip. It was like being kicked by a cloud. The White Lady was not invented at the Savoy, and a spritz of mystery…

In the summer of 2014, a year before the Whitney Museum of American Art reopened to the public in its new, downtown quarters on Gansevoort Street, David Hammons and several other artists were invited to walk through the unfinished galleries. The Whitney curators Scott Rothkopf and Donna de Salvo were planning a sequence of exhibitions that would inaugurate the fifth floor as an open, undivided space, and Hammons was an obvious but impossible candidate: an internationally renowned African-American artist who, during the past four decades, had risen to the summit of the art world by following his own rules, one of which was to turn down invitations from leading museums. Hammons was standing near the big fifth-floor windows that overlooked the Hudson when Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, joined him.…

There is a literature dedicated to fire—think of Dante, or Dylan Thomas’s “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”—and there is a literature consumed by fire quite literally. A seller of rare books I know once issued an entire catalogue devoted to books given over to the flames. The history of burnt offerings is long and varied, but among its highlights is William Carlos Williams’s first book, “Poems” (1909), most copies of which were destroyed when the shed they were stored in burned down. (Given that Williams was known to be rather ashamed of his début, one wonders if he had a hand in the conflagration.) There’s also Fire!!, the upstart effort of a younger Harlem Renaissance set that included Wallace Thurman and Zora Neale…

In the opening sequence of Damon Lindelof’s version of Alan Moore’s 1986 graphic novel, “Watchmen,” a seven-year-old black boy sits alone in the Dreamland, a Tulsa cinema, staring rapt at a flickering silent Western called “Trust in the Law.” The hero is Bass Reeves, the Black Marshal of Oklahoma, a handsome figure who pulls off a black hood to reveal a badge. Onscreen, another boy, this one white, gazes in admiration at the Marshal, as he saves the day. “There will be no mob justice today! Trust in the law,” Reeves says, as the boy in the audience says the words with him, smiling. Just then, a siren goes off outside the theatre. The black boy is about to be swept up in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre—the country’s most…