Innholdsfortegnelse for January 6, 2020 i The New Yorker

My father was forty-five or forty-six when he had a heart attack. This trouble with his heart was surprising, since for all the years we had known him as children his trouble was his stomach and his indigestion, requiring bottles and bottles of a particular brand of medicinal stomach powder, which he never had the foresight to buy when he was all right, preferring instead during a crisis to send his children on the long walk to the local pharmacy for the powder. A couple of years after this heart trouble, my father was put on half pay by the Trinidad Guardian, the newspaper for which he worked. I was in school in England when this happened, and I worried about the effect of this half pay on my family;…

Oswaldo Vidal Martín always wears the same thing to court: a striped overshirt, its wide collar and cuffs woven with geometric patterns and flowers. His pants are cherry red, with white stripes. Martín is Guatemalan and works as a court interpreter, so clerks generally assume that he is there to translate for Spanish speakers. But any Guatemalan who sees his clothing, which is called traje típico, knows that Martín is indigenous. “My Spanish is more conversational,” Martín told me. “I still have some difficulties with it.” He interprets English for migrants who speak his mother tongue, a Mayan language called Mam. Martín, who came to the United States with his parents in 1999, when he was four, was studying to be an engineer when the trickle of Mam speakers migrating…

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, by Elif Shafak (Bloomsbury). Imagining the life behind a newspaper story—the discovery of a murdered prostitute in a dumpster in Istanbul—this kaleidoscopic novel celebrates the vibrancy of its protagonist, Leila. She flees her home city to escape sexual abuse only to be sold immediately into sex work. During the final moments of her life, Leila revisits memories of loss and love; afterward, her five closest friends give her the burial she deserves. Although Leila’s life is suffused with tragedy, Shafak focusses on her loyalty and charm, on the joy that she finds in her relationships, and on the eccentricities of Istanbul. Agent Running in the Field, by John le Carré (Viking). The prolific eighty-eight-year-old author’s latest novel, a tense story laced with…

THE GIN CRAZE Many thanks to Anthony Lane for confirming the historical and cultural pedigree of the gin-and-tonic, which I and many friends in British-ruled Hong Kong regarded as more or less the official colonial drink (“Ginmania,” December 9th). Its popularity is a legacy of the Victorian era, when malaria plagued the territory. (As Lane points out, the quinine in tonic water combatted the disease.) I used to live in the colony’s mordantly named “Happy Valley” area. It was a malarial marsh in the nineteenth century, and now it’s home to a famous horse-racing track and several cemeteries, where some of the malaria victims rest. Perhaps more gin-and-tonic would have been in order; Winston Churchill credited the drink with saving “more Englishmen’s lives, and minds, than all the doctors in…

Once, I slapped my sister with the back of my hand.We were so small, but I wanted to know how it felt: my hand raised high acrossthe opposite shoulder, slicing down like a trapeze. Her face caught my hand. I’d slapped her in ouryellow room with circus animals on the curtains. I don’t rememberhow it felt. I was a rough child. I said No. I said These are my things.I was speaking, usually, of my socks: white, athletic, thin and already grayon the bottom, never where I left them. I was speaking of my fists raining downon my brother’s back. My sister’s. Socks. In the fourth grade, in California,I kicked Charles in the testicles. At that school, we played sock ball: hit the red playground ballwith the sides of our…

Abigail Disney remembers the moment, two decades ago, when she no longer wanted to fly on her family’s private plane. Disney is the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, who founded the Disney company with his younger brother, Walt, in 1923, and her father was a longtime senior executive there. Abigail’s parents owned a Boeing 737, one of the largest private-aircraft models on the market, and they let her use it for family trips. For many years, when Abigail was raising her four children, she would take the plane to Ireland, to visit her mother’s castle. The plane “was like a flying playpen,” Abigail told me recently. “I’ve known the pilot since I was a teen-ager.” One day, when her children were older, she took an overnight flight from California to…

The dead warbler started to singas she whom I lovebent down to pick him up with two reluctant fingers,maybe the small finger (of the left hand)curling, as at dinner,and carry him homeand quietly put himinto a see-through plastic bagas she did for salmon and roast chicken and pie. I want to say “alas poor warbler”but warblers die too,of disease, of age, of accidents,as all birds do. And like all birdsthey sing when they’re buried,in this case in the freezer,a cold graveyard,two cartons of ice cream,one vanilla, one dulce de leche,to remember him by. He was lifelike stiff and unapologeticand he sang from time to time, dead or not,a “rising trill,” as the book says,in the upper levels where the worms are.…

“If you dare nothing, you can change nothing,” the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth recently told the magazine Profil. “In the moment of paralysis and the resulting decay, there is always the possibility of bringing something about.” Neuwirth was addressing the creative stasis at international opera houses, where a few dozen canonical pieces are heard with numbing frequency. The reactionary outlook of these institutions is evident in the fact that operas by female composers remain unusual. Neuwirth’s “Orlando,” a radical feminist adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, recently had its première at the Vienna State Opera. It stands in contrast to a Viennese season that features women dying of consumption, flinging themselves off buildings, and riding horses into funeral pyres. Notwithstanding the conservatism of the opera business, many top houses offer a…

ART “Making Marvels” Metropolitan Museum This immense exhibition features a trove of impossibly opulent European objects from the mid-sixteenth to the eighteenth century, showcasing the scientific theories and technologies of the time—as well as the wealth of royal collectors. The parade of curiosities begins with “The Imser Clock,” ca. 1554-61, which astounded the imperial court of Ferdinand I with its representation of planetary positions. A projected montage of closeup footage shows the complex, gilded timepiece in action, ticking and chiming as its mechanical figurines rotate. (The show, which might otherwise be weighed down by its abundance of inert filigree, is enlivened by beautifully produced videos like this one.) Presented among the automata, astrolabes, and spring-powered models of the universe are wonders of the natural world. The astonishing Dresden Green, the…

When “West Side Story” débuted, in 1957, critics praised its lush, syncopated score, by Leonard Bernstein; its sardonic lyrics, by Stephen Sondheim; and the profane energy of Arthur Laurents’s script. But the choreography of Jerome Robbins, who also directed the musical, was its greatest revelation: his finger-snapping gang members seamlessly combined ballet moves with the body language of the street. In the subsequent six decades, some critics have suggested that the show’s portrayal of gang warfare was a bit romantic. Others have noted that the creators weren’t versed in Latino culture. Nevertheless, whenever “West Side Story” was revived on Broadway, the Sharks and the Jets moved exactly as Robbins had imagined them. So when it was announced that a new Broadway production would open in February, staged by the Belgian…

In August of 1972, the Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal was working on an article about theatre in New York’s Chinatown. He was focussing on the challenges faced by performers who had recently emigrated from Hong Kong and Taiwan. They were shut out of mainstream productions, and the grassroots theatre scene was still maturing. Blumenthal’s editor asked a colleague named Frank Ching, who presumably knew a bit more about that part of town, to look the piece over. Ching felt that Blumenthal cast the broader Chinese-American population as foreign. He recommended some more interesting artists to Blumenthal, who ended up including a parenthetical mention of an up-and-coming playwright named Frank Chin. Ching likely believed that he was doing a favor for Chin, whose “Chickencoop Chinaman” had opened at the American Place…

Soledad Barrio has a way of entering the stage like an animal circling her prey. She is a flamenco dancer, so her back is arched in a majestic serpentine curve, her arms and hands an ornamental filigree. This is not a glamorous diva in a ruffle-trained gown but a woman cut from plain black cloth, buttoned high, fully covered. We can see from the slight sag of her jawline that she is not young anymore—a fact that, if anything, adds to her power. As the musicians strum, pick, beat, clap, and sing, her heels break into staccato rhythmic patterns. Finally, she dives into a low, plunging turn, and all decorum falls away. Her hands clutch and flay, she squats with legs wide as in childbirth, and her body pitches and…