Innholdsfortegnelse for February 3, 2020 i The New Yorker

Fheadlines last week for dissing Bernie Sanders (“Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him,” she says in a forthcoming documentary), she went to a Hollywood dinner for a nonprofit whose aim is to “make space for women to be heard.” Thirty-four attendees waited eagerly for Clinton in a house belonging to Bozoma Saint John, the chief marketing officer of the talent company Endeavor, to talk about Vital Voices, the women’s-empowerment organization that Clinton helped start in 1997. Patricia Arquette studied a plaque on Saint John’s desk. “Feminist AF!” she read aloud. “That’s so good.” The previous week, she had urged her Twitter followers not to count Sanders out. (Arquette had no comment on Clinton’s Bernie bashing.) Sally Field, in polka dots, admired a framed definition of the…

The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. “The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America,” a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937. “In the Legislatures, over the radio, at the luncheon table, in the drawing rooms, at meetings of forums and in all kinds of groups of citizens everywhere, people are talking about the democratic way of life.” People bickered and people hollered, and they also made rules. “You are a liar!” one guy shouted from the audience during a political debate heard on the radio by ten million Americans, from Missoula to Tallahassee. “Now, now, we don’t allow…

At the Karowe diamond mine, in Botswana, the most highly secured section of the compound is known as the Red Zone. This is where the gems are sorted. To enter, you must walk, alone, through a sequence of thick doors activated by fingerprint scans. Inside, there are strict rules. You cannot touch another human being. Everyone must wear a blue, pocketless smock. Phones are not allowed. In September, when I visited Karowe, I was given special dispensation to carry a notebook and a pen into the Red Zone. I was told that if I dropped my things I should bend down slowly to retrieve them, then stand up and show the recovered items to the nearest camera. On leaving the Red Zone, everyone, including chief executives, is strip-searched. Nobody in…

High on the list was trying not to have the older boys decide to de-pants you and then run your pants up the flagpole, leaving you in your underwear, and maybe bloodied if you’d struggled—not that it helped, because they were bigger and stronger—and your pants flapping way up against the sky over the schoolyard. They mostly did this to Freddy Bird—nobody knew why, but it happened a lot. It was best to get away from him when they started to get into that mood—their let’s-depants-somebody mood. Oh, there’s Freddy Bird. You could see them thinking it. You had to slip sideways, not in an obvious way but as if you were drifting for no real reason, or maybe the wind was shoving you and you weren’t really paying attention,…

The new literature of minimalism is full of stressful advice. Pack up all your possessions, unpack things only as needed, give away everything that’s still packed after a month. Or wake up early, pick up every item you own, and consider whether or not it sparks joy. See if you can wear just thirty-three items of clothing for three months. Know that it’s possible to live abundantly with only a hundred possessions. Don’t organize—purge. Digitize your photos. Get rid of the things you bought to impress people. Downsize your apartment. Think constantly about what will enable you to live the best life possible. Never buy anything on sale. Recently, I spent a few months absorbing the new minimalist gospel, beginning with Marie Kondo, the celebrity decluttering guru, whose book “The…

In the cover story of the February issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Gwyneth Paltrow—photographed wearing a Tom Ford fuchsia “anatomical breastplate”—announced, not for the first time, that she will “literally never” star in a film again. How could empty days spent emoting compare to the constant spiritual high of building a multipronged, culturally influential “wellness” empire, in a sun-choked office in Santa Monica? Don’t call Paltrow an actor; she is an entrepreneur. She founded her lifestyle company, Goop, in 2008, as a recommendations newsletter. Reported to be worth around two hundred and fifty million dollars, it has spawned a Web site, multiple stores, a magazine, a podcast, cookbooks—and now a slick six-episode series, “The Goop Lab,” for Netflix, that is either the apex or the nadir of infotainment: irresistibly self-aware and…

ODYSSEUS IN SPAIN I read with interest Giles Harvey’s piece about the Spanish novelist Javier Cercas’s long struggle with the “historical memory” of Francisco Franco’s reign (A Critic at Large, January 13th). “D.I.Y. history,” as Harvey calls it, is alive and well in Spain, in spite of historians’ warnings against its anti-intellectualism and, worse, its use in the service of political goals. Cercas himself, fed up with the predictable vitriol over the Civil War, has joined the detractors even as he continues to write about Spain’s turbulent past. Cercas’s case is compelling in the age of fake history and fake news: he is something of an Everyman, whose narrator insists on getting the story right, plowing through archives and tracking down eyewitnesses. Cercas’s history-fictions are models for members of any…

Advisory Note Since the Middle Ages, animals have been put on trial for violating the supreme, metaphorical, social, and human order (themselves, incidentally, understood and consciously laid out, if not as a pure reproduction of metaphysical order then as its purest possible reflection). They recognized the conscious (what, you think dogs are stupid? they’re smarter than some of us) or half-conscious (given each and every animal species belonging to an empowered communal soul) assumption of responsibility for the representation of, at the very least, the forces of light or darkness. As a reflection of the fundamental world-organizing foundations of not only human existence but all of existence, these judicial proceedings were and, at times, served as the only guarantee of a person’s belonging not only to his earthly but also…

The sun eats away at the earth, or the earth eats awayat itself and burning up, I sip at punch.So well practiced at thisliving. I have a way of seeing things as they are: it’s historythat’s done this to me.It’s the year I’m told my body will turn rotten,my money talks but not enough,I feel my body turnagainst me. Some days I want to spitme out, the whole mess of me,but mostly I am good and quiet.How much silence buys me mercy, how muchsilence covers all the lives it takes to make me. In the event of every day and its newnessof disaster, find me sunning on the rooftop, pleasedon’t ask anything of me. If I could be anythingI would be the wind, if I could be nothingI would be.…

Hymns of the Republic, by S. C. Gwynne (Scribner). In August, 1864, General Ulysses S. Grant, reflecting on threats to the Union cause, wrote that the Confederacy’s “only hope now is a divided North.” He was right to be worried. As this taut, propulsive history of the war’s final year demonstrates, the infighting that was roiling Northern politics nearly changed the course of history. President Lincoln, seeking reëlection, faced exhausted voters, strident opposition, assaults from within his own party over the Emancipation Proclamation, and even calls for unconditional peace. His allies considered electoral victory “an impossibility,” but knew that any other result would imperil the war effort—a reminder that a deeply divided America is one decidedly up for grabs. Virginia Woolf, by Gillian Gill (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). In this vibrant…

“Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara,” which opens on Jan. 30 at the Met, tells the epic story of a network of African cultures that flourished, from the fourth century through the nineteenth, in the vast region that now encompasses Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal. Among the two hundred treasures on view—in wood, stone, gold, ceramic, bronze, cloth, and more—are the magnificent figures pictured above, of a mother and child and a man with a turned head, both made by the Bamana people of Mali. NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. iann dior Gramercy Theatre When iann dior seemingly appeared like magic last year, with millions of streams on SoundCloud, accusations that he was…

No one knows what happened to Gabriel’s body. Born into slavery the year his country declared its freedom, he trained as a plantation blacksmith and was hired out to foundries in Richmond, Virginia, where he befriended other enslaved people. Together, they absorbed, from the revolutionary spirit of the era, ideas of independence that were never meant for them. Gabriel kept hammering out whatever his masters demanded, but in secret he began to forge a network of thousands of enslaved and free blacks who planned to rally under a flag stitched with borrowed words: “Death or Liberty.” But a terrible thunderstorm flooded the roads on what was to be the day of their revolt, in August, 1800, and during the delay two of the conspirators betrayed the rest. Within a few…

Say you host a late-night talk show and you have Paul McCartney as a guest. He’s game for anything. When Jimmy Fallon had this opportunity, in the fall of 2018, the “Tonight Show” came up with a benign prank. Tour groups at 30 Rockefeller Plaza were herded into an elevator. When the elevator doors opened, they saw a tableau of Fallon and McCartney playing Ping-Pong, or sitting in armchairs, smoking pipes. Each time, a camera would catch the elevator full of tourists gasping and screaming like teenagers in 1964. Then, before they could process what they’d seen, the doors would close. The routine, which has been watched more than four million times on YouTube, is amusing, in the vein of “Candid Camera.” McCartney is used as a sight gag, an…

Before closing the book on that town and those people, the author has us pause for a few final images and thoughts framed by regret, shame, and horror. The book? Toni Morrison’s début novel, “The Bluest Eye,” which turns fifty this year. As the story ends, one of its protagonists, the blighted Pecola Breedlove, has been more or less abandoned by the townspeople, who have treated her with scorn for most of her life; now she’s left to wander the streets in madness: The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on her shoulders, she flailed her arms like a…

Give me a ladder to climb—the jungle gym of the corporate org chart, the hazy inner ranks of some large church, the series of badges and pins upon which military order is maintained—and I can spin out a story about America. Hierarchy is our great imaginative canvas. We don’t want to know just about the inner workings of the mob, but also about how the one guy became the boss; follow not just baseball but the World Series; if the hero’s a priest, he’d better have a plan to be Pope. Tell us how you survived, sure, but also how you got over. There’s a technical aspect to this narrative preference: upward motion feels like forward motion, and success has beats that are easy to chart and make propulsive. But…