Innholdsfortegnelse for February 10, 2020 i The New Yorker

In her memoir “Fierce Attachments,” Vivian Gornick describes the formative afternoons that she spent with Nettie, a neighbor in the Bronx apartment building where she grew up. In a building full of street-smart Jews, Nettie, a beautiful Ukrainian widow with a young son and a dreamy, childlike manner, was one of the lone Gentiles. She was a lacemaker, and, after school, Vivian would sit at Nettie’s kitchen table, watching her work the fabric and listening to her spin fantasies about money and love. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I’m coming off the trolley car and I slip and sprain my ankle and they take me to the hospital and the doctor who comes to help me is tall and so handsome, and kind and gentle, and he looks into my…

The first night the man orders an apple fritter, it is three in the morning, the street lamp is broken, and the nightly fog obscures the waterfront’s run-down buildings, except for Chuck’s Donuts, with its cool fluorescent glow. “Isn’t it a bit early for an apple fritter?” the owner’s twelve-year-old daughter, Kayley, deadpans from behind the counter, and Tevy, four years older, rolls her eyes and says to her sister, “You watch too much TV.” The man ignores them both, sits down at a booth, and proceeds to stare out the window, at the busted potential of this small city’s downtown. Kayley studies the man’s reflection in the window. He’s older but not old, younger than her parents, and his wiry mustache seems misplaced, from a different decade. His face…

A Game of Birds and Wolves, by Simon Parkin (Little, Brown). In 1941, the British Navy faced a seemingly insurmountable threat from the German U-boat fleet, whose “wolfpack” tactics baffled Allied commanders. In this engaging history, Parkin tells how members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, known as Wrens, helped develop a tactical training game that led to a decisive turning point in the war. They brought statistical and mathematical sophistication to their task, turning the floor of their control room into a giant game board and running countless reënactments and hypothetical scenarios. Parkin paints a vivid picture of training sessions in which seasoned sailors chafed at being tutored by “an inexperienced girl,” and captures each maneuver in the ensuing sea battles with zeal. Dominion, by Tom Holland (Basic Books).…

SURVIVING ABUSE Brittany Smith’s case, as portrayed in Elizabeth Flock’s powerful article about abused women and the Stand Your Ground defense, demonstrates that, despite increased awareness of gender-based violence, more work must be done to address the public perception of the problem (“A Violent Defense,” January 20th). It may seem as if Smith’s case arose solely out of a familiar cycle of violence and impunity, and of women not reporting abuse. Yet, as Flock makes clear, this seemingly simple cycle is in fact a more complicated and nuanced phenomenon, owing to the burying of evidence. This can involve hiding the abuser’s past behavior toward the survivor and others, and unfairly classifying injuries from abuse. Flock’s ostensibly small observations reveal a different story than we may be accustomed to hearing. In…

He found himself kneeling in mudAnd asked the river for forgiveness.The river punished him with silence. His whole life it had consumed him,The fear of doing it wrong, and now—He walked among the trees Like a gallery, uncertain where to start.Afraid of looking at them wrong or inThe wrong order. His whole life Even the streamlets, the streamlets hadShied from him like mice. He _____To be _____. In the clearing the dew Evaporates. The grass looks dull, dutiful.One by one, the components of feelingSlide around his body without touching his Body. His body is a snow globe. His thoughtsSnow. In him on him falls the snow. He isBuried, utterly, like the sea is buried by rain.…

I am not the girl in the picture.I am not the smell of hyacinths.I might be the boy.I am off the record. I am not a view from the island,not the sound of waves breaking,not parasols scattered on sand.I am closed for the season. I’m fingerprints on windowsthat look out on rain.I am rain that rains harder. I’m not the new fashion, nothands on a clock. I don’t springforward. Cannot turn back. I am yellow caution tapestrung from pole to pole:Police line do not cross. I see the sky but nothing in it,just spots on the sun.Then the long twilight.Then the crackle of stars.…

What are the most misleading, if plausible-seeming, metaphors that afflict our understanding of the world? Some come from incorrectly scaled expectations. There is the idea that the economics of a nation are like those of a household—that debt will strangle you sooner rather than later, and that the national checkbook must be balanced. There’s the notion that, because our little lives are ruled by intentions, evolution’s larger cycles must reflect them as well: the giraffe has a long neck in order to reach the highest branch. A hundred-plus years after Darwin, it remains hard for us to internalize the truth that longer necks arrived through adaptive accident. The most powerful of these seemingly self-evident yet specious metaphors may arise from the leakage of our physical organization into our conceptual categories.…

By the end of two shows up now—a new “Medea,” starring Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale, at BAM’s Harvey Theatre, and “Mac Beth,” adapted from Shakespeare’s play and directed by Erica Schmidt, for Red Bull Theatre—the sheer untamable mess onstage might turn your mind toward logistics: Who is going to clean all this up? And how long is it going to take? While both audiences stood to hail the casts, I couldn’t help but send thoughts and prayers to the members of the crew. “Medea”’s set is, at the start, a blank, forbidding white, on the stage floor and both sides of the extended proscenium. The effect is of a huge, three-dimensional whiteboard, waiting for a marker. The background discloses no context of time or place, or any hint of…

The playwright Lauren Yee has a disarming way of probing political trauma; her play “The Great Leap” explored China’s Cultural Revolution through basketball. Her latest, “Cambodian Rock Band”—directed by Chay Yew, starting previews on Feb. 4, at the Pershing Square Signature Center—is the first work in Yee’s Signature Theatre residency. The story, of a father and a daughter grappling with the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, is told through live rock music, including songs by the psychedelic-pop group Dengue Fever. NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Isaac Mizrahi Café Carlyle After watching Isaac Mizrahi commandeer a club with his uncensored wit, endearing charm, and from-the-heart vocalizing, you might imagine that designing clothes was a second-choice career for him.…

In 1930, the English economist John Maynard Keynes took a break from writing about the problems of the interwar economy and indulged in a bit of futurology. In an essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” he speculated that by the year 2030 capital investment and technological progress would have raised living standards as much as eightfold, creating a society so rich that people would work as little as fifteen hours a week, devoting the rest of their time to leisure and other “non-economic purposes.” As striving for greater affluence faded, he predicted, “the love of money as a possession … will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity.” This transformation hasn’t taken place yet, and most economic policymakers remain committed to maximizing the rate of economic…

When nation-states engage in the bloody calculus of killing, the boundary between whom they can target and whom they can’t is porous. On January 3rd, the United States launched a drone strike that executed Major General Qassem Suleimani, the chief of Iran’s élite special-forces-and-intelligence unit, the Quds Force. He was one of Iran’s most powerful leaders, with control over para-military operations across the Middle East, including a campaign of roadside bombings and other attacks by proxy forces that had killed at least six hundred Americans during the Iraq War. Since the Hague Convention of 1907, killing a foreign government official outside wartime has generally been barred by the Law of Armed Conflict. When the Trump Administration first announced the killing of Suleimani, officials declared that he had posed an “imminent”…

After listening to the Pittsburgh Symphony’s recent recording of the Bruckner Ninth Symphony for the tenth or eleventh time, I began planning a trip to Pittsburgh, in the hope of understanding how such a formidable achievement had come about. The playing is, first of all, at a very high technical level; the Pittsburgh musicians can withstand comparisons with their better-paid counterparts in Boston, New York, and Chicago. Yet note-perfect performances are hardly unusual in an age of impeccable conservatory training. What distinguishes this Bruckner Ninth is the rare and disconcerting expressive power of the interpretation. Savagely precise in detail, and almost scarily sublime in cumulative effect, it gives notice that the right orchestra and the right conductor can unleash unsuspected energies in familiar works. The right conductor, in this case,…