Innholdsfortegnelse for February 17-24, 2020 i The New Yorker

Is there room for champagne and chocolate when the planet is burning? One recent Tuesday, fifty hospitality and marketing professionals gathered in a suite at the Greenwich Hotel to hear the findings of a report put together As by the London-based boutique-hotel booking service Mr & Mrs Smith and a consulting firm called the Future Laboratory. The subject: the future of romantic travel. “No one needs another report that’s about the next hotel that might be on the moon or Mars,” James Lohan said. He had been a night-club promoter before he founded Mr & Mrs Smith, in 2003, with his wife, Tamara, who used to run a matchmaking service. “Or robots,” Tamara added. She wore a dress with a swirly black-and-white print. The name of Mr & Mrs Smith,…

We go to Graceland for the vigil, Hope in the same fuchsia tube dress she wore to our uncle’s funeral, but it’s O.K. this time around, nobody hissing about what’s appropriate, not in Memphis in August, 99 at dusk, the dew point making people’s hair deranged. We clutch our little candles from their cardboard cuffs, and mine keeps going out, Hope leaning over to help relight it. There are as many Elvises as Elvis fans, old and not so old and from the farthest reaches, rolling strollers, luggage, oxygen tanks; so many stick-on sideburns; so many ways to sweat. I don’t know it yet, but Hope’s blurred out on pills again. We both buy buttons with the lightning logo: Taking Care of Business in a Flash. One too-tall Elvis strums…

It was never supposed to snowhere, and yetit was snowing, big flakes tearing downover the Edwards Plateau like the skyhad crumbled. My friend and I drank cold wine while our children playedinside with maskson a big white bed. Another afternoon,my daughters sang a song about lordsand camp that I didn’t understand, but they didn’t like meto ask what it meant, andinstead of answering rolled down the hillin their pajamas. Theirfirst secret. Then: first bright-red manicure, firstchipped nail, first note taped to the doorsaying don’t come in. I wentto the museum insteadand stared a long time at the draft on which Anne Sextonhad scrawled “At last I found you, you funnyold story-poem!” and felt a happyenvy, happy for herbut not for me. Then: first time on ice skates,chick-chicking around the rink,…

If you were writing a biography of Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus—or Pliny the Younger, the author of one of the most famous collections of letters surviving from the early Roman Empire—it would be hard not to start with the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, on the Bay of Naples, in 79 A.D., for Pliny was the only writer to leave us an eyewitness account of the catastrophe. The English classicist Daisy Dunn, in her book “The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny” (Liveright), wisely does not resist the temptation. For Westerners, that explosion is probably the paradigmatic natural disaster. When we think of the worst thing Mother Nature could do to us, we are likely to think of Vesuvius. Likewise, Pompeii, the hardest hit of the communities lying at the…

DEMOCRACY, THEN AND NOW Jill Lepore’s report on the grassroots democracy debates that took place in the nineteen-thirties is a useful antidote to today’s widespread pessimism (“In Every Dark Hour,” February 3rd). But the question we must ask now is not what people might do to preserve democracy’s future but what democracy might do to preserve theirs. The surge of citizen engagement inspired by the bicentennial of the American Revolution, in the nineteen-seventies, offers a model. Communities from Maine to California gathered to discuss how they wanted their states or localities to look in the year 2000. They considered issues such as environmental sustainability, land use, race, and poverty. These conversations could have been the first steps toward a political culture of truly democratic exchange. But after Ronald Reagan was…

“I’m starting with the base, which is a tree,” the street artist London Kaye said. “Once I get that up, I’ll add all the adorable koalas and goodness and things. I’m excited!” It was a face-numbingly cold early morning on a corner of Wooster and Spring Streets, and the wind cut like a knife, but Kaye, whose medium is crochet, appeared upbeat. With a white cap pulled low over her long blond hair, and wearing a pair of fingerless gloves, she secured a brown swath of crocheted yarn she had made earlier to a chain-link fence across from the SoHo Chanel store. Kaye, who is thirty-one and based in Los Angeles, was in town to install the large-scale sets—multicolor crochet creations attached to a wire-fence backdrop—that she’d made for “Beyond…

A gunshot echoed over starlit forest near the town of Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota. It was late October, already frigid, and chasers had pushed our group of ten fugitives to the edge of a lake. For a moment, we’d hesitated, shouts drawing closer as the black water winked, but the shot drove us all straight in. My legs went numb; Elyse, a high-school sophomore, exclaimed, “My God! ” Submerged to the waist, I waded through marsh grass and lamplight toward our conductor, who silently indicated the opposite bank. The Drinking Gourd shone overhead with exaggerated clarity. This was my third Underground Railroad Reënactment. An hour had elapsed by the time we crossed the lake: seven teens, two elementary-school teachers, one “abolitionist,” and me. I had no idea where we…

People in France remember the summer of 1997 for the deaths of Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, and Jeanne Calment. The first became a household name by marrying into royalty; the second, by caring for the world’s sick and poor. Jeanne Calment, however, was an accidental icon, her celebrity the result of a form of passivity. For a hundred and twenty-two years, five months, and fourteen days, Calment managed not to die. She was born at home on the Rue du Roure, in Arles, one of only four addresses she ever held. That February morning, in 1875, lavender smoke commingled with the cold in the tight streets of La Roquette, a traditional neighborhood of fishermen and the maritime trades. Plastic, tea bags, public trash cans, and the zipper had yet to…

Love Unknown, by Thomas Travisano (Viking). This literary biography of Elizabeth Bishop underscores the aptness of her epitaph: “All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful.” Bishop’s poems, which Robert Lowell called “unrhetorical, cool, and beautifully thought out,” belie the turbulence that marked her life. The outlines of that life are well known: her father’s early death, her mother’s mental illness, her drinking, her sojourns in Key West with her lover Louise Crane and in Brazil with Lota de Macedo Soares. (Intending to visit Brazil for a few weeks, Bishop stayed for nearly fifteen years, a decision partly prompted by the gift of a blue-eyed toucan, which she named Uncle Sam.) But the accounts are parsed with particular insight by Travisano, a Bishop specialist, who assiduously traces the influence…

Ellen Reid, whose arresting opera “prism” won a Pulitzer in 2019, joins the New York Philharmonic for the première of “When the World as You’ve Known It Doesn’t Exist,” Feb. 20-22, at David Geffen Hall. Reid wrote the piece for “Project 19,” a multiyear series honoring the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, for which the Philharmonic has commissioned works from nineteen distinguished women composers. The initiative also presents Tania León’s “Stride,” nestled among warhorses by Brahms and Strauss, Feb. 13-18. ART “A New MOMA” Museum of Modern Art The Vatican, Kremlin, and Valhalla of modernism has reopened, after an expansion that adds forty-seven thousand square feet and many new galleries. Far more, though still a fraction, of MOMA’s nonpareil collection is now on display, arranged roughly chronologically but studded with…

One day last summer, Jake Fiennes was lost in a cloud of butterflies. He was on a woodland path near Holkham Beach, on the north coast of Norfolk. Every decade or so, ten million painted-lady butterflies, which are orange, black, and white, migrate to Britain from tropical Africa. The hot summer meant that it was a bumper year for native species, too, and the painted ladies mingled with red admirals, peacocks, and common blues, feeding on bushes set back a few yards from the path. “Just sat in a haze of flittering, fluttering butterflies,” Fiennes told me later. “I was in awe. These flowers were just exploding.” Two friends of mine happened to be passing at that moment. They saw a figure in the swirl. Fiennes, who is forty-nine, has…

In 2008, Yuval Noah Harari, a young historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began to write a book derived from an undergraduate world-history class that he was teaching. Twenty lectures became twenty chapters. Harari, who had previously written about aspects of medieval and early-modern warfare—but whose intellectual appetite, since childhood, had been for all-encompassing accounts of the world—wrote in plain, short sentences that displayed no anxiety about the academic decorum of a study spanning hundreds of thousands of years. It was a history of everyone, ever. The book, published in Hebrew as “A Brief History of Humankind,” became an Israeli best-seller; then, as “Sapiens,” it became an international one. Readers were offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs—evolution, agriculture, economics—while watching their personal narratives,…

What I find strange about growing old isn’t that I’ve got older. Not that the youthful me from the past has, without my realizing it, aged. What catches me off guard is, rather, how people from the same generation as me have become elderly, how all the pretty, vivacious girls I used to know are now old enough to have a couple of grandkids. It’s a little disconcerting—sad, even. Though I never feel sad at the fact that I have similarly aged. I think what makes me feel sad about the girls I knew growing old is that it forces me to admit, all over again, that my youthful dreams are gone forever. The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being.…

Halfway through the fourth episode of the Hulu television series “High Fidelity,” a new adaptation of Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel, Robin (Rob) Brooks, played by Zoë Kravitz, monologues to the camera as she stomps, dead-eyed and heartsick, down a Brooklyn block to her local bodega. At the counter, the do-ragged clerk, young and brown, looks at her. “You’re wearing lipstick,” he says. “No,” Rob scoffs, pursing her lips, which are conspicuously red. We are to understand that Rob, the sulky owner of the record store Championship Vinyl, who is on her way to meet an ex, a lesbian influencer named Kat, is more eager to please than she’d like others to believe. But, as the lighting softens and the camera zooms in on Rob’s face, something else has happened, too.…

A list of history’s my thic tricksters, Lewis Hyde says in his book “Trickster Makes This World” (1998), would be endless. Since the trickster is culture’s ultimate shape-shifting, boundary-crossing figure, “there will be some sort of representative wherever humans invent boundaries, which is to say, everywhere.” Hyde refers in passing to one of Europe’s most notorious tricksters, Till Eulenspiegel, who enters folk literature in the early sixteenth century but is supposed to have flourished earlier, in the fourteenth, crossing back and forth like a picaresque hero across his native Germany, the Netherlands, and Bohemia. Till was likely as ambiguous as the culture required: a dangerous vagrant, a folk hero, a journeyman magician, a bawdy circus performer, a jester and prankster who, like the Shakespearean Fool, recklessly needled those in power…