Innholdsfortegnelse for March 9, 2020 i The New Yorker

Bells on the Waterfront, a Milestone at the Met Shortly after the Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded, in 1870, Henry James wrote a prescient review of its first show, describing the selection of Old Master paintings as “an enviably solid foundation for future acquisition and development.” A hundred and fifty years later, those acquisitions span more than five thousand years. The building-wide exhibition “Making the Met: 1870-2020” highlights a cross-section of that encyclopedic collection, from a life-size limestone statue of the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, made circa 1479-58 B.C., to a bronze dancer by Edgar Degas, cast in 1922. (Opens March 30.) Climate-crisis awareness and boho chic both fuel renewed interest in the tradition of boro, a ragtag quilting process born of necessity, in the nineteenth century, in the wintry…

In September, at a resort hotel in the Coachella Valley, the California Republican Party held its fall convention. Brad Parscale—forty-four, six feet eight, balding, prolifically bearded—walked onstage in shirtsleeves and tilted the microphone upward, mumbling a self-deprecating joke about being “awkwardly tall.” Parscale has lived in a red county in California and a blue county in Texas, and he now splits his time between Washington, D.C., and two luxury properties in South Florida, yet he still speaks with the neutral accent of Topeka, Kansas, where he grew up. He was one of the top staffers on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. “I was the digital-media director,” he said. “So, yes, all that crazy Facebook stuff was my idea.” Other former Trump-campaign officials fill their calendars with paid speaking gigs, padding their…

Door frames off the square, the insidesweating tile-brick walls uncovered,the checkerboard linoleum floors tiltedtoward infinity or at least in the directionof my northern bedroom window, whichin winter is half-frozen with ice thickenough some mornings to draw onwith a fingernail, while in the dust ofsummer the heat though everywherefills up the sunburned space with whatmy sister calls the angels, who live alsoin the attic, no less famous for its starsand star-like rain that sometimes slipson through the ceiling into the shy air. A man standing before his children withnothing in his hands, the angst comingdown like air the weight of gravity throughthe whole length of his body, a lifetimeof falling and slow settling like night fogor soft rain, as if there were a lake insidehim and above that the cloud-float ofa…

Speaking in 1918, with Europe ravaged by the horrors of modern warfare and Russia in the hands of the Bolsheviks, Irving Fisher warned his colleagues at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association of “a great peril.” That peril, which risked “perverting the democracy for which we have just been fighting,” was extreme inequality. “We may be sure that there will be a bitter struggle over the distribution of wealth,” Fisher, perhaps the most celebrated economist of his day, maintained. More than a century later—at another annual meeting of the American Economic Association—the spectre once more loomed over the discipline. “American capitalism and democracy are not working for people without a college degree,” Anne Case, an economist at Princeton, declared in January, as she flipped through slides in…

THIS GREEN EARTH John Cassidy’s critique of continual economic growth brings welcome attention to a grave concern of many environmental scientists (“Steady State,” February 10th). He nicely describes the alternative economic approach referred to as “green growth,” which some people believe will allow us to “enjoy perpetual growth and prosperity while also reducing carbon emissions and our consumption of natural resources.” Unfortunately, it seems that green-growth enthusiasts have drunk a more diluted batch of the same Kool-Aid as people who think that conventional growth can go on indefinitely. Perhaps economic growth can be decoupled from carbon emissions, but we still need to deal with invasive species, desertification, and other insults to natural ecosystems. Clever new technologies can help, but efficiency gains are finite and can be overwhelmed when these technologies…

Personal Problems, Political Crises Family life is at the center of Eliza Hittman’s third feature, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” (March 13), about Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), a seventeen-year-old high-school student from a small Pennsylvania town who discovers that she’s pregnant and, unable to get an abortion in the state without parental consent, travels to New York with a cousin (Talia Ryder) for the procedure. The French drama “The Truth” (March 20), the director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first feature outside Japan, stars Catherine Deneuve as an actress who writes a memoir and Juliette Binoche as her daughter, who returns to Paris for the book’s publication and disputes its claims. Ethan Hawke co-stars. Among the season’s most prominent releases are adaptations from earlier works, both literary and cinematic, including “Charm City Kings” (April 10),…

JANUARY 8 Dear Sir, Your check has been cut and is ready to be mailed to you. The person who will mail it to you is currently being mailed to us. We will keep a close eye on our mail, and as soon as it arrives, with him in it, we will transfer the check to him to mail to you immediately. FEBRUARY 15 Dear Sir, Thank you for your inquiry. Your check is still here, ready to go, but the person who was mailed to us so that he could mail it to you took longer than expected to be mailed. When he finally did arrive, with the rest of our mail, he was mistaken for junk mail and ended up in the recycled mail. We have put in…

The quickexchangeof emailsbetweenthe formerlovers createsa soft holein the dayand thenightbefore. It snowedbut it wassupposedto be larger &everything’sclosed the streetsare wetI hear and Iwon’tstep intothem. One poemfor todaybut nomany littleones. The coffeeslightlyalteredis goodmy barefeet inbed readyto work.I workin the fieldof dreamswhere Ihave metyou manytimes. I feel closer, toyou thismorningand probablylast nightwhen thedoorwayslightlyopenedbecauseof ournoteswas floodedwith ghosts. When I wasyoungI liked theemptinessof myhome &now likeit or nothere isthis sweetaccumulation. The camerasall thateverythingI do can’ttouchthe singlestatementof breeze &loss & quaintbeautythings I’vehad sinceI was akid the secretsof my home.I feel condemnedby thischaoticmuseumof stuff &yes Idesireto photographit thebowls u likedthe cupu touched& me in a teeshirtthat usedto be special& now Icarouse inbed w myselfin it. I don’tknow ifthiswill everbe differentand thatis thefeeling ofthis. I feel likea treethe invisiblepart of friendshipand drinkingtogetherand warning. One empty wallis the…

She was driving Ben to a friend’s house, and this added journey was the cause of some irritation in her day; she had too much else to do. Though she did like the privacy of the car, the feeling of his voice coming over her shoulder as she checked the mirror and slowed to make a turn. He was up on the booster seat—Ben was small for eight—and he looked out the window at suburban streets and parked cars, while she used his mobile phone to map the route. She had it down by the gearshift, propped up on the gray plastic fascia. It was hard to read the little arrow through the disaster of Ben’s cracked screen—the thing was rarely out of his hand, unless he dropped it. Now…

In 2018, Israel lost its two greatest novelists, Amos Oz and Aharon Appelfeld. Both were older than the country itself and had witnessed its entire dramatic history, but the ways they dealt with that history could not have been more different. Oz, born in Jerusalem in 1939, threw himself into the development of the young Jewish state: he wrote about the kibbutz where he lived and the psychology of the first Israeli Sabra generation, and assumed an active role in politics as a founder of the Peace Now movement. If you wanted to understand Israeli society in its first half century, Oz’s novels would be the natural place to start. Reading Appelfeld, by contrast, tells you basically nothing about the country in which he lived—at least, not directly. Though he…

I would tell you my emotional responses I to the gorgeous works in the Donald Judd retrospective that has opened at the Museum of Modern Art if I had any. I was benumbed, as usual, by this last great revolutionary of modern art. The boxy objects (he refused to call them sculptures) that Judd constructed between the early nineteen-sixties and his death, from cancer, in 1994, irreversibly altered the character of Western aesthetic experience. They displaced traditional contemplation with newfangled confrontation. That’s the key trope of Minimalism, a term that Judd despised but one that will tag him until the end of time. In truth, allowing himself certain complexities of structure and color, he was never as radically minimalist as his younger peers Dan Flavin (fluorescent tubes) and Carl…

Armie Hammer, last seen on Broadway in “Straight White Men,” returns to the stage in Tracy Letts’s “The Minutes,” now in previews at the Cort. Letts, who is also in the cast, tends to play stuffed shirts in movies such as “Little Women” and “Ford v Ferrari,” but his plays, which include “August: Osage County” and “Bug,” are darkly subversive. In “The Minutes,” which ran at Chicago’s Steppenwolf, he uses a small-town city-council meeting to suss out themes of power and its perversions—Trumpism writ small. ART “Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment” New Museum The timeliest as well as the rudest painting show of this winter happens to be the first-ever New York museum survey of this American aesthetic rapscallion. Recognition so delayed bemuses almost as much as a reminder of…

When the F.B.I. recently disclosed that Vladimir Putin was meddling in the American Presidential election again, Irina Kolesnikova, a principal ballerina with the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre, was preparing to perform another bit of malevolent Russian meddling—in Tchaikovsky’s balletic saga “Swan Lake,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In the ballet, Kolesnikova plays a pair of look-alike polar-opposite beauties. First, she is Odette, a princess cursed to remain a swan until a suitor swears his love to her. Then she is Odile, Odette’s evil doppelgänger, who seduces her rival’s would-be rescuer. Chaos ensues. “I’m more like Odette,” Kolesnikova said, the night before the première. She was seated at a table at the Russian Samovar, the midtown vodka-and-caviar joint that used to be the Frank Sinatra hangout Jilly’s. Her pale hair…

You can visit all the addresses in the course of a long day. Bertolt Brecht lived in a two-story clapboard house on Twenty-sixth Street, in Santa Monica. The novelist Heinrich Mann resided a few blocks away, on Montana Avenue. The screenwriter Salka Viertel held gatherings on Mabery Road, near the Santa Monica beach. Alfred Döblin, the author of “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” had a place on Citrus Avenue, in Hollywood. His colleague Lion Feuchtwanger occupied the Villa Aurora, a Spanish-style mansion overlooking the Pacific; among its amusements was a Hitler dartboard. Vicki Baum, whose novel “Grand Hotel” brought her a screenwriting career, had a house on Amalfi Drive, near the leftist composer Hanns Eisler. Alma Mahler-Werfel, the widow of Gustav Mahler, lived with her third husband, the best-selling Austrian writer Franz Werfel,…

When we’re young, a love song can seem like a beacon. It translates the mystery of feeling—the erratic moods and palpitations associated with growing up—into the stability of language. Pop music is built on these pithy excavations of fantasy and desire, even as this actual thing called love remains ephemeral. But the love song can just as easily become a kind of provocation, an unworkable template, a list of ways we can’t fit ourselves within a supposedly universal norm. In 2017, the singer Moses Sumney released his début album, “Aromanticism,” a meditation on his inability to engage in romantic attachment. It’s not that he is incapable of feeling. It takes listening to only a few seconds of Sumney’s singing to become aware of how much and how deeply he feels,…

Weather, by Jenny Offill (Knopf). Lizzie, the narrator of this novel, is hired to answer e-mails for a prominent professor who lectures widely about the imminence of climate apocalypse. As she fields questions from evangelicals, environmentalists, preppers—“everyone who writes her is either crazy or depressed”—she finds her life mired in dread. In diaristic fragments, Lizzie builds a taxonomy of end-times experts: disaster psychologists, futurists, climate scientists, survival instructors, war journalists, hippies. Offill’s mordant humor keeps the story nimble even as the novel reveals its central inquiry: How do we make our way to safety, and whom do we bring with us? Apeirogon, by Colum McCann (Random House). This multifaceted novel, whose title means “a shape with a countably infinite number of sides,” tells the story of an unlikely friendship amid…