Innholdsfortegnelse for March 16, 2020 i The New Yorker

So you’re going to be a princess. Felicidades! Now get to work. You have a public to win over, and stuffy new in-laws to impress. There are practical matters, too. After Kate Middleton’s engagement to Prince William, she got busy choosing a wedding gown and presiding over official functions, such as the naming of a lifeboat in North Wales. Meghan Markle had to sort out her immigration forms and convert to the Anglican Church. “The biggest adjustment is not being able to do what you like when you like,” Dickie Arbiter, a former press secretary to Queen Elizabeth II, said recently. “You can’t suddenly decide, Oh, I’m going to go out to the shops.” The actress Jeanna de Waal is in her princess-preparation phase, as the star of the new…

In the morning, the blinds let in light. I lay on a recliner against the wall, with my coat wrapped around my head, and heard the nurse pump the blood-pressure thing. I’d set up a barrier, a towel hanging over the back of a chair, for privacy. I’d been reclining here, listening to ice blow against the window, since about four. Kathy sat up in bed, looking pale, with blue lips and a puffy face. She was still on morphine and seemed serene and angelic. Another nurse walked in, pushing a cart, and wanted to know if she’d felt milk coming out. Kathy stiffly undid her robe and both her hands trembled and I saw the funny webbed bandage across her belly. It was sort of threatening and serious and…

The Golden Thread, by Kassia St. Clair (Liveright). In an enlivening history of fabric, St. Clair takes aim at those who trivialize the study of clothing. “We live surrounded by cloth,” she writes. “We are swaddled in it at birth and shrouds are drawn over our faces in death.” Rather than a broad overview, St. Clair provides a cleverly structured patchwork of vignettes spanning the eras and the continents: Paleolithic bast threads excavated in a cave in Georgia; the patterns of ancient China’s silks (“mirrored flower,” “nimble waves”); the inflatable rubber-and-nylon suits that weighed down Mercury astronauts as they journeyed into space. Her descriptions of textiles and the people who created and wore them are sensual and even moving. Smacked, by Eilene Zimmerman (Random House). Opening with the author’s discovery…

EXPERIMENTAL METHODS Hannah Fry asks whether tech companies’ large-scale social experiments, such as measuring the emotional impact that negative posts have on Facebook users, are sufficiently regulated (Books, March 2nd). She is right to point out that such tests are not subject to federal regulations protecting human subjects in biomedical research. But she doesn’t mention that the experiments fall outside the federal definition of “research.” The protections for human subjects set out by the Department of Health and Human Services apply only to studies that are “designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge”—i.e., undertaken with the intent of public dissemination. Because market research is not meant to be seen by the public, the rules protecting human subjects are not generally applicable—and there are no equivalent federal protections for consumers…

I was sitting on a wooden benchwhen six men wheeled her on a gurney right past me, except she was inside a wooden boxand the lid was closed. She was on her way to becoming a skeleton. My fatheris definitely a skeleton at this point. Death is confusing. Is my father the bonesthat sit inside a box on a hillside in Odessa, Delaware? Or is he on the other sideof that keyhole in my mind that I talk into sometimes? Can he be in two places at once? Am I allowedto make it up, the way twelve-step programs tell you you can make up God? God can be a ribbonon the door, a nail in the wall. A nail in the coffin. It’s 4:59 a.m. The skya deep ocean blue.…

It sounds better in Spanish, precarioPrettier. As if it isn’t what it is and there’s that o My how will the rent get paid? The deadlineMet and who ghosted me first—valley loverOr that other one. Delicacy of skin. Quick steps, quick stopsAnd the direction is what? There’s no where there and the last shiftIs the one where tongues load a stack of sighsBridge tall and mythic. This day and the next—volcanic shardsRoll toward the door, even if mountainsAre in the far distance—thousands of miles. How the heart steadily beats as the sirensCareen and angry men launch their best livesEver by taking so many others. It is a miracle This heart steadily beating even as the next questionThreatens a late spring storm, ground brokenBy lightning—the raindrops rhythmic patter Honors percussionists—those that…

Partway through “Actress” (W. W. Norton), Anne Enright’s captivating seventh novel, the narrator, Norah, advances a theory about her mother’s rise to fame. Katherine O’Dell, who died at the age of fifty-eight, the same age her daughter is now, was a grande dame of the Irish theatre. Her four-decade-long career, which began in the nineteen-forties, brought her to Broadway, to Hollywood, to avant-garde productions of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett. This ascendance, Norah insists, was instantaneous. “A star is born not made,” she aphorizes. “Whatever a star has, they had it all along.” This notion has a charming simplicity. In the face of celebrity’s special incandescence, perhaps there is no need for an origin story of mundanities like talent and hard work. But these days the taxonomy of the famous…

Maybe you’ve seen the slightly unhinged Dior campaign starring Natalie Portman. Whether that great brand is using the ads to sell dresses or perfumes, high heels or sunglasses, or just waving its hand around and reminding us of its lasting existence, I couldn’t tell you; the product, as far as I can see, is Portman herself, and the bouquet of associations she carries to the consumer’s front door—and, as it happens, to an uneven but intriguing new play called “All the Natalie Portmans.” But here, first, is a TV commercial, which is itself a kind of abstract play: Portman, as Miss Dior, flits from one glossy frame to the next, all action, like James Bond on a vaguely fun spring-break vacation: she jumps off a pier (who knows where?) into…

Studio 54 looms so large in the cultural imagination that it’s hard to believe it was open only from 1977 to 1980. What made the night club so unforgettable? As Fran Lebowitz (above, in a portrait by Richard Bernstein for the September, 1981, issue of Interview) once recalled, “It was very sexy—it was still before AIDS—and there were a lot of cute people there, and it was filled with sexual intent, which I think is very important to a successful night.” Starting on March 13, the Brooklyn Museum revisits the legend in “Studio 54: Night Magic.” NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Peter Bernstein Village Vanguard Although Peter Bernstein cut his teeth, in the early nineties, alongside such…

Tom Goldstein, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, took an “invisibility cloak” from a pile on a chair in his office and pulled it on over his head. To my eye, it looked like a baggy sweatshirt made of glossy polyester, printed with garish colors in formless shapes that, far from turning Goldstein invisible, made him impossible to miss. It was mid-January. Early that morning, in my search for a suitable outfit to thwart the all-seeing eyes of surveillance machines, I had taken the train from New York City to College Park. As I rode the subway from Brooklyn to Penn Station, and then boarded Amtrak for my trip south, I counted the CCTV cameras; at least twenty-six caught me going and returning. When you…

Last summer, the fashion designer Telfar Clemens was thinking about cargo. In July, his label, Telfar, moved its studio from a warehouse in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick to four shipping containers down the street. The containers were stacked across from a corrugated-metal quonset hut in a gravel yard that recalled a landing-strip airport in a tropical country, exposed to the elements and easily dismantled in an exodus. As Clemens designed his Spring 2020 collection, he was considering the cargo economy. Globalization has produced a lingua franca of T-shirts and jeans, sweats and tracksuits, polo shirts and basketball shorts. These everyday garments are the ones Clemens has returned to most often in his designs. The label’s clothes are standardized forms that seem to have undergone a process of estrangement. They’re…

In the opening pages of Hilary Mantel’s 1994 novel, “A Change of Climate,” a woman in a railway carriage stares disapprovingly at the cover of the cheesy paperback her travelling companion is reading. It’s clearly a work of historical fiction, the archly period title, “Wyfe to Crookback,” traced in “florid gold script.” (The “wyfe” in question is Anne Neville, unhappy queen to the legendarily hunchbacked Richard III.) Although the woman, Emma, is a physician, she evidently knows a thing or two about late-Plantagenet domestic architecture; as she examines the cover art, she notes that the manor house behind the heroine (“a svelte woman, with a small crown perched upon her wimple”) has “anachronistic chimney stacks.” The vulgar font, the clueless art work, even the “fat” paperback’s size, with its intimation…

In modern discourse, the term “Weimar Republic” conjures a lurid host of associations, few of them related to the stately old German ducal city of Weimar. One thinks, instead, of the mythical Berlin of the nineteen-twenties: dance halls, cabarets, the sexual underground, street fighting among Communists and Nazis, the clash between a decadent liberation and a decadent counterreaction. The complex reality of the Weimar era, which lasted from 1918 to 1933, is filtered through popular reimaginings: Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories”; the musical and the film “Cabaret,” based on Isherwood; revivals of “The Threepenny Opera”; and, most recently, the television series “Babylon Berlin.” It is easily forgotten that the German Republic was founded in the spirit of the Enlightenment; the constitutional assembly met in Weimar, where Goethe and Schiller had…

“Birkenau.” The dread name—of the “Bmain death facilities at Auschwitz—entitles four large abstract paintings and four full-sized digital reproductions of them in the last gallery of “Painting After All,” a peculiarly solemn Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Met Breuer. The works are based on four clandestine photographs that were smuggled out of the concentration camp in 1944. Two, taken from the shadowed exit of a gas chamber, show naked corpses strewn on the ground and smoke rising from bodies afire in a trench beyond them. Men in uniform stand at ease—two appear to chat—amid the shambles. Richter first saw the images in the fifties. He encountered them again in 2008 and kept the worst of them hanging in his studio in Cologne. In 2014, he projected them onto canvas…