Innholdsfortegnelse for April 6, 2020 i The New Yorker

One winter day in 2016, Tonya Carter felt a sharp pain in her lower back. In the months that followed, the pain grew more frequent and more diffuse, running down the back of her legs when she was sitting, and flaring up when she lay on the sofa in her living room at night. A devout Christian, Carter prayed that God, whom she referred to as “my ultimate physician,” would make the pain go away. It didn’t go away. She would have gone to see an actual doctor, she told me recently, but it was beyond her financial means. Carter worked for Comfort Keepers, a company that provides in-home care for seniors. She liked the job, which involved tending to elderly people who required assistance with personal care and such…

What’s often referred to as the first pandemic began in the city of Pelusium, near modern-day Port Said, in northeastern Egypt, in the year 541. According to the historian Procopius, who was alive at the time, the “pestilence” spread both west, toward Alexandria, and east, toward Palestine. Then it kept on going. In his view, it seemed to move almost consciously, “as if fearing lest some corner of the earth might escape it.” The earliest symptom of the pestilence was fever. Often, Procopius observed, this was so mild that it did not “afford any suspicion of danger.” But, within a few days, victims developed the classic symptoms of bubonic plague—lumps, or buboes, in their groin and under their arms. The suffering at that point was terrible; some people went into…

DISTURBING THE PEACE As was true for Peter Hessler, the Peace Corps was a formative experience in my life and helped make me the person that I am today (“Broken Bonds,” March 16th). During my posting in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where I worked in community development from 1965 to 1967, the program showed me—a small-town idealist with no idea what to do with my life—that my vocation was to teach. Before I returned to the United States, a community leader told me that they never understood why we came there, why we stayed, and, now, why we were leaving. The truth is, I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself and to come home a better person. Learning Spanish and living abroad indisputably enhanced my fifty-year career in education.…

In the third week of February, as the COVID-19 epidemic was still flaring in China, I arrived in Kolkata, India. I woke up to a sweltering morning—the black kites outside my hotel room were circling upward, lifted by the warming currents of air—and I went to visit a shrine to the goddess Shitala. Her name means “the cool one”; as the myth has it, she arose from the cold ashes of a sacrificial fire. The heat that she is supposed to diffuse is not just the fury of summer that hits the city in mid-June but also the inner heat of inflammation. She is meant to protect children from smallpox, heal the pain of those who contract it, and dampen the fury of a pox epidemic. The shrine was a…

Sharon Stern arrived at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired university in America, with a portfolio of glamorous head shots. She had a heart-shaped face and a guileless smile. She was twenty-eight and had recently married Todd Siegel, whom her friends all described as the perfect husband. Naropa, which was founded in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974, by a former Buddhist monk, has three meditation halls that students visit throughout the day. “You are encouraged to let go of habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action and to continually refresh your experience, viewing yourself and the world anew,” read the welcome letter from the dean of students. Sharon, who was in the master’s program in contemporary performance, had spent several years acting in community theatre in Miami, but she wasn’t sure where…

Don’t misunderstand me, I love a good poemLike half my Facebook friends, one that transports youTo a corner of the soul you didn’t know was thereBecause you couldn’t find the precise metaphor,Even if you felt it, like that time my parents sawA local news story of an older woman asking for helpWith an ailing husband, and I volunteered to drive themTo the address onscreen, a neighborhoodI’d never driven through, though it looked familiarWith its usual poverty: a few leaning boards called a houseAnd inside the woman from the news in half-lightThanking us for the comforters in our hands and pointingTo a foldout chair where we could place themBefore introducing us to her husband, a scraggly beardBeneath a crinkled blanket on a cot right thereIn what would have been the living…

The female chimpanzee at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden died of complications from a cold early in the morning of December 27, 1878. “Miss Chimpanzee,” according to news reports, died “while receiving the attentions of her companion.” Both she and that companion, a four-year-old male, had been born near the Gabon River, in West Africa; they had arrived in Philadelphia in April, together. “These Apes can be captured only when young,” the zoo superintendent, Arthur E. Brown, explained, and they are generally taken only one or two at a time. In the wild, “they live together in small bands of half a dozen and build platforms among the branches, out of boughs and leaves, on which they sleep.” But in Philadelphia, in the monkey house, where it was just the two…

The Precipice, by Toby Ord (Hachette). In a book that seems made for the present moment, Ord, a moral philosopher, examines and seeks to quantify existential risk—the looming threats that might someday wipe out humanity. There’s good news (it’s exceedingly unlikely that a star will blunder through our solar system and “disrupt planetary orbits, causing the Earth to freeze or boil or even crash into another planet”) and bad (climate change is dire, though bioengineered pathogens, released by evildoers or laboratory accidents, might prove a speedier scourge). Still, there are ample proposals for risk mitigation, and readers may find the sections that argue for why humanity deserves saving, and why we’re equipped to face the challenges, even more arresting than the array of potential cataclysms. The Magical Language of Others,…

Nine days, which feel like nine weeks, have gone by, as of this writing, since Broadway went dark and New York’s theatres closed their doors. By the time you read this, it may well feel like nine years. The suddenness with which the city’s performance ecosystem has vanished defies comprehension—it’s as if the Great Barrier Reef had died overnight. Grasping for comparison, we have to look well beyond the proximate disasters of Hurricane Sandy and 9/11, when, ultimately, the shows went resolutely on. There’s been some optimistic speculation online as to whether Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” in quarantine when the plague forced the Globe to close, in the summer of 1606. (A comforting thought, if you happen to be both a genius and good at focussing in times of existential…

When I first heard “New York 93,” by the Korean-American d.j. and producer Yaeji, it felt like something I’d waited for my whole life, only I’d never known to want it. The track, released by Godmode Records in 2016, begins with the faint outlines of a house tune—an echo of an echo, as synth pulses, bass kicks, and occasional drip-drops all hint at a euphoric anthem that takes its sweet time to peak. Yaeji whispers softly over the track, humming a singsong of English and Korean, as though she’s beckoning you closer to tell a secret. By the time that tambourines arrive, snapping everything into place, you’re like confidants. And then it abruptly comes to a close. Much of the way in which we hear the world derives from how…

APRIL 1 – 7, 2020 Like all museums in New York City, MOMA is closed until further notice. But you can still see eighty-four thousand pieces from its collection online at MOMA.org. “All in One” (above), from 2016, is by the gifted photographer Aïda Muluneh, who left her native Ethiopia as a young child and later got her start taking pictures for the Washington Post. A decade ago, Muluneh returned home to Addis Ababa, where she divides her time between making art and her work as a photojournalist. MUSIC Selections to listen to online. Thomas Adès: “Adès Conducts Adès” CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL Thomas Adès wrote the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra for the pianist Kirill Gerstein, and the composer himself conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the work’s world première, last…

During our self-isolation, you send me collagesof God’s blown animals, breathed into, heated and shaped like glass. Our skin is full of holesfor oil and sweat. When I whisper, Breathe me in, I mean all of me—the scent of my flesh, but also me,my god, the beginning of the fulfillment of this desire. In a mask, you can be whoever I want you to be, kingor dog: muse comes from muzzle, to track your kill. The plague doctors wore masks in the shape of a bird,the beak filled with fresh clippings: juniper, rose, clove. The mask is a type of respirator, meaning breathe again,which is how we’ve managed to stay alive all these years. Through the glass eyes, they could examine the bodythey could not touch with their bare hands.…

February 22, 202_. Dear Robbie, Got your e-mail, kid. Sorry for handwriting in reply. Not sure e-mailing is the best move, considering the topic, but, of course (you being nearly six foot now, your mother says?), that’s up to you, dear, although, you know: strange times. Beautiful day here. A flock of geese just now came in low over the deck, and your grandmother and I, holding the bright-blue mugs you kindly sent at Christmas, did simultaneous hip swivels as they zinged off toward Rosley and, I expect, an easy meal on the golf course there. Forgive my use of initials in what follows. Would not wish to cause further difficulties for G., M., or J. (good folks all, we very much enjoyed meeting them when you stopped by last…

In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, one of the most famous cartoonists in the world was a lesbian artist who lived on a remote island off the coast of Finland. Tove Jansson had the status of a beloved cultural icon—adored by children, celebrated by adults. Before her death, in 2001, at the age of eighty-six, Jansson produced paintings, novels, children’s books, magazine covers, political cartoons, greeting cards, librettos, and much more. But most of Jansson’s fans arrived by way of the Moomins, a friendly species of her invention—rotund white creatures that look a little like upright hippos, and were the subject of nine best-selling books and a daily comic strip that ran for twenty years. Jansson travelled frequently to conduct her duties as the ambassador of Moominvalley, mingling at parties where…

In a 1961 interview, the great modernist poet Marianne Moore expressed ambivalence about her popular 1943 antiwar verse, “In Distrust of Merits.” “As form, what has it?” Moore said. “It is just a protest—disjointed, exclamatory…. First this thought and then that.” Moore was not the first author to question what you might call her reactive voice. W. H. Auden famously turned his back on his poem “September 1, 1939,” written on the occasion of Germany’s invasion of Poland—“All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie …/We must love one another or die”—because he considered the work fundamentally dishonest. “After it had been published,” he said, “I came to the line ‘We must love one another or die’ and said to myself: ‘That’s a damned lie! We must…

In 2015, the Los Angeles-based theatre company the Industry mounted “Hopscotch,” an outdoor, mobile, multi-composer opera of staggering logistical complexity and transporting, almost delirious beauty. It unfolded like a magical-realist fable in which the experience of the observer becomes part of the story. Certain of its images—a trumpeter playing at the top of a water tower, with a trombonist on a distant rooftop answering him; a soprano, in a red dress, gliding along the cast-iron walkways of the Bradbury Building’s famed atrium; another soprano singing while riding in a Jeep along the Los Angeles River—will stay with me as long as I remember anything. It was a waking dream of a city, and I keep wishing I could have it back. In February and March, the Industry presented a new…