Innholdsfortegnelse for April 20, 2020 i The New Yorker

The investor who calls himself the Australian headed out for a walk on his farm in the Alps of New South Wales, three hundred miles south of Sydney. This was a morning in late March. He’d been holed up there for a month with his wife and three kids, plus two portable oxygen units and a store of hydroxychloroquine. “But my intention is not to get it,” he said, of covid-19. “I don’t plan to see anyone until October.” He was talking on a cell phone. You could hear the caw of crows in the background, and the luffing of the wind. “I only see four other people in the valley. If I need to kill them, I will.” One assumed, from the way he laughed, that this was a…

Just before midnight on March 22nd, the President of the United States prepared to tweet. Millions of Americans, in the hope of safeguarding their health and fighting the rapidly escalating spread of COVID-19, had already begun to follow the sober recommendation of Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious disease. Fauci had warned Americans to “hunker down significantly more than we as a country are doing.” Donald Trump disagreed. “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” he tweeted. Trump had seen enough of “social distancing.” In an election year, he was watching the stock market collapse, unemployment spike, and the national mood devolve into collective anxiety. “I would love to have the country opened up, and just rarin’ to go by Easter,” he said,…

The day after my toad circus the toads were all dead, crunchyand silent in their window well. I wanted to draw a doorwayto walk through to get to the world of lilacs: purple,contagious green leaves and no movement but the steady invisiblebreathing of flowers. I knew I had to tell someonewhat I had done so I first walked to the park and stayedthere until dusk, sitting on the glider or in the middle of therusty and dangerous merry-go-round; I can’t remember which.When it was nearly dark I walked home, certain that theywere worried and maybe even out looking for me. When Igot there I saw them busy in the kitchen through the window,so I hid in the back yard until it was good and dark, aliving thing on a swing…

The joy and relief with which the general television-watching public seemed to greet each new season of “Game of Thrones”—at last, dear, merciful Lord—is how I feel about the reappearance of “Better Things,” Pamela Adlon’s bittersweet, very funny self-portrait of a show on FX, now in its fourth season. Adlon plays Sam Fox, an actress in her fifties who’s been in show biz since childhood and is successful but not famous. When she’s recognized, it’s in the gynecologist’s waiting room, or on a trip to a friend’s wedding in New Orleans, where a flush-faced drunk in an L.S.U. cap lurches over to her table at Arnaud’s to confess that he’s masturbated to her—“more than once.” She lives in L.A. with her three daughters, who range in age from around twelve…

THE LONG GAME Susan B. Glasser, in her piece about the Republican operative Sarah Longwell, writes that Longwell, unlike many Republicans, “did not make her accommodations, political and moral, with the new President” (“Hope Dies Last,” March 30th). Although Longwell is certainly resisting Donald Trump now, she is still a member of the party that made his ascendancy possible. The G.O.P. that Longwell joined at the turn of the twenty-first century was the same party that welcomed white people who resented Lyndon B. Johnson’s civil-rights legislation. It also ignored the AIDS epidemic, which killed hundreds of thousands of mostly gay, black, brown, and poor Americans. Ronald Reagan pushed to deregulate corporations and slash taxes for the wealthy, intensifying inequality. He also courted the religious right, which roundly rejects scientific truths,…

Father George R. Stewart, the pastor of St. Augustine-Our Lady of Victory Roman Catholic Church, in the South Bronx, knew when he was in the second grade that he would be a priest. He came to this church, whose name can be confusing if you don’t notice the hyphen, almost five years ago. Two churches merged to make this one, in 2012. It holds services in Spanish and English, and sometimes partly in Garifuna, the language of an ethnic group of the same name whose principal ancestors were shipwrecked African captives and Caribbean native people. Sometimes when Father Stewart gives a sermon in English, he keeps it short, because when he gets to the end he takes a deep breath and repeats it all in Spanish, or the other way…

The ex-basketball playerswant to tell me whatit was like playing youthtournaments duringthe war how hilariously andinappropriately they were dressedthis guy was shot they saypointing to their point guardnow a conductora detail that produces roarshe has scarsfor a moment I think he’sgoing to lift his shirt the quietestand drollest of the groupinstead he talks of an all-night drive backto Sarajevo in 1995 and howbandaged and bleedinginto his uniform he told the bus driverI can’t go backgot out with three friends inSlovenia 4 a.m.we took some sleep he saysin the park and phoned a friend ofa friend who asked how we werethree teen-agers in a park at dawnI had this much money in my pocketwe said fine we are O.K. but two dayslater we weren’t we had just twentyeuros our agent stalling…

Walking at dusk through the long meadow, recording this prose poem on my phone, that’s my job, as old as soldiery, the hills, the soldered hills where current flows, green current. When you are finished recording, your lips are dried flowers. The trees are full of black plastic bags and hornets’ nests but not significance; the task of imbuing them falls to me. And it’s me, Ben, just calling to check in. I’m on the way to pick Marcela up from day care and just wanted to hear about your trip. I’m sure it must have been hard seeing him like that. Anyway, I love you and I’m here. Give me a call when you can. I’ll be around until the late nineteenth century, when carved wood gives way to…

“A chance to cut is a chance to cure”: I first heard this maxim forty-five years ago, as a medical student, when I watched a surgeon extract a tumor from a woman’s abdomen. Confidence in the powers of surgery extends back to the most ancient roots of the field. There are Neolithic skulls dating from 6500 B.C. with holes that testify to trepanation, a treatment that involved drilling through the cranium, presumably to let out malign spirits. (The practice remained somewhat common until the end of the Middle Ages.) The teachings traditionally ascribed to the Indian physician Sushruta, who probably lived around the sixth century B.C., describe a cataract operation, in which a kind of curved needle was used to displace the occlusion from the line of sight, and rhinoplasties,…

APRIL 15 – 21, 2020 Baseball games are on hold until further notice, but fans can delve into the history of America’s favorite pastime via a surprising source—MetMuseum.org. The Metropolitan Museum owns thirty thousand vintage baseball cards, and fifteen thousand of them are online (including the four above, from 1933). They were donated by Jefferson R. Burdick, a New York electrician who died in 1963. Although it’s believed that Burdick never attended a game, he invented a catalogue system that’s still used by collectors today. MUSIC Flat Worms: “Antarctica” PUNK A basic tenet of high-octane rock music is to make as disobedient a racket as possible, preferably in the least amount of time. Certain arty corners of punk rock add an ambitious proviso: create this din while appearing well read.…

At 860 Grand Concourse, a residential apartment building in the Bronx, the doorman’s post is just inside the front door, on a landing between two flights of stairs. One of them leads up to the offices of a dentist and a lawyer, who, along with several physicians, rent commercial space. The other goes down past two pairs of gold-painted columns and into the main lobby, where an elevator services seven floors with a hundred and eleven apartments. Tuesday through Saturday, between eight in the morning and five in the evening, tenants going down to or coming up from the lobby could expect a greeting from a trim, punctilious man with close-cropped hair. He wore a navy-blue uniform that hung loosely off his narrow shoulders. His name was Juan Sanabria.…

It was raining in London on the evening of March 5th, and so only a small crowd had gathered outside Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London, to watch the Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrive for an awards ceremony hosted by the Endeavour Fund, a charity that supports wounded ex-servicemen and women. As press photographers waited for the couple to dart from Land Rover to lobby, they had little hope of a great shot: rain complicates flash photography, and the Duke and Duchess might be obscured by an umbrella. Luckily, Samir Hussein, who has frequently photographed the Royal Family, had an inspiration: flashes of cameras in the crowd could create a dramatic backlighting effect, as in a studio shot, and other flashes might illuminate the…

On Thursday, March 12th, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, could have insisted that he and his colleagues work through the weekend to hammer out an emergency aid package addressing the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, he recessed the Senate for a long weekend, and returned home to Louisville, Kentucky. McConnell, a seventy-eight-year-old Republican who is about to complete his sixth term as a senator, planned to attend a celebration for a protégé, Justin Walker, a federal judge who was once his Senate intern. McConnell has helped install nearly two hundred conservatives as judges; stocking the judiciary has been his legacy project. Soon after he left the Capitol, Democrats in the House of Representatives settled on a preliminary rescue package, working out the details with the Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin. The Senate…

The first time the Strokes put out an album in the midst of a local and national crisis was on October 9, 2001. The U.S. release of their full-length début, “Is This It,” had been delayed by 9/11, and the band had scrambled to excise “New York City Cops,” a sneering indictment of the city’s police force, from the CD. (It remained on the vinyl.) New York was grieving and dazed, but the Strokes seemed so emblematic of the city’s excesses and allure that loving them felt nearly patriotic. When “Is This It” was released, I was twenty-one, and in my first semester of an M.F.A. program. I worked as an editorial intern at Spin a couple of days a week, and spent most of my evenings drinking cheap beer…

A young woman has her first sexual experience. She is pleased to be desired by someone. She does not feel humiliated. But, later, she is mocked, tormented by others who believe that she has debased herself. Those whom she thought of as her friends now treat her like nothing. She feels shame. Is the shame hers? Or is it a reflection of what is expected of her? “To go all the way to the end of ’58 means agreeing to the demolition of all the interpretations I’ve assembled over the years,” Annie Ernaux writes in “A Girl’s Story” (Seven Stories), published in French in 2016, and now in English, translated by Alison L. Strayer. The book is an account of a sexual encounter Ernaux had as a teenager, and it…

Notes from an Apocalypse, by Mark O’Connell (Random House). A fitting travelogue for our stationary moment, this book seeks out the men (and a handful of women) who share the author’s fixation with doomsday scenarios. Meeting bunker builders, would-be Mars colonists, and preppers constantly at the ready to “bug out” of society and into the woods if crisis strikes, O’Connell diagnoses in them a craven obsession “with purifying their lives of dependence on others.” But other people affirm connection—a volunteer firefighter in Australia, Maori dancers honoring mosque-shooting victims in New Zealand—and O’Connell’s “future-dread” haltingly yields to faith in humanity’s resilience, resourcefulness, and capacity for coöperation. Child of Light, by Madison Smartt Bell (Doubleday). “I had taken America as my subject, and all my quarrels with America went into it,” the…