Innholdsfortegnelse for April 27, 2020 i The New Yorker

Early in the coronavirus crisis, before New York shut down and the schools closed, when people still shared opinions about Marie Kondo and the timing of the Iowa caucuses, Elmhurst Hospital, in Queens, began rearranging its emergency room. The section for less acutely ill patients became a screening room for patients with symptoms of COVID-19. Within days, a new wall had been built. The critical-care area was doubled, then tripled. A triage tent soon went up outside. And the family room—where doctors and families can have difficult conversations in relative privacy—was turned into a place for the distribution of personal protective equipment, a transition from a “cold zone” to a “hot zone.” “You walk into your shift and are handed a bag with your P.P.E. for the day, like it’s…

Before Brittany Howard was paid to make music, she bagged groceries at a Kroger, sold used cars, made pizzas at a Domino’s, fried eggs at a Cracker Barrel, built custom picture frames, sucked up trash for a commercial sanitation company, and delivered the U.S. mail along a rural route in northern Alabama, where she lived. She practiced with her rock band, Alabama Shakes, whenever she could. “I would work thirteen hours at the post office, get off, and rush to rehearsal,” she told me. In 2012, Alabama Shakes released their début album, “Boys & Girls.” Howard was twenty-three, and had never travelled outside the South. Critics scrambled to praise the record; it briefly seemed as if Howard, whose voice is both burly and tender, a mixture of Robert Plant and…

On November 10, 1898, just after Election Day, white supremacists overthrew the city government of Wilmington, North Carolina, forcing the resignation of the mayor, the aldermen, and the chief of police. A mob of white people burned down the office of an African-American newspaper and killed an unknown number of black townspeople. An eyewitness believed that more than a hundred died, and a state guardsman recalled, “I nearly stepped on negroes laying in the street dead.” In “Wilmington’s Lie” (Atlantic Monthly), a judicious and riveting new history of the coup, David Zucchino, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from apartheid-era South Africa, estimates the number of deaths at more than sixty. The conspirators went on to expel prominent blacks from the city—by means of threats in some cases,…

HOW TO SEE VELÁZQUEZ Peter Schjeldahl eloquently examines how the world’s shutdown during the COVID-19 pandemic may lead us to view art and museums differently (The Art World, April 13th). His discussion of the value of museums reminds me of a comment that Holden Caulfield makes in J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” Holden says that the best thing about the Museum of Natural History was that “everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move…. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.” The museum’s static environment is a comfort to Holden as the rest of his life largely evades control. Let us hope Schjeldahl is right when he says that, once the crisis ends, art “may even induce us to consider, however…

It is that week in April when all the lions start to shine,café tables poised for selfies, windows squeegeedand fenceposts freshly painted around Tompkins Square,former haven of junkies and disgraceful pigeonstoday chock-full of French bulldogs and ornamental tulipssuperimposed atop the old, familiar, unevictable dirt.Lying on the couch, I am drifting with the conversationof bees, a guttural buzz undergirding the soundfrom a rusty string of wind chimes hung and forgottenin the overgrown beech tree marooned out back,limbs shaggy with neon-green flame-tongue leafletsforking through a blanket of white blossoms,long-neglected evidence of spring at its most deluxe,pure exuberant fruitfulness run amok.Rigorous investigation has identified two dialectsbuzzing through the plunder-fall, hovering black bumblebeesand overworked honeybees neck-deep in nectar-bliss,as the city to us, blundering against its oversaturated anthersuntil the pollen coats our skin, as if…

One long winter night, Ezra Washington’s wife walks in on him telling their younger child stories from his rollerblading days. The room is as dark as a coal mine and his voice floats sonorously from somewhere in the vicinity of the trundle bed. He is remembering a time long before the child was born, a time when he was a poor graduate student living in New York City with nothing but his own body and mind for entertainment. Saturdays were spent in the narrow park that runs alongside the Hudson River, blading up and down the path very fast, as if his happiness depended on it. “She was coming straight at me,” he says. “To the right of me was the river. And to the left a pack of bicyclists.…

APRIL 22 – 28, 2020 This spring, the pianist Jeremy Denk was supposed to present a three-part series on Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” in WQXR’s Greene Space, in downtown Manhattan, but, with the city locked down, he is recording it at his home in the Catskills instead. It’s “a place where I pretend to garden and farm as best I can,” he said in the introduction to the April 7 concert, before weaving together preludes and fugues with his own perspicacious commentary. The next installment, on April 27, streams on Denk’s and WQXR’s Facebook pages. ART The Frick Collection Why does the art of what we term the Old Masters have so much more soulful heft than that of most moderns and nearly all of our contemporaries? I think the reason…

In the pandemic economy, face masks are like bars of gold. Hoarders are hoarding them. Governors are bartering for them. Hospital workers desperately need them. New Yorkers, ordered by Governor Cuomo last week to cover their faces in public, are repurposing bandannas and boxer shorts. In Rosie the Riveter fashion, Americans with crafting skills—among them quilters, Broadway seamstresses, sportswear manufacturers, origami artists, and grandmothers—have sprung into action. But one group has special mask-making powers: cosplayers, the superfans who specialize in making and wearing costumes. Never has the ability to whip up a Spider-Man mask or a Stormtrooper helmet been so useful. “Cosplayers have big hearts,” Monica Paprocki, a thirty-five-year-old accountant in Chicago, said. Paprocki, who runs the fandom site Geeks A Gogo, started cosplaying in 2014 and taught herself how…

Field of silos, of did we keep enoughTo keep us through; walk the fence line whereThe middle rail broke, reset the traps By the manger. Did we pay enoughAttention; should have done with less, put up more,Learned the ditch, repeated the row, the glare Of sun in your eyes, again at your back, the undersongOf the sickle to rise, and lower, the tractorThat still runs. Forgive the mind its winter, its gnaw— The softening ground waits; the ridgeWhere the sky steeples with spire, windvane,To receive what we cannot handle, in sight As elsewhere small is the first lightTo light, each room becoming manyHouses filled with their own good doings until astonished You also remain. The unlost birds come backTo crown the trees and do not wonderHow each branch bursts into…

Redhead by the Side of the Road, by Anne Tyler (Knopf). This simple but affecting story follows Micah, a man in his forties who spends his days providing tech support to elderly clients, and his evenings with a casual girlfriend. “Does he ever stop to consider his life?” the novel asks. “It’s almost certain nobody’s ever asked him.” His placidity is disturbed when a teen-ager shows up on his doorstep, wrongly convinced that Micah is his father. The encounter brings Micah back into contact with a former girlfriend and spurs him to examine the rut into which his life has fallen. Tyler has the rare ability to evoke the ordinary with particularity, and the novel, though concerned with small events, insists on the dignity of its characters and the seriousness…

Good news, these past four years, has been vanishingly sparse, like a handful of lilies in a fallow field. One of the brightest of these rare flowers is the renewal of interest in the filmmaker, playwright, and fiction writer Kathleen Collins, who died, at the age of forty-six, in 1988. Under the guidance of her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, Collins’s written work has come to us in a posthumous torrent, first with the 2016 short-story collection “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?,” then with the eclectic omnibus “Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary,” which includes fiction, a pair of screenplays, excerpts from Collins’s diary, and scripts for plays. Her richly symbolic, formidably smart feature film “Losing Ground,” from 1982, has recently been rediscovered and restored to its rightful place in the…