Innholdsfortegnelse for May 4, 2020 i The New Yorker

The first diagnosis of the coronavirus in the United States occurred in mid-January, in a Seattle suburb not far from the hospital where Dr. Francis Riedo, an infectious-disease specialist, works. When he heard the patient’s details—a thirty-five-year-old man had walked into an urgent-care clinic with a cough and a slight fever, and told doctors that he’d just returned from Wuhan, China—Riedo said to himself, “It’s begun.” For more than a week, Riedo had been e-mailing with a group of colleagues who included Seattle’s top doctor for public health and Washington State’s senior health officer, as well as hundreds of epidemiologists from around the country; many of them, like Riedo, had trained at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, in a program known as the Epidemic Intelligence Service.…

Back from Dublin, my grandmotherfinds an eviction notice on her door.Now she is in court for rent arrears.The lawyers are amused.These are the Petty Sessions,this is Drogheda, this is the Bank Holiday.Their comments fill a column in the newspaper.Was the notice well served?Was it served at all?Is she a weekly or a monthly tenant?In which one of the plaintiffs’ rent booksis she registered?The case comes to an end, is dismissed.Leaving behind the autumn evening.Leaving behind the room she entered.Leaving behind the reason I have alwaysresisted history.A woman leaves a courtroom in tears.A nation is rising to the light.History notes the second, not the first.Nor does it know the answer as to whyon a winter eveningin a modern IrelandI linger over the page of the DroghedaArgus and Leinster Journal, 1904,knowing as…

Most kids lose or break their toys. I curated mine. In 1976, the University of Iowa renamed an existing history-and-literature program America Studies. It drafted me and some other merry hippie Ivy graduates to blanket the state and gather “existing folk manifestations.” We plundered far-flung Salvation Army thrift stores and rural junk shops. We hunted the simple tools and dolls that our essays overinterpreted. Those startup treasures helped found my folk collection, one that’s not unknown today. Handwrought nineteenth-century artifacts were criminally cheap then. “Midwesterners don’t know what they have, or had,” we Easterners gloated after country raids. Prior to radio, before television, savage winters spent indoors turned many German-Americans into excellent wood-carvers. Unable to afford child whimsies (even from the Sears catalogue),a farmer just whittled his brood’s amusements. Those…

“The world will never know what has happened—what a light has gone out,” the belletrist Lytton Strachey, a member of London’s Bloomsbury literary set, wrote to a friend on January 19, 1930. Frank Ramsey, a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge University, had died that day at the age of twenty-six, probably from a liver infection that he may have picked up during a swim in the River Cam. “There was something of Newton about him,” Strachey continued. “The ease and majesty of the thought—the gentleness of the temperament.” Dons at Cambridge had known for a while that there was a sort of marvel in their midst: Ramsey made his mark soon after his arrival as an undergraduate at Newton’s old college, Trinity, in 1920. He was picked at the…

“The blessed damozel leaned out/From the gold bar of Heaven.” Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s lines caught the attention of Claude Debussy in 1887, when the composer was twenty-five. His setting of “The Blessed Damozel,” in the form of the orchestral cantata “La Damoiselle Élue,” is among his first fully characteristic works, opening a door to a landscape of unearthly radiance. The prelude begins with a spare procession of isolated harmonies: E minor, D minor, C major, D minor. The key of C is the apparent home ground of the piece, but for some thirty bars we wander through various adjacent tonalities and ambiguous zones, in a narcotizing haze. Finally, at the beginning of a passage marked “Un peu animé,” or “A bit animated,” C major arrives—but it, too, feels new. The…

A HIGHER LOVE Casey Cep’s sophisticated analysis of that quintessential New Yorker Dorothy Day made me forget the virus, at least for a few minutes, and look forward to reading John Loughery and Blythe Randolph’s biography of the would-be saint (Books, April 13th). But it also made me want to put in a good word for Forster Batterham, who is sometimes misconstrued as the villain of Day’s story. The usual understanding is that Batterham was an atheist cad who “did not believe in marriage,” as Cep notes. But Robert Ellsberg, in his collection of Day’s letters, reveals that the emotional relationship between the two persisted for years. Why didn’t Batterham marry Day, despite her entreaties? Surely their unconventionality as a couple was a significant roadblock, as were their religious disagreements.…

Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflowerand snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecyand the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tisof thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and godnot forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,enough of the will to go on and not go on or howa certain light does a certain thing, enoughof the kneeling and the rising and the lookinginward and the looking up, enough of the gun,the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lostletter on the dresser, enough of the longing andthe ego and the obliteration of ego, enoughof the mother and the child and the father and the childand enough of the pointing to the world, wearyand desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,enough…

A Thousand Moons, by Sebastian Barry (Viking). This spare, lyrical sequel to “Days Without End” takes place in the backwoods of Tennessee, a state scarred by the Civil War. Winona, a young Lakota woman, lives in a community that is prejudiced against her race and her sex, yet she finds fulfilling work and a besotted fiancé. However, after she is brutally attacked, she is forced to reckon with her past traumas, and with the cruelties faced by Native Americans. Barry’s atmospheric prose captures the mid-nineteenth century’s language and hardscrabble spirit. “Be wise,” Winona tells herself. “Trouble always comes and no use wishing it didn’t. Thing is, to get through it—and out the other side.” How Much of These Hills Is Gold, by C Pam Zhang (Riverhead). In this stylized and…

APRIL 29 – MAY 5, 2020 The century-old West Village piano bar Marie’s Crisis has shut its doors amid the pandemic, but the Broadway sing-along continues every night via Facebook Live. The bar’s crooning waitstaff is there, too. “It’s been an amazing experience to create this online community,” Yvette Monique Clark (above), who has worked at Marie’s Crisis for five years, says. (Her signature number: “When You’re Good to Mama,” from “Chicago.”) Catch her on Sundays and Thursdays, belting from her Flatbush apartment. DANCE “The Bright Stream” In 2005, the Bolshoi Ballet came to New York under the direction of a young, little-known choreographer—Alexei Ratmansky. Amid a parade of blockbuster ballets, the company performed one of his works, “The Bright Stream.” This spoof of Soviet-era propaganda—a happy farce set on…

At 4:18 a.m. on February 1, 1997, a fire broke out in the Aisin Seiki company’s Factory No. 1, in Kariya, a hundred and sixty miles southwest of Tokyo. Soon, flames had engulfed the plant and incinerated the production line that made a part called a P-valve—a device used in vehicles to modulate brake pressure and prevent skidding. The valve was small and cheap—about the size of a fist, and roughly ten dollars apiece—but indispensable. The Aisin factory normally produced almost thirty-three thousand valves a day, and was, at the time, the exclusive supplier of the part for the Toyota Motor Corporation. Within hours, the magnitude of the loss was evident to Toyota. The company had adopted “just in time” (J.I.T.) production: parts, such as P-valves, were produced according to…

Phillip Lafayette Gibbs met Dale Adams when they were in high school, in Ripley, Mississippi, a town best known as the home of William Faulkner’s great-grandfather, who ran a slave plantation, fought in the Mexican-American War, raised troops that joined the Confederate Army, wrote a best-selling mystery about a murder on a steamboat, shot a man to death and got away with it, and was elected to the Mississippi legislature. He was killed before he could take his seat, but that seat would have been two hundred miles away in the state capitol, in Jackson, a city named for Andrew Jackson, who ran a slave plantation, fought in the War of 1812, was famous for killing Indians, shot a man to death and got away with it, and was elected…

Think of the hashtag #blackAF as a millennial remix of mantras of selflove—“Black is beautiful,” “I’m black and I’m proud.” The phrase, printed on T-shirts and stamped on skin, has become a kind of shorthand for a politics of affirmation. But does it also veil a prickly insecurity? “Black as fuck” is the kind of thing an artist or a businessman might say about his work or his behavior in order to foreclose critique. After all, who is anyone to question anyone else’s blackness? Employed earnestly, the phrase makes some people wary: Why the fuck do you feel that you have to proclaim your blackness? On the other hand: Why the fuck is it such big deal to you if I do? The forty-five-year-old showrunner, producer, and writer Kenya Barris…