Innholdsfortegnelse for May 18, 2020 i The New Yorker

On Monday, March 9th, Jake Kittell, a research engineer and machinist who builds scientific equipment for the University of Vermont, in Burlington, came into work fired up. Approaching another engineer, Carl Silver, he said, “We gotta build a ventilator.” “That sounds great,” Silver replied. “What do we know about ventilators?” Neither had ever seen one. But the coronavirus pandemic, once an abstraction, had recently made itself felt in Seattle, New York, and other American cities, and doctors had warned that a shortage of ventilators could hasten the deaths of thousands. “You feel like you want to do something,” Silver recalled. The next week, Kittell e-mailed another professor at the university, Jason Bates, with whom they had worked in the past, and whom they knew to be a lung expert. We…

At first they stand, orphaned, like a line of birds,First on one foot, then the other, in unison,Like any other unnamed someones, as if poisedFor a firing line, until someone thinks he knowsA train is coming in the sparrow-morning light,And someone else taps a pack of cigarettesAgainst his gloved hand, not exotic,But it’s as if he’s slipped into captivity. OneOf those corner-of-the-eye, white-skyDays, late winter a hammer against thePlatform, and gathered above the grave-Line of the gap enough snowTo consider the blue clouds floating,Like forgiveness, above us all. Only twoAre cresting at this moment, one a showOf hands, an explosion of clapping, theOther a mask of a baptismal faceFailing behind the city’s blood-brownSkyline. Whoever screamed just then,Then quieted, then shouted, high, like a crow,Leaves me filled with absence, listeningFor silences,…

1 In Chuck’s dream, a strange womanis smoking in our kitchen. She’s doing her best, she says,exhaling into the oven. Then three military menburst in without knocking. They say they’ve cometo establish order, but their uniforms are strange.Chuck suspects they’re really salesmen. Their leader stands too closeas he begins his pitch— close enough to spread a virus. 2 I take a photo of a housepainted half blue, half pink. Why am I drawnto things that make no sense? Or is their sense excessive? You need to decontextualizean objectin order to see it, I once said. Last slothin a pocket of rain forest; exquisite scentof hyacinth waftedon the wingless breeze.…

Hell and Other Destinations, by Madeleine Albright (Harper). This richly detailed memoir by the former Secretary of State covers the period since her departure from government, in 2001. With clarity and wisdom, Albright recounts moments of pride, like receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2012, and acknowledges recent criticisms of her record, including those concerning the human cost of the sanctions that the Clinton Administration imposed on Iraq. Ultimately, the book presents an intricate portrait of a diplomat, and her ardent belief in democratic values and human rights, transatlantic partnerships and arms control, and open economies and sturdy institutions. Square Haunting, by Francesca Wade (Tim Duggan). In interwar London, Mecklenburgh Square, in Bloomsbury, attracted intellectuals fleeing convention. Many of them were also feminists, who argued that women, like men,…

Two terrific shows that languish in darkened galleries at the Museum of Modern Art should not pass uncelebrated—or unvisited, to the extent that moma’s Web site ameliorates the lockdown. It helps that both shows feature a good deal of verbal content and may well incite Googling of their brilliant subjects: Dorothea Lange, the premier photographer of the human drama of the Great Depression, and Félix Fénéon, a shadowy French aesthete and political anarchist. Fénéon was also a sometime art critic, dealer, collector, and journal editor, and a legendarily sardonic wit—not an artist but an art-world sparkplug. Best known for having coined, in 1886, the term “Neo-Impressionism,” and for his championing of Georges Seurat, he is characterized in the show’s catalogue as “implacable, inscrutable, meticulous, and mysterious.” Lanky and sporting an…

COFFEEHOUSE CULTURES Adam Gopnik fluidly leads us through the historical and economic underpinnings of coffee drinking to elucidate the global web of the bean (Books, April 27th). He observes that the growth of coffee culture in the United States can be measured by the large numbers of epicurean cafés, coffee connoisseurs, and imported espresso beans that have entered society since 1989. This notion of an American coffee culture implies that the people partaking in it have become “cultured.” Yet there are more quotidian coffee cultures in American history worth mentioning. I think back to the domestic routines developed in mid-century America: of the percolator perched on our kitchen counter, of Mrs. Olson saving marriages with Mountain Grown Folger’s, of the ubiquitous packets of Sanka, of the rotgut coffee at truck…

Not long ago, as the world was halfway into week whatever of suspended animation, a man who lives with his wife and children in the Midwest arrived in New York City. He is a writer and a musician in his early fifties. His age means that he grew up listening to the Violent Femmes and Jim Carroll, reading poems by C. K. Williams and Galway Kinnell, and writing songs about the limited options available in a small city where the interstate keeps people flowing through without stopping. He became a career military man, medically trained, who did tours in Afghanistan and other unenviable places. His latest deployment was to New York, where his expertise could be put to use saving lives and alleviating suffering in a temporary facility for coronavirus…

1. R., a sculptor, rode a shuttle bus to the afterlife. He had no baggage. That the destination was the afterlife was understood, a given. This fact R. couldn’t have explained. He didn’t have to. None of the others on the bus—it was loosely packed, perhaps a third of the seats full—challenged R.’s certainty. They knew as well. The facility was large. At a glance, all he had time for, R. failed to see its limits. Wide glass doors slid open, and R. and his fellow-passengers moved inside as if swept, yet willingly. Once they were within, the whole matter of the bus seemed irretrievably distant. (Had a movie been playing on an overhead screen? Had R. slept? What caused him to pay so little notice to the scene outside…

In 1957, a man from New York named R. Gordon Wasson published an article in Life about two trips he had taken, three decades apart. The first was to the Catskills, in New York, where his wife, Valentina, took a rambling walk in the woods and became enamored of some wild mushrooms. “She caressed the toadstools,” Wasson recalled, “savored their earthy perfume.” She brought them home to cook, and soon he, too, was enchanted. They spent the next thirty years studying and cataloguing various species, searching out literary and artistic works about mushrooms. According to Wasson, the world is divided into mycophiles and mycophobes. Reverence might take a variety of forms—think of Eastern Europe or Russia, where foraging is a pastime. There’s a famous scene in “Anna Karenina,” in which…

In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, New York City museums, galleries, theatres, music venues, and cinemas have closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found online and streaming. MAY 13 – 19, 2020 Charli XCX has been making futuristic electro-pop since her 2013 début, “True Romance,” but with her new album, “How I’m Feeling Now,” produced in quarantine at her home in L.A. (where she is pictured), the English singer-songwriter creates music for the present. The singles “Forever” and “Claws” crackle, smolder, and otherwise short-circuit, as though Charli’s electronic devices cannot withstand the intensity of her desire for human connection. “I’ll love you forever,” she sings, “even when we’re not together.” ART Kerstin Brätsch How should a painting be? Given that this daring German artist,…

We are not accustomed to destruction looking, at first, like emptiness. The coronavirus pandemic is disorienting in part because it defies our normal cause-and-effect shortcuts to understanding the world. The source of danger is invisible; the most effective solution involves willing paralysis; we won’t know the consequences of today’s actions until two weeks have passed. Everything circles a bewildering paradox: other people are both a threat and a lifeline. Physical connection could kill us, but civic connection is the only way to survive. In March, even before widespread workplace closures and self-isolation, people throughout the country began establishing informal networks to meet the new needs of those around them. In Aurora, Colorado, a group of librarians started assembling kits of essentials for the elderly and for children who wouldn’t be…

On March 10th, the German pianist Igor Levit played Beethoven’s Third and Fifth Piano Concertos at the Elbphilharmonie, the hulking concert complex in Hamburg. It was his thirty-third birthday and, it turned out, his last public concert for many weeks. The next day, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, delivered a dire warning about the scope of the looming coronavirus pandemic, and performance spaces began closing across the country. At the time, Levit had a full schedule before him. He had recently issued a boxed-set recording of Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas, and was playing Beethoven cycles in several European cities. He was also preparing to tackle an arcane colossus of the piano literature—the seventy-minute Piano Concerto by the early-twentieth-century composer-virtuoso Ferruccio Busoni, a hero of his. “That next day, the eleventh,…

In 1952, at the age of twenty-eight, Henry Kissinger did what enterprising graduate students do when they want to hedge their academic future: he started a magazine. He picked an imposing name—Confluence—and enlisted illustrious contributors: Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Lillian Smith, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr. The publisher James Laughlin, who was a backer of the magazine, described the young Kissinger as “a thoroughly sincere person (terribly earnest Germanic type) who is trying his hardest to do an idealistic job.” Like his other early production, the Harvard International Seminar, a summer program that convened participants from around the world—Kissinger gamely volunteered to spy on attendees for the F.B.I.—the magazine opened channels for him not only with policymakers in Washington but also with an older generation of German Jewish thinkers whose…

“I make one chicken feed five,” Wanda Coleman wrote in “My Love Brings Flowers,” a poem from 1983. “Make clothes ten years old fashionable/rejuvenate one fake sable coat.” Coleman, who died in 2013, was one of the great menders in American verse: she found the extra wear in old forms like the sonnet and rummaged for new forms in everyday material, like aptitude tests, medical reports, and want ads. Poets sometimes brag about their fearsome powers of transformation; Coleman, beset by hardship for much of her life, kept her boasts closer to the bone. “I scrape bottom,” she wrote, and yet her poetry drew on deep reserves. Given Coleman’s almost chaotic originality, it is touching to encounter her stark admissions of debt: “I borrow from friends.” At a moment…

There’s been ample time, during the past few endless weeks, for a person who misses theatre to think about what theatre gives us that’s different from what we get from other kinds of art and performance. We have television to entertain us, movies and books to sustain us. What can plays do? When in doubt, it never hurts to consult Hamlet. “The purpose of playing,” the Danish prince tells us, “was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Theatre can be fleet, spare, and adaptive, reactive to and reflective of the immediate conditions of its creation. Plays may spend years in development, but,…