Innholdsfortegnelse for May 25, 2020 i The New Yorker

On March 14th, Roslyn Crouch, a mother of twelve, left her house in New Orleans to stock up on toilet paper and canned goods, and didn’t return. Crouch, who is forty-two, with slender braids down to her knees, had been feeling anxious about the spread of the coronavirus. At home, she cared for her elderly mother, and for a half-dozen children, including a son with sickle-cell anemia, a blood disorder. She herself had chronic bronchitis, and worried that it put her at risk. Many people in her neighborhood lacked access to high-quality medical care. (Black residents of Louisiana have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic; they make up about thirty per cent of the state’s population, but account for almost sixty per cent of documented deaths from the virus.) She…

One night last December, the chief resident physician at a hospital in the Iranian city of Gorgan was asked to consult on a baffling case: a patient was racked with a mysterious virus, which was advancing rapidly through his body. The doctor, who asked to be identified only as Azad, for fear of retribution by authorities, performed a CT scan and a series of chest X-rays, but the virus overwhelmed the patient before he could decide on a treatment. After reading reports from China, Azad determined that the cause of death was the coronavirus. “I’d never seen anything like it before,” he told me. More patients started coming in, first a few at a time, then in droves, many of them dying. When Azad and his colleagues alerted hospital officials…

I wake early and angry, I eat oatmeal with thyme honey,I call my sister, I call my mother, I call my other sisters, my brothers,I worry about my feverish lover, I worry about my siblings, jobless now.I send an ill-advised e-mail, I don’t send an ill-advised tweet. I’m alone so I’m lonely. That’s what my sister says. Time to stay indoors, the doctor says, all the doctors say,but the open window betrays that not everyone’s voice dies to solitude.Shut up, shut up! the window slams.Time to embrace the virtues of boredom, the price of happiness again, after. The window shows men digging a place for survivors of the future, the rich ones.It will be a condo tower, glass walls for better envy.They’ve built the frames, I see, around the holes…

Before the Civil War, Southern slaveholders used to claim that their labor system was more humane than “wage slavery” in the factories of the industrializing North. They didn’t win that argument, but the idea took root that the South, during and after slavery, did not have a true capitalist economy. In 1930, twelve Southern writers (all white men) published a collection of essays, titled “I’ll Take My Stand,” that opened with a declaration that they “all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial.” To believe that the South was economically different didn’t entail being a…

The sexy cleric is ascendant. In HBO’s “The New Pope,” Paolo Sorrentino’s baroque vision of the papacy, Jude Law is Pius XIII, a fetish object who rises out of the sea in a Speedo like a male Venus. A chic oppressor, he is either a saint or a sadist. He may have transcended the need for sex, but the sight of his obscured face, as he pontificates from the Vatican balcony—or the appearance of his likeness, or even the suggestion of his likeness—is enough to make his followers swoon. Who could be more attractive than someone who has sworn off doing it? In the second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “Fleabag,” the antiheroine falls for a priest—yes, the hot one, played by Andrew Scott—whose lack of temperance has brought him only…

MEDICAL TROUBLES Siddhartha Mukherjee’s engrossing exposé of the weaknesses in America’s health-care system explains how electronic medical records have not lived up to their promise (“After the Storm,” May 4th). Their failure to enable clinicians to efficiently track patient care is particularly evident among migrant farmworkers with urgent or ongoing health needs, who frequently travel for work and must navigate a new health system after each move. The coronavirus has further constricted this population’s access to care, as some mobile health services that usually reach farmworker camps have been suspended or scaled back. I’ve been a clinician for twenty-five years, and throughout that time I have hoped for the promise of electronic medical records to be realized. But in the face of the system’s inadequacy we must fill the holes.…

What I think I know about the sunset isthe trees appear to be rising in front of it,rising in front of the brilliant, splintered,overripe light, toward animate clouds arrayedand edged in grays and dusky pinks—a few blues,damson, pastel—and that scalloping excellent white.I didn’t mention the green, the green that ispushing itself everywhere, my being, and I was yesslightly stoned, down in the gazebo, having satby the dam on the Mombaccus Creek smokingfor half an hour, waiting for the beaver to come back.It did not. The only sound was a cardinalin the trees and when overhead fourteen geesehonked me and headed south and now my childrenup in Jackie’s garden, arguing, ignoring the pleasof the babysitter I am paying twenty dollars an hour.I saw a red cardinal up at the car once…

“The Biga house is coming down,” Gerald said. “Finally.” He took the tray from Eva’s lap. “That lovely house,” Eva said. With a finger, Gerald lifted one slat of the horizontal blinds. He held the tray in his other hand and peered out the window. “What’s lovely about it?” he said, and the tray tilted. “Gerald!” Eva called, and he righted the tray without looking at her. “The Japanese maple with the crimson leaves.” “They dug it up already,” Gerald said. “Worth a fortune, a tree like that.” Eva wheeled herself to the window. “I’ll pull the blinds,” Gerald said, but he went away first, into the kitchen with the tray, and, until he came back, she studied the dust on the edges of the blinds—the very thin rim of…

Island on Fire, by Tom Zoellner (Harvard). In May, 1832, Samuel Sharpe, the leader of Jamaica’s greatest slave rebellion, was executed. Sharpe had been an “elite” slave: a literate Baptist deacon who travelled around the country delivering powerful sermons to other slaves. The previous December, Sharpe and his followers had covertly organized a nonviolent labor strike. Although the rebels lost the ensuing military struggle, a five-week-long ordeal that laid waste to dozens of plantations across the colony, the impact of their protest was substantial. Zoellner makes deft use of primary sources, and illustrates how the atmosphere of energetic political reform and events like Sharpe’s rebellion converged to end slavery in the “agricultural prison camp” of Jamaica, and in the British Empire at large. Stray, by Stephanie Danler (Knopf). After nearly…

MAY 20 – 26, 2020 Ballet Hispánico had big plans for its fiftieth anniversary: two weeks at the Joyce, new works, a retrospective. Instead, it’s limited to releasing content online, with weekly watch parties (“El Beso” is on May 20). Still, there’s a lot to celebrate. Born out of a small Manhattan school and ensemble, Hispánico is now a thriving institution with gorgeous dancers. Two of them, the married couple Melissa Verdecia and Lyvan Verdecia (above, sheltering in Miami), represent the new Ballet Hispánico—vibrant, diverse, and amazingly versatile. MUSIC Rudolf Buchbinder: “The Diabelli Project” CLASSICAL Before Instagram, it took some time to get artists on board with a music challenge. In 1819, when the publisher Anton Diabelli asked for variations on a basic waltz he’d written, it took five years…

If you wake up anxious at four in the morning, as you may be wont to do these days—assuming that you fall asleep in the first place—you are likely to hear birdsong. That wouldn’t be remarkable in, say, Larchmont, but it’s downright eerie in most precincts of New York City, where dawn’s twitters and chirps are usually drowned out by the hum of traffic, the rumble of garbage trucks, the clatter of subway trains, the echoing complaints of whoever is out and about. That sometimes glorious, sometimes aggravating all-hours din is what an old song called the “lullaby of Broadway,” and, no offense to the birds, its absence during lockdown has been disconcerting. To help fill this void, the New York Public Library recently issued its first-ever widely available album,…

In late February, the singer and songwriter Phoebe Bridgers appeared at Carnegie Hall as part of a benefit for Tibet House U.S., a nonprofit founded by the composer Philip Glass, the actor Richard Gere, and the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman. New York was not yet fully in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, but a diffuse anxiety was nonetheless in the air. Early in the evening, the artist and musician Laurie Anderson performed several pieces from her album “Songs from the Bardo,” in which she narrates sections of “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” in a gentle, steady voice. The text is intended to coax a consciousness through the foggy space between death and rebirth. Already, it felt resonant. Bridgers, who is twenty-five, wore a tea-length black dress and high-top…

One evening in February, I went to hear a lecture at the Baltimore Underground Science Space, a community lab in a former bottle-top factory. Like several dozen other “bio-spaces” around the country, BUGSS, as the lab is known, is animated by a spirit of subversive amateurism. Anybody can go there to learn about, and then do, the kind of cutting-edge bench science—gene editing, synthetic biology—that is generally confined to well-funded academic institutions and private corporations. Inside, a chalkboard with cartoon drawings of a microbe and a double helix welcomes newcomers, but the lab areas are seriously kitted out. BUGSS has a real-time PCR machine, the gadget that allows scientists to make millions of copies of a particular strand of DNA, in order to study and manipulate it. “We don’t have…

In the spring of 1876, a young man of nineteen arrived in the seaside city of Trieste and set about a curious task. Every morning, as the fishermen brought in their catch, he went to meet them at the port, where he bought eels by the dozens and then the hundreds. He carried them home, to a dissection table in a corner of his room, and—from eight until noon, when he broke for lunch, and then again from one until six, when he quit for the day and went to ogle the women of Trieste on the street—he diligently slashed away, in search of gonads. “My hands are stained by the white and red blood of the sea creatures,” he wrote to a friend. “All I see when I close…

Classical musicians, like their counterparts in the rest of the performing arts, have been trying to find a second life online during the pandemic shutdown. Pianists have streamed recitals from their homes; orchestras have used the Zoom app to create virtual ensembles; small groups have assembled in empty halls. Any discussion of this activity, encouraging as it is, must take into account that it unfolds against a backdrop of misery. The livelihood of thousands of musicians has been shattered overnight. People have been lost; grief runs deep. There should be no talk—I have seen some—of classical music “thriving” on the Internet. No one is thriving. No one is making money. No one is free from fear. With that in mind, I’ve been glued to my computer in recent weeks, consuming…