Innholdsfortegnelse for June 1, 2020 i The New Yorker

These days, the advice frequently directed at New Yorkers with deep-seated psychological difficulties is to stop having them. At a moment when every anxiety seems suddenly palpable, and every intimation of doom justified—“Congratulations on the prescience of your neurosis” is the suggested language of one therapist for patients who are obsessive hand-washers—it may seem indulgent to keep pursuing intractable dreams and dreads as though they were central to existence. Nonetheless, in the city’s great tradition, New Yorkers continue to seek out their therapists, millennial youngsters as much as neurotic elders. Governor Andrew Cuomo has launched a mental-health hotline, recruiting psychotherapists to provide probono phone sessions for every sort of citizen. Therapy has become democratized: everybody needs an ear. Despite vacant offices from the Upper West Side to Greenpoint, in the…

Having you was like having a baby.A box of matches carrying bees across a lake. I keep the reel of your passport photoin my coat pocket, bent around a coin. There were many nights when you threatened to run away.If falling in love is a decision I listened for the click in your breath.You aren’t old enough to know yet few people have your best interestat heart. At heart, I swept the wet glass of you throwing pills across the street.When you were sick, I wrote your weight in kilograms so you wouldn’t understandwhat was happening.…

“Camp was really great fun,” the English comic novelist P. G. Wode-house wrote to an old school friend. He was speaking of the forty-eight weeks between 1940 and 1941 that he spent in a series of German-run civil-internment camps. He lost nearly sixty pounds. He was separated from his wife. He slept on a straw-filled mattress, and tried to avoid scabies and lice. At Tost, in what is now Poland, the fourth of four camps, Wodehouse was offered his own room, on account of his fame, and maybe his age. Declining the offer, he shared a cell with sixty-three others. He was nearly sixty when he was released. The only privilege of which he availed himself was paying eighteen marks a month for a typewriter. The typewriter was housed…

JUST THE TICKET I thoroughly enjoyed Anthony Lane’s ode to night trains (“Because the Night,” May 11th). I had the pleasure of riding the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express from Istanbul to Paris last summer, and thus feel compelled to contest Lane’s clever swipe at the types of passenger many believe to be on board this luxurious locomotive. I had a twin cabin; though expensive, it did not have the thirty-seven-thousand-dollar ticket price of the Cabin Suite. And, happily, my conversations consisted of topics much more interesting than the “same anecdote, from the same retired fund manager, all the way across a continent.” Far from being loathsome fat-cat financiers, many passengers had saved for years to take this trip of a lifetime, just as I did. They ran the gamut from two longtime…

The brown bear living near the estuary,and wading out when the tide swells and the salmon run,during the days of the dwindling salmon runs,and slapping with his big right paw a hook-nosed fishwhipsawing inland to spawn,the ambidextrous bear,furred like the forest from which he emerged,waddling into the unteachable watersto swat the salmon out the fast-running tideand catch the red salmon in his mouthand toss and juggle the sockeye salmonthrashing and drowning in the air—and when he’s expressed himself completelyhe catches with his jaw the selfthat swam ten thousand miles to the estuaryand daintily, mincingly, with one paw graspingthe caudal fin and the other the head,eats that salmon as if he were weand the fish an ear of boiled corn—that bear is a bear about whom rich and complicatedfeelings can be…

FROM A WIDE VANTAGE Two hospital workers, somewhat lonely-looking figures, taking a smoke break, back behind a trailer, leaning toward each other as they talked softly beside a row of neatly trimmed bushes. One had long hair and thin, pale arms that dangled from her scrubs. The other was big, burly, with a tattoo on his arm. Even that day in June—if you paid close attention, driving past—you might’ve seen desire in the way she pointed her toe and dug it into the dusty concrete while she listened to him, or you might’ve noticed the way he swayed as he talked, because he liked to riff on the subject at hand, and, lately, the last few times, when she visited with the trailer, he had expounded upon the recent news:…

The Death of Jesus, by J. M. Coetzee (Viking). The trilogy of novels that began with “The Childhood of Jesus” (2013) ends as enigmatically as it began. David, the protagonist, is now a precocious ten-year-old, in an unnamed country where memories are expunged. After he forsakes his adoptive parents for a nearby orphanage, a strange illness renders him emaciated and epileptic, and he expounds idiosyncratic theories about celestial phenomena and “Don Quixote.” His startling pronouncements and sudden death lead some to believe that he was a martyred savant. (Others see him as merely an unlucky child.) The novel, dense with veiled allegories and philosophical dialogues, challenges readers both to look for David’s message and to question whether it existed at all. A Children’s Bible, by Lydia Millet (Norton). In this…

Pop music, once ruled by constraint and conformity, now faces a tyranny of freedom. Technology has eroded boundaries of taste and influence, cracking open a trove of stylistic opportunity. No mainstream act has embraced this freedom more wholeheartedly than the 1975, a group from Britain that could loosely be classified as a band, if only because its members sometimes play instruments. The group was formed, in the early two-thousands, as a teen-age punk cover band but has morphed into a genre-defying shape that poses a series of questions: Where does nostalgia end and innovation begin? What counts as rock and roll, and why should anyone care? What’s the difference between ambition and self-indulgence? Is self-awareness an asset or a cross to bear? The 1975 has four members, but its…

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 27 – JUNE 2, 2020 Wave Hill, the twenty-eight-acre horticultural gem in the Bronx, is closed temporarily, but its public programs continue. On Sunday mornings through July 26, it hosts Zoom yoga classes taught by Susie Caramanica (pictured), from her home in the Hudson Valley. Registration is required on wavehill.org, where visitors can also download thirty virtual landscapes to use as Zoom backgrounds. Practice lotus pose in an aquatic garden, or perfect tree pose under a canopy of cherry blossoms. DANCE JoyceStream: Signe Roderik Most dance offerings online have been performances and classes, but dance films…

Samuel and his friends found the apartment in 2014. They were all in their twenties, mostly Bard graduates, living in a Victorian house in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn, which held ten people. But the owner was selling, so six of them found a place in Bushwick, where they could keep living together as a big, happy postgraduate commune. It was a duplex on the top two floors of a small building, part of a row of new residences across the street from a Baptist church. “It looked like any new construction: bare white walls, wood floor,” Samuel recalled. “It had almost no character at all.” But it had a washer-dryer, lots of bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a roof-deck, where, on a clear night, you could see the lights of the…

In Lionel Shriver’s novel “The Mandibles,” it’s 2029, the United States has defaulted on its loans, and the country is plunging into an economic abyss. Suddenly, a cabbage costs thirty-eight dollars. Savings accumulated over a lifetime evaporate in an hour. Former hedge-fund managers compete for jobs as waiters. (Their new patrons are foreigners; America, like other failed states, has become a magnet for tourists who can afford luxuries that the natives can only dream of.) Everyone is grimy, because water shortages have rendered showers brief and infrequent. This is made particularly troublesome by another post-apocalyptic issue: there’s not enough toilet paper. “I found that really gratifying,” Shriver said, as she considered her prescience, one recent afternoon in London. Since the lockdown went into effect, she has been sequestered with her…

Professional sports right now is a COVID-19 ghost town. The games have vanished. There are few events to cover and almost nothing to broadcast. Yet, eerily, the industry lives on. Reporters file stories and analysts hold forth even though the stadiums are empty. Athletes are paid even though they are sitting around the house. A chunk of your cable bill is going to Major League Baseball even though there are no major-league baseball games to watch. M.L.B. is selling Mookie Betts Dodgers jerseys and the N.F.L. is selling Tom Brady Buccaneers jerseys even though no one knows when they will ever play for those teams. In Las Vegas, you can get 3–1 odds on the Yankees to win the World Series. It’s a reminder that the industry is much bigger…

Who could resist the title? László F. Földényi’s new book of essays is called “Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears” (Yale). It sounds like something that might happen in a Dostoyevsky novel: cause and effect scrambled, reason abolished by extremity, the thunderclap of irrationality producing religious storms of weeping and abasement. And behind it all something faintly farcical, deliberately exaggerated—another of Dostoyevsky’s self-consciously scandalous “scenes.” After all, who in world history has ever read Hegel and burst into tears? Except of frustration? It turns out that we don’t know if Dostoyevsky burst into tears, either; Földényi is punting here. But Dostoyevsky may well have read Hegel in Siberia. His American biographer, Joseph Frank, tells us that in 1854 he wrote to his brother in St. Petersburg, imploring…