Innholdsfortegnelse for June 8-15, 2020 i The New Yorker

In 1973, Maxine Hong Kingston and her husband, Earll, took a vacation to Lāna’i, a small Hawaiian island about eighty miles southeast of O’ahu, where they lived. There was little to do. Lāna’i was essentially a pineapple plantation, and they were awakened each morning at five, when a siren called workers to the fields. The Kingstons stayed at the only hotel on the island, which was largely empty. The bulb for the movie projector was broken. The bowling alley was closed for repairs. Maxine turned her desk to face the wall, and began writing. The Kingstons had moved to O’ahu after getting burned out on life in Berkeley, where they met as college students, in the early sixties. They got caught up in the era’s celebration of free expression and…

In the late fall of 2006, I went out for what I knew would be my last night of drinking. I remember stopping at Kellogg’s Diner to buy some Advil and a SlimFast, which I chugged on my way to the bar where I was meeting a girlfriend and a guy she was dating. There was something ceremonious about drinking that SlimFast, like putting on war paint. I thought it would protect my stomach from all the alcohol I was about to pour into it. I had never cared to do such a thing before. The first few rounds of drinks were unremarkable, and I was bored with my girlfriend and her guy. Then we went to another bar, which I think was on Graham Avenue. I remember that the…

THE WALLS OF ROUND HILL Evan Osnos’s survey of how country-club Republicans have embraced Trumpism was brilliantly done (“The Greenwich Rebellion,” May 11th). Osnos makes their conversion to winner-take-all libertarianism seem so natural that one wonders whether the super-rich ever felt the need for, as John Kenneth Galbraith termed it, “a truly superior moral justification for selfishness.” Members of the older generation in Greenwich, Connecticut, who called the prominent resident Prescott Bush a “Ten Commandments man,” must have admired both his sense of decorum and his moral stature. In this vivid chronicle, the absence of religious congregations prompts one to wonder whether a turn away from faith has led members of the one per cent to usher in what Osnos calls “a vision of politics that forgives cruelty as the…

On the morning of Friday, February 28th, Ævar Pálmi Pálmason, a detective with the Reykjavík police department, was summoned by his boss. Iceland did not yet have a confirmed case of COVID-19, but the country’s Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management wanted to be prepared. Suppose somebody tested positive? A team would be needed to track down everyone with whom that person had been in contact. Pálmason’s supervisor told him he was going to lead that team. “We were just talking: ‘If and when the first case happens—it could be this week, we just don’t know,’” Pálmason recalled. “And then, two hours later, we got the call.” A man who’d recently been skiing in the Dolomites had become the country’s first known coronavirus patient. Two other cops, two nurses,…

I was unincorporatedI was without a bodyI was lotsNot lots yet parcels I was groundWhere the pipes will goI was shrubs I wasBrush and the space Between shacks I lackedGovernance I wasLean-tos I was densIn the earth and Roots of the weakSweetgum I was pearAnd turtle sunningI was lungs un- Breathing I was the siteOn the horse’s neckWhere bats cameNightly to feed I was The blood coagulatingInto morning I wasWaiting for full darkAgain I was waiting For the woundTo reopen I was ledTo a tree a weakTree strung with nets I was the bat hopingTo be caught ICouldn’t heal myselfFast enough…

The dreams had mostly stopped. Still, he found himself awake, blinking in the dark room. Four A.M. He lay unmoving for a moment under the duvet. His T-shirt was stuck to his back—night sweats, the pillow swampy, the sheets damp. Roll to the other side. Spread out on the chilly sheets. Keep the eyes closed. As soon as both eyes opened, it would be straight to dull business, an organizer already laid out with his morning meds, a bottle of room-temperature Fiji water alongside. This time tomorrow, he would know everything. Well, not exactly this time, more like 10 a.m., but, in any case, all would be decided. He believed, truly, that he would be exonerated. How could he not be? This was America. Maybe there was a moment, a…

Andy Warhol’s life may be better documented than that of any other artist in the history of the world. That is because, every few days or so, he would sweep all the stuff on his desk into a storage box, date it, label it “TC”—short for “time capsule”—and then store it, with all the preceding TCs, in a special place in his studio. As a result, we have his movie-ticket stubs, his newspaper clippings, his cowboy boots, his wigs, his collection of dental molds, his collection of pornography, the countless Polaroids he took of the people at the countless parties he went to—you name it. We have copies of bills he sent and also of bills he received from increasingly exasperated creditors, including one (“PAY UP YOU BLOW-HARD”) from Giuseppe…

Dark Mirror, by Barton Gellman (Penguin Press). In 2013, the author, reporting for the Washington Post, was among those who brought to light the trove of top-secret N.S.A. files leaked by Edward Snowden. Here he delves even deeper into the maze of government secrecy and surveillance, but at the book’s core is his wary, exasperating relationship with his source, who slides between principled candor, exaggeration, and evasion. Gellman takes us through his efforts while reporting to weigh the public’s right to know against the need for secrecy on national-security matters, as he carefully charts the course toward transparency. Even so, when an N.S.A. spokesperson accuses him of being “in love with your source,” he takes seriously the possibility that her words might bear some truth. The Compton Cowboys, by Walter…

JUNE 3 – 16, 2020 The theatre initiative the Homebound Project has been live-streaming batches of original short plays, written and shot in isolation, to benefit food-deprived children during the pandemic. The next edition, available June 3-7, includes the actors Diane Lane, Blair Underwood, and Ashley Park and the playwrights Bess Wohl, John Guare, and Michael R. Jackson, the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama. The “Hamilton” star Phillipa Soo, above, will appear in a work by Clare Barron. Watch at homeboundtheater.org. MUSIC Essentially Ellington Festival JAZZ For twenty-five years now, Jazz at Lincoln Center has been throwing teen-agers into the lions’ den with the Essentially Ellington Festival competition, which asks high-school students to take on the challenging and elegant music of the Duke Ellington Orchestra and other…

That year we had planned to fish for marlin off the Cuban coast for a month. The month started the tenth of April and by the tenth of May we had twenty-five marlin and the charter was over. The thing to have done then would have been to buy some presents to take back to Key West and fill the Anita with just a little more expensive Cuban gas than was necessary to run across, get cleared, and go home. But the big fish had not started to run. “Do you want to try her another month, Cap?” Mr. Josie asked. He owned the Anita and was chartering her for ten dollars a day. The standard charter price then was thirty-five a day. “If you want to stay, I can…

I met that elderly monkey in a small Japanese-style inn in a hot-springs town in Gunma Prefecture, some five years ago. It was a rustic or, more precisely, decrepit inn, barely hanging on, where I just happened to spend a night. I was travelling around, wherever the spirit led me, and it was already past 7 p.m. when I arrived at the hot-springs town and got off the train. Autumn was nearly over, the sun had long since set, and the place was enveloped in that special navy-blue darkness particular to mountainous areas. A cold, biting wind blew down from the peaks, sending fist-size leaves rustling along the street. I walked through the center of the town in search of a place to stay, but none of the decent inns…

How again after months there is awe.The most personal moment of the dayappears unannounced. People wear leather.People refuse to die. There are strangerswho look like they could know your name.And the smell of a bar on a cold night,or the sound of traffic as it follows you home.Sirens. Parties. How balconies hold us.Whatever enough is, it hasn’t arrived.And on some dead afternoonwhen you’ll likely forget this,as you browse through the vintageagain and again—there it is,what everyone’s given upjust to stay here. Jewelled hairpins,scratched records, their fast youth.Everything they’ve given upto stay here and find more.…

William Faulkner claimed that he wrote “As I Lay Dying” in six weeks, and the speed makes sense—it comports with the quick intimacy of the book’s form, in which a chorus of first-person narrators plunge us into their soliloquies. This novel, hovering somewhere between the older epistolary structure and pure dramatic monologue—between correspondence and a playscript—becomes magically liberated from the more burdensome narrative machinery, that wheezing apparatus of persuasion and pastness. Instead, we get the immediacy of voice, characters pressing themselves on us without any apparent authorial filter in a continuous oral present, even when they are relating their own histories. This is the form that Megha Majumdar uses for her first novel, “A Burning” (Knopf); she may have taken six weeks or six years to write it, but…

On March 26, 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson went to a funeral. As the elderly writer stared into the open casket, he grew perplexed. He could not identify the body. He seemed to know that the man had been a friend—indeed, he felt sad that the bearded stranger in the casket had predeceased him—but Emerson had no idea who he was. “Who is the sleeper?” he finally asked his daughter. The answer was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Emerson was in the throes of dementia. Even so, the story seems like a small allegory of Longfellow’s disappearance from American culture. He was, in his heyday, the most famous poet in the English-speaking world. Perhaps T. S. Eliot, in his sports-arena-filling prime, would be a comparable figure. But Eliot was lionized by many people…

Snappy as it sounded, the term “streaming wars,” in retrospect, was an overblown way to describe the competition between the companies that hoped to monopolize TV streaming. Little about the rollouts of the major subscription services this year has seemed grand or strategic. A better martial allusion? Clusterfuck. Teasers promise portals to unprecedented ways of viewing programs new and old, but so much curation soon starts to look like clutter. Subscribe to Apple TV+, Disney+ and Hulu, Netflix, the ill-fated Quibi, and now HBO Max—the latest of the big-deal bundles to première, in late May—and find yourself participating in a bitter joke: we have invented cable. HBO, the tentpole of WarnerMedia, is still a symbol of prestige television, and a lingering fidelity to the network will, I suspect, draw many…