Innholdsfortegnelse for June 29, 2020 i The New Yorker

Three days after her upset victory over a ten-term congressman in the 2018 Democratic primary, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted a photograph of her cracked, battered sneakers. Some analysts had attributed her win to changing demographics, but she was having none of it. “Here’s my 1st pair of campaign shoes,” she wrote. “I knocked doors until rainwater came through my soles. Respect the hustle.” It was a tribute to old-school progressive campaigning and engagement, her viral videos notwithstanding. But what if door-knocking and hand-shaking and showing up for parades and community festivals and church-basement meetings are all off the table, because of a pandemic? How does a new candidate get her non-household name in front of voters when she’s mostly stuck at home—and when there’s a lot else going on? That is…

By the late summer of 1967, when I turned seven, we’d been living in the house for six years. By “we,” I mean my mother, two of my four older sisters, and my little brother. And although we shared the place with a rotating cast of other relatives, including my mother’s mother and an aunt and her two children, I always considered it my mother’s home. The house was in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Like all the moves my mother engineered or helped to engineer for our family, this one was aspirational. Despite the fact that Brownsville had begun its slow decline into drugs, poverty, and ghettoization years before, my mother’s house—the only one in her life that, after years of work and planning, she would even partly own—symbolized…

The Brookings Institution is one of many think tanks in Washington, D.C., where scholars and bureaucrats sit in quiet offices and wait by the phone. They write op-eds and books, give talks and convene seminars, hoping that, when reputations falter or Administrations shift, they will be rescued from the life of opining and contemplation and return to the adrenaline rush and consequence of government. Nearly always, the yearning is to be inside. Strobe Talbott, who became the president of Brookings in 2002, served in Bill Clinton’s Administration as his leading Russia expert, and he was rumored to be on the shortlist for Hillary Clinton’s Secretary of State. Others, too, may have expected a call. But, after Donald Trump was elected, only one prominent Brookings stalwart was summoned, and her story…

A legend is an attempt to explain the inexplicable; emerging as it does from a basis of truth, it is bound to end in the inexplicable. We have four legends concerning Prometheus. According to the first of them, for betraying the gods to mankind he was shackled to a peak in the Caucasus, and the gods sent eagles that ate at his liver as it kept growing back. According to the second, the pain of the jabbing beaks drove Prometheus ever deeper into the rocks until he became one with them. According to the third, his betrayal was forgotten in the course of millennia: the gods forgot, the eagles forgot, he himself forgot. According to the fourth, everyone grew tired of the procedure, which had lost its raison d’être. The…

THE TRUE IMPEDIMENTS TO RACIAL JUSTICE Nicholas Lemann’s thesis, which ends his review of Walter Johnson’s book “The Broken Heart of America,” is a warning: we should expect only “partial victories” when it comes to racial justice in America, and we ought to beware the likes of Johnson, who insists on “deflating and deriding” past progress (Books, May 25th). To Lemann, Johnson errs insofar as he “discourages us from drawing much hope” from the election of an African-American President, the passage of civil-rights legislation, or the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. But Johnson’s contribution—like much of the recent scholarship on racial capitalism—reveals the poison at the heart of these and other celebrated steps forward. The Thirteenth Amendment, for example, contains, in its liberating language, the legal justification for convict labor…

In this version of the city, no one dares read,ragtime grows underneath Washington’s obelisk,not a monument but a threat to the clouded sky. Next door to McCormick’s, a telescope sits,looking over the harbor, inside all of what is,for a new constellation, the hidden dancers, a joining, convergences that come only whenSeptember moons bring heavy rains, a delugeto sound alarms to haul in the blue crabs. In all of this we are overgrown ants, brittleon the tongue, held up above ourselves singingSouthern chants for spells to soften the hard. What names us? I ask a man shuffling in bags,a man who knows the giant ants we have become,who knows us, but says now we have no name, but purple iris in a golden vase over the harbor,peace wrapping itself over the…

Flame in the cloud at midnightBlankets my bed with light.The scent of winter jasmineRises from a tomb to meet my eyes. I watch you as if from my girlhood.I watch as if from death, anonymousBeneath a dim sky, holding aloftThe burden of my body. Death, Bloodless and unfeeling, is familiar.But what if we could live that way, too?At the moment, darling,At the moment I’m a woman without lust. Moonlight, like new snow,Covers the hands and feet of night.Huge strange facesFade from my windows and doors. (Translated, from the Chinese, by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi.)…

JUNE 24 – 30, 2020 The latest record from HAIM, “Women in Music Pt. III,” has a slouchy, comfortable quality—as though the three sisters recorded it while lounging in the breeze, letting inspiration drift around them like dandelion seeds. The busy production of their previous work has been pared back to a crisp, easy buoyancy on upbeat tracks. Still, this apparent effortlessness doesn’t compromise emotional complexity; “Man from the Magazine” and “Hallelujah” are reflections on sexism and loss, made more powerful by the album’s carefree air. DANCE “Love from BAM” The collection of archived dance footage that the Brooklyn Academy of Music is making available online while its theatres are closed expands greatly on June 25, with the release of seven performances by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. Chronologically,…

The call came in to the emergency department at Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital, a twenty-five-bed facility in Lebanon, New Hampshire, around 2 P.M. on a weekday in mid-March. Patient X had arrived by car, and, by the time he reached the hospital, the pain in his legs was so severe that he couldn’t move. Jesse Webber, a paramedic, donned full personal protective equipment (P.P.E.) before going outside with a wheelchair. Since the onset of the pandemic, almost all sick people who entered the hospital’s E.R. were considered, whatever their symptoms, to be P.U.I.s—persons under investigation for COVID-19. The patient, a heavyset man in middle age, was lucid when Webber wheeled him into the emergency department’s negative-pressure room—a seven-by-eleven-foot windowless space fitted with a noisy exhaust fan that removes contaminated…

Jerusalem, in the tenth century B.C., is an inhospitable place for farmers but a strategic location for men on the run. Human settlement in the Judean highlands is sparse: five thousand people, spread out in hamlets of about fifty families each. The landscape is rugged, veined with ravines and thicketed with oaks. Rain is unpredictable. To the east lies the desert, hushed and empty. To the west—teasingly close—are the lush lowlands of the Philistine city-states, with their seaside trade routes and their princely homes. Cut off from these coastal plains, life in the hill country is severe. Homes are made of unworked stone; sheep and goats are quartered indoors. There are no public buildings, no ornate furnishings in the shrines. Bands of fugitives, landless laborers, and tax evaders rove the…

Death in Her Hands, by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press). Moshfegh, known for her screwball subversions of genre tropes and her gleefully grotesque sensibility, here offers a thriller that glitters with jagged details and unfolds mostly inside the protagonist’s head. The unlikely detective is Vesta Gul, an elderly widow, who discovers an ominous note in a forest: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her.” Trying to solve the mystery, Vesta conjures up characters, backstories, and motives from her impressions of the small town where she lives. As her mind fills with misanthropic assessments of her world and memories of her controlling late husband (whom she was devoted to but resentful of), the murder of one woman becomes a soundboard for the internal monologue of another. The Taste…