Innholdsfortegnelse for July 27, 2020 i The New Yorker

In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, most New York City museums, galleries, theatres, music venues, and cinemas are closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found online and streaming. JULY 22 – 28, 2020 The outdoor exhibition “Monuments Now,” at Socrates Sculpture Park, in Long Island City (through March), feels attuned to this unprecedented summer of American reckoning. The eye-catching ziggurat “Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House,” by Jeffrey Gibson (pictured)—a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and a 2019 MacArthur Fellow—doubles as a stage for a trio of indigenous American artists, whose on-site performances will be filmed and released online. MUSIC The Beneficiaries: “The Crystal City Is Alive” TECHNO At a moment when dance music’s spotlight is firmly…

I happened to fly from Atlanta to Jackson on the same plane as Martin Luther King, who was about to begin his tour of Mississippi with some speeches and meetings in Greenwood. He was accompanied by four of his aides in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—Andrew Young, C. T. Vivian, Bernard Lee, and Dorothy Cotton—and except that all of them are Negroes and that the men were wearing buttons in their lapels that said, “S.C.L.C. Freedom Now,” the group might have been thought to consist of a corporation executive off to make a sales-conference speech accompanied by efficient, neatly dressed young assistants brought along to handle arrangements and take care of the paperwork. As the plane left Atlanta, Young began going through a number of file folders, making notes on…

By the time they cracked me open again, topside,abandoned in a toolshed, I had become another kind of nest.Not many people connect possums with Chicago, but this is where the city ends, after all, and I floatstill, after the footfalls fade and the roots bloom around us.The fact was, everything that worked for my young man worked for my new tenants. The fact was, he had beengone for years. They lifted him from my embrace, and I wasempty, ready. That’s how the possums found me, friend, dry-docked, a tattered mercy hull. Once I held a boywho didn’t look like a boy. When they finally remembered,they peeked through my clear top. Then their wild surprise.…

A long and vituperative essay appeared on the front page of the March 14, 1983, issue of a biweekly newspaper called the New York Native. The Native was the city’s only significant gay publication at the time, and anything printed there was guaranteed to attract attention. This piece did considerably more than that. Entitled “1,112 and Counting,” it was a five-thousand-word screed that accused nearly everyone connected with health care in America—officials at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, researchers at the National Institutes of Health, in Washington, doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in Manhattan, and local politicians (particularly Mayor Ed Koch)—of refusing to acknowledge the implications of the nascent aids epidemic. The article’s harshest condemnation was directed at those gay men who seemed to think that if…

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took only about two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner. The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer,…

On February 18th, as part of the official recognition of Black History Month, President Obama met with a group of African-American leaders at the White House to discuss civilrights issues. The guests—who included Representative John Lewis, of Georgia; Sherrilyn Ifill, the director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund; and Wade Henderson, who heads the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights—were intent on pressing the President to act decisively on criminal-justice issues during his last year in office. Their urgency, though, was tempered by a degree of sentimentality, verging on nostalgia. As Ifill later told me, “We were very much aware that this was the last Black History Month of this Presidency.” But the meeting was also billed as the “first of its kind,” in that it would…

No. 2245 Elyria Avenue in Lorain, Ohio, is a two-story frame house surrounded by lookalikes. Its small front porch is littered with the discards of former tenants: a banged-up bicycle wheel, a plastic patio chair, a garden hose. Most of its windows are boarded up. Behind the house, which is painted lettuce green, there’s a patch of weedy earth and a heap of rusting car parts. Seventy-two years ago, the novelist Toni Morrison was born here, in this small industrial town twenty-five miles west of Cleveland, which most citydwellers would consider “out there.” The air is redolent of nearby Lake Erie and new-mown grass. From Morrison’s birthplace it’s a couple of miles to Broadway, where there’s a pizzeria, a bar with sagging seats, and a brown building that sells dingy…

In Spanish it’s naturaleza muerta and not life at all.But certainly not natural. What’s natural?You and me. I’ll buy you a drink.To a woman who doesn’t act like a woman.To a man who doesn’t act like a man.Death is natural, at least in Spanish, I think.Life? I’m not so sure.Consider the Contessa, who in her time was lovelyand now sports a wart the size of this diamond.So, ragazzo, you’re Venice.To you. To Venice.Not the one of Casanova.The other one of cheap pensiones by the railway station.I recommend a narrow bed stained with semen, pee, and sorrow facing the wall.Stain and decay are romantic.You’re positively Pasolini.Likely to dangle and fandango yourself to death.If we let you. I won’t let you!Not to be outdone, I’m Piazzolla.I’ll tango for you in a lace…

In May of 1850, after four years abroad, Margaret Fuller set sail from Livorno to New York, bound for her native Massachusetts. She was just about to turn forty, and her stature in America was unique. In the space of a decade, she had invented a new vocation: the female public intellectual. Fuller’s intelligence had dazzled Ralph Waldo Emerson, who invited her to join the Transcendental Club and to edit its literary review, The Dial. She was considered a “sibyl” by the women who subscribed to her “Conversations,” a series of talks on learned subjects (Greek mythology, German Romanticism) whose real theme was female empowerment. In 1844, Horace Greeley, the publisher of the New-York Tribune, had recruited Fuller to write a front-page column on culture and politics (the former, mandarin;…