Innholdsfortegnelse for August 3-10, 2020 i The New Yorker

Weekend swabbies readied themselves to swarm New York Harbor on Sunday, July 19th, for Trump-Stock NY, a floating political rally, which, its organizers hoped, would “make liberals cry.” The more immediate effect was to give the local Coast Guard agita. According to Chief Warrant Officer Mariana (“like the deep sea trench”) O’Leary, a week before the event, official attempts to communicate with Boaters for Trump New York had met with radio silence. No permit application had been filed. A direct message from the group’s Facebook page told participants to “just show up.” “Trumptillas” (Trump flotillas) and “KAGattas” (“Keep America Great” regattas) have been spotted around the country since Memorial Day. The President approves, retweeting announcements and praising the “beautiful ‘boaters.’” At a Florida event, he crowed, “There are thousands and…

The Simulmatics Corporation opened for business on February 18, 1959, in an office rented by Edward L. Greenfield, the company’s thirty-one-year-old president, on an upper floor of a building at the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-second Street, five blocks south of I.B.M.’s glittering World Headquarters. Greenfield, an adman, political consultant, and all-around huckster, pulled people in like a “Looney Tunes” magnet. “Ed Greenfield,” he’d say, flashing a Dean Martin grin, slapping a back, offering a vodka-and-tonic, palming a business card. His new company’s offices were threadbare; his ambition could hardly have been grander. “Simulmatics,” a mashup of “simulation” and “automatic,” had much the same mystique as another nineteen-fifties neologism: “artificial intelligence.” Decades before Facebook and Google and Cambridge Analytica and every app on your phone, Simulmatics’ founders thought of…

Even the night cooling down is slick with heat.Even the sheet we share like a humming skin. From three stories up the sounds of the street,drinkers at the curb, a wet hiss of dry tires, is a rhythm through our box fan, like panting.When we sleep it is piecemeal until morning. Listen, the years are short. They are nothing.I write each morning, while you are at work. In the heat of day, I walk to the library, coldwater at the fountain, air-conditioned air; walk with a new book back in the elm-lined shade.At night I meet you at the top of the stairs. Where are you gone, who loved me so longone summer far from home? Days are long. Even the heat is lovelier there, as memory is.We make lemonade…

Must I Go, by Yiyun Li (Random House). Lilia, a woman in a retirement home who believes that she lacks a “porous heart,” recalls a love affair with a man whose posthumous journals have recently been published. She never told him that he was the father of her first child, Lucy, who killed herself. When the home offers a memoir-writing class, Lilia, reflexively cynical about her fellow-residents, is scornful, but she independently starts work on a personal history for Lucy’s daughter, Katherine, her favorite grandchild. The account suggests the places where Lilia’s hardness readily cedes to something tender. “People will say all sorts of things about those who’ve committed suicide,” she writes. “But, Katherine, your mom was a brave woman.” Empire of Wild, by Cherie Dimaline (William Morrow). In the…

In late 2018, a Brooklyn teen-ager named Bashar Jackson experienced his first brush with viral fame. In a video, Jackson is standing in a royal-blue puffer vest, the same color as his BMW, arguing with the police. As the cops attempt to detain him for a reason that is not discernible, a voice out of the frame says, with increasing urgency, “Yo, look what they doin’! Yo, Pop! Yo, Pop!” The clip then shows Jackson—who was eventually crowned the king of New York hiphop under the name Pop Smoke before being shot and killed, this past February—wriggling out of the grasp of five officers. He dodges and weaves through them like a running back, sailing down the sidewalk as they struggle to catch up. Shortly after this clip began circulating…

DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE As a health-care professional who during the pandemic has used telemedicine for the first time, I read John Seabrook’s report on the subject with great interest (“Hands Off,” June 29th). Seabrook does an excellent job outlining telemedicine’s advantages and limitations, but my colleagues and I continue to wonder how a for-profit medical system that relies on “heads in beds” to drive revenue can adequately deliver virtual care, particularly amid a pandemic. In developed countries with socialized medical systems, saving lives means saving money, because reducing the number of sick people lowers costs for the system. But in the United States the situation is reversed. Despite surging E.R. and I.C.U. admittances, hospitals—owing to the cancellation of lucrative elective procedures—are losing money and laying off staff. Although preventive…

I still wore the cut-offs I’d hurried into her roomwearing that morning, and, as we inchedtoward an off-ramp in the valleyafter going to the mortuary and the cemeteryto make arrangements for the mass, the musicand the lowering, something shimmered, hovered the way it had all day, the waya month or so ago when I’d walked into her roomand awakened her, she told meher daughter had died,and I said, No, I’m still here. But she insistedbecause it was taking her longer and longerto come back from where she had begun to dwell,minutes later asking whenwere they coming for the body? My body,though she did not seem to know who I was,until finally, fully awake, she mused, I thinkI’m the one who is supposed to die. But I think she was right,part…

It’s still dark when I wake up, the morning after Mike leaves, but Mitsuko’s mincing shrimp. She’s hunched over the cutting board, beside eggs, flour, and honey. Do you eat, she asks. I tell her I do. We don’t say shit while she’s working. Mitsuko blitzes everything in a food processor. Drops the mixture in a skillet, dabbing everything with soy sauce, folding the batter gradually. I take my meds, watching her do all this, and she ignores me the entire time, working at her own pace. When I sit on the sofa, Mitsuko stops rolling. I stand to set the table, and she starts rolling again. Once she’s finished, she fills a bowl with some pickled cucumbers and puts an omelette on a plate, leaving another one out for…

JULY 29 – AUGUST 11, 2020 With New York movie theatres closed to maintain social distancing, the big-screen experience has been thriving at drive-ins, which are making a comeback throughout the region—whether upstate (as at the Warwick Drive-In, pictured above), in New Jersey (at Demarest Farms, in Hillsdale), or within the city limits (at the Skyline, in Greenpoint). Offerings tend toward familiar fare, such as “The Goonies,” “Iron Man,” and “Mamma Mia!,” but also include such new releases as “Relic” and “She Dies Tomorrow.” ART Ja’ Tovia Gary Early in her rhapsodic forty-minute film, “The Giverny Document (Single Channel),” from 2019, this American artist is seen standing on a street in Harlem asking women, “Do you feel safe in your body?” One answer declares a collective truth: “It’s already not…

The commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is Todd Semonite, a stocky three-star general who recently turned sixty-three. Every workday for the past forty-one years, he has served in uniform. On his left wrist is a FitBit; on his right, the kind of Casio calculator watch that he has worn since he was a teen-ager. In high school, in Vermont, Semonite wasn’t the biggest guy on the football team, but he played varsity center; he told a newspaper that size is “not really a disadvantage if you work hard.” Semonite and his wife, Connie, live in Washington, D.C., at Fort McNair. On weekends, they renovate foreclosed houses and flip them. They have four children, all of them grown; Semonite, a civil engineer, made cradles for his grandchildren in…

When my sister and I were young, we liked to come home from school and turn on “Guiding Light,” a soap opera on CBS. We only ever caught the last fifteen minutes of the hour-long show, but, because it wasn’t particularly subtle, this was plenty of time to follow even its most involved plotlines—such as when Reva Shayne, a nine-times-married character who had arcs as a talk-show host, a psychic, the princess of a fictional island, and a time traveller to the Civil War and Nazi Germany, had to fight Dolly, a devious clone that her most recent husband had made of her in order to spare her children from grief during the most recent of her presumed deaths. “Guiding Light” began, in 1937, as a radio show to promote…

Our species cannot make sense of warnings. In January, when reports of the coronavirus in Wuhan began to appear on the front page of the Times, we in New York grimaced and flipped past. Even as northern Italy succumbed, Milan’s Fashion Week rattled along. Something was happening to someone else, again. In retrospect, the confused feeling of early March in New York was like the sickening pause that heralds the arrival of a tsunami, the water receding before the wave crashes down. Now that we have been spat out onto drier land, we try to persuade the rest of the country to look at us, to listen, to learn from our mistakes, and we get silence, or worse, in return. If the progression of the unchecked virus doesn’t scare the…