Innholdsfortegnelse for August 17, 2020 i The New Yorker

Last October, Jerry Volenec, a dairy farmer from southwestern Wisconsin, took the morning off to go to Madison for the World Dairy Expo, an annual cattle-judging contest and trade show. Volenec wanted to hear a townhall discussion led by Sonny Perdue, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, to learn how the Administration planned to address the economic crisis gripping Wisconsin’s family dairy farmers. Volenec’s farm sits atop Bohemian Ridge, a jagged plateau named for the Czech immigrants who settled there in the late nineteenth century. Among them was Joseph Volenec, Jerry’s great-great-grandfather, who established the farm, in 1897. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Volenec’s grandfather milked a herd of sixteen cows; he could make a living because New Deal policies used price supports and other measures to boost farmers’ earnings and…

The Bakers held a party in their flat, and Mrs. Baker told Geeta that she was to bring the children in to say good night to the guests. So just before eight-thirty she made the girls undress and pulled their purple nightgowns down over their heads. Sally, nine years old, stretched her chubby fingers skyward. Emma, seven, was less coöperative, but together they managed it. The girls smiled sleepily at Geeta through veils of blond hair. Holding each by the hand, she walked them up the corridor toward the smell of rum and cigarettes. The guests were scattered across the living room, most of them reclining on the Bakers’ couches with the spent aspect of runners at the end of a race. Geeta paused with the girls at the entrance.…

DOLLAR FOR DOLLAR Alec MacGillis’s piece on the violence plaguing dollar stores offers a depressing glimpse into economic decline in major Midwestern cities (“The Dollar Store Deaths,” July 6th & 13th). I lived in St. Louis from 1936 until 1963, and was moved by the stories that MacGillis tells. Based on my years of academic research into the economic problems that cities face, I believe that dollar stores are more often a symptom than a cause of this decline. The way to address the issues that cities such as St. Louis and Dayton are confronting is not merely to improve the conditions at dollar stores. Rather, we need to look toward a guaranteed income for all, enhanced gun control, and a radical reconception of racial justice. Alphonse HoltmannProfessor Emeritus, EconomicsUniversity…

A woman stands in an otherworldly landscape, looking out. The landscape is sublime, though not the European sublime of cliffs, peaks, and mist. Here the sublime is African. It has many textures—conglomerations of stone, waterfalls, verdant grasslands—and may remind Nigerians of their own Jos Plateau. The woman stands with her left leg raised, surveying it all, with no sense of urgency; indeed, she appears to be in a state of philosophical contemplation. She seems assured both of her mastery over this land and of her natural right to it. This sovereignty is expressed primarily by her body—the fabrics she wears, the pose she strikes, all of which find their reflection in the land around her. The same dark lines tracing her impressive musculature render the rippling rocks; the ridges of…

The father begins to make the sound a tree frog makesWhen he comes with his son & daughter to a pailOf tree frogs for sale in a Deep South flea marketJust before the last blood of dusk.A tree frog is called a tree frog because it chirpsLike a bird in a tree, he tells his daughterWhile her little brother, barely four years old,Busies himself like a small blues piperWith a brand-new birthday harmonica.A single tree frog can sound like a sleigh bell,The father says. Several can sound like a choirOf crickets. Once in high school, as I dissectedA frog, the frog opened its eyes to judgeIts deconstruction, its disassembly,My scooping & poking at its soul.And the little girl’s eyes go wide as a tree frog’s eyes.Some call it the “spring…

Your lip an abstraction of iris always arousingthe question of the bed. Which goodbye lasts?Only yesterday my hands rich with dirt. I told youMilkweed is my new salvation addiction. You knowI always need to save something, to control it.I can make a pollen island, make your collarbonea spiritual landscape, the air around us orangeand alive. The shape you left in the sheetsa Rorschach I read as a rattlesnake’s skeletonin the silverware drawer, no, a fire in a cabin,no, a cabin on fire, the absence it will make.But look at me now, my heat signature a wholebouquet of howling, straddling scarves of smoke. It’s O.K. that it’s over. Leaving is a lesson ofpleasure. My ribs, sets of parentheses. My heart,an aside, an apple ready for the twist. My legsaround your hips,…

The Beauty in Breaking, by Michele Harper (Riverhead). This memoir by an E.R. doctor suggests that emergency medicine can heal its practitioners as well as its patients. As a teen-ager, growing up among the Black élite of Washington, D.C., the author drives her brother to the hospital one day after their father bites him. The emergency room, “throbbing with life,” presents an escape from her family’s cycle of abuse, and Harper becomes a determined careerist. Acutely aware that Black women rarely achieve powerful positions in her field, she climbs the ladder at hospitals in the Bronx and Philadelphia, before switching to an under-resourced V.A. hospital. A witness to “tortured flesh,” she finds that her patients’ injuries often refract her own trauma, and she attempts to treat with empathy rather than…

At the end of 1940, after Paris had fallen under German occupation, the spectacularly refined French composer Francis Poulenc made a musical setting of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Sanglots,” or “Sobs.” Poulenc was in no way a political artist: although he steered clear of collaboration with the Nazis, he also held back from an active role in the Resistance. Still, it is difficult not to hear the song in the context of the time, particularly when it arrives at its wrenching conclusion: And nothing will be free until the end of timeLet us leave all to the deadAnd hide our sobs “Sanglots” is the last of five songs in a cycle deceptively titled “Banalités.” In a demonstration of the stealthy power of Poulenc’s art, the grouping swerves from merry, irreverent vignettes…

In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, most New York City venues are closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found around town, as well as online and streaming. AUGUST 12 – 18, 2020 Immortalized by the Ramones in their 1977 punk-rock anthem of the same name, Rockaway Beach (pictured) remains a favorite place for New Yorkers looking to escape the heat of the city. (“Rockaway” is the Anglicized version of reckouwacky, which means “sandy place” in the language of the Lenape people, who originally lived there.) This summer, masks are required on all city beaches—as is social distancing—but swimmers can remove them before venturing into the water, when lifeguards are on duty. ART Art 21 Ten days after 9/11, when people’s spirits desperately needed a…

“The house wants doing up—and the wallpapers are awful,” Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister, Vanessa Bell, during the midst of the First World War, about a farmhouse called Charleston, in Sussex. The bathwater was cold, and the tenants had given animals the run of the rooms, but the garden was charming—“a pond, and fruit trees, and vegetables”—and Bell moved her household there in 1916. She brought her lover, Duncan Grant, his lover David Garnett, and her two children by her husband, Clive, who was waiting out the war elsewhere. (Complicated but harmonious.) The farmwork enabled the men, both conscientious objectors, to avoid conscription, and the house offered the family an idyllic, secluded retreat from the outside world, not unlike the one imagined by Woolf for her character Orlando, who…

There is just no such thing as social distancing for actors. You cannot prevent contact. That is just not the way our industry works. —Kate Shindle, president of Actors’ Equity Association. SCENE: Capulet’s orchard. Juliet appears above at a window. ROMEO: But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. ’Tis not the yondest window I have seen; In truth, I fear, ’tis not quite yond enough. The distance, by my reckoning, is fine, Being thrice the span of my outstretchèd arm; The real problem here is one of height, With me down here and her up there and all— It is my lady, O, it is my love! She speaks yet she says nothing: what of that? I actually prefer that…

Last year, I took more than a hundred flights, travelling to twenty-three countries on four continents. From my home, in an old town on the English coast, I went east to Switzerland and Greece, and south to Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Chile. There were trips into the Kenyan bush, across Siberia, and to remote settlements in the Brazilian Amazon. I wasn’t home for more than a few weeks at a time—my habit since I started working as a foreign correspondent, almost forty years ago. During the quarantine, I’ve spent five long months at home. My office here is festooned with mementos of reporting trips: a rug from one of Saddam’s palaces, a gilded leather box that belonged to Muammar Qaddafi, a piece of a Bosnian tombstone. On a…

One reason that the novel, despite so many tedious predictions to the contrary, stubbornly refuses to die is that the world that fiction helps us see keeps shifting shape. Take Raven Leilani’s first book, “Luster” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which tells the story of Edie, a twenty-three-year-old publishing peon who begins an affair with a married man she meets on a dating site. You could be forgiven for thinking that adultery, a cornerstone of so many great nineteenth-century novels, had been exhausted as a subject. Sexual barriers have long since been torn down, taboos lifted, transgressions neutralized; from Anna Karenina’s point of view, things would look positively utopian. Yet the heart is as muddled by freedom as it was by constraint, and that is where the mordant, bruising “Luster” charges…