Innholdsfortegnelse for August 24, 2020 i The New Yorker

In mid-March, in the tense week before the British government announced its belated coronavirus-induced lockdown, certain everyday products became extraordinarily hard to find. Panicked buyers swept up fundamentals of alimentation and elimination: yeast, flour, bathroom tissue. More surprising, the horticulture industry experienced a surge in demand. In the week before the lockdown began, sales of plants, seeds, and bulbs were reportedly up thirty-five per cent from 2019. Seed packets, especially for tomatoes and lettuces, were in limited supply. As Britain faced the COVID crisis, reassurance was difficult to come by, and one way it could still be attained was in the reliable germination of a windowsill pot of watercress or a garden-patch row of chard. Eight out of ten people in Britain live in a home with a private…

By blood we go into the fabric of what once felt hymnal at worst;we are tuned to higher pitches now, in languages invented,not imagined rites of spring but last rites in strange establishments.Trucks collect the dead and roll uptown to bury in a potter’s fieldcorpses we knew, and loved, their long solemn gravestogether, better here than bodies shelved or stacks of fleshshipped out of state to cremate or left to rot. We formalized obituaries(she was first to graduate, he escaped, she was a composer, he,though deaf, was a composer, too; we pray alone to keep their soulsalive) until this month. We lived in adverbs, dressed for rainshinehalf the time and not according to the daily toll, not this runningtally, at scale in every borough. Our minds are lost to gravityagain.…

In 1993, the photographer Richard Avedon made a portrait, in edgeless black-and-white, of the playwright and actor Anna Deavere Smith, to accompany an article in this magazine by John Lahr. In the picture, Smith wears a dark, baggy jacket, and her English garden of loosely coiled hair tickles at her shoulders and clavicle. Her face is hard to parse. Her scrunched brows are like thin awnings over her eyes, which stare intensely; there’s a tension in her mouth that draws one side slightly higher than the other—this could be a put-on sneer or an attempt to mask a sudden laugh. Smith looks serious and funny, formidable and unpredictable, and—not unlike the works of confessional-historical theatre with which she has made her name—capable at once of intimate empathy and detached appraisal.…

A FLAWED REPORT Robert Mueller’s missteps, as Jeffrey Toobin chronicles, all arose from undue caution (“The Surrender,” July 6th & 13th). Mueller kept his investigation’s scope too limited, declined to subpoena President Trump, and shied away from claiming that Trump had obstructed justice. As a result, Toobin concludes that “his report was, ultimately, a surrender.” Yet he neglects to mention another failure of the report: the bloat that rendered it unreadable to the general public. Mueller’s four-hundred-and-forty-eight-page document was the victim of a repetitive structure and a frequent rehashing of facts. (I confess that I ended up skimming the behemoth.) Had Mueller followed my twelfth-grade English teacher’s advice to “prune your prose,” perhaps the evidence of Trump’s criminality would have reached more Americans—or at least the ones willing to consider…

I told my grandmother I am afraid and she made that little wave, each plump finger brushing away my worries just the way she’d brush crumbs from around the toaster tray, the way she’d sweep the dog’s dry tracks from the trailer floor. Oh, now, it’s not so bad here, she said, but I am afraid that when I’m gone no one will remember her, her dimpled knuckles, the way her mouth turned down at the corners in a sweet prim frown. No one will put flowers on her grave; even I don’t do that now, but what I mean is, no one will intend to. I told my mother I am afraid she’ll die alone and she laughed out loud: Let’s hope that’s the worst thing coming. I looked…

There was once a beginning and it involved sprinklers and green grass, but that happened a long time ago. Right now it’s Saturday night, the night of the big night, in the eternal return of suburban Cincinnati, summer of 1986. The neighborhood in question could be Indian Hill. Or Oakley. Or Stetson Square. Though in reality it’s Hyde Park that the boys are driving through, fresh from their stop at Graeter’s Ice Cream, which might elicit a few nods from the locals in the know—Graeter’s and its black-raspberry chocolate chip, the flavor of choice for all three boys. They lick their cones in almost comedic unison. Like they’re ten again. Speed three-fourths of pleasure. Feeling the cold against the humid air, the sweet smooth taste on their tongues, the tart…

The Golden Thread, by Ravi Somaiya (Twelve). This taut investigative history delves into the death of Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, who was killed in a plane crash in 1961, en route from Congo to Northern Rhodesia. The crash was ruled an accident, but Somaiya’s painstaking re-creation of events all but proves the role of foul play. The first half of the book establishes motive, showing how Hammarskjöld’s efforts to rid Congo of foreign influence had thrust him into the center of a Cold War struggle for the country’s mineral resources, including cobalt and uranium, used in nuclear weapons. Contemporary accounts show that Hammarskjöld was mistrusted by the Americans, the Soviets, and the Congolese, and, while there’s no smoking gun here, Somaiya gathers more than enough…

AUGUST 19 – 25, 2020 Nonessential travel from New York to Venice is off limits, but the Frick has a festive alternative. On Aug. 21, during its weekly online series “Cocktails with a Curator,” Xavier F. Salomon discusses a portrait of the Renaissance writer Pietro Aretino by the Venetian painter Tiziano Vecellio, a.k.a. Titian. Viewers are invited to mix a Titian-inspired version of a popular drink named for another Italian Old Master, Giovanni Bellini. A classic Bellini calls for prosecco and peach juice; use red grape juice instead and—cin cin!—it’s a Tiziano. DANCE Ballet Hispánico This stalwart New York company should be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary with a tour. Instead, it has been sharing nuggets from its repertory in periodic watch parties. This week’s edition, on Aug. 19, is devoted…

In March, Victorino Narcizo developed a hacking cough. He and his brother-in-law Fidel, undocumented immigrants who had lived together for a decade, disagreed about what to do. Narcizo’s boss had threatened to fire him if he missed a shift. His mother, in Mexico, depended on the money he sent home, so he resolved to keep working. Twenty-five, and otherwise in good health, he doubted whether his symptoms were serious. Fidel, however, argued, “Stay home and get better. There’s work everywhere. This is New York.” Narcizo and Fidel moved around the city as a duo, more like best friends than like extended family, and they shared a studio apartment in Harlem with two roommates who worked in restaurant kitchens, as they did. A few days later, Narcizo woke up gasping for…

Michael Rakowitz was looking for Kubba, a stall in London’s Borough Market that serves Iraqi cuisine. The air was temperamental: a cold mist clung to hair between bouts of drizzling rain. Rakowitz had arrived on a red-eye from Chicago, where he runs a nine-person studio, producing sculpture that shows frequently on the international art circuit. He had wrapped himself in a dark coat and a checkered kaffiyeh, which pushed up against his wavy, disordered hair. The stall had just opened, and he had never been to it. His phone was no help. “It should be here,” he said, looking up from a map quizzically. Kubba’s owner, the chef Philip Juma, is a friend and a collaborator of Rakowitz. Last year, they prepared an Iraqi dinner at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, to…

Last November, drone footage was posted on Instagram of a gray whale swimming near the surface just off the coast of Dana Point, California. In the video, the whale, a juvenile maybe twenty-five feet long, cruises slowly into a lineup of surfers, its undulating tail casting arcing ripples, and then emerges from the water, exhaling through its blowhole. A few surfers paddle off in alarm, though most seem oblivious. The whale dips below the surface again, a ghostly silhouette, and glides out beyond the surfers, away. I had been surfing in that spot just a few weeks before. Had I been in the water that day, and suddenly seen the whale’s body beneath me, gargantuan and silent, I would have, for a moment, gone cold with dread. How could I…

Like much of Catherine Lacey’s writing, the title story of her collection “Certain American States” (2018) only just hangs together: the frailty of coherence is her great theme. In little more than five pages, a world that is at once hypothesis and presumption fizzles into view. Lacey certainly knows how to open: “I was one of those babies who look as if they won’t survive to dinnertime, but somehow do, then become toddlers with the tics and nerves of a used-up veteran.” Our narrator tells us that her mother died “while the ink was still wet on my birth certificate,” and that she was brought up by a man named Leonard, who disliked her. When the narrator is sixteen, Leonard writes her a large check, walks to town, and never…

When I am falling asleep, I sometimes hear voices. They are not hallucinations—I am perfectly aware that they are inside my own head. It feels as if my brain had pulled them down from the airwaves, or up from storage in my synapses. Their speech has meaning, though it comes in snatches. The closer I get to going under, the more indistinct the buzz becomes, until I am hearing not language but an oceanic murmur. Alice Oswald eerily evokes that state in her eighth and most enigmatic volume of poetry, “Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea” (Norton). The book has had several incarnations. It began as a collaboration with the British artist William Tillyer, to accompany a 2018 show of his lyrical, semi-abstract watercolors. Her wall text and his images…