Innholdsfortegnelse for September 21, 2020 i The New Yorker

I May Destroy You In this mesmerizing twelve-episode series for HBO and BBC One, written and co-directed by the aggressively free-minded Michaela Coel, Arabella (Coel), a young East London writer avoiding a deadline, parties late into the night, and then experiences a temporal blackness: she bolts awake, a gash on her forehead. The next day, a reel of horrible action colonizes her brain—a man, sweating and panting, thrusting in a bathroom stall. It will be a while before she can acknowledge that the image is a memory. Arabella has improvised a family in her mates Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), a gay aerobics instructor with a Grindr addiction, and Terry (Weruche Opia), an aspiring actress. Essiedu and Opia are understated and frequently superb, and Coel channels her enormous energy into a standout…

On a chilly November morning last year, the sunlight a ribbon of gold on the rolling Virginia hills, Ethan Hawke, who would turn forty-nine the next day, ambled into a replica of Harpers Ferry in 1859. An armory and four short streets had been constructed on the grounds of State Farm, a prison property outside Richmond. Hawke, already in full makeup and sporting a long, shaggy beard, was playing the flinty abolitionist John Brown, in “The Good Lord Bird,” a seven-part Showtime series adapted from James McBride’s 2013 National Book Award-winning novel. (The show, which premières October 4th, is the first project that Hawke has produced, co-created, with Mark Richard, and starred in.) For his next scene, he was preparing to reënact Brown’s famous raid on the United States arsenal.…

Martin Luther King, Jr., in his book “Stride Toward Freedom,” wrote, “On a cool Saturday afternoon in January 1954, I set out to drive from Atlanta, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama…. The Metropolitan Opera was on the radio with a performance of one of my favorite operas—Donizetti’s ‘Lucia di Lammermoor.’ So with the beauty of the countryside, the inspiration of Donizetti’s inimitable music, and the splendor of the skies, the usual monotony that accompanies a relatively long drive—especially when one is alone—was dispelled in pleasant diversions.” What does it mean, if anything, that King was listening to bel-canto opera as he made his historic journey to preach his first sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church? One response would be to find something curious, or even contradictory, in the image of…

BEASTS OF NUNIVAK ISLAND I read with interest Jon Lee Anderson’s account of his visit to Nunivak, in the Bering Sea, in search of musk-ox wool (“Wanderlust,” August 17th). Anderson cites as inspiration the late Peter Matthiessen’s participation in a 1964 expedition to Nunivak. That journey was led by John J. Teal, Jr., an American anthropologist and visionary, who, in a 1958 Profile in The New Yorker, was described as enjoying “the unique and quite profitless distinction of being the only musk-ox herdsman in the world.” Earlier that decade, Teal had embarked on a mission to capture and domesticate the beast. With support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, he started Alaska’s first domestic-musk-ox farm, in Fairbanks. He envisaged an Arctic domestic industry built around the animal’s underwool, known as…

The Promise This podcast, reported and hosted by Meribah Knight for Nashville Public Radio, explores, with a keen ear for character and detail, life amid economic inequality in swiftly gentrifying East Nashville. The stellar first season focussed on the redevelopment of a public-housing complex; the new season studies de-facto segregation in schools and the people trying to challenge it, with historical context that includes clips from a John F. Kennedy speech and interviews about a forty-three-year segregation case that ended in a Pyrrhic victory. The show’s greatest asset is Knight’s vivid on-the-ground scene-setting, especially in schools—the sounds of bustling energy, teachers’ devotion, and kids making strides. In the COVID era, it’s practically a tearjerker, as is the joyful shouting of one bright, irrepressible kid running through the housing complex, telling…

A year after Donald Trump assumed office, Ayad Akhtar was at the American Academy in Rome, contemplating populism, the degradation of democracy, and ruinous civil strife. He had been mulling over the idea of a play about the brothers Gracchus, plebeian politicians in the century before Caesar whose defiance of the senatorial élite and championship of the poor led to an unhappy end. Akhtar wasn’t alone in consulting Roman history to gain perspective on the present. From his window, he could look out at the residence of the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, Callista Gingrich, whose husband, Newt, was studying Augustus, rumor had it, for pointers on how to counsel a President who fancied himself an emperor. Akhtar, who is forty-nine, is an obsessive autodidact, with a mind like…

In the spring of 2017, an Iranian materials scientist named Sirous Asgari received a call from the United States consulate in Dubai. Two years earlier, he and his wife, Fatemeh, had applied for visas to visit America, where their children lived. The consulate informed him that their requests had finally been approved. The timing was strange: President Donald Trump had just issued an executive order banning Iranians from entering the U.S. on the very kind of visa that Asgari and his wife were granted. Maybe applications filed before the visa ban had been grandfathered through, or some career State Department official wanted to give families like his a last chance to reunite. Asgari, who was then fifty-six years old, considered the U.S. a second home. In the nineties, he had…

It’s been thirty years since I saw Soraya. In that time I tried to find her only once. I think I was afraid of seeing her, afraid of trying to understand her now that I was older and maybe could, which I suppose is the same as saying that I was afraid of myself: of what I might discover beneath my understanding. The years passed and I thought of her less and less. I went to university, then graduate school, got married sooner than I’d imagined and had two daughters, only a year apart. If Soraya came to mind at all, flickering past in a mercurial chain of associations, she would recede again just as quickly. I met Soraya when I was thirteen, the year that my family spent abroad…

SEPTEMBER 16 – 22, 2020 People’s love for New York assumes many forms, from a Frank Sinatra ballad to a Frank O’Hara poem. The newly reopened MOMA is greeting visitors to its lobby with a big mural of the iconic I♥NY logo (seen in closeup, above). It was conceived for a 1977 tourism campaign by the legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser, who died in June, at the age of ninety-one. To insure a safely reduced capacity, the museum is making timed tickets available at moma.org; admission is free through Sept. 27. MUSIC Rez Abbasi: “Django-shift” JAZZ The music of the legendary Romani guitarist Django Reinhardt is Gallically romantic, effervescent, and almost aggressively expressive; the music of the guitarist Rez Abbasi, as heard on his tribute album to Reinhardt, “Django-shift,” can…

Here in stately, spacious Kalorama, a Washington, D.C., neighborhood less familiar and storied than nearby Georgetown, politics makes strange neighbors. Over on Tracy Place, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump occupy a large, charmless house whose chief selling point, one suspects, was its fuck-you proximity to the post-Presidential residence of Barack and Michelle Obama, several houses away, on Belmont Road. A short walk from either takes you to 2340 S Street, into which Mr. and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson moved after leaving the White House, in March, 1921. Wilson’s successor, Ohio’s Senator Warren G. Harding, and his wife, Florence, were packing up their house a few blocks away, at 2314 Wyoming. Harding was a serious poker player, and today his old house is occupied by the Ambassador of gambling-friendly Monaco. The…

In deciding what I am, I’ve ruled out cat, vulture, shoe,a sadist who tortures people to death in a Syrian hospital,a president who separates families at the border,a handful of purple irises at the beginning of the pathto heaven. Is there memory in the shade of a treeof a lynching fifty years ago, when I was nine? And do I lovethat tree? Love the sinner, not the sin. Forgive the electricity,not the singeing of genitals. The more I know about human naturethe more I plan to be tall grass in a field. Until thenI’ll tell my wife I love her in Toronto and Blacksburg and bed,in pajamas and bluejeans and song, in theory and fact and dream.I will not gouge a man’s eye out, I promise, yet the eye is…

Our first concern might be did the artist consider the impossibilityof definingnothing without speaking of absence without speaking The white paint of the artist carefully selected and applied so as to seeman uncreased space unwrinkled unnippled a whatever indefinitenondescript discreet But even without a mouth without figure or form or face the canvas if itwere to speakas we the viewers imagine would it not speak of powdered sugarand cocaine,chalk, marshmallows, and saltand even that a betrayal of substanceWould it not privately murmur something about the white simmer of starsWould it not speak of something not nothing would it not Perhaps here then is the problemof the art not the art but the reflection the world cut in a pane of glassor rather being as it is latex paint on canvas…

Wandering in Strange Lands, by Morgan Jerkins (Harper). The author’s ancestors were part of the Great Migration, the exodus of six million African-Americans from the rural South to Northern and Western cities. Growing up in New Jersey, she felt frustratingly detached from her Southern roots. In a book that is at once a family history, an ethnography, and a detective story, she follows clues about her lineage across the county. The people she meets—Gullah Geechee, Louisiana Creoles, Black “freedmen” fighting for recognition in the Cherokee Nation—resist categorization and help her to embrace the intricacies of her own identity. For Jerkins, this “journey in reverse” has a dual purpose: “to excavate the connective tissue that complicates but unites us as a people, and to piece together the story of how I…