Innholdsfortegnelse for September 28, 2020 i The New Yorker

Every workday, at ten o’clock, at noon, and at three in the afternoon, Eran Baniel receives an alert on his phone: the call to taste. When I joined him on a Monday morning in January, in an office park a few miles east of Tel Aviv, he was sitting at a desk with two white china plates of Petit Beurre cookies in front of him. The cookies looked identical, but a label identified the plate on Baniel’s left as 792, and the one on his right as 431. “Petit Beurre is our preferred platform,” Baniel told me, breaking off a corner of a 792 cookie and crunching it thoughtfully. “It’s fast to make and fast to taste.” He sipped some water, took a leftover shard of 431, and invited me…

The immediate aftermath of the Presidential election of 2000 has taken on the air of legend. On Election Night, news organizations first called Florida for Vice-President Al Gore—then, about two hours later, withdrew the call and, about four hours after that, declared that George W. Bush, the governor of Texas, had won the state, giving him enough electoral votes to become President. Gore called Bush to concede, and left his hotel in a motorcade to announce the end of his campaign to his supporters. His aides, learning that the race in Florida was, in fact, too close to call, tried frantically to contact the Vice-President in his limousine. They reached him just in time, and he telephoned Bush to retract the concession. Bush indignantly told Gore that his “little brother”—the…

Can you diagnose fear? The red tree blooming from uterusto throat. It’s one long nerve, the doctor says. There’s a reasonbreathing helps, the muscles slackening like a dead marriage.Mine are simple things. Food poisoning in Paris. Hospital lobbies.My husband laughing in another room. (The door closed.)For days, I cradle my breast and worry the cyst like a bead.There’s nothing to pray away. The tree loves her cutter.The nightmares have stopped, I tell the doctor. I know why.They stopped because I baptized them. This is how my motherand I speak of dying—the thing you turn away by letting in.I’m tired of April. It’s killed our matriarchs and, in the back yard,I’ve planted an olive sapling in the wrong soil. There is a droopinessto the branches that reminds me of my friend,…

The Erratics, by Vicki Laveau-Harvie (Knopf). This atmospheric memoir finds the author returning home to Alberta, Canada, to help her sister manage their aging parents. They must put their lying, manipulative mother in an institution, in order to excise her from the life of their vulnerable, enabling father. The mother is the book’s hollow center; a compassionless parent and a compulsive scammer, she invents family members and then kills them off for sympathy. Laveau-Harvie does not dig much into the reasons for this cruelty, or into her own backstory, finding that her early years are “like the blank bit that airplanes routinely plummet through and recover from.” The result—the rare memoir unobsessed with memories—is sometimes infuriating but always enthralling. Deep Delta Justice, by Matthew Van Meter (Little, Brown). In 1966,…

In reality, superhuman speed might come with drawbacks. As Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid), the reluctant lionheart of Amazon’s superhero satire, “The Boys,” discovers, a body streaking through space is essentially a scythe. Quaid’s parents are the actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan; his genes have endowed him with parodically sweet button features, which he scrunches to great effect as Hughie realizes, to his horror, that his girlfriend, Robin, with whom he has just been chatting on a New York City sidewalk, has been unceremoniously pulverized by the fastest man in the world, a superhero known as A-Train (Jessie T. Usher). Hughie is still clasping her hands after her other parts have been strewn all over the curb, his precious face Pol-locked with her blood. Robin’s killing precipitates Hughie’s loss of…

HARVESTING HOPE I could not agree more with Rebecca Mead’s lovely article about the therapeutic benefits of having one’s hands in the soil (“Nature and Nurture,” August 24th). Her words brought back memories from fifteen years ago, when I was taking part in a development project in an aspiring eco-village in South Africa. The facilities were rented every few weeks to a Buddhist group that brought victims of the violence in Zimbabwe to the village for workshops and meditation sessions. On their afternoon breaks, these adults, many of whom had suffered rape, loss of livelihood, hunger, and torture, came to life as they helped clear new garden beds. As Mead notes, “Gardening can be especially helpful for people suffering from P.T.S.D.,” and that seemed to be the case for these…

before the raised eyebrowsand the bigtut-tut, did any of you lotever actually trulytry burning a book? | you have to attend,poker and stoke,make flames go leafing page to page,drive oxygen into the gillstill a sheaf peels openexposing its sheetsto the blaze, get the parchments—wadded, involved—to surrender in turn until the effacementsbegin, beforethe retractions of ink | even thensome charred erratumor index floats off through the trees,some ashen verseor black-edged stanza gets rakedfrom the layers of sludgeafter rain | how many booksdid I burn? |scores | whose books? | whose booksdid you burn? |reader, I burnt yours…

I asked my father if he knew where he was and he said, “Kind of.” “You are in the hospital. Your hip surgery went well. But there is a virus and you have been found to have it. You are contagious. No one can get near. It’s happening all over the world. You caught it in your assisted-living facility. The chef had it.” His blue eyes had a light that appeared to race from the back of his brain to the front. The brightness of them seemed to direct itself, with sudden power, into the screen, then straight through and past me. “The Berrywood chef?” “Yes.” Now his eyes dulled again. “The food was not that good. I did have a glass of lemonade once that was delicious. Like in…

During the winter of 2016, after the Times sent out disposable virtual-reality headsets to its subscribers, the rooms of our house filled up with animated beasts and haunted dolls. “Look at that!” you would exclaim, pointing at a pile of laundry. In the chintzy transformations of augmented reality, our children became insects, foxes, muffins. I could make domestic life temporarily thrilling or scary, then reverse the current and make it humdrum again. Soon, the estrangement itself came to seem banal. The crumpled cardboard glasses are in a drawer someplace. In “Blizzard” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the tenth book of poems by Henri Cole, ordinary life shares a plane with the eerie, the uncanny, and the berserk. A menagerie of cats, snails, flies, bees, and other creatures fills these poems, acting…

SEPTEMBER 23 – 29, 2020 Lincoln Center is presenting the city’s main annual movie event, the New York Film Festival, at virtual and drive-in screenings. This year’s edition features the New York premières of Chloé Zhao’s drama “Nomadland,” starring Frances McDormand, and Garrett Bradley’s documentary “Time,” as well as the world premières of the first three installments of “Small Axe”—Steve McQueen’s five-part film series about London’s West Indian community—including the musical romance “Lovers Rock,” set in 1980 and starring Micheal Ward (pictured above). ART Alex Dodge The characters in this Brooklyn painter’s new works, at Klaus von Nichtssagend, seem to float in a desolate virtual space. Their blue-to-white gradient backgrounds are actually inspired by a technique that predates digital design: Dodge studied traditional woodblock printing in Japan and borrows the…

For decades, the International Space Station has been hovering over Earth, in an orbit somewhere between two hundred and three hundred miles above sea level. Its massive rectilinear structure, resembling an Eisenhower-era TV antenna, contains hundreds of thousands of solar cells and a series of pressurized modules that can support life and equipment, all of it weighing close to a million pounds. Since 2000, people have been living on the station, in an area comparable to a six-bedroom house: humanity’s most expensive real estate. The station is also the fastest structure a person can live in. It orbits the planet at more than seventeen thousand miles an hour, many times faster than the Earth’s rotation. A day on the station, from sunrise to sunrise, lasts just ninety minutes. In the…

Lincoln revisionism is not new. In the nineteen-fifties, Edmund Wilson, in these pages, shook off the crooning hagiography of Carl Sandburg’s multivolume biography and replaced it with a vision of Lincoln as a calculating, aggressive nationalist—an American Bismarck, though one in possession of a sternly arresting prose style. The Civil War, in Wilson’s account, was fought for no higher cause than that which makes sea slugs attack other sea slugs: because it is in the nature of beasts to make war. In place of smiling Honest Abe we got lynx-eyed Killer Lincoln. This view was taken up, with a few complimentary curlicues, in Gore Vidal’s best-selling 1984 novel, “Lincoln.” Wilson and Vidal, channelling the ghost of Henry Adams, and seeing themselves as the last redoubts of patrician hauteur, painted their…

At nine-thirty on the morning of August 1st, thirty-eight members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic gathered onstage at the Hollywood Bowl, in the Hollywood Hills, to play the final movement of Maurice Ravel’s “Mother Goose” Suite. It was the first time that an appreciable number of L.A. Phil musicians had played together since the covid-19 lockdown began, in mid-March, and elaborate preparations were necessary to insure safe conditions. All performers and staff were tested beforehand, and their temperatures were taken upon entrance to the Bowl. Socially distanced changing areas had been organized. Signs backstage marked one-way lanes. Members of the wind and the brass sections, who cannot wear masks as they play, sat behind custom-built three-sided Plexiglas enclosures. Musicians were placed much farther apart than usual. They would have to…