Innholdsfortegnelse for October 26, 2020 i The New Yorker

Ratched Did a caricature as crude as Mildred Ratched, the cruel nurse in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” need to be reclaimed? Sarah Paulson stars in the character’s origin story, a new Netflix drama created by Evan Romansky and produced by Ryan Murphy. “Ratched” is not subtle about what caused the rot at the core of its protagonist: she and a boy whom she considered to be her brother were foster children who landed in a particularly twisted family. Mildred finagles her way into a job at a psychiatric facility run by Dr. Richard Hanover (Jon Jon Briones), a lobotomy enthusiast, and Betsy Bucket (Judy Davis), the long-suffering head nurse; the hospital’s newest inmate is Nurse Ratched’s “brother,” whom she plans to break free. The…

On February 24, 2010, during a show at SeaWorld Orlando, a trainer named Dawn Brancheau was reclining on a platform in the middle of a stadium pool when Tilikum—the park’s largest killer whale—pulled her into the water and thrashed her around until she drowned. Her death was initially reported as an accident, but a subsequent investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration revealed an “extensive history” of incidents exposing SeaWorld trainers to serious hazards. (It turned out that Tilikum, along with two other whales, had previously drowned a trainer at another park.) Osha fined SeaWorld seventy-five thousand dollars for three violations and ordered it to either install barriers or keep trainers at safe distances during shows. SeaWorld contested Osha’s actions, and, in 2013, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals…

Walking down Abbot Kinney Boulevard, the retail strip in Venice, California, can feel like scrolling through Instagram. One afternoon this July, people sat at outdoor tables beneath drooping strings of fairy lights, sipping cocktails and spearing colorful, modestly dressed salads. The line for Salt & Straw, a venture-funded, “chef-driven” ice-cream shop, stretched up the block, and athleisureclad twentysomethings photographed themselves eating waffle cones, fabric masks pulled down around their chins like turkey wattles. A month earlier, Abbot Kinney had become a central gathering place for protesters during the mass demonstrations against police brutality and systemic racism. Moxie Marlinspike, who firmly supported the protests, noticed that many of the high-end businesses, fearing looters, had boarded up their windows, then decorated the plywood with murals and messages in support of Black Lives…

Yesterday I sent you a letter. And today on the phoneyou tell me you are pregnant. I pack up and return,you greet me at the airport, you’re even lovelier thanin my letter that’s on its way to you. We builda house, our child grows, our parents shrink,then a few years of sweat and tears, in which we prudentlypickle cabbage and gherkins for the ever-colder days.In the coloring book of our life there are fewer and fewerblank spaces, the crayons grow shorter, we try to be precise,but even so we go over the lines. We busy ourselveswith everyday matters, and our paths are everdeeper, they start to look like tunnels. Meanwhilemy letter’s on its way to you. You’ll open it whenit suits you best. (Translated, from the Polish, by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.)…

His Very Best, by Jonathan Alter (Simon & Schuster). Evoking an era when decency and competence in the White House were expected, this biography makes the case for reëvaluating Jimmy Carter’s “underrated” Presidency. The Iran hostage crisis and popular impatience with Carter’s “eat your spinach” leadership cut short his project, but Alter argues that he made a consequential mark on the country. Carter defended the environment, reformed the civil service, concluded the Camp David Accords, and forever changed the federal bench by appointing women and minorities. One of them, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, later said that her selection, in 1978, was not “in the realm of the possible until Jimmy Carter became president.” Alter praises Carter’s moral rectitude and attention to detail, and laments that his tenure is so often seen…

The Irish composer Jennifer Walshe nails down, better than any artist I know, the antic, raucous, confessional, sordid, semi-sublime texture of modern digitized life. At the age of forty-six, she has established herself not only as a composer but also as an electrifying vocalist, a sly comedian and storyteller, a fertile maker of videos and visual art. Yet she comes across less as an all-knowing mastermind than as a free-spirited instigator of happenings that threaten to spiral out of control. One of the last live events I saw before the pandemic shutdown was a performance, in March, of her 2016 work “EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT,” for vocalist and string quartet, at National Sawdust, in Brooklyn. It ends with abrasive timbres on violin and viola, mournful sustained fifths on the cello, a…

ANEW FOREIGN POLICY I enjoyed reading the magazine’s multipart endorsement of Joe Biden for President, in which your editors and writers expressed their support for the candidate and provided him with an urgent to-do list addressing health care, the climate crisis, the rule of law, civil rights, and foreign policy (The Talk of the Town, October 5th). I completely agree with the notion that the United States must address threats to justice, freedom, and prosperity on its own turf, but I took issue somewhat with Susan B. Glasser’s discussion of foreign policy, in which she expresses hope that “a commitment to universal freedoms and human rights will once more be a foundation of U.S. foreign policy.” The truth of the matter, of course, is that the U.S. has a checkered…

It was the way summer hunted me:a sequence of instructionsin the folds of a flower.How do I explain the hatred of the sun,the terrible wonder of being alive?Fuck the fucking birds. I lookedto the sky to join the storms. I couldn’thave imagined you, swift as the lightningI traced with my finger, a song scratchedinto a back. I ached with the not-knowing.On Mother’s Day I knelt and beggedfor something to help me. Is that God?I played “Here Comes the Sun”in the psych ward and everyonewatched as I shook. Thisis not true, I said. The sunis already here. Hope was slightas an eyelash. How clean the sky—a cloud that posed as a spine.There was no containerfor my despair. In your face I sawa sequence of instructions.When you touched me, I namedthe future:…

His teacher informed the class that her name was Miss Rita and they must always address her as such. She assured them that she would be guarding them all and that not one of them would be lost, except the one who was destined to be lost. “What does she mean?” he asked the child beside him. They were all sitting in their chairs. On his other side was a window looking out on … He could never remember what it was looking out on. “I wish she were pretty,” the child said. “Shouldn’t she be pretty?” He told his mother what Miss Rita had said about the one who was destined to be lost. “That happens to be from the Bible,” his mother said. “When people take words from…

September 12, 2001, was a hard day for many people around the world, but for Martin Amis, the celebrated English novelist and critic, it came bearing a surprise surplus of customized pain. Staring down what seemed like the sudden obsolescence of his life’s work (“the pointlessness of everything you’ve ever written and everything you’ll ever write”), Amis arrived at his London office that morning to find an unwelcome message on his answering machine. “I have something to tell you,” a long-estranged ex-girlfriend, Phoebe Phelps, announced. “It’s been bothering me for twenty-four years and I don’t see why it shouldn’t start bothering you.” When the doorbell rang a short while later, and someone handed him the promised communication, Amis, who had once betrayed Phelps with another woman, thought he had some…

OCTOBER 21 – 27, 2020 The noise-rap trio Clipping—composed of the rapper, actor, and “Hamilton” star Daveed Diggs and the producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson—has been making left-of-center hip-hop since 2014. In the group’s ambitious new horror-themed album, “Visions of Bodies Being Burned,” each song plays into one of the genre’s tropes, occasionally as an expression of radical politics. Nowhere is this overlap more effective than on “Pain Everyday,” which calls on the ghosts of lynching victims to haunt the descendants of their killers. MUSIC “Alice in the Pandemic” CLASSICAL The heroine of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books navigates an absurd alternate reality, and that idea spoke to the composer Jorge Sosa and the librettist Cerise Lim Jacobs during this chaotic year. Their virtual opera, “Alice in the Pandemic,” employs…

Callahan County, an agricultural region outside Abilene, Texas, is a place where people pay attention to their neighbors. Bart Kendrick, whose family has lived in the county since the nineteenth century, takes particular notice of vehicles. (When I visited him, he greeted me by saying, “Nice truck. What year is it?”) Last summer, Bart saw something odd at a nearby house. In the morning, a pickup truck was parked in front of the garage. In the evening, the truck had been replaced by a patrol car. When Bart went to introduce himself to his new neighbors, no one answered the door. The yard was weedy; the windows were covered with aluminum foil. In December, Bart and his wife, Amber, read in the local paper that Leroy Foley, a police officer…

On a clear night earlier this year, the writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman was fidgeting in a cab on the way to MOMA PS1, the contemporary-art center in Queens. The museum was holding an event to celebrate Hartman’s latest book, “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,” an account, set in New York and Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century, that blends history and fiction to chronicle the sexual and gender rebellions of young Black women. Several artists planned to present work that illustrated Hartman’s influence on them. She was nervous just thinking about it. “I’m crying on the inside,” she said. “I’m this shy person, and this feels so weird.” Hartman, who is fifty-nine, wore a blue batik tunic over slim black pants and plum-shaded ankle boots. A professor of…

If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can recall what it felt like to go days at a time without considering the end of the world. Now these thoughts are constant, the thrumming background noise of ordinary life, a vast and terrifyingly specific catalogue of horrors. Smoke billows across the West, submerging our cities in a murky orange twilight; more than two hundred thousand Americans die of a virus whose dangers half the country seems intent on ignoring. The world’s most powerful democracy teeters, and children sleep in cages at its southern border. We’ve submitted willingly to mass surveillance and filled the oceans with microscopic plastics; the climate refugees, it turns out, are us. It all happened so fast, or at least it feels that way, speed being an…

What happens when we try to walk at night through museums we can no longer visit? A range of online virtual tours provides the possibility, but apart from physical problems of reproduction—the pixel resolution is inadequate, the movement glitchy and twitchy—the real difference is the loss of tactile and optical tension, the missing dialogue of aching feet and happy eyes. Online, we float, ghostlike, down corridors, making giddy hundred-and-eighty-degree spins, with no querulous photographer from Toledo with a selfie stick to bump into. Sit and know you’re sitting is the meditation master’s insistence, and Walk and look while knowing you’re walking and looking is the more complicated Zen of the museum experience: the physical and the painterly, the squinting to see and the moments of transporting vision, have to go…