Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2, 2020 i The New Yorker

On a Thursday afternoon in early May, Governor Gavin Newsom briefed reporters on California’s progress in containing COVID-19, advising residents that they would have to wait a while longer for some businesses to reopen. “This whole thing started, in the state of California—the first community spread—in a nail salon,” he said. “I just want to remind everybody of that.” There are some eleven thousand nail salons in California, about eighty per cent of which are owned and staffed by Vietnamese Americans. For many of them, Newsom’s announcement came as a surprise. Janet Nguyen, a former state senator who is running for the Assembly as a Republican, tried to find out if the spread really had been traced to a nail salon. The following day, having found no evidence to…

In the old land,People perished not from hungerBut from gorging on lust and liver. Birds flew backward, thoughts swarmedAgainst foreheads. Grass vined up stakes,Sprouted out of the eyes of the impaled. In the old land,The mountains were seasonally flattened,Carved and rolled up like woven prayer mats. The sky was shallow and piebald in the fall,Striped and shiny when it rained or snowed,So splendorous we’d go blind, lose our minds. In the old land,Homes were made of honeycomb and straw,Cars ran on blood, melted pennies, bones. Streets zigzagged like startled antelopes.Life and death were simple and whole,No need for explanation, let alone hope. In the old land,Love was meant for strangers and their dogs,Yowling, licking wounds, sore lymph nodes. We were living our long lives at home,Until we sank and resurfaced…

In the movie, flamingos migrate over Rome and restovernight on the terrace of Jep Gambardella, so that, in the rose light of dawn, he walks out to find his saintlyold guest, Sister Maria, meditating among a flamboyance— a hundred stand on pink stilt-like legs with roseate plumesand beaks sturdy as lobster crackers. Some rest on one leg or sit with legs tucked under them; some halfheartedly peckat stone—as if they might find bread crumbs from last night’s party. But all are quiet. “I know all their Christian names,”she brags under her breath to no one, or perhaps to God. I never received such tidings from the universe, but Saturday on my walk, checking my Fitbit again (3,000 for an old lady is good),I heardwing beats and cooing, and then, almost…

On a cloud-spackled Sunday last June, protesters in Bristol, England, gathered at a statue of Edward Colston, a seventeenth-century slave trader on whose watch more than eighty thousand Africans were trafficked across the Atlantic. “Pull it down!” the crowd chanted, as people yanked on a rope around the statue’s neck. A few tugs, and the figure clanged off its pedestal. A panel of its coat skirt cracked off to expose a hollow buttock as the demonstrators rolled the statue toward the harbor, a few hundred yards away, and then tipped it headlong into the water. The Black Lives Matter movement has accelerated a reckoning across Europe about the legacies of slavery and imperialism, nowhere more urgently than in Britain, which presided over the largest empire in world history. The Colston…

In the psychogeography of modern life, parking garages are sites of anxiety and subtle terror. The doctor’s appointment is minutes away, and yet you are still frantically circling. The space you find is so torturously narrow that it could have been designed only in consultation with auto-body shops. Afterward, desperation rises as you wander acres of concrete, listening for your faintly beeping vehicle. The lighting is sepulchral, the air dank. Few soothing scenes in movies are set in garages: shady deals are done, witnesses are offed, Deep Throat speaks. It made sense, then, that Yuval Sharon, the new artistic director of Michigan Opera Theatre, chose a Detroit parking garage as the impromptu set for an abridged production of “Götterdämmerung.” The final installment of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle ostensibly addresses the twilight…

RECONSIDERING ARTEMISIA Rebecca Mead’s thoughtful essay on the seventeenth-century artist Artemisia Gentileschi traces how the understanding of her work and persona has become more complex over time (“A Brush with Violence,” October 5th). She was initially viewed as a rape victim who overcame trauma to create paintings that defiantly engage with gender issues from a female point of view. More recently, as Mead observes, the artist has been celebrated as an entrepreneur who knew how to market her gender. A step further is to understand Artemisia in the context of the feminism of her own time, which I explore in my book “Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe.” In seventeenth-century Italy and earlier, women writers voiced outrage at rape and sexual intimidation; they produced incisive analyses of the…

At a rally in Pennsylvania recently, Donald Trump beseeched the voting bloc he’s most afraid of losing. “Suburban women, will you please like me?” he said. “I saved your damn neighborhood.” Picture the endangered suburbs in Trump’s mind: homogeneous and as white as the milk you dip your after-school snickerdoodle in. The mothers, home. The fathers, not. You’re seeing Cherry Hill, New Jersey, circa 1966, when Jona Frank was born. Frank is a photographer, based in Santa Monica, who has taken pictures of skaters, boxers, rodeo kids, and evangelical youth. This fall, Monacelli Press will publish “Cherry Hill,” a book of autobiographical essays and photographs by Frank that re-create a girlhood spent waiting all day for the mailman. “There was this feeling of Nothing happened here,” she said. “I wanted…

Irene’s medium, the one in which she has exhibited at galleries, is textiles, but for “Interrogating Graham/Pence” she decides to use Polaroid photos and off-white Tintoretto paper. Even though the questions will be the same for all the men, she handwrites them in black ink, because the contrast of her consistent handwriting with the men’s varied handwriting will create a dialogue in which she is established as the interrogator. Before her lunch with Eddie Walsh, she writes: Date Name Age Profession When, prior to lunch today, did you last spend time alone with a woman who is not your wife? Are you aware of the Modesto Manifesto, also known as the Billy Graham Rule, also known as the Mike Pence Rule? If so, what is your opinion of this rule?…

The Next Great Migration, by Sonia Shah (Bloomsbury). Countering the perception that today’s human and nonhuman migrations represent a global crisis, this engrossing book draws on history, interviews, and a wide range of scientific research to show that migration is “an unexceptional ongoing reality.” Shah deftly traces the influence of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, whose commitment to the Christian idea of a static, divinely ordered world led him to dismiss the reality of natural migration, and whose bigotry led him to reject the possibilities of human migration and of shared ancestry. She shows how Linnaeus’s ideas formed the basis for centuries of so-called race science, eugenics, racist state structures, and xenophobia. Max Jacob, by Rosanna Warren (Norton). The poet, painter, and astrologer Max Jacob embodies both the euphoric inception…

Mercifully, the new Showtime miniseries “The Good Lord Bird,” a reimagining of the militant abolitionist John Brown’s doomed ride to Harpers Ferry, is not “woke.” Instead, it has an impish spirit of contrivance that is largely missing from contemporary antebellum historical fictions. Among its finest moments of cultural sacrilege is a sex farce starring Frederick Douglass, whom Brown (Ethan Hawke) insists on calling “the King of the Negroes.” Douglass, in a canny bit of casting, is played by Daveed Diggs, who originated the roles of Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway phenomenon, “Hamilton,” a retelling of American history that marked the apex of Obama-era artistic liberal agitprop. “The Good Lord Bird,” though, is not concerned with supplanting the mess and the mystery of history with…

OCTOBER 28 – NOVEMBER 3, 2020 Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Met’s Costume Institute, who chose the British writer as the “ghost narrator” of the new exhibition “About Time: Fashion and Duration” (opening on Oct. 29). Literary excerpts accompany paired garments (including Viktor & Rolf’s haute-couture gown, from 2020, above) that are stylistically similar but were designed decades apart—a chic exploration of what Woolf once described as “the extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind.” MUSIC Autechre: “SIGN” ELECTRONIC For three decades, the Manchester-based electronic-dance producers Rob Brown and Sean Booth, who work together as Autechre, have made some of dance music’s most baffingly original tunes. Glacial, antic, gnarled, and alien, the duo’s tracks (and their titles) can…

The last weekend in August, 2001, two weeks before the attacks of 9/11, President George W. Bush travelled with his wife, Laura, and an entourage of government officials to a steel mill outside Pittsburgh. He worked the tables at a picnic for members of the United Steelworkers union and their families. I was there as a reporter, and I recall standing just a few feet away from the President on that hot day, listening to him make small talk with the factory workers and watching the sweat soak through his checkered shirt. After the picnic, he ascended a temporary stage and gave a speech promising a “level playing field” for American steel. A few months later, he instituted a tariff on steel imports. A President serves as the chief executive…

The ghosts of forgotten histories haunt America’s heartland, begging to be remembered and exorcised. George Floyd’s Minneapolis, as we have lately come to understand, has never been a harmless Midwestern town of grains and lakes. The enslaved Dred Scott’s eighteen-thirties sojourn at Fort Snelling (now part of the Twin Cities) and his subsequent return downriver to Missouri gave rise to the nation’s most notorious Supreme Court decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford, which ruled that Black Americans—slave or free—had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Floyd, who died choking on that assertion, was from North Carolina by way of Houston, and the string of memorials following his death sent a mourning cry out of Minnesota back along Dred Scott’s path, downriver to the South before turning east…

“Look with thine ears,” Lear tells poor blind Gloucester, and that is exactly what the rest of us should do now we know that the majority of New York theatres will not open their doors until, at the most optimistic guesstimate, the middle of next year. Zoom fatigue set in months ago, but audio is stepping into the breach to take us places that glazed screen-gazing can’t. The eyes tend toward the literal, while what we only hear can bloom, the way a novel does, in the privacy of the mind, as is the case with two new productions—one radical, one retro—that use audio to light a path forward for performance in the Covid era and beyond. “A Thousand Ways” (produced by the Brooklyn-based ArKtype) was created by the duo…