Innholdsfortegnelse for November 30, 2020 i The New Yorker

When Pamela Rush was a young woman, in the late nineties, she moved into a trailer on an orange-dirt road in Collirene, Alabama. Rush’s home sat on half an acre of land, surrounded by lush woods, and her sister Almedia lived in another trailer on the same plot. The family had bought Rush’s trailer, a pale-blue single-wide, a few years earlier. She moved in to take care of her aging mother, and ended up staying for decades. At forty-eight, Rush had full cheeks and a shy way of carrying herself. She looked everyone in the eye, but often had to be reminded to speak up. “Everybody in the neighborhood knows her,” her niece Veronica said. Rush’s family was one of the largest in the area, and she got together nearly…

In 2008, Jeremy Neuner and Ryan Coonerty, two city-hall employees in Santa Cruz, California, decided to open a co-working space. They leased a cavernous building a few steps from a surf shop and a sex-toy boutique, and equipped it with desks, power strips, fast Wi-Fi, and a deluxe coffee-maker. Neuner and Coonerty named their company NextSpace Coworking. Neuner, who had attended Harvard’s Kennedy School after serving in the Navy, was looking to be part of a movement. “We really believed that this would be a totally new way of working,” he told me. NextSpace provided a refuge for local freelancers desperate for office camaraderie, and within six months the company was turning a small profit. Soon, NextSpace opened locations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Jose. Neuner and Coonerty…

A downdraft early in life I never pondered:Horses threw riders, divers bounced and plunged,I stumbled and hit the ground but at that ageNot tall, didn’t fall far, so no bones fractured. At what point did it start to feel uncanny,The way a scarf or jacket carelessly tossedOn a chair or satin counterpane would halfThe time begin to creep and slide, consenting To a force I couldn’t—though in operationCould—see? And even coats hooked on a hangerMight later accept the earthward invitation,Coaxed loose and sucked toward the globe’s fierce center. Deepening experience drove homeWhat the ninth month demands of gravid women:To endure, and not complain of stressed backs,The drudgery of living in italics. Terra’s a magnet, and we its iron filings,Arrayed in patterns preordained. Much likeThe sun, which grips our blue-white planet…

THE FUTURE OF TRUMPISM Nicholas Lemann’s illuminating piece on where Republicans will go after Donald Trump leaves office proposed three possible paths forward for the G.O.P. (“The After-Party,” November 2nd). Lemann refers to the Reversal scenario, in which “Republicans would replace the Democrats as the party of the people,” as “perhaps the least plausible.” There is, in fact, some historical precedent for Reversalism in the U.S. For several decades, Black Americans have overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party—an allegiance that few could have foreseen when the Republican Party was founded, in 1854. Republicans—who, in the mid-nineteenth century, favored abolishing slavery and extending the franchise to Black men—were frequently at odds with the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party. As the two parties’ priorities changed over time, Black Americans shifted their loyalties.…

My runes are in ruins, little laughter here for my sarcasmWhat to do, this chart confuses, conflates moon, which phaseAnd honey, local or from some exotic shore and what of moneyMy savings stuffed beneath deflating mattress. Each cold Day warns me that my résumé is unworthy. Who will hire meNow that my spells are so easily broken, my warnings useless It is a wonder that I worked as long as I could. IncantationsMemorized and recipes for spells written in an ink too paleFor visibility—each item sourced, the medicine worked and then It did not. Was it the well of stories drying up? The fish scalesStinking the kitchen table. The cat wandering away, whileSpiders spread their cosmic maps unreadable to all butThe other spiders. They cheer me. Again, I read the…

Since 2009, the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour, an amount that bears only the sketchiest relationship to the cost of living in many parts of the country. Twenty-nine states have set their own, higher minimum wage, somewhere between $8.65 and $13.50. On November 3rd, Florida voters approved raising the state’s baseline to fifteen dollars an hour. (This rate is the goal, and the namesake, of the grassroots movement the Fight for Fifteen; seven other states are phasing in such an increase, and Washington, D.C., has mandated one already.) Fast-food workers—for whom the federal minimum wage is often both floor and ceiling—are among the Americans who have been deemed essential in the pandemic. Especially in places where indoor dining is not permitted, drive-throughs have been providing…

What if the North had won the Civil War? That technically factual counterfactual animated almost all of William Faulkner’s writing. The Mississippi novelist was born thirty-two years after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, but he came of age believing in the superiority of the Confederacy: the South might have lost, but the North did not deserve to win. This Lost Cause revisionism appeared everywhere, from the textbooks that Faulkner was assigned growing up to editorials in local newspapers, praising the paternalism and the prosperity of the slavery economy, jury-rigging an alternative justification for secession, canonizing as saints and martyrs those who fought for the C.S.A., and proclaiming the virtues of antebellum society. In contrast with those delusions, Faulkner’s fiction revealed the truth: the Confederacy was…

“Here time becomes space.” A famously enigmatic line from Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” toyed with my mind during a recent visit, my first since last winter, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It chimed with my experience as I prowled the prodigious institution, which has been celebrating, in a pandemically muted manner, its hundred-and-fiftieth birthday as the world’s chief encyclopedic art museum. “Making the Met,” a huge show, roughly tracks the sequence of the museum’s acquisitions and policies since its founding, in 1870. A hundred and fifty is a lot of years, though a mere flicker compared with the five millennia’s worth of objects from the permanent collections that are sampled in the show. If you’re so inclined, there’s much to think about when considering the successive mind-sets of patrician…

NOVEMBER 25 – DECEMBER 1, 2020 Since the nineteen-thirties, the New York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, has dedicated three and a half acres to its Native Plant Garden (pictured here in early November). Redesigned in 2013, it’s home to some hundred thousand species of trees, ferns, shrubs, wildflowers, and grasses, all indigenous to the Northeast. Meadows, woodlands, wetlands, and glades surround a crescent-shaped pool of recycled rainwater, purified with the help of aquatic plants—an urban refuge for which to give thanks. Advance tickets are required. TELEVISION Seduced In October of this year, Keith Raniere, a con man from Albany who ran a self-help seminar turned cult business called NXIVM, was sentenced to a hundred and twenty years in prison for his involvement in several unsavory and downright malevolent crimes.…

I am here to spin. It’s 3:30 P.M. on a Friday in late January, in Los Angeles—specifically, Culver City. I am in a freezing-cold studio on the Sony lot. I like saying “on the Sony lot.” I’m on the Sony lot, in a studio, and it’s freezing cold. But I am thankful for this temperature. My skin rests atop a roiling sea of sweat. I am often a boat adrift on this sea. A friend once saw my wedding photos and asked if I had been flung into a pool—you know, one of those weddings. Nope, just plain old sweat. My friend went silent. I am no longer married. I have three children: boy and girl and girl, eighteen and seventeen and twelve. My parents were married for more than…

Everyone at gate B6 was bathed in gold. She sat there with one foot off the edge of the earth, close to falling, until she saw the couple with matching extravagant mullets that hung down past their shoulder blades. The man took out a brush and began to fight through his mullet until it was free, and then he handed the brush to his wife and she began to fight through hers with the same consecrated look; these mullets were their acre and when God came down he would not find a rock, a stump, a weed. They shook out their hair together, as if it were all on the same head, joined hands, and rested. She sat in the gold that made them the same and felt a little…

Metazoa, by Peter Godfrey-Smith (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Philosophers have long debated the nature of consciousness. This probing study takes an evolutionary approach, examining “experience in general” not only in humans but in much of the animal kingdom. Animals, it argues, developed consciousness gradually, through such biological innovations as centralized nervous systems and the ability to distinguish one’s actions from external forces, which have given rise to “varieties of subjectivity.” The author is crisp on a subject notorious for abstraction, dissecting fuzzy philosophical metaphors and weaving in lively descriptions of the octopuses, whale sharks, and banded shrimp he observes on scuba dives off the coasts of Australia. Heinrich Heine, by George Prochnik (Yale). Cosmopolitanism and nationalism form the backdrop for this life of the great Jewish German poet. Born in…

One way to measure a filmmaker’s commitment to his subject is to look at the not so minor details, such as costumes, wigs, and food. If the paraphernalia of a people doesn’t feel forged but, rather, appears to have been lifted unmolested from observation or memory, or both, then the effect is immersion—the melding of reality with the world of the screen. Black folks haven’t often felt that rush. Looking to support the film industry, over the past century we have excused everything from minstrelsy to bad drag. So when a story comes along that wants not to extract from you but to support you, you take notice. In “Small Axe,” a collection of five films by Steve McQueen about the British West Indian experience, three of which are reviewed…