Innholdsfortegnelse for December 14, 2020 i The New Yorker

On a recent Monday, Zosia Mamet, the actress, unwrapped a peppermint candy and offered it to her six-year-old dappled gray horse, Ten. “Nom nom nom. Yes, you good girl!” she said, her eyes soft, as the mare chomped loudly on the treat, then butted a velvety muzzle into her owner’s palm. “Horses love peppermints. Right, Tenny girl?” Mamet, who is thirty-two, wore riding breeches and tall boots. She was spending her afternoon at the Stables at MiraBella, in Florida, New York, about two hours north of the city, where she has been riding for two years. Last spring, Mamet and her husband, the actor Evan Jonigkeit, gave up their Manhattan rental and moved upstate. Although the move wasn’t animated by the pandemic, it dovetailed with it. “We ended up having…

On a hot afternoon in August, Debbie Honeycutt walked into the crowded waiting room of the Medical Center for Clinical Research, an experimental-treatment facility tucked inside a squat office building in San Diego. She was volunteer number four hundred and ten out of four hundred and sixty-six that the clinic had recruited to test a potential coronavirus vaccine. After a brief screening, a research assistant led her into an exam room, where a doctor administered a nasal-swab test and performed a physical examination. Honeycutt, who is sixty-nine years old, with short white hair and a matter-of-fact disposition, spent much of her career as a fund-raiser in the fields of education and science. This would be her sixth time volunteering in a clinical trial, and it had never felt more important.…

Dust loves me now, along withleaflets, plastic bags, anything unattached, anything looking forsomewhere to stop, something to emblazon. Too painfulto brush them off, the day’s adhesions, too mucha reënactment. I float in my tub of blood-warm water; elementof indecision, if only it could be my habitat,if only the sawtoothed air didn’t insist on its ownuninterrupted necessity. I hate it, but, lacking skin, I’ve lostmy capacity for scorn: that was my failing—not excessof pride, but that stooping to pick up their accoutrements,as if emulation could engender equality. I stain everythingI touch, it all stains me; my raw surface is an unlidded eye,each stimulus its own white- hot knife, but why would Isubmit to be resheathed? To lessen pain? What usedto distinguish me is already defeated, limp trophyflag of conquest; now I…

Feline Philosophy, by John Gray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This teasing book by a political philosopher known for critiquing liberal theories of social progress argues that philosophy is a mere distraction from our deepest fears. Rather than groping for meaning in a universe that offers none, we should try to be more like cats, creatures congenitally “happy being themselves.” Gray has fun deriding philosophy but also draws on it; Taoism’s presumption that all species and ways of living are equal, for instance, allows for “the possibility that human beings might flourish in many different ways.” Ultimately, he endorses contemplation—a mode of perception that fosters equanimity—and offers a scheme for emulating the catlike qualities that might permit us to “thrive without anxiously inquiring how to live.” Billion Dollar Loser, by Reeves…

A POTENT TACTIC I was grateful to Andrew Marantz for his engagement with questions concerning civil disobedience (“The Anti-Coup,” November 23rd). He emphasized the success of nonviolence as a tactic, prompting me to think back to the sixties and early seventies, when civil disobedience in response to the Vietnam War was widespread. While the commitment to nonviolence was undeniably tactical, it was also a spiritual choice, evidenced by the roles that Quakers and the Catholic left played in organizing the movement. I understand spiritual commitment as an alignment with something bigger than divisive self-interest. The fact that people are willing to risk their well-being for the sake of a cause greater than their own interests remains surprising and powerful. Understanding this less tangible aspect of nonviolent action feels important in…

I knew the Antichrist. We worked together in New York, at a major investment bank. (Due to the nondisclosure agreements we had to sign, neither the Antichrist nor myself can disclose which investment bank.) The Antichrist was a pretty good guy, but, when we went for drinks after work, if he got drunk he’d start ranting on and on about how he was going to rule the world and how we’d all bow down and worship him. You wanted to say, “Give it a rest, Antichrist.” Plus, he would conveniently make himself scarce just before the bill came. Another annoying thing about the Antichrist was that he was always complaining that our department was not committing enough abominations. But the Antichrist was not without his good points. When my girlfriend…

In July, 2015, Patrick Byrne, the founder of the online discount retailer Overstock, delivered a twenty-minute talk at FreedomFest, the annual libertarian conference in Las Vegas. Other speakers included the venture capitalist Peter Thiel; John Mackey, the chief executive officer of Whole Foods; and the Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. Byrne’s talk, entitled “Turtles All the Way Down: How the Crypto-Revolution Solves Intractable Problems on Wall Street,” was a version of one he had given many times before. It touched on several of his interests, including the kind of liberalism usually referred to as libertarianism, the flaws in the structure of the stock market which make it vulnerable to manipulation, and how a block-chain-based financial system could eliminate those flaws. After the talk, a line of people waited by the…

Until this spring, a dominant part of the human experience involved leaving one’s home, going somewhere else, encountering a specific bunch of people, trying to get along with them, doing some work, bidding them goodbye, and going home again. The comedy of this ritual—disparate characters flung together day after day, attempting to accomplish grand or humble things without killing one another—has fuelled countless workplace sitcoms, from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” to “30 Rock.” But “The Office,” the American faux-documentary series that ran from 2005 to 2013, and which arose from the sour, drab-looking, painfully funny British sitcom of the same name, came to be one of our most prominent depictions of office life, because it seemed to show us the truth in the tedium. As Jim (John Krasinski), the…

In the late nineteen-sixties, the clinical psychologist Arthur Janov conceived of a new form of treatment for his patients. It was called primal therapy, and it was based on the notion that most adult neuroses and mental strife could be ameliorated by deliberate, supervised regression into childhood, a process that would unearth some form of early-life trauma. The most notable by-product of this therapy was the “primal scream”—the guttural, involuntary vocal emission that accompanied such emotional excavation. Janov’s work generated plenty of suspicion among psychologists, but during the nineteen-seventies it was a cultural touchstone, particularly among musicians. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were both dedicated primal practitioners, and the therapeutic insights they gained from their time working with Janov informed the post-Beatles record “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band”—an intense experimental album…

DECEMBER 9 – 15, 2020 The playwright, performance artist, and sprite Taylor Mac (above) does holiday cheer with a twist of subversion. In 2017, Mac, who uses the gender-neutral pronoun “judy,” débuted “Holiday Sauce,” a vaudevillian romp emphasizing alternative family over Christmas capitalism, at Town Hall. This year, it goes virtual. On Dec. 12, Mac performs “Holiday Sauce … Pandemic!” (available online through Jan. 2), featuring music, burlesque, a tribute to queer elders, and designs by Mac’s frequent collaborator and fellow-maximalist Machine Dazzle. TELEVISION Happiest Season This new meet-the-family holiday movie, streaming on Hulu, comes with a peppermint twist: the lovebirds are lesbians. Harper (Mackenzie Davis) is a journalist in Pittsburgh who invites her girlfriend, Abby (Kristen Stewart), home with her for Christmas to her tony Pennsylvania suburb; unfortunately, she…

I. More a game than a question, he thinks. Then thinks maybe not much difference between games and questions. He decides to call it a thought experiment when he tries it out on a friend. If he can find a friend willing to play. Friend he wants to play with. He’s old. Few friends left. A stranger might do. Start the experiment by asking: If you were one of those in charge of running the world and you learned in secret from unimpeachable sources that life on earth is going to terminate abruptly, very soon, within weeks, months, six months at most, if such incontrovertible information existed and you had the power to reveal it or keep it hidden, would you inform the public. Thought experiment goes on from there…

A high-school classroom is drenched with club lighting. Electronic dance music thumps as an overgrown, hoodied boy pads over to a desk, where his lustful teacher awaits him. She drops to her knees, a swift demonstration of her style of authority. Suddenly, an audience of students materializes. Confusion replaces pleasure, and the expression on the boy’s face lasts well after his alarm clock rings. This dream sequence opens the third episode of “A Teacher,” a promising but emotionally vacant exploration of an illicit student-teacher relationship, based on an indie film of the same name. (Both were created by the filmmaker Hannah Fidell.) The miniseries, on FX on Hulu, wishes to splash cold, purifying water on a permitted perversion, a subject of memes and giddy Post headlines: the sexual abuse of…