Innholdsfortegnelse for January 18, 2021 i The New Yorker

Lupin In 1905, in reaction to the runaway success that the British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was enjoying with Sherlock Holmes, the French writer Maurice Leblanc invented Arsène Lupin, a dashing thief and cunning mischief-maker who often wore a top hat and a monocle while pocketing the world’s most valuable diamonds. The Lupin character became a hit, and Leblanc spent decades churning out adventures. This massive body of work has been translated to television many times—but never as compellingly as in “Lupin,” a new Netflix series (by way of Gaumont Television, in France) in which the rakish Omar Sy plays a modern-day mastermind named Assane Diop, who works as a janitor at the Louvre. When Diop comes across an original Lupin novel, it grants him superpowers, including the ability…

“It’s alright, Ma, I’m only bleeding.” You live your life alone but tethered to the deed of a mother. You live your life naked to the world and what it will pile upon you. And, no, you will not avoid death. You won’t survive it. And by “you” I mean not just Jesus, who is invoked in this Bob Dylan song, whether intentionally or not, but you as in you, the person reading this. Someone loves you. That’s not small. You suffer and she watches, living or dead. She can’t protect you, but it’s alright, Ma, I can make it. Jimmy Carter used a famous line from the same Dylan song—“he not busy being born is busy dying”—to make a point about patriotism: America was busy being born, Carter said,…

Dr. Cole eased his car from his garage, then stopped, out of habit, to watch in his rearview mirror the garage door slide gently down and the light above it extinguish itself. This had once given him an absurd, vain satisfaction; now it was his only goodbye. The car was expensive and comfortable, as was the house that went with it: large, sedate, islanded in lawns and leafage, like the others in the discreet crescent. As he drove off, the purr of the engine and the crackle of gravel were the only sounds, except for—though inside his car he couldn’t hear it—the great anthem of birds. It was a little after six on an April morning, but at eight it would still be astonishingly quiet. Except for the birds. They…

Beethoven, by Laura Tunbridge (Yale). Focussing on nine pivotal works, this study, equal parts musicological and biographical, complicates the simplistic portrait of Beethoven as an isolated, single-minded genius. Although he seemed inclined to rebellion and irreverence, he still relied upon a close circle of friends and patrons—especially as he began to lose his hearing—and saw his fortunes as bound up with theirs. His music also testifies to his political awareness. Tunbridge writes that “Fidelio,” his only opera, “roots him as a man of his time rather than allowing him to float free of worldly concerns, a transcendent genius.” The Light Ages, by Seb Falk (Norton). The figure at the heart of this exploration of medieval astronomers, philosophers, and physicians is John of Westwyk, a brilliant fourteenth-century Benedictine monk who created…

BONES OF THE HIMALAYAS Douglas Preston, in his piece on the mysterious human remains found around Roopkund Lake, tells a thrilling story that highlights how far scientific study of ancient people’s genomes has advanced in recent decades (“The Skeleton Lake,” December 14th). But, all too often, celebrations of paleogenomics overshadow the ethical considerations of field work. The sprint to study DNA extracted from human remains has been described by some as a reckless “bone rush,” or “vampire science”; research on genomes from across the globe, including such places as South Africa and New Caledonia, has raised questions about how to examine human origins without the participation of those whose history is under the microscope. Local communities do not seem to object to scientific work at the Himalayan lake, but a…

Odin, in Norse mythology, is an extremely powerful god who’s also a trickster. He has only one eye, having sacrificed the other for wisdom. Among his many talents, he can wake the dead, calm storms, cure the sick, and blind his enemies. Not infrequently, he transforms himself into an animal; as a snake, he acquires the gift of poetry, which he transfers to people, inadvertently. The Odin, in Oakland, California, is a company that sells genetic-engineering kits. The company’s founder, Josiah Zayner, sports a side-swept undercut, multiple piercings, and a tattoo that urges: “Create Something Beautiful.” He holds a Ph.D. in biophysics and is a well-known provocateur. Among his many stunts, he has coaxed his skin to produce a fluorescent protein, ingested a friend’s poop in a D.I.Y. fecal-matter transplant,…

as children we ate watermelons over trash bags in my aunt’s back yardfilled with so many black & blue-eyed crowsit stopped being an omen & they’d eat what fell to the ground& our skin stayed on we’d get yelled at for spitting seeds at each othersaliva thick with redwe made a war from the sweetest thingsthe flies made a mess of our dancingthe flies made a dance in our messes our mothers thanked god it was not the blood feareda watermelon’s vine would wrap itself around youif you fell asleep under them watching meteorsmelons make magic under midnight moons i once grew watermelons that flowers could singif i sat there singingthe way my aunts break out into song i mean beautifullike that the flowers would start moving i’m so free…

The final piece of terrain to be incorporated into the contiguous United States was an oddly shaped strip stretching from Las Cruces, New Mexico, to Yuma, Arizona. Known as the Gadsden Purchase, the area was obtained from Mexico in 1854 for ten million dollars, adding nearly thirty thousand square miles to a nation still drunk with Manifest Destiny expansionism. The motivations for acquiring the land were many—it contained huge deposits of ore and precious metals, held vast agricultural potential in the soils of its fertile river valleys, and, most important, had an arid climate that could allow a rail route to connect the coasts while remaining free from snowpack year-round. Like much of the American West, the Gadsden region bears unmistakable scars of our nation’s drive for expansion and control.…

A weird thing happens when you A watch an actor look down at a sheet of paper and read her lines. Suddenly, you’re aware—painfully or pleasantly, depending on the subtlety of the maneuver—that this character is a locomotive, moving inexorably along the track that is the script. One question in great dramas is how an individual’s free will might chafe against the world’s immovable fixtures. The actor’s eye on the page offers a slightly dark answer: maybe our liberty is an illusion, and our lives, like a play or a piece of music, are churning toward an inevitable destination. The slang for actors who haven’t yet learned all their lines is that they’re still “on book.” Perhaps that applies to all of us, just reading aloud and ambling toward our…

JANUARY 13 – 19, 2021 The Malaysian textile artist Anne Samat wove the intricate, room-filling sculpture “Follow Your Heart Wholeheartedly” (pictured, in detail, above) for the inaugural Asia Society Triennial. Titled “We Do Not Dream Alone,” the ambitious exhibition, which features works by some forty contemporary artists and collectives from twenty-one countries, unfolds in two installments; the current show closes on Feb. 7, and the second opens on March 16. Advance tickets are required and available via asiasociety.org. MUSIC “Aqua Net & Funyuns” OPERA The new serial from Experiments in Opera, “Aqua Net & Funyuns,” shows that opera, in all its grandeur, isn’t incompatible with the smaller scale of a podcast. The series’ five musicalized radio plays are designed for both earbuds and stereo speakers: the conversational vocal lines are…

Among the things I have not missed since entering middle age is the sensation of being an absolute beginner. It has been decades since I’ve sat in a classroom in a gathering cloud of incomprehension (Algebra 2, tenth grade) or sincerely tried, lesson after lesson, to acquire a skill that was clearly not destined to play a large role in my life (modern dance, twelfth grade). Learning to ride a bicycle in my early thirties was an exception—a little mortifying when my husband had to run alongside the bike, as you would with a child—but ultimately rewarding. Less so was the time when a group of Japanese schoolchildren tried to teach me origami at a public event where I was the guest of honor—I’ll never forget their sombre puzzlement as…

Maria Fernandes died at the age of thirty-two while sleeping in her car in a Wawa parking lot in New Jersey. It was the summer of 2014, and she worked low-wage jobs at three different Dunkin’ Donuts, and slept in her Kia in between shifts, with the engine running and a container of gasoline in the back, in case she ran out. In the locked car, still wearing her white-and-brown Dunkin’ Donuts uniform, she died from gasoline and exhaust fumes. A Rutgers professor called her “the real face of the recession.” Fernandes had been trying to sleep between shifts, but all kinds of workers were spending hours in their cars, waiting for shifts. Within a year of Fernandes’s death, Elizabeth Warren and other Senate and House Democrats reintroduced a bill…