Innholdsfortegnelse for January 25, 2021 i The New Yorker

Bridgerton Lady Whistledown (voiced by Julie Andrews), a pseudonymous gossip columnist, is the faceless narrator of this new Netflix show, a costume farce of Regency society based on Julia Quinn’s wildly popular romance-novel series. It’s courting season in early-nineteenth-century London, and the eligible girls are vying for approval from the snuff-sniffing Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel). Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor, as delicate as a songbird) is the most sought-after girl in the “ton,” until, all of a sudden, she’s not. Desperate to marry well, she recruits the grouchy bachelor Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page), into a mutually beneficial dating scheme. Daphne and Simon, of course, end up falling for each other, and their union permits “Bridgerton” to mature past the cutesy and into the adult. A burlesque of…

If you are an undocumented person anywhere in America, some of the things you do to make a dignified life for yourself and your loved ones are illegal. Others require a special set of skills. The elders know some great tricks—crossing deserts in the dead of night, studying the Rio Grande for weeks to find the shallowest bend of river to cross, getting a job on their first day in the country, finding apartments that don’t need a lease, learning English at public libraries, community colleges, or from “Frasier.” I would not have been able to do a single thing that the elders have done. But the elders often have only one hope for survival, which we tend not to mention. I’m talking about children. And no, it’s not an…

They were a family of long marriages. You might sleep in separate bedrooms and wash dishes in a fury. You might find a moldy peach in the refrigerator and leave it on the counter for three days as evidence in some private trial—but you would never leave. Dan and Melanie had been married for thirty years. Steve and Andrea were coming up on twenty-five. Andrea felt a certain vindication about this anniversary because she had married in, and her own parents had split when she was young. Steve’s mother, Jeanne, used to ask Andrea, in a melancholy way, “How is your mother?” and then, after a long pause, “How is your father?” Clearly, divorce was hereditary, and Andrea a carrier. Real Rubinsteins had the marriage gene—except for Aunt Sylvia and…

Icebound, by Andrea Pitzer (Scribner). This meticulous account of the sixteenth-century Dutch navigator William Barents’s three ill-fated journeys to the polar seas is a portrait in miniature of the Age of Discovery—a time when sovereigns’ ambitions for wealth and glory far outpaced their knowledge of climate and geography. Barents died in 1597, after his ship became trapped in ice during an attempt to crest the top of the world and find a trade route to China. Journals from the expedition survived, endowing the Netherlands with a powerful national story of courage and endurance. The chapters describing the crew’s forced overwintering in a cramped makeshift hut—seventeen confined seafarers “forced to move entirely through the medium of time”—are a resonant meditation on human ingenuity, resilience, and hope. Sylvia Pankhurst, by Rachel Holmes…

Madlib has always seemed more concerned with making music than with the question of what to do with it. The forty-seven-year-old producer and multi-instrumentalist has estimated that he makes hundreds of beats a week, many of which he never shares with anyone. His beats are a form of homage. He listens carefully to an old record, trying to squeeze every musical possibility out of it, to follow every path not taken. Sometimes it’s therapeutic. The week that Prince died, Madlib mourned by making tracks built on Prince samples. Following the death of his collaborator J Dilla, and then that of MF DOOM, he stayed awake for days, making hundreds of hours of music. Since the nineties, Madlib has essentially been building a private, ever-expanding library of beats, which spans everything…

THE PATHS NOT TAKEN I applaud Joshua Rothman for a fascinating look into the attraction of imagining unlived lives (A Critic at Large, December 21st). His piece brought to mind the rare pairs of identical twins who are reared separately and later reunited, and thus given a glimpse of an alternative path. In my work as a psychology professor specializing in twin research, I was struck by the case of Jack and Oskar, born in 1933 in Trinidad. Their German Catholic mother and their Romanian Jewish father divorced when the twins were six months old. Jack remained with his father in Trinidad and was raised Jewish, whereas Oskar went with his mother to Germany. He was raised Catholic and joined the Hitler Youth. The twins, who met in their twenties,…

Senator William H. Seward’s enemies in Congress called him a villain and a traitor, but they rarely missed his parties. Invitations to his soirées—which took place several times a week in the eighteen-fifties, during Washington’s winter social season—were more coveted than those to the White House. Seward was an impresario of dinner diplomacy. He thought entertaining was indispensable to his political success, and, as of 1854, to the future of the new Republican Party. In those days of polarized politics, it was Republicans who espoused the rights of Black men, and reactionary Democrats who indignantly defended white male supremacy. One of Seward’s regular guests was the Democratic senator Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, who described slavery in the United States as “a moral, a social, and a political blessing.” After Seward…

To do all your picnicking in a suburban forest. To liehammocked under the persimmon tree. To dream of ultralights while wearing a lime-green jumpsuit, or inflatewith blood before flying off the handle. But you reach a point when there are no more infinitives. The beautifulthe only imperative. You signal for sex then death. Is that it? Nothing comes after but moonlight & a butterfly net?A man chainsaws the orchard of which you once partook. The man has a mill in mind where the woodis valued, where gold runs out into the river with the sewage. You taste the fizz of a Royal Crown Cola.And the rain, the rain, the rain. At you, spitting.…

For a man who died ninety-seven years ago, Carl Flügge had a very big 2020. We paid homage to him every time we waited in a socially distanced grocery line, used a homemade chute to deliver Halloween candy, or yelled “Six feet!” to a child wandering too close to a stranger. In an age of CRISPR and face transplants, one of the heroes of the coronavirus pandemic was a German doctor who, in 1897, measured how far bacteria-laden spittle could travel from the mouths of volunteers. Six feet, he determined, and so, last year, that became the recommendation offered by caution signs around the world. (In Sweden: “Please keep a distance about the size of a small moose between your-selfing and others.”) We’ve learned that our breath can sometimes carry…

Is there anything more delightful than watching Martin Scorsese enjoy someone? One of the best things about his new documentary series, “Pretend It’s a City,” is getting to see the filmmaker react to his subject, the author and humorist Fran Lebowitz, who is also his good friend. Ten years ago, Scorsese made “Public Speaking,” his first documentary about Lebowitz, which was an ode to a vanishing breed of New York celebrity, as well as a portrait of the city itself. Sitting in a booth at the Waverly Inn, Lebowitz expounded on her various hobby-horses, including her rejection of technology, her love of talking, and her addiction to smoking. (“The clerk said, ‘Oh, you know, Marlboro Lights, they’re on sale.’ And I thought, Really? Why? … They could be a million…

JANUARY 20 – 26, 2021 A group of penguins in the water is called a raft—on land, they become a waddle. Four species of the flightless birds—chinstrap, gentoo, king, and macaroni—inhabit the Polar Circle exhibit (pictured, with gentoos, above) at the Central Park Zoo, whose work supports the protection of animals in the wild. (Advance timed-entry tickets, available via centralparkzoo.com, are required.) Lucky visitors might spot a recent arrival: Marinara, the first macaroni-penguin chick to hatch at the zoo. ART Garrett Bradley This filmmaker’s entrancing and unsettling installation “America,” now on view at MOMA, was inspired by “Lime Kiln Club Field Day,” a silent feature, from 1914, that’s considered the earliest extant movie with an all-Black cast. On four screens, configured to form an X, joyful vintage footage of a…

I don’t want to die in a poemthe words burning in eulogythe sun howling whythe moon sighing why not I don’t want to die in bedwhich is a poem gone wronga world turned in on itselfa floating navel of dreams I won’t meet death in a fieldlike a dot punctuating a pageit’s too vast yet too tinyeveryone will say it’s a bit cinematic I don’t want to pass away in your armsthose gentle parenthesesnor expire outside of their swoonself-propelled determined shouting Let the end comeas the best parts of living have comeunsought and undeservedinconvenient now that’s a good death what nonsense you saythat’s not even worthwriting down…

On October 19, 2017, a Canadian astronomer named Robert Weryk was reviewing images captured by a telescope known as Pan-STARRS1 when he noticed something strange. The telescope is situated atop Haleakalā, a ten-thousand-foot volcanic peak on the island of Maui, and it scans the sky each night, recording the results with the world’s highest-definition camera. It’s designed to hunt for “near-Earth objects,” which are mostly asteroids whose paths bring them into our planet’s astronomical neighborhood and which travel at an average velocity of some forty thousand miles an hour. The dot of light that caught Weryk’s attention was moving more than four times that speed, at almost two hundred thousand miles per hour. Weryk alerted colleagues, who began tracking the dot from other observatories. The more they looked, the more…

We drove higher and higher, the road corkscrewed tighter, and the air grew thinner. It was September of 2019 and I was travelling with my wife and two sons in the Indian province of Ladakh, deep in the Himalaya. We were on our way to the Nubra Valley, a high-altitude desert in the northeastern part of the province, close to the Chinese border. The road crossed the 17,428-foot-high Wari La Pass, at roughly the same elevation as Mt. Everest’s base camp. As we climbed, there was a pounding in my temples; I wondered if we’d have to use the oxygen cylinder in the trunk. Mostly, I felt the isolation. There was no cell-phone coverage, and the vistas were forbidding in their emptiness. It felt like the end of the world;…