Innholdsfortegnelse for February 1, 2021 i The New Yorker

Two weeks before Joe Biden’s Inauguration, L. Lin Wood answered his telephone. The defamation attorney and conspiracy theorist was at home, in Atlanta, watching a human-trafficking segment on the One America News Network. “I saw there was a warning out,” Wood told the caller. Maybe there was work in it for him? His recent clients have included the Georgia congress-woman Marjorie Taylor Greene (Wood appends heart emojis to their correspondences) and Kyle Rittenhouse (“a hero”), and he has litigated on behalf of Donald Trump, whose election-fraud suits in Georgia had failed under Wood’s watch. “Nobody loses 0–60,” Wood said, “unless the deck is stacked!” Twitter had permanently banned Wood, as it had Trump, for inciting violence. Parler was shut down. Wood lost more than a million followers on the two…

Pretend, the mother had said when she crept to her daughter’s room in the night, that tomorrow is just an ordinary day. So the daughter had risen as usual and washed and made toast and warm milk for her brothers, and while they were eating she emptied their schoolbags into the toy chest and filled them with clothes, a toothbrush, one book for comfort. The children moved silently through the black morning, put on their shoes outside on the porch. The dog thumped his tail against the doghouse in the cold yard but was old and did not get up. The children’s breath hovered low and white as they walked down to the bus stop, a strange presence trailing them in the road. When they stopped by the mailbox, the…

The Liar’s Dictionary, by Eley Williams (Doubleday). A playful paean to lexicology, this novel tells the story of two Londoners, Peter and Mallory, employed more than a hundred years apart by the publisher of a fictional rival to the Oxford English Dictionary. They are bound together by a number of false entries in the dictionary, put there by Peter, in 1899, and now being winnowed out by Mallory. As she works, we learn of their respective struggles: Peter, an awkward loner who speaks with a fake lisp, is in love with a co-worker’s fiancée; and Mallory, to her girlfriend’s dismay, is afraid to come out as a lesbian. Although the book abounds in dramatic incident, its main focus, like the characters’, is not actions but words, and “the transformative power…

THE PANDEMIC IN AMERICA Lawrence Wright’s exhaustive and historically important account of the COVID-19 crisis contains the surprising revelation that Dr. Deborah Birx, the coördinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force under Donald Trump, spent much of the past year travelling through the United States and cajoling governors, public-health officials, hospitals, universities, and others to impose masking orders and other measures to help stop the spread of the disease (“The Plague Year,” January 4th & 11th). Birx and her colleague Irum Zaidi covered twenty-five thousand miles in rented cars, and seem to have persuaded even the governor of Texas to implement a mask mandate. Wright notes that Birx was “the only federal official” who consistently promoted masks and social distancing in this way. Although she did not halt the…

Browband cheekpiece throatlatchbit.Plus all the links and leathers for holding this extra part on. We’re meant to be accustomedto the bodiesin the mud. We’ve seen the documentaries, we’ve read about the mustard gas. We knowthey’re onlyactors on a union wage. What is it about the horse that falls—is that the wayto put it—fallsjust slightly out of solution here? Precipitate, noun. That fails to hold its peace within the fiction.There willhave been a handler on the set, there are rules. The barbed wire won’t have torn his flank.You can traina horse to stagger. Maybe. Check the delicate ankles later on. But this ghastlyreproductionof a ghastly piece of now-you’re-allowed-to- breathe-again, it isn’t so wholly removedfrom the worldas in a better world would be the case. You’ve seen the newsreels? Everything black-and-white backthen,…

On September 24, 1970, the Rolling Stones interrupted their concert at the Palais des Sports in Paris to invite a French Maoist called Serge July onstage. News of an earthshaking event called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had been trickling out of China since 1966. Information was scarce, but many writers and activists in the West who were opposed to the United States and its war in Vietnam were becoming fascinated with Mao Zedong, their earlier infatuation with Soviet-style Marxism having soured. Jean-Paul Sartre hawked copies of a banned Maoist newspaper in Paris, and Michel Foucault was among those who turned to China for political inspiration, in what Sartre called “new forms of class struggle in a period of organized capitalism.” Editors at the influential French periodical Tel Quel learned…

JANUARY 27 – FEBRUARY 2, 2021 Boston Lyric Opera’s arresting stop-motion film of Philip Glass’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (available starting Jan. 29, at operabox.tv) sets Edgar Allan Poe’s tale of familial strife at a migrant-detention center on the U.S.-Mexico border. The Usher home and the government facility are both monuments to the misery of their inhabitants. As Glass’s gradually intensifying music plays, a Guatemalan girl who has been separated from her mother dreams up a doll-like world populated by Poe’s star-crossed characters. ART Jane Freilicher For more than fifty years, as Abstract Expressionism gave way to Pop, then to Minimalism, and on to Neo-Expressionism, until art’s isms exhausted themselves, Freilicher devoted herself to painting “eternally fixed afternoons,” to borrow a phrase from Frank O’Hara’s 1957 poem…

You would think it was a performance of some kind. When she wakes up, if she has slept at all, she tells me about the giants carrying trees and bushes on what she calls zip lines, which I am able to identify as telephone wires. Beneath the busy giants, she explains, there is a marching band playing familiar tunes by John Philip Sousa. She is not especially impressed by either of these things, and the various children playing games in the bedroom annoy her. “Out you go,” she says to them. Then she describes the man with no legs who spent the night lying beside her in bed. He had been mumbling in pain, but nobody would come to help him. She remembers her own pain, too. “I could hardly…

Outside, my little brother presses his handsinto the window A.C. unit’s aluminum grillelike a film star at the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre of the hood. It’s summer. Sort of. School beganlast week, but it takes all of August for usto remember the boys our mother wants us to be. My father has just tossed a glass bottleinto the street. Its pop and scatter againstconcrete is what I’ll remember; his laughter. The car he tried to crack is up the blockand anonymous again. By this timenext year he will no longer be taller than me or my brother. I grow impatientfor this evening, his eventual quiet and closingof doors. It will take a decade before I begin to wonder if each afternoon were actuallya lesson for my older self to use. My…

My obsession with perfume began when I was around ten years old, spritzing on layer after layer of my mother’s Anaïs Anaïs and Poison, until I reeked of a duty-free store. It continued through my mall-rat teen-age years, when I blew through my babysitting tips at Bath & Body Works, convinced that I could amplify my personality with a generous dose of Sun-Ripened Raspberry. Throughout my twenties, I collected hundreds of fragrance samples, bought for less than five dollars apiece from Web sites with names like the Perfumed Court and Surrender to Chance. Tiny glass vials of liquid tuberose regularly spilled out of my coat pockets. So when an editor at a newspaper for which I occasionally wrote about hair and beauty trends asked me if I had anything to…

A metrotome sounds like a more A pleasant device than it is. A switchblade of sorts, it was once used to treat fertility issues. A doctor would push the metrotome into a woman’s uterus, press the handle, and release the blade; when he pulled it out, it cut through one side of her cervix. After that, the doctor reinserted the tool and repeated the procedure on the other side. Eventually a version of the metrotome was made with a double blade that could cut both sides of the cervix at once—a supposed improvement on the original design. Elizabeth Blackwell did not approve of metrotomes, or much of anything else that male doctors recommended for female patients in the nineteenth century. When one of her relatives faced the prospect of…

In the spring of 1967, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, freelance writers married to each other and living in Los Angeles, were engaged to write a regular column for the Saturday Evening Post. This was a good gig. The space they had to fill was neither long nor short—about twelve hundred words, a gallop larger than the Comment that opens this magazine. The Post paid them well, and Didion and Dunne each had to file one piece a month. The column, called “Points West,” entailed their visiting a place of West Coast interest, interviewing a few people or no people, and composing a dispatch. Didion wrote one column about touring Alcatraz, another on the general secretary of a small Marxist-Leninist group. The Post was struggling to stay afloat (it…