Innholdsfortegnelse for February 8, 2021 i The New Yorker

Chicano Squad This podcast, from Frequency Machine and Vox Media, explores a little-known chapter in the history of American justice—that of a team of five young Latino homicide detectives in the Houston Police Department during the late seventies, who were tasked with a daunting Spanish-language caseload amid a volatile climate of anti-Mexican bigotry and police violence. Narrated by the actor Cristela Alonzo (“Cars 3”), the series beautifully situates its narrative in time and space, opening with vivid stories about a melee at a Cinco de Mayo celebration in 1978 and agitation over the 1977 murder of José Campos Torres, a Vietnam veteran, by Houston police. Though marred by occasional off notes, the writing, narration, and production include color and humor (“Everybody used to go skinny-dippin’ in the bayou,” a local…

At noon on the bright, frigid day before the Biden-Harris Inauguration, a small, masked group assembled outside Playwrights Horizons, the Off Broadway theatre on West Forty-second Street, for the unveiling of an art work with overtones of resistance. The piece, by the street and subway artist Jilly Ballistic, is the first in the theatre’s new public-art series. On the sidewalk, Ballistic, in a trenchcoat, with her hair in an elegantly sculpted Mohawk, stood near Adam Greenfield, the theatre’s artistic director, who wore a retro parka. “This is the first time we’re meeting!” Greenfield said, smiling. He created the series with his associate artistic director, Natasha Sinha; the costume and set designer David Zinn; and the artist Avram Finkelstein, a co-founder of the Silence = Death project, in the early AIDS-activism…

in which the poet discoversdelicate white-parched bonesof a small creatureon a Great Lake shoreor the desiccated remainsof cruder roadkillbeside the rushing highway. Nor is it a poem in whicha cracked mirror yieldsa startled face,or sere grasses hissinglike consonantsin a foreign language.Family photo albumfilled with yearningstrangers long deceased,closet of beautifulclothes of the dead.Attic trunk, stone well,or metonymic moontime-travelling for wisdomin the Paleolithicage, in the Middle Kingdomor Genesisor the time of Bashō…. Instead it is a slewof words in searchof a container—a sleek green stalk,a transparent lung,a single hair’s curl,a cooing of vowelslike doves.…

The title of Erin Belieu’s new book of poems, “Come-Hither Honeycomb” (Copper Canyon), is a compact gadget of a phrase that embodies her tinkerer’s style of found puns, verbal doodles, and word games. “Come-hither” is both invitation and command, an adjective that evolved from, but clings to, the imperative. It modifies the word it mirrors, “honeycomb,” which is both the sweet core of a hive and, it turns out, a tropical fish with a sparkly exterior. And yet those showy scales are a camouflage, a defense against predators. Though its body may narrow to an exaggerated pucker, it wasn’t put on the planet to kiss. Belieu—who grew up in Nebraska, lived for years in Florida, and now teaches at the University of Houston—often explores the relationship between arousal and survival.…

WORKING WOMEN It was this historian’s pleasure to follow Jill Lepore as she showed how the meaning of work has changed over time (A Critic at Large, January 18th). She notes that feminists in the nineteen-seventies called for the recognition of housework as work. In fact, there was considerable debate within the women’s movement about demanding wages for housework. While we acknowledged the value of housework, many of us worried that getting paid for it would lock women into domestic labor, instead of expanding our access to all forms of paid work. Although wages for housework did not become widely adopted, fears about the siloing of women’s labor have been borne out. The paid labor force has become more gender-diverse, but women still perform the bulk of housework, whether unpaid…

One morning last August, Vladimir Putin, isolated at his Presidential residence in the forest outside Moscow, held a videoconference with his Cabinet. The ministers’ faces, stern yet deferential, populated a large screen in front of Putin’s desk—the Kremlin’s version of a pandemic Zoom call. The proceedings were broadcast on state television, and had the wooden quality of reality TV. The meeting’s ostensible agenda was the government’s preparations for the school year ahead, but the real news came in Putin’s opening remarks, when he revealed that Russia had granted approval to Sputnik V, the country’s first vaccine against COVID-19. The vaccine, Putin noted, is “quite effective, helps develop immunity, and has gone through all the necessary trials.” In fact, Russian scientists hadn’t published any data from their Phase I and Phase…

Maria was sitting in her room sketching a pink hibiscus, one evening last May, when she heard footsteps coming down the hallway. A fourteen-year-old asylum seeker from Honduras, she was living at Abbott House, a child-welfare agency in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, that cares for unaccompanied migrant children. The law required that, as a minor, Maria have the chance to be released to a cousin in Miami, but the reunion had repeatedly been delayed. For the past three months, she had spent her evenings watching Disney sitcoms and learning English-language sentences. (“The little girl tripped over the crack in the pavement.”) That night, at about 8 P.M., a staffer told her that she had a phone call from her lawyer, Hannah Flamm, who works with a nonprofit called the Door. Maria…

The first time he realized that there was something not quite right about him was when a woman crossed the street as she saw him coming. He thought it was a coincidence. Then it happened again. He began to watch those around him. One day, on the Underground, a woman three empty seats away moved her handbag to her other side when she saw him. He wasn’t sure why. After the fourth or fifth time something like that happened, he looked at himself in the mirror. He thought he was normal, like everyone else. But when he looked at himself through the eyes of those who clutched their handbags when they saw him he understood that his face was not as normal as he’d thought. He couldn’t see what was…

Among the Old Masters, still-lifes and landscapes tend to be as individuated as fingerprints, but the naked body provokes a more generalized reaction. The nude in art should come in as many varieties as there are bodies in the world but tends to fall, instead, into two distinct clumps, or lines: the Suspiciously Perfect and the Depressingly Truthful. The Suspiciously Perfect, which can be produced in life only by adherence to a strenuous regimen and a certain amount of retouching, stems from the Greek tradition: all those idealized bodies of kouroi, the musculature of their torsos fitting them like Armani sweaters; all those curvy Aphrodites, crouching and stretching. (This figural tradition persists both as Photoshopped Instagram selfies and, in parodic form, in the ghastly-glamorous painting of John Currin.) The Depressingly…

FEBRUARY 3 – 9, 2021 President Biden has earned the nickname Amtrak Joe because of his enthusiasm for railways. With the newly opened Moynihan Train Hall, New Yorkers might begin to see how he feels. The soaring marble, glass, and steel space is on Eighth Avenue, across from Penn Station—the renovation, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, cost more than a billion and a half dollars—and is graced by first-rate public art, including “The Hive” (pictured), a stalactite-like skyline by the Berlin-based duo Elmgreen & Dragset. MUSIC Ani DiFranco: “Revolutionary Love” FOLK So much of Ani DiFranco’s career feels like an act of rebellion: the blunt songs she began writing as a precocious kid; the independent music label she started in her twenties, after refusing to sign with the corporate record…

In the summer of 2016, Molly Burhans, a twenty-six-year-old cartographer and environmentalist from Connecticut, spoke at a Catholic conference in Nairobi, and she took advantage of her modest travel stipend to book her return trip through Rome. When she arrived, she got a room in the cheapest youth hostel she could find, and began sending e-mails to Vatican officials, asking if they’d be willing to meet with her. She wanted to discuss a project she’d been working on for months: documenting the global landholdings of the Catholic Church. To her surprise, she received an appointment in the office of the Secretariat of State. On the day of the meeting, she couldn’t find the entrance that she’d been told to use. She hadn’t bought a SIM card for her phone, so…

Trio, by William Boyd (Knopf). Following a producer, an actress, and a novelist, whose lives intersect during a film shoot in Brighton in 1968, this novel proceeds at a brisk clip, cutting from person to person. Boyd winks at the idiosyncrasies and vulgarities specific to each character’s métier, and at the precarious process of artistic creation—its joy, torment, stasis, and upheaval. Musing about the film, the actress says, “I think it’s about how art imitates life. And life imitates art. That’s the point.” “What on earth is that to mean?” her interlocutor replies. Boyd addresses these questions with tart humor and earnestness. When, after several gin-and-tonics, the novelist starts to see her book taking shape in her head, she feels that “life was suddenly worth living again.” Hades, Argentina, by…

The fourth season of the French show “Call My Agent!” (on Netflix) has just been released, and fans will be dismayed to learn that it is the last. How can this warm, witty series abandon us in such an hour of need? It may be less than dignified to confess such feelings, I know. A lot of fuss has been made about the question of relatability in art, whether we should think of the made-up people we read about and watch as friends. No, of course not, and not just on aesthetic principle. People love to be repelled; that is why we have “Lolita,” “The Sopranos,” and the “Real Housewives” franchise. But there’s no pleasure like experiencing real affinity for fictional characters, and that is a commodity that “Call My…