Innholdsfortegnelse for February 15-22, 2021 i The New Yorker

One morning when the weather was strangeand haunted following a rain—I believe a fog had settled likea thought over the field and the sunthat peered through it troubled the thought—I remember saying to myself,for no one was around, it’s likewe’re living in a Turner painting,a haunted cave of melodyso indistinct, almost unseen.As if a painting could conveyits time and also imagine a timeafter, but keep the original timeto let it heavily hang in the present.The point is, something in the worldis timeless, beyond the measure of time,yet we perceive the timeless in time,aware of its weight and of its passinglightly like a song through a voice.It isn’t always beautiful,the voice, the time, the foggy scene.I said the fog had settled likea thought over the field, but the thoughtwas mine. I…

In the garden, my father sits in his wheelchairgarlanded by summer hibiscuslike a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche.A flowering wreath buzzes around his head—passionate red. He holds the gift of deathin his lap: small, oblong, wrapped in black.He has been waiting seventeen years to open itand is impatient. When I ask how he ismy father cries. His crying comes as a visitation,the body squeezing tears from his ducts tenderlyas a nurse measuring drops of calaminefrom an amber bottle, as a teen at the car washwringing a chamois of suds. It is a kind of miracleto see my father weeping this freely, weepingfor what is owed him. How are you? I ask againbecause his answer depends on an instant’s microclimate,his moods bloom and retreat like an anemoneas the cold currents whirl…

The Unusual Suspect, by Ben Machell (Ballantine). This cross between heist tale and biography examines the career of Stephen Jackley, a British student who blamed the financial system for the world’s suffering, and, in 2007, decided to become a modern-day Robin Hood. The plan was to rob banks in order to fund schemes for eradicating poverty and reversing ecological harm, but the execution bordered on farce. Jackley was arrested within nine months, having attempted ten robberies, five of which failed—once, he accidentally ransacked a children’s charity—and he wasted his loot on frivolities or gave it away to the homeless. Nonetheless, Machell treats his subject, a sensitive loner with undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome, with tender fascination, disapproving of Jackley’s strategy but not of his world view. Unsolaced, by Gretel Ehrlich (Pantheon). Perpetual…

“Welcome to my house,” I’ve said more than once while introducing people to the Frick Collection, my favorite museum. I’ve had to acknowledge an awkward domestic layout, extending to nine stops on the No. 6 train from the East Village. But I’ve meant it in a way that I share with a lot of art lovers, or even just art likers. The Frick stirs proprietary feelings as, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art doesn’t. Big museums array works by a historical logic that is cold to the eye until thawed by your attention. Everything at the Frick is toasty at first glance. That’s an effect of the place’s having been a home, the mansion of the coke mogul Henry Clay Frick, and of the somewhat fictive sense of the collection’s…

IN SEARCH OF ALIEN LIFE In a review of current debates about whether extraterrestrials have visited Earth, Elizabeth Kolbert discusses the Fermi paradox, which asks, in reference to aliens, “Where are they?” (Books, January 25th). Some useful context is the Rare Earth hypothesis, which argues that advanced life is an extremely unlikely outcome of Darwinian evolution; after all, life required nearly four billion years—almost one-third of the age of our universe—to develop on Earth. There is growing consensus that intelligent life here may well have depended on improbable contingencies such as the Chicxulub asteroid impact, sixty-six million years ago, which obliterated the dinosaurs. Fermi’s question, seen in the light of the Rare Earth hypothesis, could yield the answer “They are not there.” Pedro Lilienfeld Lexington, Mass. Speculation that advanced extraterrestrials…

On the morning before the Presidential election, the author and activist Glennon Doyle was drinking coffee in bed, exhausted. For the past forty days, she had led her 1.5 million Instagram followers in taking an action each day to disempower Trump: phone banking, exploring the details of absentee ballots, contributing to progressive candidacies, discussing civics with Elizabeth Warren (who told Doyle, “You, in a time of complete insanity, are a voice for reminding us all we have a center, we have a heart”). But that’s not why she was tired. She hadn’t stopped cleaning in days. “I did the house, then I did the garage, and then yesterday we moved on to the storage unit,” she said. Doyle’s wife, the soccer legend Abby Wambach, who was stretched out next to…

In the early nineteen-forties, decades before he was Stan the Man, the impresario of the Marvel Universe, Stanley Martin Lieber fetched coffee, took notes, and sat on desks playing the piccolo—or perhaps the ocarina—in the offices of his uncle’s comic-book company. There, before and after his Army service, and into the decade that followed, Stanley became one of many typists and scribblers providing copy for word balloons and prose for the books’ filler pages. He was as efficient as his older colleagues at churning out scripts, and already distinguished himself in one way: he put his pen name, Stan Lee, on all his work. He said that he was saving his birth name for a more respectable project, like a novel. Still, if he was going to make comics, he…

When Chang-rae Lee was young, he was drawn to old souls. He published his first novel, “Native Speaker” (1995), at twenty-nine, and though its protagonist is roughly the same age, he is so freighted with world-weariness that he seems twice that. Lee’s next two novels, “A Gesture Life” (1999) and “Aloft” (2004), were both narrated by retirees, men looking fitfully backward. Now Lee is fifty-five, and his sixth novel, “My Year Abroad” (Riverhead), brims with youth. Its narrator, Tiller Bardmon, is a twenty-year-old college dropout just back from an adventure overseas, whose outrageous particulars he recounts in wide-eyed detail in the course of the novel’s nearly five hundred pages. Where did he go? To Asia, the place that many of Lee’s previous characters left for the United States. Much is…

The most promising character at the start of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” which débuted in November, is not one of the “housewives” but one of their children: Meredith Marks’s son, Brooks, who, in oversized sunglasses and a puffer coat, presents himself as a ready-made meme. Meredith, a jewelry designer, tells us that her son has taken a break from his studies at New York University to support her as she navigates a tough spot in her marriage. The twenty-one-year-old Brooks, an aspiring fashion designer of limited skill, seems to be a student of the “Housewives” phenomenon; he is fluent in the show’s tropes, acting as Meredith’s confidant and stylist. Here is a thoroughly modern, weirdly affecting image: the savvy, gay son protecting his sad, subdued mother, with…

On an icy Saturday afternoon, on Myrtle Avenue in Bushwick, a homeless man missing an eye walked up to the campaign office of the mayoral candidate Paperboy Love Prince. He grabbed a bejewelled lilac blazer that was hanging on a hook near the open front door. Afrobeats blared from a boom box, and the man danced a little in the street before abandoning the stolen blazer on the hood of a Prius and taking off. “At least he has good taste,” Briana Calderón Navarro, a longtime volunteer, said afterward. “I was, like, you know what? I’m just gonna let him have his moment.” She added, “I think it was done with love.” The candidate arrived, and a passing cyclist shouted, “Hey, Paperboy, I voted for you, man!” Prince, who lost…

For ten years, I have lived in a neighborhood defined by the Port Authority Bus Station to the north, Penn Station to the south, the Lincoln Tunnel to the west, and, to the east, a thirty-one-foot stainless-steel sculpture of a needle threaded through a fourteen-foot button. Though there are many, many people here, the neighborhood is not a people place. It is better suited to the picking up and dropping off of large pallets. Within this homey quadrilateral are a methadone clinic, a parole office, liquor shops with cashiers behind thick plastic screens, a fancy Japanese clothing store, plenty of pawnshops, the Times Building, drumming studios, seven subway lines, and at least four places to get your sewing machine repaired. A young runaway, emerging from one of the many transit…

Every day seems to bring another test of whether our democracy can succeed in managing the problems of a country as big, varied, and individualistic as ours. In Minot, a city of forty-eight thousand people in Ward County, North Dakota, the twice-monthly city-council meeting was into its fourth hour when an alderwoman named Carrie Evans put forward an unexpected motion: she wanted Minot to adopt a mandatory-mask policy. It was Monday, October 19th, two weeks before the Presidential election. In the wood-panelled council chambers of city hall, Evans and the five other alderpersons who, with the mayor, make up the council, sat on a dais, in padded chairs, behind brass nameplates and stemmed microphones. Mayor Shaun Sipma, a baritone-voiced former anchor for the local CBS television station, presided in the…

Now and then on the streets of my neighborhood I bump into a man I might have been involved with, maybe shared a life with. He always looks happy to see me. He lives with a friend of mine, and they have two children. Our relationship never goes beyond a longish chat on the sidewalk, a quick coffee together, perhaps a brief stroll in the same direction. He talks excitedly about his projects, he gesticulates, and at times as we’re walking our synchronized bodies, already quite close, discreetly overlap. Once he accompanied me into a lingerie shop, because I had to choose a pair of tights to wear under a new skirt. I’d just bought the skirt and I needed the tights for that evening. Our fingers grazed the textures…

Don’t think yourself odd if, after reading the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s romantic, spiritually macabre, and ultimately devastating collection of memoirs, “The Copenhagen Trilogy” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), you spend hours, if not days, in a reverie of alienation. It’s because the author, who died by her own hand in 1976, when she was fifty-eight, makes profound and exciting art out of estrangement. Like a number of dispassionate, poetic modernists—the writers Jean Rhys and Octavia Butler, say, or the visual artists Alice Neel and Diane Arbus—Ditlevsen was marked, wounded, by her own sharp intelligence. Her world—the world she describes in “Childhood,” “Youth,” and “Dependency,” the three short books that make up the trilogy— was cash poor, emotionally mean, and misogynist. The sun must have shone sometimes in Denmark before and…