Innholdsfortegnelse for March 1, 2021 i The New Yorker

My mother was always asking my sister and me to do things—to call her union about her monthly pension checks (forty-nine dollars), to research the contraindications of a new prescription, to drive her to the wholesale distributor to pick up fifteen-pound boxes of frozen tilapia and some nice eye-of-round roasts. Six years ago, when she was eighty-seven, she wrote a letter outlining everything that we would need to tend to after her death. Her first request was that we send a hundred and fifty dollars to Tía Niña—our name for her sister Ada—every December, March, June, and September. She included the phone number and address of the man in Hialeah who would deliver the money to Cuba. “Even dead,” she added in parentheses, “I will bug you.” If we cooked…

New York City’s first blizzard of the season whipped in on a Wednesday evening in mid-December. Earlier in the day, the air had had that damp chill that even Real-Feel can’t get right; people wedged through it with lowered foreheads and solstice scowls. All over town, restaurant owners and managers were making their own calculations. Open up just for lunch? Close until the weekend? Shut down indefinitely, or even for good? No matter how you ran the numbers, the outlook was dire. It encapsulated, in miniature, the extinction threat facing them all. Two days earlier, New York State, citing a steepening of the Covid curve, had banned indoor dining again, after having permitted it for ten weeks, at twenty-five-per-cent capacity. Justifiable as the decision was in epidemiological terms, the timing…

OUT OF OFFICE John Seabrook’s piece about the post-pandemic future of the office covered a number of important topics related to working from home (“Office Space,” February 1st). Two other factors are worth considering. First, remote working pushes the costs of maintaining office space onto employees. Some companies do offer stipends for office technology and athome setups, like chairs and WiFi, but many employees end up shouldering the majority of these costs. We must ask who benefits from the ostensible savings represented by home offices. For many employees—especially parents—working at home is much harder and sometimes more costly than working in an office. The second factor involves office dynamics: with people at home, there are likely fewer opportunities for sexual harassment and other detrimental encounters between colleagues, and any attacks…

On December 2nd, Mukul Ganguly, an eighty-three-year-old retired civil engineer in Kolkata, India, went to the Salt Lake Market to buy fish. The pandemic was surging around much of the world, and he wasn’t oblivious of the risks of spending time at a wet market. His wife, a former forensic analyst, protested vehemently. But Mr. Ganguly wouldn’t be deterred. He picked up his fabric shopping bag, tucked a doubled-up handkerchief in his pocket, and stepped out. Mr. Ganguly lives in a modest, two-story, book-filled house a few blocks from the market. He tied his folded handkerchief into a makeshift mask, and spent about two hours buying groceries, choosing vegetables and sweets, and bargaining with the venders. (Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a…

Nicole Eisenman, whose paintings and sculptures often show people—with cartoonish distortions of their hands, feet, and noses—trying to make the best of tragicomic circumstances, grew up in a house on a quiet street in Scarsdale, New York. A gate in the back yard opened onto the playing field of the elementary school where she was once a student; she could wait at home in the morning until the bell rang, and then run, and not be late. One day last July, Eisenman was standing at that garden gate. She had driven from Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, where, in a studio close to her apartment, she was working on three large paintings, each of which included at least one vulnerable-looking figure making awkward, and to some degree ridiculous, progress under skies filled…

I look at the ocean like it’s goodbye.Somewhere, it is touching a land laying prey to fire.My grieving mother brings the forest inside, a green excess.When she repots the trees, it is not unlike changing diapers.But she no longer tends to the small abject frames of the dying.These days, everything feels like the end.A few days ago, a typhoon shaved glass off buildings.A woman in her sixties bled to death after it cutthe window into her arms. The name of the wind, Maysak,means teak tree in Khmer, I learn. The timberretains its aromatic fragrance to a great age, I learn. I am alwayslearning. What is it that I wantto know? There is nowhere in this worldthat I want to live. I look at your facelike it’s goodbye. There is nowhere…

Nuestra América, by Claudio Lomnitz (Other Press). In the early nineteen-twenties, Lomnitz’s grandparents fled Eastern Europe for South America, seeking refuge from anti-Semitism. In the next half century, his family moved among Peru, Colombia, France, Romania, Israel, Chile, and Mexico. In Peru, Lomnitz’s grandparents became part of the Marxist-Jewish vanguard; returning to Romania in the nineteen-thirties, they spent two years trying to persuade Jews to leave. In the wake of mass displacement, a family history like this one, Lomnitz writes, “is no longer an aristocratic incantation of the glories of a lineage.” It is a means of confronting and redefining the concepts of homeland, belonging, and history. Nobody’s Normal, by Roy Richard Grinker (Norton). This study, by a cultural anthropologist who comes from a long line of accomplished psychiatrists, traces…

In the past five years, three movies of great distinction have challenged, in subtle and profound ways, our notions of who gets to speak for whom, especially when it comes to race, gender, and sexuality. In 2016, Barry Jenkins, a straight Black filmmaker, directed “Moonlight,” a landmark movie about Black gay life. Three years later, Trey Edward Shults, a white director, wrote and directed “Waves,” an extraordinary study of the dissolution of one middleclass Black family. And last month, at the Sundance Film Festival, the actress Rebecca Hall premièred “Passing,” her directing début (she also wrote the screenplay), which is based on Nella Larsen’s uncanny, tightly structured 1929 novel about Black female friendship, mirroring, deception, and class privilege. (“Passing” will stream on Netflix in the fall.) Hall, working with the…

On a chilly Los Angeles morning in late January, I woke up an hour before dawn and drove to Griffith Park, a rugged expanse that stretches northeast of the Hollywood Hills. Five times the size of Central Park, and home to a solitary mountain lion, Griffith brings a tinge of wilderness to the urban sprawl. During the pandemic, it has been more crowded than usual, but in the half-light of 6 a.m. there was no one about. I hiked up to a point where downtown L.A. became visible. Rains had recently come through, and mists rose from vegetation, giving a gauzy shimmer to the lights of the awakening city. During quarantine, I’ve been going on regular sunrise hikes—a habit that would have dismayed my militantly nocturnal younger self. Usually, I…

In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, many New York City venues are closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found around town, as well as online and streaming. ART “Albers and Morandi” In this show, subtitled “Never Finished,” the Zwirner gallery pairs two artists who can seem bizarrely mismatched: Josef Albers, the starchy German-American abstract painter and color theorist, who died in 1976, at the age of eighty-eight, and Giorgio Morandi, the seraphic Italian still-life painter, who died in 1964, at the age of seventy-three. Albers, who was wedded to a format of three or four nested, hard-edged squares, is academic in spirit—easy to admire but hard to like. Morandi, transfixed by the bottles and vases in his studio for fifty years, is deeply poetic.…

At the AmericanAirlines Arena, in downtown Miami, eighteen hundred N.B.A. fans lined up outside Lexus Gate 5 for a K-9 inspection. Banners instructed guests how to proceed through the security line: KEEP 6FT APART WEAR MASKS AT ALL TIMES DETECTION DOGS WILL NOT ATTEMPT TO TOUCH YOUR PERSON AND IN ALMOST ALL INSTANCES THERE IS NO CONTACT, ALTHOUGH IT IS POSSIBLE THAT AN INADVERTENT, MOMENTARY CONTACT COULD OCCUR Ticket holders were unfazed; the vibe was more outside-a-night-club than T.S.A.-checkpoint, although there wasn’t any music, and a sixty-pound German shepherd named Abby paced up and down the queue. Her leash was held by Adam Davila, who spent fourteen years as an Army Ranger before training as a bomb-sniffing-dog handler. A guy wearing orange tie-dyed pants and Gucci loafers hollered to a…

Professional wrestler Owen Hart embodied his ownomen when he battled gravity from rafters to canvas in a Kansas City stadium. Like a great tent collapsing,he fell without warning, no hoverboard, no humming bird’s finesse for the illusion of flight, no suspensionof disbelief to hammock his burden—the birth of virtue— in its virtual reality. His angelic entrance eclipsedwhen his safety harness failed. He fell out of the ersatz like a waxwing duped by infinities conjured in a squeegee’smirage. Spectators wilted as the creature of grief emerged to graze on their sapling gasps and shrieks. I’d like to thinkthat, freed of self-hype, he realized his mask was not a shield, and that he didn’t spend his last attempting to methodZeno’s proofs. E.M.T.s like evangelicals huddled to jolt the hub of Hart’s radiating…

Dad thought himself a good-looking man. He was fit, if you like that sort of thing. He was thirty-eight years old and worked at the gym four days a week for eight hours. He was an instructor for a few exercise classes and filled in when others couldn’t make their shifts. He didn’t wear a wedding ring. He said this was good for business. His boss agreed and encouraged the other male instructors not to wear a ring, if they had one—a wife, that is. Dad was encouraged to flirt with women at the gym. Harmless flirting. Talking and smiling and being friendly, being nice. Leave the rest up to the imagination. Mislead, and then apologize. “Exercise, good health—these things don’t sell gym memberships!” Dad said. If there were female…

“I wanted my fiction to be as critical as it was creative,” Viet Thanh Nguyen recalled in an essay a few years ago. “But I didn’t know how to do this, and no one could teach me this, and it took the discipline of sitting in a chair for countless hours over 20 years before I could even approach bringing together the critical and the creative.” This patience, and this determination to escape traditional influences, help explain why Nguyen made his début as a novelist at the relatively late age of forty-four, a début that proved, for author and readers alike, worth the wait. “The Sympathizer,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016, is set during and just after the years of the war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam.…

The singer and guitarist Julien Baker makes raw, ghostly rock music that’s rooted in personal confession. But, unlike some artists operating in that mode, she’s figured out how to turn fragility into a display of fortitude. Baker’s songs—which explore themes of self-sabotage, atonement, and restitution—are aching but tough. This stems, in part, from Baker’s spiritual upbringing. She was raised in a devout Christian family near Memphis, Tennessee, and sang in church. When she came out as gay, at seventeen, she prepared herself for a swift denunciation, but her parents were compassionate. (Her father began scouring the Bible for passages about acceptance.) It’s possible to hear the echoes of Christian hymnals in her first two albums—ideas of love and grace, mentions of God and rejoicing. Baker has a tattoo that reads…