Innholdsfortegnelse for March 22, 2021 i The New Yorker

“The Howard Stern Show” counts among its regular guests a driving instructor known as Bobo, a former garbage collector known as King of All Blacks, and a tanning enthusiast known as Tan Mom. Last spring, a new personality joined the mix: Dr. David Agus, physician, professor, and COVID-19 pundit. Even-keeled and eager to assist, Agus, who is fifty-six, appears on the satellite-radio show every few months to debunk rumors, share best practices, answer questions, and, given the nature of the forum, goof around. Recently, Stern asked, “What’s the dumbest thing you’ve heard about the vaccine?” “There’s this notion that Bill Gates has a plan to take over the country and there’s a tracker in the vaccine, so once you get it the federal government knows everything you do and say,”…

On February 22nd, in an office in White Plains, two lawyers handed over a hard drive to a Manhattan Assistant District Attorney, who, along with two investigators, had driven up from New York City in a heavy snowstorm. Although the exchange didn’t look momentous, it set in motion the next phase of one of the most significant legal showdowns in American history. Hours earlier, the Supreme Court had ordered former President Donald Trump to comply with a subpoena for nearly a decade’s worth of private financial records, including his tax returns. The subpoena had been issued by Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney, who is leading the first, and larger, of two known probes into potential criminal misconduct by Trump. The second was opened, last month, by a county…

On the black wet branches of the linden,still clinging to umber leaves of late fall,two crows land. They say, “Stop,” and still I wantto make them into something they are not.Odin’s ravens, the bruja’s eyes. What newsare they bringing of our world to the worldof the gods? It can’t be good. More sufferingall around, more stinging nettles and toxicblades shoved into the scarred parts of us,the minor ones underneath the trees. Raincomes while I’m still standing, a trickle of waterfrom whatever we believe is beyond the sky.The crows seem enormous but only becauseI am watching them too closely. They do notcare to be seen as symbols. A shake of a wing,and both of them are gone. There was no messagegiven, no message I was asked to give, onlytheir great absence…

In Sarah Moss’s new novel, “Summerwater” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which portrays a Scottish campground during the course of a sodden August day, a character mournfully reflects that Edinburgh is full of English people “these days.” It’s a phrase that occurs repeatedly: having kids “these days” is not a very clever thing to do; those who have had the misfortune of being born “these days” are given silly names like Honey. Everywhere in the book, people are sighing over the present. A teenager remembers his grandmother bemoaning “young people nowadays,” and a small boy listens to his father raging, in the middle of the night, against the inertia or cowardice of his temporary neighbors: “Bloody typical…. The state of this country.” The effort to capture what we mean by “these…

A GLOBAL-HEALTH MYSTERY Siddhartha Mukherjee’s piece on why COVID-19 has hit some countries harder than others considers many possible explanations, including differences in government response, in levels of immunity, and in demographic features (“The COVID Conundrum,” March 1st). Another factor at play is cultural differences in the willingness to follow rules. In a study of fifty-seven countries published in The Lancet Planetary Health, my co-authors and I found that in cultures with looser social norms there were five times the number of COVID cases and more than eight times the deaths as in cultures with stricter norms. These effects were replicated when controlling for variables including under-reporting, wealth, inequality, population density, migration, government efficiency, political authoritarianism, median age, non-pharmaceutical government interventions, and climate. Ironically, looser cultures had more deaths but…

When I was committing the crime of high school,the songs on the radiotook about two minutes to play,and smoking a cigarette took about five,so that things happened fairly quicklyas we passed the time and it passed uswithout a sound except for the singing. Singing by the Orioles, the Dubs, and the Clovers,plus Lee Andrews and the Hearts,who could do no wrong, according to me. One night in the spring,I even saw the Jesters battling the Paragonson the stage of the Brooklyn Paramount,then wandered the borough in a drizzle. These days, if I’m not at my deskor asleep in the back room,I’m sitting in the garagewith a cup of coffee watching the rain and waiting for that startling chordthat concludes “He’s Gone,” by the Chantels, the five notes the rungs in…

You love someone. Someone loves you not. What to do, besides find someone else to love, which, by the way, is not easy? Ah, my dear young friend, I’m so glad you came to me for advice. A quagmire of this nature requires the wisest of minds to resolve; clearly, you recognize who the most sagacious man in this part of the country is. As you know, there are a million and three solutions to this problem, virtually none of which have a great success rate. I imagine you tried at least twenty-eight of them before coming to see me today, am I correct? No? You tried only four? It doesn’t matter. You’re here and I have the best advice for you. Love potions. Have you ever heard of them?…

Foregone, by Russell Banks (Ecco). Leonard Fife, the protagonist of this elliptical novel, is a documentary filmmaker, a man whose career has rested on uncovering the truth. Now cancer-stricken and facing his life’s end, he agrees to a retrospective interview with a grating former protégé. During their discussion, Leonard starts to confess to past sins: a wife and child abandoned, infidelity, lies. But it’s not clear how trustworthy his memories are; he might be lost in the fog of his medication. Banks carefully layers the strata of a life, showing that the past is always more ambiguous than we think. The Bad Muslim Discount, by Syed M. Masood (Doubleday). The two main characters of this novel couldn’t be more different, though both are Muslim immigrants who find their way to…

MARCH 17 – 23, 2021 While the Frick Collection’s historic mansion undergoes renovations, its masterpieces have a new home: the Frick Madison, opening on March 18. (Timed-entry tickets, available via frick.org, are required.) The Marcel Breuer-designed building, most recently a branch of the Met, turns out to be a magnificent context for the museum’s holdings—the brutalist décor even serves the frothy tastes of Madame du Barry, who commissioned Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s rococo painting “The Progress of Love: The Pursuit,” pictured above. MUSIC Drake: “Scary Hours 2” HIP-HOP Drake puts his fans on standby with “Scary Hours 2,” an hors d’oeuvre before the long-awaited release of his next album, “Certified Lover Boy.” The three-song EP is full of top-of-the-world grandstanding and mythmaking from a master of the form. His life has only…

Now that the dust has settled at the implosion site of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, in Atlantic City, the rubble is being eyed by sport fishermen, who want to use it to add to an artificial reef in nearby Little Egg Harbor. But the day of the implosion itself, February 17th, is being remembered by the Jersey Shore’s weather-interested mostly for what it was: a beautiful, clear winter moment that, meteorologically speaking, represented a short high-pressure respite in a series of low-pressure systems that briefly threatened South Jersey’s place in the meteorological history books. State officials have been sorting through North Jersey’s competing snow totals since February, interviewing observers, going through reports. “There’s no perfect way to measure snow,” David Robinson, New Jersey’s state climatologist, said the other…

In 2019, more than a hundred thousand people walked into the Pierre, the five-star hotel on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Some checked in at the front desk; others, in ball gowns and tuxedos, headed up the stairs to the Grand Ballroom. About five hundred events were held at the Pierre that year: weddings, galas, corporate parties, bar mitzvahs. In December, there were holiday parties every night. Such events could run to four hundred and fifty dollars a guest for food, drinks, and staff—and then there were the ice sculptures and custom-made dance floors that clients ordered from outside venders. At the Pierre, events were a forty-million-dollar-a-year business, accounting for half the hotel’s revenue. About eighty weddings took place at the Pierre in 2019. A certain subset of wealthy New Yorkers…

“The first thing I remember is sitting in a pram at the top of a hill with a dead dog lying at my feet.” So opens an early chapter of a memoir by Graham Greene, who is viewed by some—including Richard Greene (no relation), the author of a new biography of Graham, “The Unquiet Englishman” (Norton)—as one of the most important British novelists of his already extraordinary generation. (It included George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Elizabeth Bowen.) The dog, Graham’s sister’s pug, had just been run over, and the nanny couldn’t think of how to get the carcass home other than to stow it in the carriage with the baby. If that doesn’t suffice to set the tone for the rather lurid events of Greene’s life, one need only…

On July 1, 1907, Marcel Proust organized a short concert to follow a festive dinner at the Ritz in Paris. The program, with its interweaving of Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and protomodern strands, exemplifies the impeccable taste of one of the most musically attuned writers in literary history: Fauré: Violin Sonata No. 1Beethoven: Andante [unspecified]Schumann: “Des Abends”Chopin: Prélude [unspecified]Wagner: “Meistersinger” PreludeChabrier: “Idylle”Couperin: “Les Barricades mystérieuses”Fauré: Nocturne [unspecified]Wagner: Liebestod from “Tristan”Fauré: Berceuse Afterward, Proust reported to the composer Reynaldo Hahn, his friend and sometime lover, that the evening had been “perfect, charming.” His distinguished invitees, who included the Princess de Polignac and the Mesdames de Brantes, de Briey, d’Haussonville, de Ludre, de Noailles, and de Clermont-Tonnerre, enjoyed themselves thoroughly. Little did they know that the affair was a dry run for the…