Innholdsfortegnelse for March 29, 2021 i The New Yorker

Some years after we moved to the city, my husband and I started looking for an apartment to buy. We were renting a small place past the southern boulevard that marked the end of the historic neighborhoods. On weekends, we’d usually take walks, always in the direction of the finer quarters that had first lured us to the city with their Old World charm. We lived on an unremarkable street, without cafés or shops. At the corner was a large glass building, on whose steps teen-agers congregated at every hour, smoking, laughing, playing music. Those with skateboards rode up and down the boulevard, dodging out of the way of old women who frowned at them. During our first year, we learned that the building was a youth center, founded by…

New Yorkers, by Craig Taylor (Norton). The joys and agonies of New York City—what this British author unabashedly calls “the greatest ongoing flicker of human life I’ve ever encountered”—are the subject of a teeming oral history. Over six years, Taylor interviewed a profusion of residents, including a window washer, a private chef, a bodega worker, a sex worker and Occupy protester, and a lice consultant. The kaleidoscopic portrait captures the city’s thrilling lexical diversity, as well as moments of grace, compassion, cruelty, and racism. “I do have like a sort of philosophical thing about New York,” one of his interviewees—an artist and former inmate of Rikers Island—confesses; the obsessions, allegiances, habits, desires, and serendipities on display here suggest why anyone might. Speak, Okinawa, by Elizabeth Miki Brina (Knopf). In 1973,…

THE HEART OF THE MATTER Joshua Rothman brings much-needed attention to artificial hearts and to the challenges faced by the engineers, doctors, and patients who are invested in this technology (“Missing a Beat,” March 8th). I am a co-founder of a national coalition for women with heart disease. It is important to remember that artificial-heart research has disproportionately focussed on male patients and that, at this stage, experimental hearts often only fit the chests of large men. Yet heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, and almost as many women as men die of it each year. Gender bias in cardiac clinical trials and in access to advanced medical technologies persists, owing to sexism, misinformation about the extent to which women experience heart…

Last night it startled me again—I dreamedof the corn maze through which we walked,almost a decade ago, in the presenceof our other lovers. It was all burned down.Purple corn glowed in the fields envelopingthe ruined maze, the woodlands washedby October sun. Instead of you, I found in the salt-white musicof that familiar landscape an old piano, hollowedby the draft of time, and the handle of a porcelain cupin scorched soil. Relics of an imagined,civil life. Today, in the lemony light by your grave,I recited Merrill: Why did I flinch? I loved you, then touchedthe damp and swelling mud, blue hyacinthsyour mother planted there—ants were swarming the unfinished plot of earthlike the black text of an infinite alphabet. I couldn’tread it. There was no epiphany, just dirt, the vast curtainbetween this…

Walking among the graves for exerciseWhere do you get your ideas how do I stop themLooking for Mike Mazur’s marker I lookedDown at the grass and saw Stanislaw BaranczakOur Solidarity poetry reading in PoznanYears later in Newton now he said I’m a U.S.Liberal with a car like everybody elseWhen I held Bobo dying in my armsHis green eyes told me I am not done yetThen he was gone when he was young he enjoyedLeaping up onto the copy machine to pressA button and hear it hum to life and rustleA blank page then another out onto its traySometimes he batted the pages down to the floorI used to call it his hobby here’s a marbleWicker bassinet marking a baby’s graveTo sever the good fellowship of dust the vet’sNeedle first a…

Tony Blair was usually relaxed and charismatic in front of a crowd. But an encounter with a woman in the audience of a London television studio in April, 2005, left him visibly flustered. Blair, eight years into his tenure as Britain’s Prime Minister, had been on a mission to improve the National Health Service. The N.H.S. is a much loved, much mocked, and much neglected British institution, with all kinds of quirks and inefficiencies. At the time, it was notoriously difficult to get a doctor’s appointment within a reasonable period; ailing people were often told they’d have to wait weeks for the next available opening. Blair’s government, bustling with bright technocrats, decided to address this issue by setting a target: doctors would be given a financial incentive to see patients…

About halfway through a recent episode of “POOG,” a new podcast that is essentially one long, unbroken conversation about “wellness” between the comedians and long-time friends Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak, the hosts spend several minutes trying—and failing—to devise a grand theory about the existential sorrow of eating ice cream. “The pleasure of eating an ice-cream cone for me,” Novak says, in the blustery tone of a motivational speaker, “involves the attempt to contain, catch up, stay present to the cone. Because the cone will not wait.” Berlant, a seasoned improviser, leaps into the game. “And it’s grief,” she says, with no trace of irony. “And it’s loss, because it’s so beautiful, it’s handed to you, and you’re constantly having to reckon with the fact that it is dying, and…

Of all the unlikely runaway hits in the history of television, “Shtisel” must be near the top of the list. The show, which débuted in Israel in 2013, has no nudity, no violence, and no dragons. Its characters are Haredi Jews, whom English speakers usually call “ultra-Orthodox,” and its raciest moment involves a woman trying to discourage a suitor by taking off her sheitel and revealing her graying hair. When the series came to Netflix, at the end of 2018, secular Jews everywhere went crazy for it. My phone lit up with messages from “Shtisel”-obsessed friends in Stockholm and Paris. On the Upper West Side, my parents were hooked. Newspapers around the globe covered “‘Shtisel’-mania,” and members of the tribe not normally inclined to piety reported that they had taken…

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. MARCH 24 - 30, 2021 THE THEATRE The Aran Islands “And that’s my story”: such is the matter-of-fact ending used by one of the colorful narrators of these tales of magic and murder, told by natives of the desolate, starkly beautiful Aran Islands, off Ireland’s western coast. They were written down, in 1898, by John Millington Synge, a poet, travel writer, playwright (“The Playboy of the Western World”), and founding member of the Abbey Theatre. He had visited the place at the urging of W. B. Yeats, and in his time there, among elemental figures both human…

I am sitting with my shoulders scrunched, my feet up on my desk, and my rear end tilted so that I am as close as one can be in a chair to lying down. In a pasta police lineup, I’d be elbow macaroni. “Did you nag me about posture when I was young, back in the sixties?” I asked my mother recently. “Evidently not,” she said. Remarkably, I am not among the estimated eighty per cent of Americans who suffer from back troubles. So far. Can I continue to get away with my saggy posture forever? “The answer is no, and here’s why,” Robert DeStefano, a chiropractor who works with the New York Giants, told me. “It might take years for bad posture to rear its head, but the effects…

“The Ghost Writer” was published in 1979. It was the first of nine novels by Philip Roth narrated by Nathan Zuckerman. The story begins when Zuckerman, a young writer who has just published his first short stories, pays a visit to E. I. Lonoff, an eminent novelist living in the New England woods. In the course of an overnight stay, Zuckerman is witness to his idol’s domestic implosion. Lonoff has betrayed his wife, Hope, with a former student named Amy Bellette, whom Zuckerman somehow imagines to be none other than Anne Frank. Secrets are revealed. Tempers flare. Amy drives off into the snow. Hope, refusing the self-abnegating existence of Tolstoy’s wife, walks out. The acolyte takes it all in. “When you admire a writer you become curious,” Zuckerman admits. “You…

In 1947, Kurt Gödel, Albert Einstein, and Oskar Morgenstern drove from Princeton to Trenton in Morgenstern’s car. The three men, who’d fled Nazi Europe and become close friends at the Institute for Advanced Study, were on their way to a courthouse where Gödel, an Austrian exile, was scheduled to take the U.S.-citizenship exam, something his two friends had done already. Morgenstern had founded game theory, Einstein had founded the theory of relativity, and Gödel, the greatest logician since Aristotle, had revolutionized mathematics and philosophy with his incompleteness theorems. Morgenstern drove. Gödel sat in the back. Einstein, up front with Morgenstern turned around and said, teasing, “Now, Gödel, are you really well prepared for this examination?” Gödel looked stricken. To prepare for his citizenship test, knowing that he’d be asked questions…

Ferrell Sanders was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1940. His mother was a school-cafeteria cook, and his father worked for the city. When Sanders was growing up, someone at his church advertised a metal clarinet for sale; the previous owner had died in his nineties. Sanders couldn’t afford to buy it outright, so he paid twenty cents a week until it was his. He began taking music seriously in high school, encouraged by a teacher, and traded in his clarinet for a saxophone. At the time, Little Rock was an important stop for Black musicians touring in the segregated South, and Sanders honed his skills jamming with the R. & B. and jazz groups that came through town. After graduating, he briefly lived in Oakland, and then, in 1962,…