Innholdsfortegnelse for April 5, 2021 i The New Yorker

Elizabeth Loftus was in Argentina, giving talks about the malleability of memory, in October, 2018, when she learned that Harvey Weinstein, who had recently been indicted for rape and sexual assault, wanted to speak with her. She couldn’t figure out how to receive international calls in her hotel room, so she asked if they could talk in three days, once she was home, in California. In response, she got a series of frantic e-mails saying that the conversation couldn’t wait. But, when Weinstein finally got through, she said, “basically he just wanted to ask, ‘How can something that seems so consensual be turned into something so wrong?’” Loftus, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, is the most influential female psychologist of the twentieth century, according to a list…

When I first met my love, I had been off my reservation for a little more than a year. I had become acculturated, we’ll say, to university life—and willingly! I wanted to know what larger America was all about. I took on the aspect of a young dog; everything was new to me, I had my nose up everyone’s ass. First there was Lana, then Julie, then … a few other names I can’t remember, and then there was Barbara. That should have been the name of a grandmother, but in fact it belonged to a sweet thing who liked to call me her favorite indian toy. I’ll be whatever you want, I said, long as we keep knocking those boots. Which we did, because she was young, almost too…

Zabor, or the Psalms, by Kamel Daoud, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan (Other Press). This second novel by the celebrated Algerian author of “The Meursault Investigation” is a deeply imaginative allegory about the possibilities of language. Zabor, the narrator, proclaims that writing—not “prayer, medicine, magic”—is “the only effective ruse against death.” After losing his mother at a young age and being abandoned by his father, Zabor is sent to live with an aunt. He develops a passion for reading and writing in Arabic and French, and becomes convinced that writing about a person can delay that person’s mortality. When he is summoned to his father’s deathbed, he grapples with whether to use his power to save the man who spurned him. Milk Blood Heat, by Dantiel W. Moniz…

IMMOBILE HOMES Sheelah Kolhatkar describes how, when investment firms acquire mobile-home parks and suddenly raise rents on the land, mobile-home owners become trapped (“Trailer-Park Trades,” March 15th). One solution, as Kolhatkar discusses, is for the law to treat mobile-home parks more like rental housing, and to extend tenants’-rights laws to cover them. This may help in the short term, but it does not change the fundamentally feudal relationship between homeowner and landlord. A better answer is for residents to organize themselves in coöperative mutual-aid associations and together buy the trailer-park land. Successful examples of this approach exist. I worked with residents near Cumberland, Wisconsin, who, when faced with the sale of their mobile-home park and possible eviction, formed the Country View Cooperative and purchased the property. Each mobile-home owner has…

I’m thinking of you beautifuland young, of me young and confused and maybebeautiful. There were lots of us— these were our twenties, when,post-9/11, we were about to inherit the world, and we had no ideawhat to do with it. And look what we did, and we didn’t.And now look at us, and it. We turned away for a blip, startedwhispering, kissing, had kids, bought houses, changed bulbs,submitted claims, changed channels, FaceTimed, streamed, upgraded,were two-day-shipped to, and midway through our prime earning yearswe look up again, decades groggy, decades late. Forgive us, we thought—but now it doesn’t matter. These are our outcomes, consequences, faults,forties, when the hourglass is beeping and bleak and peoplelike us have memories like this and wonder if the beauty that’s leftis really still beautiful, if it was.…

My empire made mehappy because it was an empireand mine. I was too stupid to rage at anything. Babies cried at birth, it was said,because the devil pricked them as introductionto knowledge. I sat fingering my gilded frame, countinggrievances like toes: here my mother, here my ring,here my sex, and here my king. All still there. Wrath is the desireto repay what you’ve suffered. Kneeling on coinsbefore the minor deity in the mirror.Clueless as a pearl. That the prophets arrived not to ease our sufferingbut to experience it seems—can I say this?—a waste? My empire made me happyso I loved, easily, its citizens—such lovinga kind of birth, an introduction to pain. Whatever I learn makes me angry to have learned it. The new missiles can detect a fly’s heartbeatatop a…

In the summer of 1940, when she was twenty-nine years old, Sybille Bedford took on an unusual assignment: driving Thomas Mann’s poodle across the United States. Bedford had known Mann, nearly forty years her senior, since her adolescence, which she spent living among German expatriates in the South of France. An aspiring but so far unprolific writer of fiction and nonfiction, she had come of age under his shadow. Now both she and Mann were refugees in another country. Mann and his family, moving from Princeton to Pacific Palisades, took the train; the country was experiencing a heat wave, and the compartments were air-conditioned. Bedford drove the writer’s car with her girlfriend and Nico, the poodle, stopping every once in a while for a bottle of Coke, which she spiked…

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 31 - APRIL 6, 2021 MUSIC American Modern Opera Company OPERA The enterprising artists of American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) have spent recent weeks in a bubble residency at the Catskill Mountain Foundation, workshopping a new project with the composer and interactive-electronics trailblazer George Lewis. Now, as the Guggenheim’s “Works & Process” series resumes responsibly managed live performances, the AMOC members Jonathan Allen, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Miranda Cuckson, Conor Hanick, Aaron Wolff, and Emi Ferguson showcase material newly developed with Lewis, plus some company favorites, in a brief rotunda performance. Tickets are available seventy-two hours in…

One of the most amazing things I have ever witnessed involved an otherwise unprepossessing house cat named Billy. This was some years ago, shortly after I had moved into a little rental house in the Hudson Valley. Billy, a big, bad-tempered old tomcat, belonged to the previous tenant, a guy by the name of Phil. Phil adored that cat, and the cat—improbably, given his otherwise unenthusiastic feelings about humanity—returned the favor. On the day Phil vacated the house, he wrestled an irate Billy into a cat carrier, loaded him into a moving van, and headed toward his new apartment, in Brooklyn. Thirty minutes down I-84, in the middle of a drenching rainstorm, the cat somehow clawed his way out of the carrier. Phil pulled over to the shoulder but found…

At eight-fifteen on a pre-pandemic Friday morning, Shaina Harrison arrived at the Bronx Academy of Health Careers, one of seven specialized high schools in the massive Evander Childs Educational Campus building, in a northerly part of the borough. She had come from Red Hook, in Brooklyn, where she lives, to teach a weekly for-credit class on gun violence and how to prevent it. New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, or N.Y.A.G.V., the nonprofit organization of which she is one of three full-time employees, has been sending her to teach in New York City high schools for nine years, since she was in her mid-twenties. She is almost six feet tall, and she wears false eyelashes, bright-red lipstick, and striking clothes—on this day, a red fleece coat, a bold black-and-white-checked blouse, wide-leg…

In October, 2014, three days after Derek Jeter played the last game of his Hall of Fame career with the New York Yankees, he launched the Players’ Tribune, a Web site for athletes to tell their side of the story. It seemed like an odd decision. As a player, Jeter had always been a polite but almost pathologically reserved presence, offering the media pro-forma pleasantries, deflecting deeper inquiries into his personal life. The site, he explained, would give athletes a chance to speak directly to fans, who deserved “more than ‘no comments’ or ‘I don’t knows.’” Naturally, these were just the types of answers that he was known for. At first, it was a bit funny, the notion of Jeter hounding athletes for their delinquent essays. Most imagined that the…

“Listen to your vegetables and eat your parents!” So ends the earworm theme song of “Waffles + Mochi,” a food-travelogue series for kids, sprung from the cosmopolitan minds at Netflix and Higher Ground, Michelle and Barack Obama’s production company. To the young viewer, a Roald Dahl-esque jingle like this one pinkie-promises a trippy, macabre world of adult order undone, an imaginative expanse where edible monsters roam free. Our protagonists are cute puppet monsters for sure—Waffles is the child of a waffle father and a yeti mother, and Mochi is an emotive but nonverbal Japanese dessert—and they are sensualists, but they are not free. Really, they are the least willful characters I’ve seen on television in some time. The strength of “Waffles + Mochi,” which was created by Erika Thormahlen and…