Innholdsfortegnelse for April 19, 2021 i The New Yorker

SLOOP TO GIBRALTAR I thought once of writing about what happens to some books. I had in mind my own. A grizzly ate one—in a trapper’s cabin on a Yukon tributary a couple of hundred miles northeast of Fairbanks—or at least destroyed it, tore it apart, and whole chapters were missing. The book, “Coming into the Country,” was in some measure about the grizzly, and the trapper figured prominently in it, too. I sent him another copy, with an inscription noting that I was glad he had not been in the cabin when the bear broke in. Another trapper, in a neighboring drainage, fell out of his canoe in high water and drowned. His inscribed copy of the same book ended up on Amazon.com. A dozen books inscribed privately across…

Truman State University, in northern Missouri, is sometimes called the Harvard of the Midwest. For the past twenty-four years, U.S. News & World Report has ranked it as the top public university in the region. “I love the atmosphere here,” a student named Deanna commented on Unigo, a Web site that evaluates colleges. “I love that my professors actually care about me as a person and know my name. I love that I am challenged every day—even if it means losing some sleep or passing on an opportunity to hang out with friends. I don’t want to be anywhere else.” Other students feel stuck at a provincial grind school, and jealous of peers attending more glamorous universities. Truman State is in Kirksville, a faded town with seventeen thousand residents. St.…

My parents did not often concern themselves with my moral education, but, when they did, whatever wisdom or warnings they had to impart were accompanied by books—typically, pop-psychology best-sellers. Two stand out in my memory: “Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls,” by Mary Pipher, and “Emotional Intelligence,” by Daniel Goleman. The first I read with great satisfaction. None of my transgressions were as alarming or exciting as what Pipher described—no drugs, no clandestine trips to the family liquor cabinet, no sullen application of nail polish—so her tales of bad behavior left me feeling both titillated and smug. The second book I set aside, as I suspected it had been purchased to point out my more common defects. I was an “angry teen-ager,” with a very sharp tongue and…

THE LIMITS OF CONSTITUTIONS In a review of the historian Linda Colley’s book about the evolution of written constitutions, Jill Lepore notes that “American scholars interested in the history of constitutionalism” have largely ignored the Nakaz, Catherine the Great’s blueprint for government (A Critic at Large, March 29th). This, she says, is “not so much because the document failed to shore up Catherine’s regime” as because “it was created by a woman.” But the lack of American scholarly interest in the Nakaz might be less a function of the document’s author and more a result of its content. As Lepore points out, the Nakaz was devised primarily to buttress Catherine’s position on the throne. More important, it did nothing to forestall a further century and a half of tsarist autocracy.…

We pour sand into brown lunch bags, then placea votive candle inside each; at night, lined along the driveway,the flickering lights form a spirit way, but what spirit? what way?We sight the flames and, swaying within, know the future’s fathomless;we grieve, yearn, joy, pinpoints in a greater darkness, and spy sunlightbrighten craters on a half-lit moon; in this life, you may try, tryto light a match, fail, fail again and again; yet, letting go, you strikea tip one more time when it bursts into flame—now the flamesare lights in bags again, and we glimpse the willow tips clutch at a lunarpromise of spring.…

I arrived in Copenhagen sweaty and halfway out of myself after an extremely fictional flight. Frankly, I would use that word for any air travel, but on this trip I had, shortly after takeoff, fallen into a light feverish daze in which I relived a series of flights I had taken earlier in my life. First, there was the flight home from Nepal with my ex-wife, then girlfriend, our first trip together, when we, maybe out of boredom, curled up in our seats and took turns miming various sexual scenarios that the other person had to guess and sketch on a piece of paper, which we tore into pieces and reassembled into new situations to mime again, so that the game could continue for eternities. In my daze there was…

The end of the Cold War has allowed for a particular niche of historical fiction, transnational novels whose gay male protagonists live out their coming of age against a backdrop of national struggles for freedom and renewal. In Caleb Crain’s “Necessary Errors” (2013), Jacob Putnam, a recent Harvard graduate, heads to Prague in 1990 with a “wish to follow history” just after the Velvet Revolution. Although only tentatively out, he feels sexually ahead of the local historical curve: “It occurred to Jacob that he might not have arrived too late for the liberation of Eastern Europe’s gay people.” Tomasz Jedrowski’s “Swimmingin the Dark” (2020) runs in the reverse East-West direction, telling the story of a Polish student, Ludwik, who flees Warsaw for New York before the Solidarity movement is crushed…

If you want to see “Blindness,” a new show created by Donmar Warehouse and up at the Daryl Roth Theatre—up not on some Web site but in the antediluvian sense: at a place other than your home, scheduled for a non-negotiable time—you’ll have to submit to the weird rigors of COVID screening. If you’ve eaten at a restaurant or gone to the dentist lately, you can probably rattle off the questionnaire by heart: Have you coughed? Are you hot? Have you, to your knowledge, recently consorted with the possibly ill? That test successfully passed, you’ll have your temperature taken by what looks like a futuristic grocery scanner—then, with no detour to the bathroom, which is closed, you’ll be ushered to your socially distanced seat. “Blindness,” directed by Walter Meierjohann and…

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. APRIL 14 – 20, 2021 ART “Grief and Grievance” This terrific show, subtitled “Art and Mourning in America”—whose starry roster includes Kerry James Marshall, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Theaster Gates—was originally intended to open at the New Museum last October, amid the furors leading up to the Presidential election. The pandemic scotched that. But “Grief and Grievance,” the brainchild of the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, doesn’t have a use-by date, because it celebrates what artists are good at: telling personal truths through aesthetic form. Works by thirty-seven artists emphasize interiority and the…

Greta Thunberg, the eighteen-year-old Swedish climate activist, hasn’t decided exactly what she’ll be doing on Earth Day (April 22nd) this year. But she’s sure she will have some critical things to say about the virtual climate summit that begins that day, to which President Biden has invited forty world leaders. Even though Biden has reversed the course set by his predecessor, who liked to call climate change “a very expensive hoax,” Thunberg knows she will be disappointed. “The things that they are going to present will not be nearly enough for what science is saying will be in line with the Paris Agreement,” she said. “So I’ll just be calling that out, I guess.” It was a Saturday, and Thunberg was on Zoom. She was dressed like a homebound teen-ager:…

French tacos are tacos like chicken fingers are fingers. Which is to say, they are not tacos at all. First of all, through some mistranslation or misapprehension of its Mexican namesake, the French tacos is always plural, even when there’s only one, pronounced with a voiced “S.” Technically, the French tacos is a sandwich: a flour tortilla, slathered with condiments, piled with meat (usually halal) and other things (usually French fries), doused in cheese sauce, folded into a rectangular packet, and then toasted on a grill. “In short, a rather successful marriage between panini, kebab, and burrito,” according to the municipal newsletter of Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of Lyon in which the French tacos may or may not have been born. In the American imagination, French cuisine can seem a static…

When I first met Carol Dana, in the spring of 2018, she told me that she was thinking of getting a parrot. Dana, a member of the Penobscot Nation, one of five hundred and seventy-four Native American tribes recognized by the United States federal government, was attending a small ceremony at the University of Maine’s anthropology museum. She wore her silver hair pulled back from her face, and introduced herself to me as the tribe’s language master, a title, she added, that she wasn’t fully comfortable with. The idea of mastery seemed an imprecise way to describe the fraught relationship she had with the Penobscot words inside her head. Though not fluent, Dana has a better grasp of the language than anyone else on Indian Island, where six hundred of…

“She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.” This is how Mrs. Dalloway thinks of herself, early in Virginia Woolf’s novel. It’s an even better description of how Woolf writes—how she passes between and beyond her characters, their anima and ghost, immanent and posthumous at once. “Mrs. Dalloway” appeared in 1925; two years later, in “To the Lighthouse,” Woolf would slice through her characters and even more flagrantly stand outside them and look on. In its famous middle section, “Time Passes,” Woolf describes how a decade elapses in an uninhabited country house, as the wallpaper peels away, the books rot, and the animals come to stay. The writing is both domestically meticulous (“The…

Horizontal Vertigo, by Juan Villoro, translated from the Spanish by Alfred MacAdam (Pantheon). One of Mexico’s most celebrated contemporary writers offers an affectionate exploration of the country’s capital city. In Villoro’s view, chilangos—a term for the city’s residents—experience life as a series of impending disasters, such as the earthquake of 1985, and a fear of calamity explains why the city has grown outward rather than upward. Following the “zigzagging of memory or the detours endemic to city traffic,” he incorporates character studies, essays, and autobiography. He does not shy away from issues of poverty, class, and gender, and the result is an enthralling, often funny depiction of a city that “overflowed urbanism and installed itself in mythology.” Halfway Home, by Reuben Jonathan Miller (Little, Brown). The author, a professor of…

On the stage of an empty concert hall, the Austrian-born composer Peter Ablinger sits in a chair and begins to tell the time. “At the third stroke, it will be twenty o’clock precisely,” he says, adhering to the hallowed formula of the BBC’s Speaking Clock. He accompanies himself with a simple C-minor sequence on a keyboard. After continuing in this vein for twenty minutes, Ablinger cedes the floor to the young German actress Salome Manyak, who speaks over an atmospherically bleeping soundtrack by the Finnish experimental musician Olli Aarni. The ritual goes on for nearly twenty-seven hours, with an ever-changing team of artists, curators, composers, singers, and d.j.s announcing the time in German, English, Italian, French, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Oromo, Mandarin, and twelve other languages. A rotating assortment of…