Innholdsfortegnelse for April 26-May 3, 2021 i The New Yorker

“Pants or dead leaves?” Lizzie says. “My guess is pants,” Nell says. The two of them stand on the dock in their age-inappropriate bathing suits and stare at the dark patch under the water. An hour earlier, Nell was toasting her laundry on the dock, which was the best place to dry it: it had been the best place for seventy years. But she didn’t put rocks on top of her cotton yoga pants, though she ought to have known better, and then she went back up the hill to the house, through the sighing and rustling trees. The pants are lightweight, and they seem to have blown away. Logic dictates that they must be somewhere in the lake. Other pants she might have kissed goodbye, but she’s fond of…

Of all the paradoxes in the paradoxical field known as home economics, perhaps the most peculiar is the practice house, with its practice baby. Colleges and universities that offered home-ec majors—and there were many in the twentieth century, including historically Black colleges, land-grant universities, and Ivy League institutions—often had a cottage or an apartment on campus where female home-ec students could keep house. Some of them were preparing for careers in education or industry, but most saw home ec as training for their inevitable futures as wives and mothers. Often, practice-house life entailed caring for practice babies, actual human ones, lent by adoption agencies, orphanages, or sometimes the mothers themselves. At Cornell University, the students called their first practice baby—borrowed in 1920, when he was three weeks old—Dicky Domecon, for…

AFTER SANDY HOOK I was moved by Ian Frazier’s piece about anti-gun-violence activists like Shaina Harrison, who are working in the eye of the storm: in the classroom, where gun-violence-prevention skills can be taught, and on the streets, where violence interrupters demonstrate peaceful ways to settle disputes (“Guns Down,” April 5th). I have been a gun-safety activist since my nephew Daniel Barden was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in 2012. The damage done by mass shootings is immense, but the suicides and everyday community violence caused by guns also deserve our attention. Many worthy groups are working to address these issues, from the big names like Brady and Everytown for Gun Safety to myriad smaller ones, like those which Frazier writes about. The N.R.A., rocked by scandal and mismanagement,…

On February 29, 2020, Ari Emanuel, the C.E.O. of the Endeavor company, and Mark Shapiro, its president, were leaving Madison Square Garden after a Knicks game. “Ari said he wanted to stop at this new bar for a drink,” Shapiro recalled. “We walk in, and boom! It’s a surprise party, for my fiftieth birthday.” Emanuel was uncharacteristically reserved. COVID-19 had just begun to spread in the United States, and very few people could guess how disruptive it would be. Emanuel, however, had been discussing the dangers of the new virus with his eldest brother, Zeke Emanuel, a prominent bioethicist and oncologist. Shapiro told me that, at the bar, “everyone was saying to me, ‘What the hell’s wrong with Ari? You can’t get a hug, can’t get a kiss on the…

I am bored of all the excuses.Bored as Mayakovskyat the Finnish painters’ exhibitionbarking like a dog through the foreign minister’s toastuntil he cried and sat down. Deadly serious.I am bored as an elegy. I mean,why care at all, speaking as a pitfallin a world of pits. But we do. To the death.We all agree to garden this year.And my raspberry bushes,picked over by wrens—I’ll make them great againand let America go wild.It’ll be all trumpets and leeks and lilacsfrom here on out.Let’s stop paying for it, get it free.Let’s plan our victory gardens to supplement grief,boost morale, as though something newand uncontrolled were available—it is the original new hot future joy.We’re making it out of dough.And the illusion of separateness,let it go back into remission.Just look at you—you looklike a…

“Professor of Terror” was the head-on the cover of the August, line 1989, issue of Commentary. Inside, an article described Edward Said, then a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, as a mouthpiece for Palestinian terrorists and a confidant of Yasir Arafat. “Eduardo Said” was how he was referred to in the F.B.I.’s two-hundred-and-thirty-eight-page file on him—perhaps on the assumption that a terrorist was likely to have a Latin name. V. S. Naipaul willfully mispronounced “Said” to rhyme with “head,” and asserted that he was “an Egyptian who got lost in the world.” Said, an Arab Christian who was frequently taken to be Muslim, recognized the great risks of being misidentified and misunderstood. In “Orientalism” (1978), the book that made him famous, he set out to answer…

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. The nonagenarian Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama was born into botany: her grandparents ran a nursery in Matsumoto, where she grew up. Through Oct. 31, her crowd-pleasing works grace the grounds and interiors of the New York Botanical Garden in “Kusama: Cosmic Nature.” (Timed tickets, available via nybg.org, are required.) “My Soul Blooms Forever” (above), a painted-steel whimsy from 2019, is installed under the newly restored dome of the Palms of the World Gallery, in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. R. & B. In the course of three months in 2012, the singer and producer Miguel released a…

A couple of weeks ago around dinnertime, neither my husband nor I were in the cooking mood. We didn’t feel like ordering out, and, since we hadn’t got our second vaccine, we didn’t want to go to a restaurant. I said to him what one of us says to the other at times like these: “Should we just fend?” “Fending” is our household’s word for picking around the kitchen, seeing what’s there, and making a meal of it. We’re not complete savages—i.e., we don’t stand next to the refrigerator at any old hour shovelling food into our mouths. No. We eat together at a table, which has been set. We might even open a bottle of wine. But there is no prep, aside from maybe heating stuff up. It’s very…

The first thing that Rita Leggett saw when she regained consciousness was a pair of piercing blue eyes peering curiously into hers. “I know you, don’t I?” she said. The man with the blue eyes replied, “Yes, you do.” But he didn’t say anything else, and for a while Leggett just wondered and stared. Then it came to her: “You’re my surgeon!” It was November, 2010, and Leggett had just undergone neurosurgery at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. She recalled a surge of loneliness as she waited alone in a hotel room the night before the operation and the fear she felt when she entered the operating room. She’d worried about the surgeon cutting off her waist-length hair. What am I doing in here? she’d thought. But just before the anesthetic…

Our bodies had limits, perimeters,Edges marking the end of us and the beginning of not us:The flies hovering in space, the dirt floor stubborn beneath everything.The table, too, was rectangular every time,As was the door facing westAnd its modest field of corn or sometimes sorghum,A mesquite in one corner,A mulberry tree in the other,And when they started losing their traces,Branches blending in with the purpling sky behind them,I knew to turn back to the kitchen so as not to miss it—My family slowly fading away, beginning at the edges,The nearest part of their bodies always the last to go,Then the glint of the eyes,Then hardly shadows with voicesHumbly calling out, “The sun is leaving us.”I’ve written about this so many times.…

In 2003, the rapper and entrepreneur Sean Combs—then operating under the nom de plume Diddy—launched the third iteration of “Making the Band,” a reality-competition series that had débuted in 2000. The show was predicated on the idea that it was possible to manufacture a musical group from parts, much as a person might, with time and focus, successfully assemble a side-board from IKEA. The first season was hosted by Lou Pearlman, the talent impresario behind the Backstreet Boys and ’NSync. (In 2008, Pearlman was imprisoned for overseeing one of the longest-running Ponzi schemes in American history, and died in federal custody in 2016.) Diddy took over for “Making the Band 2,” relentlessly testing the mettle of Da Band, a hip-hop group he’d put together through an arduous audition process. Between…

Second Nature, by Nathaniel Rich (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Tales of greed, corruption, and indifference abound in reporting on climate change and ecological disaster, and there are plenty in this vibrant book: DuPont and the poisoning of Parkersburg, West Virginia; SoCalGas and the poisoning of Porter Ranch, California. But there are also stories of bravery, passion, and inventiveness, like the quests to bring the passenger pigeon back from extinction, and to create eggless egg and meatless meat. Rich has an appreciation for dreamers, even for billionaires whose idealism may be indistinguishable from hubris. Will the three-hundred-foot-tall clock Jeff Bezos is building inside an excavated mountain in Texas really make humanity think more about its future? Finding the Raga, by Amit Chaudhuri (New York Review Books). The author of this compelling meditation on…

She had no business moving uptown. Generally, nice white lady artists like Alice Neel lived among their own kind, down in the Village, or they went wherever the male painters went and helped make those guys’ stories happen first. But Neel always wanted a different kind of life, so in 1938, at the age of thirty-eight, she chose to leave what she disparagingly called the “honky-tonk” atmosphere of the Village and move to Spanish Harlem—where European immigrants were giving way to Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrants. She learned the place by observing and then painting what she saw and wanted to understand: a “new,” diverse America, populated by men of color, single mothers sitting on stoops, and children in repose. As in Chekhov’s stories, there is no “other” in her…