Innholdsfortegnelse for May 17, 2021 i The New Yorker

Sheelah Kolhatkar (“The Big Gamble,” p. 30), a staff writer, is the author of “Black Edge.” David Sedaris (“Pearls,” p. 20) has contributed to The New Yorker since 1995. His new book, “A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020),” will be out in October. Tiana Clark (Poem, p. 38), the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College, most recently published the book of poems “I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood.” J. M. Holmes (Fiction, p. 50), the author of the story collection “How Are You Going to Save Yourself,” is at work on his first novel, “Me and Mine.” Brooke Jarvis (Books, p. 58) is a contributing writer for the Times Magazine. Nicholas Schmidle (The Talk of the Town, p. 16) has written for the magazine since 2011.…

SUMMER PREVIEW Shakespeare in the Park, Williamstown Festival To quote “West Side Story”—one of the Broadway shows that vanished into the ether last March—New York theatre is in its “Could it be? Yes, it could” phase. After a year of virtual plays, there are finally inklings of a return to flesh-and-blood performance. As Broadway makes plans to come back in September, the summer brings major strides toward post-Zoom theatregoing. Shakespeare in the Park, one of the city’s most beloved summer traditions, returns to the Delacorte, with “Merry Wives” (beginning July 6), Jocelyn Bioh’s adaptation of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” now set in South Harlem’s West African immigrant community. The Public’s open-air production, directed by Saheem Ali, promises to be joyful, cathartic, and, as always, free. Downtown, Moisés Kaufman’s Tectonic…

SUMMER PREVIEW A Piece of Sky, Cars, Women with Cameras Paul Cézanne’s prominence as a painter overshadows his dedication to drawing, but the French Post-Impressionist put pencil to paper, often adding watercolor, almost every day of his career. moma exhibits some two hundred of these revelatory, underappreciated still-lifes, landscapes, and figure studies in “Cézanne Drawing.” (Opens June 6.) The acclaimed American sculptor Sarah Sze has a gift for making cosmic subjects seem down to earth—“Fallen Sky,” her new permanent sculpture at Storm King, in the Hudson Valley, is no exception. Thirty-six feet in diameter and made of polished stainless steel, the concave form appears to be both contained by and disintegrating into the grass, alternately suggesting a dislodged chunk of sky, a reflecting pool, and a portal to another dimension.…

Aunts et Uncles 1407 Nostrand Ave., Brooklyn Michael Nicholas grew up around the corner from the site of Aunts et Uncles, the Flatbush café he opened last year with his wife, Nicole, not far from where they live now. One of the couple’s mottoes, Nicole told me the other day, is “make it in”—as opposed to make it out, of the proverbial old neighborhood. In 2006, Michael started a clothing store, Brooklyn Sky, across the street. By the time he closed it, in 2014, he’d married Nicole, a native of Toronto who worked in the food industry, and together they began to envision a local restaurant. When the couple met, Nicole was a pescatarian, and although Michael was an omnivore, he’s allergic to shellfish. “It was getting a little tricky…

One recent afternoon, Tina Seeger and Diana Trujillo were showing off a few snaps from their latest trip. “I have a soft spot for rover selfies,” Seeger, a twenty-seven-year-old NASA geologist, said. She was screen-sharing a shot of the Perseverance rover posing at the Jezero Crater on Mars, taken April 6th. Jezero (rhymes with “hetero”) is just north of the Martian equator. “It’s really special, because it used to have this ancient lake environment with rivers flowing into a delta,” Seeger, who has wavy hair and was seated outside a coffee shop in Bellingham, Washington, said. Deltas are “sexy” for geologists. “They’re murky and gross, with a lot of sediment,” she said. “Maybe there could have been life there!” She clarified: “We’re not looking for little green men. More like…

Early on the morning of January 19th, Cody Herdman woke to the vibration of his smartphone alarm under his pillow. He immediately checked the finance app Robinhood for the trading price of a company called GameStop. Herdman, who is nineteen, is a freshman computer-science major at Dakota State University, where until recently he played center for the Dakota State Trojans football team, and he had been investing in the stock market for a month. Robinhood, which offers zero-commission trading in stocks and cryptocurrencies, pitches itself as an enlightened version of Wall Street; its stated mission is to “democratize finance for all.” Herdman’s friend Chase Bradshaw had introduced him to trading on the app, which now consumed much of the time that he used to spend playing video games. With a…

SUMMER PREVIEW The Governors Ball, John Legend, Julien Baker After more than a year with live performance in hibernation, the music scene revs up considerably this summer, with a slew of new albums and concerts. The musician and former Vampire Weekend member Rostam brings a newfound jazz inspiration to “Changephobia” (June 4), his follow-up to “Half-Light,” from 2017. The pop historian Lana Del Rey releases her second album of the year, “Blue Banisters,” on Independence Day. Following a sweep of the major categories at the 2020 Grammys, Billie Eilish returns with the highly anticipated “Happier Than Ever” (June 30). The same day, the Prince estate plans to release “Welcome 2 America,” a never-before-heard project from the icon’s vaults. Venues begin the slow process of reopening, with shows rescheduled from early…

SUMMER PREVIEW On Site Opera, Tanglewood This summer, New York’s classical programmers embrace ways to entertain audiences outside. The New York Philharmonic, which hasn’t performed at its home, in David Geffen Hall, since March, 2020, makes excursions: to Bryant Park, for free ticketed events with Picnic Performances (June 9-12), and to Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, for a music-and-whiskey concert series by Death of Classical (June 3-5). Gil Shaham and the Knights also visit Green-Wood, to perform a chamber arrangement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61, a work as sprawling as the cemetery grounds (June 25). On Site Opera offers “The Road We Came,” a set of prerecorded and self-guided walking tours of Harlem, midtown, and lower Manhattan that dive into the music and the history of Black…

Among the world’s autocratic populists, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, of India, is distinguished as a storyteller. He offers beguiling accounts of Hindu identity and Indian greatness, with the aid of allied newspapers and television networks, as well as on Twitter, where he has sixty-eight million followers and a phalanx of trolls. When the pandemic struck, last year, Modi summoned his loyal media barons and editors, who, according to the Prime Minister’s Web site, promised “inspiring and positive stories” about his government’s fight against the coronavirus. The country suffered tens of thousands of Covid19 deaths in 2020, but forecasts of even more dire outcomes did not materialize. In January, at Davos, Modi boasted that India had “saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.” He loosened restrictions and invited…

For almost a decade, the artist Maya Lin has run an interactive project called “What Is Missing,” which documents ecological loss in New York and other places. Among the missing, for instance, are the lobsters in the harbor that, back in Henry Hudson’s time, were bigger than Citi Bikes. Since the Dutch arrived, it’s been taken for granted that New York is never the same city for long, and this is part of the appeal. But Lin’s project shows that there’s scant record of what’s been lost. We don’t know what we don’t have. The other day, Lin was at Madison Square Park, working on a cousin of “What Is Missing,” an art exhibition called “Ghost Forest,” which opens this week. A ghost forest is an entire stand of trees…

Introductions: When a gentleman offers his hand—gloved or ungloved—a lady does not recoil and yell, “What are you, crazy?” This is a handshake, and a lady knows it poses her no threat. If she must sanitize immediately afterward, she will do so discreetly. If her companion wishes to hug hello, a lady must never moan in ecstasy at the long-missed sensation of human touch. That would be very weird. Greetings: When a gentleman asks, “How are you?,” a lady generally replies, “Fine, thank you.” She is not to reply, “Unravelling,” or “Today, I sat on my floor sobbing for twenty minutes, just to feel something.” Conversely, if quarantine has been “a really good time” for her, “just creatively and spiritually,” a lady should can it. No one wants to hear…

SUMMER PREVIEW Jacob’s Pillow, Kaatsbaan, Mark Morris It took a pandemic to shut down the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, in Becket, Mass., which, before 2020, had not been cancelled once in its eighty-nine-year history. The festival’s return, and that of live performance in general—with small-scale shows en plein air—is one of the most welcome signs that life, art, and joy are making a comeback after a grim year. From June 30 to Aug. 29, Jacob’s Pillow’s outdoor stage will host, among others, Michelle Dorrance’s innovative tap company, Dorrance Dance (June 30-July 4), Ballet Hispánico (July 14-18), and the voguing legend Archie Burnett (July 28-Aug. 1). A little closer to home but no less bucolic, Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, whose rambling grounds in Tivoli, N.Y., were once a horse farm, is holding…

SUMMER PREVIEW Music, Horror, Medieval Legend, Twitter Along with movie theatres, film festivals are returning this summer—including the most prestigious of all, Cannes, in July. Its opening-night film, Leos Carax’s “Annette,” starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, is scheduled for a late-summer release in theatres and on Amazon. All of Carax’s films have a major musical element—such as Denis Lavant’s mad, ecstatic dash in “Bad Blood” to David Bowie’s “Modern Love”—but “Annette” is his first full-on musical, and it’s one of a radical sort: even the dialogue is sung, to music by the duo Sparks, in a tale of a standup comic (Driver) and an opera singer (Cotillard) whose lives are changed by the birth of their daughter, a child prodigy. A real-life Twitter thread by Aziah Wells King provides…

The art world is used to antics: Maurizio Cattelan sold a banana ducttaped to a wall, Robert Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning drawing, Ai Weiwei photographed himself smashing a two-thousand-year-old urn. Seconds after the painting “Girl with Balloon” sold at auction for $1.4 million, its creator, the street artist Banksy, shredded the piece via remote control. Earlier this year, in Chelsea, an aspiring artist in his mid-twenties walked into Taglialatella Galleries and purchased a Banksy screen print, titled “Morons (White),” for ninety-five thousand dollars, using funds that he had raised from investors. Then he set it on fire. “Art is whatever you want it to be,” the young man, who goes by the name Burnt Banksy, said, laughing. “Do I think I’m an artist? Yes and no. I don’t think…

One rainy night in locked-down London, the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber put on a hard hat and a yellow safety vest and slipped inside the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, via a side entrance. He was accompanied by his friend Simon Thurley, an architectural historian and the former head of English Heritage, which oversees historic buildings and monuments, including Stonehenge and Hadrian’s Wall. The pair had their foreheads scanned and stepped backstage, where they peered up at a towering steel rig. “You could swing several double-decker buses from there,” Thurley said. The Theatre Royal Drury Lane is the oldest continuously running theatrical site in London. When it opened, in 1663, London had no buses, double-decker or otherwise. It had a lot of fields. People arrived at the theatre mostly by foot,…

Nine years ago, Marie Ulven, a teenager from suburban Norway, was, like most of her peers, broadcasting her interests on social media. Ulven’s hobby of choice was fingerboarding, a miniaturized version of skateboarding in which people perform tricks on tiny boards using just their hands. Ulven eventually amassed a modest following on Instagram. In real life, she participated in formal, refereed “battles,” where she would square off against fellow-fingerboarders. (In one battle, which still lives on YouTube, an antsy, fresh-faced Ulven competes against a male boarder and is met with raucous cheers and fist bumps from the crowd.) One Christmas, Ulven’s grandfather gave her a more traditional outlet for manual dexterity: a guitar. From her childhood home, in the small town of Horten, Ulven began writing jangly indie-pop songs, which…

ACROSS 1 City where Red Clydeside, a radical era in Britain’s labor movement, began 8 Covenant 12 1972 Presidential-primary candidate who said, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair” 13 Main ingredient in jollof 14 Cut off supply routes, say 15 Flubs 16 London line 17 Developmental period 19 Sch. that’s home to the Frank Gehry-designed Stata Center 20 Risk territory that borders Siberia 21 One past twelve? 22 Move effortlessly 24 Raid target 25 Occupy 26 Acclaimed 27 Lady Macbeth, for one 29 Anchors’ anchors 30 Cheeky bottoms? 31 Lilliputian 32 “Factory Girl” subject Sedgwick 33 Critic’s pick? 36 Point of view 37 Façades 38 Resolve, with “out” 39 Org. helmed by Dr. Rochelle Walensky 40 ___ bar 42 Like a bad…