Innholdsfortegnelse for June 14, 2021 i The New Yorker

In early June, 2020, a week after the murder of George Floyd, the country singer Mickey Guyton released “Black Like Me,” a tender piano ballad about deep and relentless racial alienation. Her voice is velvety and pro-pulsive, and when she leans into a big note it can feel cool and bracing, like sticking your head out the window of a moving car. She wrote “Black Like Me” in 2019. “The common response from people in Nashville was ‘I need to sit with this for a minute,’” Guyton, who is thirty-seven, told me recently. “It made people uncomfortable. Nobody was really writing songs like that in the country format.” When Guyton signed with Universal Music Group, in 2011, she was the only Black woman under contract with a major country-music label.…

Late on the evening of June 15, 2019, Flordelis dos Santos de Souza and her husband, Anderson do Carmo, left for a night out in Rio de Janeiro. They had been looking forward to a break, after an exhausting few months. Flordelis was a celebrity in Brazil: a gospel singer and the pastor of her own Pentecostal ministry, the Ministerio Flordelis, with six churches and thousands of followers. Born in the favelas, she had become famous for adopting troubled kids left behind by the drug wars, and her life story, an archetypal Brazilian redemption tale, had been made into a movie starring some of the country’s best-known actors. That February, she had taken office as a new member of the National Congress. Anderson was busy, too. He managed the ministry’s…

He isn’t any kind of cat that I’ve ever seen. The paws look like something out of a story-book. And his fur shines an Ikea-bag blue. Some Googling tells me this means he’s a shorthair, maybe—but my older brother’s letter just called him a stray. You have that in common, my brother wrote. It’ll give you two something to talk about, he wrote. So that’s what I think of him as: a fucking stray. A woman I can’t responsibly call my brother’s girlfriend dropped the cat off at my apartment in Montrose. Literally tossed him on the sidewalk. She didn’t wait for me to stumble outside before she drove off. There was a crumpled note, along with a food dispenser, and then this cat in his box. I let him…

Phase Six, by Jim Shepard (Knopf). Set in a post-COVID-19 world, this ingenious novel imagines the ramifications of an even more lethal pandemic. The focus switches between an eleven-year-old in Greenland, where the virus originates; an Algerian epidemiologist working for the C.D.C.; and an I.C.U. doctor tending to a patient in upstate New York. Told in short chapters with a dispassionate, clinical style, the story is at once gripping and difficult to bear. As the world gives way to panic, the epidemiologist wonders, “What were all those dystopias she’d had to read about in high school, concerning the individual trampled by the state, talking about? Why hadn’t anyone imagined the chaos of no one in charge?” Walking on Cowrie Shells, by Nana Nkweti (Graywolf). This début collection of stories revels…

Hacks,” on HBO Max, is a comedy about comedy—a chilling “proposition, in 2021. There is a loud species of comic who has no muse but grievance politics, who makes the stage a bully pulpit. One even nabbed the Presidency. The pilot episode of “Hacks” gets its source material from the culture war. When we meet Ava (Hannah Ein-binder), a bisexual television writer in Los Angeles, she is pouting intensely. She has landed herself in hot water by tweeting a rude joke about a right-wing politician and his gay son; it’s a setup so familiar that no one even needs to use the term “cancelled.” Ava’s a hot shot in her twenties with a mortgage, so the blow to her ego and her wallet is a kind of hell. Her agent,…

FEELING FRIED In Jill Lepore’s piece about burnout, she notes that the condition “is generally said to date to 1973” (“It’s Just Too Much,” May 24th). One earlier reference is Graham Greene’s 1960 novel, “A Burnt-Out Case.” The main character, Querry, is a famous architect who has come to hate everything about his life. He escapes to a leper colony in the Congo, where a doctor declares him the mental analogue to a “burnt-out case”; the term is one used to describe members of the colony who have progressed through several stages of leprosy. These characters seem to understand the concept much as we do today. Jerry Monaco Astoria, N.Y. I was the chair of the American Psychiatric Association task force charged with revising the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual…

Magritte is saidto have said thateverything we see hides another thing, thatwe always want to seewhat is hidden by what we see,& in his second paintingof the lovers, with their mouthsseeminglypressed against each other’s throughthick white veils,I don’t know what is meant to be hiddenfrom me,except perhaps Magritte’s dead mother, who diedby drowning—a suicide, her body pulledfrom the water,nightgown wrapped aroundher face. I admireMagritte’s defense & disgust—the idea thather death had any place in his paintings, no,the obscured faces,their opaque longing, no. He is saidto have said thathis paintings conceal nothing, that theyevoke mystery& that the answer to the questionWhat does it mean? isnothing, because mystery meansnothing, becausemystery is unknowable. Sometimesa veil is just a veil &sometimes a veil is everythingwe uncloakin order to see clearly.…

The child sees the firefly far off in the tall pines. It’s very late. I didnot expect another summer, another child, so much darkness. She trotsaway to catch it. Possibly nine minutes later, she lopes back, barelywinded. There is the light in her cupped hands. She shows it off: lookhow it pulses. She will pass it to me. I can feel the little wind and theadamant wing against my palms. My life is almost over. I pass it back.She waves it up dramatically. We watch for a greenish spark. If thenight is clear and we can stare up for a full minute, we are guaranteedto see a satellite, a star whose name I know—there are only five—aglittering meteor, a comet, or the glint of a plane headed to the Arctic.…

Before autofiction, there was autobiographical fiction, and before autobiographical fiction there was nothing very much. There’s no whole cloth in fiction; the novelistic floor is littered with our private scraps and remnants. Invented stories are also inventories of the self: dressed facts; felt, remembered tales. When Cervantes came to write the second part—the sequel—of “Don Quixote,” he incorporated into his novel a real rival writer, Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, who had already published a knockoff “Quixote” sequel of his own. Tolstoy borrowed so much from his own life, and so directly, that he once remarked that he lacked any imagination. Kafka edited his harrowing allegory “A Hunger Artist” on his deathbed, while suffering from starvation brought on by tuberculosis. Francisco Goldman’s new novel, “Monkey Boy” (Grove Press), looks like a…

JUNE 9 - 15, 2021 Millions of years ago, in present-day Uruguay, gas bubbles became trapped in magma as it hardened to rock; over time, these cavities morphed into amethyst-quartz-lined geodes. A dazzling twelve-foot-tall example (pictured, in detail, above) greets visitors to the American Museum of Natural History’s newly redesigned Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals, a showcase of some five thousand specimens from ninety-five countries, which opens on June 12. Advance tickets to the museum, via amnh.org are required. MUSIC Tim Berne: “Broken Shadows” JAZZ A recording like “Broken Shadows” reminds us that the free-jazz revolution initiated by Ornette Coleman may have loosened the bonds of harmony and rhythm, but it didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater when it came to melody. This new album unites the…

Nero, who was enthroned in Rome in 54 A.D., at the age of sixteen, and went on to rule for nearly a decade and a half, developed a reputation for tyranny, murderous cruelty, and decadence that has survived for nearly two thousand years. According to various Roman historians, he commissioned the assassination of Agrippina the Younger—his mother and sometime lover. He sought to poison her, then to have her crushed by a falling ceiling or drowned in a self-sinking boat, before ultimately having her murder disguised as a suicide. Nero was betrothed at eleven and married at fifteen, to his adoptive stepsister, Claudia Octavia, the daughter of the emperor Claudius. At the age of twenty-four, Nero divorced her, banished her, ordered her bound with her wrists slit, and had her…

One day in June, 1990, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, I sat in the auditorium of San Francisco’s Moscone Center and watched as hundreds of activists pelted Louis W. Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, with condoms. Sullivan had been attempting to deliver the closing address at the 6th International AIDS Conference. The protesters, from the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, were there to stop him. Shouts of “shame, shame, shame” were accompanied by whistles and air horns. Like many people who were in the audience that day—I was there as a Washington Post reporter—I remember everything about the speech except what Sullivan said. Which was exactly what ACT UP wanted. The group had been formed to force a negligent government to take…

The Western tradition has never been more appealingly portrayed than in Rembrandt’s 1653 painting “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer.” Whether you stand in front of it at the Metropolitan Museum or look at it online, the painting turns you into a link in a chain that goes back three thousand years. Here you are in the twenty-first century, contemplating a painting made in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, which portrays a philosopher who lived in Athens in the fourth century B.C., looking at a poet thought to have lived in the eighth century B.C. Tradition abolishes time, making us all contemporaries. Yet the painting hints that Homer doesn’t quite belong in the same dimension of reality occupied by you, Aristotle, and Rembrandt. Aristotle is portrayed realistically in the dress…