Innholdsfortegnelse for June 21, 2021 i The New Yorker

When Victoria Bradley was in fifth grade, she started asking her mother, Bernita, to homeschool her. Bernita wasn’t sure where the idea came from—they never saw homeschooling on TV. But something always seemed to be going wrong at school for Victoria. In second grade, a teacher lost track of her during parent pickup, and she wandered off school grounds. Bernita went to see the principal, intent on getting the teacher fired. The principal asked if she would consider taking an AmeriCorps position at the school. Bernita cut back her hours at the hair salon she owned and started doing community outreach, assisting teachers and hosting parent meetings. In 2011, Bernita moved her family—which also included her older son, Carlos—to Detroit’s East English neighborhood, where she bought a three-story, yellow brick…

For select Chinese skiers and snowboarders, there are WeChat groups whose names include the phrase Gan Dengyan: “Look on in Despair.” Despair is not open to everybody. In order to join, applicants submit their name, place of residence, and proper documentation in the form of an X-ray or other medical report. Despite the strict rules, a handful of interlopers have successfully penetrated Despair and returned with screenshots. In January, 2020, somebody called Ruirui recorded images from a WeChat group called Look on in Despair While Healing During the 2018-2020 Winter Season. Originally, this group had been dedicated to 2018-19, but the season of Despair was extended, because many people had yet to recover from their skiing injuries. Ruirui’s screenshots showed a total of three hundred and fifty-five members, including Feng…

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.—Walter Pater The last time George and the three women met, it was on a warm October afternoon in that same small Greek restaurant, with bluish fluorescent lights overhead, in Stamford, Connecticut. Their knees were crowded under the tablecloth, and inadvertently rubbed one against another. Though they all wore glasses (Ruby was seriously myopic), even so it was difficult to read the menu. “Nice,” George said. “Gives the place the feel of a modest bordello.” And only Evangeline laughed; Olive made a face, and Ruby sighed in disgust, but it was merely to tease. Not that it escaped him that behind the ribbing was an old and avid jealousy; they adored what they could not…

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, by John Tresch (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The book that Edgar Allan Poe considered his crowning achievement, “Eureka,” was a treatise on the universe’s origin and makeup. A wild, poetic journey through space and time published the year before he died, it muses on gravity, consciousness, and the dispersal of stars. It was also, as this biographical study shows, at the vanguard of scientific thought. Poe was known for his fiction and poetry, but he’d spent decades reporting on the latest developments in science, and some of his theories anticipated the new physics, including the “prophetic” observation that “Space and Duration are one.” Tresch draws alluring connections between Poe’s cosmological vision and his fiction, noting the “staggering unity of purpose” that defined both.…

RETHINKING ROBO-PETS Katie Engelhart, in her article on robotic aids for homebound elderly people, describes how petlike robots, which communicate with their owners and are designed to get to know them using machine learning, are alleviating feelings of loneliness (“Home and Alone,” May 31st). Mechanical cats and dogs are certainly a sensible innovation during the loneliness epidemic, which has become a costly catastrophe. But, while it’s clear that robot pets can provide some level of comfort, the commercial interests that stand to profit from A.I. pets may divert attention from solutions that are more humane, if more complex to implement. We should not overlook less techy remedies for loneliness, which include sharing one’s housing with other people. There are millions of spare bedrooms in the United States, many of them…

The wind is loud on the water todayI think about him drowning I walk to the store for a bottleof wine I think about him drowning I read to Rosie before napin the rocker where he’s drowning I make her a peanut-butter sandwichcut in triangles think about him drowning I rinse her little blue plate and spoonin cool water where he’s drowning I get up to pee in the nightwith the light off and he’s drowning An old woman throws crusts to gullsin their descent I see him drowning Wondering if there’s a word for how birdsall move together drowning Thinking about my father thinking about himdrowning I think about him drowning…

I would’ve stabbed the man’s handhad he not jerked it away—this is what I usually saytoward the end of the story. The man had pried back the right vinyl side panelof my living-room window’s A.C. unit, rippedthe accordion-style flap from its mounting track,and began palming the wall insidemy first-floor apartment. My ex had left at the beginning of summer and Nataliawouldn’t move in until spring, so I lived alonethat June in Richmond, in the back bottom suiteof a shoebox-shaped fourplexset perpendicular to the street. In the story I’ve told for almost twenty years,I’m a junior in college towelling my wet hairas I walk from my bathroom through the hall,headed to my bedroom, at two in the morning.I notice a flicker of motion from the living- room window: a human handflopping,…

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; as ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. MUSIC Ka Baird EXPERIMENTAL Last spring, as singers flocked online to perform acoustic songs from lockdown, Ka Baird premièred a different kind of quarantine concert. In closeup, Baird appeared to be trapped in a wind tunnel, holding a flute against the gale. As anxious electronic sounds built, Baird raised the flute to play, but few notes came out; the artist turned to a microphone to sing, but words failed. Rooted in the avant-garde, Baird’s loopy nightmare, hatched as a Kraftwerk tribute, seemed more attuned to the…

It was the first day of June, and Rose Byrne, the Australian actress, had a voluminous houndstooth scarf wrapped around her neck. “It’s not New York winter, but it’s actually quite cold here,” she said, speaking over Zoom. “I had to go to Uniqlo and buy a big puffer.” (In her mellifluous accent, the word sounded more like “puffah.”) Byrne, who is usually based in Brooklyn, was in Sydney, where she grew up, and where she had arrived some weeks earlier, along with her partner, the American actor Bobby Cannavale, and the couple’s two young boys. They had spent a fortnight observing Australia’s ultra-strict quarantine edicts. (“Hotel, police, the whole thing. That’s why Australia has been so incredibly successful in dealing with COVID,”Byrne said.) She had just done “preschool drop-off…

The singer and composer Josquin Desprez traversed his time like a diffident ghost, glimpsed here and there amid the splendor of the Renaissance. He is thought to have been born around 1450 in what is now western Belgium, the son of a policeman who was once jailed for using excessive force. In 1466, a boy named Gossequin completed a stint as a choirboy in the city of Cambrai. A decade later, the singer Jusquinus de Pratis turned up at the court of René of Anjou, in Aix. In the fourteen-eighties, in Milan, Judocus Despres was in the service of the House of Sforza, which also employed Leonardo da Vinci. At the end of the decade, Judo. de Prez joined the musical staff at the Vatican, remaining there into the reign…

Omar Sy was sure he saw Jesus. He had just dropped his children off at school and was driving home on Sunset Boulevard when he spotted a man with flowing hair and a long beard, dressed in a white toga. “He was walking barefoot in the street, and I’m staring at him, slowing down to get a better look. I’m asking myself, ‘Am I hallucinating, or what?’” Sy recalled. No one else seemed to notice. “And right next to him there’s a girl marching along with her Starbucks, and then, on the other side, a guy doing his jogging, and some other dudes washing their car. I was the only one looking.” Sy, who was born and raised in France, had only recently arrived in Los Angeles, and, gawking at…

The International Seabed Authority is headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica, in a building that looks a bit like a prison and a bit like a Holiday Inn. The I.S.A., which has been described as “chronically overlooked” and is so obscure that even many Jamaicans don’t know it exists, has jurisdiction over roughly half the globe. Under international law, countries control the waters within two hundred miles of their shores. Beyond that, the oceans and all they contain are considered “the common heritage of mankind.” This realm, which encompasses nearly a hundred million square miles of seafloor, is referred to in I.S.A.-speak simply as the Area. Scattered across the Area are great riches. Mostly, these take the shape of lumps that resemble blackened potatoes. The lumps, known formally as polymetallic nodules, consist…

On paper, “Kevin Can F**K Himself,” a new meta-series on AMC, is a tempting stylistic cocktail—one part Jekyll, one part Hyde, garnished with a zesty feminist twist. Onscreen, it’s a bizarro centaur with a horse’s head and a man’s hairy ass: the concept is there, but the assembly is all wrong. Annie Murphy plays Allison McRoberts, a standard-issue sitcom wife living a multi-cam sitcom life in Worcester, Massachusetts, with her dopey slob of a husband, Kevin (Eric Petersen). For ten years of marriage, Allison has tolerated Kevin’s antics, which tend to involve guzzling booze, worshipping the Patriots, and evading all adult responsibility, but she’s finally had enough of the long-suffering shtick. She begins to dream of escape—stabbing Kevin in the jugular with a broken beer mug is one happy fantasy—and,…