Innholdsfortegnelse for July 5, 2021 i The New Yorker

“Madonna della Vittoria,” by the Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna, must have looked imposing when it was first installed as an altarpiece in Santa Maria della Vittoria, a small chapel in the northern-Italian city of Mantua. The painting, which was commissioned by the city’s ruler, Francesco II Gonzaga, was completed in 1496, and measures more than nine feet in height. A worshipper’s eye likely lingered on its lower half—where the Virgin, seated on a marble pedestal, bestows a blessing on the kneeling, armored figure of Francesco—instead of straining to discern the intricacies of its upper half, which depicts a pergola bedecked with hanging ornaments and fruited vines. In the late eighteenth century, Napoleon’s forces looted the painting and transported it to the Louvre, where it now occupies a commanding spot in…

The proliferation of digital video has exposed abuses of power that in the past often remained hidden. It has also allowed people to watch shocking footage and make pronouncements about it on social media before knowing all the facts. Last summer, Americans were still reeling from the excruciating sight of a Minneapolis police officer slowly killing George Floyd when another violent encounter unfolded, with seemingly similar clarity. On the afternoon of Sunday, August 23rd, three police officers tried to arrest a man outside a fourplex in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A neighbor started recording on his phone when he saw the officers, who were white, scuffing with the man, who was Black. The confrontation began behind a parked S.U.V., so initially the neighbor couldn’t see everything. Then the man broke free, went…

My apology, Leffler informs me, is tone-deaf and insufficient. “But that’s O.K.,” Beekman says. “There is still time to revise.” “But not much time,” Leffler says. “It’s too late to get out in front. But you can still come abreast.” “But, of course, there are better ways to say that nowadays,” Beekman says to Leffler. “But of course, but of course,” Leffler says. Is there ever laughter in an office that isn’t at least a little nervous? “So,” I say, “as you are both my bosses, not to mention my mentors, do you have any tips on how to best approach this apology revision?” “Be less tone-deaf,” Beekman says. “Be more sufficient,” Leffler adds. I spend the evening on my apology. Near midnight, my daughter leans into the kitchen. “Still…

The story of the writer who called himself O. Henry could almost be an O. Henry story. The writer—his real name was William Sidney Porter—had a secret, and he spent most of his adult life trying to conceal it. The pseudonym was part of that effort, but Porter also avoided being photographed, rarely gave interviews, and steered clear of situations where someone might pry into his past. He was not a recluse, but he did not like to be the center of attention. People found him affable, unpretentious, and some what inscrutable. As a writer, Porter was identified with New York City, where more than a hundred of his stories are set, but he was born in the Confederacy, in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1862, and he retained, as you…

WHO WAS HOMER? Adam Kirsch, in his essay on the classicist Milman Parry’s studies of Homer, is too quick to conclude that the Iliad and the Odyssey were produced by the oral tradition rather than created by individual poets (Books, June 14th). Parry, whose wife, Marian, I interviewed in 1981, devoted his career to proving that the epics’ treasury of formulaic epithets and passages had been developed and handed down over many generations by illiterate singers. Other scholars, Parry’s contemporaries, identified structural intricacies, symmetries, and geometries in both epics that are unlikely to have occurred without writing, which came into use around 750 B.C. In their view, a gifted inheritor of that traditional material (or, more plausibly, two inheritors—one for each poem) took advantage of the possibilities that writing afforded…

Four high-profile monarchs passedon the Bible before King James agreed to publish it. Now it’s the most widely read book in the world! It takes just one divinely appointed ruler who believes in your work. Gretchen R. Kleenex got a D on a paper for her college geometric-engineering course called “The Perfect Size for a Facial Tissue—Also We Should Add Lotion.” Little Debbie worked in the back of Big Deborah’s kitchen for years, using her free time to bake cakes and cookies with the preservative runoff from the inside of the oven and the expired contents of the front-office first-aid kit. One day, Big Deborah caught her in the act and said, “You’re wasting your time. People only want fresh baked goods made by adults. Go get a real, reliable…

you ask meagain—whyputting your tiny hand onthe not yet unsheathedbud on therhododendronand I see I need to be skyI need to be soilthere are no wordsfor why that I can find fastenough, whyyou say atthe foot of the cherry’s wide blossomfallis it dead now whydid it let go, why,tossed out into what appearsto be silencewhen I saylet’s run the rain is starting—whyare we lost why didwe just leavewhere we just were why iseverythingso far behindnow as we go on I see you thinkwhen you reachme again to askwhy when I say are you coming now & you say no,I want to stay, I wantthings to stay, I donot want to come away from things—whatis this we areentering—me taking yrhand now to speed our goingas fast as we can in this…

How do you tell the truth about Hollywood, the greatest fantasy-making machine the world has ever known? One approach is to assume that the glamorous surfaces conceal something sordid, which means that exposing it will be titillating, and also sort of righteous: illusions are punctured, the rich and famous taken down a peg, and so on. Kenneth Anger’s compendium of formative celebrity scandals, “Hollywood Babylon,” first published in the United States in 1965, took that tack, as do tabloids covering Hollywood gossip. One problem with this style of revelation—in addition to its frequent misogyny and its breezy violation of privacy—is that the details are often wrong, fact checking not being a key value for the “Hollywood Babylon” school. At the other end of the spectrum, academic film scholars offer a…

JUNE 30 – JULY 6, 2021 On July 4, moma opens “Automania,” a show about the complicated legacy of the automobile, an emblem of freedom—of speed, escape, joyriding, and the open road—whose fossil-fuel emissions are a major cause of global warming. On the third floor, visitors encounter models, movies, car parts, posters, and works of art. Real vehicles are on view, too, in the exhibition proper, in the lobby, and in the sculpture garden, including a recently restored 1959 Volkswagen Type 1 sedan (pictured), better known as the Beetle. MUSIC Conclave: “Conclave” ELECTRONIC The New York groove unit Conclave, led by the vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Cesar Toribio, is steeped in Afro-Latin jazz and disco, in the vein of Osunlade and Nuyorican Soul. The band’s self-titled début album has an agreeably…

I used to keep a Post-it note hanging over my workspace with the name Esther Murphy written on it in black Sharpie. I jotted down this warning-to-self sometime around 2012, when I was inhaling Lisa Cohen’s exuberant triple biography, “All We Know,” about three queer women of ample means who cavorted through the literary and fashion circles of Paris, London, and New York in the early twentieth century. Murphy, the daughter of a leather-goods mogul (and the younger sister of Gerald Murphy, whose house in the South of France was immortalized in “Tender Is the Night”), was a brilliant talker. She held parlor rooms rapt with rollicking historical anecdotes and swaggering political soliloquies; her mind, a magpie’s nest of knowledge, connected people to ideas and ideas to sweeping philosophies. “If…

Kate Green was in bed one night when she heard somebody trying to break into her home. This was 2017. Her apartment, in the Hollywood Hills, was a well-appointed studio. Green heard footsteps, and saw a stranger peering through the full-length glass by her front door. For a moment, she was paralyzed; then she dove for cover in her closet. By the time the police arrived, the unknown intruder had disappeared. Green, who is in her mid-thirties, was the right hand to a celebrity chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant, and had a reputation for being unflappable at work. Yet, in the months that followed the intrusion, she lost her equilibrium in life. Again and again, she found herself staying out until dawn. Eventually she realized that she was avoiding going…

Everybody, by Olivia Laing (Norton). In this “book about freedom,” a novelist and critic presents an expansive exploration of topics such as sexual liberation, feminism, illness, incarceration, exile, gay and trans rights, and the nature of protest. Drawing consistently surprising corollaries from history and art, Laing vaults from subject to subject. She returns repeatedly to her own experiences (including as a nonbinary person) and to the life of the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, whose career began with groundbreaking work on bodily autonomy and sexual politics but ended in quackery, isolation, and a prison sentence. Although Laing cannot fully explain the “weird border between self and world” that fascinates her, her paths of inquiry are engrossing and illuminating. Geniuses at War, by David A. Price (Knopf). Colossus, the first digital, electronic…