Innholdsfortegnelse for July 26, 2021 i The New Yorker

David Makes Man This remarkably humane melodrama, created by Tarell Alvin McCraney (who co-wrote “Moonlight”), débuted on OWN, in 2019; its second season premièred in June. In Season 1, Akili McDowell gives a groundbreaking performance as David, a fourteen-year-old Black boy who lives with his doting mother, Gloria (Alana Arenas), a recovering addict, in a faded-pink housing project in Miami-Dade County, while attending a prim middle school for gifted students. Meanwhile, one of David’s neighbors, Mx. Elijah, played by Travis Coles, who is nonbinary, serves as a nurturer to the community. The first season is a surreal exploration of found family; the first three episodes of Season 2, which jumps a couple of decades into the future, denature much of what made Season 1 a non-normative surprise. The dialogue, which…

In 2017, a German man who goes by the name Marco came across an article in a Berlin newspaper with a photograph of a professor he recognized from childhood. The first thing he noticed was the man’s lips. They were thin, almost nonexistent, a trait that Marco had always found repellent. He was surprised to read that the professor, Helmut Kentler, had been one of the most influential sexologists in Germany. The article described a new research report that had investigated what was called the “Kentler experiment.” Beginning in the late sixties, Kentler had placed neglected children in foster homes run by pedophiles. The experiment was authorized and financially supported by the Berlin Senate. In a report submitted to the Senate, in 1988, Kentler had described it as a “complete…

Carney took the long way to Nightbirds. This first hot spell of the year was a rehearsal for the summer to come. Everyone a bit rusty, but it was coming back—they took their places. On the corner, two white cops re-capped the fire hydrant, cursing. Kids had been running in and out of the spray for days. Threadbare blankets lined fire escapes. The stoops bustled with men in undershirts drinking beer and jiving over the noise from transistor radios, the d.j.s piping up between songs like friends with bad advice. Anything to delay the return to sweltering rooms, the busted sinks and clotted flypaper, the accumulated reminders of your place in the order. Unseen on the rooftops, the denizens of tar beaches pointed to the lights of bridges and planes.…

The dominant tenor of contemporary American politics would seem to be mistrust. Trumpism is its purest expression, impermeable even to the humiliation of an electoral rebuke; the majority of Trump supporters still doubt the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory. Diehards in Arizona are, more than half a year after the election, searching fruitlessly for bamboo fibres on ballots to prove that they were flown in from Asia. Conservative news outlets remain committed to the lucrative business of constructing hermetically sealed echo chambers. Although the forces of animosity, resentment, and paranoia are asymmetrically distributed, they are hardly the exclusive province of one political faction. Walk the streets of Portland, Oregon, and you will see evidence of another legitimacy crisis. Not long ago, outside the Red House, the site of a…

Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Innocence,” which had its première at the Aix-en-Provence Festival on July 3rd, contains one of the most unnerving scenes I’ve witnessed at a theatre. About forty minutes into the piece, in a scene marked “IT,” the chorus chants the phrase “When it happened” in staggered rhythm, with low piano and double-basses punching up each syllable. A frame drum raps out sixteenth notes in rapid-fire bursts, and two trumpets let loose a series of “rips”—quick, shrieking upward glissandos. Then the orchestral mayhem cuts off abruptly; sopranos oscillate queasily between the notes A-flat and G; and the brutalrhythm resumes in the percussion. The terror is made explicit onstage, as a high-school student stumbles through a door, his arms covered in blood. A shooter, a fellow-student, is laying siege to…

PLOT POINTS As someone who makes charts for a living, I agree with Hannah Fry that data visualization is an important tool for solving problems (A Critic at Large, June 21st). Fry uses the circumstances surrounding the explosion of the Challenger, when crucial data were poorly presented to decision-makers, as evidence of the explanatory power of charts. But the notion that proper data visualization “would have shown the truth at a glance” and prevented the Challenger’s explosion ignores a difficulty that has been noted by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, of Google Brain: such a conclusion is clear only in hindsight. Ahead of the Challenger’s launch, analysts could have made hundreds of charts about variables associated with O-rings without knowing which of them might highlight a potentially fatal design flaw.…

In May, on the eve of Orthodox Easter, when the Russian politician Lyubov Sobol normally would have been at an all-night church service, she was in her four-hundred-square-foot apartment in Moscow talking to me. A court order required Sobol to remain at home every night from 8 P.M. to 6 A.M.; she was also banned from using the Internet or the telephone. She had received a suspended sentence in one case and was awaiting trial in another, on charges stemming from her work with the opposition leader Alexey Navalny. For now, Sobol is the only one of the half-dozen people who run Navalny’s projects who is neither under arrest nor living in exile. Navalny is in a prison colony a couple of hours east of Moscow, ostensibly for failing to…

Pale silk spilling from a tortoise shell clip,crow-black sleeve reaching for the overhead rack—and there we are, a lifetime agoon Pierrepont Street, caramel hair gold leaf on yourblack coat, the river smell seaweed and tarmac,the curb wet after rain and all of us soakedto the bone, the children singing fa so la.In the station, the train’s headlighta spirit lamp, a silver brooch of stalactites, the carthe long boat over the black wateran oar splitting the Lagoon. Hot tea. Archangelsk. The splinteredsnowbound road. After all these yearsI’ve forgotten how to write to you.And that red smear on your hand? Lily pollen, the handkerchiefpetals white in the station’santhracite air. Call me when you get there, you said. All right then—I’m doing as you asked, and callingacross the pleated water, from this place…

It isn’t the dogs, their blacksAnd whites, nor the undercurrentGreen seaweed the rocksGlisten with, at first light,Nor the headlong, uninterruptedFlight of this bald eagleThat has come, like wind,Topping the branches—norAlong the estuary the riptideWavering, like terra-cotta,Refractory, floating, like smallMillings from the cast-Iron sun, abandoned—As on the highlands of an oldPastoral. From this lateIn summer, I can feelThe wind broken, orPlowed, over opened ground,Over tide-furrowsRooted but half a day—Like branchings of wild,Pink-topped thistle—into the sea.Here, the sand topples into acresUnderfoot, marshes lathedOver with mist. SomethingAbout its whirls, or whorls,Worries how I understandHow I used to liveWith an ear to the air,A weather eye on the farSpine of the horizon,Indifferent to whateverSky lifted over theWoods inside the cloud-Flotsam—though sometimesWhen I stopped swirlingAway from who I wasBecoming, I’d look upward.There, the outcrop across…

All That She Carried, by Tiya Miles (Random House). This powerful history of women and slavery revolves around a nineteenth-century cotton sack found at a flea market in 2007, now on view at the Smithsonian. An enslaved woman named Rose gave it to her daughter Ashley when she was sold and they were separated. As Miles tries to add to this information, embroidered on the sack by Ashley’s granddaughter, she finds that reconstructing marginalized histories “requires an attentiveness to absence as well as presence.” She uses the item and its contents—a tattered dress, a handful of pecans, and a braid of hair—to explore the lives of Black women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and her meticulous research ultimately reveals the probable origins of the keepsake’s former owners. Upper Bohemia,…

What is it, exactly, about Wallace Shawn’s voice? His vocal presence keeps you attentive and improbably charmed, even when the leading men of his plays—the writer-actor often portrays them himself—are at their piggish and sociopathic worst. You detest these guys, but you also sort of get them. Gideon Media has released audio versions of two of Shawn’s previously produced plays, “The Designated Mourner” (1996) and “Grasses of a Thousand Colors” (2009). These twin speculative catastrophes are presented in podcast form, six episodes each, placing Shawn’s voice (he plays the lead in both) directly in his listeners’ ears, which helps clarify its weird, wavering power. When a character Shawn is playing is confused or having fun, the actor goes for high, whimsical, nasal rides of near-falsetto. His middle voice—the one he…

JULY 21 – 27, 2021 The opulent sculpture pictured here sharing a bench with a child on the High Line is “Stand Inside Your Love,” made by the artist and performer Raúl de Nieves for “The Musical Brain,” a surprise-packed group exhibition installed throughout the park until March, 2022. (De Nieves’s piece is situated near Hudson Yards.) The work of this Brooklyn-based artist reflects both his longtime interest in costumes—he learned how to sew as a boy in Michoacán, Mexico—and his involvement in New York City’s club scene. MUSIC “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” OPERA Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” is a prototypical bel-canto comedy—lean, farcical, sparkling—with a breathless pace that suits small, agile voices. Will Crutchfield’s company, Teatro Nuovo, promises a historically informed rendition, with larger voices that can nonetheless…

“The crows have left,” Ishmael Reed said, explaining the chorus of songbirds. It was a clear spring day in Oakland, California, and I had just sat down with Reed, his wife, Carla Blank, and their daughter Tennessee in the family’s back yard. The eighty-three-year-old writer looked every inch “Uncle Ish,” as he’s known on AOL: sunglasses, New Balances, a Nike windbreaker, and an athletic skullcap covering his halo of dandelion-seed white hair. He described his war against the neighborhood crows with mischievous satisfaction, as though it were one of his many skirmishes with the New York literary establishment. “They had a sentinel on the telephone wire,” he said, and were chasing away the other birds. But Reed learned to signal with a crow whistle—three caws for a predator, four for…

Have you ever heard of a Norwegian artist named Nikolai Astrup, a younger contemporary of Edvard Munch? If so, you’re either a rare bird or Norwegian. Astrup is new to me—and I’m of Norwegian descent, with ancestral roots in much the same rugged, sparsely populated, preposterously scenic western region of the country where Astrup, who was born in 1880, spent nearly his entire life. (There’s a farming community called Skjeldal.) An enchanting Astrup exhibition at the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, startled me with densely composed, brilliantly colored paintings and wizardly woodcuts, mostly landscapes of mountains, forests, bodies of water, humble farm buildings, and gardens (among other things, the artist was a passionate amateur horticulturalist), with occasional inklings of mysticism relating to native folklore. A receding row of grain…

Anthony Comstock may be the only man in American history whose lobbying efforts yielded not only the exact federal law he wanted but the privilege of enforcing it to his liking for four decades. Given that Comstock never held elected office and that the highest appointed position he occupied in government was special agent of the Post Office, this was an extraordinary achievement—and a reminder of the ways that zealots have sometimes slipped past the sentries of American democracy to create a reality that the rest of us must live in. Comstock was an anti-vice crusader who worried about many of the things that Americans of a similar moral and religious cast worried about in the late nineteenth century: the rise of the so-called sporting press, which specialized in randy…