Innholdsfortegnelse for August 9, 2021 i The New Yorker

I Think You Should Leave The second season of Tim Robinson’s zany sketch-comedy show, which premièred in 2019, landed on Netflix in early July. Robinson (formerly of “Saturday Night Live” and “Detroiters”) and his co-creator, Zach Kanin (a former “S.N.L.” writer and a New Yorker cartoonist), know how to craft an impeccable sight gag; as a performer, Robinson also makes a strange kind of music with language. He seems to calibrate each line reading to its funniest possible sound; he’ll shriek a random word in an otherwise quiet sentence—“I didn’t DO this!,” from a sketch about a cable show called “Coffin Flop,” which captures corpses falling out of shoddy caskets—or swallow words in the back of his throat like a bullfrog. “I Think You Should Leave” doesn’t have an official…

Something about a car running over a policeman and a second officer being injured. This is my assessment of a news story broadcast on the television in my father’s room at Springmoor, the retirement community where he’s spent the past three years in the assisted-living section. It is early April, three days before his ninety-eighth birthday, and Amy, Hugh, and I have just flown to Raleigh from New York. The plan is to hang out for a while, and then drive to the Sea Section, our house on Emerald Isle. Dad is in his wheelchair, dressed and groomed for our visit. Hair combed. Real shoes on his feet. A red bandanna tied around his neck “Well, hey!” he calls as we walk in, an old turtle raising his head…

Is it hyperbolic to suggest that the 747 has been more world-changing than the Internet—that the supercharged mobility of people, rather than of bits, has mattered most? Consider immigration in the decades after the Second World War, and the rich literature it produced. A world in which it was practically impossible to return to the country one had left resulted in a kind of immigration close to the idea of exile. The journey from birthplace to adopted country—the journey that V. S. Naipaul called, in “The Enigma of Arrival,” the “great movement of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth century”—took on an arrowlike terminality. Life inthe old country receded into vivid memory, while the immigrant’s daily focus had to shift to the sometimes…

WHO WAS O. HENRY? Louis Menand, in his review of the new Library of America volume of short stories by O. Henry, notes that the prolific writer once worked at a bank, and had various problems, large and small, handling money (Books, July 5th). Money is a theme in his stories, too. Indeed, in the opening line of “The Gift of the Magi,” he informs the reader that Della has only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a Christmas gift. We learn that Jim’s weekly salary has shrunk from thirty dollars to twenty, and that the weekly rental price of a furnished room is eight dollars. The story’s obsession with such particulars is a reminder of the financial pressure that O. Henry felt when it came to writing and selling…

On a windy afternoon in April, the landscape architect Kate Orff stood on the open walkway of a container crane, some eighty feet above the Red Hook Terminal, in Brooklyn, and the Buttermilk Channel, a tidal strait on the southeast side of Governors Island. Most places in New York City make it easy to avoid thinking about the rivers, canals, and ocean waters that form an aquatic thoroughfare for the global economy and surround the industrial corridors, office towers, and densely populated neighborhoods where millions of people have settled. This place is not one of them. Orff, who is forty-nine, pushed back strands of ash-brown hair that had blown loose from her ponytail, and pointed out the busy navigation channels, which, for more than two centuries, the U.S. Army Corps…

It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the…

The Cypriot sun is impatient, a woman undressedwho can’t spare the time to dress, so lightlike a vitrine holds even a storm.One day in the Old City, a pineapple rain.And I’m on my way home from the pharmacy, carrying my little bag of cures.Refuge at the café in the nameless square.Nihal brings espresso poured over ice, turns off the music.We listen to rain fall through the light until the end. White wine greening in a glass.Lion rampant in the sky. Moon reclined gorgeous in her silver shift.Polished newels. Door askew in its frame. Hot mornings. Hot apple tea, honeyed.The mountains a fist knuckled on the horizon.Dust is coming, dust is not yet here. Whenever her hands dance, I tell her how beautiful.She says there’s so much other movement I do…

When the poet Kaveh Akbar was a young child, his father taught him to recite Muslim prayers in Arabic, a language Akbar didn’t understand, and which his family spoke only during worship. Mimicking those incantatory sounds, he briefly embodied a foreign tongue. He could inhabit the lyric beauty of the words, he discovered, even without grasping their meaning. Akbar, who was born in Iran, arrived in the United States when he was two, a transition that imparted another lesson in linguistic gain and loss: while he picked up English, Farsi began to fade. In a poem called “Do You Speak Persian?,” Akbar writes, “I have beenso careless with the words I already have. //I don’t remember how to say home/in my first language, or lonely, or light.” Poetry requires the…

AUGUST 4 – 10, 2021 Robert Longo is a key figure of the Pictures Generation, an influential group of American artists who gave image-making conceptual cred starting in the late seventies. He is best known for his cinematic charcoal-on-paper works, epic in both subject matter—the eternal mysteries of the sea, in the case of “Untitled (Rumi),” from 2019, above—and scale (the magnificent hand-drawn piece is more than seven feet high). The exhibition “Robert Longo: A History of the Present” opens on Aug. 7 at Guild Hall, in East Hampton, New York. MUSIC Leon Bridges: “Gold-Digger Sound” SOUL Leon Bridges made his musical début with tender soul songs that sounded as if they had been sitting in dusty record crates for decades. His voice, all warmth and rounded edges, replicated the essence…

Lately, I’ve been starting to feel as though my friends are so much farther ahead of me in life. Every week, someone gets engaged, or announces a pregnancy, or complains of having a slimy alien parasite crawl down her throat, attach itself to her brain stem, and take over her body as part of a wide-scale invasion. Meanwhile, I’m still going on first dates! It seems like just yesterday that we were all carefree twentysomethings with entry-level jobs, kissing strangers in bars at 2 A.M. But now my friends all have responsibilities, mortgages to pay, or a planet to overrun and strip of its natural resources until Earth is a lifeless husk. I see my friends a lot more infrequently than I used to—everyone’s so busy now, with work and…

I felt some desire and I lost my centsit was expensive to feel so much I lost my sense and my money I didnot consent though it was consensual It was a con and it cost me my selfI was selfless I was trailing a scent I was moaning but not for the moneyand that’s a mistake I lost my sole take and now there’s nowhere to stake a claimI’d put a stake in his heart but I can’t O Bacchus will you dress me in grape leavesI’m back to the bar to begin again and needing a quaff of some rich stuffand some hair dye and a bewitching scent and all that is sensual and cunningwithout a cent or sense in the world and nothing in my handbag but…

They were born to the cul-de-sacs of the Arizona desert, hose-drinking boys, allowed to run loose provided they came when called, and they did, these two. James and Lenny. Obedient and clever. Garages packed with scooters, go-carts, arsenals of water guns, each machine-gun soaker more elaborate than the last. They’d outgrown the toys only yesterday, but the rift was total. Now they were sixteen and spent afternoons in the food court dreaming up pranks, or sprawled on the carpet watching sitcoms. Their aimlessness was permitted—not a mark against their future. They had been in Gifted and Talented. Lenny was funny and good at math; James was an ace mimic. Sometimes he was in the school plays. James wanted to become an actor, a theatre rat in Manhattan; Lenny wanted to…

This Is Your Mind on Plants, by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press). The plants of the title furnish three consciousness-altering drugs—opium, caffeine, and mescaline—and this thoughtful study traces their effects not only on our brains but also on our culture and history. Coffee and tea consumption in Europe may have paved the way for the Enlightenment; the peyote cactus, which produces mescaline, is central to Native American Church ceremonies that help participants process Colonial traumas. Pollan, experimenting himself, discovers that opium “lightens the existential load,” while mescaline brings about “a tidal wave of awe.” As the U.S.’s drug policies become less punitive, he argues, we should think more clearly about substances we’ve come to depend on, “both allies and poisons at once.” Islands of Abandonment, by Cal Flyn (Viking). Travelling around the…

In 2014, music fans and critics began paying close attention to a mysterious group of artists who’d started releasing tracks online. They were part of PC Music, a loose electronic-music collective that functioned more like a conceptual-art project. Led by a young, inventive producer from London named A. G. Cook, PC Music, and its affiliates, rejected a dark, murky strain of underground electronic music that was beloved at the time. Instead, they latched onto the most exuberant and absurd elements of pop, making cutesy, theatrical songs that sounded a bit like children’s music, but with an unsettling aftertaste. If mainstream pop is designed to make people feel as if they’re on common ground with all of humanity, this music made listeners feel like they were in on a very specific…