Innholdsfortegnelse for August 16, 2021 i The New Yorker

Elizabeth Kolbert (“The Lost Canyon,” p. 40), a staff writer, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for “The Sixth Extinction.” Her latest book is “Under a White Sky.” Rumaan Alam (“Mirror Writing,” p. 34) has written three novels, including “Leave the World Behind.” Rivka Galchen (“The Youthful Universe,” p. 28) published “Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch” in June. hurmat kazmi (Fiction, p. 58), a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, divides their time between Iowa City, where they teach, and Karachi, Pakistan. They are working on a book of short stories. Roz Chast (Cover), a New Yorker cartoonist, most recently published, with Patricia Marx, “You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time.” Michael Longley (Poem, p. 65) is the author of many poetry collections, including…

If you take the “Three Amigos” formula, fast-forward forty years, swap out Chevy Chase for Selena Gomez, and transplant it to a ritzy Upper West Side apartment building, you have the kooky new Hulu comedy series “Only Murders in the Building” (Aug. 31). Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Gomez play neighbors in the musty Arconia (a fictional cross between the Ansonia and the Dakota) who, after a fellow-tenant turns up dead, form a vigilante Scooby squad—and record the whole thing for a podcast. The show digs into a peculiar slice of Zabar’s-adjacent, persnickety New York (with cheeky cameos from Tina Fey, Nathan Lane, and Jayne Houdyshell), and although it can teeter into the wackadoo, it’s an oddly touching tale of intergenerational scheming. For a trip to outer space, there’s “Foundation” (débuting…

Some prime directors of modern classics have new films en route, starting with Paul Schrader, whose gallery of obsessives expands to include poker players in “The Card Counter” (Sept. 10). It stars Oscar Isaac as a deceptive gambler who’s haunted by his criminal past and Tiffany Haddish as the head of a ring of cheaters; Willem Dafoe and Tye Sheridan co-star. Clint Eastwood, who’s ninety-one, directed and stars in the neo-Western “Cry Macho” (Sept. 17), set in the nineteen-seventies. He plays a former rodeo star who’s hired to get a five-year-old (Eduardo Minett) back to his family in Mexico; the supporting cast includes Dwight Yoakam and Fernanda Urrejola. In “The French Dispatch” (Oct. 22), Wes Anderson’s grandly stylized comedic homage to The New Yorker, Bill Murray plays the founding…

Andrew Cuomo’s downfall, which at press time could best be described as either ongoing or imminent, has been both gradual and swift, at once predictable and shocking. During his decades in politics, and three terms as governor, he has banked enough ill will, among enemies and erstwhile allies, to sink a political career a dozen times over, and yet he has also seemed (or been said) to have a mastery of the mechanics of power and a knack for self-advancement and self-preservation. The skills that have helped him rise and thrive are the ones that have made him widely feared and despised. The vices occlude the virtues. Detractors may find it bittersweet that Cuomo’s comeuppance results from personal sins instead of political ones—such as his poor stewardship of mass transit…

Few things are purer or more open than the heart of a New York University freshman, just transplanted from his family home to the city. This was the case for the actor Simon Helberg when he entered N.Y.U., to study drama. “I remember going up the escalator in Tower Records. Radiohead’s ‘OK Computer’ had just come out, and ‘Karma Police’ was playing,” he recalled the other day, in the West Village. “And I was thinking, I’m in Heaven! This is New York!” He laughed. “I probably said this to myself five times a day, and nothing could have been further from what New York was.” Helberg, who is forty, is slight and elfin, with a jokey, engagingly nervous manner. He is best known for playing the dorky, bowl-cut-wearing aerospace engineer…

Naturally, “Ted Lasso,” the picture of a Midwestern gentleman, introduces the lady first. In the opening scene of the series, which premièred last year on Apple TV+, Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) gazes at a Hockney on the wall of her new skyrise office, oblivious of the activity taking place on the soccer field below. Rebecca has recently become the owner of AFC Richmond, an English Premier League soccer club, which she received in a divorce settlement from her cheating husband. The plot is set off by Rebecca’s convoluted act of sabotage: she recruits the small-time American-football coach Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) to lead Richmond, in the hope that he will steer the team—her ex-husband’s second-favorite plaything—to failure. Ted, who is from Kansas, has never been to England, and knows nothing…

ACROSS 1 Performed at a jazz club, say 7 Voice disapproval of 13 Agcy. with the slogan “Building peace in the minds of men and women” 14 Merchant of music? 15 Common wine-label word 16 1957 Marlon Brando film, for which Miyoshi Umeki won a best-supporting-actress Oscar 17 Hi-___ audio player 18 “An ___” (1941 O’Keeffe pastel) 20 Ombré expert 21 Hammock breaks 23 Hairless, now 24 Parisian demonstrative 25 Half brother of Ishmael 27 Former Bolivian President Morales 28 Album between “Thriller” and “Dangerous” 29 Accepting quarters, for short 31 Some emo-influenced TikTokers 33 Forthcoming TV reboot starring Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw 38 Absolute 39 She danced to get a head 40 “Don’t think so!” 41 “Read Across America” org. 43 What type-A types rarely do 44…

In 2008, the American Conceptualist Adam Pendleton, then in his mid-twenties, conceived “Black Dada,” a poetic manifesto of sorts, about avant-gardism, abstraction, and civil rights. In 2015, Pendleton planted a flag for Black Lives Matter at the Venice Biennale. In the ambitious installation “Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?,” the artist fills moma’s five-story atrium with paintings, drawings, and textiles, augmented with sound and moving images. (Opens Sept. 18.) Jasper Johns is arguably the most revered American painter alive. He may also be the most elusive. What do his iconic targets, flags, numbers, maps, and, more recently, hat-wearing skeletons mean? Don’t ask Johns—he’s been silent on the subject throughout his nearly seven-decade career. The Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art join forces for the concurrent, two-part retrospective “JasperJohns: Mind/Mirror”—an homage…

Fall schedules may be thinner than usual, but the fact that they contain live, indoor, and in-person events engenders a hopefulness that was missing just a few months ago. The New York Philharmonic recounts the first year and a half of the pandemic in its season-opening concert,  “From Silence to Celebration,” at Alice Tully Hall, Sept. 17-19. (David Geffen Hall is closed for renovations.) The program traces an arc from Anna Clyne’s heart-tugging “Within Her Arms” and Aaron Copland’s dignified “Quiet City” to George Walker’s “Antifonys” and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, in which the solo piano gleams and trills as it emerges from the shadows. The Metropolitan Opera stages a work by a Black composer for the first time in its history: the baritone Will Liverman stars in Terence Blanchard’s…

For some city dwellers, Rockaway Peninsula, in Queens, is exactly the opposite of its eponymous Ramones song (“It’s not hard, not far to reach/We can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach”); rather, it is so hard and so far to reach that it’s merely a composite of faraway stories. There’s the one, from back in the nineteen-forties, of its middle-class resort heyday, and the one of sagging bungalows and drug-infested public housing under Robert Moses. Fast-forward to the past decade and there’s Hurricane Sandy, and the ravages of a once-in-a-century pandemic. Terence Tubridy—who grew up in the Rockaways and is a partner at Margie’s, the flagship restaurant of the recently opened Rockaway Hotel—told me that, like his birthplace, his grandmother, after whom the restaurant is named, was a survivor. An…

The most enduring image from Bobby Valentine’s six full seasons managing the Mets might be the time, in 1999, he was ejected from a game by an umpire and then sneaked back into the dugout incognito, wearing dark glasses and an eye-black mustache. But on a recent afternoon, in his home town of Stamford, Connecticut, Valentine revelled in being recognized. Passersby on Main Street waved, wished him luck, stopped to chat. He greeted a parking-enforcement agent sticking a ticket on the windshield of an S.U.V. “Good to see you!” the officer said. “Keep those taxes coming!” Valentine replied. Both laughed. Valentine was en route to a local park for a party for his seventy-first birthday, which doubled as the unofficial kickoff for his campaign to become Stamford’s mayor. The…

Next month, the James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to take a slow boat from Los Angeles, spend a few days traversing the Panama Canal, and arrive at a spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The telescope will have been twenty-five years and ten billion dollars in the making. Thousands of scientists and engineers from fourteen countries will have worked on it. It could have flown, sure, but it’s a tight squeeze—plus the telescope weighs seven tons, and Kourou’s airfield is connected to its spaceport by seven bridges not built to endure such a load. The telescope will be put into Ariane 5, a European rocket named for a mythical princess who helped a man she loved defeat the Minotaur and escape a maze. Ariane 5 will carry the telescope some…

For months, dance has been making its cautious return, usually outdoors, in small-scale works, but nothing can compare with the rush of seeing a stage full of dancers, their arms and legs radiating energy and precision. New York City Ballet’s opening-night program this fall closes with just such a spectacle—George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” a grand display for fifty dancers, dressed in black and white, set to youthful Bizet. If you’re in need of a burst of joy, here it is. The season (Sept. 21-Oct. 17) also offers new works, farewells (for Maria Kowroski, Lauren Lovette, Abi Stafford, and Ask la Cour), and Balanchine’s razor-sharp modernist masterpiece “Agon,” which for many has come to define the company style. The Joyce Theatre is back in the business of presenting companies from…

Whether the Olympic Games would, could, and, above all, should take place this year was a problem that preoccupied everyone from virologists to heptathletes. The emergence of COVID-19 prevented Tokyo from hosting the Games in 2020. A year on, with the virus continuing to spread, even the host nation was unconvinced. According to a poll conducted in May, eighty-three per cent of the Japanese public believed that the Olympics should not go ahead, and enthusiasm in the wider world had barely progressed beyond the featherweight. With so many fears at large, how could we be expected to worry about rhythmic gymnastics? Or dressage, which is rhythmic gymnastics plus horses? Who cares about men’s badminton? The answer to that last question turned out to be Viktor Axelsen, the Dane who dethroned…

The other day, in a woodworking studio above Santee Alley, a flea market in downtown Los Angeles, C. C. Boyce took a succulent from a row on her windowsill and placed it in a handmade wooden urn—a Planturn. Next to it sat a U.S.P.S. box stamped with a bright-orange sticker that read “CREMATED REMAINS,” sent from a funeral home. “This is the box that customers tell me they have, like, under their bed, waiting,” Boyce said. Unlike the ancient urns that Keats reflected on, Boyce’s wooden vessels are “modern and minimal, they’re reminiscent of L.A. mid-century,” she said. And, besides holding human remains, they double as planters. “I recommend succulents, cacti, and air plants, because they don’t need much care to stay alive”—allaying the fear of letting a plant expire…

FROM: The Metropolitan Museum TO: Seth Reiss SUBJECT: Your Membership Expires Soon Dear Mr. Reiss: Members count. You help us bring life to art, and art to lives. Thank you. Your membership expires at the end of September. Please take this moment to renew with Early Views by making a membership gift of $80. You will also receive two complimentary guest passes. Thank you for being part of what makes the Met extraordinary. FROM: The Metropolitan Museum TO: Seth Reiss SUBJECT: Your Membership Expires Soon Dear Mr. Reiss: Perhaps you didn’t get our e-mail? Anyway, your membership expires at the end of September, the 28th, to be exact. Just saying, if you do not renew your membership, you will no longer be helping us bring life to art and art…

Wind back to the opening of Leos Carax’s first feature, “Boy Meets Girl” (1984), and you find a woman who has just split from her lover, Henri, and taken their young daughter with her. Fast-forward to Carax’s new movie, “Annette,” and you find Henry McHenry (Adam Driver), who at one point, sundered from his lover, Ann Defrasnoux (Marion Cotillard), is left with their young daughter. From “The Night Is Young” (1986), “The Lovers on the Bridge” (1991), and “Pola X” (1999) to “Annette,” Carax has stuck to his story: boy meets girl, and the meeting sends them down into the depths. Plus ça change. What distinguishes this latest Carax adventure is that it’s a musical. Everybody joins in: major characters, midwives, theatre audiences, and cops. The lyrics, the songs, and,…