Innholdsfortegnelse for August 23, 2021 i The New Yorker

In July, 2016, thousands of demonstrators gathered in Baton Rouge to protest the death of Alton Sterling, a Black man who was shot by a police officer after being pinned to the ground outside a convenience store, where he had been selling compact disks. Although the protests were largely peaceful, officers in full riot gear dispersed the crowds and made more than a hundred and fifty arrests. A coalition of advocates, including the A.C.L.U. of Louisiana, filed a lawsuit accusing the Baton Rouge Police Department of infringing on the protesters’ First Amendment rights. A year later, Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, who had servedas a legal observer during some of the protests, co-authored a report cataloguing degrading conditions at East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, a…

Dyrham Park, an English country estate nestled among steep hills seven miles north of Bath, fulfills your fantasy of what such a place should be. A house and a dovecote were recorded on the site in 1311. The deer park was enclosed during the reign of Henry VIII. The mansion that you see today is a mostly Baroque creation: long, symmetrical façades, looking east and west; terraces for taking the air; eighteenth-century yew trees, an orangery, a church, fascinating staircases, a collection of Dutch Masters. According to “The Buildings of England: Gloucestershire,” published in 1970, Dyrham Park constitutes “the perfect setting; English country house and church.” The house was a location for the movie of “The Remains of the Day.” On the second floor is the Balcony Room, which affords…

A human is not such a perfect machine.I didn’t design it for interaction particularlywith other machines—not closely—not non-stop.I made the campfire, for example, to be nature’stelevision but with a human being basicallyI was thinking of a tree, of what a tree needs.A root system, distance, light and air. Even livingyou are tearing through something made notof particles but of the relations between them.This morning, it really does seem necessaryto tell you, I made the mist lie above the contoursof the forest in the precise shape of the remainsof a poster a boy is ripping from a plywood sidingon Rue du Regard in the Sixth Arrondissement.As to the question of pain—why it hurts, whysometimes we crave it—I have here a numberof promising leads but the matter is dark, socalled because it…

Lafayette, like Betsy Ross and Johnny Appleseed, is so neatly fixed in the American imagination that it is hard to see him as a human being. Betsy sews stars, Johnny plants trees, Lafayette brings French élan to the American Revolution. He is, in the collective imagination, little more than a wooden soldier with a white plume on his cocked hat. In the original production of “Hamilton,” Daveed Diggs portrayed him affectionately, with a comically heavy French accent and an amorous manner—a hero, yes, but of the cartoon kind, a near relation of Pepé le Pew. In France, where Lafayette played an even larger historic role, he has come to be a more contentious figure. He is a kind of transposed Jerry Lewis, someone whose high reputation in one country is…

If you heard that the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park, a much missed source of pleasure in this show-starved town, had chosen to reopen the Delacorte Theatre after the winter, and summer, and second winter of our discontent with “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and thought, Huh?, you’re not alone. The play’s haters are legion. Harold Bloom called it a “tiresome exercise,” and insisted that even Shakespeare held it in contempt. The feminist argument that “Merry Wives” is a proto-screwball comedy in which the women triumph and the men are made to look like fools doesn’t entirely move me to give up my spot in the naysayers’ camp. Shakespeare’s plays are full of ingenious, witty women, and the merry wives of “Merry Wives” aren’t chief among them. Legend has…

ADMISSIONS DECISIONS Nicholas Lemann’s article on affirmative action provides marvellous historical and legal context for efforts to promote the inclusion of racial minorities in higher education in the U.S. (“The Diversity Verdict,” August 2nd). As an assistant dean at Harvard Law School, I played a large role in implementing affirmative action in admissions from the mid-nineteen-sixties to the eighties, and am well acquainted with the struggle. While I read the article, two points about affirmative-action opponents struck me. First, those who acknowledge that minorities have faced discrimination in the past but who nevertheless oppose affirmative action have never come up with reasonable alternatives that will help level the playing field. For people who have suffered from historical bigotry, simply ceasing to discriminate against them is not enough: if some participants…

The year is still the perpetual nowrefusing to escape its frame:the egg unbroken, the angles as sharp as ever. The man in the next roomis breathing. The woman, that’s me,is wondering what we will have at the end of the day. Wine or waterfrom a frozen-over lake?The line between the two blues, water and sky, you and I, is no longer as fineas it once was. I want you, the waterwould say if water could speak. Nothing is speaking. This is allthe waiting you could ever want.Waiting to know if the air will be purer tomorrow, if the grass will be greenertomorrow. Will the wildfires burnthemselves out? Will the night scene with moonlit details go on and on,as if the personified dayhad effaced herself from the calendar and left us…

First, he readied the King and the Queen. A quick pass with a Lysol wipe around their molded-plastic surfaces before returning the pieces to their proper place on the oversized chessboard. Each piece came up to his knee. Sam had never seen a hotel guest actually play chess on this huge board. He had seen guests pose for photos, though, cradling the pieces in their arms or pretending to be mid-move, faces frozen in faux contemplation. Once, Valeria politely chased after a bachelor party that had absconded with a pawn; she found it in the hallway of the North building, abandoned among all the stinking room-service trays. Sam’s own brief stint working room service had been a queasy experiment in holding his breath: collecting the tiny miserable autopsies, the fatty…

From the Streets of Shaolin, by S. H. Fernando, Jr. (Hachette). This sweeping history of the Wu-Tang Clan, the nine-man rap crew from Staten Island whose eclectic sound transformed the genre, traces the journey of its members from their childhoods in New York City housing projects to their current role as elder statesmen of American hip-hop. If the Clan’s initial success was surprising, in an early-nineties rap scene dominated by a slick, West Coast style, its longevity has been astonishing; its various artists have produced nearly a hundred albums. Fernando dutifully narrates the group’s origin story, but his real contribution lies in a careful analysis of how its mastermind, RZA, that “mystic, majestic magus from the slums,” created a dynasty. Distant Fathers, by Marina Jarre, translated from the Italian by…

AUGUST 18 – 24, 2021 On Saturday, Aug. 21, at 10 a.m., the Brooklyn Museum hosts an hour-long yoga class on its plaza stairs. (Spaces are reserved on a first-come, first-served basis; a ticket to the museum and your own yoga mat are required.) Overlooking the scene is Daniel Chester French’s “Allegorical Figure of Manhattan” (pictured), originally carved, along with its counterpart representing Brooklyn, between 1915 and 1916, by the Piccirilli brothers, for the Manhattan Bridge. MUSIC John Cage: “Number Pieces” CLASSICAL “After all these years, I’m finally writing beautiful music,” John Cage said of the forty-odd “Number Pieces”—so called because the title of each work denotes the number of players required to play it—that occupied the last six years of his life, from 1987 to 1992. Cage wields control…

Last week, as Andrew Cuomo announced that he was resigning as governor of New York, Californians prepared to begin voting on whether to replace their own governor, Gavin Newsom, in a recall election. If Newsom is ousted, he’ll be replaced by one of forty-six candidates, a list that includes the front-running challenger, Larry Elder, a conservative talk-radio host who has referred to climate change as “a crock” and a “myth”; John Cox, a Republican real-estate mogul, who has travelled around the state in a campaign bus with a Kodiak bear named Tag; and Caitlyn Jenner, who recently took a leave from the trail to film “Celebrity Big Brother” in Australia. The other day, another contender, the professional celebrity Angelyne, went to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel for dinner to strategize about…

I met the most rational person I know during my freshman year of college. Greg (not his real name) had a tech-support job in the same computer lab where I worked, and we became friends. I planned to be a creative-writing major; Greg told me that he was deciding between physics and economics. He’d choose physics if he was smart enough, and economics if he wasn’t—he thought he’d know within a few months, based on his grades. He chose economics. We roomed together, and often had differences of opinion. For some reason, I took a class on health policy, and I was appalled by the idea that hospital administrators should take costs into account when providing care. (Shouldn’t doctors alone decide what’s best for their patients?) I got worked…

At the opening of Ha Jin’s new novel, “A Song Everlasting” (Pantheon), a troupe of Chinese singers is finishing an American tour. After the final show—in New York’s huge Chinatown in Flushing—the troupe’s lead tenor, Yao Tian, is greeted by a man, Han Yabin, whom he knew in Beijing but who later left and ended up in New York. Yabin says how happy he is to see Tian. Could they go for a drink? Not without permission, as Tian knows, and so, like a schoolchild who needs a bathroom, Tian asks the troupe’s director, Meng, for leave to accept the invitation. “Meng’s heavy lidded eyes fixed on him, alarmed,” but eventually he says O.K. Off Tian goes to have what Meng, who is responsible for seeing that all his singers…

Halfway through “Malcolm & Marie,” a black-and-white Netflix drama that was shot during the pandemic, the dialogue pauses—the film consists of almost nothing but dialogue—so that viewers can listen to some music. The interlude lasts for nearly two uninterrupted minutes while Marie, played by Zendaya, sinks sorrowfully into a bathtub, and Malcolm, played by John David Washington, refills his glass of Scotch and prepares for their nightlong argument to resume. Most of the “Malcolm & Marie” soundtrack was a familiar combination of soulful older songs, by singers like Roberta Flack and James Brown, and soulful newer ones. But the music in this interlude was harder to place. An electric bass sketched out a couple of chords, and a breathy saxophone added a few restrained lines of melody—the horn sounded like…