Innholdsfortegnelse for August 30, 2021 i The New Yorker

In the nineties, Jeffrey D. Grant had a law firm in Westchester County, a seat on the local school board, and an ownership stake in a bistro called, if you’ll forgive the irony, the Good Life. He was in his early forties, garrulous and rotund, and he gloried in his capacity to consume. Each year, he took his wife and daughters on half a dozen “shopping vacations,” though they sometimes neglected to open the bags between trips. Grant had developed an early appreciation for personal displays of wealth and power. Born in 1956, the son of a marketing executive, he grew up on Long Island, graduated from SUNY Brockport, and worked his way through New York Law School as a shoe salesman. By then, his parents had divorced, and his…

A gain she found herself spending her precious morning writing time pacing her lovable sty of a kitchen making no progress at all. Why was she holding a can opener? Hmm. That could be something. “The Trusty Little Opener.” Gerard the Can Opener was a dreamer. He wanted to open BIG things. BIGGER things. The biggest things! But all he ever got to open was, uh, beans? Corn? Tuna? You had to give him something essential to open, to save the day. Medicine? Heart medicine? You did not open heart medicine with a can opener. Tomato paste? Some beloved person in the household really longed for spaghetti? Old Italian gal. Friend to all. On her last legs. The spaghetti brought her back to Florence or whatever? But the modern, high-tech…

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, settlement of America’s western frontier generally reached no farther than the Great Plains. The verdant land that Spanish conquistadors called Alta California had been claimed by Spain and then by Mexico, after it secured its independence, in 1821. In 1844, James K. Polk won the Presidency as a proponent of America’s “manifest destiny,” the belief that it was God’s will for the United States to extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, and soon took the country into a war with Mexico. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, Mexico ceded California to the United States, along with the vast expanse of land that today comprises Nevada, parts of Arizona, and New Mexico. California was sparsely populated and almost wholly separate…

In the essay “Street Haunting,” published in 1927, Virginia Woolf describes nighttime walks through London as a kind of escape from the self. A city dweller, drawn to the “irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow,” takes to the street to join the “vast republican army of anonymous trampers.” Woolf goes on, “The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughness a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.” For Woolf, this is a matter not merely of voyeurism but of empathy: the street-haunter cherishes xthe “illusion,” nourished by rambling, “that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes…

QUEENS OF THE BOARD Louisa Thomas’s piece on the chess champion Hou Yifan highlights the unending comparison between female and male intelligence (“Queenside,” August 2nd). From my perspective as a therapist in training, it seems that the obstacles that female chess players confront have much to do with the weight of a psychological phenomenon called “stereotype threat”—a situational predicament in which people feel themselves to be at risk of conforming to negative stereotypes of their social group. Studies have shown that stereotype-threat conditions, such as a standardized test of one’s intellectual ability, can result in measurable deficits in performance. In the presence of the limiting notions—expressed by both female chess players and their male competitors—about women’s “physical endurance” and their “nature,” it is not surprising that female players may begin…

When Jesse Armstrong, the writer and creator of the HBO series “Succession,” arrived on set at Amerigo Vespucci Airport, in Florence, one morning in June, he was faced with an extravagant decision. The scene to be shot was from the first episode of Season 3, in which various members of the Roy family—the dysfunctional media dynasty whose power struggles the show acidly chronicles—have just disembarked from the yacht on which, in the Season 2 finale, they bobbed in gilded captivity. Two planes had been positioned together on the tarmac: a Boeing 737, rented at a price of more than a hundred thousand dollars, and a smaller Falcon business jet. Tracks had been laid for a dolly shot. The temperature was already climbing into the eighties, and a crew of more…

I was just beginningto wonder about my own lifeand now I have to return to itregardless of the weatheror how close I am to love.Doesn’t it bother you sometimeswhat living is, what the day has turned into?So many screens and meetingsand things to be late for.Everyone truly deservesa flute of champagnefor having made it this far!Though it’s such a disasterto drink on a Monday.To imagine who you would beif you hadn’t crossed the streetor married, if you hadn’tagreed to the job or the moneyor how time just keeps going—whoever agreed to thathas clearly not seenthe beginning of summeror been to a partyor let themselves floatin the middle of a bookwhere for however brieflyit’s possible to stay longer thanyou should. Unfortunatelyfor me and you, we havethe rest of it to get…

The legend of Simone de Beauvoir—of how an obedient Catholic schoolgirl cast off her rigid, patriarchal upbringing to become the high priestess of existential feminism—is often narrated as a love story. Her biographers trace her escape from the bourgeois Parisian milieu into which she was born, in 1908, first to the Sorbonne and then to the École Normale Supérieure. There, among the “graceless faces” of the agrégation candidates of 1929, she spied Jean-Paul Sartre, twenty-four years old and—as she rhapsodized in “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter” (1958), the first of four autobiographical volumes—“still young enough to feel emotional about his future whenever he heard a saxophone playing after his third martini.” Together, she and her “Playboy,” her “Leprechaun,” as she called him, chased life’s pleasures up the steps of Boulevard…

The ninety-four-year-old Swedish conductor Herbert Blomstedt has achieved a longevity that is almost unprecedented in his profession. Various conductors have remained active past the age of ninety—Leopold Stokowski made it to ninety-five—but no nonagenarian has sustained a schedule anything like Blomstedt’s. Earlier this month, he spent nearly two weeks at Tanglewood, working with the Boston Symphony and with students from the Tanglewood Music Center. At the end of the summer, he will take the Vienna Philharmonic on an eight-city European tour. In the fall, he goes to Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, Leipzig, Munich, Bamberg, Oslo, and Paris. More American dates are slated for next year, including a return to the San Francisco Symphony, which he led from 1985 to 1995. With the recent retirement of Bernard Haitink, who is ninety-two, Blomstedt…

AUGUST 25 – 31, 2021 Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, in Tivoli, New York, with its outdoor stage in the middle of a field and its view of the Catskills, has become a haven for dance. The first weekend of the Kaatsbaan Summer Festival (Aug. 28-Sept. 12) features three commissions choreographed by women—Gemma Bond, Lauren Lovette, and Claire Davison. Jose Sebastian and Chloe Misseldine (above), both from American Ballet Theatre, perform in Bond’s new ballet; it’s set to Rachmaninoff’s Thirteen Preludes for piano, played live by Cecile Licad. MUSIC Alarm Will Sound CLASSICAL One artist’s homage to another’s work needn’t mimic its forebear stylistically; divergence can be just as telling. Tyshawn Sorey was moved to write “For George Lewis,” named for the trailblazing composer and improviser with whom he studied, after hearing…

Somewhere I read that music was invented to confirm human loneliness.But from the same source I learned that truth disappears in the telling of it,and this, spurious as it seemed, since it unwrites what it teaches,cast doubt on everything else—the same way a mad ravingmight come in the same door of the mind as a profound equilibrium,causing that mathematical proof, though luminous, though true,to be discarded. And perhaps this is why progress is taking so long.Too much weight placed on the doors of things, on their beginnings.How they entered. Why they came. Nothing allowed tojust arrive and sit down, even into the blue district of dreamsnothing immune to this pathological sourcing.I confess I often used you this way: as a front gateto the elaborate memory palace I was building,asking you…

In the words of Ji-Yoon Kim (Sandra Oh), the title character of the Netflix series “The Chair,” the job of the college professor is to offer her students “refuge from the bullshit.” The campus often seems our last bastion of idealism, where the pursuit of knowledge runs free from faddish politics or market imperatives. This makes it an easy place to ridicule. As the series begins, Kim is settling into her new role as the chair of the English department at Pembroke University, a prestigious “lower-tier Ivy.” Kim is the first woman and the first person of color to lead the department, and when we meet her she is sitting behind an imposing desk in her new office—one of the position’s few perks. She lets out the satisfied breath of…

The Minister Primarily, by John Oliver Killens (Amistad). Unpublished for more than thirty years after its author’s death, in 1987, this madcap novel is set in the imagined African nation of Guanaya, where the discovery of mineral deposits has drawn international interest. Our hero, an African American musician from Mississippi, has come for a different reason—to “get to the heart of being African and all at once and in a hurry.” But he bears an uncanny resemblance to the Guanayan Prime Minister, and, following a series of bureaucratic mishaps, he is recruited to return to America posing as the P.M. The absurd situation gives Killens a perfect vantage from which to satirize international race relations. I Couldn’t Love You More, by Esther Freud (Ecco). Across three generations, the Irish women in this…