Innholdsfortegnelse for September 13, 2021 i The New Yorker

The Chair Ji-Yoon Kim (Sandra Oh), the title character of this new Netflix series (created by Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman), is the first woman and the first person of color to chair the English department at the fictional Pembroke University, a prestigious “lower-tier Ivy.” Kim’s cartoonishly out-of-touch colleagues grapple with declining class enrollments. The university’s dean (David Morse) enlists Kim in an effort to cull the faculty, but Kim, loath to betray her former mentors—including Elliot Rentz (Bob Balaban), a Melville expert, and Joan Hambling (a phenomenal Holland Taylor), a crass medievalist—instead tries to help them boost their enrollment numbers. Meanwhile, one of the department’s pillars, the iconoclastic superstar Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass), shows up unprepared to his courses, which remain popular anyway. Other familiar campus controversies include…

My father’s favorite sound was the sound of the kora, a harp-like instrument with twenty-one strings held taut between a wooden neck and a calabash body. He was from the Gambia, in West Africa, a smart and peculiar boy who left his village for the big city, Banjul, and then left Banjul for college and graduate school and a long career in America as a historian of Christianity and Islam. Perhaps the kora reminded him of the village life he had left behind. He named me after a legendary warrior who is the subject of two important compositions in the kora tradition, “Kuruntu Kelefa” and “Kelefaba.” When I was a kid, in suburban New England, I thought of my dad’s beloved kora cassettes as finger-chopping music, because of the keening…

Until she was thirty-three, Kathryn Paige Harden, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, had enjoyed a vocational ascent so steady that it seemed guided by the hand of predestination. When she first went on the job market, at twenty-six, her graduate-school mentor, Eric Turkheimer, a professor at the University of Virginia, recommended her with an almost mystified alacrity. “More than anyone else who has come through my lab, I find myself answering questions by saying, ‘We should check with Paige,’” he wrote. “I am absolutely confident she will be a successful addition to any faculty, and she brings a significant chance of being a superstar.” Her early scholarship was singled out for prestigious awards and grants, and she was offered tenure at thirty-two. In 2016,…

On the evening of March 9, 1945, the United States sent an armada of B-29 Superfortresses toward Japan, which for months had resisted surrender, even as a naval blockade brought much of the population to the brink of starvation. The B-29s were headed for Tokyo, and carried napalm, chosen for the mission because so many of the city’s inhabitants lived in houses made of wood. The bombing ignited a firestorm that sent smoke miles into the sky; the glow was visible for a hundred and fifty miles. In six hours, as many as a hundred thousand civilians were killed, and a million others were left without homes. In the words of the raid’s architect, Major General Curtis LeMay, the Japanese were “scorched and boiled and baked to death.” Five months…

Spike Lee cannot wait for the picture to begin. He wants to have you in his custody from the moment you learn the name of the “joint.” It is possible that, among all of Lee’s projects, “NYC Epicenters 9/11 → 2021 ½,” an oral history for HBO, reveals the most about his mammoth political and aesthetic appetites, in part because of its mammoth subject: twenty-first-century New York City, his home and muse. The ego is all there in the informality of the title, which gives off the weird gravitas of an epiphany scribbled in the Notes app. You can watch “NYC Epicenters” as a raw paean to the unbreakable city, but you can also watch it as a twilight retrospective of Lee by Lee. Unpredictably, the director splays himself across…

MEMORIES OF GLEN CANYON As two of only a handful of people still alive who ran Glen Canyon by raft, we read Elizabeth Kolbert’s article about the vanished landmark with sadness and awe (“The Lost Canyon,” August 16th). We floated down the Colorado River in 1962 with Georgie White, a “woman of the rivers,” on rubber rafts lashed together. We hiked up insanely beautiful side canyons to Rainbow Bridge, drank muddy river water flavored with bourbon, hungrily ate canned fruit salad, and spent the evenings listening to tall tales around a campfire. We bemoaned congressional approval of Glen Canyon Dam, which would, only a year later, drown all this beauty beneath Lake Powell. Kolbert observes that, “if the dam is hard to explain as a water-management tool, that may be…

Ruskin College, in Oxford, England, was founded in 1899 to serve working-class men who were otherwise excluded from higher education, and went coed in 1919. In 1970, it was the site of the inaugural National Women’s Liberation Movement Conference. Women’s-liberation groups had already been meeting across Britain, inspired variously by the high-profile women’s movement in the U.S.; anticolonial and pro-democracy struggles in Europe, Asia, and Latin America; and workingclass women’s strikes closer to home, in Dagenham and Hull. But the Ruskin conference was, for the women who gathered there, a heady moment of consolidation. One participant, the playwright Michelene Wandor, described Ruskin as an “exhilarating and confusing revelation … six hundred women … hell-bent on changing the world and our image as women.” The conference produced several demands: equality in…

Roscoe could stand to lose twenty pounds. Closer to thirty would be even better. It would ease the burden on his heart. One blessing, though: he’s still ambulatory. At his most intrepid, he makes do with an aluminum cane. Not for him the “suave” models he and Flavia marvelled over in a catalogue “for the dapper older gentleman,” which had appeared in Roscoe’s mailbox, but with somebody else’s name on the address label. One cane had a detachable metal-eagle handle and a tapered body whose tip was sheathed in copper. Another had a concealed dagger that you accessed by unscrewing the head, which was of a beagle, deceitfully hapless. Most days, Flavia takes him for a walk, circling the two or three blocks around his Ridgewood home, and he uses…

One of the most famous images by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya is an etching that depicts a man slumped over his desk asleep, papers underneath him and his head buried in his arms. From the shadows behind him, strange and sinister creatures emerge: owls and bats with their wings spread wide, a cat with a stony gaze, other beasts impossible to identify. “El sueño de la razon produce monstruos,” a caption on the side of the desk warns: “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” The picture is often taken as Goya’s assertion of faith in Enlightenment values, in the ability of logical thought and empirical observation to sweep away the darkness of superstition. But there is a catch: sueño, the Spanish word for “sleep,” can also be translated as…

SEPTEMBER 8 – 14, 2021 The creators of the theatrical installation “Sun & Sea” (Sept. 15-26, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) address climate change without pedantry. The cast (pictured at Seaside Regional Park, in Lithuania) lies around a beach as the audience engages in people-watching from fifteen feet above the stage. The work’s musical and visual surfaces are “very light and very pleasurable,” the director Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė notes, and viewers needn’t dive any deeper. Those who do, the librettist Vaiva Grainytė adds, “feel this threat throbbing beneath.” ART “Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art” The looting and destruction of art works belonging to Jewish collectors and communities—an infamous aspect of the Nazis’ sweeping campaign against “degeneracy” and of the plunder of Europe during the Second World War—remains…

Hey, guys! I know that the news has been a little scary of late, but at least we’ve got one good update for you: our wedding is still on! After three date changes (and a small fortune in nonrefundable deposits—haha!), Pete and I are finally getting married, and we can’t wait to share our special day with you. Although we had originally been pretty confident that the pandemic would be completely over by now (because how could it not be when we have a vaccine, right?!), in light of what’s been going on with the Delta variant we’re making a few changes to the itinerary: Instead of a rehearsal dinner the night before, we’re going to have a totally wild dance party five nights before! It’s going to be so…

Tsvetan would moderate the eventI sat with Charlesin a little café, in silence, a bituneasy before a public readingof our poems, which always seemdefenseless at such moments—you never know,would listeners, if any came, be readyto forget about themselves And would we two ignitethat rivalry the ancientsso loftily called agon,although it’s rarely noblenowadays, in recent times(and likely wasn’t even then) We said nothing, glanced at our watches;each lost in a different city,a different childhood, a different familyJust then a speaker started playingthe songs of Billie Holiday—she sangfrom immortality, without fearBut no, not quite, her fear was nowperfectly formed, refined It’s January here, the wet snow fallsIt muffles sounds and colorsIt masks the imperfectionsof yet another city, hides its pettiness— Both of you are long since gone I turn back to that…

I studied much and remembered little.But the world is generous, it kept offering figs and cheeses.Never mind that soon I’ll have to give it all back,the world, the figs.To be a train station of existence is no small matter.It doesn’t need to be Grand Central or Haydarpaşa Station.The engine shed could be low, windowed with coal dustunder a slat-shingled roof. It could be tin.Another mystery bandaged with rivets and rubies.Leaking cold and heat in both directions, as the earth does.…

The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper). Stretching from the antebellum era to the late twentieth century, this ambitious début novel, by a noted poet, follows the fortunes of the Garfield family, members of the African American élite. In one narrative strand, Ailey Pearl Garfield, born in the late sixties, grows up navigating family expectations, colorism, romantic entanglements, and the trauma of sexual abuse. In another, an unnamed chorus chronicles the lives of her ancestors. When Ailey embarks on a Ph.D. in history, focussing on the family’s ancestral home, in Georgia, the story lines converge and long-kept secrets are exposed. Jeffers amasses details, richly rendering suffering and resistance. “Only half the history had been told,” Ailey reflects, as she considers her duty to probe…