Innholdsfortegnelse for September 20, 2021 i The New Yorker

At the end of August, the Times ran a story about a Harvard chaplain named Greg Epstein, an avowed atheist and “humanist rabbi,” who had been selected by his fellow-chaplains at the university (there are more than thirty of them, of diverse faiths) to serve as their president. Here was an ivory-tower man-bites-dog tale that elicited some context about the ascendancy of secularism, both at a particular institution (one founded, almost four centuries ago, essentially as a seminary) and in the culture at large. “We don’t look to a god for answers,” Epstein told the paper. “We are each other’s answers.” In response to this relatively mild provocation, readers aligned themselves according to their own cosmologies. In the comments online, nonbelievers, generally, expressed versions of “Right on!,” while believers tended…

The town of Harmony, Mississippi, which owes its origins to a small number of formerly enslaved Black people who bought land from former slaveholders after the Civil War, is nestled in Leake County, a perfectly square allotment in the center of the state. According to local lore, Harmony, which was previously called Galilee, was renamed in the early nineteen-twenties, after a Black resident who had contributed money to help build the town’s school said, upon its completion, “Now let us live and work in harmony.” This story perhaps explains why, nearly four decades later, when a white school board closed the school, it was interpreted as an attack on the heart of the Black community. The school was one of five thousand public schools for Black children in the South…

On a September day in 1961, a thin man with a small mustache walked into a post office in Damascus to pick up a parcel addressed to Georg Fischer. Few people knew that Fischer, an ill-tempered Austrian weapons merchant, was actually the S.S. Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner, “the erstwhile assistant of Adolf Eichmann in the annihilation of Jews,” as a classified U.S. cable put it. But among those who were aware of his identity was a Mossad operative who had infiltrated the Syrian élite. When Brunner opened the package, it exploded, killing two postal workers and blinding him in the left eye. The Israeli spy was later caught, tortured, and executed; Brunner lived openly in Damascus for the next several decades, in the third-floor apartment of 7 Rue Haddad. “Among Third…

Asher Rubin goes in through the dark, muddy courtyard of Elisha’s house, where just-slaughtered geese, fattened all summer long, hang upside down. He walks through a narrow entryway and smells the fried cutlets and onions, hears someone somewhere grinding pepper in a mortar. The women are noisy in the kitchen; the cold air is pierced by the steam that comes from there, from the dishes they’re preparing. There are the smells of vinegar, nutmeg, bay leaves; there is the aroma of fresh meat, sweet and sickening. These scents make the autumn air seem even colder and more unpleasant. The men behind the wooden partition speak aggressively, as if they were arguing; he can hear their voices and also smell candle wax and the damp that has permeated their clothing. The…

Fifty years ago, I was a guest at the baptism of a friend’s son in the ancient church of a Tuscan hamlet. It was Easter, and lambing season. A Sardinian shepherd who tended the flocks of a local landowner came to pay his respects to the new parents. He was a wild-looking man with matted hair whose harsh dialect was hard to understand. Among our party was a beauty of fifteen, an artist’s daughter, and the shepherd took such a fancy to her that he asked for her hand. The girl’s father politely declined, and the shepherd, to show that he had no hard feelings, offered us a lamb for our Paschal dinner. My friends were penniless bohemians, so the gift was welcome. It came, however, with a condition: we…

THE HEAT OF THE MATTER Elizabeth Kolbert, in her piece on the I.P.C.C.’s new climate report, describes a low-emissions future—in which carbon emissions reach net zero in the next few decades and billions of tons of carbon dioxide are removed from the atmosphere—as “the most optimistic, though by no means the most realistic,” of the five global-warming scenarios discussed in the report (Comment, August 23rd). One might also call it “the responsible scenario,” as it is the only one that meets the Paris agreement’s commitment to limit the increase in global average temperature to well below two degrees Celsius. Scientists use scenario analysis of this kind to assess what might happen under a range of uncertainties. In the case of climate change, however, the most relevant problem at present is…

Got the script. Sorry to leave you hanging so close to production on the series. The good news is that, on the creative side, we can make it work. There are a few small scheduling issues related to Grant’s other commitments, but, if the Guys really want him, we think that we can make it work. The show would just need to fly him in and out. Nightly. His time is precious right now, because he’s got family issues. He’s not with the family. He’s in Vegas. Far away from them. But it really clears his head to be there. What with the girls and the gambling and so forth. So, that’s schedule. There’s also the money. Grant does want to make this work creatively. And the schedule stuff can…

I wonder if I will miss the mossafter I fly off as much as I miss it nowjust thinking about leaving. There were stones of many colors.There were sticks holding bothlichen and moss.There were red gates with oldhand-forged hardware.There were fields of dry grasssmelling of first rainthen of new mud. There was mud,and there was the walking,all the beautiful walking,and it alone filled me—the smells, the scratchy grass heads.All the sleeping under bushes,once waking to vultures above, peering downwith their bent heads the way they do,caricatures of interest and curiosity.Once too a lizard.Once too a kangaroo rat.Once too a rat.They did not say I belonged to them,but I did. Whenever the experiment on and ofmy life begins to draw to a closeI’ll go back to the place that held meand…

Roe v. Wade may be the rare Supreme Court decision that most Americans can name, but it’s also one of the few that many volubly disparage—and not just anti-abortion activists who want to get rid of it altogether. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a staunch advocate of access to abortion but an open critic of the reasoning behind Roe. She thought the rationale should have centered on preventing sex discrimination rather than on preserving a right to privacy. “The image you get from reading the Roe v. Wade opinion is it’s mostly a doctor’s-rights case—a doctor’s right to prescribe what he thinks his patient needs,” Ginsburg told the legal writer and scholar Jeffrey Rosen, in 2019. “My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a…

The animating force of pop music is youth. Many of the great musical revolutions and upheavals have been the result of teen-agers experiencing the world for the first time, capturing the sensation of discovery, and making art of their new intimacies and feelings. But it’s not just the experience of youth in real time that inspires popular music; it’s also the memory of what it once felt like to be young. The yearning to recover youth’s extremes—the highs and lows, the startling breadth of one’s imagination when one had the energy to take it all in at once—also makes for a strong muse. For thirty years, Saint Etienne, a British trio consisting of Bob Stanley, Sarah Cracknell, and Pete Wiggs, has specialized in a nostalgic, time-travelling approach to pop. Stanley…

SEPTEMBER 15 – 21, 2021 The acclaimed English actor Cynthia Erivo has brought her stunning voice to many roles, onstage and onscreen; now she tests its full range with her début album, “Ch. 1 Vs. 1” (out Sept. 17). The project is full of soothing contemporary soul music, showing off the warmth and the depth of her tone, particularly on “Day Off” and “A Window.” On Sept. 28, Erivo expands her storytelling repertoire with the publication of her new children’s book, “Remember to Dream, Ebere.” DANCE Little Island Dance Festival Curated by the brilliant and generous tap dancer Ayodele Casel and the producer Torya Beard, this new festival on Little Island (Sept. 15-19) leans toward the percussive side of dance. Free events throughout the day, featuring the likes of the…

In early August, Caroline Polachek practiced her whistling in a dark, foggy warehouse, deep in the San Fernando Valley, as lights sliced the room into coruscating triangles. She was rehearsing for her first show since the pandemic took hold. It would be in Los Angeles, at the Greek Theatre, an outdoor venue with a capacity of around six thousand—the biggest gig that she’d ever played as a solo headliner. Polachek released “Pang,” her first album under her real name, in the fall of 2019, and, despite a year and a half of collective isolation, she was more famous than she’d ever been. The pressure of reëmerging under these circumstances felt intense. A few weeks earlier, when she began rehearsing, she panicked. “I had completely forgotten how to be a…

The Irish writer Colm Tóibín is a busy man. Since he published his first novel, “The South,” at thirty-five, in 1990, he has written eleven more books of fiction. He has also published three reported books, three collections of essays, dozens of introductions to other writers’ work, prefaces to art catalogues, an opera libretto, plays, poems, and so many reviews that it’s surprising when a week goes by and he hasn’t been in at least one of the New York, London, or Dublin papers. When I asked Tóibín—the name is pronounced “cuh-lem toe-bean”—how many articles he had written, he could only guess. “I suppose thousands might be accurate,” he said, adding that his level of output used to be more common among writers: “Anthony Burgess, whom I knew slightly, used…

Matrix, by Lauren Groff (Riverhead). The author, whose previous fiction has probed contemporary American communities, sets this novel in an impoverished twelfth-century English abbey, where the protagonist, Marie, is sent at the age of seventeen to be prioress. A half-royal orphan used to court life, she looks upon the role as a living death but becomes adept at eliding medieval strictures of faith and gender. Wrestling with a multifaceted devotion—tenuous piety, thirst for power, love for her sisters in the abbey—she creates an “army of nuns” who undersell male scribes and rout unscrupulous tenants. Through Marie, Groff explores how a society’s religious and gendered constraints can be turned on their head to create a utopia. Damnation Spring, by Ash Davidson (Scribner). Taking place in a small town in Northern California’s…

“Pass Over,” by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, opens on a stark and uninviting nocturnal tableau. Above a huge metallic street lamp stretch several crisscrossing beams of white light. On the ground, there’s a loose tire, a milk crate, and a big oil drum where, in a different story, a homeless person might draw heat from a fire. The result of this arrangement—which remains essentially untouched throughout the play, until a radical change occurs in the final moments—is a haunted, paranoid feeling. In some ways, the set—designed by Wilson Chin for this production, at the August Wilson, directed by Danya Taymor—and the play itself are a strange fit for the moment at hand. “Pass Over” is the first play to open on Broadway after nearly seventeen COVID-harrowed months. For this notionally celebratory…