Innholdsfortegnelse for October 4, 2021 i The New Yorker

The D’Amelio Show The seventeen-year-old Charli D’Amelio is currently the most popular creator on Tik-Tok, with more than a hundred and twenty-four million followers. Her older sister, Dixie, trails her with a still enormous fifty-four million. And yet the D’Amelios, who are at the center of this Hulu series, insist on perching, somewhat precariously, on the border between exceptionality and ordinariness. “I don’t consider myself famous. I’m just a person that a lot of people follow for some reason,” Charli says. A big part of the family’s brand is their relatability, which can feel simultaneously genuine and curated. Charli and Dixie are what the philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer have called “ideal types of the new dependent average,” their fame both seemingly within reach—stars, they’re just like us!—and yet impossibly far…

In 1975, the professor and poet Michael S. Harper conducted a lengthy interview with Gayl Jones, a twenty-six-year-old writer from Lexington, Kentucky. Jones was a former graduate student of his in the literary-arts program at Brown University, and the occasion was the publication of her first book, “Corregidora,” a short, baroque novel about love and history in Trumanera Kentucky. The novel had been edited by Toni Morrison, who was then working as a senior editor at Random House. (It was Harper who had first sent Jones’s work to Morrison.) But Jones had attracted notice before she was accepted at Brown, in 1971; she’d had a modest upbringing, and the critic Elizabeth Hardwick, a fellow-Lexingtonian and a friend of a teacher who took a special interest in Jones, had helped her…

There was dirt once, an entire earthThat clung to our bare feet when it rained,Scorched them when it hadn’t,Coated our arms when it roseWith the dry, furious wind.How obvious, I thought then,That it wanted to touch, interact,Even if just molecule to molecule.We hated that we couldn’t escape its reach—Even indoors, weighing down our heels,Licking our shoelaces. How it even opened itselfTo other creatures, a baby snake poking through,Surveying the kitchen. Such naked desire,Though we never called it that, even after we movedTo another country with its concreteAnd vast fields held inert beneath.“Our feet never touch mud now,”I told my mother the other day.“Yes,” she said, “yes.”That was all.…

A rabbi, a preacher, and a drug dealer walk into a Christmas party. This is not the setup to a joke; it is the setup to a pivotal scene in “Crossroads,” Jonathan Franzen’s new novel. The drug dealer is Perry, the fifteen-year-old son of Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of the First Reformed Church of New Prospect, Illinois. That makes him a P.K., or preacher’s kid, a famously fraught identity that some people navigate by striving to be good enough to live up to the accompanying expectations, and others by becoming conspicuously, defiantly bad. When we first meet Perry, he is stranded between the two options: brilliant but troubled, he has lately resolved to quit doing drugs, be nicer to his sister, and generally become a better person, but he…

Do you know the story of Myrrha and Cinyras? It appears in Book X of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, alongside more celebrated tales, like that of Orpheus and Eurydice; in fact, Orpheus himself sings of it. Myrrha, he tells us, was the princess of Cyprus, the daughter of King Cinyras, whom she dearly loved—but not as a daughter should. Tormented by forbidden lust, she tried to hang herself, but was discovered in time by her nurse. The nurse then arranged for Myrrha to go to Cinyras during a festival when married women (including Myrrha’s mother, the queen) stayed away from their husbands’ beds. Disguised by the dark, Myrrha spent many blissful nights with her father, until Cinyras at last thought to fetch a light to see the face of his young lover.…

BETTER MEDICINE Atul Gawande, in his piece on the advantages of Costa Rica’s approach to health care, writes that what set the country apart wasn’t “simply the amount it spent on health care. It was how the money was spent: targeting the most readily preventable kinds of death and disability” (“The Costa Rica Model,” August 30th). As he observes, the medical system in the United States is much more reactive, and less focussed on community care. Limited access to primary care is perhaps the weakest link in our system, and it is largely due to the U.S. establishment’s emphasis on curing disease rather than on ministering to patients’ over-all health. This bias is also reflected in medical schools, which tend to push students toward specialties rather than toward primary care.…

Cobb County, a wealthy area northwest of Atlanta, recently advertised a new escape room on its Facebook page. “You’ve been wrongfully sentenced to life without parole,” the description read. “You’ve settled in, made a few friends, but every one has their breaking point.” It continued, “While the prison is in chaos because of a riot in the yard, you have a tiny window of opportunity to explore the building and carry out a great escape.” Noting a “hard difficulty level” and the potential use of fog machines, the description concluded with a line cribbed from “The Shawshank Redemption”: “It’s time to get busy living, or get busy dying.” A local reporter posted a screenshot on Twitter. Commenters noted the weirdly worded plot. What, one asked, did “you’ve settled in” mean,…

I first met the German painter Neo Rauch shortly before Christmas last year, in Leipzig. It was one of the final days of his show at the gallery Eigen+Art, and the place was nearly empty. The show was called “Handlauf ” (“Handrail”), and the title picture, roughly eight feet tall by ten feet wide, showed a solidly built, barefoot woman joining hands with a gentleman in leather boots. But the man’s hindquarters revealed him to be a centaur, and the woman seemed to have an extra leg and an extra face, to the side of her main one. They were in a tumbledown room in front of what looked like a stage backdrop of a classic German Romantic landscape—mountains, forest, clouds, moon—next to which a man cradled an electric guitar…

To put it plainly, Yura confused Fryazino with Fryazevo and went the wrong way. Natasha had explained everything to him: go to Yaroslavsky Station and take the train toward Fryazevo or toward Schelkovo. Her station was Zagoryanskaya and not all trains stopped there. The train toward Fryazevo did, but the train toward Fryazino didn’t. Yura ended up on the train toward Fryazino. “There’s a train at six-fifteen—it runs regularly on weekdays,” Natasha had said, standing in the Dinamo Station and licking the ice cream, sandwiched between two round waffles, that Yura had treated her to. “That train always stops at our station.” “And how long … mmm … does it take to get there?” Yura quipped, chomping on his own ice cream and waffles. “Forty-five minutes.” Natasha smiled. “You’ll be…

Bewilderment, by Richard Powers (Norton). In this follow-up to Powers’s Pulitzer-winning eco-saga “The Overstory,” a recently widowed astrobiologist engaged in assessing the potential for life on other planets must attend to the needs of his nine-year-old son, Robin, who has a spectrum disorder. Since the boy’s mother died, his symptoms have intensified and his empathy for animals sometimes leads to angry outbursts. He undergoes an experimental neurofeedback therapy that can imprint other people’s emotions—including his mother’s—onto him. Before long, the treatment transforms Robin into an almost oracular figure, a social-media activist devoted to protecting the earth against mankind. Powers provides a moving depiction of filial love, as father and son confront a world of “invisible suffering on unimaginable scales.” Something New Under the Sun, by Alexandra Kleeman (Hogarth). In this…

In the earliest days of his career, the twenty-two-year-old musician Lil Nas X was a poster child for success on TikTok, after the platform helped propel his song “Old Town Road” to unprecedented ubiquity. Lately, he’s grown into something more old-fashioned: a music-video star. Pop culture is more visual than ever, but the traditional music video—in all its cinematic, big-budget glory—has been overtaken by bite-size, off-the-cuff material tailored for rapid consumption on social media. Still, the extravagant music video has become the most effective way for Lil Nas X, a master of visual iconography, to make asplash. In March, he released a video for a new single titled “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” which begins with a voice-over: “In life, we hide the parts of ourselves we don’t want…

SEPTEMBER 29 – OCTOBER 5, 2021 For the show “Only an Octave Apart” (running through Oct. 3, at St. Ann’s Warehouse), Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond stitch together opera and cabaret in medleys arranged by Nico Muhly. One mashup combines two different laments by a woman named Dido: the closing aria from Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” (1689), and the singer Dido’s single “White Flag” (2003). Purcell’s Carthaginian queen cannot forsake love, and the English songwriter echoes her namesake’s dignified demurral: “I’m in love and always will be.” THE THEATRE Polylogues The actor and journalist Xandra Nur Clark wrote and performs this skillful piece of documentary theatre, extracted from dozens of interviews, about polyamory in all its variety, including a household with five members in a collective relationship…

Patricia Highsmith, who published twenty-two novels, including “Deep Water” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” died in 1995, at the age of seventy-four. By the time of her death, she had alienated many of the people in her life, espousing racist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise offensive views, but the eight thousand pages of diaries and notebooks she left behind—an edited version of which will be published this November—depict an engaged, social, and optimistic youth. The following selections begin in the spring of 1948, when the twenty-seven-year-old Highsmith had a two-month residency at the Yaddo artists’ colony. There, she met the British writer Marc Brandel, with whom she began an on-again, off-again relationship, and finished writing her first novel, “Strangers on a Train.” To make money, for several years Highsmith wrote for comics,…

It is not yet after the pandemicbut most of us have bared our facesin public. Most of us are a little hapticthough we remain somewhat waryof strangers merging in enclosures &what does it mean, to gather? To take upfrom a resting place. We are so tired.We are uncovered & musteringstrength. Never mind my mother’spost-stroke slurred speech & vertigo,her ear crystals misaligned, herneck brace. We are survivors of thepanic wars. We are reaching newconclusions intuitively from inferencesabout hugging. My radar is broken.I’m not sure where to put all my limbs.When they’re tangled with yours it’s nota problem. Your failing configurationsof attention. My bad knees. To drawfabric into puckers: pleated pants,rumpled sheets, your fingers hookedin my underpants & we bring togetherall the parts of ourselves to embrace—haul in our bodies. To harvest,…

A curious coincidence, of the kind favored by certain novelists, occurred in 2014 and 2015, when both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction were awarded in consecutive years to Donna Tartt, for “The Goldfinch,” and Anthony Doerr, for “All the Light We Cannot See.” These novels, enormous bestsellers, are essentially children’s tales for grownups, and feature teen-age protagonists. In both books, the teen-ager possesses a rare object that has been removed from a great museum; the subsequent adventures of the object are inextricable from the adventures of the protagonist. In “The Goldfinch,” the object is an exquisite seventeenth-century painting, which thirteen-year-old Theo Decker has stolen from the Metropolitan Museum. In “All the Light We Cannot See,” Marie-Laure LeBlanc, sixteen years old and blind,…