Innholdsfortegnelse for October 11, 2021 i The New Yorker

Wolfgang Van Halen, the front man of the band Mammoth WVH, settled into an armchair in a replica of Central Perk, the coffee shop on the sitcom “Friends.” He was about to embark on a private, off-hours tour of the Friends Experience, an “interactive celebration” of the show, in Gramercy Park. (Tickets usually start at forty-five dollars.) Van Halen was dressed all in black: shorts, T-shirt, a Mammoth hoodie, and two masks. Despite being the son of the late guitar god Eddie Van Halen, he is an unlikely rock star. A self-described “dork” who struggles with anxiety, he doesn’t drink or smoke or do drugs. “I do not have the personality type required for my job,” Van Halen said softly, hands tucked into his sweatshirt pockets. During downtime on the…

Let’s say that you’ve devoted your entire adult life to developing a carbon-free way to power a household for a year on the fuel of a single glass of water, and that you’ve had moments, even years, when you were pretty sure you would succeed. Let’s say also that you’re not crazy. This is a reasonable description of many of the physicists working in the field of nuclear fusion. In order to reach this goal, they had to find a way to heat matter to temperatures hotter than the center of the sun, so hot that atoms essentially melt into a cloud of charged particles known as plasma; they did that. They had to conceive of and build containers that could hold those plasmas; they did that, too, by making…

The world will keep trudging through time without usWhen we lift from the story contest to fly homeWe will be as falling stars to those watching from the edgeOf grief and heartbreakMaybe then we will see the design of the two-minded creatureAnd know why half the world fights righteously for greedy mastersAnd the other half is nailing it all back togetherThrough the smoke of cooking fires, lovers’ trysts, and endlessHuman industry—Maybe then, beloved rascalWe will find each other again in the timeless weave of breathingWe will sit under the trees in the shadow of earth sorrowsWatch hyenas drink rain, and laugh.…

Alas, good master, my wife desired some damsonsAnd made me climb, with danger of my life.—Simpcox, “Henry VI, Part II.” 1 It would take more than a clip round the earto bring me to my sensesas I tried to get clearwhat exactly a United Ireland would mean to mynext-door neighbor.His trenchcoat had been made by Thomas Burberry.The last time I’d seen him he’d presented me with a pot ofjam for my journeyand a rumpled copy of “The Big Sleep.” 2 I’d set out that morning fortified by the aromaof Nescafé that must have wafted over from as far awayas Brannigan’s.I knew flax-holes were bog-holes with linnets.I knew Uncle Pat’s Ford Prefect was a donkey cartwith a motor. 3 I also knew that, in June, 1954, the I.R.A. had raided GoughBarracks…

Oscar Wilde was in the dock when he observed himself becoming two people. It was a Saturday in May, 1895, the final day of his trial for “gross indecency,” and the solicitor general, Frank Lockwood, was in the midst of a closing address for the prosecution. His catalogue of accusations, shot through with moral disgust, struck Wilde as an “appalling denunciation”—“like a thing out of Tacitus, like a passage in Dante,” as he wrote two years later. He was “sickened with horror” at what he heard. But the sensation was short-lived: “Suddenly it occurred to me, How splendid it would be, if I was saying all this about myself. I saw then at once that what is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.” At…

Much has been made of the fact that Monica Lewinsky is one of the producers of “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” the third installment in Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy’s FX anthology series. The show depicts the events that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and Lewinsky’s willingness to attach her name to the project—a name that, amazingly, she has managed to reclaim in her second life, as an anti-bullying activist—wraps the chaotic miniseries in a clean air of legitimacy. Her involvement is crucial to viewers, in the #MeToo era, who want to feel virtuous when consuming stories about women who have been publicly pilloried. Morality is not the currency of art, however. The show offers a surprising characterization of Lewinsky, who was twenty-one when she interned in the White House and…

DEBATING LONG COVID I read with great interest Dhruv Khullar’s detailed account of the complex and sometimes contentious interactions between health-care providers and advocates for patients with COVID-19—particularly those suffering from possibly related chronic illnesses (“The Damage Done,” September 27th). Some of the misunderstandings between doctors and patients may stem from medicine’s unwieldy vocabulary. Khullar describes how Diana Berrent, the forceful patient advocate, implies that people with relatively mild COVID infections can suffer “end-stage organ failure”—total and irrevocable loss of function of a vital organ. The statement’s implausibility makes Berrent seem out of touch with science. But the error is perhaps only a linguistic one. “End-organ damage,” a related but very different condition, is characterized by injury to any organ at the end of the circulatory supply chain that starts…

Soon, a vast, decrepit oil tanker in the Red Sea will likely sink, catch fire, or explode. The vessel, the F.S.O. Safer—pronounced “Saffer”—is named for a patch of desert near the city of Marib, in central Yemen, where the country’s first reserves of crude oil were discovered. In 1987, the Safer was redesigned as a floating storage-and-off-loading facility, or F.S.O., becoming the terminus of a pipeline that began at the Marib oil fields and proceeded westward, across mountains and five miles of seafloor. The ship has been moored there ever since, and recently it has degraded to the verge of collapse. More than a million barrels of oil are currently stored in its tanks. The Exxon Valdez spilled about a quarter of that volume when it ran aground in Alaska,…

I led the way through the woods because I didn’t want my daughter to have her first encounter with the ghost flock alone. We were trespassing, but it seemed highly unlikely we’d be caught—the school had been abandoned since the previous century, when ash from the Great Western Fires made most of the region unlivable. My daughter had never set foot inside an old-fashioned brick-and-mortar school, and seemed more intrigued by the idea of seeing a chalkboard than by the birds. The school was on the outskirts of a Red Zone in our family’s ancestral breeding grounds—“Oregon” on the older maps, the ones from my boyhood. An evocative name, a name I loved and mispronounced with reverence at age eleven. I grew up in a town called Eugene, in the…

Late City, by Robert Olen Butler (Atlantic Monthly). This grandly retrospective novel warns of the political consequences of failures of personal insight. On Election Night, 2016, God visits the deathbed of Sam Cunningham, who, at the age of a hundred and fifteen, is the last living veteran of the First World War. God instructs him to narrate his life—“to live in your stories just as they felt in their own moment”—and we learn of a childhood in Louisiana, a stint as an Army sniper, marriage, family, and an illustrious career at a Chicago newspaper. Cunningham prides himself on his journalistic acumen but comes to realize that “I reported but I did not see”—remaining tragically oblivious of intimate truths about himself and those close to him. Assembly, by Natasha Brown (Little, Brown).…

OCTOBER 6 – 12, 2021 The poet, novelist, journalist, and artist Etel Adnan (pictured above, on the Brittany coast) was born in Beirut in 1925. She grew up speaking Arabic and Greek at home, and was educated in French and English. In the late nineteen-fifties, while working as a philosophy professor in Northern California, Adnan began to express herself in a new language—painting—making luminous abstractions of the view of Mt. Tamalpais from her home in Sausalito. On Oct. 8, the Guggenheim opens the exhibition “Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure.” MUSIC Boys Noize: “+/-” ELECTRONIC As Boys Noize, the German electronic producer and d.j. Alex Ridha has straddled the pop sphere and the club underground since 2004. On the heels of his Grammy win—for co-producing Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande’s…

Ahundred years ago, on the Saturday before Labor Day, Roscoe Arbuckle drove his plum-colored Pierce-Arrow to San Francisco for a weekend of partying. At two hundred and sixtysix pounds, Arbuckle, known to movie audiences as Fatty, was the Chris Farley of silent cinema, beloved for his pratfalls and for his skill at throwing custard pies in people’s faces. By September, 1921, he had appeared in more than a hundred and fifty films, often in his trademark outfit of baggy pants, suspenders, and an undersized bowler hat; he was earning a million dollars a year at Paramount. In Los Angeles, he owned a twenty-room mansion, complete with servants, Oriental rugs, gold-leaf bathtubs, and a cellar full of liquor that he broke out for jazz-fuelled soirées. The Pierce-Arrow, his thirty-four-thousand-dollar “gasoline palace,”…

On August 24, 2020, as I attempted the first pee of the morning, I felt a tightness on the underside of my penis. A tiny hair had formed a tourniquet around a skin bridge on the genital. I was not in immediate pain, but I knew that something irrevocable had happened, as if time itself had caught up to me with an abacus in hand, demanding a full accounting. My penis was shaped by the Cold War and God’s covenant with Abraham. My father, born in a small village outside Leningrad in 1938, had been circumcised. By the time of my birth, in 1972, Jewish children were generally not circumcised in the Soviet Union, part of a long-standing campaign against religion. Seven years later, soon after our arrival in the…

The state hangs over some stories like a ghost. It changes fates, constrains motion, and complicates motives, all invisibly, without ever having to step into a scene. In “Sanctuary City”—written by Martyna Majok, in a New York Theatre Workshop production, back up at the Lucille Lortel after being interrupted in March, 2020, by the COVID lockdown—a pair of young people are drawn together and, inevitably, set at odds by an everpresent, all-encompassing entity: America. B (Jasai Chase-Owens) is an undocumented immigrant who was brought to the United States as a child by his mother, who now, just as he’s about to finish high school, wants to return home and leave him in a hostile country. He’s a so-called Dreamer at the onset of a long nightmare. He invokes America—sometimes calling…