Innholdsfortegnelse for October 25, 2021 i The New Yorker

My mum’s favorite cold cream was Nivea, and I love it to this day. That’s the cold cream I was thinking of in the description of the face Eleanor keeps “in a jar by the door.” I was always a little scared by how often women used cold cream. Growing up, I knew a lot of old ladies—partly through what was called Bob-a-Job Week, when Scouts did chores for a shilling. You’d get a shilling for cleaning out a shed or mowing a lawn. I wanted to write a song that would sum them up. Eleanor Rigby is based on an old lady that I got on with very well. I don’t even know how I first met “Eleanor Rigby,” but I would go around to her house, and not…

We turn to the Internet for answers. We want to connect, or understand, or simply appreciate something—even if it’s only Joe Rogan. It’s a fraught pursuit. As the Web keeps expanding faster and faster, it’s become saturated with lies and errors and loathsome ideas. It’s a Pacific Ocean that washes up skeevy wonders from its Great Garbage Patch. We long for a respite, a cove where simple rules are inscribed in the sand. You may have seen one advertised online, among the “weird tricks” to erase your tummy fat and your student loans. It’s MasterClass, a site that promises to disclose the secrets of everything from photography to comedy to wilderness survival. The company’s recent ad, “Lessons on Greatness. Gretzky,” encapsulates the pitch: a class taught by the greatest hockey…

Helga had always—unreasonably—expected more from life than it could deliver. People like her live among us, not differing conspicuously from those who instinctively settle their affairs and figure out precisely how, given their looks, their abilities, and their environment, they can do what they need to do in the world. With respect to these three factors, Helga was only averagely equipped. When she was put on the marriage market, she was a slightly too small and slightly too drab young woman, with narrow lips, a turned-up nose, and—her only promising feature—a pair of large, questioning eyes, which an attentive observer might have called “dreamy.” But Helga would have been embarrassed if anyone had asked her what she was dreaming about. She had never demonstrated a special talent of any kind.…

At first glance, Pat Barker’s 2018 novel, “The Silence of the Girls”—an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad—looked like a radical departure. The author, after all, had never strayed very far from the twentieth century: she is best known for her “Regeneration” trilogy, about the inter-twined fates of a group of Britons during the First World War, which has attained the status of a classic since its publication, in the nineteen-nineties. A decade before that, she had established herself with a trio of contemporary novels about working-class women in the North of England—the territory in which Barker grew up, and which she depicts as scarred by its own battles. These, as often as not, are between women and men. Her first novel, “Union Street” (1982), a series of portraits of down-and-out women…

“Yes, we talk about race a lot on this show,” Charlamagne tha God says, in his new weekly late-night series on Comedy Central. “That’s America’s fault. Not mine.” Voilà, the rationale behind our glut of edutainment! The ignorance of the population has compelled Charlamagne, a radio personality turned member of the commentariat, to dispense his wisdom. He is the latest pop-cultural figure to convince Americans that he is a race whisperer. As the host and one of the executive producers of “Tha God’s Honest Truth with Charlamagne tha God,” he purports to offer an “unapologetically Black” perspective on crises like the backlash against critical race theory and the discourse surrounding mental health. It is the species of current-affairs television that executives like to categorize as urgent or necessary. The…

DISASTER ON DECK Ed Caesar hauntingly depicts the catastrophe that is due to occur in the Red Sea when the F.S.O. Safer, a deteriorating oil tanker that sits near the coast of Yemen, spills a million barrels of crude (“The Dead Ship,” October 11th). I am a concerned scientist and a member of a team of researchers from Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, and U.C.S.F. A week after Caesar’s piece came out, we published a paper in Nature Sustainability in which we model the humanitarian impacts of the coming disaster, some of which may be even worse than Caesar describes. We expect, in addition to a famine, that the clean-water supply for at least nine million people will be disrupted, which will cause outbreaks of waterborne illnesses and death. We also anticipate…

In the fall of 2015, Rob Reich, a philosopher and a political scientist at Stanford, was chatting with a freshman during office hours. “I asked him what he planned to study,” Reich recalled recently. “He said, ‘Definitely computer science. I have some ideas for startups.’” In the spirit of small talk, Reich asked, What kind? “He looked at me with total earnestness and said, ‘To tell you that, I’d have to ask you to sign a nondisclosure agreement.’” The student was hardly the first to treat a Stanford education as a prelude to an I.P.O. In 1939, two graduates started Hewlett-Packard; in 1996, two Ph.D. students founded Google. A recent study estimated that if all the companies established by Stanford alumni were to form their own country, it would have…

Paul Auster’s “Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane” (Holt) is a labor of love of a kind rare in contemporary letters. A detailed, nearly eight-hundred-page account of the brief life of the author of “The Red Badge of Courage” and “The Blue Hotel,” augmented by readings of his work, and a compendium of contemporary reactions to it, it seems motivated purely by a devotion to Crane’s writing. Usually, when a well-established writer turns to an earlier, overlooked exemplar, there is an element of self-approval through implied genealogy: “Meet the parents!” is what the writer is really saying. And so we get John Updike on William Dean Howells, extolling the virtues of charm and middle-range realism, or Gore Vidal on H. L. Mencken, praising an inheritance of bile…

OCTOBER 20 – 26, 2021 The British artist Gillian Wearing is celebrated for her photographic and video portraits, which are at once conceptual and empathetic. Recently, Wearing began making sculptures, including the first monument to a woman—the suffragist Millicent Fawcett—ever installed in London’s Parliament Square. On Oct. 20, the Public Art Fund unveils Wearing’s bronze homage to Diane Arbus (pictured) in Central Park’s Doris C. Freedman Plaza; on Nov. 5, the Guggenheim opens the retrospective “Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks.” THE THEATRE The Fever Wallace Shawn’s unrelenting 1990 monologue, performed here by Lili Taylor and directed by Scott Elliott, tells the story, perhaps, of one privileged New Yorker’s destabilizing encounter with Marxism, centering on a night of illness in “a strange hotel room in a poor country where my language isn’t…

Severin Beckwith and Anna Brettmann, a young couple from Ithaca, New York, have been hiking from Georgia to Virginia on the Appalachian Trail since late September. In western North Carolina, after a few days of hard rain and little sleep, they decided to take a break from the woods. A shuttle delivered them to the Lodge at Fontana Village Resort, a rustic retreat two miles off the trail, where they ate lunch and lay down for a midday nap. Knocking awoke them. There was a muffed voice outside their door. It burst open before Beckwith could unlock it. “Next thing I see is a bunch of guys with riot shields with ‘U.S. Marshals’ written on them,” Beckwith said. “Handguns pointed at my face.” Brettmann was still in bed. A marshal…

In the spring of 1936, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, an African American man from Dallas, Texas, vanished in Moscow. He had lived in the Soviet Union for nearly a decade, most recently with his wife, Marina, a Russian Jewish chemist, in a cramped apartment around the corner from the Central Telegraph building. By then, a half-dozen African Americans had settled in Moscow permanently. Even among them, Fort-Whiteman, who was forty-six, was a striking sight. He wore knee-high boots, a black leather cap, and a belted long shirt in the style of Bolshevik commissars. Homer Smith, a Black journalist from Minneapolis and Fort-Whiteman’s close friend in Moscow, later wrote, “He had adopted the practice of many Russian Communists of shaving his head, and with his finely chiseled nose set into a V-shaped face…

Before getting into the cab, she hands him a cup.Then, after they kiss, she hands him the cup again. As they walk, she hands him a man-made substance.Then, after they kiss, she hands him the cup again. She hands him a chalice of lightning& he hands her a chalice of fire. Then in the next shot, after they kiss,They exchange chalices again. When she goes through the metal detector,She carefully places a pair of hoop earrings in a plastic tray. When she retrieves them,They are two silver bangles she fits to her wrists. When they climb from the cab in the rain, her hair is wet,But when they kiss on the sidewalk her hair is dry again. After she takes off her helmet & breastplate,& enters the water wearing nothing…

I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, by Claire Vaye Watkins (Riverhead). “I’ve tried to tell this story a bunch of times,” the protagonist of Watkins’s arresting novel writes. “This will be my last try.” Stricken with a sense of alienation after having her first child, she leaves both baby and husband in Michigan and goes to Nevada, where she grew up. She revisits her family’s ranch, which is about to be demolished; remembers a boyfriend who died; thinks about her father, who (like the author’s) was in the Manson family; and reads letters her mother wrote before retreating into opioid addiction. Her search for a sense of self culminates in a journey to a particular area of desert steeped in family lore, one she calls a “made-up place.” Happy…

The human ear edits even as it absorbs. Every time I listen to a recording of an interview I’ve done, I’m confronted with the little repetitions and stutters that cling to what I process, in the moment, as perfectly fluid speech: the tics and filler phrases; the sentences that are snuffed out, unfinished; the runway of false starts from which a thought takes flight. One thing that immediately stands out in the stellar Broadway staging of “Is This a Room” (a Vineyard Theatre production, at the Lyceum) is the awkwardness of so much of our speech, its weird hesitations and confused banalities. That’s because the play, which was conceived and directed by Tina Satter, takes as its text the transcript of the F.B.I.’s visit to the home of the whistle-blower…