Innholdsfortegnelse for November 1, 2021 i The New Yorker

In August, Brené Brown, the Houston-based writer, researcher, professor, social worker, podcast host, C.E.O., and consultant-guru to organizations including Pixar, Google, and the U.S.Special Forces, met with a group of graduate students at the McCombs School of Business, at the University of Texas at Austin, to talk about emotions. Brown, fifty-five, was wearing a shiny maize blouse, jeans, and a black face mask. It was the first day of her new class, Dare to Lead, and she stood onstage in a small auditorium. There were about a hundred people in the room; Brown had them stand up and introduce themselves. “Howdy!” a Black student in a fleece jacket said, giving a Longhorns salute. “Who else is from Washington, D.C.?” Other students were from Texas, Nigeria, Ohio, Hong Kong. They were…

For nearly four decades, Ron Bishop has had nightmares about an afternoon from his youth. It was November 18, 1983, and he was in science class with his friend DeWitt Duckett, at Harlem Park Junior High School, in West Baltimore. When the bell rang, the boys, both fourteen and in ninth grade, left class with another friend. They headed to the cafeteria for lunch, and, to avoid the crowds of students, they took a shortcut down a deserted corridor. As they passed rows of metal lockers, Bishop joked about Duckett’s antics back when they were in first grade. “We were laughing,” Bishop recalled. “And within seconds I turned, and someone had a gun in my face. And then the gun went from being in my face to the back of…

In the summer of 1942, Ed Wilson, age thirteen, decided that it was time to get serious about research. He had already determined that he wanted to be an entomologist, a choice made partly out of interest and partly out of injury. As a child, he’d been fascinated with marine life. One day, he jerked too hard on a fish he caught, and one of its needlelike spines lodged in his right eye. The lens had to be removed, and, following the surgery, to see something clearly he needed to hold it up near his face. Insects were just about the only animals that submitted to this treatment. That summer, Wilson was living with his parents in Mobile, Alabama, in a run-down house that had been built by his great-grandfather.…

In 1621, the Dutch East India Company—the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or V.O.C.—arrived at the Banda Islands with a formidable navy. The global spice market was fiercely competitive, and a number of European powers had already sailed to this Indonesian archipelago and tried to strong-arm the locals into accepting various treaties. The V.O.C. had recently sought a monopoly on the spice trade with the islands, home to the precious nutmeg. Nutmeg, valued for its culinary uses and its medicinal properties—rumor had it that it could cure the plague—had long been traded across vast networks that traversed the Indian Ocean and linked Africa and Eurasia. At one point, a handful of the seeds could buy a house or a ship. But the V.O.C. couldn’t secure a deal. The islands lacked a central…

I don’t remember where I was at the I precise moment that Lehman Brothers collapsed—asleep, presumably, as the firm filed for bankruptcy at 1:45 a.m. on a Monday—but I do recall how the news hit home. It was mid-September, 2008, the beginning of my senior year of college; I was making my desultory way to a career fair, on the off chance that some representative from the future might set my life on its mysterious course. Students in dark suits, who had spent the summer in the corporate chrysalis of banks and consulting firms, rushed ahead. Too bad for them. There stood Lehman’s poster-board sign, its text crossed out with thick black marker: a gesture whose symbolic significance could be lost on no one. The hundred-and-sixty-four-year history that preceded that…

DEFENDING THE DEAD Thank you for recognizing the efforts of the activists featured in Jill Lepore’s piece about African American burial grounds (“The Underworld,” October 4th). Their work in reclaiming cemeteries and other hallowed spaces is essential in moving the United States toward truth and justice. As the executive director of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, I can attest to the consequences of the past and present erasure of history in this country, driven by those who wish to conceal the shameful truth of racial terror and systemic racism. Our organization’s aim is not only to tell the full histories of sites but to foster the engagement of descendant communities and others in demanding a reckoning. We know from our two decades of work in the U.S. and…

There’s a saying in Arabic about learning from hard experience: “Burn your tongue on soup and you’ll blow on yogurt.” Mansour Abbas, an Arab-Israeli legislator, has had his share of tongue burns, and he has learned to be cautious. In public appearances, he makes sure to keep the Israeli flag in view; last year, he spoke stirringly on Holocaust Remembrance Day. But, as the head of an Islamist party with connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, he remains an object of suspicion for many Jewish Israelis. At least four of his colleagues in the Knesset, the country’s parliament, have called him a “supporter of terror.” When Ayelet Shaked, a member of his coalition, recently saw him in a narrow corridor there, she walked right past, as he stood by, offering a…

In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Lee Iacocca, the celebrated executive who had run both Chrysler and Ford, visited the Los Angeles laboratory of Patrick Soon-Shiong, a surgeon at U.C.L.A. Iacocca’s first wife had died of Type 1 diabetes a few years earlier; he was searching for a cure. Soon-Shiong, who was in his thirties, specialized in pancreas transplant, a risky treatment reserved for severe diabetics. Soon-Shiong was a skilled surgeon who had trained under organ-transplant pioneers, but he’d grown unhappy with the procedure: pancreas transplants carried a high risk of organ rejection, and he didn’t feel that the outcomes were worth the danger. He wanted to shut down U.C.L.A.’s pancreas-transplant program and embark on a new line of research. Instead of replacing the entire pancreas, Soon-Shiong would replace only the insulin-producing islet…

Write about that night, long ago, when you lay in bed listening to the sound of wind buzzing through the old television aerial mounted on the porch outside your bedroom—remember the door out to the tin roof, the buckle and ting against your toes—a deeply disturbing sound, like a stuck harmonica reed, one that, combined with the sound of crying drifting up from downstairs through the heater duct, seemed indicative of more troubling harmonics. Write about the way that, one summer afternoon, your older sister, Meg, disappeared, heading out into the beyond, as you saw it, until finally she called one night in September to explain that she was fine, safe in California, not far from a redwood forest, staying with a guy named Billy, which caused your father, who…

The Book of Form and Emptiness, by Ruth Ozeki (Viking). When this novel opens, a young father has been killed by a truck, and his wife and son have begun to grieve in incompatible ways. She starts hoarding things, and he hears voices: the objects are talking to him. As the house fills up, Christmas ornaments and pickle jars clamoring for the boy’s attention, the pair seek help from various sages (including a Zen Buddhist priest not unlike the author), asking whether the voices are “music or madness.” Hints of an answer emerge gradually, in part through “the Book,” a voice that rises out of the narrative, instructing both the boy and the reader on how to speak up. The War for Gloria, by Atticus Lish (Knopf). Set on the…

OCTOBER 27 – NOVEMBER 2, 2021 Halloween scares abound in the “Folk Horror” series at Anthology Film Archives (Oct. 28-Nov. 11). This subgenre, which links mystery and monstrosity to ancient ways that endure beneath the surfaces of modern life, is explored in Kier-La Janisse’s new documentary, “Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched.” It’s featured alongside fourteen dramatic classics, including “The Wicker Man” (above), from 1973, in which a policeman searches for a missing child on an island where paganism is practiced, complete with fertility rites and human sacrifices. MUSIC Jacques Greene: “ANTH01” ELECTRONIC The Vancouver house-music producer Jacques Greene emerged at the dawn of this past decade, stippling R. & B. vocal lines over hazy, melancholic dance tracks suffused with an emotionality that’s rare in modern club music. “ANTH01” is the…

1. THE MEETING PLACE OF BIRDS In some folklore, birds would always meet at the edgeof a town. It was how they knew they were ona journeyto save themselves from the sudden loss of a season.At the intersection of three busy roads, two busesbroke downand spilled us out, humans tired of the road.We watched the beauty of the Presidential palace.I wondered how many days of sweat went intothe earthto produce such beauty. While smoking, I met a mancalled Trolley,named for his expertise in flinging humans acrossborders.His works of terror were suffering in the coldnessof brothelsacross Bamako, across Tripoli, across Mauritania, andon the red sand of Kayes.He watched his girls drink gin on the sidewalk.I asked him, Do you feel shame?He answered, I desire beauty. In its pursuit there isno end,only…

My mother saves emptyContainers. Boxes, glass spiceJars, bottles, plastic bags.Something could bePut in it, one day,One day it could be useful.& sometimes she’s right.The word hoard meansHidden treasure.My mother the dragonWith her empty jars& cardboard boxes. Emma Morano, who lived to 117,Said her secret to lifeWas three raw eggs a day& no husband.A man who lived to 111Said his secret was rubbingOlive oil each day on his feet.Our 97-year-old neighborSaves black microwave trays.She keeps high stacks of themIn her house in the midst ofHer enormous ranch.Everything in her refrigeratorIs covered in green. In Sicily, first they drained theirDead of fluids, then stuffedThem with bay leavesTo kill the stench & to keepThe shape. The bodies wereDried, washed in vinegar,Then the mummies were dressedUp in their finest clothes & eitherHung on the…

It is the hour for despair. The writer sits, crumpled and waiting. The sun sets. He lays his head upon his desk. A plot—he must have a plot. The public, ravenous for story, has no use for his fine observations and his subtle characterizations. A plot: his publishers require it, his wife demands it—there is a child now. Slowly, miserably, he gouges the words out of himself. George Gissing’s 1891 novel, “New Grub Street,” is one of the most pitiless portraits of the writing life in any age. Set among London’s hacks, grinds, and literary “women of the inkiest description,” the story follows Edwin Reardon’s nervous and financial collapse as he struggles to complete a book that might sell. His friend, the sleek and cynical Jasper Milvain, regards his…

The German tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who recently brought his goldbronze voice to Carnegie Hall, may be the most bankable male star in opera today. His appearances all but guarantee a full house. Tough-minded critics exit the venue with elated grins. His not infrequent cancellations traumatize the front offices of leading institutions. With his wavy hair and wide cheekbones, he cuts a plausible profile as a Puccinian lover or a Wagnerian hero. In German-speaking lands, he is a part-time pop idol with best-selling crossover records to his credit, including a Christmas album—“It’s Christmas!”—that includes traditional carols alongside lightly accented versions of “Jingle Bells,” “White Christmas,” and “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” Every merry crowd must have at least one unsmiling soul, and in this case the role…