Innholdsfortegnelse for November 8, 2021 i The New Yorker

For months, during the main pandemic stretch, I’d get inexplicably tired in the afternoon, as though vital organs and muscles had turned to Styrofoam. Just sitting in front of a computer screen, in sweatpants and socks, left me drained. It seemed ridiculous to be grumbling about fatigue when so many people were suffering through so much more. But we feel how we feel. Nuke a cup of cold coffee, take a walk around the block: the standard tactics usually did the trick. But one advantage, or disadvantage, of working from home is the proximity of a bed. Now and then, you surrender. These midafternoon doldrums weren’t entirely unfamiliar. Even back in the office years, with editors on the prowl, I learned to sneak the occasional catnap under my desk, alert…

The most prophetic literary criticism that I’ve read in recent years is a twenty-four-page chapbook published by an obscure private foundation in Vermont. The author is Claude Fredericks, a printer, playwright, amateur poet, and classics professor, who died in 2013. He is largely unknown outside a small circle of former students and colleagues at Bennington College—unknown, at least, by his own name. But readers of Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel, “The Secret History,” will have a sense of Fredericks through his fictionalized alter ego, Julian Morrow, a magnetic classics professor whose tutelage in ancient Dionysiac rites so enthralls his students that they commit—or are complicit in—two murders. I learned about the real Fredericks only after joining Bennington’s faculty, in 2012. His chapbook is titled “How to Read a Journal,” and the…

Moments of sociopolitical tumult have a way of generating all-encompassing explanatory histories. These chronicles either indulge a sense of decline or applaud our advances. The appetite for such stories seems indiscriminate—tales of deterioration and tales of improvement are frequently consumed by the same people. Two of Bill Gates’s favorite soupto-nuts books of the past decade, for example, are Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” and Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens.” The first asserts that everything has been on the upswing since the Enlightenment, when we learned that rational argument was preferable to religious superstition and wanton cudgelling. The second concludes that everything was more or less O.K. until about twelve thousand years ago, when we first beat our swords into plowshares; this innocent decision, which must have seemed a…

THE LONG-COVID CONUNDRUM The New Yorker’s article on Long COVID, in which I was a central subject, was a profound affront to everyone suffering the long-term sequelae of even mild and asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 (“The Damage Done,” September 27th). The piece included no interviews with doctors or scientists directly investigating Long COVID, and no interviews with patients battling the disease. I participated in the article with the understanding that it would be a profile of me and of Survivor Corps—the world’s largest grassroots COVID movement, which I founded—but it proved to be something entirely different. It depicted my organization as anti-science, even though we have reinvented what it means to be citizen-scientists by co-authoring scientific papers and creating a system in which patients and researchers partner to advance science…

Like many executives, Jake Paul pays close attention to the fluctuating prospects of the business he runs, which in his case is the business of being Jake Paul. One hot afternoon in Sun Valley, California, he had some encouraging news to report. “I think the narrative is changing from ‘Fuck Jake Paul’ to ‘We love Jake Paul,’” he said. As evidence, he adduced some recent data collected from American sports arenas. In April, Paul had travelled to Jacksonville, Florida, for a night of fights sponsored by the U.F.C., the preëminent organization in mixed martial arts. As he made his way to his seat, the attendees did, indeed, chant, “Fuck Jake Paul!” (Daniel Cormier, an M.M.A. champion turned commentator, also took note of Paul’s arrival, and explained his reaction to viewers…

1. There was a busyness. Yes, in the apple tree.The first light. You could say it was a busyness—like a hive of movements, indistinct as haze caught up in strings of light. Low sunlight, among webs.And along the strands those slender brown fingerlings,the leaves, hovered, just there, in the breeze. 2. What I meant to say is the morning was heavy.Was it our sorrow. The tree was at the window.Before we could see the webs, the dew, the thousand little apples, we saw the end of it only. The night, yes—the end of it. There is always something else to say.No, I mean the first light. There’s far too much to say. 3. Low sunlight. Yes, in the apple tree, coming up.Every day is the anniversary of a terror.But there…

No woman could get away with it. Murdering her children is all she would ever be known for—ask Medea. Yet Herakles, often called by his Roman name, Hercules, is known for everything else: slaying the man-eating birds of the Stymphalian marsh, the multiheaded Lernaean Hydra, and the Nemean lion, with its Kevlar-strength fur; capturing the wild Erymanthian boar, the goldenantlered deer of Artemis, and the Minotaur’s father; stealing the girdle of Hippolyta, the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, the flesh-eating mares of Diomedes, and the red cattle of the giant Geryon; mucking the Augean stables in a single day; and kidnapping thethree-headed dog Cerberus from Hades. Those dozen labors have inspired countless playwrights, poets, and philosophers throughout the centuries, not to mention Walt Disney Pictures. In the…

When the third season of “Succession” premièred, a couple of weeks ago, some viewers watching on HBO Max experienced a glitch: instead of being brought to the first episode of the new season, they found themselves rewatching the first episode of the entire series. The pilot opens with Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) rapping in a town car belonging to Waystar Royco, the right-wing media conglomerate run by his father, Logan (Brian Cox). It is Logan’s eightieth birthday, and Kendall is certain that his father is going to name him C.E.O. of the company. (“You’re the man, Mr. Roy!” Kendall’s driver tells him.) The scene is a far cry from the actual opening of Season 3, which begins where Season 2 left off, with Kendall collecting himself after a press conference…

NOVEMBER 3 – 9, 2021 In 1857, Seneca Village, a community of predominantly Black Americans, was destroyed to build Central Park. Beginning Nov. 5, the Met imagines an alternate world, one in which the village still thrives, with “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room,” combining historic and contemporary art and décor. Its visionary lead curator, Hannah Beachler—who won an Oscar for her production design on “Black Panther”—is pictured here, with wallpaper by the Nigerian American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby. THE THEATRE Dana H. In the late nineties, when the playwright Lucas Hnath was a college student at N.Y.U., his mother, Dana Higginbotham, was kidnapped by a man she had met while working as a psych-ward chaplain at a hospital in Florida. She spent five terrifying months as…

You don’t know why, exactly, you’ve been assigned to this particular family, in this particular home, in West Sacramento, California. It’s not your job to wonder why. Nonetheless, after a few days, you begin to speculate that the suspect at the heart of your assignment is the father, code-named Hajji, even though you have no reason to believe that he has ever actually completed the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. In fact, Hajji hardly leaves home at all. He spends hours at a time wandering around his house or his yard, searching for things to repair—rotted planks of wood, missing shingles, burned-out bulbs, broken mowers, shattered windows, unhinged doors—until his old injuries act up, and he is forced to lie down wherever he is working, and if he happens to be…

The Morning Star, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken (Penguin Press). In his first work of fiction since the six volumes of “My Struggle,” Knausgaard trades his bracingly autobiographical mode for a ravishing form of theologically infused fabulism. A mysterious celestial body appears in the late-August sky, accompanied by Biblical omens, hallucinations, and increasingly uncanny events in the natural world. Tracing the lives of nine interconnected characters, Knausgaard sets these enigmatic phenomena against the minutiae of everyday life. This combination of the universal and the intimate enables the novel to approach weighty subjects—death and dying, belief and despair—with both the thrust of a suspense narrative and the depth of a philosophical inquiry. Imminence, by Mariana Dimópulos, translated from the Spanish by Alice Whitmore (Transit). “I’m not…

You never quite know what you’re going to get with a revival of a lesser-seen work, one that had the mixed blessing to be considered ahead of its time. Have the moths got to it over the years? Does it now fit the way it was supposed to? When Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s musical, “Caroline, or Change,” premièred on Broadway, in 2004, it received an uneven critical response, ran for less than four months, and hasn’t been staged here since. Now “Caroline” is back (in a Roundabout Theatre Company production, at Studio 54), with the English star Sharon D Clarke making her soul-shattering Broadway début in the title role. The musical hasn’t just stood thetest of time; it has grown into the present—or maybe the present has grown to…