Innholdsfortegnelse for November 15, 2021 i The New Yorker

Ian Parker (“Inorganic,” p. 46) contributed his first piece to the magazine in 1994 and became a staff writer in 2000. Brooke Jarvis (“Animal Passions,” p. 38) is a writer based in Seattle. Clarence Major (Poem, p. 74) is the author of numerous books, including the novels “Thunderclouds in the Forecast” and “The Lurking Place.” His next poetry collection, “Sporadic Troubleshooting,” will be out in 2022. Leslie Jamison (Books, p. 82) has published four books, including “The Recovering” and “The Empathy Exams.” She teaches at Columbia University. Eric Drooker (Cover) is a painter and a graphic novelist whose drawings have been on display at the Guggenheim Museum. This is his thirty-seventh cover for the magazine. Yiyun Li (Fiction, p. 70) won a 2020 Windham Campbell Prize. Her latest book is…

At one point during the Joyce Theatre’s streaming presentation of the tap dancer and choreographer Ayodele Casel’s “Chasing Magic,” in April, Casel turned to the pianist Arturo O’Farrill and said, “What will be will be.” With a smile, they launched into a joyously intimate passage of rhythmic repartee. “Chasing Magic” conveys, with great power, the pleasure of dance, of rhythm, and of making music together. It comes to the Joyce, live at last, Jan. 4-9. Jamar Roberts emerged as a powerful new force in dance just before the pandemic, with works that explore pain, history, and the beauty of the body in motion. Roberts is the choreographer-in-residence at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, where he has been a dancer since 2002; he retires from Ailey with a show on…

After last year’s season of deprivation, classical presenters are rebounding with a feast of winter events that provide familiar comforts and some surprising delights. The Metropolitan Opera undertakes its second twenty-first-century opera in as many months, Matthew Aucoin’s “Eurydice” (Nov. 23-Dec. 16). Then it pivots to a time-tested holiday game plan, condensing Laurent Pelly’s dreamy production of Massenet’s “Cendrillon” into an English-language, family-friendly attraction (Dec. 17-Jan. 3) before unveiling Bartlett Sher’s Art Deco-inspired take on “Rigoletto” on New Year’s Eve. The New York Philharmonic’s annual “Holiday Brass” concert returns, in all its refulgence, to Alice Tully Hall (Dec. 16-18). The Oratorio Society of New York and Musica Sacra each bring their own COVID-friendly abridgment of Handel’s eternal oratorio “Messiah” to Carnegie Hall (Dec. 20 and Dec. 21, respectively). At the…

Ever since the phrase “gluten-free” entered the vernacular, it has been deployed, in some circles, as a term of mild disparagement. In 2015, the American comedian and life coach J. P. Sears went viral with a YouTube sketch titled “How to Become Gluten Intolerant,” in which he describes gluten-free bread as a “coagulation of mysterious flours that form a brick with a density of a black hole and the dryness of a desert.” It’s unlikely that Mr. Sears has dined at Senza Gluten, a reliably good and gluten-free Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. A few years ago, I took my gluten-free girlfriend there just hours before making her an offer of marriage. The scheme worked. The photograph from that day in which my soon-to-be wife looks happiest shows her inspecting…

On a sunny morning last month, the students in Ms. Jones’s second-grade class and Mr. Wilkinson’s fourth-grade class lined up single file outside P.S. 213, in East New York, Brooklyn, for a field trip to learn about police brutality. The second graders wore sky-blue polos and the fourth graders were in maroon. They had little masks with polka dots or the logos of football teams. They’d been invited by Terrence Floyd, a former school-bus driver, to visit Union Square to see the new statues of John Lewis, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, who was Terrence’s brother. Terrence was waiting in the schoolyard for the buses. He was dressed in a black T-shirt printed with his brother’s name. After George’s murder, Terrence started a foundation, We Are Floyd, to rebuild communities…

ACROSS 1 Star of “Us”13 “Sigh…”14 Award won by Marlon James, in 2015, for “A Brief History of Seven Killings”15 Signature fabric for designer Veronica MacIsaac16 Demolition expert’s supply17 Adventurer in Grouchland, in a 1999 film18 Extra19 “Incident at ___” (Arthur Miller play)21 Toby Stephens, to Dame Maggie Smith22 ___ rally23 Public alternative to an Uber, perhaps25 Sections in some retrospective exhibitions27 Weeder’s tool28 Leave out30 Eddying32 Luis of Atlético Madrid34 Voice-activated assistant35 White House press secretary Psaki36 Onetime “Born from Jets” automaker38 Lost40 Tablet’s core, briefly41 Person who experiences little to no sexual attraction, for short44 Covers45 Handsome, in Huesca47 Sunburn remedy49 Lament50 Sancho Panza’s mount, for one51 Livelihood54 Latin motto above the Eye of Providence on a dollar bill55 Closes DOWN 1 Slowly, musically2 ___ planning3 Menial laborer4…

For most of this year, concert dates have continually shuffled as a recuperating industry tries to make sense of a chaotic schedule and a host of new variables. With the winter’s contemporary-music slate, however, the docket finally seems to be stabilizing—a return to the night life of old. Stadium shows are back, and in bigger numbers, and we are seeing fewer cancellations. Veteran acts relish the opportunity to delve back into their catalogues, and artists sitting on albums now get the chance to see how people respond to the music in the wild. Bob Dylan finally heads out on his “Rough and Rowdy Ways” tour, supporting his exceptional 2020 album of the same name, at the Beacon Theatre (Nov. 21). Oddball producers descend upon Brooklyn in the days before: after releasing…

For those inclined to see them, there were plenty of bad omens last week as the latest round of international climate negotiations—COP26—got under way in Glasgow. A storm that lashed England with eighty-mile-per-hour winds disrupted train service from London to Scotland, leaving many delegates scrambling to find a way to get to the meeting. Just as the conclave began, Glasgow’s garbage workers went on strike, and rubbish piled up in the streets. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in his opening speech, compared the world’s situation to that of James Bond, who often finds himself “strapped to a doomsday device, desperately trying to work out which colored wire to pull to turn it off, while a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a detonation that will end human life as we…

Public Records late on a Friday night. A café-bar connected to a night club, in the former headquarters of the A.S.P.C.A., by the canal in Gowanus. Andrew Savage and Austin Brown, of the Brooklyn band Parquet Courts, at table, Savage with a Martini, Brown with a mezcal. They were sharing a slice of banana cream pie. “Look at those bananas,” Brown said. Savage, in a brown cardigan, has short dark hair and a solemn, ingenuous aspect that made possible more than several registers of droll. Brown, in a T-shirt featuring yin and yang and the caption “Same Team,” has John Lennon glasses and unexpectedly long King Charles II hair and a for-now-I-shall-suffer-fools tilt of the chin. Savage and Brown are the band’s principal songwriters. Missing were Savage’s brother, Max, the…

Outside the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse, in lower Manhattan, police stood watchfully behind yellow “Do Not Cross” tape. An agitated crowd had gathered: people chanting, jostling, shouting into megaphones. Some waved blue-and-white Honduran flags. Others held up signs in English and Spanish: “No Clemency for Narcopolitics.” It was March 30, 2021: sentencing day for Juan Antonio (Tony) Hernández, a former Honduran congressman who had been arrested in Miami in 2018, on suspicion of drug trafficking. After a trial in the Southern District of New York, Hernández had been found guilty of taking part in the smuggling of at least a hundred and eighty-five thousand kilos of cocaine into the U.S.—enough to supply five doses to everyone living in America. On the street, protesters waved a huge hand-painted banner that read…

From 1956 to 1964, one of the most popular daytime television programs was “Queen for a Day,” a game show that rested on a simple, and savage, premise. In each episode, four women who had suffered recent hardships spoke candidly about their experiences on live TV. At the end of the half hour, one woman would be crowned queen and showered with prizes. One of the so-called misery shows of that era, along with “Strike It Rich” and “Glamour Girl,” it largely featured working-class contestants: widows whose husbands had been killed in hunting accidents, mothers of chronically sick children, grocery-store owners who couldn’t afford to stock their stores. In addition to the prizes, each winner was granted a request for some product or service, which tended to be practical and…

It’s been fourteen long months since a marquee heralding a splashy revival of “The Music Man,” starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, went up at the Winter Garden. Originally scheduled to open in the fall of 2020, the production was delayed until spring, then winter, holding out a post-pandemic promise of seventy-six trombones and a big parade. Along the way, it lost its lead producer, Scott Rudin, who stepped back amid accusations of workplace bullying. River City, meet trouble. Meredith Willson’s classic finally starts previews on Dec. 20, under the direction of Jerry Zaks. It’s one of several mammoth musicals careening toward midtown. Michael Mayer’s production of “Funny Girl” (starting March 26, at the August Wilson) is the first attempt at a Broadway revival since the show premièred, in 1964—likely because…

The West End Phoenix, a four-year-old community newspaper in Toronto, bills itself as “slow print for fast times”—a reaction against global forces that have been decimating local journalism, if not an analog way of life altogether. The Phoenix, which publishes periodically, is a broadsheet, defiantly large and ill-suited to manipulating on the subway. Its design is heavy on art photography, and feature articles range from “Pet of the Month” to examinations of the demonizing of Black communities by traditional crime reporting. The founding publisher, Dave Bidini, is an author and a musician, best known for fronting the Rheostatics, who used to tour with the Tragically Hip. Owing in part to Bidini’s celebrity, in 2019 the Phoenix office received a personal visit from Justin Trudeau (“It’s got a real heft to…

In June, the fashion designer Scott Sternberg made plans to vacation in Hawaii in October. He wasn’t sure if the trip would be a celebration or a consolation. If things went according to plan, he would have sold his company, the cult leisure-wear brand Entireworld, to a larger apparel company, and stayed on as creative director. But if the sale didn’t fly, he would run out of money and be forced to shut down the business. The second scenario happened. On October 13th, Sternberg’s forty-seventh birthday, he announced on Instagram that Entireworld was closing. He had been trying to find a buyer or investors for months, and now the anticipated deal, he wrote, “disappeared in a flash.” He took off for Hawaii. “It wasn’t like I was dying to be…

Choose a direction for your perusal of “Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle,” a retrospective that lines the upper three-fifths of the Guggenheim Museum’s ramp with some eighty paintings, drawings, and woodcuts by the Russian hierophant of abstraction, who died in France in 1944, at the age of seventyseven. The show’s curator, Megan Fontanella, recommends starting at the bottom, with the overwrought works of the artist’s final phase, and proceeding upward, back to the simpler Expressionist landscapes and horsemen of his early career. This course is canny in terms of your enjoyment, which increases as you go. The teeming complexities of the enigmatic glyphs and contradictory techniques that mark Kandinsky’s late phase defeat my comprehension: they are numbingly hermetic. A middle range, from about 1910 to the early twenties, seethes with…

Picture the scene. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, mooching around their Montecito stronghold and desperate to get out for the evening, are picking a movie to see. “Dune”? Too long. “No Time to Die”? Too sad. Harry won’t watch “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” because it reminds him of the British press. Meghan won’t watch “The Addams Family 2,” because it reminds her of lunch at Windsor Castle. “Hey, I know!” she cries. “Let’s go and see a film about your mother.” “Spencer” is a rum concoction, starring Kristen Stewart as the late Princess of Wales. It is written by Steven Knight, directed by Pablo Larraín, and described at the outset as “a fable from a true tragedy”—fancy talk for “We kind of made this stuff up.” The…