Innholdsfortegnelse for November 22, 2021 i The New Yorker

Around noon every workday, Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, sits down at the head of a long table in a large round room in the paper’s office, in Moscow, to chair a planyorka, or planning meeting. On October 11th, the Monday after the Friday when the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it was awarding this year’s Peace Prize to Muratov and the Filipina journalist Maria Ressa, ten people gathered at the table, joined by fifteen on Zoom, to discuss how to spend Muratov’s half of the $1.15 million in prize money. Muratov had told the media that he saw the Nobel as a prize for everyone at the paper, that he wouldn’t take a kopeck for himself, that the entire amount would go to charity, and that he…

On Thanksgiving morning, 1987, Rick Bart, a homicide detective in Snohomish County, Washington, got word that a pheasant hunter had discovered a body in a field beneath High Bridge, an overpass spanning the Snoqualmie River. Bart was preparing to spend the day with his family, but he went anyway. He was one of only two homicide detectives in Snohomish—a jurisdiction, just north of Seattle, that covers more than two thousand square miles. He was familiar with the crime scene. It was near the Monroe Honor Farm, where inmates milked cows to provide dairy to the state prison system. The bridge was secluded enough to be private, but accessible by a country road. Teen-agers drank there. When Bart arrived, morning fog was clinging to trees along the riverbank. The body was…

“No politics, just make money,” Betty’s mother, Tina, liked to say. And when it came to China: “See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. Do you hear me?” “I hear nothing,” Betty had wanted to say sometimes. Or, well, many times, really. But instead she’d said nothing and, as directed, made a lot of money. After all, she was the good daughter. And that was how it was that when umbrellas took over Hong Kong she had a nice place in Vancouver. And that was how it was, too, that when racism took over Vancouver she could up and move to New York. It was convenient to be rich, you had to say. In New York, she didn’t even have to buy an apartment. She and her husband and the boys…

A BETTER DEFENSE As a criminal-defense attorney, I read with interest Rachel Poser’s article about stash-house stings (“Set Up and Sent Away,” October 18th). I recently represented a client with no criminal history, who worked as a grocery-store clerk and an Uber driver. During one ride, he told a passenger about his financial difficulties, which stemmed in part from expenses relating to the care of his two children. My client’s passenger happened to be a government informant. An undercover operation was set up, and my client, though hesitant, agreed to pick up a package, drive twenty minutes, and deliver it, in exchange for five hundred dollars. On collecting the package, my client was arrested. He accepted a plea deal that required at least two years of prison time; he was…

My mother is uncomfortable with my top.She doesn’t think my boobs should beout like this. She adjusts the TV antenna and saysIsn’t the TV working better now? I don’t wantto watch football. I am trying to learn to do my makeup.My mother never taught me. Should I say at this pointthat my mother is white? I used to watch Pantene commercialsand think my hair could look like that if I used enoughof her product. She has one of those white-momhaircuts now. It is thinning. She needs more volume.She needs me to tell her I know I’m white, too.Like I think about anything else. The football playersare kneeling because, I say, anyone could killyour Black son. He’s white, too, she says—and youcould use a little more eyeliner. She wonderswhy I don’t…

It can lead to the practice of tolerance, the notionThat the soul returns to earth more than onceAnd remembers at least a few faint glimmersOf the life just prior to the one at hand.It can prompt you to be more patient with a friendWho’s linked her fate to the fate of a manShe knows is liable to wander offJust when she needs him. Better this life,You’ll hear her telling herself, than the dullFifty-year marriage she dimly recallsTo a husband too sluggish to go anywhere. And think how much easier it will beTo put up with the spendthrift cousin of yours,Who has to borrow from you most monthsTo pay his mortgage, if you can supposeHe recalls enough of his prior lifeAs a penny-pincher to make him decideTo err this time on…

The Wrong End of the Telescope, by Rabih Alameddine (Grove). Don’t “call it ‘A Lebanese Lesbian in Lesbos,’” a character jokes, apparently to the author, in this sardonic meta-novel. The lesbian in question is a Chicago surgeon, who, amid the rising anti-immigrant sentiment of 2016, goes to Greece to help refugees. The experience sparks thoughts about her Syrian Lebanese family, who cut her off when she came out as a trans woman. The narrative, in which she tends to a dying mother and sees virtue-signalling volunteers taking selfies and getting mocked by refugees, is interspersed with accounts of the migrants’ pasts and questions about the utility of telling their stories: the surgeon asks, “Did you believe that if you wrote about Syrian refugees the world would look at them differently?”…

H.G. Wells is remembered today mostly as the author of four visionary science-fiction perennials with premises so simple and strong that they can sustain any amount of retelling: “The War of the Worlds,” “The Invisible Man,” “The Time Machine,” and “The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Social historians recall Wells as one of the brighter technological optimists and left-wing polemicists of the early part of the twentieth century. He is also remembered, among Brits with a taste for evergreen gossip, as perhaps the most erotically adventurous man of his generation, the satyr of the socialists. “I have done what I pleased,” he wrote. “Every bit of sexual impulse in me has expressed itself.” The case is sometimes even made that Wells invented the word “sex”—that he pioneered its modern use, in…

NOVEMBER 17 – 23, 2021 Edmund de Waal’s memoir, “The Hare with Amber Eyes,” has inspired an exhibition of the same name, at the Jewish Museum, opening Nov. 19. At the heart of both the book and the show is an exquisite group of Japanese netsuke—ivory carvings used as kimono ornaments—acquired, in the nineteenth century, by an ancestor of de Waal’s, the French art historian Charles Ephrussi. (Four are pictured above.) When the Nazis later looted the family’s art collection, the netsuke, hidden in a mattress, eluded their grasp. MUSIC Ellen Allien ELECTRONIC Much of the Berlin-based techno producer Ellen Allien’s latest music boasts a flat formalism that reaches back to nineties-vintage basics—the kick drums brusque, the synths buzzy, the bass a no-nonsense pummel—standing apart from the more textured work…

Before the altar of the church stood a large screen displaying the words “recital no. 1: mass,” in black letters on a white background. The singer entered from the back, walking slowly, delivering an a-cappella setting of the Kyrie from the traditional Mass, by the contemporary composer Caroline Shaw: “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.” The light was low, almost séance-like. The singer wore a black suit jacket over a black tank top, with a pearl rosary around his neck. Once he reached the front of the church, he walked over to a piano, where an accompanist was waiting for him, and launched into Bach’s “Wie jammern mich,” from the cantata “Vergnügte Ruh”: “How I bewail those waywardhearts/That set themselves against you, my God.” He then sang the spiritual “Were…

The airport in Telluride, Colorado, is small and private. The town’s film festival, held each year during the Labor Day weekend, has a reputation for intimacy—celebrities are not subjected to red carpets or corsetry, and the looming mountains have a way of making Hollywood seem garish and far away. This year, Kristen Stewart flew to Colorado from Venice, Italy, where “Spencer,” a new movie in which she plays Princess Diana, had just premièred. The first reviews of her performance (“ ‘Spencer’ Stuns Venice, Earning Standing Ovation and Oscar Buzz”—Variety) were published as she slept above the Atlantic. She stopped at a hotel to change and have her dyed blond hair styled in a messy updo, then went directly to the Werner Herzog Theatre, along with Pablo Larraín, the movie’s director,…

Elizabeth Hardwick was a master of the opening sentence. Few writers have the guts to begin so boldly—or with so many adjectives. Here’s the first line of her 1955 essay on George Eliot: “She was melancholy, headachey, with a slow, disciplined, hard-won, aching genius that bore down upon her with a wondrous and exhausting force, like a great love affair in middle age.” An essay about the poet Dylan Thomas begins more briskly, but with equal intrigue: “He died, grotesquely, like Valentino, with mysterious weeping women at his bedside.” Her biography of Herman Melville, from 2000, carries on the tradition: “Herman Melville: sound the name and it’s to be the romance of the sea, the vast, mysterious waters for which a thousand adjectives cannot suffice.” Sound Hardwick’s name, however, and…

When Peter Martin, who performs as Petey, noticed that he was getting popular on social media, he was pleased but confused—he couldn’t quite figure out whether the seven-digit numbers beneath his videos had any realworld corollary. He remembers thinking, “Are these bots? Are these people? What the fuck is this?” Petey lives in Los Angeles, and although he spent three years working in the mailroom of a talent agency, he never really thought that he might get drawn into the city’s star-making industry. His first real celebrity experience came last year, in Mendocino, the Northern California beach town, where he was approached-by a woman in a coffee shop. “I’m way too old to be on TikTok, and this is embarrassing, but I love your shit,” she told him. Petey responded…