Innholdsfortegnelse for December 6, 2021 i The New Yorker

It was a sizzling August morning in 2021, but inside a hair-and-makeup trailer parked at the Pacific Palms Resort, an hour east of Hollywood, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle were returning to the year 2000. The women, who are both thirty-four, are co-creators and co-stars of “PEN15,” a Hulu series in which they play versions of themselves as teen-agers, the thirteen-year-old best friends and misfits Maya Ishii-Peters and Anna Kone. In the makeup trailer, Erskine sat in front of a vanity mirror as a stylist wearing a face shield used a felt-tip pen to paint hundreds of tiny strokes onto her upper lip, creating the illusion of a faint mustache. “I was made fun of for being hairy—I had a deep insecurity about that,” Erskine told me. Beside her, a…

A collection of makeshift warehouses sits along the highway in Ghout al-Shaal, a worn neighborhood of auto-repair shops and scrap yards in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. Formerly a storage depot for cement, the site was reopened in January, 2021, its outer walls heightened and topped with barbed wire. Men in black-and-blue camouflage uniforms, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, stand guard around a blue shipping container that passes for an office. On the gate, a sign reads “Directorate for Combatting Illegal Migration.” The facility is a secretive prison for migrants. Its name, in Arabic, is Al Mabani—The Buildings. At 3 A.M. on February 5, 2021, Aliou Candé, a sturdy, shy twenty-eight-year-old migrant from Guinea-Bissau, arrived at the prison. He had left home a year and a half earlier, because his family’s…

Mary Jane follows her husband, Daniel, from room to room, words pouring out of her, yammering. Or hammering, as he has said, as if she must hit every nail on the head. What does he mean by that, she wanted to know. What do you mean by that? she had asked, but Daniel shrugged. No idea, he said. She follows Daniel into the living room, where he sits in the big blue chair he likes to relax in after dinner, watching home-improvement shows on his device. Mary Jane has her own device, though she is slightly less captivated by its offerings—the games and apps and streaming services—which is not to say she is above it, she is definitely not above it, no, just slightly less captivated. She often checks the…

In the early hours of Independence Day, 2018, I found myself awake. I put it down to jet lag: I’d just returned from South Africa, where my wife—like me, a physician—and I were working with a medical charity. I decided to get up, and drank a cup of strong coffee. Within minutes, my heart was racing. I attributed this to the caffeine, but my heart rate went on rapidly accelerating. I counted beats on my watch: a hundred and eighty a minute, three times my resting rate. My chest tightened and my breathing became labored. I tried to be calm, telling myself no, it wasn’t a heart attack, merely the exhaustion of the trip and the effect of the coffee. But the symptoms were getting worse, and I broke out…

My first-ever solid take on Sophie Taeuber-Arp, the subject of a wonderful retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, occurred nine years ago, by way of a survey, also at MOMA, of the genesis of abstract art, circa 1910-25. Until then, I had regarded the Swiss virtuoso of many crafts lightly. But on that occasion, which featured such heavy hitters of the aesthetic revolution as Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich, I kept coming back to a smallish wool embroidery of rectangular forms, “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” (1916), by Taeuber-Arp. Beautiful, utterly assured, and ineffably heartfelt, it made the artist’s associates, nearly all male, seem relative louts, worked up about innovations that were a breeze for her. That the medium was “woman’s work” by the standards of the time added to my startlement, upending…

DANCING AGAIN Jennifer Homans, in her review of the New York City Ballet’s long-awaited return to the stage, notes that today’s dancers approach the now classic George Balanchine repertoire, which has defined the company’s identity and aesthetics since its beginning, with “spine-straight” rigidity and orthodoxy (Dancing, November 8th). There is “no fragility or spontaneity in sight”; the dancers have traded “vulnerability for perfection.” Homans laments that the company’s zipped-up approach to the founding choreographer’s ballets is not “something anyone can undo.” But, to the contrary, much could be done if the keepers of the George Balanchine Trust opened his works to new interpretations by dancers and choreographers. Balanchine himself remade dozens of his dances during his long career—notably, “Serenade,” a ballet set to Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings”—altering the sets, the…

Buses move at a glacial pace, empty taxis are an endangered species, Ubers cost a million bucks, biking is like wheeled circus combat, and the subway turns into a water park when it rains. Maybe private aquatic travel isn’t so crazy? Corey Orazem, the thirty-year-old owner of Jersey Jet Ski, thinks the future is a world in which office workers Jet-Ski to their jobs. Say goodbye to gridlock and road rage (and perhaps to a general sense of environmental responsibility). Currently, New York City regulations make it illegal to park a Jet Ski along most of the shoreline without a special permit. But Orazem has been talking with legislators in New Jersey about updating its laws, and he hopes to convince New York, too. One warmish Saturday, Orazem jumped on…

There are many things about me that I’m sure might be of interest to readers. Things I’ve never really told anyone. I’ve always been a private person, but I wanted to make sure I got a few things down in writing, just in case anything happens to me—or before I forget! Like, here’s something: People might be surprised to learn that I’m a speed reader. I took a course when I was a kid, and one would be hard pressed to name a book I haven’t read. Books are my constant companions. Like, last year, I went to Turks and Caicos over Christmas and read “The Count of Monte Cristo” on the way there and “Anna Karenina” on the way back. I’m glad I read them in that order. It…

In the spring of 2011, a recent Williams College graduate named Lina Khan interviewed for a job at the Open Markets Program, in Washington, D.C. Open Markets, which was part of the New America think tank, was dedicated to the study of monopolies and the ways in which concentration in the American economy was suppressing innovation, depressing wages, and fuelling inequality. The program had been founded the previous year by Barry Lynn, who believed that monopolies posed a threat to democracy, and that policymakers and much of the public were blind to this threat. Unlike the practice at other think tanks, which publish research reports and white papers, Lynn, a former reporter and editor, disseminated the program’s findings directly to the public, through newspaper and magazine articles. The study of…

They say paratroopers still yell Geronimo when they jumpBecause of a movie the first ones saw the one with Geronimo Played by Chief Thundercloud the first Tonto real nameVictor Daniels not the one with him played by Chuck Connors Who played for the Dodgers and later played the RiflemanWhich became a nickname of Flemmi a mob killer in Boston In real life he came home to find soldiers had killed his agedMother his young wife and his children that not in the movie Somewhere sometime someone must have yelled GeronimoWhen committing atrocities or about to or some such redolent Word or phrase that too a kind of poetry even official jargonA kind of poetry Bless comedy for an opposite rude poetry They told me Germans murdered our cousins so I…

“Killing a European is killing two birds with one stone,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1961, seven years into France’s brutal suppression of the Algerian independence movement. After all, such a killing eliminates “in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.” Sartre, despised in France for his solidarity with Algerian anti-colonialists, wanted to goad people into seeing the “striptease of our humanism.” He wrote, “You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.” Sartre wrote these incendiary words in a preface to “The Wretched of the Earth,” an anti-colonial treatise by the French and West Indian political philosopher and psychiatrist…

Everybody’s entitled to a little privacy. Character development in drama is similar to a growing friendship—a process of gradual divulgence. The puzzle of someone’s bearing and outward presentation gives way to the collection of secrets and fears and family history that make up—and, over time, help to explain—that person. Still, the most interesting people, onstage and in our lives, hold on to a whiff of mystery. There’s something alien and ineffable about them that can’t be reduced to mere facts, or be rationalized by psychology. Call it soul. Lynn Nottage’s new play, “Clyde’s,” directed by Kate Whoriskey (at the Helen Hayes), about the staff of a rundown sandwich joint at a truck stop, takes a stark either-or stance regarding the lives of its characters. They spill their guts without much…

DECEMBER 1 – 7, 2021 In 2014, the Venezuelan singer and producer Alejandra Ghersi, who records as Arca, emerged as a forward-thinking electronic artist with an inventive, almost alien sensibility. In 2020, her focus shifted and she released the album “kick i,” the first in a series that moves toward a more pop sound, featuring art-pop progressives such as Björk and Rosalía. On Dec. 3, Arca completes the anthology, sharing the remaining three installments of the project, each carrying on an extended metaphor of individuation. ART Vasily Kandinsky Some eighty paintings, drawings, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, the Russian hierophant of abstraction, line the upper three-fifths of the Guggenheim’s ramp, in the retrospective “Around the Circle.” The show’s curator, Megan Fontanella, recommends starting at the bottom, with the overwrought works of…

A dozen or so friends from the Internet gathered recently at Sotheby’s in Manhattan to buy a first printing of the U.S. Constitution (estimated value: fifteen to twenty million dollars). The group, who called themselves ConstitutionDAO, had just spent a week raising millions of dollars on Twitter, TikTok, and Discord from anonymous screen names: recent immigrants, college dropouts, the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of someone who fought in the American Revolution. (The “DAO” in “ConstitutionDAO” stands for “decentralized autonomous organization”—a leaderless corporate structure that resembles an online chat room with a bank account.) They raised four million in the first twenty-four hours. Then someone pitched in another four million, in Ethereum’s currency. By the next evening, the project had gone viral: seventeen thousand donors had given more than thirty-three million (median contribution: $206.26).…

The land is a crick in the neck. An orange grove burnsand it’s sour when you burp. Whose voice is that?There’s a fable. There’s a key. Every Ramadan,the artery suffers first. A diet of heavy lamband checkpoint papers. Indigestion like a nightmare.The Taurus sun burns your forehead. I mean the land.The land looks white on the MRI images:you call your grandfather. He’s been finding the landin his stool. His body contours the mattress like a coffin.His hand trembles. When he drinks the land,the urine comes out rose-colored.The land sears the esophagus. No more lemons,the doctor says. Two pillows at least. In July,you lived inside your grandfather like a settlement.You ate currant sorbet from the same cup.Did you inherit the land in your arthritic wrist?It makes knitting hell. On the telephone,your…

Born in Blackness, by Howard W. French (Liveright). Reaching as far back as 1324, when King Mansa Musa, of Mali, embarked on a pilgrimage to Mecca, this revisionist chronicle sets out to depict Africans and people of African descent as the “prime movers in every stage” of global history. Challenging the common view that the West rose because of some inherent superiority, French emphasizes that it could not have become what it did without Africa’s resources, noting, for instance, the centrality of the continent’s gold and its labor to the development of European societies. Weaving together previous scholarship on the subject with new archival research and eye-opening descriptions of historic sites, French makes an engaging, persuasive case for reconsidering Africa’s place in world history. Twelve Caesars, by Mary Beard (Princeton). Ever…

When Adele set out to finish her new album, “30,” her record label wondered how to make it resonate with a younger crowd. Adele is a vocal powerhouse with an out-of-time sensibility, and she takes long hiatuses between albums. It has been six years since her previous record, “25,” and much has changed in the world of popular music, whose pace Adele has long been proudly out of synch with. “The conversation of TikTok came up a lot,” the singer told the radio personality Zane Lowe, in a recent interview. “They were, like, ‘We’ve really gotta make sure that these fourteen-year-olds know who you are.’” Adeleis one of the few figures in entertainment with the authority and the gravitas to brush off such misguided suggestions, and her solution was defiantly…