Innholdsfortegnelse for December 13, 2021 i The New Yorker

If things had gone just a bit differently, James Howells might today be as rich as the Queen of England. The decisive moment, he now thinks, occurred one evening in August, 2013, when he was twenty-eight and at home with his family in Newport, a small city on the Welsh coast. Howells and his partner, Hafina, were raising three children, and family trips—like the one that they had taken to Disneyland Paris—were fun but exhausting. So he had made plans to treat himself to what he called a “lads’ vacation”: a trip with friends to a resort in Cyprus. Howells, an engineer who helped maintain emergency-response systems forvarious communities in Wales, often worked from home, and that night he decided to neaten up his office. As he recently recalled to…

On the north side of Independence Square, in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, is the House of Government—a row of cuboid white buildings, each with a checkerboard of identical black windows. Members of parliament go in through the main entrance, passing a towering statue of Lenin and a forlorn line of trees that stand amid several acres of pavement and brick. People who want to visit the Central Election Commission use a small entrance to the right. On the afternoon of August 10, 2020, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya went in through the smaller entrance, to complain that her victory in the Presidential election had been stolen. Tsikhanouskaya was not a career politician; she was the daughter of a truck driver, a mother of two who had set aside a career as an…

Sergeant Jackie Noonan was squaring away paperwork when the call came in, just her and the gosling, Pronsius Swift, in Ballina Garda Station. The third officer on duty, Sergeant Dennis Crean, had run out to oversee the extraction of a Renault Mégane that some young lad—sober, apparently, just a nervous nonlocal negotiating the cat’s cradle of back roads around Currabaggan—had nosed into a ditch a half mile out from the national school. The car was a writeoff but the lad had got away without a scratch, according to Crean, and he was a lucky lad, because Noonan knew the roads out that way and they were wicked: high-ditched, hilly, and altogether too narrow; scantily sign-posted and laced with half-hidden, acutely right-angled turns that it took only a second’s inattention to…

Fame is so powerful that renouncing it can seem like the supreme power move. Celebrities who retreat from the public eye (Howard Hughes, J. D. Salinger, Prince) will always be legends, no matter what else they may be. Rumored comebacks tantalize. Paparazzi circle. The mystery deepens. In 1941, at the age of thirty-six, Greta Garbo, one of the biggest box-office draws in the world, stopped acting and, though she lived for half a century more, never made another film. For a star who, more than any other, “invaded the subconscious of the audience,” as Robert Gottlieb writes in his new biography, “Garbo” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), this was an abdication, a privilege of monarchical proportions. But it was also a decision made by one particular, peculiar person who had never…

In the nineteen-nineties, when I fit the profile of a young person, I sometimes ventured into tumultuous New York dance clubs like Twilo and the Tunnel, vaguely in the hope of making some transient romantic connection but mainly to experience the kind of overpowering sonic sensuality in which these clubs specialized. Inept at dancing, I mimicked people around me, bopping up and down as inconspicuously as possible. If I got close enough to the speakers, I could feel bass beats passing through my body—an elemental intersection of flesh and sound. The unrelenting noise was both gorgeous and hellish. Afterward, I’d wander home on empty streets, savoring the distant rumble of the city as a new kind of silence. Ash Fure and Lilleth Glimcher’s performance installation “Hive Rise,” which the Industry…

PAIN AND GAIN Meghan O’Gieblyn, in her review of recent books about suffering, points out that many people believe hardship can be a source of good things (Books, November 15th). I can attest to this. I spent the year of 2011 working in an impoverished town in the Australian outback. I did not choose to do this, and I did not have the resources to leave. The suffering I observed during this time was crushing. Even a year or two after I returned to the U.S., when people asked what the experience had yielded, I couldn’t say. Only later did I realize that it had changed me utterly. That year was difficult. (Indeed, I, along with most of my fellow-workers, was paid an hourly “hardship” bonus by the Australian government.)…

All morning gently swimming in the misery of a dead writer. Poverty like a genetic bequest, polar loneliness. The finical, fanatical, reciprocal chiselling of mind and matter. And the long silences, late saliences of God and sound set like glyphs in the mother country, childhood. All morning, as if it didn’t touch me, as indeed it doesn’t, mostly, one daughter dead, another mad as jacks, drafts and diaries scattered like a plane crash in the ocean. And fragments as fruition, and exile like a birthright, and, as the sun bleeds out one evening like a suicide, suicide. All morning my exercise to keep these muscles strong enough to recognize the weakness meaning time, to climb out as if there were an out, to dry off as if there were a…

What would we seem, stripped downLike a wintered tree.Glossy scabs, tight-raised skin,These can look silver in certain moonlights.In other words,Our scars are the brightestParts of us.* * *The crescent moon,The night’s lucent lesion.We are felled oaks beneath it,Branches full of empty.Look closer.What we share is moreThan what we’ve shed.* * *& what we share is the bark, the bones.Paleontologists, from one fossilized femur,Can dream up a species,Make-believe a bodyWhere there was none.Our remnants are revelation,Our requiem as raptus.When we bend into dirtWe’re truth preservedWithout our skin.* * *Lumen means both the cavityOf an organ, literally an opening,& a unit of luminous flux,Literally, a measurement of how litThe source is. Illuminate us.That is, we, too,Are this bodied unit of flare,The gap for lux to breach.* * *Sorry, must’ve been the lightPlaying…

Under Jerusalem, by Andrew Lawler (Doubleday). Chronicling more than a century and a half of contentious digs around Jerusalem’s sacred sites, this history profiles the various “treasure hunters, scholarly clerics, religious extremists, and secular archaeologists” who hoped to uncover the Biblical city. Lawler’s history tracks both the marvels found underground and the events unfolding above them, including the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the birth of Zionism, the creation of the Israeli state, and the shattered peace talks of the nineties. Probing excavators’ often partisan motivations, Lawler highlights archeology’s power to shape narratives and its development from a discipline “not far removed from its far older cousin, tomb robbing,” into a modern tool of nationalist mythmaking. The Amur River, by Colin Thubron (Harper). The world’s tenth-longest river, running through eastern Russia…

I suppose it’s accurate to refer to “South I Side,” a series set in the Chicago neighborhood of Englewood, as a workplace comedy. Simon (Sultan Salahuddin) and Kareme (Kareme Young) are best friends who grudgingly clock in at Rent-T-Own, a shady furniture-and-appliance-rental service. Its name, a parody of Rent-A-Center, is the bitter, primal joke of the show: a retail center where the true product is debt. “South Side” derives a great deal of its Black black humor from the encounters between its protagonists and the delinquent renters: the physical aspect of product repossession allows for so much slapstick. The tang of the show’s critique brings to mind other satires of workplace culture, such as “Reno 911” and the genre-shifter “The Office.” But the creators of “South Side”—Salahuddin, his brother, Bashir,…

DECEMBER 8 – 14, 2021 The photographer Gordon Parks was the first Black director to make a major-studio feature: “The Learning Tree,” from 1969, an autobiographical drama about growing up in Kansas in the nineteen-twenties. It’s screening in Anthology Film Archives’ near-complete retrospective of Parks’s films (through Dec. 11). Also included are the TV movie “Solomon Northup’s Odyssey,” the bio-pic “Leadbelly,” the personal documentary “Moments Without Proper Names,” and, of course, the Harlem-based private-eye thriller “Shaft.” MUSIC Kati Agócs CLASSICAL The signature “Composer Portraits” series at Miller Theatre, which has supplied a vital platform for dozens of established and emerging artists through the years, resumes for the venue’s first in-person event since March of 2020. In the spotlight is Kati Agócs, whose music is known for its elemental strength and…

This story begins about two billion years ago, when the world, if not young, exactly, was a lot more impressionable. The planet spun faster, so the sun rose every twenty-one hours. The earliest continents were forming—Arctica, for instance, which persists as bits and pieces of Siberia. Most of the globe was given over to oceans, and the oceans teemed with microbes. Some of these microbes—the group known as cyanobacteria—had mastered a peculiarly powerful form of alchemy. They lived off sunlight, which they converted into sugar. As a waste product, they gave off oxygen. Cyanobacteria were so plentiful, and so good at what they did, that they changed the world. They altered the oceans’ chemistry, and then the atmosphere’s. Formerly in short supply, oxygen became abundant. Anything that couldn’t tolerate it…

When Jeremy Strong was a teen-ager, in suburban Massachusetts, he had three posters thumbtacked to his bedroom wall: Daniel Day-Lewis in “My Left Foot,” Al Pacino in “Dog Day Afternoon,” and Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man.” These weren’t just his favorite actors: their careers were a road map that he followed obsessively, like Eve Harrington casing out a trio of Margo Channings. He read interviews that his heroes gave and, later, managed to get crew jobs on their movies. By his early twenties, he had worked for all three men, and had adopted elements of their full-immersion acting methods. By his mid-thirties, after fifteen years of hustling in the industry, he’d had minor roles in a string of A-list films: “Lincoln,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Selma,” and “The Big Short.” He’d…

One of the problems with podcasts about music is that they compete with music. Why listen to people mulling over a song’s greatness when the actual song is just a few clicks away? Some of the most popular music podcasts, like “Switched On Pop” or “Song Exploder,” essentially reverse engineer a song’s magic, disassembling it and puzzling over the constituent parts. Yet professional judgment matters little when it comes to our own sentimental attachments. It’s impossible to persuade someone that a song that reminds him of home, or that got him through a rough breakup, is derivative or bad. We don’t all have taste, but we all have stories. In the age of the explainer, it’s rare for a podcast to dwell on the mysteries of feeling and memory. “Soul…

“Dear Sir,” the letter from Lord Sandwich to the English naturalist Joseph Banks began, “poor Captain Cooke is no more.” That was about all the Earl or anyone else could say with certainty, since word of the explorer’s demise had only just reached England’s shores, nearly a year after he died on the black-sand beach of Kealakekua Bay, on the island of Hawaii, on Valentine’s Day, 1779. Yet the passage of time did not clarify the matter: although thousands witnessed Cook’s death, exactly how he died is a matter of dispute to this day. According to Cook’s journal, and to diaries kept by crew members aboard the Resolution, Cook first reached Hawaii in 1778, while searching for the Northwest Passage. When he returned, a year later, circling the islands…