Innholdsfortegnelse for December 20, 2021 i The New Yorker

Twelve years ago, on the banks of the Mississippi, a pair of thru-paddling canoeists, new acquaintances, made plans to meet for a gimlet at Nye’s Polonaise, a Minneapolis dive identified by Esquire as the “best bar in America.” One, named Neal Moore, was a non-practicing Mormon in his late thirties who had grown up in Los Angeles, his back yard separated by razor wire from Richard Pryor’s. A former missionary, he called himself a “citizen journalist,” curious in a Twain-tinged way about the effects of the Great Recession. The other was Dick Conant, a Falstaffan vagabond in his late fifties who was “connecting rivers,” as he put it, en route to Virginia, for no apparent reason. He offered Moore a couple of pieces of advice: one, slow down, and two,…

Five years ago, Josh Quillen, a member of Sō Percussion, a Brooklyn-based music ensemble, spoke with a maker and tuner of steel drums named Kyle Dunleavy about building a potentially unworkable design. Musical steel drums, also called pans, are fashioned from industrial barrels of the type used for storing crude oil or hazardous waste. Pans come in a variety of different voices—bass, tenor bass, cello, guitar, double second, double tenor, and tenor. “I wanted a pair of double seconds that would have at least three octaves of notes on them,” Quillen said recently. “The drums would be fully chromatic, with all the sharps and flats, and would go down to the C below middle C.” No drums like them, with such a plenitude of notes, were then in existence. “That…

As a child, Xiao Fei Zheng did not understand want. He was born in Guangzhou, in southern China, in 1969, and grew up in a quiet neighborhood. Walking home from school, he often heard parents disciplining their children. But he was pampered. His father was a political officer in the Army, and his mother, a former professional basketball player, was an accountant. Their apartment was large, with a dining room spacious enough for his parents to host parties where couples would dance to tango and cha-cha records. In the rest of the building, apartments of this size were divided among three families. On many nights, the Zhengs’ neighbors patiently waited for the family to finish dinner. Then they would invite themselves over, stools in hand, and watch the Zhengs’ color…

A lison Roman approves of creamed greens, knobby lemons, and iceberg lettuce. She’s a slicer of onions, not a dicer; a “ride-or-die corner person” when it comes to lasagnas and cakes. She doesn’t sift flour, soak beans, or peel ginger. Instapots are a no, as are runny dressings, tomatoes on sandwiches, apples as snacks, and drinks served up. Breakfast is savory. Naps are naked. Showers are “objectively boring” and inferior to baths. The thing to do, according to Roman, is to start the water, put on a towel, and head back into the kitchen. The amount of time it takes to fill the tub is roughly equivalent to the time it takes to tear up a loaf of stale bread, for croutons fried in chicken fat. “You either like my…

Roosevelt Montás was born in a rural village in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to the United States when he was eleven years old. He attended public schools in Queens, where he took classes in English as a second language, then entered Columbia College through a government program for low-income students. Afte getting his B.A., he was admitted to Columbia’s Ph.D. program in English and Comparative Literature when a dean got the department to reconsider his application, which had been rejected. He received a Ph.D. in 2004 and has been teaching at Columbia ever since, now as a senior lecturer, a renewable but untenured appointment. He is forty-eight. Arnold Weinstein is eighty-one. Although he was an indifferent student in high school, he was admitted to Princeton, spent his junior year…

ORGANIC MATTER Ian Parker is to be congratulated on his extraordinarily clear-eyed look at Randy Constant’s organic-grain-fraud scheme (“Inorganic,” November 15th). Parker’s article conveys the inherent weirdness of the organic commodity market, in which certain grain that is essentially indistinguishable from other grain becomes worth twice as much because of a written record of how it was produced. I have grown field crops organically for seven years, and agree with Parker that “the organic story has legitimate power.” But, though my practices may have a relatively benign impact on my surroundings as compared with conventional farming, their larger environmental impact is not so clear. Controlling weeds without herbicides generally requires more tillage. Turning the soil more frequently means using more diesel fuel per ton of grain, as well as freeing…

When Dinosaur Jr. goes out on tour, J Mascis, the band’s guitarist and principal singer and songwriter, takes along a bicycle. “Biking has helped me get through the pandemic,” he said on a recent sunny Sunday afternoon, in his halting monotone. “My only social media is Strava. This year is my most miles ever. I’m approaching five thousand.” He was standing with his bike on a patch of lawn near Strawberry Fields, in Central Park, while his wife, Luisa, and his fourteen-year-old son, Rory, played in the grass with a friend’s miniature Dachshund. Passersby made a fuss over the puppy but not over Mascis, in spite of his glum-wizard bearing. He has long white hair and a gray beard, and wore pink-rimmed glasses that complemented his purple helmet. “I have…

For a long time, I believed that my only hope of becoming a professional writer was to find the perfect tool. A few months into my career as a book critic, I’d already run up against the limits of my productivity, and, like many others before me, I pinned the blame on Microsoft Word. Each time I opened a draft, I seemed to lose my bearings, scrolling from top to bottom and alighting on far-flung sentences at random. I found and replaced, wrote and rewrote; the program made fiddling easy and finishing next to impossible. I’d fallen into the trap that the philosopher Jacques Derrida identified in an interview from the mid-nineties. “With the computer, everything is rapid and so easy,” he complained. “An interminable revision, an infinite analysis is…

On April 14th, President Joe Biden ended the longest war in United States history, announcing that the last remaining American troops in Afghanistan would leave by September 11th. In the following weeks, the Taliban conquered dozens of rural districts and closed in on major cities. By mid-June, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan—the brittle democratic state built by Afghan modernizers, NATO soldiers, and American taxpayers after the 9/11 attacks—appeared to be in a death spiral. Yet its President, Ashraf Ghani, insisted to his cabinet that the Republic would endure. In every meeting, “he assured us, and encouraged us,” Rangina Hamidi, the acting minister of education, said. Ghani reminded them, “America didn’t make a promise that they would be here forever.” On June 23rd, Ghani and his advisers boarded a chartered Kam…

There were three pages to go, and it was already past midnight. Lu had asked her big daughter to edit her report for tomorrow’s Purchasing meeting. This daughter, who was eleven, excelled at things like that. “Mom,” the girl said, “why did you ask if a ghost hit the back of my head?” “Because you told your father I was home late, and I specifically told you not to do that. So why did you? Did a ghost hit the back of your head?” “Oh, ha.” They were whispering back and forth in two languages, the girl in English and Lu in Cantonese. Tomorrow was a school day, and Lu could guess what Husband would say if he woke up and found them still working. The girl yawned and made…

The Power of Women, by Denis Mukwege (Flatiron). In the past twenty-five years, conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have created an epidemic of sexual violence. In 1999, the author, who trained as a gynecological surgeon, founded the Panzi Hospital, in one of the country’s most troubled areas; since then, the facility has treated the rape injuries of sixty thousand women. Mukwege, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, recounts his story and offers resonant portraits of the women who have most affected him. One of them is Wamuzila, a teen-ager who was kidnapped by a militia, forced into sex slavery, and then abandoned in the rain forest, before arriving at the Panzi clinic. Her experience was one among many that inspired Mukwege’s campaign for gender equality…

DECEMBER 15 – 21, 2021 Barbara Cook originated the role of Marian the librarian, the headstrong, love-starved heroine of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man,” in 1957. In a splashy new Broadway revival, the role is played by Sutton Foster (above), who, like Cook, has a soprano tone as clear as a bell on a hill and an uncanny ability to make her work look easy. In Jerry Zaks’s production (starting previews on Dec. 20, at the Winter Garden), she’s joined by Hugh Jackman, as the smooth-talking con artist Harold Hill, and a bunch of plucky kids. ART Ruth Asawa The daughter of Japanese immigrants, Asawa, who died in 2013, was detained in internment camps during the Second World War and later thrived artistically in the avant-garde milieu of Black…

Claire says the day will be one second longer.Darkness will no longer exceed light.But the weather is abysmal,so hatred of gloom is not an option. I want to liveto be ninety-five, too, and still be assemblingwords into music and truth. For now,I regard a conference of stars, with fast-moving clouds.Sometimes my dreams are like explosion pits,with scary lava. Yet the Earth remains constant,tilting away from the sun and back,like a robin to a bare branch.Be somebody with a body, the stars command;Don’t be a nobody. I know them by heart,as they sink and as they rise.…

I ordered the seeds months before quarantineorca-marked yin-yangsmonths before we found our black-and-white dogspotted like a bean brought him homebetween the planting and the harvest shelling time he took a fallen bean in his mouthand held it under his tongue all afternooncrying to it as he does to his most precious possessionsdead hummingbird plush foot torn from the toy alligatora bite of rib eye fallen to the floor too good to swallow panic of holdingfrenzied whimper no place safer than the mouthbut the mouth is not safe enough the mouthcannot stop time he cries and paces with his beanhe digs frantic for a burial place abandons the new holes cries in his keepingthe bean smooth on his tongueand crucial I tell himsmall dog: the seeds were already here time is…

“Company,” Stephen Sondheim’s gimlet ode to the eternal fear of shrivelling up and dying alone—that is, of being thirty-five and single—is now itself fifty-one: a brassy older broad, two generations removed from the people it describes so brutally and so well. Three years before it premièred, in 1970, Benjamin Braddock sprang Elaine Robinson from her wedding ceremony with the urgency of a fireman rescuing a baby from a burning building, only to ride into their joint future with a look of numb horror on his face. That was commitment in the age of sexual revolution—the end of joy, the ruin of youth, the kiss of death. “Company” took that queasy closing shot of “The Graduate” as its starting point. “It’s things like using force together/shouting till you’re hoarse together/getting a…