Innholdsfortegnelse for December 27, 2021 i The New Yorker

If health is wealth, the Oura ring endeavors to be the trust fund that you wear around your finger. A band of titanium that costs two hundred and ninety-nine dollars (more if you want it in gold), Oura (sounds like “aura”) tracks body temperature and movement to measure the quality of your sleep. The ring synchs with an app and, each morning, delivers personalized sleep and “readiness” scores of between zero and a hundred. Factors considered include: Tossing and turning. Trips to the bathroom. Staying up past what Oura decrees is your ideal bedtime on any given night (sometimes 7 P.M.), blue-light exposure (bad), and alcohol consumption (worse, so much worse). “I’ve never gotten a hundred,” Harpreet Singh Rai, the departing C.E.O. of Oura, said the other day, via a…

In July, 2001, Zarmina Faqeer, a sixteen-year-old Afghan refugee living in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar, learned that the BBC radio soap opera “New House, New Life” was seeking an actress for one of its lead roles. Faqeer, who was compact and scrappy, had little interest in fame. “It wasn’t about the glamour,” she told me recently. “It was the salary.” Her family had fled Afghanistan on foot in 1985, when she was six months old, during the Soviet occupation; her father, a wheat farmer, carried her over the snowy Hindu Kush mountains to safety. He found work in Peshawar as a security guard, and his wife had five more children. He died in 1995, and the family moved into a single room in the children’s school. Now, six…

ACROSS 1 Coöperative undertaking resettled worm in wood (8) 7 Convulsive anger overwhelms a politician who was reëlected in 1984 (6) 8 Overlook fräulein (4) 9 Preëminent members of institute never function on dope (4) 10 Selfish individual and Zoë finally leave one saint (6) 12 Pile fire around principal character in “Thaïs” (5) 14 Hacks reference line for time coördinates? (5) 17 Drink at Noël, for example, recalled instrument struck before dinner (6) 19 Doppelgänger putting drop of water in can (4) 20 Heal Mötley Crüe (4) 21 People enjoying a döner kebab take a bit of ham from warmers (6) 22 Least naïve athletes in Los Angeles recalled trial (8) DOWN 1 Domesticate wayward mate (4) 2 Puzzle game in novel (6) 3 Messing with sonar is a…

Schools gone dark. On the last daywe told the children to take everythinghome, supervised as they emptied darklockers of books, loose pages, mirrors.I don’t drive past the dark windows andhalls, missing it. I make dark the livingroom and fill it back up with the light ofa movie. Something about creatures whostalk in the dark, thrive on its blankness.But I go to bed before the end, whendark returns to the screen with its listof names. I sleep in dark, but shovevoices in my ears that belong to bodieswho sat in lit rooms a good while agoto discuss science, loss. Even sunrises—I sleep through them now, can’t standthat semi-dark slide into the worsenedday. Dark soil in the garden beds, inthe houseplants, spilled on the kitchenfloor. The dark fur of the dog so…

Many people in England think of Dorset as Thomas Hardy country. They have been to Dorchester or Weymouth, have driven through the woodland villages and seen the mist shrouding the hills, and tend to believe that this is a pleasantly rustic corner of the island. But if they venture inland, to the henges and hill forts of prehistoric Britain, they find that all is not sunlit and grass-colored. Hard winds scream across the ruins. The clouds cast strange forms over the valleys. There are no creatures in sight, only holes burrowed in the ground. This is a realm of brute, timeless magic. That magic looms over the Iron Age hill fort of Badbury Rings—or the Rings, as the bewitched modernist writer Mary Butts called these three huge walls of turf,…

WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY Charles Bethea’s piece about the efforts of Charlie Munger—the billionaire vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and “amateur architect”—to build a dormitory without windows at the University of California, Santa Barbara, made me uneasy (The Talk of the Town, November 22nd). Munger should take a look at the dozens of houses that Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices lists for sale in the surrounding community. No matter the price of the property, buyers expect each bedroom to come with a window, as is normally required by California’s residential code. Berkshire Hathaway real-estate agents could not represent a windowless room as a bedroom, because it would be unwelcome to buyers. The fact that top university systems in California and Michigan have indulged Munger’s propensity for trapping students in rat mazes shows how desperately…

The days grow short, the sun declines,And once again, in cobbled rhymes,We greet you all! “Dear all,” we say(The standard form, that is, today),“Et cetera”—a long quotation,Which we’ll omit in salutation,The freight of which is: Yay! You’re here!We’ve made it through another yearTogether, somehow, bless us all.Now let’s adjourn to our Great Hall,Whose walls, we’re told, are well bedecked, ’n’Punch bowls checked for ivermectin.The stars arrive, both nat. and local:Both Bidens, natch, and our Gov. Hochul.Jill, Joe, and Kathy, sit ye downAround the blazing Christmas nounBeside Saul Griffith, whom we’re tight with(Someone Joe should talk all night with),And lean in close to Rachel Cusk,Barbara Kingsolver, Elon Musk,Harry Styles, Lisa Yuskavage,Jorge Ramos, Adam Savage,Olympic champ Sunisa Lee,And Dr. Annie Onishi.We wish pure bliss to Allie BroshAs she enjoys a Yuletide nosh,And…

HARD ACROSS 1 “Infinite ___” (novel that’s very easy to read and understand) 5 Amuse-gueules, colloquially 9 Bailiwick 10 Word said twenty-seven times during Abbott and Costello’s performance of “Who’s on First?” in their film “The Naughty Nineties” 11 “Is this a prologue or the posy of a ___?” (line from “Hamlet,” but you already knew that) 12 Detritus used to make sauces, in culinary patois 13 Gelate 14 Vessels that you may remember from your Oxbridge days 15 1960 composition by the experimental Italian composer Luciano Berio 17 Author who wrote, “When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune” 18 ___ product, a simple method of adjoining two cocycles of degree p and q to form a composite cocycle of degree p + q 20…

As I watched James Lapine’s new musical, “Flying Over Sunset,” at the Vivian Beaumont, trying to summon some empathy with its subject matter, I started thinking through my own quite limited history with hallucinogens. “Sunset”—directed by Lapine, who also wrote the book, with music by Tom Kitt, lyrics by Michael Korie, and choreography by Michelle Dorrance—is the fictionalized story of three celebrities dropping LSD in the nineteen-fifties, searching for God knows what: tie-dyed enlightenment, perhaps, or an eased and possibly clarified relationship with the past, or maybe just simple fun. The writer Aldous Huxley (Harry Hadden-Paton), the actor-dancer Cary Grant (Tony Yazbeck), and the polymathic diplomat Clare Boothe Luce (Carmen Cusack) get together (there’s no reason to believe that they did this in real life) and trip their extraordinary lives…

DECEMBER 22 – 28, 2021 The towering Norway spruce installed at Rockefeller Center is the tallest holiday tree in New York City, but it isn’t the only evergreen game in town. Forty blocks south, the Stanford White-designed arch in Washington Square Park, one of Manhattan’s liveliest landmarks, is home to a majestic forty-six-foot-tall fir (pictured above). At 5 p.m. on Dec. 24, carollers are invited to Greenwich Village to gather around the Beaux-Arts arch for a sing-along that will likely include a rendition of the classic “O Tannenbaum.” THE THEATRE Company Stephen Sondheim’s gimlet ode to the eternal fear of shrivelling up and dying alone—that is, of being thirty-five and single—from 1970, based on a series of one-act plays by George Furth (who wrote the book), gets a bristling, buoyant…

A grid has a matter-of-fact magic, as mundane as it is marvellous. From sidewalks to spreadsheets to after-hours skyscrapers projecting geometric light against a night sky, the grid creates both order and expanse. In 1979, the art critic and historian Rosalind Krauss wrote about the ubiquity of the grid in modern art, citing the even-panelled windowpanes of Caspar David Friedrich and the abstract paintings of Agnes Martin. “The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion or fiction),” Krauss wrote. It was this paradox—the promise of control and transcendence—which first drew me to the prototypically modern grid: the crossword puzzle. I began…

ACROSS 1 “A Raisin in the ___” (Lorraine Hansberry play)3 Before5 Celestial being, in Latin6 Dubya, e.g.7 Engage in playful heckling8 Fluffy stack in a bathhouse10 Good & Plenty flavoring12 Howard who directed “Frost/Nixon”13 Interjection heard after a goal14 Just adored15 “Kill Bill” star Thurman16 Like software that’s still being tested18 Mimic Ella Fitzgerald, say19 Natural gut flora22 ___ of Hearts (tart thief, in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”) DOWN 1 Presses for juice or for information2 Quibbles4 Resolve, as a thorny problem5 Shying away6 That is to say?8 Unobtrusive spaceship on “Doctor Who”9 Voting-rights-campaign city of 196511 Weed whackers, for short?17 ___X (online subsidiary of a hallowed English school)20 Yo ___ Tengo (rock band with an annual eight-night Hanukkah concert series)21 Zwei : II :: vier : ___ Find the…

PLUNGER As Sara bunched up her night-shirt, she clocked a disturbance. Some movement or sound. Scraping? Paddling? Exhalations? It happened so fast, she said, she couldn’t be sure, but a rat in the toilet, submerged to the neck, was definitely trying to scale the bowl, and the next thing she knew she was standing in the bathtub, hollering for Darren. Next thing Darren knew, he was brandishing a plunger and yelling at the rat, hoping to scare it back down the toilet. Then nudging it toward the outlet with the plunger. Then driving it below the surface with the plunger. But soon he was afraid he was making a mistake. Were the rat to escape the toilet through the outlet, it could drown along the path to freedom. Clog the…

All of the Marvels, by Douglas Wolk (Penguin Press). This guide to the world of Marvel Comics encompasses the entirety of the franchise’s twenty-seven-thousand-issue corpus, which Wolk describes as “the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created.” Alternating between short, catalogue-like entries and longer essays, Wolk alights on such topics as the founding triumvirate of Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and Stan Lee; changes in how East Asian characters are depicted; and the stop-and-start process of bringing Marvel-superhero movies to the big screen. As Wolk explores Marvel’s visual, narrative, and commercial innovations, he argues that its products offer a “funhouse-mirror history of the past sixty years of American life.” The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, by Zoë Playdon (Scribner). In the nineteen-sixties, a legal battle took place, in secret, over…

“Landscapers” opens with a magic trick. It’s nighttime, and a town square in England is mostly still. A voice declares, “Action! Rain!,” and immediately the area begins to experience weather. We presume that the voice belongs to Will Sharpe, the director and co-creator of this HBO miniseries, which is based on the true story of Susan and Chris Edwards, an English couple who, in 2013, were arrested for murdering Susan’s parents—and burying the bodies in their back yard—fifteen years earlier. “Scenes from a Marriage,” another recent HBO miniseries centered on a relationship, similarly had the figure of the director spill into the frame. But the move felt superficial, like a postmodern garnish rather than like a narrative device. In “Landscapers,” Sharpe and his fellow-creator, Ed Sinclair, who wrote the script,…