Innholdsfortegnelse for January 17, 2022 i The New Yorker

In the nineteen-thirties in Budapest, a young mother struggled. “I was amazed at how difficult it was to be a parent. I was angry,” Magda Gerber wrote later. “I thought I was the only one who didn’t know what to do with babies and somehow in my education someone had forgotten to tell me.” Then, one day, she watched in astonishment as a pediatrician treated her four-year-old daughter. The doctor, a Viennese Jew named Emmi Pikler, did something unheard of: she listened to her patient. Gerber was dazzled by Pikler’s insistence that her daughter could speak for herself—that even the youngest children could be enlisted instunning feats of coöperation. “It made me feel that this was the answer to all my questions and doubts,” Gerber wrote. She devoted the rest…

Like echoes in a seashellheld gingerly to the ear,bright as a mother and baby’s please,early memory is white canvas: held gingerly for years,the baby laughs or sobs or sleeps.Bright as a mother and baby’s please—remembered as peas and appease— the baby laughs or sobs or sleeps andsounds separate from noise to events,remembered as peas and appease.While she listens and hears, sounds separate from noise to events,from blur to fidelity.While the girl listens and hears,she recalls peas as appease. Both blur and fidelityecho in her seashell.She recalls pleas and pleasebright as her mother and her baby’s peas.…

Pushing Cool, by Keith Wailoo (Chicago). Tracking the evolution of a century’s worth of targeted marketing, this history documents the sinister engineering of a Black consumer preference for menthol cigarettes. Wailoo details how Big Tobacco placed billboards in inner-city neighborhoods, strategically funded Black enterprises, and marshalled a vast network of influencers—from Ebony to the N.A.A.C.P.—to yoke ideas of Black authenticity to smoking menthols. His case study concludes with reflections on the resonant presence of menthol cigarettes in the deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd, linking the dire plea “I can’t breathe” to tobacco’s long-term assault on Black lives. Aftermath, by Preti Taneja (Transit). In November, 2019, on the day after the London Bridge knife attacks, the author of this experimental work of nonfiction learned that both the killer and one…

THE WRITE STUFF The new-age typewriters, digital paper, and featureless word-processing programs that Julian Lucas describes in his piece about “distraction-free” writing devices seem to be an inevitable response to our contemporary condition (“Focus Mode,” December 20th). As someone with adult A.D.H.D., I have experimented with different methods of blocking out distractions while I’m writing. But I would like to push back on the notion, implied by the philosophies and technologies behind some of these devices, that a linear writing process is inherently superior to a more meandering one. Because of the way my brain works, it would be disconcerting to see only the immediately preceding sentence in a text, or to be unable to digitally cut and paste. I can’t imagine writing without being able to jump around and…

Hanya Yanagihara wears her black hair pulled back with a razorsharp center part, and she prefers to dress in black, especially in clothes by Dries Van Noten, the cerebral Belgian designer. She is the editor-in-chief of T, the style supplement to the Times, which publishes articles and photo-essays about fashion, travel, art, and design. Through her editorial work, Yanagihara, who is forty-seven, has become conversant with hundreds of creative people and their work. She has spent a lot of time travelling and has an unusually international aesthetic: she is as comfortable speaking about ceramicists in Sendai as about conceptual artists in New York. She took over T four years ago, and, thanks to her magpie intelligence, it has become a vibrant cabinet of curiosities. Fashion and design spreads are now…

It was late October, 1962. Russian missiles were being shipped to Cuba. Kennedy was having words with Khrushchev. The world might be coming to an end. It was a common remark: “Cheer up, it’s not the end of the world.” Frank Greene’s wife, Joan, had just said to him, a look of genuine fear on her face, “Is the world going to end, Frankie?” He said, “Don’t be silly.” He’d nearly said, “How should I know?” But that would have sounded flippant. His wife looked truly distraught. “Will it come to an end before the wedding?” Had she really said that? “Sophie’s shut herself in her bedroom. She won’t let me in. She’s in tears. We were going to collect the dress this week.” “Well, collect it.” It was a…

The late, great sinologist Simon Leys once pointed out a peculiar paradox. China is the world’s oldest surviving civilization, and yet very little material of its past remains—far less than in Europe or India. Through the centuries, waves of revolutionary iconoclasts have tried to smash everything old; the Red Guards, in the nineteen-sixties, were following an ancient tradition. The Chinese seldom built anything for eternity, anyway, nothing like the cathedrals of Europe. And what survived from the past was often treated with neglect. So what accounts for the longevity of Chinese civilization? Leys believed it was the written word, the richness of a language employing characters, partly ideographic, that have hardly changed over two thousand years. As Jing Tsu, a scholar of Chinese at Yale, observes in “Kingdom of Characters:…

JANUARY 12 – 18, 2022 A century ago, the Stettheimer sisters were known for hosting salons in their Manhattan apartment. Florine was a painter, Ettie wrote novels, and so it fell to Carrie, an aspiring stage-set designer, to manage the household. In domesticity, Carrie found a new muse: from 1916 until 1935, she lavished her talents on an exquisite miniature representation of the sisters’ milieu (including a nursery, pictured above). “The Stettheimer Dollhouse: Up Close” is on view at the Museum of the City of New York through May 20. ART Chando Ao The Postmasters gallery was an early adopter of digital art, which it has been exhibiting since 1991. So its recent foray into the crypto ecosystem—Postmasters now accepts cryptocurrency for all transactions, and also mints and sells N.F.T.s—is…

Omicron Variant “Almost Certainly” Less Severe Than Delta: Fauci —The Post, December 7, 2021. As of 0900 hours today, the Omicron variant of Covid-19 is considered more transmissible than the preëminent Delta by a factor of 3.4, while also being “less severe” by a factor of 2.8 (this measurement being on a scale of 1 to 12.7, with the median being 5.3 and the number 7 entirely left out). These two facts will have certainly changed by the time this sentence has been written, and changed five more times by the time it’s been spell-checked. But, rest assured, Omicron is a certified doozy (on the Farce-Doozy scale), and worthy of the attention it has received. What about the lesser covids? There are ten Greek letters between delta and omicron—and ten…

In mid-September, 2017, the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul flew to Chicago to see how a world that he’d made had been remade: the School of the Art Institute of Chicago had installed the first large-scale retrospective of his non-feature-film work: short films, videos, photographs, and ephemera. The show, “The Serenity of Madness,” which was organized by the curator and scholar Gridthiya Gaweewong, and occupied the institute’s cavernous Sullivan Galleries, had begun a seven-city tour in Chiang Mai in 2016. Now it was making its first American stop. An admirer of Weerasethakul’s films, I had also flown to Chicago to immerse myself in his world. Entering the gallery, I meandered through an eerie, darkened space with something approaching fear. Images of boys and landscapes and fire jumped out at me, like…

In “His Master’s Voice,” a 1968 sci-fi novel by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem, a team of scientists and scholars convened by the American government try to decipher a neutrino signal from outer space. They manage to translate a fragment of the signal’s information, and a couple of the scientists use it to construct a powerful weapon, which the project’s senior mathematician fears could wipe out humanity. The intention behind the message remains elusive, but why would an advanced lifeform have broadcast instructions that could be so dangerous? Late one night, a philosopher on the team named Saul Rappaport, who emigrated from Europe in the last year of the Second World War, tells the mathematician about a time—“the year was 1942, I think”—when he nearly died in a mass execution.…

“Yellowjackets,” an arch survival drama on Showtime, is ostensibly centered on a mystery that’s planted in the pilot: Who was the girl running for her life as her hunters—former soccer teammates now uniformed in beast-hide regalia—waited for her to fall into a trap of spikes? Maybe the season finale, in mid-January, will reveal her identity. Maybe it won’t. Honestly, with apologies to the corpse—I forgot all about her, so addicted did I become to the character development unwinding around this twisty plot. You know a show is onto something when possible cannibalism is the least interesting thing about it. The series, created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, depicts two main time lines: 1996, when a plane carrying the Yellowjackets, a New Jersey high-school soccer team, crashes in the Canadian…