Innholdsfortegnelse for January 24, 2022 i The New Yorker

Cocaine & Rhinestones This exhaustively researched, feverishly delivered history-of-country-music podcast—a passion project and one-man show from Tyler Mahan Coe—was an instant cult hit among music obsessives when its first season came out, in 2017. Coe spent the next few years creating the second season, a wildly ambitious, and wildly long, epic about George Jones. In telling the great singer’s story, Coe zooms in and out to include the development of the Nashville sound, the history of pinball, the invention of ice cream, the Medicis, the production of moonshine, Martin Luther’s opposition to the Roman Catholic Church, Jones’s alcoholism, Tammy Wynette’s affair with Burt Reynolds, the history of drag and masquerade balls—and, quite deftly, cocaine and rhinestones. Coe, an autodidact and the son of the outlaw-country musician David Allan Coe,…

In 1950, a Briefly Noted reviewer in this magazine made short work of “The Thomas Mann Reader,” an anthology culled from the German novelist’s vast prose output: “The total impression created by this three-hundred-thousand-word monument is that Mann is a major writer, but perhaps not all that major.” A New Yorker subscriber in Los Angeles, residing at 1550 San Remo Drive, in Pacific Palisades, was annoyed. “Yes, I may well be a ‘major author,’” Thomas Mann wrote to a friend, “‘but not that major.’” The creator of “Tonio Kröger” and “Death in Venice” was at the summit of his fame, yet many younger critics dismissed him as a bourgeois relic, irrelevant in the age of bebop and the bomb. Another commentator numbered Mann among those “literary monoliths who have outlived…

Katie Kitchen had always felt some sadness about the fate of the man convicted of murdering her father. On a summer night in 1991, Robert Hans Kaim, a seventy-seven-year-old white real-estate developer, had just pulled into his garage in Houston’s upscale Tanglewood neighborhood when an assailant robbed him at gunpoint, shot him in the chest, and then drove off with his wallet. Nine days later, police arrested a twenty-year-old Black man named Joseff Deon White in connection with the crime. White told investigators that he’d had an accomplice, a Jamaican friend who went by the street name Blocker, but the police never found or even identified him. At White’s trial, Kitchen noticed his small stature, and the mothers of his children sitting on his side of the courtroom, crying. The…

It is one of the most famous murders in the history of cinema. A mother and her child are out for a walk, on the first warm day after a bitter winter. Beguiled by the changing weather, we do not see the danger coming. In fact, we never see it at all, because the man with the gun remains offscreen. We see only the mother’s sudden alarm; her panicked attempt to get her child to safety; their separation in the chaos of the moment; and then the child, outside in the cold as snow once again begins to fall, alone and crying for his mother. The film in question is, of course, the 1942 Walt Disney classic “Bambi.” Perhaps more than any other movie made for children, it is remembered…

In 2012, the singer and songwriter John Mellencamp was given the John Steinbeck Award, presented annually to an artist, thinker, activist, or writer whose work exemplifies, among other virtues, Steinbeck’s “belief in the dignity of people who by circumstance are pushed to the fringes.” The grace of the marginalized is a long-standing theme of Mellencamp’s writing. The musician, who comes from Indiana and began releasing records in the late nineteen-seventies, is known as a populist soothsayer, an irascible and unpretentious spokesman for hardworking, rural-born folks. Yet Mellencamp has also bristled at this characterization, which is largelyrooted in fantasy: men gazing wistfully out the windows of vintage pickup trucks, watching dust blow by, listening to some parched and distant radio station. The image of such “real,” noncoastal Americans has become a…

HUMANITIES, REDEFINED Louis Menand, in his review of two books that defend so-called “great books” courses, points out that the tension underpinning both works, between professors’ motivations and their institutions’ priorities, is nothing new (A Critic at Large, December 20th). Recent trends in undergraduate enrollment, however, may help to explain why students seem to be turning away from subjects such as English, foreign languages, and philosophy in favor of more career-oriented courses of study. According to a report published by the Pew Research Center in 2019, between 1996 and 2016, the share of dependent undergraduates in the U.S. who came from families living below the poverty line rose from twelve per cent to twenty per cent. A decline in humanities enrollment might stem from the fact that students from less…

On a cloudless morning last May, a pilot took off from the Niagara Falls International Airport, heading for restricted military airspace over Lake Ontario. The plane, which bore the insignia of the United States Air Force, was a repurposed Czechoslovak jet, an L-39 Albatros, purchased by a private defense contractor. The bay in front of the cockpit was filled with sensors and computer processors that recorded the aircraft’s performance. For two hours, the pilot flew counterclockwise around the lake. Engineers on the ground, under contract with DARPA, the Defense Department’s research agency, had choreographed every turn, every pitch and roll, in an attempt to do something unprecedented: design a plane that can fly and engage in aerial combat—dogfighting—without a human pilot operating it. The exercise was an early step in…

1. Dear Future: It’s strange how muchyou resemble the past, all the housesGone dark, the rooms where we livedso many lives: the ruptured sofaGroaning as we read the book about the rabbit,the kitchen table shattered with flourFor bread, all vanished into an emptinessthirsty as old iron, a plowshareLeft in a fallow field for decades besidea snakeskin wound through the eyeholeOf a steer’s skull. Dear Future: I am stillstanding there, a shadow at the threshold.My mother was the door through whichI entered the light. Now she is goneAlone through her own vanishing door. 2. With the hands of my heartI would claw out a placeFor her in the darkness beyondbreath, I would break throughThe silence after heartbeatwith another rhythm hammeredOn the hide drumhead of death.It would sound like the ghostOf Professor…

Free, by Lea Ypi (Norton). This memoir of growing up amid Albania’s transition to a democracy is bounded by two revolutions: the violent uprisings against the Communist regime in 1990, and those that took place seven years later, against the depredations of the economic “shock therapy” that followed its collapse. Ypi, who was twelve at the time of the first protests, writes with compassion and dry humor of the dismantling of the world view—in which socialism meant that “everyone was already free”—that she internalized in grade school. As the reductive tenets of proletarian struggle give way to the equally facile doctrines of capitalism and privatization, she finds the latter, which has devastated Albania’s economy, to be deeply flawed. She ultimately launches a search for a new definition of “freedom” that…

Has Danny McBride been reading bell hooks? “The Righteous Gemstones,” McBride’s farce about a family of mega-rich megachurch pastors in South Carolina, grapples with the late theorist’s conclusion that “most men find it difficult to be patriarchs.” The scope of the conflict is a step up from McBride’s previous HBO comedies, which dealt with individual men who were unable to cope with losing their authority in narrower settings. As Kenny Powers, the washed-up baseball star in “Eastbound & Down,” and Neal Gamby, the hostile educator in “Vice Principals,” McBride played outrageous and dark “angry white men,” wallowing in grievances of race and gender. Both were somewhat absent fathers, and so we weren’t worried about them passing their angst on to others. In “Gemstones,” McBride’s character, Jesse Gemstone, is both a…

JANUARY 19 – 25, 2022 The streaming service MUBI is a virtual repertory cinema, adding a movie each day alongside ongoing series. The January offerings include notable first features (Janicza Bravo’s “Lemon,” Noah Baumbach’s “Kicking & Screaming”), the new release of the 2020 documentary “There Will Be No More Night,” and a tribute to the Sundance Film Festival, presenting such independent-film classics as “But I’m a Cheerleader,” “Chuck & Buck,” and Jonathan Caouette’s pioneering personal documentary “Tarnation” (pictured above). As New York City venues reopen, it’s advisable to confirm in advance the requirements for in-person attendance. 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…

Last week, an insurrection,yesterday, the second impeachment,and this evening of slurry and windthat makes the old dog wary, I callmy grandpa, my mama’s daddy, to askwhy we called his parents’ land 16 Center.He doesn’t know! And he laughs,can fathom no reason but his daddy’sdrunk whimsy and charisma in the namingof those twenty acres of Arkansas backwoods,those pastures and good timber a miledown Columbia County Road 14.Nor does he remember how to call a hog.Nor does he remember who first calledhim Billy, as much his name now as Samand for nearly as long. We leave what is forgottenbehind us easily enough, detourthrough what rough country he can recall:his uncle Sonny Boy taking him west to livein Vegas; his grandma, Ma Gladys, in L.A.rescuing him from Vegas; his baby sister shot,and him…

On or around May 5th of 2020, he just stopped. He stopped exercising, stopped walking, stopped reading, stopped planning. He ate, drank, washed, and paid the bills, but that was it. He was seventy-three. He’d spent more than 38,368,800 minutes on earth, only a precious few of which he remembered. That’s what hit him one evening, after the cheering and clanking of pots and pans had died down: a vast chunk of his life—the greater part of his life—might as well never have occurred. Not just the time spent sleeping but those millions of minutes spanning lunches, dinners, meetings, concerts, marriage, work, books, movies, conversations—all gone. What remained? A bird’s breath of his existence. Sitting with his mother in Prospect Park when an actual bird had shat on her dress…