Innholdsfortegnelse for January 31, 2022 i The New Yorker

Landscapers This HBO miniseries 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. The show’s co-creators, Will Sharpe, who directed, and Ed Sinclair, who wrote the script, fully integrate the breaking of the fourth wall into their haunting study of marriage, victimhood, and role-play. Since the killings, Susan (Olivia Colman) and Chris (David Thewlis) have been living in France, where fugitive life is uneventful. Susan, a cinephile, blows through ludicrous amounts of money on rare movie posters and film memorabilia, while Chris tries and fails to find a job to support her life style. Their outlaw existence is endearingly simple, a trifle boring—they are not so much…

There are four possible skin tones for your orphan avatar, but all come with red hair. The red hair parts down the middle and exists, throughout the thirty minutes, in two long braids. Your experience takes place in a room, with sensors placed on your hands and feet, and a headset that dictates what you see and hear. Should you wander out of bounds, a metal railing will restrain you. Should you flip over this railing, a staff member will flip you back. Enjoy the carriage ride down the Avonlea main road, which dips and winds as good rural roads should. Wave hello to the brook, the valley, the hollow, the pond landing, and another brook, over which the carriage goes because this brook has a bridge. It’s always autumn…

How on earth did my mother know that Led Zeppelin was composed of satanists? Specifically, how did she know that Jimmy Page had “a great interest in the occult,” and owned a bookshop “somewhere down in London” dedicated to these pursuits? Presumably, some furtive Christian network or back channel had provided the information. It was more than I or my elder brother knew, and gave her a sinister advantage over us. In my memory, she looms as a column of judgment in the doorway of the sitting room, as Angus and I watch the closing frames of the concert film “The Song Remains the Same” on television. It was 1979, I think. Angus, five years older than me and provider of all musical contraband, was eighteen. He may have lost…

WORDPLAY Anna Shechtman’s essay about her intertwined experiences of crossword-puzzle construction and anorexia presents a candid look at eating disorders (“Black-and-White Thinking,” December 27th). As someone who has struggled with anorexia, I, too, believe that my disorder was primarily a curse of dualistic thinking, coupled with perfectionism, rigidity, and a desire to craft a certain identity. Yet I hadn’t considered the connection between my disorder and my love of crosswords. I enjoy solving puzzles during meals, perhaps as a way of taking the focus away from what I’m eating. In the presence of a grid—and a seemingly impossible clue—any invasive thoughts quiet down. Maybe crosswords are both an extension of my eating disorder and part of my becoming free of it. I’m grateful to Shechtman for offering a sense of…

In December, Chief Justice John Roberts released his year-end report on the federal judiciary. According to a recent Gallup poll, the Supreme Court has its lowest public-approval rating in history—in part because it is viewed as being overly politicized. President Joe Biden recently established a bipartisan commission to consider reforms to the Court, and members of Congress have introduced legislation that would require Justices to adhere to the same types of ethics standards as other judges. Roberts’s report, however, defiantly warned everyone to back off. “The Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence,” he wrote. His statement followed a series of defensive speeches from members of the Court’s conservative wing, which now holds a super-majority of 6–3. Last fall, Justice Clarence Thomas, in an…

Last summer, the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson went on a backpacking trip with some friends. They headed into the High Sierra, hiking toward Deadman Canyon—a fifty-mile walk through challenging terrain. Now sixty-nine, Robinson has been hiking and camping in the Sierras for half a century. At home, in Davis, California, he tracks his explorations on a wall-mounted map, its topography thick with ink. He is a devotee of the “ultralight” approach to backpacking and prefers to travel without water, instead gathering it along the way, from lakes and streams. Arriving at the canyon, with its broad, verdant floor cradled in smooth slopes of granite, he planned to fill his bottles with meltwater from the seven glaciers buried in its headwall. But as the group hiked they found no water.…

No one knew the reason the town goatfollowed the flower vender around townuntil someone found piles of damp petalsalong the routes the flower vender took. All the kinfolk of the goat had longbecome food. Their bones & muscleshad been used for tools & weapons.Mannish water, a popular goat stew, was made from the feet, intestines& testicles of some goats. Cashmerecame from the undercoat of superfinefibres on the underbelly of other goats. Because the goat is one of the oldestdomesticated animals, it was one of the firstto be sacrificed in rituals, cooked in a holeof fire, thrown off the side of a mountain. Our goat followed the vender around towndragging chains anytime there was a death& dragging bells anytime a child was born.The goat had no name. Or each of us…

South to America, by Imani Perry (Ecco). Structured as a journey, with chapters organized by location, this history of the American South examines its subject from both personal and sociopolitical perspectives. Perry, an Alabama-born Princeton professor, encounters a Confederate reënactor in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and visits the Equal Justice Initiative’s museum, in Montgomery, Alabama, which is situated near a parole office. She draws connections between the past and contemporary experience—for instance, she reads Thomas Jefferson’s racist observations on Black people in the light of her own Ancestry.com results. Threading her protagonists’ narratives through the book, Perry admits to “a bit of navelgazing” but observes that, “if you gaze anywhere with a critical eye, you do have to look at your own belly, too.” The Uninnocent, by Katharine Blake (Farrar,…

Today, I woke up and my first thoughts were about the inevitability of war. With reports of Russian saboteurs and hackers infiltrating Ukraine, anxiety is running high among my family and friends. Some of us have decided to join the Territorial Defense Forces—this helps calm me down, but not much. We pass soldiers on the street and in the metro. Around the city, the government is checking bomb shelters as a worker repaints a “Shelter” sign. In vain, I try to hide from the news.…

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Christopher Weyant, must be received by Sunday, January 30th. The finalists in the January 17th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the February 14th & 21st issue. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.…

JANUARY 26 – FEBRUARY 1, 2022 In 1950, the American poet Gwendolyn Brooks became the first Black recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, in any category, for her second collection, “Annie Allen.” Twenty years later, she donated the proceeds from “Riot”—poems about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.—to its publisher, the Black-owned Broadside Press. Both books are among a variety of first editions, broadsides, and manuscripts on view in “Gwendolyn Brooks: A Poet’s Work in the Community,” opening at the Morgan Library on Jan. 28. As ever, it’s advisable to confirm engagements in advance and to check the requirements for in-person attendance. MUSIC Earl Sweatshirt: “Sick!” HIP-HOP In recent years, the rapper Thebe Kgositsile, who performs as Earl Sweatshirt, has tried to reassess the music of his youth in an…

Not long after we began dating, my now wife, Christine, and I started making up stories about the child we might have. We named the child—or, in the stories we told about him, he named himself—Suzuki Noguchi. Among the things we liked about him was that he was cheerfully indifferent to us. He did not wish to be either Irish (like Christine) or Indian (like me). Suzuki was eight, and he chose this name because he was into Japanese high fashion. When we told him that he couldn’t just go around claiming to be Japanese, Suzuki said that he was a child of God and who were we to say that God was not Japanese. In addition to being a dandy, Suzuki was a criminal. He dealt in yellowcake uranium…

Don’t throw out that old chair!Someone said yes there,listened to Brahms while it rained,fell asleep over “Das Kapital,”told a small child about King Alfred and the cakes. Don’t be fooled by the dining table,discreetly silent under its green cloth.Momentous events occurred there,all of which it remembers perfectly.A terrible silence was broken over cake,and three aunts sang a song about Romania.Not your aunts? Not important. They were there. Your living room’s still making history.All night the sofagossips with the Turkish carpet,which boasts to the glass-fronted bookcaseabout the fantastic voyages of its youth. These things remember so that we can forget.Who will love the oldif not the old?…

Lea changed the sheets when she got up. She’d bought flowers the previous day, tulips that she’d put on the dresser. There were carnations on the kitchen table, in a squat glass vase. She thought they looked cheerful, and not too fussy. The fridge was filled with more things than they would be able to eat: olives, jams, prosciutto, cheeses. She’d bought wine and beer, cookies, breads, the round taralli crackers that were common in Roman cafés. She didn’t think they’d be staying home very much—there were so many places she wanted to take Leo—but she had in mind a scene of the two of them eating in bed. Did people really do that? It seemed as though there would be too much mess, nowhere to put your plate. Still,…

Critics like to create causes. If a pair of new Grover Cleveland biographies appears, we say that, with the prospect of a President returning to win a second term after having been defeated at the end of his first, who else would interest us more than the only President who has? In reality, the biographers started their work back when, and now is when the biographies just happen to be ready. And so it is with the appearance of two significant new books about the silent-film comedian Buster Keaton. We start to search for his contemporary relevance—the influence of silent-comedy short subjects on TikTok?—when the reason is that two good writers began writing on the subject a while ago, and now their books are here. The truth is that Keaton’s…

Chopin’s Nocturne No. 7, in C-sharp minor, begins with a low, ashen sound: a prowling arpeggio in the left hand, consisting only of C-sharps and G-sharps. It’s a hollowed-out harmony, in limbo between major and minor. Three bars in, the right hand enters on E, seemingly establishing minor, but a move to E-sharp clouds the issue, pointing toward major. Although the ambiguity dissipates in the measures that follow, a nimbus of uncertainty persists. Something even eerier happens in the tenth bar. The melody abruptly halts on the leading tone of B-sharp while the left hand gets stuck in another barren pattern—this one incorporating the notes D, A, and C-sharp. It’s almost like a glitch, a frozen screen. Then comes a moment of wistful clarity: an immaculate phrase descends an octave,…