Innholdsfortegnelse for February 7, 2022 i The New Yorker

Bruce Handy, in his 2017 book about children’s literature, “Wild Things,” confesses that he always imagined the writer Margaret Wise Brown to be a dowdy old lady “with an ample lap”—just like the matronly bunny from her classic story “Goodnight Moon,” who whispers “hush” as evening darkens a “great green room.” In fact, Brown was a seductive iconoclast with a Katharine Hepburn mane and a compulsion for ignoring the rules. Anointed by Life in 1946 as the “World’s Most Prolific Picture-Book Writer,” she burned through her money as quickly as she earned it, travelling to Europe on ocean liners and spending entire advances on Chrysler convertibles. Her friends called her “mercurial” and “mystical.” Though many of her picture books were populated with cute animals, she wore wolfskin jackets, had a…

There is a grass stillgrows that I once mowed,deep green St. AugustineI cut in patterned lines.My father bought this idealfamily plot, a red brick ranchwith plenty of yard and a niceswimming pool, an unusual coral blue.The color took himback to when they bombed the fleet,at anchor and asleep, and howafter that they shocked his brainand placed him in the shadebeside the box of paintshe’d hauled from ship to ship,sketching mushroom cloudsen plein air like Gauguinswinging in his hammockbefore it became his grave.The diagnosis was severedepression with possible futurecomplications from exposureto high levelsof nuclear radiation,having been among the firstwave of men to stand withinthe radius of the blast afterthe surrender of Japan.But they couldn’t say for sure.He did his best,a doctor of dental surgery.But he was never muchfor beating his chest.A…

Worn, by Sofi Thanhauser (Pantheon). This expansive history documents the transformation of clothing manufacture from a handmade practice, rich with personal significance, to a mass-production industry. Thanhauser toggles between scenes of Louis XIV’s court, where the fashion season was invented, and Phoenix, Arizona, where Navajo weaving revivalists engage in the recovery of ancestral traditions. Elegantly chronicling how textile production came to be defined by worker exploitation, misogyny, environmental devastation, and colonialism, Thanhauser writes, “Our clothes are never neutral, and cannot be.” Yet she also finds space to appreciate sartorial marvels and to celebrate the loom aficionados, “denimheads,” and “wool enthusiasts” who aim for a more ethical, analog future. The Secret Listener, by Yuan-tsung Chen (Oxford). This candid memoir by a self-described “ingenue in Mao’s court,” who worked in China’s Central…

IMAGINING TRAUMA I read with great interest Parul Sehgal’s essay about our culture’s fascination with trauma (A Critic at Large, January 3rd & 10th). As a sitcom writer, and as someone whose life has been shattered by trauma—my two children were killed by a drunk driver when they were teen-agers—I am often dismayed by film and television depictions of parents who have lost children. Need a quick, easy way to explain a character’s depression, or failed marriage, or difficulty getting through the day? Whip out the “dead kid” backstory. It seems to have become the perfect explanation for any debilitating dysfunction. When I talk about my grief with friends, they often say, “I can’t even imagine.” If they are fellow-writers, I urge them to not just use their imaginations but…

In Preston Sturges’s 1941 film “Sullivan’s Travels,” a Hollywood director wants to “know about trouble” firsthand, so he sets out hopping freight trains, living as a self-described “tramp.” Two weeks ago, a handful of people rummaged through the detritus of thousands of looted packages along the Union Pacific rail line, near downtown L.A. “It’s like the Wild West out here,” John Rodriguez, who lives near the tracks in a dwelling he built by hand, said. Union Pacific says that train robberies in the area are up a hundred and sixty per cent since December, 2020. During the past few months, around ninety train containers have been broken into each day. Thieves either jump onto the moving cars and toss cargo out the doors, or they breach the containers while the…

With access to the most charismatic pastors and snappiest sermons via YouTube and podcasts, churchgoers’ standards are rising…. Full texts and outlines of sermons are available on websites like Sermon Central and Logos, ostensibly for reference and inspiration…. Some larger churches… employ in-house “preaching teams” that collaborate on sermon production. —The Times, July 7, 2021. 1. DO NOT BEGIN ANY SERMON WITH THE FOLLOWING LINES: - “Yesterday morning, while I was sitting on the toilet…” - “Some of you may have seen the headline ‘Local Clergyman Found Naked and Inebriated in Walmart Linens Aisle’…” - “What a great-looking crowd! Anyone in a relationship? With Jehovah?” - “A priest, a rabbi, and the man they both crave walk into a bar…” 2. PHRASES THAT WILL APPEAL TO YOUNGER PARISHIONERS: - “Texting—it’s…

For most of November, 2020, the director Céline Sciamma didn’t have any lamps in her apartment. They were all on the set of her fifth film, “Petite Maman.” Each day, she got ready before sunrise, leaving her Paris apartment in the dark. One morning when she was running late, she rushed into her room and hit something with her foot. It hurt, a lot, but she put on her shoes and hurried to the set, where she sat around for three hours, waiting for everyone else to be ready. Suddenly, she heard a familiar, uneven step behind her: that of her maternal grandmother, Marie-Paule Chiron, who walked with a limp and who had been dead for six years. Sciamma jumped from her chair, remembering too late her injured foot. Instinctively,…

In January, 1923, Lee Strasberg went to Al Jolson’s 59th Street Theatre to see “Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich,” a nineteenth-century Russian play about sixteenth-century Russian politics, performed, in Russian, by a company called the Moscow Art Theatre. Strasberg, twenty-one years old, was born in a Polish shtetl and brought up on the Lower East Side. He worked as a bookkeeper for a business that sold human hair. He didn’t know Russian. What he knew was acting. As a kid, Strasberg had performed in a few plays—his brother-in-law did the makeup for an amateur Yiddish theatre troupe—and by the time he graduated from high school he had fallen headlong in love with the theatre. He went to show after show on Broadway, where he saw extraordinary performances by some of the great…

In the early two-thousands, indie rock—a genre once characterized by dissonance, subversion, and exclusivity—was in the throes of an identity crisis. Musical classifications are often fluid, but indie rock was long defined by rigid boundaries. No bullshit, no capitulations to the mainstream; guitars, sternly crossed arms, seven-inch singles, glasses. It’s difficult to say when, precisely, indie rock loosened its grip on itself. Perhaps the music industry’s clumsy response to file sharing (and, later, streaming) meant that musicians of all types had to be less scrupulous when it came to earning a living. Maybe the success, in 2000, of Radiohead’s experimental album “Kid A,” which augmented the guitar with an array of electronics, expanded a new generation’s musicalpalette. Forawhile, I wouldn’t have known how to define indie rock—maybe it was folksy,…

FEBRUARY 2 – 8, 2022 George S. Schuyler’s satirical novel “Black No More,” from 1931, takes a speculative approach to American racism: What if a scientific procedure could turn Black people white? The book—set in Harlem, where Dr. Junius Crookman has invented such a thing—is now an Off Broadway musical, with lyrics and musical contributions by Tariq Trotter (above, right), of the Roots, who also stars, as Crookman. Brandon Victor Dixon (above, left) plays an eager participant. The New Group show is in previews at Pershing Square Signature Center. ART Jasper Johns In 1954, having had a dream of painting the American flag, Jasper Johns did so, employing a technique that was unusual at the time: brushstrokes in pigmented, lumpy encaustic wax that sensitize the deadpan image. The abrupt gesture—sign…

NOT THAT ONE Edward Abbey was a walking Profile subject. In 1972, I came close to acting on that fact, but in the ensuing years never got to it, as with all the other story ideas in this reminiscent montage. Abbey came to Princeton as a guest speaker in a colloquium series called “On Wilderness,” organized by two young physicists, Rob Socolow and Hal Feiveson, who described themselves and a number of their colleagues as the Center for Environmental Studies. The colloquia were open to the public, and the public came—townspeople, tennis shoes—crowding a large living room also occupied by some interested students and faculty. These events were among the harbingers of environmentalism in an academic curriculum, of what evolved some years later into Princeton’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary…

She did not want to visit the old lady. Amy studied the stroller, then the bags, then her boyfriend and the baby. She checked her phone: 11:26 a.m. It was time to go. Ninety degrees, ninety-per-cent humidity, and, according to Google, more than an hour each way. Each stage had its own icon, like the Olympic events, and all the separate minutes were broken up, then totalled at the end. WALK 10 min, TRAIN 36 min, BUS 15 min, WALK 9 min. Nothing could be worth this much effort on a hot Sunday afternoon. “Abort mission,” she said. “Abort! Just call her up and say we’re sorry, but the baby’s not right and we can’t make it.” She showed Matt the phone. “Are you seeing these numbers? It’s a furnace…

Where can we live but in decades? Since the twenties roared, it’s become a habit to delimit history in distinctive ten-year stretches. The upward spiral of developments in science and technology, imposed upon business cycles, political successions, and evolving cultural orders, guarantees that every decade inscribes a novel signature on popular memories and historical perspectives. The diffuse complexities of time get condensed into a series of indelible moods. The thirties—famished, ominous, forbidding. The forties—triumphant, horrifying. The icy cornucopia of the fifties is flushed out in the fervid deliquescence of the sixties. In the fluctuating world engendered by modernity, the decade stands for truths still held in common. You may not understand the ultimate meaning even of yesterday, and the notion that you and your neighbor occupy the same reality wanes…

Bristling and jumping and speeding forward with skillful talk, “Skeleton Crew,” the new play by Dominique Morisseau, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson for Manhattan Theatre Club (on Broadway, at the Samuel J. Friedman), stakes out ground that’s viable only in the theatre: the piece offers hope—and a kind of proof—that conversation carried out seriously is its own undeniable action. As Morisseau’s characters think, they speak in eloquent earfuls, and, in speaking, they push themselves and one another toward crises and discoveries that can be resolved only by yet more talk. Friendly insults are a goad and a salve. Side comments grow into rafts of rhetoric. Everyday complaints—those absolutely necessary companions to repetitive work—grasp toward, and often reach, an earthy philosophy. Fuelled on the diesel of ardent chitchat, this play moves and…