Innholdsfortegnelse for February 14-21, 2022 i The New Yorker

I pull my pickup into the parking lot of the Nashua Firing Line Range, off U.S. Route 3, when it hits me like I’ve been rear-ended: the memory of the time, right after I got my license, when I braked too late on Bloomfield Avenue and bumped the car in front of me, and I got out, and the other driver got out, and I apologized profusely and he said it was O.K., and then I drove home, shaking. The range is surprisingly crowded for a Tuesday. I choose a Glock 19X Crossover, a Glock 17L Long Slide, and three boxes of rounds. Dropping the magazines into a shopping basket, I remember when I was a toddler and I stole a gummy bear from a grocery store and ate it.…

all day long you wring yourself outwork virtuallygo nowherebrain exclusively tunedto end-times musictill twilight arrivesto fold you in blue pleats of eveninga flock of night herons flaps pastacross the sky or your mindit’s the same either waylong-closeted thoughts rise with themwinging out from daytime rooststo forage swamps and wetlandsto nest in groupsblack-crowned birds who croak like crowsswoop low over mangrovesthe whirr of wingsreal or imaginedblurs trivial thingsstrange-times lullabiesdeclare doom loomseveryone’s muzzledmired in dreadthe future’s not mutualit’s mute or deadeverybody misses everybodytry to ride it outas night herons seekwhat the sunwill someday summon us toafter endless-seeming exilea prayer to be sparedI shall be satisfied, when I wake, with thy likenessa psalm’s promisethe night herons keep flying towardtomorrow’s garlands…

The Twitter account Ulysses-Reader is what programmers call a “corpus-fed bot.” The corpus on which it feeds is James Joyce’s modernist epic, “Ulysses,” which was published a hundred years ago this month. For nine years, UlyssesReader has consumed the novel’s inner parts with relish, only to spit them out at a rate of one tweet every ten minutes. The novel’s eighteen episodes, each contrived according to an elaborate scheme of correspondences—Homeric parallels, hours of the day, organs of the body—are torn asunder. Characters are dismembered into bellies, breasts, and bottoms. When UlyssesReader reaches the end, it presents the novel’s historic signature, “Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921,” intact, like a bone fished out of the throat. Then it begins again, arranging, in its mechanical way, the tale of a young Dubliner named Stephen Dedalus…

Not long ago, in my sister’s elementary-school classroom, I met a second grader who seemed well on his way to a doctoral degree in Egyptology. After describing the mummification process in recondite detail—not only why the brain was removed through the nose but how exactly natron dried out the rest of the body—the child drew an elaborate cartouche with the hieroglyphs used to spell my name. He then proceeded to tell me more about the pharaoh Tutankhamun than most of the other students could tell me about their own grandfathers. It makes sense that a boy king would have an enduring hold over boys, but it is less clear why so many of the rest of us are still enthralled by Tutankhamun more than three thousand years after he ruled…

“MJ,” Broad way at the Neil Simon Theatre—directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, with a book by Lynn Nottage and music (mostly) by, well, M.J. himself—begins before the lights go down. While the audience members settle into their seats, a sheer, bluish scrim stretches from the ceiling to the edge of the stage. On it are printed hand-written inspirational notes, short, self-helpy sparks of tough motivation: “study the greats and become greater”; “get all Bob Fosse movie dances, study these inside out know every cut, move, music, etc.” It’s a legendary figure’s notebook gone public, an id bent on besting its forebears, framed as crucial context for the show to come. Behind the scrim, dancers are chatting and stretching and warming up in a dingy, warehouse-like rehearsal space. And so,…

FAHRENHEIT FIVE Joshua Yaffa paints a vivid, dire picture of the role that rising temperatures are playing in thawing permafrost, a process that then accelerates climate change (“The Great Thaw,” January 17th). It is impossible to deny the United States’ outsized contribution to the climate crisis, or the need for urgent action. So climate data and reporting need to be legible to as many people as possible. In Yaffa’s piece and other climate journalism, I fear, the sole use of Celsius, without a Fahrenheit conversion, risks understating the problem for too many Americans. A recent poll indicated that Americans are largely unfamiliar with Celsius and would like climate research and reporting to include Fahrenheit. The U.N. Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report 2021 warns that the world is “on track for…

On a wet day in London, around 2013, the poet Warsan Shire turned on a voice recorder as her uncle talked about his youth in Somalia, his life as a refugee, and his addiction to the bitter-leaf stimulant khat. Shire, who is thirty-three, with dark curls and a high forehead, sat with him in his room at a boarding house in Northwest London, where several immigrant men lived. Her uncle had lost most of his teeth because of his khat addiction. “When you chew khat, you don’t sleep, it keeps you up,” Shire told me recently. “I asked him how it feels to do that.” He told her, “While you’re high, it’s like you build, with your words and with your dreams, these massive towers of what you’re going to…

One by one, the guests got up from the table and returned with their instruments. It was around ten-thirty on a warm, breezy night in December, and at the house of Caetano Veloso, Brazil’s most celebrated musician, an after-dinner custom was under way. One person came back with a guitar, another with a Brazilian-style ukulele called a cavaquinho, and a third with a tambourine and a tantam drum with a long, thick neck. They sat in a semicircle around a large coffee table in the living room. Behind them, a set of sliding doors had been opened to admit the coastline of Rio de Janeiro. The lights of Leblon Beach dotted the dark bay. Veloso, who is seventy-nine, cracked a can of Coke, and sat down in a cushioned seat…

A Japanese folktale concerns a young acolyte so obsessed with drawing cats that the elderly and perplexed head priest sends him away. In time, he finds shelter in an abandoned temple that, unbeknownst to him, is haunted. But he has ink. He draws cats all over the walls, the beams, and the floors. Tiring, he tucks himself into a closet to sleep, but wakes to the sounds of violent struggle. When the temple falls silent, he creeps out. The mangled body of a giant goblin rat lies on the ground. From the walls, the beams, and the floors, his cats look on, their mouths bright with blood. What writer does not dream of her work rising up to protect her? What writer does not, at some point, endure the opposite—the…

FEBRUARY 9 – 22, 2022 The visual onslaught of an endless Instagram feed is exhausting, but it’s not without precedent. During the Great Depression, Walker Evans discovered that the storefront window of one photo studio was displaying a staggering two hundred and twenty-five portraits, as seen in “Penny Picture Display, Savannah, Georgia, 1936” (above). The work is on view in the exhibition “A Trillion Sunsets: A Century of Image Overload,” at the International Center of Photography (through May 2). As ever, it’s advisable to confirm engagements in advance and to check the requirements for in-person attendance. MUSIC The Black Dog: “Brutal Minimalism” ELECTRONIC The prolific British techno group the Black Dog—comprising Ken Downie, who co-founded the crew in the early nineties, and the later recruits Martin Dust and Richard Dust—has…

On December 1st, the Supreme Court had its day of oral argument in a landmark abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, brought by the State of Mississippi. It was the first case that the Court had taken in thirty years in which the petitioners were explicitly asking the Justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion, and its successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which affirmed that decision in 1992. If anyone needed a reminder that, whatever the Justices decide in Dobbs, it will not reconcile the American divide over abortion, the chaotic scene outside the Court made it clear. At the base of the marble steps, reproductive-rights supporters held a large rally in which they characterized abortion as a human right—and an act of health…

Some nights, in my dreams, I find myself running through those hills above Palo Alto again. It is always just before dawn, and as I run I smell the sun-crisped fields, the sage, the eucalyptus. The mist falls in starched sheets over the distant hills, the ones that press against the Bay, and I can hear nothing but my own footsteps, my own breath, once in a while a peloton of cyclists whirring out of the morning fog that swallows them up again. I descend, going ever faster through the quiet wealthy neighborhoods, across the empty black river of asphalt that is El Camino Real, then when the road flattens out into Mountain View I am flying, and I see at last the great strong-armed oak that spreads its grace…

The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson, by Chris Joyner (Abrams). In 1948, when the witness to a fatal shooting in a small Georgia town claimed that the attacker “sounded like a Negro,” the police arrested a Black sharecropper named Clarence Henderson. This history, by an Atlanta-based investigative reporter, examines the bizarre process by which Henderson was sentenced to death for murder in three separate trials but avoided execution each time. Using a range of archival sources, Joyner illustrates Henderson’s vulnerable position as a Black defendant, and shows how external factors—such as the introduction of lie-detection and ballistics analysis and the rivalry between the N.A.A.C.P. and the Communist Party, which were both determined to come to his defense—shaped the legal proceedings in unexpected ways. Speak Not, by James Griffths (Zed). This…

In 2012, the indie-pop duo Beach House took the stage in Central Park, in front of nearly five thousand people, one of the biggest audiences of its career. The band, made up of the vocalist and keyboardist Victoria Legrand and the guitarist Alex Scally, had made a name for itself first within Baltimore’s eclectic scene, and then in the wider world. The music was woozy and impressionistic, but also steady and painstaking. It had become synonymous with the term “dream-pop,” making it part of a lineage that includes the work of artists from the Beach Boys to My Bloody Valentine. On Beach House’s self-titled début album, from 2006, Legrand and Scally used nothing but a guitar, a Yamaha keyboard, and an organ to produce a thick, lo-fi blanket of warbled…