Innholdsfortegnelse for February 28, 2022 i The New Yorker

In the early hours of January 7th, the cardiothoracic surgeon Bartley Griffith, unable to sleep, went to his kitchen to make coffee. It was about 2 A.M. His usual mug is tall, and he had to remove the stand from his Krups machine in order to fit it. “Next thing I realized, I had coffee all over the floor. I had forgotten to put the cup under,” Griffith told me. “You get a bit wiggly, a bit superstitious.” He asked himself, “Do you know what you’re about to do?” Griffith has forty years of surgical experience. But later that morning he was scheduled to perform a surgery that would be unusual even for him: the world’s first transplantation of a pig’s heart into a human. Griffith’s team, at the University…

Hidden in the woods on a slope above the Kentucky River, just south of the Ohio border, is a twelve-by-sixteen-foot cabin with a long front porch. If not for the concrete pilings that raise the building high off the ground, it would seem almost a living part of the forest. Readers around the world know the “long-legged house” as the place where Wendell Berry, as a twenty-nine-year-old married man with two young children, found his voice. As he explained in his essay by that name, he built the cabin in the summer of 1963—a place where he could write, read, and contemplate the legacies of his forebears, and what inheritance he might leave behind. The cabin began as a log house built by Berry’s great-great-great-grandfather Ben Perry, one of the…

On Friday, July 29th, Dublin got the weather that had been forecast. All morning, a brazen sun shone down on Merrion Square, reaching onto Cathal’s desk, where he was stationed, by the open window. A taste of cut grass blew in, and every now and then a warm breeze played with the ivy on the ledge. When a shadow crossed, he looked out: a gulp of swallows skirmishing, high up, in camaraderie. Down on the lawns, some people were out sunbathing and there were children, and beds plump with flowers; so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human conflicts and the knowledge of how everything must end. Already, the day felt long. When he looked back at his screen, it was 14:27. He wished, now, that…

The Great Mrs. Elias, by Barbara Chase-Riboud (Amistad). Using hitherto overlooked documents, this novel reconstructs the life of Hannah Elias, who was born in poverty in Philadelphia in 1865 but became, at the turn of the century, one of the wealthiest Black women in the country. In this telling, Elias, confident that she is destined for greatness, joins New York’s “sisterhood” of sex workers and meets a rich client whose pillow talk consists of finance lessons. Putting her unorthodox education to use, Elias amasses a real-estate fortune, but the empire teeters after her unexpected connection to the murder, in 1903, of the civic leader Andrew Haswell Green. Chase-Riboud’s narrative challenges us to confront the ways in which race, class, and gender inform whose lives are deemed worthy of remembering. Last…

There’s a new old painter in town: Hans Holbein the Younger, the dazzling Renaissance German specialist in portraiture, with his first major American show of paintings, “Holbein: Capturing Character,” at the Morgan Library & Museum. It has been a long wait since 1543, when the artist died, at about the age of forty-five (his birth year is uncertain), probably of the plague, while in service to England’s Henry VIII. Why? Holbein is an awkward fit in art history—overqualified, in a way, for the sixteenth century’s march of eclectic Mannerist styles toward the aesthetic revolution of the Baroque. He is familiar hereabouts mainly from two portraits in the Frick Collection: “Sir Thomas More” (1527), a hands-down masterpiece of the great humanist whom Henry had recently appointed the Chancellor of the Duchy…

MURDER AND FORGIVENESS As the director of Just Alternatives, a nonprofit that supports survivors of criminal violence and helps enable dialogues between victims and offenders, I was inspired by Eren Orbey’s piece about Katie Kitchen’s forgiveness of Joseff Deon White, the man convicted of murdering her father (“Fault Lines,” January 24th). In my twenty-one years of working with survivors, I have found that most of the ones who initiate victim-offender dialogues (V.O.D.s), in the states that allow them to do so, aren’t necessarily looking to forgive. Rather, they are often seeking to express some of the anguish and trauma that they have endured, and to ask questions that only the offenders can answer. Those of us who facilitate these dialogues understand that we cannot compel offenders to tell the whole…

When the daily commute suddenly disappeared for millions of office workers, some were jubilant, others bereft. Many mourned the loss of a buffer, of time to read or decompress. (It’s difficult to finish a crossword on the 8:30 express to the kitchen table.) Some tried to re-create their commutes by putting on headphones, or squeezing into the shower fully dressed with a magazine. But most people adapted; there were perks to working from home. Things were slower, quieter. Other people’s armpits were rarely an issue. You could Zoom from bed if you wanted. You could buy fancy pajamas and wear them all day. In London, where W.F.H. guidelines have eased following Omicron’s retreat, the commute may be poised for a comeback. Bosses miss their workers. Workers miss their colleagues. But…

Downwind, I walked the wide hallwaysof a great endowment. It didn’t matter if I did or didn’t.It changed only myself, the doing. It fed down to one knucklethen the next, this compromise. It fed down to one frequencyand another, leaving me only a scrambled sound. It would burn your fingertipsto walk the length of the hall dragging them along the grass-papered wallswhere they punished you for notwanting enough. For not wanting to be nonbelligerentby naming the terms for belligerence.The shellacked shelves, the softly shakingpens in their pen case. What was given therecould be taken, and quietly, you were reminded of this.You were reminded all was property of the West.The mess of a raven’s nest built behind a donor’s great bustthen gone. The mess of bird shit on the stepsthen gone.…

I watched you kneel to measure what wasAgainst what was not. The horse and cowRattle the gate as you turn to the road, Through. Abundance no longer anythingBut another day done. Burn the old grasses,Plow in the remainder, the dusk folds To an emptied bucket. Each row sownWas how you would never raise enoughTo stop, or get out before you began To hate what might fail. You will never beWhat the field remembers. The latch holds—Alone in the grief of being Outside what you have made, and the possibleThat lies in whatever green you leave behind.…

According to Yoko Tawada, literature should always start from zero. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds. They are, for the most part, at the mercy of circumstances: a literate circus bear betrayed by her publisher, an interpreter who loses her tongue, a nineteenth-century geisha discussing theology with an uncomprehending Dutch merchant. But their creator—a novelist, a poet, and a playwright—has chosen her estrangement. Tawada, who was born in Tokyo and lives in Berlin, writes books in German and Japanese, switching not once, like Vladimir Nabokov or Joseph Conrad, but every time she gets too comfortable, as a deliberate experiment. Her work has won numerous awards in both countries, even as she insists that there’s nothing national, or even…

The actor John Douglas Thompson, now legendary among theatre audiences for his interpretations of classical material, is his own philharmonic of well-tuned instruments. His voice, at a rumble or a rasp, glides from line to line and feeling to feeling—he turns Shakespeare’s flurries and puzzles of language into seemingly inevitable verbal outpourings of unknowable internal processes. His face, similarly, is a map of emotions. Before he speaks, his brows churn and his mouth searches. Whatever he says next has been looked for and, somewhere deep in the soul, found. But, in a new production of “The Merchant of Venice” (directed by Arin Arbus and produced by the Shakespeare Theatre Company and Theatre for a New Audience, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center), what I noticed most about Thompson, who plays Shylock,…

FEBRUARY 23 – MARCH 1, 2022 Neil Simon’s comedy “Plaza Suite,” from 1968, is a portrait of three marriages, set in one hotel room, with the same two actors playing a different couple in each act. A Broadway revival, directed by John Benjamin Hickey and starring the real-life married couple Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, was slated to open in early 2020 (when the above photo was taken), but it was, like the rest of the Broadway season, swept away by the pandemic. Now, just like that, the show is finally in previews, at the Hudson, beginning Feb. 25. ART “Charles Ray: Figure Ground” America’s most enthralling contemporary sculptor is an artistic and philosophical provocateur whose ever-startling creations look back in spirit, if rarely in appearance, to the sublimity…

Marcia Resnick was the last photographer to do a studio shoot of John Belushi before he died, of an overdose, in Los Angeles, in 1982. She was a friend and had for a few years been eager to take his picture, for a series of portraits of more than a hundred New York “punks, poets, and provocateurs” that she was calling “Bad Boys.” One night, in late 1981, she ran into Belushi at a club called AM/PM, and said, “How about now?” When she got back to her loft studio, on Canal Street, his limo was waiting outside. He and his entourage came upstairs. It was five or six in the morning. “He was pretty high,” she recalled the other day. The famous photo of Belushi in a ski mask,…

One recent Saturday morning, when snow-blasted city streets took on the feel of Alpine downhills, two Irish families set off from the Park Central Hotel toward the subway at Columbus Circle. Their destination: the Armory track, in Washington Heights, home of the century-old Millrose Games track-and-field meet. Their goal: to find out if either Cian Donnelly, of Headford, or Grace Foley, of Sligo, both eight years old, just might be the Got Milk? Fastest Kid in the World. “The kids aren’t nervous at all, while I’m about to vomit all over the place,” Cian’s father, Keith, said. Leading the trek was Dermot McDermott, the Sligo-based coach who has brought Irish grade-schoolers to Millrose meets since 2014. He wore Nikes (colorful) and track pants (gray) and seemed undaunted by the raging…

Shortly after the birth of Pop art, in the nineteen-sixties, came the discovery of the precursors of Pop, the American artists who had anticipated the Pop fascination with commercial culture: billboards, magazine advertisements, Broadway shows, department stores, the works. Frozen out by the wintry regime of absolute abstraction, these artists sprang back to life: Stuart Davis, with his Damon Runyon imagery of Lucky Strike packs and newspaper headlines; Charles Demuth, with his feedstore signs and water-tower lettering; Gerald Murphy, with his precisionist studies of watches and razors and safety matches, who went from being cast as a beautiful Fitzgerald loser, having inspired the character of Dick Diver in “Tender Is the Night,” to sudden recognition as an American rhapsodist alongside Fitzgerald himself. Of all these, the painter and scenic designer…

“We Need to Talk About Cosby,” a four-part Showtime series from the director W. Kamau Bell, is documentary as collage, as editorial, as attempted community exorcism. In 2018, Bill Cosby was convicted and imprisoned for sexual assault, after sixty women came forward with allegations of abuse, drugging, and rape against the comedian. Bell’s documentary, which premièred at the end of January, comes seven months after Cosby’s conviction was overturned, owing to a legal technicality. This most recent development, which, in fiction, one would refer to as the twist, drapes Bell’s series in a kind of under-acknowledged despair. Valiantly, Bell seeks to puncture the esteem that Cosby still holds, and to convert those who are in denial about Cosby’s character, despite the fact that he has admitted—under oath—to drugging and…