Innholdsfortegnelse for March 28, 2022 i The New Yorker

In the world as it existed before Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24th, the Vnukovo International Airport, in Moscow, was a point of departure for weekend-holiday destinations south of the border: Yerevan, Istanbul, Baku. In the first week of March, as tens of thousands of President Vladimir Putin’s troops advanced into Ukraine, Vnukovo teemed with anxious travellers, many of them young. The line for excess baggage split the giant departure hall in half. These people weren’t going for the weekend. In a coffee shop, a skinny young man with shoulder-length hair and steel-framed glasses sat at a tall counter. “I haven’t done much in the last day,” he told someone through his headphones, sounding more nervous than apologetic. “I’ve been busy with my move. I am flying to Yerevan today,…

In 2013, a charismatic Mexican doctor took the stage at Burning Man, in Nevada, to give a TEDx talk on what he called “the ultimate experience.” The doctor’s name was Octavio Rettig, and he would soon become known by his first name alone, like some pop diva or soccer star. He told the crowd that, years earlier, he had overcome a crack addiction by using a powerful psychedelic substance produced by toads in the Sonoran Desert. Afterward, he shared “toad medicine” with a tribal community in northern Mexico, where the rise of narco-trafficking had brought on a methamphetamine crisis. Through this work, he came to believe that smoking toad, as the practice is called, was an ancient Mesoamerican ritual—a “unique toadal language,” shared by Mayans and Aztecs—that had been stamped…

Roman Abramovich was thirty-four years old—baby-faced, vigorous, already one of Russia’s richest oligarchs—when he did something seemingly inexplicable. The year was 2000. Abramovich, an orphan and a college dropout turned Kremlin insider, had amassed a giant fortune by taking control of businesses that once belonged to the Soviet state. He owned nearly half of the oil company Sibneft, and much of the world’s second-biggest producer of aluminum. A man of cosmopolitan tastes, he favored Chinese cuisine and holidays in the South of France. But now, he announced, he was going to relocate to the remote Chukotka region, a desolate Arctic hellscape, where he would run for governor. Chukotka, which is some thirty-seven hundred miles from Moscow, is comically inhospitable. The winds are fierce enough to blow a grown dog off…

OUR ANIMALS, OURSELVES Rivka Galchen’s fascinating article about xenotransplantation elucidated the details of this complicated procedure, focussing on the use of genetically modified pigs’ hearts (“Change of Heart,” February 28th). Although Galchen touches on some of the ethical quandaries of xenotransplantation—such as why baboons are “hardly, if ever,” used as a source of organs—I wish that she had written more about the ethics surrounding the use of pigs. Galchen cites the fact that pigs “aren’t closely related to us” as a reason that they are a “preferred xenotransplantation animal.” She might have more directly interrogated that notion, especially considering her invocation of “Charlotte’s Web,” in which, as she notes, Wilbur, the pig, becomes “more valuable to the farmer as a beloved individual than as pork.” What does it tell us…

I’m on my second tuxedo. The first one I bought in college at the Yale Co-op in the spring of 1954, having calculated, in one of my rare moments of shrewd financial planning, that, given how often I’d need it by the time I graduated, buying made more sense than renting. The possibility of postgraduate amortization had not occurred to me. But, largely from that tuxedo’s being called into service when I was the m.c. or a speaker at blacktie events, it was costing me something like two dollars and fifty-five cents a wearing when I finally, reluctantly, abandoned it. By then, comments from family and friends who’d been urging me to get a new tuxedo (e.g., “This one lasted you thirty-five years—one more ought to do you”) were beginning…

A modern-day Tocqueville, surveying American life from a friendly distance, could easily conclude that we are living in an era of Black ascendancy. This might sound crazy to Black people who cope with oppression and injustice on a daily basis, but in the cultural sphere the prominence that African Americans have held for more than a century in music is increasingly evident across many genres. It is unmistakable in contemporary art, where market-savvy galleries scramble to add Black artists to their rosters, and such major figures as Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, David Hammons, and the late Jean-Michel Basquiat bring record-shattering prices at auction. At the Venice Biennale, the oldest and still the most important international exhibition of recent art, the United States was represented on the last two occasions…

I can only be forgiven by Black peoplefor the million times I walked down a streetand no one knew I was there—as if I were tiptoeing,as if I took my self back from existence.For the hundreds of times my mother and Iwalked the galleries at Hudson’s—not a dark soul to be found!—the furniture behind red ropes, untouchable.For all the places she and Ikept eating our sandwiches.My mother liked minestrone soupon the thirteenth floor where the whitewaitresses wore dull green dresses & caps.I always enjoyed a hot-fudge sundae.Only Black people can judge me. Only they knowthe anguish inserted in history when someancestor of mine took the place of onewho went to the back. What was donemade me. Only Black people can know—who I loved most;for whom I have done good.…

The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead). Published in Poland before its author won a Nobel Prize, in 2018, this epic reimagines the life of the eighteenth-century Jewish heretic and self-proclaimed Messiah Jacob Frank. Tokarczuk’s Frank is perhaps motivated less by faith than by political expediency and even erotic desires, as he converts to both Islam and Christianity and fashions a subversive sect drawing on many religions. Crisscrossing Europe, he encounters a huge cast of characters, including a devoted, naïve “messenger,” an anti-Semitic bishop, and a slippery Polish translator. In the popular movement that Frank inspired, Tokarczuk finds a multiethnic, multi-faith tableau of Europe that repudiates the increasingly nationalist, historically revisionist views of many of its modern nation-states. Defenestrate, by Renée Branum…

Last month, the twenty-two-year-old Jamaican singer and rapper Koffee appeared as a musical guest on the “Tonight Show.” The studio’s stage had been outfitted to look like a casual and haphazard dance party, with a couch, rugs, strings of lights, and a crew of dancers performing seemingly unchoreographed moves. A structure made of speakers and red, green, and black storage crates served as a d.j. booth. The scene was a monument to one of Jamaica’s most cherished musical traditions: the sound system—a giant portable wall of speakers used for parties and d.j.’ing competitions. In front of the set, Koffee (born Mikayla Simpson) sang “Pull Up,” her new single, which is a bit less beholden to the trademarks of her native country than the art direction onstage was. Produced by JAE5,…

The octogenarian American artist Larry Bell is renowned for his geometric glass sculptures, which resist classification. (Bell was already a cult figure in 1967, when he appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”) Dia: Beacon, in the Hudson Valley, has opened a long-term installation of Bell’s works, both historic and new, including “Nesting Boxes” (pictured), from 2021, which he conceived specifically for the space it now occupies. MUSIC American Composers Orchestra CLASSICAL Anna Clyne’s orchestral piece “Restless Oceans” draws its title from the poem “A Woman Speaks,” by the influential feminist and activist Audre Lorde: “and if you would know me / look into the entrails of Uranus / where the restless oceans pound.” The score instructs the players to raise their voices,…

When Jacqueline Kennedy was living in the White House, in the early sixties, she relied upon the taste of Oleg Cassini, the costume designer turned couturier, to supply her with a wardrobe that would befit her role as First Lady, one of the most photographed women in the world. In 1962, Cassini provided her with a striking leopard coat. Knee-length, with three-quarter sleeves and six buttons that fastened across the chest, the coat was not made from a synthetic leopard-patterned fabric. Rather, it consisted of the pelts of several formerly wild, living leopards, which had been hunted and slaughtered for their alluring, treacherous skins. Fashionwise, the garment was a great success: the demand for Jackie-style leopard coats soared. For leopards, the trend was a disaster. It has been estimated that…

The town reservoir on the hillWas built in the twenties.If you lifted a round metal coveringAnd dropped a stone, you could Hear it plonk into the depths.There were small hollows in the rocksThat, no matter how dry the weather,Were filled with rainwater. These rock pools must have been hereWith different water in themThat summer when the rebelsFled toward Needham’s Gap. From the hill, as the croppies did,You can view the town, narrowStreets even narrower, and moreTrees and gardens than you imagined. It was burning then, of course,But now it is quiet. There is,In the Market Square, a monumentTo Father Murphy and the Croppy Boy. We can see the hill from our house.It is solid rock in the morningsAs the sun appears from just behind it.It changes as the day does.…

After the funeral, the two little girls, aged nine and seven, accompanied their grief-stricken mother home. Naturally, they were also grief-stricken, but, then again, they hadn’t known their father very well and hadn’t enormously liked him. He was an airline pilot, and they’d preferred it when he was away working; being alert little girls, they’d picked up intimations that he preferred it, too. This was in the nineteen-seventies, when air travel was still considered glamorous. Philip Lyons had flown 747s across the Atlantic for B.O.A.C., until he died of a heart attack—luckily not while in the air but on the ground, prosaically, eating breakfast in a New York hotel room. The airline had flown him home free of charge. All the girls’ concentration was on their mother, Marlene, who couldn’t…

In 2013, when people still nursed high hopes for the salvific effects of the Internet and cancellation was a fate reserved for poorly rated TV shows, a private citizen with a hundred and seventy Twitter followers was loitering in Heathrow Airport, waiting for a flight to Cape Town, South Africa. “Going to Africa,” she dashed off before boarding. “Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” By the time she landed, eleven hours later, her ill-advised missive had gone disastrously viral. She stumbled off the plane to discover that a multitude of online detractors had weighed in on her character. Now she was a globally known racist. The woman, Justine Sacco, was one of the first high-profile casualties of public shaming in the digital era, and she suffered all…