Innholdsfortegnelse for April 4, 2022 i The New Yorker

Rachel Aviv (“The Price of Admission,” p. 34), a staff writer, is the author of “Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us,” which will be published in September. David Sedaris (“Lucky-Go-Happy,” p. 27) has contributed to the magazine since 1995. His new essay collection, “Happy-Go-Lucky,” will be out in May. Rae Armantrout (Poem, p. 40) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Her latest book is “Finalists.” Sunil Khilnani (Books, p. 64) is the author of “Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives” and “The Idea of India.” Liana Finck (Sketchbook, p. 43), a New Yorker cartoonist, will publish “Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation” in April. Ben McGrath (The Talk of the Town, p. 16) has been a staff writer since 2003. His new…

Last September, the filmmaker Robert Eggers was having breakfast—grains, seeds, black coffee—at a bistro in central London. He was preoccupied, to some extent. At seven that morning, he had spoken to an executive at New Regency Productions, to receive the studio’s notes on the latest cut of “The Northman,” the ninety-million-dollar Viking movie that had consumed two years of his life. “The studio is expecting the next cut to be different,” Eggers said. Eggers’s previous films—“The Witch” (2015) and “The Lighthouse” (2019)—were claustrophobic, visionary works that blurred the boundary between the imagined and the real. They didn’t test well at all. The first audiences for “The Northman”—a loose pre-telling of “Hamlet” (Shakespeare’s play is based on a Viking tale) involving longships, volcanoes, transcendental visions, and the singer Björk’s first cinematic…

In the winter of her sophomore year of high school, Mackenzie Morrison sat in her bedroom closet and began a new diary. Using her phone to light the pages, she listed the “pros of telling”: “no more physical/emotional attacks,” “I get out of this dangerous house,” “the truth is finally out, I don’t have to lie or cover things up.” Under “cons of telling,” she wrote, “damaging mom’s life,” “could go into foster care,” “basically I would probably lose everything.” After she finished, she loosened the screws of a vent panel on the wall outside her closet and slipped the notebook behind it. Mackenzie went to Whitfield, a private prep school in St. Louis, where the school’s wellness director, Ginny Fendell, called her the “queen of compartmentalization.” She got A’s,…

1 Someone will need to forgive me for beingwho I am, for sneaking back to my blue chair by the window, where for the last three hundred and seventy daysI have learned that to be alone is what is good for me. I am pretending as if I really belong with those who want to return to this worldwith open arms, even though it has done to us what it has done. I wish I could love like that,instead of wanting to turn my back on it all, as if life in the world were a marriageassumed too young and necessarily left behind. Try as I might I will never becomeone of the world’s faithful ones. My naked face and your naked face,maskless. A cold March dawn, harsh sunlight, impersonal…

Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky (New Directions). Published in Ukraine in 2018, these surreal short stories by a noted photographer probe the experiences of women from the Donbas region, many of whom fled the separatist conflict that erupted in 2014 and now live as refugees in Kyiv. The stories, ethnographic in perspective but Gogolian in register, gravitate toward inexplicable disappearances, repressed memories, and phantasmagoria. Belorusets writes of “the deep penetration of traumatic historical events into the fantasies … of everyday life” and richly evokes the fatalistic humor of her marginalized characters, one of whom observes, “If you had the luck to be born here, you take things as they come.” Chilean Poet, by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Viking).This…

“WeCrashed,” a scripted series about the rise and fall of WeWork, Adam Neumann’s office co-working company, begins not with a startup but with a shakedown. Neumann (Jared Leto), a wannabe entrepreneur from Israel, tries to woo Rebekah (Anne Hathaway), an underpaid yoga teacher, by berating her boss into properly compensating her. “Instead of you giving Rebekah one dollar per student, she’s going to keep the donations,” he barks at the studio’s owner, shaking a finger in the man’s face. Next, we cut to Neumann and Rebekah tumbling into bed. Sex, money, aggression: this early scene gestures at the show’s ambitions, which can feel as outsized as those of Neumann, who hawked a real-estate company as a revolutionary tech venture. “WeCrashed” seemingly wants to align itself with the golden age of…

REASONS AND PERSONHOODS Lawrence Wright’s report on the predicament of Happy, an elephant kept at the Bronx Zoo, offers an excellent account of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s long battle to expand the legal definition of personhood (“The Elephant in the Courtroom,” March 7th). Another species that Wright refers to—orcas—represents a strong case for nonhuman personhood, and yet probably stands little chance of obtaining it. Unlike chimpanzees, orcas have no physical features that resemble a human’s, and live only in aquatic environments. Unlike elephants, which humans have trained for centuries, orcas are relative newcomers to captivity. Until the nineteen-sixties, they were generally held to be vicious killers. But orcas have been known to show an astonishing regard for human wellbeing. In the late seventies, the SeaWorld park in San Diego put…

At the height of the British Empire, just after the First World War, an island smaller than Kansas controlled roughly a quarter of the world’s population and landmass. To the architects of this colossus, the largest empire in history, each conquest was a moral achievement. Imperial tutelage, often imparted through the barrel of an Enfield, was delivering benighted peoples from the errors of their ways—child marriage, widow immolation, headhunting. Among the edifiers was a Devonshire-born rector’s son named Henry Hugh Tudor. Hughie, as he was known to Winston Churchill and his other chums, pops up so reliably in colonial outposts with outsized body counts that his story can seem a “Where’s Waldo?” of empire. He’s Churchill’s garrison-mate in Bangalore in 1895—a time of “messes and barbarism,” the future Prime Minister…

MARCH 30 – APRIL 5, 2022 In 2020, the American floral designer Jeff Leatham—who counts the Dalai Lama, Dolly Parton, and the Kardashians as clients—masterminded the eighteenth annual Orchid Show at the New York Botanical Garden, only to see his kaleidoscope-themed installation abruptly shuttered by the pandemic. Leatham’s extravaganza returns to the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory (pictured) through May 1, reconceived in collaboration with the Garden’s horticulturists, including Marc Hachadourian, the senior curator of orchids. As ever, it’s advisable to confirm engagements in advance and to check the requirements for in-person attendance. THE THEATRE Help In 2019, the poet Claudia Rankine published an essay in the New York Times with a simple conceit. Seeking to understand privilege, she interviewed white men at airports about their white-maleness. Sometimes they were rude—skipping…

If you see something, say something, or so we’re often told, though on a recent moonlit night in Central Park the sight of two men lifting Kevlar canoes over the iron fence around the reservoir seemed to concern no one. Joggers jogged, walkers walked—and Neil King and Tyler Maroney, self-styled urban rusticators, scampered down a steep embankment and pushed off into what King later called the “epicenter of emptiness” for an illicit crossing of Manhattan’s largest body of freshwater. A hundred yards in, they clapped paddles together, in celebration. Twenty minutes later, they were high and dry again, heading south and portaging to the Turtle Pond, in anticipation of an amphibious assault on Belvedere Castle. This lark was King’s idea. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, he’d decided last year,…

I’m gonna spend some time with [my family]…. It’s not always about what I want. It’s about what we want as a family. —Tom Brady, January 24, 2022. These past two months I have realized my place is still on the field. —Tom Brady, forty-eight days later. Saw the children this evening. Spent some wonderful time with them. Or perhaps I should say near them, as the time I spent was the few moments between my entering the house after my last game and walking upstairs to go to bed. They were in the living room and saw me walk up the stairs, and we looked at one another and I smiled at them, a sign that I recognized them and that I was fairly sure they were my children.…

She and I converged on a sullen love for our country. A hate-love, some might say. A love with a dash of masochism, I used to say. A love in defiance of pain, she used to say. And that was how she and I loved each other, too—through pain and a bit frantically. Almost every weekend, she and I would get on a train or a bus and head off somewhere. And, in Ukraine, you can get far in the course of a weekend. And make it home, too. Only once were we late for work on a Monday—when we were hitchhiking back from Milove, in the Luhansk region, in January. It’s the easternmost point of the country. We made it there on buses and headed back on foot along…

The comedian Alex Edelman is thirty-three but looks younger. He wears his shock of dark hair swept over his forehead, like a middle-school heartthrob. He has a springy walk, a peppy, engaged stage presence—“pandering and solicitous,” in his own words—and a Muppet-ish physicality, with emphatic jellyfish hands that he likes to flop and flail, and big eyes that pop wide in astonishment or narrow in conspiratorial outrage when a beat needs holding. In the show “Just for Us” (directed by Adam Brace and produced by Mike Birbiglia), which Edelman is performing at the SoHo Playhouse after a buzzy, sold-out run earlier this year at the Cherry Lane, he wears pristine white sneakers, snug black jeans, and a shirt buttoned all the way up to its point collar. Image, the performer’s…