Innholdsfortegnelse for April 18, 2022 i The New Yorker

She was shampooing her hair with cherries. It was entirely her idea to do it—she hadn’t read about it anywhere. She had taken the little cellophane sack of cherries out of her bag and put the cherries in a wooden bowl and pounded them down with a flat, broad spoon, drawing out the pits with her fingers, then she had slipped into the shower and put the whole mess on her head and shampooed it in with a little bit of moisture. This was her way of treating herself, since only the moon seemed to be on her side, shining down silver on her coat that night. After she rinsed out her hair, it was pink and smelled like cherries. She went to bed with it wet like that, and…

The Believer, by Sarah Krasnostein (Tin House). The line between fact and fiction blurs to revelatory effect in this account of ghost hunters, death doulas, six-day creationists, U.F.O. investigators, and others who hold ideas at odds with, as the author judiciously puts it, “more accepted realities.” Krasnostein spends years among her subjects, in Australia and the U.S., hoping to reach an intimate understanding of what drives their devotion. Though her approach is journalistic, pure objectivity proves impossible; an attempt to bond with a group of Mennonite women in the Bronx falters because “they believe I am going to Hell and I believe they may already be living in one.” Ultimately, it is Krasnostein’s dawning awareness of herself as a believer which brings a kind of enlightenment. The Subplot, by Megan Walsh…

HIDDEN DESCENDANTS Jill Abramson’s thoughtful piece about West Ford, a man who was enslaved at Mount Vernon and whose descendants claim that he was George Washington’s son, brought to mind the story of Maria Carter Syphax (“Far from the Tree,” March 14th). Like Ford, Syphax, who was born in 1803, is linked to Washington’s family. Her father was George Washington Parke Custis, a grandson of Martha Washington and a step-grandson of George Washington. Syphax’s mother was Arianna Carter, an enslaved woman who served Martha Washington. Syphax was enslaved at Arlington House, the mansion that Custis built in what is now Arlington National Cemetery, where she served her half sister, Mary Anna Custis Lee, the wife of Robert E. Lee. In 1821, Maria married Charles Syphax, who was enslaved at Mount…

DISTANT MORNING Another morning.The trees always look the same.I am different.Each day, I am greedier.How do trees refuse evening? THAT MUSIC Once, I fell in lovewith the music, not the man.When the music played,my heart moved like paper boats.When it stopped, I was eighty. IN A CLEARING My whole life, I thoughtto mourn leaves falling. Now Imarvel at all the splitting. TO THE HAND Someone is turningthe earth with wrenches, each turna bit closer to the end.The earth is warmer.The crickets are still singing,rehearsing for the last day. TOOL We make tools to fixeverything—hammers, nails, wiresthat we twist to holddown or bend into beauty.We make a small treeinto the shape we want, tobe slanted, silent.The wire on my wrists cut in,I take the shape of desire.…

On the way to the cemetery, I slept.Not in the limousine that carried my mother’s coffnbut out cold in a van, the family all talking around me.I was exhausted from her suffering, her pleas—help me and enough, enough—and trying to get the morphine to stay in the ditch of her gums.How could I not have studied this in advance?The way my mother learned to give shots in nursing school,plunging the needle into an orangethen practicing on the other girls.God only gives you strength for one day at a time.How many times did I hear her say this?Ask yourself, can I make this day?And then she made her last day.On the way back, the driver got lost. As we circled unfamiliarfields and trees dizzy with blossoms, we began to imaginewe could…

“It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” Those are the words of Edward Gibbon, and the book he imagined was, of course, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” The passage is from Gibbon’s autobiography, and it has been quoted many times, because it seems to distill the six volumes of Gibbon’s famous book into an image: friars singing in the ruins of the civilization that their religion destroyed. And maybe we can picture, as in a Piranesi etching, the young Englishman (Gibbon was twenty-seven) perched on…

When the country singer Orville Peck released “Pony,” his début album, in 2019, biographical details were kept purposely scant. He was born somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, perhaps to a show-business family. Maybe he had played drums in a Canadian punk band. Peck wore a series of leather masks with strips of dangling bordello fringe, which obscured most of his features, but not his searching blue eyes. Amateur gumshoes began sniffing around for clues to Peck’s “real” identity and found them—he has since admitted that he was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa—but his artfully cultivated mystique was part of the point, and part of the fun. His big, swooning baritone could be menacing or magnetic, depending on the lyric. Even when he was being campy or teasing, there…

APRIL 13 – 19, 2022 Finished soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, “The Skin of Our Teeth,” Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning allegorical comedy, tells the story of human history through a single family—the Antrobuses of Excelsior, New Jersey, who have survived the Ice Age, floods, plagues, and wars. This Lincoln Center Theatre revival (in previews at the Vivian Beaumont), directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, with additional script work by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, reinterprets the Everyman family to embody the Black experience. As ever, it’s advisable to confirm engagements in advance and to check the requirements for in-person attendance. MUSIC Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center CLASSICAL Julius Eastman—a gay Black composer who blazed his own path in the Minimalist movement and died, largely unappreciated, in 1990—has enjoyed a small yet persistent…

Faced with an image of themselves on a screen, untold numbers of Americans have, of late, wondered: needle or knife? “You can do filler, Botox, get a face-lift—fine,” Mark Stanlein, the C.E.O. of the skin-care company QMS, said the other day. He sat at a table at the Palm Court, at the Plaza Hotel, wearing a blue suit, an expression of sublime equanimity on his very smooth face. “That won’t change the quality of your skin. Greasiness, oiliness, dryness, eczema, large pores—none of those procedures will change that.” He is pushing another option: spackle. “Your cells are bricks. The cement between them is collagen,” he said. “You have to start adding cement after eighteen, nineteen years old.” QMS uses bovine collagen, which our skin absorbs more readily than its popular…

On the first weekend of May, 1926, the Trades Union Congress, which represented more than three million workers in Britain, voted for a general strike. Factories came to a stop. Trains stayed in their sidings. Cities fell quiet. Volatile crowds gathered, ready to block roads and head off strikebreakers. Virginia Woolf, who was writing “To the Lighthouse,” saw a column of armored cars roll down Oxford Street. In the House of Commons, the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, accused the unions of “going nearer to proclaiming civil war than we have been for centuries past.” But it was hard for Baldwin’s words—anyone’s words—to travel far. National newspapers had ceased to print. Unions and strike councils put out their own pamphlets, under the threat of police raids. The government was producing the…

Strangers often told me how wonderful my father was. “Wait, my father?” I’d think. They met a different man, the handsome polymath with the much stamped passport. The earnest charmer. At conference dinners, he’d linger over the Sauternes to draw out his tablemate’s knowledge of Persian poetry; once, with a Korean man who spoke almost no English, he was able to convey baseball’s arcane balk rule using only pantomime. His pockets were always full of business cards inscribed with pleas to keep in touch, as if he were a human Wailing Wall. Theodore Wood Friend III was Dorie to his contemporaries and Day to his children, from my first tries at “Daddy.” (We’re one of those Wasp families where baby names stick for life.) A believer in letters to the…

The human animal has an instinctive awe of sounds from above. In the Hebrew Bible, God makes his presence felt as a voice in the firmament, as a whirlwind, as thunder. In the modern age, technological threats rumble overhead—helicopters, drones, planes that fly ominously low. Sound from above is chastening; it destroys the illusion that we are masters of our environment. In musical terms, though, awe can turn to wonder. Some part of me is still reeling from a performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony that the great choral conductor Robert Shaw led at Carnegie Hall, in 1995. More than five hundred singers were deployed onstage and in the first- and second-tier boxes. In my orchestra seat, I felt not so much surrounded by sound as inundated by it. Near the…

Have you heard of the juggernaut musical about the young, scrappy American revolutionary with a surplus of political genius, who’s determined to change the course of history with the help of a gang of committed cronies? No, not “Hamilton”—I’m talking about “Suffs,” an ambitious new show (directed by Leigh Silverman, at the Public) that sets out to do for the suffragist Alice Paul what Lin-Manuel Miranda did for Alexander H. The show’s thirty-three-year-old creator, Shaina Taub, wrote the music, the lyrics, and the book, and she stars as Paul, who surely counts as one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable figures, if not—yet—one of its household names. “Suffs,” which sold out its run well before opening, features a strong female and non-binary cast, an inspiring story, and songs that stick…