Innholdsfortegnelse for April 25-May 2, 2022 i The New Yorker

In a sense, the playwright Mona Mansour has been working on “The Vagrant Trilogy” for fifteen years; in another sense, she’s been working up to it her whole life. It’s that kind of play. “You try not to think of it as this huge, epic thing, because it puts too much pressure on it,” she said the other day. The play was supposed to open soon, at the Public Theatre. Then again, the first time the production went into tech rehearsals, in early 2020, it was supposed to open on April 1st, and everyone knows what happened next. “The joke, among people who spend time in the Arab-speaking world, is that everything is ‘Inshallah,’” Mansour said. “You ask the cabdriver, ‘Can you get me to the airport?’ ‘Inshallah.’ I wasn’t…

The German word Dunkelflaute means “dark doldrums.” It chills the hearts of renewable-energy engineers, who use it to refer to the lulls when solar panels and wind turbines are thwarted by clouds, night, or still air. On a bright, cloudless day, a solar farm can generate prodigious amounts of electricity; when it’s gusty, wind turbines whoosh neighborhoods to life. But at night solar cells do little, and in calm air turbines sit useless. These renewable energy sources stop renewing until the weather, or the planet, turns. The dark doldrums make it difficult for an electrical grid to rely totally on renewable energy. Power companies need to plan not just for individual storms or windless nights but for Dunkelflaute that stretch for days or longer. Last year, Europe experienced a…

The parliament of Catalonia, the autonomous region in Spain, sits on the edge of Barcelona’s Old City, in the remains of a fortified citadel constructed by King Philip V to monitor the restive local population. The citadel was built with forced labor from hundreds of Catalans, and its remaining structures and gardens are for many a reminder of oppression. Today, a majority of Catalan parliamentarians support independence for the region, which the Spanish government has deemed unconstitutional. In 2017, as Catalonia prepared for a referendum on independence, Spanish police arrested at least twelve separatist politicians. On the day of the referendum, which received the support of ninety per cent of voters despite low turnout, police raids of polling stations injured hundreds of civilians. Leaders of the independence movement, some of…

All the parties you spentwatching the roomfrom a balconywhere someone joined youto smoke then returned.And how it turns out no onehad the childhood they wanted,and how they’d tell you thisa little drunk, a little slantin less time than it tookto finish a cigarettebecause sad thingscan’t be explained.Behind the glass and inside,all your friends buzzed.You could feel the shapeof their voices. You couldtell from their eyes they werein some other place. 1999or 2008 or last June.Of course, it’s importantto go to parties. To makelife a dress or a drinkor suede shoes someone wearsin the rain. On the way home,in the car back, the night skyplayed its old tricks. The starsarranged themselves quietly.The person you thought of droveunder them. Away from the party,(just like you) into the years.…

The incremental Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014—which began with the seizure of Crimea and continued as a hybrid operation, capitalizing on anti-Kyiv sentiment in eastern Ukraine and backed by an information war, mercenaries, and, ultimately, tanks and rockets—was eventually halted by Ukrainian forces, that summer, about fifty miles from the Russian border. A shaky ceasefire was signed in Minsk, and a so-called “line of contact” emerged. It ran for three hundred miles and separated Ukrainian government-controlled territory from the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Along this line of contact, Ukrainian troops dug in on one side and Russian-backed troops on the other, with about nineteen miles between them. For more than seven years, with ebbs and flows in their frequency and intensity, the conflict featured sniper fire and…

A confession, and a sheepish one for a Francophile to make: my heart does not thrill to the prospect of sitting through “Cyrano de Bergerac.” This may be the fault of my Anglophone ear, which is too clumsy to pick up the rapid-fire panache of Edmond Rostand’s rhyming Alexandrine couplets as they fly by in the original, and English translations have a way of starching the esprit right out of the language. Fairly or not, I have come to associate the play with an aura of whipped-cream foppishness, heavy on swordplay, swishing capes, and swelling bosoms, like the ones in Joe Wright’s recent film adaptation of Erica Schmidt’s musical version. Wright, who cast Peter Dinklage in the title role, traded a big schnoz for small stature as his hero’s signature…

BUFFETT’S MIGRATIONS As an aficionado of Jimmy Buffett tunes, I enjoyed Nick Paumgarten’s report from the singer’s Latitude Margaritaville retirement communities (“Five O’Clock Everywhere,” March 28th). His vivid descriptions of some of the Parrotheads who have flocked to these developments elucidate Americans’ growing fascination with unconventional retirement scenarios. Yet Paumgarten missed a chance to point out that Latitude Margaritaville defies a view of retirement that Buffett himself once expressed—in, for example, his 1974 ballad “Migration”: “Most of the people who retire in Florida/Are wrinkled and they lean on a crutch/And mobile homes are smotherin’ my Keys/I hate those bastards so much.” Many of Buffett’s songs and stories convey environmental themes that no longer ring so true, considering the fact that a third Latitude Margaritaville complex will be carved out of…

The water cuts out while shampoo still clogs my hair.The nurse who swabs my nose hopes I don’t have the virus, it’s a bitch.The building across from the cemetery calls itself LIFE STORAGE. My little brother was shot, I tell the barista who asks how things have been,and tip extra for her inconvenience. We speak onlyto the dead, someone tells me—to comfort, I assume, or inspire, but I take it literally, as I am wont: even my shut up and fuck and let’s cook tonight,those are for you, Stephen. You won’t come to me in my dreams,so I must communicate by other avenues. A friend sends an image from Cy Twombly’s “Fifty Days at Iliam”—a red bloom, the words “like a fire that consumes all before it”—and asks: Have you…

Svetlana got back to Harvard the day after me, though it felt like years. I had already slept the night in my new room, eaten breakfast and lunch in the cafeteria, and made numerous trips to the storage facility, having the same conversation over and over with people whose existence I had forgotten. “How was your summer?” “How was your summer?” “How was Hungary?” “So, how was Hungary? Did anything happen?” Lakshmi asked, with a conspiratorial sparkle. Lakshmi was one of the people I remembered: last year, when we were freshmen, we had exchanged confidences; we had both been in love with older guys. There had been certain similarities between our situations, between Ivan and Noor. And, notwithstanding my feeling that a lot of things had happened, I answered the…

Whole Earth, by John Markoff (Penguin Press). This biography of Stewart Brand, the creator of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” explores the varied career of a “quixotic intellectual troubadour.” An early techno-utopian—he coined the phrase “information wants to be free” and was the first journalist to use the term “personal computer”—Brand also organized parties for Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and helped spark the environmental movement, befriending such luminaries as Marlon Brando, Brian Eno, and the California governor Jerry Brown along the way. What emerges is a view of an insistently holistic thinker unafraid to pursue idiosyncratic ideas and possessing “an uncanny sixth sense for being in the right place at the right time.” The Genesis Machine, by Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel (Public-Affairs). Predicting that technologies for editing and programming DNA…

There’s an old episode of “Seinfeld” in which Jerry, in his opening monologue, riffs on office workers who keep family photographs at their desks. “Do they forget that they’re married?” he asks. “They go, ‘All right, it’s five o’clock, time to hit the bars and pick up some hookers. Hold it a second … I’ve got a wife and three kids! I’d better head home!’” This scenario—temporarily forgetting your home life while at work—is the premise of the gripping dystopian drama “Severance,” which just completed its first season on Apple TV+. In the series, which was created by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife Mc-; Ardle, the employees who work on theso-; called severance floor at Lumon Industries—a shadowy megacorporation—know nothing of their lives outside the office.…

APRIL 20 – MAY 3, 2022 The singer-songwriter Indigo De Souza has rapidly evolved into one of indie rock’s most versatile young voices. After débuting, in 2018, with “I Love My Mom,” an endearing, albeit crude, grunge-pop revelation, her second album, “Any Shape You Take,” from 2021, brought breadth to her songs of unsustainable love, smoothing out her sound and refining her lyrics, even as she extended into new territory sonically and emotionally. On April 24, De Souza brings her bracing, catharsis-driven breakthrough to Music Hall of Williamsburg. ART Morgan Bassichis This gifted New York performance artist’s first solo gallery show is a spare but inviting installation of videos, handwritten to-do lists, and colorful pamphlets offering a series of “Questions to Ask Before” such potentially nerve-racking situations as “Beginning a…

Brumunddal, a small municipality on the northeastern shore of Lake Mjøsa, in Norway, has for most of its history had little to recommend it to the passing visitor. There are no picturesque streets with cafés and boutiques, as there are in the ski resort of Lillehammer, some thirty miles to the north. Industrial buildings, mostly for the lumber industry, occupy the area closest to the lake, and the waterfront is cut off by a highway. The town, which has a population of eleven thousand, was until recently best known to Norwegians for a series of attacks on immigrant residents three decades ago, which led to street clashes between anti-racism protesters and supporters of the far right. Since 2019, however, Brumunddal has achieved a more welcome identity: as the site of…

“The Color Purple” is a novel about women, but one man takes up precious room. For much of the book, Celie, the narrator, refers to the epistolary novel’s principal patriarch (aside from the God to whom she addresses her letters) only as “Mr. _____.” She has passed from one man’s domain to another’s, handed off by the only father she knows to live with Mr. _____ in wedlock, though her sister, Nettie, is the one he really wanted. Yet, in a world ruled by men, Celie provides our perspective; even their speech must flow through her pen. And so she at least sets the tone. We hear breathlessness, for example, when she learns that “Shug Avery is coming to town!” That Shug Avery—the sharp and singing Queen Honeybee—knows exactly who…

It’s evident within the opening minuteute of “The Lightning I, II,” a vigorous, urging single from Arcade Fire’s excellent sixth album, “WE,” that the band has returned—prodigally, ardently—to the hard-charging sound that once made its live shows resemble tent revivals. If you’ve ever driven a little too fast on the highway—all your earthly belongings wedged into the trunk, cheap sunglasses on, hair blowing everywhere, booking it from somewhere to somewhere else—you likely have a sense of the gasping exhilaration Arcade Fire specializes in. It’s tough to think of another band that’s as formally concerned with (or as preternaturally adept at) enabling full-body catharsis, and it’s tough to imagine another moment in which this sweaty, hyper-intimate brand of absolution might be more welcome. Yet, for a brief while, Arcade Fire—which was…