Innholdsfortegnelse for May 16, 2022 i The New Yorker

Raffi Khatchadourian (“Light and Shadow,” p. 34) has been a staff writer since 2008. Ludmila Khersonsky (Poem, p. 53) is a Ukrainian poet and translator. Her collection “The Country Where Everyone’s Name Is Fear,” which she co-authored with Boris Khersonsky, came out in English last month. Stephen Witt (“Weapon of Influence,” p. 22) published “How Music Got Free” in 2015. Emily Flake (Comic Strip, p. 57) is a New Yorker cartoonist. Her books include “Mama Tried” and “That Was Awkward.” Frank Viva (Cover), an illustrator and a graphic designer, has contributed to the magazine since 2010. His books for children include “Young Frank, Architect” and “Sea Change.” Maggie Doherty (Books, p. 74) is the author of “The Equivalents.” She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rivka Galchen (“The Grothendieck Mystery,” p. 28),…

This summer’s classical performances reflect a pandemic reset that feels more than temporary. Lincoln Center has collapsed all of its seasonal programs and series into a single initiative, Summer for the City (May 14-Aug. 14). The festival embraces diversity, with free events that include a Pride-themed Mini Kiki Ball (June 24) and a Juneteenth celebration (June 19). The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, survivors of the reorganization, plays six different programs, featuring Henri Vieuxtemps’s highly embroidered Violin Concerto No. 5, with Joshua Bell (Aug. 2-3), and Mozart’s Requiem (Aug. 5-6). The Metropolitan Opera’s season, typically finished in May, runs into June, with Brett Dean’s “Hamlet” (May 13-June 9). Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads the Met orchestra in back-to-back concerts, at Carnegie Hall—Act I of Wagner’s “Die Walküre” (June 15) and an all-Berlioz program (June…

American Ballet Theatre finally gets its New York première of the ballet “Of Love and Rage,” by the company’s choreographer-in-residence, Alexei Ratmansky. The work, which débuted in California days before the lockdown, is a large-scale, evening-length spectacle, inspired by a first-century adventure-romance from the Greek author Chariton of Aphrodisias. It opens during A.B.T.’s summer season, at the Metropolitan Opera House (June 13-July 16), which also features “Don Quixote” (with a promising début by the young dynamo Catherine Hurlin), “Swan Lake” (of course), and a new work by the California-based Alonzo King. At the Joyce, the Paul Taylor Dance Company performs three intriguing programs (June 14-19) that combine reconstructions of early Taylor experiments not seen in years—among them “Events II,” from 1957, and “Fibers,” from 1961—with new pieces by contemporary dancemakers. Later,…

The idea of authenticity in food is tempting but slippery. Take, for example, So Do Fun, a new restaurant in Gramercy. If you had to categorize it bluntly, you might call it Sichuan—but it’s the first U.S. outpost of a chain founded in 2007 in Guangzhou, the Chinese city historically romanized as Canton, which means that it’s Sichuan for a Cantonese clientele. Does this origin story make it less authentic—or, indeed, more authentic, reflecting the organically idiosyncratic way that a specific group of people eat? Regardless, to experience that idiosyncrasy is pure pleasure: a sort of push and pull through peppercorn punch and mellow sweetness, across the menu’s dishes and sometimes within them, too. Sichuan-style boiled fish in chili sauce—a house specialty, advertised on custom takeout containers—is properly, immutably fiery,…

Last Tuesday afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion indicated that the fight to protect Roe v. Wade would soon suffer an epochal defeat, New Yorkers began showing up at Foley Square, in lower Manhattan. “CHAN-NEL YOUR RAGE INTO ACTION,” an announcement shared on social media read. “WEAR GREEN.” The threat to Roe had been a slow build, but the suddenness of the leak meant that the protest was marked by improvisation. People wore green bandannas, hoodies—whatever was in their closets—and carried signs bearing Sharpie’d slogans, ranging from the succinct (“RAGE”) to the specific (“I SURVIVED AN ILLEGAL ABORTION in Birmingham Ala. in 1969 #NeverAgain”). Helicopters buzzed overhead. “It’s scary that something we relied on for fifty years can be taken away,” a law student…

ACROSS 1 Assume6 Title in Tyrol10 Site that acquired Depop in 2021 for $1.6 billion14 Comic going after big bucks?16 El Pollo ___ (restaurant chain)17 Charges for parties18 Self-appointed tastemaker19 Crew cutter?20 Social circles21 See 3-Down23 Cookout staple24 Like some marches, tonally25 What makes a grasshopper green28 Judge in the Book of Judges29 Succumbs 30 Morning ___31 Stage name of the rapper Tracy Marrow32 Like 26-Down’s demeanor33 Flew34 “Found you!”35 Studio54, once36 Secures a weave, say37 “Do I look like I have time for this nonsense?”40 Fútbol icon Messi41 Stinks42 Mimicked a hot dog43 Minderbinder of “Catch-22”44 Sweeping shot47 “Quantum of Solace” actress Kurylenko48 Lack of finesse51 One bowed in a Renaissance ensemble52 “Meh,” for one 53 Comic ___54 Symbol used to represent the reduced Planck constant55 Forwards, say DOWN…

The Chilean-born artist Cecilia Vicuña, a self-described “poet of precarity,” creates daring, beautiful works—paintings, textiles, books, performances, films—that interweave language, spirituality, progressive politics, and ancient Andean culture. Vicuña has lived in New York City since 1980, and now the Guggenheim presents the artist’s first museum retrospective, “Cecilia Vicuña: Spin Spin Triangulene,” in her adopted home. (Opens May 27.) As the war in Ukraine rages on, it’s hard to imagine a more timely summer show than “Designing Peace,” at the Cooper Hewitt. Twenty-five countries are represented by forty pacifist propositions—models, maps, objects, mobile-phone apps, videos, full-scale installations—including rugs woven from discarded bullet casings and plans for a memorial garden at the forthcoming International African American Museum, in Charleston, S.C. (Opens June 10.) The quicksilver collagist Ray Johnson (1927-95), best known for…

Those who have watched Samuel Alito during his sixteen years as a Supreme Court Justice will not have been surprised to learn that his draft opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a challenge to a restrictive Mississippi abortion law, is written in a register of scorn. Alito’s 2015 dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry, complains that “those who cling to old beliefs” will be forced to “whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes,” lest they be subject to “turn-about” persecution by gays and lesbians and their sympathizers. What’s different about his Dobbs opinion, which was leaked to Politico last week, though, is that it’s not a dissent. It was, apparently, circulated in February…

MISSION: Her Excellency Samia Suluhu Hassan, the sixth President of the United Republic of Tanzania, and its first female head of state, desires a stroll through Central Park. OBJECTIVE: To correct certain impressions advanced by Hassan’s predecessor, John Magufuli (nickname: the Bulldozer), who largely closed off Tanzania to the rest of the world and whose Covid strategy centered on three days of national prayer, after which he proclaimed, “The Corona disease has been eliminated thanks to God.” He died nine months later, seemingly thanks to Covid. (Official Tanzanian-government stance: heart problems.) Hassan, who was vaccinated publicly, is on a good-will tour of the United States, declaring Tanzania again open to visitors, investors, and science. STRATEGY: Meet at Ritz-Carlton. Hassan is incoming from Washington, D.C., where she attended a summit with…

The radical left’s panties are in a twist over the hordes of extraterrestrial aliens who—based on little more than wild speculation from quack scientists and so-called Pentagon videos—they claim will kill us all in their ravenous hunt throughout the galaxy for energy sources. (Cocks head quizzically.) Huh. I guess extraterrestrials are anthropomorphically cute so long as they fill the coffers of liberal billionaire filmmaker Steven Spielberg and his shadowy cabal of global financiers. Before you cower in your bunker, ask yourself a few questions. (Squints in constipated bafflement.) Has an extraterrestrial alien ever gotten into college over your more qualified child? Are extraterrestrial aliens gouging you at the gas pump? Has an extraterrestrial alien tried to sue you for sexual harassment over a polite invitation to enjoy a few glasses…

At Chinese universities, when a student reports a professor for political wrongdoing, the verb that’s used to describe this action is jubao. It happens rarely, but the possibility is always there, because potential infractions are both undefined and extremely varied. A student might jubao a teacher for a comment about a sensitive historical event, or a remark that seems to contradict a Communist Party policy. Ambiguous statements about Xi Jinping, the President of China, are especially risky. In 2019, during a class at Chongqing Normal University, a literature professor named Tang Yun off handedly described the language of one of Xi’s slogans as coarse. After students complained, Tang was demoted to a job in the library. Other problems can involve class materials. In the fall of 2019, I started teaching…

The blockbuster season is, as usual, filled with fantasy franchise films, such as the sequels “Jurassic World Dominion” (June 10) and “Thor: Love and Thunder” (July 8), and the “Toy Story” spinoff “Lightyear” (June 17), but its more visionary offerings also spotlight original stories, including Jordan Peele’s horror drama, “Nope” (July 22), starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Steven Yeun, about a Black-run horse farm in Northern California that’s invaded by space aliens. In David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” (June 3), starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart, accelerated evolution drastically transforms the human species. In the Afrofuturist musical “Neptune Frost” (June 3), directed by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, a coltan miner (Bertrand Ninteretse) and an intersex hacker (Cheryl Isheja and Elvis Ngabo) unite against a repressive regime.…

Supreme Court watchers have been calling the leak of a draft opinion in advance of the Court’s abortion decision “unthinkable” and “unprecedented.” Chief Justice John Roberts has ordered an internal investigation by the marshal of the Court, and former Attorney General Bill Barr has suggested that a criminal probe may be warranted. Fifty years ago, however, the Court sprang another leak—two, in fact—in connection with the original Roe v. Wade decision. A rookie writer named David Beckwith published a story in Time asserting that the Court was about to legalize abortion, a few hours ahead of the official decision. Speaking by phone the other day from his home in Austin, Texas, Beckwith said, “In my little incident, no one had any mal intent.” He joked, “They just had the bad…

Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, retired his trademark off-white Stetson about five years ago after he looked out from the stage one night and saw that a number of fans were wearing the same hat. “I felt like Madonna,” he said the other day, in Chicago. He’s played largely hatless ever since. But for Wilco’s twelfth studio album the band is returning to its roots (roots music), and the fiftyfour-year-old front man is feeling ready to reinstate the image repertoire. The band will première all twenty-one tracks of “Cruel Country”––“I love my country, stupid and cruel”—at Solid Sound, the music-and-arts festival that it throws every two years at Mass Moca: lawn chairs, vintage Luccheses, craft I.P.A. Tweedy had to complete the costume. In search of a new hat, Tweedy wandered the…

The heroine of “Happening” is Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei), who is clever, young, industrious, and French. The year is 1963, and she is studying literature, in the city of Angoulême. In her path stand difficult exams, though Anne is expected to ace them; in the company of her friends Hélène (Luàna Bajrami) and Brigitte (Louise OrryDiquero), she conjugates a Latin verb while lying on a beach. Thus are two of the prime national objectives, rigor and pleasure, compacted by the film’s director, Audrey Diwan, into a single scene. Sensing that warmth, and listening to Brigitte’s dreamy boast that “if I were a man, I’d make love to me,” one might think that we’re heading into traditional summertime territory—the kind staked out by Éric Rohmer’s “The Collector” (1971) and “Pauline at the…