Innholdsfortegnelse for May 30, 2022 i The New Yorker

The Content Mines To place the blame for the state of the Internet on tech titans such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos is to imagine that the Internet is a more sensible place than it is. In fact, it’s a lunatic collaborative project, in no small part a function of the minds of the influencers, pop stars, crypto-utopians, rage grandpas, anime superfans, white nationalists, shitposters, and everyone else who shares the Web with you. Luckily, the journalists Ryan Broderick and Luke Bailey are able to find meaning amid the noise on their podcast about online culture, “The Content Mines.” Each episode drills down into a single topic, from COVID disinformation to the scam-happy world of N.F.T.s to social media’s role in the war in Ukraine. Broderick…

People think it’s easy to come up with torture ideas. I wish! You can spend hours walking along a tranquil beach, or sitting in a meadow full of butterflies, and not come up with a single torture idea. Sometimes a torture idea will come to you out of the blue. Your mother and stepfather might be visiting, and suddenly a great torture idea will occur to you. But most torture ideas come from just putting your nose to the grindstone—locking yourself in a small, dark room with a lamp shining in your face, staring down at a pen and a blank piece of paper, until the ideas are forced out of you. Eventually, whipping yourself, you become the proud author of hundreds of torture ideas—many with helpful illustrations. But here’s…

What was I thinking when I got into cars with boysI hardly knew and drove to houses out in the country,where my screams would be muffled by the oaks and pinesand the teeming carpet of mushrooms, too stupid to knowI wasn’t even close to being free, though I thought I was,but all that happened was we listened to “Blood on the Tracks”and tried to write down lyrics in the flittering of candles, andI was dropped off at my apartment all too aliveto the possibilities of mayhem. Where was I going when I walkeddown the streets in my armor of beauty and youth,lying in the sun, and thinking of Anaïs Nin in Paris, Rimbaudin Abyssinia, Kafka in Prague? How did I translatemy dreams into Italian? Not by planning, that’s for sure,because…

After finishing my degree I would have liked to have stayed on in London. Despite owing considerable arrears on my rent I somehow assumed that I could carry on living in my high-ceilinged bedsit near the common for as long as I liked. I’d done a lot of work in the garden, two gardens really—the landlords owned two semis at the top of a smart tree-lined avenue. The semis were next to each other, but separate, joined to other houses, though the gardens at the back were side by side with no boundary between them, so it was quite admissible to think of them as a single sprawling entity. Especially when you were down there, hauling cables of bindweed that began in one corner and tapered off many solid yards…

Dress Code, by Véronique Hyland (Harper). “Controlling what you wear is a proxy for controlling what you do,” Hyland writes in this examination not only of fashion but also of sartorial life more generally. Hyland finds meaning in what we wear, whether in the nineteenth-century vogue for bloomers or in courtroom attire, which is chosen to convey its wearer’s respectability. Indeed, even an anti-fashion impulse can yield fashionable results. Hyland shows how normcore, which “annihilated the idea of personal style and its emphasis on individuality,” arose as a street look just as online forums for self-expression, such as blogs and Instagram, were becoming coöpted by corporate sponsors. Journeys to Heaven and Hell, by Bart D. Ehrman (Yale). Ehrman follows up his masterly history of concepts of the afterlife with one about…

REMEMBERING BABYN YAR I always find Masha Gessen’s work thought-provoking, and their piece about Babyn Yar, where German soldiers massacred tens of thousands of Jews in 1941, is no exception (“The Memorial,” April 18th). I’m sure that many other people were first jolted, as I was, into an understanding of that atrocity by Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, from 1962. Subtitled “Babi Yar,” the composition opened with a movement set to Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s searing poem about the massacre. The symphony was greeted with alarm by Soviet authorities. Yevgeny Mravinsky, who had conducted many of Shostakovich’s premières, refused to conduct the Thirteenth; he was replaced by Kirill Kondrashin, who faced pressure to withdraw but resisted. Yevtushenko was compelled to alter his poem, replacing lines expressing solidarity with the murdered Jews with…

Let’s say that you suffer from arthritis, arteritis, bronchitis, bursitis, colitis, diverticulitis, endometriosis, laryngitis, osteoporosis, rhinitis, sinusitis, tendinitis, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Raynaud’s disease, multiple sclerosis, angina, asthma, sciatica, kidney stones, sore throat, dizziness, spasms, migraines, high blood pressure, heart palpitations, back pain, earaches, vaginal dryness, menstrual cramps, itching, bloating, swelling, constipation, gout, obesity, gum disease, dry mouth, psoriasis, acne, eczema, frostbite, hives, rosacea, scarring, stretch marks, or varicose veins, or that you are depressed, trying to quit smoking, or simply dealing with a lot of stress. You also, crucially, live in France. You go see the doctor. She writes you a prescription for a thermal cure, indicating to which of the country’s hundred and thirteen accredited thermal spas you will be sent. Then you fill out a simple form and…

At the beginning of 1996, Sara Nelson was twenty-two years old, living in St. Louis, and working as a waitress at a California Pizza Kitchen. A recent college graduate, she had a job lined up for the fall as a high-school English teacher, and in the meantime she was juggling three part-time gigs in addition to her restaurant job. Then, one day in February, she got a call from Chloe Caviness, her best friend from college. “Guess where I am,” Caviness said. “The beach in Miami!” After graduating, Caviness had started working as a flight attendant for United Airlines. Now, on the phone, she went on and on about the job’s perks, which included layovers in warm locales, and Nelson wondered if she ought to apply. She recalled thinking, “I’m…

My first bicycle was not, in fact, a bicycle. I rode it in 1968, when I was two years old and as tubby as a bear cub. It had four wheels, not two, and no pedals: strictly speaking, it was a scooter. But Playskool called it a Tyke Bike, so I say it qualifies, and aside from the matte-black, aluminum-alloy number that I’ve got now, which is called (by the manufacturer dead seriously, and by me aspirationally) the Bad Boy, the Tyke Bike may be the swankiest bicycle I’ve ever ridden. According to the box, Playskool’s scooter—red and blue and white, with a yellow, leopard-spotted wooden seat, chrome handlebars, and black, white-walled wheels—offered “smart high style” for the “preschool jet set,” as if a little girl in a diaper and…

Organized philanthropy, like most things, looks different on the inside than it does from the outside. “Philanthropy” comes from the Greek for “love of humanity,” and public perceptions of it have usually centered on donors and how humanity-loving they really are. The good guys are generous rich people who give to causes we all approve of, like combatting climate change; the bad guys give in order to launder their reputations (like the opioid-promoting Sackler family) or to advance unsavory goals (like the anti-environmentalist Kochs). Either way, the salient questions about philanthropy, for most people, have to do with the size and the quality of a donor’s heart and soul. In real life, the interaction between big-money philanthropy and philanthropy-reliant institutions like universities, charities, and museums is more of a business…

MAY 25 – 31, 2022 For its forty-fifth edition, BAM’s DanceAfrica festival (May 27-30) focusses on the theme of “homegrown,” showcasing some of the local companies and schools that keep African traditions alive in Brooklyn and the Bronx. These include the Bambara Drum and Dance Ensemble (pictured above); the LaRocque Bey School of Dance Theatre, founded in Harlem in 1960; and the festival’s own BAM/Restoration Dance Youth Ensemble, which has been stealing shows for twenty-five years. As New York City venues reopen, it’s advisable to confirm in advance the requirements for in-person attendance. DANCE New York City Ballet For his “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the choreographer George Balanchine decided to divide the evening into two parts. He put most of the story—about parallel amorous follies in the human and fairy realms—in…

I can’t tell youWhy I loved him orWhat it meant. When youAre a child, you know onlyThe kind of love your littleLife lacked, so everyBlooming flower is a field. What I knowIs that there were two skiesAnd under one, I was a shadow. HisSky was as blue as his eyes. SomeOf that is my doing and the rest of itIs time. These days, he traces the shape ofThe curds above him and I lay out underA separate sun. Both of us are fineWith this. We picked our placeUnder the lid of god and we shutOur eyes to it every night. That’s what it meansTo have loved goodly—to meetFate in a lavender hall and walkRight past it, the white train quivering,Nostalgia in your wake.…

Rhyme thrives at both poles of literature. It is the material of a greeting card—“Roses are red/Violets are blue/Sugar is sweet/And so are you”—and the high-tragic language of Racine. Rhyme turns language into ritual, and rituals tend to be either levelling and egalitarian, bringing different kinds together to be brethren, as in churches, or exclusive and exalting, advancing a narrow set to elect status, as in clubs. Rhyme does both. In Shakespeare, it can offer the primitive force of incantation, as when the witches ask, “When shall we three meet again/In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” And it can also offer the lulling reassurance of stylized speech, as when Juliet tells Romeo, “Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow/That I shall say good night till it be morrow.”…

In 2011, Daniel Ward, a lawyer at a small firm in Washington, D.C., brought a lawsuit against Cisco Systems, the mammoth technology company, on behalf of thirteen Chinese dissidents. The suit alleged that Cisco had helped the Chinese Communist Party to stifle free speech and suppress dissent by designing and implementing the Golden Shield Project, a digital security system that allowed the C.C.P. to surveil Chinese citizens’ activity on the Internet. The plaintiffs said that they had been imprisoned and tortured in retaliation for online articles that could be traced to them in part because of the Golden Shield. Had Cisco executives known the harm that their work would cause? Ward believed so. He pointed to a leaked slide from an internal Cisco presentation which listed some of the project’s…