Innholdsfortegnelse for July 25, 2022 i The New Yorker

As in politics, a few famous families dominate pickleball, the fastest-growing sport in America. One is the Johnsons, of Florida. In January, on a breezy afternoon in Boca Raton, J. W. Johnson, a strapping nineteen-year-old with short brown bangs and a leather necklace, took to the court for a semifinal match at a tournament. Johnson is taciturn, with an often impenetrable expression. He was seeded second in the tournament; his opponent, Zane Navratil, a twenty-six-year-old former C.P.A. from Wisconsin, was seeded first. Pickleball, a tennis-like sport played on a smaller court, places a gentle strain on the body, and both men had the oxygenated flush of a long day of exercise. They began by dinking—softly bouncing the ball back and forth—before Navratil, with gazelle-like grace, executed two snazzy moves…

In the Victorian era, it was said that the length of a man’s boat, in feet, should match his age, in years. The Victorians would have had some questions at the fortieth annual Palm Beach International Boat Show, which convened this March on Florida’s Gold Coast. A typical offering: a two-hundred-and-three-foot superyacht named Sea Owl, selling secondhand for ninety million dollars. The owner, Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund tycoon and Republican donor, was throwing in furniture and accessories, including several auxiliary boats, a Steinway piano, a variety of frescoes, and a security system that requires fingerprint recognition. Nevertheless, Mercer’s package was a modest one; the largest superyachts are more than five hundred feet, on a scale with naval destroyers, and cost six or seven times what he was asking. For the…

In a cosmic mixup,the wife switches bodies with her husband.Nothing like this has happened before, she criesas she pulls on his pants, minds the crotch,barrels down the long staircase to an office where they call herBud & How About Those Steelers.It’s upsetting, the whole charade,except at lunch when she orders fries and no one says,We’re so bad,or at the meeting when she gives the room all her best ideasand they say, Man, where have you been? We have to fix this, her husband begswhen the wife returns for dinner.Come here, she says, slipping off her shoesand drawing the curtainsbefore she makes love to another life.…

Nightcrawling, by Leila Mottley (Knopf). Kiara, the narrator of this searing novel, is a seventeen-year-old high-school dropout in East Oakland, California, who has to take care of the boys in her life—an immature older brother, an addict-neighbor’s young son—despite not having anyone to take care of her. After a man forces himself on her, she reasons that her body will be used with or without her consent and turns to sex work. Her johns range from men as destitute as she is to the local police. Careful not to portray Kiara as a victim, Mottley shows us the pleasures of family, friendship, and love. The result is an intimate portrait of a young Black woman searching for autonomy and fulfillment in a society designed to deny her both. One’s Company,…

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” How do you translate this, the first line of the Bible’s Song of Songs—or the rest of this ancient collection of erotic poems—into a dance? And how do you do it in pure dance, without kissing or acting? This is the task that the choreographer Pam Tanowitz has set herself in her new work, “Song of Songs,” which recently premièred at Bard’s Fisher Center. The poems, with their sensual exchanges between lovers, famously make no mention of God, and have attracted centuries of commentary—Jewish, Christian, allegorical, feminist. But what about viewing the poems through dance; that is, through the body, which is, after all, their subject? For Tanowitz, who is Jewish, making “Song of Songs” was deeply personal. She began…

CONSIDERING PINOCCHIO I enjoyed Joan Acocella’s piece on the many lives of Carlo Collodi’s character Pinocchio (Books, June 13th). Yet I must quibble with the notion, perhaps suggested by comparisons made in the introduction to the new translation of “The Adventures of Pinocchio,” that both Collodi’s book and Miguel de Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” are picaresques. As Acocella notes, these two books are often slotted together because they go “from episode to episode.” But the picaresque novel, as Cervantes would have understood it, is characterized by the first-person narration of a poor individual—the picaro—who relates his own misadventures and misdeeds. Picaresque works have a retrospective episodic structure that justifies the protagonist’s dishonorable actions. Though “Don Quixote” possesses some of these elements, it’s an oversimplification—unfortunately common in the Anglophone academy—to categorize it…

The sunset earlier, the sky spookyas the nineteenth century, skeletal trees,a brief orange glow before the bluesand grays darken in a landscape that lastsfor an hour before the shapes dissolveinto the dark of All Hallows’, a nightas sacred as would scare us, the guiltless ones,who maintain our belief in metaphysics,which French philosophes declared deadin 1970 or so. As the last branchesdisappear into the heavenly darkness,what remains is what resists and whatclings to the oblivion of a fallen worldthat exists in memory only, and poetry.…

Is the boy in the window attempting telepathy with Shara? If not, why won’t he look away? His head is three floors up, a postcard. But he’s found the sun. Solo, while the other windows on all sides of him feature multiple scowlers, some holding out their cell phones to record. As above, so below: Shara, on the sidewalk, stands amid scowlers, too. Ranters and chanters. Giving everything they have to this mass protest. On one side of her is her mother, and on the other her seven-year-old sister, Rosie. Shara and her sister are their mother’s hostages. At least her sister is too young to be entrusted with a placard. There is no such exemption for Shara. The sign her mother carries is in Mandarin. She doesn’t understand or…

It wasn’t until my mid-forties that I began to write about the world of medicine. Before that, I was busy building a career as a hematologist-oncologist: caring for patients with blood diseases, cancer, and, later, AIDS; establishing a research laboratory; publishing papers; training junior physicians. A doctor’s workload tends to crowd out everything but the most immediate concerns. But, as the years pass, the things you’ve pushed to the back of your mind start to pile up, demanding to be addressed. For two decades, I had seen my patients and their loved ones face some of life’s most uncertain moments, and I now felt driven to bear witness to their stories. After writing and revising three chapters of what I envisioned as my first book, I showed a draft…

JULY 20 – 26, 2022 Since the late eighties—long before the invention of Twitter—the American artist Barbara Kruger has been using mass media’s aphoristic language and provocative tone to address such charged subjects as abortion rights (“Your Body Is a Battleground,” 1989) and craven consumerism (“I Shop Therefore I Am,” 1987). Through Jan. 2, Kruger fills moma’s soaring atrium with her latest trenchant critique, pictured above during its installation process: the site-specific “Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.” As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. MUSIC Berkshire Opera Festival OPERA In 2021, Berkshire Opera Festival supplemented its usual choice of a work from the canon with a contemporary chamber opera. The 2022 lineup follows that structure, opening with Jake Heggie’s “Three Decembers,” a…

It’s been a rough few years for the supply chain. Last spring, as the world watched, a huge container ship loaded with bicycles, dildos, and IKEA furniture blocked the Suez Canal for six days. In February, a cargo vessel carrying four hundred million dollars’ worth of Audis, Porsches, Bentleys, Lamborghinis, and Volkswagens caught fire and sank in the North Atlantic. Ports are crowded, consumers are cranky, and the glaciers are still melting. But maybe the tides are turning. Not too long ago, Olivier and Jacques Barreau, twin brothers from France, who had no experience with export or with wine, founded a company that ships biodynamic wines across the Atlantic. Their aim: ninety-nine-percent-carbon-neutral shipping. (The global shipping industry creates almost as much CO2 as the entire continent of South America does.)…

In 1979, an Oklahoma woman named Johnnie Mae Austin stopped getting mail from the Muscogee Nation. There were no more announcements of meetings, notices of elections, or news of monetary settlements. The problem wasn’t postal. Austin’s Muscogee citizenship had been erased by a new Muscogee constitution in which citizenship was defined “by blood,” words that named a fraught crossroads in Native and African American histories. The Muscogee people, also referred to as Creeks, were among the tribes that once enslaved people of African descent and that were required, in the wake of the Civil War, to accept them as tribal citizens. A tribal-enrollment census around the start of the twentieth century split the Muscogee citizenry into groups that were separate but by no means equal. One roll—the “by blood” roster—listed…

“Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott,” a clamorous retrospective at the New Museum, bodes to be enjoyed by practically everyone who sees it, though some may be nagged by inklings that they shouldn’t. For more than three decades, until he was slowed by health ailments in the two-thousands—he died in 2009, at the age of eighty-three—the impetuous figurative painter danced across minefields of racial and sexual provocation, celebrating libertine romance and cannibalizing canonical art history by way of appreciative parody. He was born in California, the son of musicians from New Orleans. His mother, certainly, and possibly his father, who worked as a railroad waiter, had enslaved ancestors, but both of them—and Colescott—could pass for white. As Matthew Weseley, the cocurator of the show with Lowery…