Innholdsfortegnelse for August 15, 2022 i The New Yorker

Five years ago, the sly, spectacular musical “KPOP” transformed two floors of a building in Hell’s Kitchen into a fictitious Korean hit factory. Audience members, divided into groups, shuffed through various rooms, following stars in the making through choreography sessions and plastic-surgery consultations, all culminating in a full-on concert. The show was a flashy, immersive hit, but how could it translate to Broadway? We’ll find out this fall, when it opens at the Circle in the Square (beginning previews Oct. 13), starring the real-life K-pop singer Luna. The show joins a busy Broadway season, including a revival of “1776,” the Nixon-era musical that follows John Adams as he corrals his fellow Founding Fathers into signing the Declaration of Independence. Taking a cue from “Hamilton,” Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus’s…

Historical events figure prominently in this season’s releases, including “Moonage Daydream” (Sept. 16), a documentary portrait of David Bowie, centered on his audiovisual archive, directed by Brett Morgen. Phyllis Nagy directed “Call Jane” (Oct. 14), a drama based on the real-life Jane Collective, a Chicago group that provided abortions at a time when the procedure was illegal. The story, set in 1968, follows a housewife (Elizabeth Banks) who, after having an abortion, joins the group. “Till” (Oct. 14), directed by Chinonye Chukwu, dramatizes the effort of Emmett Till’s mother, MamieTill-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler), to seek justice for her son’s lynching and to publicize the facts of his murder. Family stories are being told with a wide variety of approaches, starting with “The Cathedral” (Sept. 2), the daringly original second feature by…

Make of it what you will, but the sharks appear to be coming for us: a foot laceration at Jones Beach, a punctured calf off Fire Island, a bloody chest at Smith Point. Four attacks in Suffolk County alone. They were soon followed by the washing ashore of a great white in Quogue, baring teeth that looked hungry for elbows and knees. New Jersey is more often spared these visitations, although a twelve-footer swam laps around a fishing boat in June, near Townsends Inlet. And then, in neighboring Avalon, there was the recent case of the shark that showed up in Erin Doyle’s swimming pool. Doyle, a television producer, was Zooming on her phone, with colleagues, from the back porch of her beach house, when something dark and “baguette-sized” caught…

In the summer of 1943, the playwright and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson received word that Ernst Lubitsch, the Berlin-born director of such incandescent Hollywood comedies as “Trouble in Paradise,” “The Shop Around the Corner,” and “Heaven Can Wait,” had suffered a fatal heart attack. Raphaelson, who had written scripts for those films and for many others, set about composing a tribute to Lubitsch, extolling him in terms that few other directors of the era elicited: “However great the cinema historians will eventually estimate him, he was bigger as a person. He was genuinely modest. He never sought fame or coveted prizes…. He was as free from guile and pretense as children are supposed to be, and this made him endlessly various and charming.” Lubitsch had not died, it turned out,…

The philosopher William MacAskill credits his personal transfiguration to an undergraduate seminar at Cambridge. Before this shift, MacAskill liked to drink too many pints of beer and frolic about in the nude, climbing pitched roofs by night for the life-affirming flush; he was the saxophonist in a campus funk band that played the May Balls, and was known as a hopeless romantic. But at eighteen, when he was first exposed to “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” a 1972 essay by the radical utilitarian Peter Singer, MacAskill felt a slight click as he was shunted onto a track of rigorous and uncompromising moralism. Singer, prompted by widespread and eradicable hunger in what’s now Bangladesh, proposed a simple thought experiment: if you stroll by a child drowning in a shallow pond, presumably you…

The stakes could not be higher for Beyoncé—an artist who has challenged herself at every turn—to do more, to be more, to say more. She has, throughout her solo career, rewritten the rules of album releases, of stage performance, of music videos, of Black representation, of cultural legacy, and of self-expression. The final frontier of innovation, the only thing left for her to achieve, is to walk away from it all. And that’s what she’s trying to do these days—sort of. “I just quit my job,” she announces on “Break My Soul,” a clubby and joyous house track, on her new album, “Renaissance.” “I’m looking for new motivation.” It’s been six years since Beyoncé released “Lemonade,” an album (and film) on which she laid bare her marital strife, and subsequent…

The opening gambit of “The Rehearsal,” on HBO, is deceptively simple. “I’ve been told that my personality can make people uncomfortable,” the show’s creator and host, Nathan Fielder, explains, in a voice-over, as he enters the apartment of a middle-aged man named Kor. “Shoes off? … Shirt off?” Fielder cracks to Kor, adding, in his narration, that, when meeting someone for the first time, “every joke is a gamble.” Luckily, there’s a solution to this uncertainty: Fielder has found that rehearsing uncomfortable life events before they take place can produce a “happy outcome.” We then watch him, in a flashback, prepare for his meeting withKor, using a full-scale model of the man’s apartment—the details of which were underhandedly obtained by actors posing as technicians sent to investigate a fake gas…

SAVING OUR SWAMPS Annie Proulx’s inspiring article about the importance of preserving our swampland reminded me of a time, in the early nineteen-sixties, when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, seeking to relocate and expand Newark Airport, decided to put a new complex in the Great Swamp, a twelve-square-mile wetland (“Swamped,” July 4th). It seemed like a done deal until a local resident, Helen Fenske, began promoting the swamp as an invaluable habitat for wildlife and migrating birds, and warned that an airport on the site would threaten the area’s water sources. My family and I lived near the swamp then. We wondered what, besides mosquitoes and the odd turtle, could possibly want to live in that bog. But we certainly didn’t want an airport in our…

The stars are ageless. So says Norma Desmond, the forgotten silentmovie queen at the center of “Sunset Boulevard.” Desmond is written as an inconceivably ancient fifty—the age of Gloria Swanson, the actress who played her. Swanson died in the early eighties, shortly after her co-star, William Holden. Nancy Livingston, then an ingenue named Nancy Olson, who portrayed a novice screenwriter and Holden’s love interest, is the last surviving member of the cast. Livingston is ninety-four, and lives just north of Sunset, in a one-story L-shaped house graciously appointed with animal-print velvet, much like the interior of Norma Desmond’s Isotta Fraschini. She has coiffed mediumblond hair, high Scandinavian cheekbones, and a trim figure. “I’m the same weight I was in college, that’s not an issue,” she remarked breezily on a recent…

As the Supreme Court anticipated when it overturned Roe v. Wade, the battle over abortion rights is now being waged state by state. Nowhere is the fight more intense than in Ohio, which has long been considered a national bellwether. The state helped secure the Presidential victories of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, then went for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Its residents tend to be politically moderate, and polls consistently show that a majority of Ohio voters support legal access to abortion, particularly for victims of rape and incest. Yet, as the recent ordeal of a pregnant ten-year-old rape victim has illustrated, Ohio’s state legislature has become radically out of synch with its constituents. In June, the state’s GeneralAssembly instituted an abortion ban so extreme that the…

Shura was trying to reach Alyona and Oleg, first over Skype and WhatsApp, then Facebook, on which Alyona kept an account she barely used. It should not have been so hard to get hold of them. Alyona had not posted recently, but she’d checked her messages, Shura could see that. Maybe she thought Shura was being dramatic—hadn’t she always thought so? With her digital silence, Alyona was making a big show of her own calm, doubling down on her refusal to treat anything as a catastrophe. Well, goody for her, Shura thought, and shut her laptop. If Alyona wasn’t panicked, why should she be? It was day three and there were still no Russian boots in central Kyiv. There was the battle at the Hostomel airport, and a rocket had…

The Negro, historically, has always been in the espionage business. Subalterns survive by being watchful, warily gathering intelligence about those for whom they labor. The flight from servitude, even from an identity, involves spycraft, too. Harriet Tubman was called Moses for a liberator who slipped the confines of caste when his mother placed him undercover among the reeds in that pitch-daubed basket. Brown skin could be cloaked in soot and stereotype or in learned airs. George Harris, one of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s high-yellow fugitives, attained an inscrutable foreign ness with the assistance of walnut bark: “A slight change in the tint of the skin and the color of his hair had metamorphosed him into the Spanish-looking fellow he then appeared; and as gracefulness of movement and gentlemanly manners had always…

The Brooklyn-based sculptor and L.G.B.T.Q. activist Leilah Babirye, who was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1985, was granted asylum in the U.S. in 2018, after being outed by her country’s notoriously homophobic press. Through Nov. 27, “Agali Awamu (Togetherness),” a towering ensemble of wooden figures (pictured above), which Babirye carved with a chisel and a chainsaw, is on view in Brooklyn Bridge Park as part of “Black Atlantic,” a group exhibition from the Public Art Fund reflecting on themes of the African diaspora. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. THE THEATRE The Butcher Boy “What’s so great about being a grownup anyway?” Francie Brady (Nicholas Barasch), whose tale will never be mistaken for Peter Pan’s, sings. This new musical—based on Patrick McCabe’s 1992 novel and…

The fall television season kicks off with duelling fantasy spinoffs, milking some of the most valuable fire-breathing franchises in Hollywood. On Aug. 21, HBO releases a “Game of Thrones” prequel, “House of the Dragon,” which follows the ice-blond Targaryen clan as it attempts to tame scaly beasts some two hundred years before the start of the original series. Then, on Sept. 2, Amazon Prime Video débuts a big-budget “Lord of the Rings” prequel, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” following the rise of the nefarious wizard Sauron. Which will be the one binge to rule them all? Only time—and Nielsen ratings—will tell. In general, this season of television is all about rebooting, remixing, or resuscitating existing intellectual property—so much so that you might wonder if anything is…

Your last roommate left hair everywhere, but James Taylor leaves guitar picks. James Taylor is always saying he’s your handyman, but when you ask if he’ll unclog the toilet he says he can only fix broken hearts. When you confront him about his late rent check, he insists that his manager was supposed to send it. Deep greens and blues are not the colors you choose, but he’s painted your entire apartment in a mind-bending swirl of them anyway. You wanted to decorate the mantel with tasteful dried flowers and candles, but James insists that’s where all six of his Grammys go. He’s always bragging about his Starbucks CD and asking if you’ve ever released something that can be purchased with your morning Frappuccino. When you tell him that no…

She’s a clever dog, but she can’t understandthat the leash—a fifty footer I stakedout back so she can explore our patch of land—is tangling, trailing her like a wakeor like a crayon’s line looping througha placemat maze. She ambles a few feetto sniff a clump of leaves, slaloms between twopoles beneath the deck, then visits the slab of concretewhere I sit at the pandemic picnic table writing.Then she doubles back to find a place to pee.The leash has been recordingher every turn, and her territory,which was the whole wide yard, is diminishing.Bewildered, suddenly stuck, she’s me.…

Hawks, rivers, cities, ochre, us. A species whose right hand sketches its left handbut can’t draw itself. Whales.Geosynchronous satellites.A truck hauling folded tarps under a tarp. Wars, hunger, jail cells, praises, pratfalls, puns,gold circuits on phone-card connectors—all cargo, manifest,circling the sun togethereach three hundred and sixty-five daysplus a few remnant hours. A story here ribboned with lightning,there dimmed by clouds,on a nitrogen-, oxygen-,carbon-dioxide-, and dust-cushioned bundle,whose glaciers depart, insects quiet, seas rise. To that which is coming, I say,Here, take what is yours. But forget, if you can, what-is-coming,find not worth pocketing,let fall unnoticed as weed seed,one small handful of moments and gestures. Moments mouse-colored, minor.Gestures disturbing no one,slipped between the ones that were counted,the ones in which everything happened. A petroglyph’s single fingerprint. A spider awake in an undusted…

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin (Knopf). Having met as children, playing Super Mario Bros. in a hospital, Sam and Sadie, whose relationship forms the core of this novel, become reacquainted in college. There they develop a video game, featuring a child who “ages and takes the damage inflicted by the narrative and time itself,” which makes them famous and rich. Their friendship lasts for almost twenty years but frays amid fights and a shocking tragedy. Woven throughout are meditations on originality, appropriation, the similarities between video games and other forms of art, the liberating possibilities of inhabiting a virtual world, and the ways in which platonic love can be deeper and more rewarding—especially in the context of a creative partnership—than romance. Hurricane Girl, by Marcy Dermansky (Knopf). Allison,…