Innholdsfortegnelse for August 29, 2022 i The New Yorker

The New Negro is an inventive amalgamation of past and future trends that are indigenous to black American style. Generally, the New Negro—who is “new” every decade or so—is female, a woman who considers her marginal status a form of freedom and a challenge: she takes the little she has been given and transforms it into something complex, outrageous, and, ultimately, fashionable. She is outrageous because no one cares what she does—until, that is, she begins to make money. Missy (Misdemeanor) Elliott, the twenty-five-year-old hip-;hop performer who is energetically redefining the boundaries of rap music, is a singer, a songwriter, an arranger, a producer, and a talent scout. Six months ago, few people outside the music industry had heard of her; six months from now, it will be necessary to…

None of this would have happened if I had not noticed, while lying late in bed on a hot Sunday morning last year in Santa Monica and flipping through the TV guide for the impending week, that one of the local public-broadcasting channels had decided to show, at 1 P.M. that very January day, a film on which my fantasies had fed ever since I first saw it, a quarter of a century before. Even for Channel 28, it was an eccentric piece of programming. I wondered how many of my Southern Californian neighbors would be tempted to forgo their poolside champagne brunches, their bicycle jaunts along Ocean Front Walk, their health-food picnics in Topanga Canyon, or their surfboard battles with the breakers of Malibu in order to watch a…

Twice I have sat next to a famous man on an airplane. The first man was Jason Kidd, of the New Jersey Nets. I asked him why he didn’t fly first class, and he said that it was because his cousin worked for United. “Wouldn’t that be all the more reason to get first class?” “It’s cool,” he said, unfurling his legs into the aisle. I let it go, because what do I know about the ins and outs of being a sports celebrity? We didn’t talk for the rest of the flight. I can’t say the name of the second famous person, but I will tell you that he is a Hollywood heartthrob who is married to a starlet. Also, he has the letter “V” in his first name.…

At the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, bird-watchers should prepare to be house-hunters, too: the garden-wide installation “For the Birds,” on view until Oct. 23, features site-specific birdhouses made by thirty-three artists. The Indian-born, New York-based designer Sourabh Gupta fashioned the cloudlike “Woven” (pictured) from burlap, husk, plaster, and water-based sealer, in the hope that a quarrel of sparrows might take up residence. On Aug. 27, Martha Harbison, of the Feminist Bird Club, leads a guided tour. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. ART Alex Bradley Cohen Conversation, often held over coffee, is a favorite subject of this Chicago painter, whose small canvases—quiet but for their blaring color—are windows onto private moments shared in public spaces. Cohen’s everyday scenes assume an eventful, even mythic quality thanks to…

This past summer, I booked a plane ticket to Los Angeles with the hope of investigating what seems likely to be one of the oddest legacies of our rapidly expiring decade: the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face. It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a private-jet ride to Coachella. The face is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic—it suggests a National Geographic composite illustrating what Americans will look like in 2050, if every American of the future were to be…

Three weeks ago I went backto the same street corner where27 years ago I took a bus for Akron,Ohio, but now there was only a blank spacewith a few concrete building blocksscattered among the beer cansand broken bottles and a view ofthe blank backside of an abandoned hotel.I wondered if Akron was still down therehidden hundreds of miles south amongthe small, shoddy trees of Ohio,a town so ripe with the smellof defeat that its citizens liedabout their age, their height, sex,income, and previous conditionof anything. I spent all of a Saturdaythere, disguised in a cashmere suitstolen from a man twenty poundsheavier than I, and I never unbuttonedthe jacket. I remember someonemarried someone, but only the bride’sfather and mother went outon the linoleum dance floor and leanedinto each other like whipped…

Word of the car crash reached Balmoral Castle, in Scotland, at one o’clock in the morning of August 31, 1997. Word of the death came through at four. Prince Charles was in residence, with his sons; the Queen advised him not to wake them (they would need all their strength), adding, “We must get the radios out of their rooms.” Charles broke the news just after seven. Prince Harry, then twelve, couldn’t quite take it in. Was everyone sure? he asked; would somebody check? The boys were asked if they would like to accompany the family to church. (It was Sunday.) Prince William, then fifteen, wanted to attend—so he could “talk to Mummy.” “The world’s going to go completely mad,” Charles said, presciently, when he heard. By the following Thursday,…

One of our men, who used to admire Edith Piaf, the tiny French singer, in Paris in 1939, was afraid that she might have brightened up her repertory for her engagement at the Playhouse here, on the theory that Americans demand optimism. He was so concerned that he went over to the Hotel Ambassador to see her before he took a chance on going to the show to hear her—said he wanted to remember her in all her pristine gloom, and not be disillusioned. In Paris, he said, she used to stand up straight and plain in front of a night-club audience—no makeup, a drab dress—and delight it with a long series of songs ending in a drowning, an arrest, an assassination, or death on a pallet. At the finish…

late, in aqua and ermine, gardeniasscaling her left sleeve in a spasm of scent,her gloves white, her smile chastened, purse giddywith stars and rhinestones clipped to her brilliantined hair,on her free arm that fine NegroMr. Wonderful Smith. It’s the day that isn’t, February 29th,at the end of the shortest month of the year—and the shittiest, too, everywhereexcept Hollywood, California,where the maid can wear mink and still be a maid,bobbing her bandaged head and cursingthe white folks under her breath as she smilesand shoos their silly daughtersin from the night dew… What can she bethinking of, striding into the ballroomwhere no black face has ever showed itselfexcept above a serving tray? Hi-Hat Hattie, Mama Mac, Her Haughtiness,the “little lady” from Showboat whose nameBing forgot, Beulah & Bertha & Malena& Carrie &…

The word “folk” in the term “folk music” used to connote a rural homogeneous community that carried on a tradition of anonymously created music. No one person composed a piece; it evolved through generations of communal care. In recent years, however, folk music has increasingly become the quite personal—and copyrighted—product of specific creators. More and more of them, in fact, are neither rural nor representative of centuries-old family and regional traditions. They are often city-bred converts to the folk style; and, after an apprenticeship during which they try to imitate rural models from the older approach to folk music, they write and perform their own songs out of their own concerns and preoccupations. The restless young, who have been the primary support of the rise of this kind of folk…

We have already, I think, exhausted the subject of Kim Kardashian West’s birthday bash earlier this year. But allow me a brief recap: “40 and feeling so humbled and blessed,” she wrote on October 27th, six days after her special day, captioning a series of Instagram photos showing the Kardashians and company bronzed and professionally lit at an indistinct, beachy location that one might have assumed was Malibu. It was not Malibu. “After 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time,” themessage continued. “I realize that for most people, this is something that is so far out of reach right…