Innholdsfortegnelse for September 12, 2022 i The New Yorker

The Icelandic musician Björk makes albums that are difficult to classify. Are they rock? Folk? Experimental pop? A dreamy mishmash of performance, visual, and outsider art? On the new podcast “Björk: Sonic Symbolism,” from Talkhouse and Mailchimp Presents, the woodland-fairy-voiced singer works through these questions. Each episode explores the creation of one album—beginning with her first, fittingly titled “Debut”—with Björk, in conversation with her friends the writer Oddný Eir and the musicologist Ásmundur Jónsson, serving as a whimsical guide through her musical mind. This is a rare chance to listen in as one of the most mysterious and mystical artists working today explains herself—but never so clearly as to totally unravel her own mythology. Björk keeps it weird; would you have it any other way?—Rachel Syme…

Put-in-Bay, a village on an island off the northern coast of Ohio, is sometimes called the Key West of the Midwest. In the winter, the population is roughly three hundred, nearly all white. In the summer, hundreds of thousands of tourists arrive by ferry or private plane to drink at the island’s fifty-two bars. Men celebrating bachelor parties go around in golf carts, carrying inflatable naked women. The police chief told me that he’s known as “the guy who pulls people over and deflates the blow-up dolls.” In July, 2020, Arica Waters, the only Black female cop on the island, was invited to a pool party. She was twenty-seven and had been hired five weeks before, as a seasonal employee without benefits. She was ebullient and quick to make friends.…

I was ten when my mother had to take me to the emergency room. I’d sort of skidded on our fire escape while I was recklessly dancing around on it, showing off for the kid in the apartment across the way. I’d done a bump-de-bump, and I was singing “whoopty-whoopty” and starting a foxy little move while waving the ends of my bathrobe sash when I slipped on the rusted flooring that was splashed with snow, and collapsed on its see-through slats in an unnatural crumple. The back yard was three floors below, too visible. I screamed when I tried to get up. I wanted my mother to hear me. She was watching TV, she thought I was asleep—how would she guess where I was? I knew I had done…

When I was a child, my grandmother and I played a game that involved walking around her neighborhood pretending to be aliens, from a planet called Algernon, trying to discern the nature of every object we saw. That garden hose? It was a snake that spewed poisonous tears from its rusty mouth. Those tree roots? They were the knobby fingers of a giant sleeping under the sidewalk. Nothing has brought back the thrill of these walks—the pleasures of excavating strangeness from banality—as sharply as reading the prose of Kathryn Scanlan, who describes a suburban home and its back-yard playhouse as “two of the same animal, large and small, grown and juvenile,” or an ordinary tart as a wild creature at rest: “The thing I’ve made is resting. It has a…

What makes a generation a generation? Collective identity is often forged through catastrophe. In the United States, we bicker over cohort-establishing events: an endless war, economic collapse, the onslaught of illness. “Katrina Babies,” a documentary by Edward Buckles, Jr., released on HBO Max before the seventeenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, argues for the ordination of the storm as a defining American tragedy. Buckles’s memory piece springs from a well of frustration. The director, a Katrina baby himself, and his subjects, other Black survivors of both the storm and the government’s opportunistic response to the storm, make anobservation that becomes something of a refrain: “Nobody ever asked the children how they were doing.” In the late summer of 2005, Buckles was thirteen years old. The director’s wistful narration captures the back-to-school…

SEEKING JUSTICE IN UKRAINE Masha Gessen’s grim account of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine makes plain the invaders’ brutal tactics (“The Law of War,” August 8th). More than two decades ago, I co-wrote a human-rights report on Russia’s atrocities in Chechnya—an early indication of Putin’s way of war. Gessen rightly asks whether punishments for such acts can ever fit the crimes, whether prosecutions can deter further atrocities, and whether victims can ever gain closure or adequate compensation. The piece suggests that quick prosecutions might bring about a more just end to the war in Ukraine. Yet there is another, equally profound, reason to pursue justice: doing so formally expresses to the world that such horrors cannot be inflicted with impunity. Leonard RubensteinProfessor of the PracticeBloomberg School of Public HealthJohns Hopkins…

15 REASONS TO REMAIN SILENT Because I have nothing to say.Because, though I’ve got plenty to say, you’re not paying attention.Because I’d rather listen to what you’re saying.So as not to talk to myself.So as not to talk to the wall.So as not to talk to the crack in the wall.So as not to waken the cricket who lives in the crack in the wall.Because they’ve sealed my lips with honey.Because I’m kissing you.Because I’m sulking.Because I’m sulking and I’m kissing you.Because I like to remain silent.Because our breath is speaking all on its own.Because I’m keeping a secret larger than words.Because my heart is in my mouth. 15 REASONS TO YELL Because you haven’t let out a yell in ages.To make sure all your vowels are still in their…

Elizabeth Finch, by Julian Barnes (Knopf). The title character of this cerebral novel is an enigmatic professor whose personal papers are inherited, after her death, by the narrator, Neil, her former student. The book begins with a finely drawn character study of Finch, a freethinker idolized by her students. Neil, overwhelmed by adoration, failed to turn in his final essay, a task to which he now applies himself. That essay, on Rome’s last pagan emperor, Julian, makes up a full third of the book. What would the world be like, it asks, if Julian had succeeded in halting the rise of Christianity? Barnes boldly resists providing answers, inviting the reader to ponder the ways in which history shapes our lives. Autoportrait, by Jesse Ball (Catapult). A novella-length unbroken paragraph of…

SEPTEMBER 7 – 13, 2022 New York’s roller discos may have dwindled since the Koch era, but this summer a sparkly throwback called the DiscOasis has materialized at Central Park’s Wollman Rink, complete with mirror balls and Donna Summer anthems. Lorded over by the disco-funk veteran Nile Rodgers, who curated the music, the roller rink welcomes both tentative date-nighters and seasoned skaters (such as Harry Gaskin, above), with interspersed dance routines by a cast of thirteen, through Oct. 2. Neon-bright attire encouraged. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. MUSIC Derrick Carter HOUSE Derrick Carter tends to give the side-eye to heavy pronunciamentos about his music, but there’s little question that his work as a producer and, especially, as a d.j. defines Chicago house. There’s a…

Rachel Bowman is a diver who specializes in the hunting, catching, and killing of lionfish, a species native to Indo-Pacific waters. Off the coast of Indonesia or Australia, an adult typically grows to about twelve inches; groupers, eels, and sharks are its natural predators, and in many countries divers cannot spear one without a permit. Lionfish have also long been popular in aquariums. Tens of thousands of American homes have them in saltwater tanks. Lionfish spend their days hovering in the water, which makes them particularly well suited to the job of being looked at. They are also striking, with shimmery white bodies overlaid with bold red or orange stripes, a Mohawk of spikes on their backs, and clashing patterns on their fins and faces. They look at once…

Roosevelt Dargon, how often I have thought of youand your leg. We were driving that last stretchof slow road home, in snow and ice, in the blueVista Cruiser—what was I, five?—when your bigrig crashed. We didn’t see it happen, but got thereright after, before the ambulance and cops, beforethe snarl of cars that would have kept us fromreaching you. I say us, but what I mean is my father,who told my brothers and me, Stay here, while my mothertoggled between static and Tommy Dorsey and he ranto the jackknifed cab and found you pinned in there,left leg mostly severed but tethered enough underthe crushed front dash to keep several bigger menfrom pulling you out. There was a lot of blood youwere losing, and the tumbled lumber and concreteblocks from the…

“Democracy is the worst form of government,” Churchill is said to have said, “except all those other forms that have been tried.” Actually, what he excepted was “all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” with that last phrase implying that democracy is the root form, and the others mere occasional experiments. It was an odd notion, but was perhaps called for by the times in which he was speaking, the mid-nineteen-forties, when a war was won for democracy at a nearly unbearable cost. The art historian Kenneth Clark recalled appearing in those years on a popular BBC radio quiz program, “The Brains Trust,” and fumbling a question on the best form of government. The “right” answer, given by all the other panelists, was “democracy,” but…