Innholdsfortegnelse for September 26, 2022 i The New Yorker

In 2015, Don Fleming and Jason Stern were in the West Village, at Sister Ray Enterprises, the office of the late Lou Reed, when they made a startling discovery. Fleming, a musician and an archivist, and Stern, who had worked for Reed, had been hired by Reed’s widow, the avant-garde musician and artist Laurie Anderson, to catalogue Reed’s archive, which she later donated to the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts. On a shelf behind Reed’s desk, amid Velvet Underground-related books and music, Fleming spotted what resembled a CD box. “I picked it up and said, ‘Oh, my God, this isn’t a CD,’” he said. It was a notarized, self-addressed package, to and from Lewis Reed at his parents’ address on Long Island; it appeared to contain a…

Shane Gillis has noticed that when he tells people his father watches Fox News they sometimes do something rude: they boo. Gillis is a standup comic, which means that he spends a lot of time at clubs in big cities, where he can seem a bit out of place. He is six-three and beefy, with a round head and small eyes that, he says, combine to make him look like Mimsy, a minor character from “South Park” who is too dull-witted to effectively throw his weight around. Gillis grew up playing football in Mechanicsburg, in central Pennsylvania, and he brings to the stage not just a lineman’s body and a coach’s mustache but a faint Pennsylvania accent, which he sometimes exaggerates for effect, and a much stronger Pennsylvania attitude, which…

In the spring of 1997, an art collector in Geneva received a call from a contact at the city’s office of bank-ruptcies and legal proceedings. There was an auction coming up, of an estate that had gone unclaimed for nine years, and among the lots was a painting that the collector might want to take a look at: a canvas attributed to the British artist Lucian Freud. The collector was a businessman, originally from North Africa, who was used to picking up furniture and art works at competitive prices from Geneva’s plentiful array of galleries, antique dealers, and salesrooms. He is keen to preserve his privacy, so I will call him Omar. Omar went to see the painting that day, at the auction house in Carouge, a suburb to the…

A head of its release, Olivia Wilde’s “Don’t Worry Darling” has worked a multitude of observers into an enjoyable lather—not just online but also, more heatedly still, in the flesh. I am thinking of the fans who camped out at the Venice Film Festival before the movie’s red-carpet première, on September 5th. There they crouched beneath umbrellas, shielded against the pitiless noontide glare, for a ghost of a chance of a glimpse of Harry Styles, who acts, in the most elastic sense of that word, in the new film. As for the reputed feud between Wilde and Styles’s co-star, Florence Pugh, it is widely and maturely decreed to be insoluble. Tensions are lower in the Taiwan Strait. And what of the poor movie, lost in the fury and the froth?…

One day a few years ago, an Englishman walked into a tourist shop on the ground floor of a Neapolitan palazzo and told a woman he encountered there that he was searching for the soul of Naples. The building, named Palazzo del Panormita, for an obscure fifteenth-century author of erotic Latin epigrams, stands near a small piazza named for the River Nile, recalling the Egyptian traders who once lived in a mini-quarter within the city center’s ancient Greek grid. (There was a Greek settlement there before the Parthenon was built.) Today, that gridruns into a thoroughfare cut by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, when the Kingdom of Naples was under their imperial control. Named Via Toledo by the Spanish, the street became Via Roma three centuries later, when Naples,…

Early in “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” a new play by Clark Young and Derek Goldman, the lights go low, shrouding the stage in black, and a video starts. It’s an intense, moving clip of the real Karski—a heroic Polish diplomat who served as a dogged messenger to the outside world during the Holocaust, sharing his eye-witness accounts of the grotesque German occupation. Karski is a serious-looking man with flushed cheeks and tailored clothes. He tries to speak but, quickly losing his composure, begins to weep. The video—taken from Claude Lanzmann’s documentary “Shoah”—is a compressed statement of the play’sthemes: here’s a man trying to speak the unspeakable, seeking and failing to corral language for ungraspable horrors. Once the video stops—it’s the show’s only detour into multimedia—David Strathairn, who…

GREATER GOOD Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s article about William MacAskill, one of the key figures in the effective-altruism (E.A.) movement, inspired me to learn more about E.A. (“Do Better,” August 15th). It’s hard not to admire these young people and their desire to do good. Yet, the more I read about E.A., the more I wondered why its proponents focus almost exclusively on the developing world and the future, generally ignoring problems closer to home. They don’t seem especially concerned about the hundreds of thousands of unhoused people living in American cities where the tech industry has played a role in driving up the cost of housing—even though rich, tech-adjacent people seem to dominate the E.A. movement. They don’t appear to talk much about gun violence or income inequality. Is this because—as…

The peach wasapricot in color— the fibre wetbeneath its skin, which held it in.I consumed the juicy flesh,sweet meat meant to nourish the pitsurrounding it. A miniature sunset:burnished hazy red, within its bleedinghues, there lodged the stone, undulatedas a brain, dormant yet alive. Reposedwithin orange-and-apricot, its seed within that stone—harboring cyanide, just enough to keep the deer at bay—it could have procreated, this pit-then-seed. And partis now a part of me.…

Mayor of New York City is famously a dead-end job. The last New York mayor to win higher office was John T. Hoffman, and that was in 1868. He became governor. Every mayor since then has found the way up barred. And, for some, the way up turned into the way down. The mayors are often a little surprised by this reversal of fortune. The assumption seems to be: If I can govern there, I can govern anywhere. This may or may not be true. What is true is that New York City’s mayors have had a hard time getting non-New Yorkers to vote for them. After all, you’re not likely to be elected President of the United States by promising to make the country more like New York. You…

Telluria, by Vladimir Sorokin, translated from the Russian by Max Lawton (New York Review Books). Taking place in 2026, this kaleidoscopic romp of a novel by one of Russia’s leading dissident writers features robots, dog-men who accuse one another of being “neo-Hegelian,” and an autonomous phallus that wonders “Am I depressed? Maybe.” The plot, such as it is, concerns the recreational use of a drug called tellurium. Although moments hint at critiques of both Stalinism and Putin (“Collective life is hell. But loneliness isn’t heaven either”), it is the novel’s form, its restless joy and protean pastiche, that opposes authoritarianism’s homogenizing squeeze most forcefully. “Everyone chooses what to overcome,” Sorokin writes. “And they make that choice themselves!” Sojourn, by Amit Chaudhuri (New York Review Books). The narrator of this elliptical…

SEPTEMBER 21 – 27, 2022 “The Piano Lesson,” the fourth installment in August Wilson’s ten-play cycle chronicling twentieth-century African American life, reckons with the burdens of history. The Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, set in Depression-era Pittsburgh, follows a family tussling over an heirloom: a piano carved with the faces of enslaved ancestors. LaTanya Richardson Jackson’s revival, at the St. James, stars John David Washington, Danielle Brooks, and Samuel L. Jackson (the latter two pictured above); Jackson appeared in the première, in 1987. MUSIC Ezra Furman ROCK During the past decade, Ezra Furman has released six full-length solo albums and one book: an entry in the 33 ⅓ monograph series which explores Lou Reed’s glam-pop classic “Transformer.” No doubt Furman, who calls herself a “desperately fascinated” fan of the late proto-punk icon, has…

On the plane from Houston to Fort Worth, 21F turned out to be a window seat. Jacob shrugged out of his backpack and swung it down the row. He wasn’t stoned, but he had been stoned recently and still had the residual exhausted dissociated calm of someone who had recently been stoned. A state of mind that was milder and lacked any spasms of paranoia. Kind of better, actually. He kept being reminded—because every flight echoes every other flight, on account of the sameness of the costumes and rituals—of how thickly, blockily stoned he had been on the plane he had taken from Massachusetts to Houston, a few days earlier, and the memory dropped another light scrim of defamiliarization between him and the world. During that flight, everyone seemed to…

A middle-aged woman takes a holiday in the Austrian Alps with A her cousin Luise and Luise’s husband, Hugo. She is their guest at a hunting lodge, a two-story wooden villa on the edge of a forest. On their first evening together, Luise and Hugo go into the local village for a drink, leaving the woman alone. She makes a risotto for their expected return. The next morning, she wakes to an empty house, her only companion their Bavarian bloodhound, Lynx. It is a sunny day, so she sets off to the village with Lynx, in order to discover what has happened to Luise and Hugo. Lynx runs on ahead, but is soon “howling with pain and shock.” Bloody saliva drips from his mouth. A moment later, the woman bumps…

For anyone who is exhausted by the male antihero, “American Gigolo,” on Showtime, is good news. Our main man, Julian Kaye (Jon Bernthal), has not committed one selfish act in his sad life. He has been groomed, pimped, framed—you name it—and still he looks out on the site of his trials, the putrid vista of present-day Los Angeles, with moist eyes, conveying resignation. David Hollander, who developed the series, designed Julian as a martyr, sanctified by his misfortune, which has been dealt to him by a parade of conniving or selfish or stupid women. This project, a reboot of the 1980 movie of the samename, is abysmal, but it is not inert. It thrums with a militancy, in its promotion of the orthodoxies of our era. It is unabashedly anti-pleasure,…