Innholdsfortegnelse for October 3, 2022 i The New Yorker

Celebrities sometimes introduce Kevin Mazur as “my favorite paparazzo.” “I go, ‘I’m not paparazzi!’” Mazur said the other day. “I’m the guy that’s invited. Everybody wants me to be there.” Mazur is the guy you get when, say, you’re the Rolling Stones in 1988 and need someone to document the “Steel Wheels” tour. Or when you’re the Met Gala and need someone to capture Kim Kardashian at the top of the stairs. At concerts, he slips onstage to shoot Elton John close up. On red carpets, he waltzes past the penned-in press and snaps J. Lo from two feet away. “The trust factor is the biggest thing,” he said. “When you respect somebody, they’ll feel comfortable with you. And then they’ll let you in.” Mazur, who is sixty-one, with swept-back…

May is the merriest month, and there are few more cheering journeys than a train ride into the green wilds of Sussex, in southern England. And no destination is more peaceable than Charleston, the secluded house, wreathed with gardens, that found fame as a rural HQ of the Bloomsbury Group. Now a place of pilgrimage, it continues to summon writers and artists, with audiences to match. Here it was, for a festival in May, that the culture-hungry came. Drifting in their dozens past fruit trees and congregations of flowers, they entered a large tent, where the trappings of Bloomsbury-scented comfort were on sale: straw hats, cushions, padded Alice bands, and vials of Sussex Rose Aromatic Water for the soothing of high or fevered brows. We took our seats for the…

At the wheel of an armored Toyota Land Cruiser, trailed by a car full of bodyguards, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed drove me around Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. With a politician’s pride, he pointed out some of his recent civic projects: a vast park and a national library; a handicrafts market; a planetarium, still under construction. Throughout the city were government buildings that he’d built or remade: the federal police headquarters, the Ministry of Mines, an artificial-intelligence center, the Ministry of Defense. In the Entoto Hills, above Addis, he had established a complex of recreational areas to showcase his Green Legacy Initiative, aimed at making Ethiopia a pioneer in sustainable agriculture and renewable energy. He boasted of having planted eighteen billion trees. “If in five years the world does…

At the start of this narrative, I will pretendNot to be alive, not to be Speaking to you from the living earth.To help you. I will pretend The circumstances of our beingHere, together, are casual— And not incidentalOf this awkward dilemma: How to coexist When you would like me dead.For simplicity. For lack of threat. In this narrative, I will lookAt you from a distance, as into the future, No more real than I am,Sitting here in my off-white body which I can feel But is somehow less important, lessUrgent than the problem it poses. Sometimes, when I write this kind of narrative,My mind flees and all I see above is text At once strange, because I don’t knowHow to hold it, and familiar, because I wrote it— Send out…

Sacred Nature, by Karen Armstrong (Knopf). An urgent plea opens this nuanced exploration, by a veteran writer on religion, of our relationship to nature: if ecological disaster is to be avoided, Armstrong writes, “we need to recover the veneration of nature that human beings carefully cultivated for millennia.” What follows is a tour of how various spiritual traditions conceive of nature, with a focus on a common thread: an understanding of the natural world as a unified whole shot through by “an immanent sacred force.” This concept, prominent in Eastern thought, was also a feature of Western monotheist traditions before we began treating nature as “a mere resource.” “While it is essential to cut carbon emissions,” Armstrong writes, we also need to overhaul “our whole belief system.” Lady Justice, by…

It’s perhaps easiest to describe the Lucille Lortel production of “Four Saints in Three Acts,” starring David Greenspan, by saying what it is not. For one thing, it’s not at the Lortel, which is in Manhattan, but at an experimental theatre in Brooklyn. Nor is it really a play—there are elliptical references to scenes and scenarios but no dramatic dialogue. Gertrude Stein wrote it, in 1927, for the composer Virgil Thomson to set to music, subtitling it “An Opera to Be Sung,” but Greenspan performs it solo, as a text without a score. So it’s not exactly a libretto, either. Even Stein’s title won’t tell you what it is: Greenspan refers to around twenty saints, and the show runs to four acts, not three. This production of “Four Saints” brings…

TOO COOL Nicola Twilley, in her piece about Rwanda’s valiant effort to widen access to refrigeration, acknowledges many of the obstacles standing in the country’s way while also conveying the hope that creating a cold chain will improve the predicament of its smallholder farmers (“The Cold Rush,” August 22nd). My fifty years of experience in international-development work, some of them spent in Rwanda, have given me a more pessimistic view. The economic situation of smallholder farmers is on a downward trajectory almost everywhere in the world. This is in part because, in the world’s economy, scale is paramount, and being able to get more product to market is unlikely to mean more than a slight increase in income for small farmers, who can produce only so much. A more dismal…

Everything he touches turns yellow. We are meant to understand this as a form of death. Death is a wish to improve one’s surroundings. Which is to say, to be dissatisfied with one’s surroundings is a form of death. To be dissatisfied with one’s child, to wish to improve one’s child, is to wish its death. Her death. The dead child is unchanging, therefore beautiful. Which is why we say that death is the father of beauty. He created her. Then he created her again. His tears gild his gaze. They harden as they hit the ground. They are a tribute scattered at her perfected feet. Unlike other forms of grief, they are durable, portable. A currency, they can be exchanged for other beautiful or useful things. His weighty head…

The paradox of personal religion: God has abandoned me, so I’ll pray. On my knees. The sky exploding. And her on her back, gasping from the pain, making use of all the Arabic curses. Cohen saw the pregnant woman five or six times before they ended up together in the mamak, a room with reinforced-concrete walls, a heavy, sealed window, and a steel vault of a door, that can protect residents from deadly gas, earthquakes, or the blast of rockets, one room on each floor, stacked atop one another, creating a core of safe rooms in the building. She lived across the hall from the apartment he’d Airbnb’ed. One of those young Tel Avivian women who looked like they’d learned krav maga at the breast, waited enough tables to be…

Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian are, to me, the twin groundbreakers of twentieth-century European pictorial art: Picasso the greatest painter who modernized picture-making, and Mondrian the greatest modernizer who painted. (They call to mind an earlier brace of revolutionaries from the southern and northern reaches of the continent: Giotto, in Italy, humanized medieval storytelling, and Jan van Eyck, in the Low Countries, revealed the novel capacities of oil paints with devout precision.) The case for Picasso makes itself, with the preter-natural range of his formal and iconographic leaps—forward, backward, and sideways—in what painting could bemade, or dared, to do. The brief for Mondrian is harder to extract from a cookie-cutter modernist narrative (“Next slide, please”) of marching styles, from the artist’s modest-looking Dutch landscapes in the eighteen-nineties to the riveting…

SEPTEMBER 28 – OCTOBER 4, 2022 “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” So said Robert Capa, who co-founded the Magnum Photos collective in 1947. The exhibition “Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers of Magnum,” opening on Sept. 30 at the International Center of Photography, includes Myriam Boulos’s daringly intimate scene of life during the recent revolution in her native Lebanon, “Jasmine and Laura-Joy kissing in the grand theater, Beirut, October 20, 2019” (above). As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. MUSIC Carnegie Hall: Opening Night Gala CLASSICAL Last year, the Philadelphia Orchestra and its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, opened Carnegie Hall’s season with Valerie Coleman’s “Seven O’Clock Shout,” a stirring tribute to frontline workers. In a seemingly comfortable return to…

I remember the first time I encountered a pierced eyebrow. I was sixteen, travelling with the debate team from my high school in the quiet suburbs of Bangalore to the busy city center for a regional meet. I had managed to get the team together only by promising the other boys that there would be girls there. But the girls we were ranged against, who went to a “progressive” school for which we had an unreflective contempt, were creatures from another world. They all wore a kind of shapeless tie-dyed garment that couldn’t be part of any uniform, spoke in a slack, almost American drawl, and, with their air of casual privilege, were amused by our prissy diction—our try-hard idea of what proper English was supposed to sound like—and our…

Perhaps the riskiest venture that an English-speaking composer can undertake is to make an opera out of Shakespeare. Although the repertory contains various Shakespeare adaptations, only one version by a native speaker has found a secure place on international stages: Benjamin Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” from 1960. The hazards of Bardic opera are obvious. The plays generate their own indelible music in the reader’s mind, and recitations by celebrated actors linger in the memory. A safer approach is to appropriate Shakespeare’s drama and psychology while substituting a more modern text. Verdi and Arrigo Boito did as much in “Otello” and “Falstaff”; so did Thomas Adès and Meredith Oakes in “The Tempest,” which made its début in 2004 and has shown staying power. Britten’s singular feat was to set the…