Innholdsfortegnelse for October 10, 2022 i The New Yorker

I have few memories of being four—a fact I find disconcerting now that I’m the father of a four-year-old. My son and I have great times together; lately, we’ve been building Lego versions of familiar places (the coffee shop, the bathroom) and perfecting the “flipperoo,” a move in which I hold his hands while he somersaults backward from my shoulders to the ground. But how much of our joyous life will he remember? What I recall from when I was four are the red-painted nails of a mean babysitter; the brushed-silver stereo in my parents’ apartment; a particular orange-carpeted hallway; some houseplants in the sun; and a glimpse of my father’s face, perhaps smuggled into memory from a photograph. These disconnected images don’t knit together into a picture of…

On the morning of April 13th, forty-seven days after Russia began its siege of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, a man in his early twenties whom I’ll call Taras heard his dog barking in the front yard. Two days earlier, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, had pronounced Mariupol “completely destroyed.” Russian forces had bombed or otherwise damaged ninety per cent of the buildings, including dozens of schools and a maternity hospital. The mayor estimated that at least twenty-one thousand residents had been killed. Taras had spent the better part of the siege with his family in a small basement, without electricity or running water. He would surface intermittently to collect buckets of rain to drink or to prepare meals of wheat porridge over a wood fire. All the cell-phone towers…

In June, Grant drove his project Mazda with the FFA sticker south, out of Montana’s spring rain squalls to Oklahoma, drinking Red Bull and Jolt Cola, grinding his teeth, with his saddle in the back seat. Each summer, he took whatever job his friend Rufus had found for him. This time it was on the Coy Blake four-township spread, but he had to meet Mr. Blake first to see if the offer was final. “You’ll get it, but you got to sit with him and let him talk,” Rufus said. “He’s a lonely old land hog with one foot in the grave. His people been here since the Indians.” Coy Blake was ninety years old, with no immediate family, but he had not relinquished an inch of his land. Grant…

There are lots of screens onstage these days. The intrusion of video into drama can be a nod to the visual culture of surveillance, or to the uncanny fantasy that our private and public lives are somehow being secretly filmed for a later wide release. Often, though, the gesture is underdeveloped, a wan attempt at multimedia art, perhaps the result of insecurity about the ever-increasing dominance of TV. Plus, actors can have their cake and eat it, too: they can play big and also get their closeup moments. “American (tele)visions,” by Victor I. Cazares, at New York Theatre Workshop, is the rare recent show whose use of—and constant references to—video feels absolutely necessary to its story. It’s about a Mexican immigrant family who live in a cramped double-wide trailer, and…

THE CONSERVATIVE COURT Margaret Talbot’s thorough and superbly written account of Justice Samuel Alito’s grievance tour would have benefitted from a more nuanced distinction in one spot (“The Last Word,” September 5th). Talbot describes Justice Neil Gorsuch as “concluding—ostensibly through originalist logic—that Title VII prohibitions on employment discrimination applied to gay and transgender people.” But, in fact, Gorsuch’s opinion can be said to have used the textualist method—derived from the plain language of the statute—rather than originalism. The decision was criticized by the dissenters, including Alito, who invoked originalism to argue that Congress’s intent in enacting Title VII did not include protecting the L.G.B.T.Q. community against discrimination. The case illustrates that these two judicial decision-making methods are not always viewed synonymously. Sheryl SnyderLouisville, Ky. Talbot’s portrait of Alito would have…

Having been a kid amid the release and receptionof the Alanis Morissette song IRONIC, having absorbed the scoffingover how some scenarios detailed withinwere not in fact IRONIC—this made me shy, going forward, to term things IRONIC, in case I was getting it wrong—I even hesitated to attach the label to Romeoending his life a mere half hour prior to Juliet waking,though of course that’s ironic— each next day is just getting berated or scrapingagainst what the state won’t fix or aching at the door, and stillI wept when you said that to be here is sacred—I wept in agreement— and also I wept because each next day is Juliet waking, yet taking herfor dead when she looks so dead—a mistake who wouldn’t beforgiven for making—…

On January 4, 1995, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, of New York, introduced a bill called the Abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency Act. It had been a rough stretch for the C.I.A. The year before, Aldrich Ames, a longtime officer, had been convicted of being a longtime mole for Soviet (and then Russian) intelligence. Despite having a reputation among his colleagues as a problem drinker who appeared to live far beyond his means, Ames had been given high-level assignments with access to the names of American sources in the U.S.S.R. When the F.B.I. finally arrested him, he was in the Jaguar he used for commuting to work at Langley; by then, he was responsible for the death of at least ten agents. Moynihan said that the case was such a…

“To look without fear,” the immense, flabbergastingly installed retrospective of the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, at the Museum of Modern Art, persuades me that the man is a genius. There’s a downside to the concession—it dampens my quarrels of taste with certain items, among the show’s predominantly brilliant several hundred, that I do not like. Geniuses alter the basic terms of the fields of art or science which happen to engage them. Criteria that once applied no longer compel. The ground zero at MOMA is “art photography,” its former autonomy diluted in a tsunami of images from Tillmans, in wildly varying sizes, mediums, and formats, which are often mounted from floor to ceiling, and may less risk than exalt banality. Almost violently sociable, the work retroactively mainstreams such precedents as…

OCTOBER 5 – 11, 2022 The exhibition “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England,” opening at the Met on Oct. 10, concerns five monarchs, from Henry VII to Elizabeth I, whose dynasty ruled for more than a century, as well as the European artists and artisans who flourished in Britain under their patronage. One of the greatest was Hans Holbein the Younger, the Swiss German Old Master, whose 1532 portrait—likely of Hermann von Wedigh III, a London-based German merchant—is seen, mid-installation, above. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. THE THEATRE Body Through Which the Dream Flows The teen-age (and younger) gymnasts in Soomi Kim’s devised-theatre work create a kind of Busby Berkeley choreography around Kim herself, who dances, confesses her doubts about her life…

Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor, walked into the David Zwirner Gallery, in Chelsea, the other day to see the retrospective of Diane Arbus photographs. The first picture one sees upon entering is titled “A Very Young Baby, N.Y.C.” Cooper was particularly interested in this picture, for he is that baby. It’s an intense closeup shot, the baby just a few weeks old, fast asleep, his face filling the frame. “I remember reading some critic saying that it resembled a Roman death mask,” Cooper said, peering at the print while hoisting and sometimes gently bouncing his own seven-month-old baby, Sebastian. “I didn’t really know much about Roman death masks, but I can understand that now.” This being an Arbus show, “Very Young Baby” is surrounded by photographs of giants, cross-dressers, circus…

When Bryon Schroeder moved to Alpine, Texas, in 2016, he was amazed at how few rules there were. In Texas—unlike in Wyoming, where he grew up, and in Montana, where he got a Ph.D. in archeology—if you have permission to dig on someone’s land “you don’t really have to do any permits or anything,” he told me. “Here, you can’t tell landowners not to do stuff. This is Texas, goddammit!” Schroeder is thirty-eight, with a tangle of curly hair and a taste for Hawaiian shirts. He came to Alpine to work for the Center for Big Bend Studies, which he now runs. The Center, a research institute focussed on archeology and history, is affiliated with Sul Ross State University, an agriculture-focussed school that calls itself “the frontier university of Texas.”…

By Hands Now Known, by Margaret A. Burnham (Norton). This history of Jim Crow explores “slavery’s afterlife in law” from the nineteen-twenties to the sixties through the fates of Black Americans whose stories “were not meant to leave the South.” Some were “abducted from their homes, churches, fields, and other workplaces,” others murdered after flouting bus segregation. Burnham illuminates a continuum of white supremacy, dating back to slavery, that depended on the blurring of “formal and mob law” and on an often complicit federal government. “Law needed terror, and terror needed law,” she writes. She also examines Black Americans’ long-standing “practices of dissent and resistance” and describes reparations as an ethical imperative. The Portraitist, by Steven Nadler (Chicago). Little is known about the Dutch painter Frans Hals: no letters or diaries…

Major labels often like to boast about the creative agency afforded to their artists, but earlier this year a number of prominent musicians found reason to gripe about the oppressive influence of their corporate overlords. “All record labels ask for are tiktoks and i got told off today for not making enough effort,” the experimental pop and R. & B. artist FKA Twigs told her fans, in May. (She did so on her TikTok page.) A few days later, the smoldering pop vocalist Halsey had a similar complaint about the pervasive pressure to use the platform. Halsey had an unreleased song ready to drop, and wrote, “My record company is saying that I can’t release it unless they can fake a viral moment on tiktok.” (The label responded at the…