Innholdsfortegnelse for October 17, 2022 i The New Yorker

In the summer of 2019, the actor Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub won a role on “Tandav,” an Indian political drama being produced by Amazon Prime. The title was clever. In Hindu lore, the tandav is the dance of life and death performed by Shiva, the god whose terrible powers can end the universe—a neat metaphor for the dark, intricate maneuvers of national politics. When Ayyub read the show’s script, he spied a handful of allusions to the India around him. In one episode, policemen barge onto a university campus to arrest a Muslim student leader. The scene recalled the government’s persecution of popular student politicians and, more broadly, the hostility toward Muslims that marks the Hindu nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.). The B.J.P. had…

The handoff was planned for late afternoon on a weekday, at an underused trailhead in a Texas park. The young woman carrying the pills, whom I’ll call Anna, arrived in advance of the designated time, as was her habit, to throw off anyone who might try to use her license plates to trace her identity. She felt slightly absurd in her disguise—sun hat, oversized sunglasses, plain black mask. But the pills in her pocket were used to induce abortions, and in Texas, her home state, their distribution now required such subterfuge, along with burner phones and the encrypted messaging app Signal. Since late June, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Texas and thirteen other states had effectively banned abortion, and more were sure to follow. In some of…

Upstairs, the sisters prepared by putting on their dresses, while down in the yard everyone drank Mott’s apple juice and snacked on Ritz crackers squared with Cheddar. Afterward, they’d have a proper meal. Lily had brought six pies. Eleanor, pasta salad and lentils with sweet potatoes. Louise’s son Charlie would man the grill. There’d be enough to drink, that was for sure, and maybe something to smoke thanks to the dispensaries in nearby Great Barrington. Come night, Jasper, Lily’s grandson, would play guitar. And Lewis, the son of Benjamin, the sisters’ cousin, would light the bonfire, once his father’s job. Oh, Benjamin. He’d been cremated with his healing crystals still clenched in his hands. The bonfire nowadays was confined to the copper fire pit at Louise’s house, but they’d manage…

The novelist Lydia Millet once told an interviewer that when she first moved to New York, in 1996, she was “amazed” by how people were “relentlessly interested in exclusively the human self.” This myopia—a sort of “inarticulate, ambient smugness about everything”—wasn’t her creed. Millet, who now lives near Tucson, has written more than a dozen books of fiction, one of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but she works at the Center for Biological Diversity and holds a master’s in environmental policy. As in life, so in art. Increasingly, fiction studies the “arc of the private individual,” Millet told another interviewer: “The personal struggles of a self and the ultimate triumph of that self over the obstacles in its path.” But Millet is energized, instead, by how feelings…

In everyday discourse, the word “operatic” signifies loudness, opulence, mayhem, and excess. Everything from the Lexus LC500 convertible to Rudolph Giuliani’s third divorce has been described as operatic. Theatrical values at the Metropolitan Opera perpetuate the pejorative meaning of the term. The auditorium is vast; sets tend toward the hulking; singers must bellow in order to be heard. The repertory favors Romantic entertainments that litter bodies across the stage. A new production of Cherubini’s “Medea,” which opened the Met season, proves no exception. Sondra Radvanovsky, in the title role, staggers about with a knife in her hand, issues bloodcurdling high notes, and, at the end, curls up with her murdered children. It’s all good fun, yet it’s somewhat peripheral to what makes opera truly satisfying as an art. Two days…

TESTIMONIES OF PAIN Jonathan Blitzer’s article about Nayib Bukele reminded me of what I observed during a recent trip to Bajo Lempa, a rural region of El Salvador (“Strongman of the People,” September 12th). Between 2001 and 2007, I worked as a mental-health provider in the area, which is populated mostly by civil-war survivors and their descendants, who make their livings by organizing in farming coöperatives or managing small farms. In late August, I travelled there to visit people I know, and I heard many firsthand accounts of the impacts of Bukele’s government’s “state of exception.” A woman named Esmeralda—a farmer and community leader whose mother survived a wartime massacre, and who is herself the mother of two young children—had been thrown into prison. A man’s disappearance left his wife…

Lawn-mower parents were even more overly involved … making “helicopter parents look mild in comparison.” … Today, teachers say, some parents have taken even that to extremes.—“Rise of the ‘Jackhammer Parent,’” Washington Post. Waring-Blender Parents Will absolutely liquefy obstacles to their children’s future success, but they are not above dicing someone who just annoys them. Pasta-Maker Parents They roll teachers, babysitters, and other people’s kids flat and then slice them up into different shapes, depending on their whims and what works best with a sauce made from pushy relatives, nannies, and admissions officers. Leaf-Blower Parents Very loud and aggressive. They don’t actually deal with stuff so much as dramatically blow it around so that someone else will clean it up. Drone Parents Stealthier than Helicopter Parents, they use location…

Now that the TV is gone and the musichas been hauled away,it’s just me here, and the muffing silencea spider wraps around a living morsel.And at times, often, the unbearable.I bear it, though, just like you.Long ago, I bore a suitcase filled with books,bore it far on city streets. To sell, I guess, at someused-books place, one of those doorways downsteps into dankness and darkness. The scent of mildewed, dog-eared, fingered pages.The suitcase, big and square and sharp-cornered,covered in snakeskin, bought at Goodwillfor a dollar, knowing I had some travelling to do,some lugging, and I was right.What books I sold I do not know.Maybe that’s where “Modern Poetry” went.The cover cherry-red and blossom-white.I can see its spine in my mind’s eye,pointing downward beneath the dank and the dark to the…

In the grave chambers of the cathedral / we were reverentsilent // we didn’t want to awaken the saints and/besides/though votive candles and sober sermon andvenerating faithful / I had no prayers to offer // my god was a private shame / the space betweenmy parents // I couldn’t petition this heaven / despitethe invitation / am not so much a tourist that I’ll takeanother man’s holy for my own / though it did make me want to say holy/even in my godlessness/myhalf-assed tourist pass through a city cramped ancient andcobblestoned // (and yes full of lights/I wish I could’ve lovedsuch radiance) // an old world from which god was made / and the two of us / foreign and/together / and witness to a faith that dwarfed even what…

Marigold and Rose, by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This slip of a book, the Nobel-winning poet’s first work of narrative prose, consists of the thoughts of twin baby girls, each named after a flower. Marigold is small, quiet, inward; Rose, born first, is loud, forgiving, and protective. Alongside an exploration of the dichotomies that bind the girls together are meditations on many of Glück’s familiar preoccupations: halves and wholes, familial inheritance, time’s passage, the psychic power of words. The innocence of the girls’ observations, bearing an infant clarity, pare many of the book’s subjects down to a revealing frankness. “Infinite possibility,” they think as they learn to walk. “Then an absence or loss. Safety, which had disappeared.” The Slowworm’s Song, by Andrew Miller (Europa). The narrator of this…

OCTOBER 12 – 18, 2022 “The Jazz Continuum” is the name of LaTasha Barnes’s ensemble show at the Joyce, running Oct. 11-16. It’s also a good phrase for what she effortlessly embodies: the continuity between Lindy Hop and house dance, between Black dance of a hundred years ago and Black dance of yesterday. When she’s moving, steps and styles separated by time embrace like long-lost relatives. Here, she gathers performers of various disciplines and generations, using jazz music—plus hip-hop and line dance—as the thread. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. ART Jessi Reaves This New York artist, originally from Portland, Oregon, continues to mine the rich gray area between furniture design and sculpture, presenting absurdist hybrid objects of debatable utility in her new show, “At…

The word on “Leopoldstadt,” the latest drama by Tom Stoppard (at the Longacre), is that this time, at last, he gets personal. In Hermione Lee’s immense 2020 Stoppard biography, in recent interviews and profiles, and even via links e-mailed to ticket buyers before the show, we read that the playwright has finally abandoned what Clive James called his “ebullient detachment” and broached the topic of his Jewish identity and a long-gestating survivor’s grief. Some critics have been looking for this turn for decades. In 1977, in this magazine, Kenneth Tynan compared the stories Stoppard used in his plays (wild coincidences with peacocks and shaving foam) with the one he never did share: his 1939 flight, at the age of eighteen months, from the Nazis. He was then Tomáš Sträussler, and…

A few years ago, reading the introduction to an English-language version of Hugo’s “Les Misérables,” I found the translator, Norman Denny, confessing that he had made a number of cuts in the French text. Certain of them, he said, were for sense. But others, he was not ashamed to say, were due to his feeling that the book was just too long-winded. The great Frenchman couldn’t shut up. He told us things twice, three times. Or he said them too many times the first time. “It is not uncommon to find eight or ten adjectives appended to a single noun,” Denny noted, with wonder. Even after the trims, his version is still more than twelve hundred pages long. This fullness, overfullness, was endemic to the genre to which “Les Misérables”…