Innholdsfortegnelse for October 24, 2022 i The New Yorker

The night nurse turns me in my bed and changesthe white sheets under me. They are wet, they are soiled, and the night nurse washes my face and changes my gown.I am clean and refreshed because of the night nurse. The night nurse comes to me with a pill in a tiny cup.I take the pill from her beautiful hands and the night nurse takes away my pain, so that I may sleepwithout plague of dream or fear of never waking. The moon is out. The night nurse does not notice.The night nurse only watches me. I am life and death to the night nurse. I am more important to the night nursethan the full pink moon over which the poets obsess. The night nurse comes flying low over me…

Wednesday is ironing day, a day of smoothness, the pleasing, embryonic smell of wet heat, and the satisfactions of erasure. How rewarding it is, Evelyn thinks, to work the tip of the iron into the wrinkled underarms of her favorite blouses and watch their instant transformation into material that is fresh and untried. Now that she is seventyfour, and her skin has lost its elasticity, this trick of reversing time is no longer available to her. It’s like a head of wilted lettuce, she thinks, as she mists a blouse with water. All you have to do is put it in ice water and it springs back to life. These were lessons she’d tried to impart to her daughters: the proper way to store vegetables, to fold clothing, to wash…

Armies, like writers, prey on orphans and misfits. Scenes of military recruitment have been a literary staple at least since Bulgarian soldiers kidnapped Voltaire’s Candide, but few are more bleakly memorable than the one at the end of “Paradise” (1994), by the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah. It’s around the time of the First World War. Yusuf, a runaway servant in what’s now Tanzania, wanders into a camp abandoned by askari, or local troops, who have occupied his coastal town in the name of Germany. He finds wild dogs eating the soldiers’ excrement, and, when they return his gaze, experiences a shock of recognition. “Thedogs had known a shit-eater when they saw one,” Yusuf decides, and promptly joins the askari. The grotesque analogy poses a painful question: How did so many colonial…

FOOD NETWORKS Carolyn Kormann’s profile of the Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman and his restaurant, Owamni, captures the chef’s character, many of his influences and sources of inspiration, and numerous facts about the mistreatment of Indigenous people (“Tribe to Table,” September 19th). But I was puzzled by the article’s omission of any mention of Beth Dooley, the co-author of Sherman’s cookbook, “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen.” Dooley has authored or co-authored eight cookbooks that celebrate local, sustainable foods and their producers; like Sherman, she believes that eating well and eating locally are one and the same. Brian NerneySt. Paul, Minn. Kormann mentions that, in the nineteenth century, a “government-funded campaign to kill buffalo herds” drove the species nearly to extinction. It bears noting that it was ultimately the industrial harvesting…

Seek Treatment Do you ever wish your therapist would loosen up and crack a joke, for once? For help processing this feeling, you might turn to “Seek Treatment,” a podcast hosted by the comedians and best friends Catherine Cohen (whose special “The Twist…? She’s Gorgeous” premièred on Netflix earlier this year) and Pat Regan (a writer for HBO’s “Hacks”). They delve into topics that you’d typically discuss with your psychologist—especially those touted in the tagline, “a podcast about boys, sex, fucking, dating, and love”—in interviews with fellow comics and writers, including Jo Firestone, Bowen Yang, and Naomi Ekperigin. Cohen and Regan maintain an artful, at times manic, balance between earnest conversations about addiction and eating disorders and nostalgic banter involving, say, the cruelly medieval nature of three-ring binders and the…

At my local convenience store, and almost surely at yours, too, it is possible to buy upward of fifty different kinds of scratch-off lottery tickets. To do so, you must be at least eighteen years old, even though the tickets look like the décor for a kindergarten classroom. The dominant themes are primary colors, dollar signs, and shiny, as in gold bars, shooting stars, glinting horseshoes, and stacks of silver coins. When you are looking at a solid wall of them, they also resemble—based on the palette, font choices, and general flashy hecticness—the mid-nineties Internet. Some of them are named for other games, such as the Monopoly X5,the Double Blackjack, and the Family Feud, but most are straightforward about the point of buying them: Show Me $10,000!, $100,000 Lucky, Money…

Is Paul Newman’s memoir, “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man” (Knopf), really Paul Newman’s memoir? As best I can piece together the story, in 1986, the year he turned sixtyone, Newman sat down with an old friend, the screenwriter Stewart Stern, and began recording on a cassette player material for an autobiography. This continued for several years, during which Stern also interviewed some of Newman’s buddies from college and the Navy, his two wives, his brother and other members of his family, friends and show-business colleagues, including screenwriters, directors, producers, agents, and actors—pretty much everyone he could find who’d had some relationship to Newman. By 1991, Stern had recorded more than a hundred interviews. Then Newman asked him to stop. In 1998, Newman took the cassettes to the dump…

In 2018, the singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield released a pair of covers she’d recorded with her boyfriend, the musician Kevin Morby. They were tributes to Jason Molina, a singer and guitarist who performed under various stage names in the nineties and two-thousands before dying, of alcohol-related organ failure, at thirty-nine. Molina’s work sprawled across decades and collaborators, but almost all of it was indie rock that had been suffused with the spirit and the inflections of the blues. When Crutchfield began playing his songs, she had an unexpected breakthrough. Under the name Waxahatchee, she’d risen to prominence as an emotionally evocativeindie-rock singer, but when she tinkered around with Molina’s songs “Farewell Transmission” and “The Dark Don’t Hide It” she was taken aback by how comfortable she felt inhabiting Molina’s warbly twang.…

According to a running tally compiled by UNESCO, the war in Ukraine had, by early this month, damaged thirty-seven historic buildings, thirteen museums, eighty-six religious sites, eighteen monuments, ten libraries, and thirty-seven other cultural buildings. What about dances? This is harder to calculate, because dance is essentially stored in bodies. When Oleksandr Shapoval, a longtime dancer for the National Opera of Ukraine, died in combat, in September, the Russians killed both the man and the dances he contained. I couldn’t help thinking that Alexei Ratmansky had something like this in mind when he made “WartimeElegy,” which recently had its première at Pacific Northwest Ballet, in Seattle. It is the first dance he has made since the Russian invasion, and he has dedicated it to the people of Ukraine. During the…

OCTOBER 19 – 25, 2022 When Sheku Kanneh-Mason—a cellist of blazing sensitivity, who catapulted to stardom when he performed at Harry and Meghan’s wedding—comes to Carnegie Hall’s largest stage for the first time, on Oct. 22, he’ll play one of his favorite pieces: Elgar’s Cello Concerto, a work that rises and falls grandly in the expression of intimate feeling. “It’s an incredibly personal piece of music,” Kanneh-Mason said recently. “The interaction between myself and the orchestra is often very conversational, and it’s important to have that active relationship for the music to be alive.” As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. ART “Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young” This jewel box of an exhibition at the Grolier Club, an oasis for bibliophiles, founded in 1884, offers an…

When a professional golfer wants to pass along a rumor, he’ll tell you that he heard it “on the range.” The pro driving range conjures a serious place where serious men who abide by dress codes and honor systems tweak swing paths and spin rates, but this impression is incomplete. The range, the one location where everyone in the sport gathers, is also golf’s back room. Pre-round chat may concern course conditions, or who is sleeping with whose wife. Recently, the range has been preoccupied by one topic. Since late last year, representatives of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the multibillion-dollar investment vehicle for the kingdom, have been quietly recruiting players for a new super-league that they hope will rival the P.G.A. Tour. They were calling it LIV; the name…

The Sherry-Netherland, a slender neo-Renaissance tower at 781 Fifth Avenue, is known as one of New York’s “white glove” co-ops, for the linen gloves that the elevator attendants wear. It has panoramic views of Central Park, décor inherited from a Vanderbilt mansion, and amenities befitting a luxury hotel; room service comes from the Harry Cipriani restaurant downstairs. Through the years, the Sherry has accommodated the occasional celebrity—Diana Ross, Francis Ford Coppola, David Bowie—but, like other buildings of its kind, it tends to prefer quieter money. On a winter day in 2015, the Sherry’s co-op board received an unusual application. A Chinese businessman calling himself Miles Guo wanted the most expensive unit in the building—a penthouse that occupies the entire eighteenth floor, with six bedrooms, nine bathrooms, and three terraces. There…

Not afterglow,not the lastword. Stillthey were ableto more or lessenjoythe feeling of beingwashed up togetheron what was notreally a floodplainfrom which the not-quite waterhad receded,leaving a large numberof more or lessinteresting artifacts,which, they had learned,appeared to themdifferentlyso that what she sawas a large woodenradio, he sawas a fireplace mantel,and what she sawas self-sufficiency, he sawas strangulation.In past times,they had fought bitterlyabout what things were,what they shouldor should not be.Now they tried to guesswhat the other would callany object they spotted;they had cometo find failurehilarious, and evenfaked iton some occasions.…

The Book of Goose, by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This novel dissects the intense friendship between two thirteen-year-olds, Agnès and Fabienne, in postwar rural France. Believing themselves “old enough for everything,” they stave off boredom with increasingly elaborate schemes. Fabienne begins dictating morbid tales to Agnès, and then engineers their publication under Agnès’s name. Agnès is celebrated as a child prodigy and her life assumes a new trajectory. The story unfolds in retrospect, after Agnès, now twenty-seven and living in Pennsylvania, learns of Fabienne’s death. Her recollections of their friendship and her brush with unearned fame have an ethereal tone, punctuated with sharp descriptions of adolescent convictions. The Birdcatcher, by Gayl Jones (Beacon). With the plush scenery of a travelogue, the misshapen soul of a noir, and the…

Watching Wendell Pierce act is more like listening to music than it is like taking in a play. It’s his job to carry a story forward, but he’s best enjoyed on the basis of individual line readings and gestures. At his finest, his scratchy, searching baritone can make the melody of a sentence carry meaning beyond its words. His stocky, solid body, fraught with intention, moves decisively: he twitches a shoulder or points a finger and you know what he means to get across. Often, it’s something you won’t find spelled out in the script. Pierce is probably best known for playing the wisecracking detective Bunk in “The Wire,” created by David Simon. I liked him better in the less plot-dependent “Treme,” also by Simon, in which he plays Antoine…