Innholdsfortegnelse for October 31, 2022 i The New Yorker

One afternoon at the end of March, barely a month into Russia’s fullscale invasion of Ukraine, nine slightly rumpled officials from the U.S.Treasury Department emerged from a train at the Brussels station, boarded a waiting minibus, and headed toward the headquarters of the European Union. The Americans had come to meet with their European counterparts and further a plan of economic retribution against Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation. Leading the U.S. delegation was Adewale (Wally) Adeyemo, the Deputy Treasury Secretary. Born in Nigeria, raised in California, and educated at Yale Law School, Adeyemo served as an economic adviser in the Obama Administration. Now he directs Joe Biden’s campaign to devise sanctions and weaponize global financial systems against Putin’s war machine. Before the invasion, Western leaders had tried to use…

Six years ago, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk started writing a historical novel about the outbreak of bubonic plague on a fictional island. He’d been dreaming of such a project for decades: as a student of history and of the great European plague chronicles and novels—Defoe’s “A Journal of a Plague Year,” Manzoni’s “The Betrothed,” Camus’s “The Plague”—he had a particular interest in the way that plagues have tended to get what we might now call “Orientalized.” Muslims, especially in the Ottoman Empire, have been portrayed as more resistant than Christians to the imposition of quarantine. In a 2020 essay, Pamuk argues that Western observers like Defoe noted a strain of fatalism in the Muslim world view—the theological idea of “Every Man’s end being determined,” as Defoe put it. If…

PROTESTS IN IRAN In his recent piece on the protests for women’s rights taking place in Iran, Dexter Filkins suggests that the exiled dissident Masih Alinejad is one of the leaders of the movement (Daily Comment, September 24th, newyorker.com/filkins-on-alinejad). Though Iran’s leaders are certainly opposed to Alinejad’s activities—she is a vocal critic of theirs, and is one of the most recognized Iranian dissidents living in the U.S.—their antagonism does not necessarily make her a leader of the movement. The women’s movement in Iran has a long history, and the current moment is a result of decades of activism by many people, the vast majority of them inside Iran. Today, few of the young people on the streets of Iran’s cities and towns are saying Alinejad’s name, donning white on Wednesdays,…

I’ve been spending time lately travelling to closely contested political territories, watching endangered Democrats campaign. If you live in deep-blue America, as I do, this can feel surreal. The issues my neighbors talk about on the street, usually in a tone of crisis-level alarm—the ill health of American democracy, the fragility of the planet, the pervasiveness of social injustice—and the issues the candidates I watched talk about on the campaign trail have only one point of intersection: the threat to abortion rights. The candidates talk less about fighting climate change, more about lowering your federal taxes through solar credits; less about the January 6th insurrection, more about the many reasonable Republicans they enjoy working with; less about the Biden Administration’s passage of historic legislation, more about insulin price caps. And…

WIDE LOAD / “MR. BLUE SKY” The characters ride into the story aboard a 1976 Winnebago Minnie Winnie, one driven breakneck across broiling asphalt, overspilling its lane on both sides. Though the story’s characters are themselves oblivious, the story acknowledges that it is being written on stolen Tongva land—indeed, the same Tongva land toward which the recreational vehicle now barrels. The story gives respect and reverence to those who came before it, which ought to be absolutely everyone, even you, reader, since the story does not yet and may never exist. Yet here it seems to come—the story, and the recreational vehicle—the Winnebago like a breadbox rumbling westward on fat half-melted tires, a monster’s breadbox with its bragging orange stripe, side-view mirrors flying-buttressed a full foot from its cab to…

American Midnight, by Adam Hochschild (Mariner). The four years of American history from 1917 to 1921 are underexamined, but, in this account, they emerge as pivotal. “Just as the war in Europe was being fought on several fronts, so was the war at home,” Hochschild writes. Vigilante groups and the government itself targeted labor unionists, socialists, immigrants, Blacks, Jews, and others perceived to be insufficiently patriotic. While narrating raids, arrests, lynchings, deportations, and instances of censorship, spying, and torture, Hochschild periodically checks in on an achingly conflicted Woodrow Wilson. When a member of his Administration suggested pardoning those who had been punished for opposing conscription, the President replied that, while the idea “appeals to me not a little, … I don’t feel that I can follow my heart just now.”…

Sixty years ago, Leonard Bernstein presided over the inauguration of Philharmonic Hall, the chief concert venue at Lincoln Center. The event was broadcast live on network television, with an estimated twenty-six million people tuning in. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy headed a procession of distinguished attendees, who exclaimed over the white-columned monumentality of the façade and the blue-and-gold opulence of the interior. Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic in a program that included the Gloria from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the first part of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, and—less celebratory in mood—Aaron Copland’s concussively dissonant “Connotations.” Mrs. Kennedy, greeting the composer afterward, was at a loss for words. “Oh, Mr. Copland,” she said. “Oh, Mr. Copland.” When she was asked about the acoustical achievement, she replied, ambiguously, “I never saw anything like it.” In…

OCTOBER 26 – NOVEMBER 1, 2022 The Criterion Channel, which has been a treasure trove of art-house movies since its launch as an independent streaming service, in 2019, has ramped up its offerings to include a wide range of Hollywood classics and genre delights. This month’s program features a trio of Halloween-ready series: “’80s Horror” (including Paul Schrader’s “Cat People,” starring Nastassja Kinski), “Vampires” (with such notable films as “Blacula,” starring William Marshall, and Werner Herzog’s “Nosferatu the Vampyre”), and “Universal Horror Classics” (which is heavy on selections from the nineteen-thirties, such as “The Bride of Frankenstein,” starring Elsa Lanchester and a heroic hairdo). As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. ART “Lux and Lumen: Spencer Finch” “Inebriate of air – am I,” Emily Dickinson wrote, and…

IT TAKES A VILLAGE to raise a child. The child is extremely heavy. She’s not large, just dense, like a four-foot-two anvil that likes unicorns. The village must erect a system of pulleys to raise her, and, even then, only inches from the ground. The village raises the child once a year, on the eve of her birthday, and then it puts her down again. IT TAKES A VILLAGE to qualify for Village Infrastructure Assistance under bylaw 57:2.1.5. A village constitutes a population of at least a hundred and seventy-five living human bodies within a twenty-two-square-mile area in the town of Nuttsall, Mobrasky. Village Infrastructure Assistance includes, but is not limited to, the building of a simple, sturdy footbridge next to the more charming and older footbridge that is falling…

Come down to us. Come down with your song,little wren. The world is in pieces. We must not say so. In the dark hours,in the nearest branches, I hear you thrum— The deer come to die beside the creek.Mud the color of walnut stain. Reek and runoff from the new development, there,beyond the woods. Rib and skull. No jawbone— It makes a soundless scream. I hope for peacewhen I walk here sometimes in the dark. If not peace, clarity. If not clarity,at least a place to breathe. Else I’ll scream, too— Come down, little dove, far above the bay.I hear you in a thirsty palm or up beyond the rocks. A windy reed of song.Blue sun, blue cloud above the sweeping bay— Sometimes we have to say so. I don’t…

How are we to find the Founding Fathers, in this period of their persistent unfounding? Popular books on the Founding Fathers keep appearing, and, far from being uniformly revisionist, they continue to make a case for the romance of the Revolution. Take these lines from Stacy Schiff’s “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams” (Little, Brown), evoking the famous ride of Paul Revere: A glimmer, a gleam, the hurry of hoofs: a sturdy, square-jawed man speeds through the night, with an urgent message, on a borrowed horse. His topcoat flaps behind him. A bright moon hangs overhead. Within days he will know he has participated in some kind of history, though he will hesitate to attach his name to it for decades and is never to know that his own account will be…

Even among the many seismic changes that the New York art world has experienced in the past seventy years or so, the legendary gallerist Linda Goode Bryant stands out. The founder of Just Above Midtown, or JAM, the historic gallery that played host to an incredible range of artists of color from 1974 to 1986, Goode Bryant established what she called a “laboratory”—a singular place where an artist’s meaning and intention could be expressed in an intellectually free ethos and without commercial interference, a down-home, do-it-yourself cosmos for performance art, happenings, and conceptual, rather than narrative—read:ideological—art. And what art! David Hammons, Howardena Pindell, Lorraine O’Grady, Senga Nengudi, and Lorna Simpson, among many others, had their first significant New York showings at JAM, while volunteers such as the critic Greg Tate…

In the late nineteen-nineties, the singer and songwriter Will Sheff founded Okkervil River, a bony, urgent indie-rock band—later a kind of collective—named for a short story by the Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya. Sheff and his bandmates had gone to boarding school at Kimball Union Academy, in New Hampshire; after graduation, they had relocated to Austin, where similar acts such as Spoon, … And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, and Explosions in the Sky were becoming fixtures on college radio and MP3 blogs. Okkervil River released its début LP, “Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See,” in 2002. This was a fertile time for downbeat, brainy, vaguely dissonant folk rock, but Sheff’s elegant lyrics and expansive musical vision made Okkervil River feel unique. Other members drifted…