Innholdsfortegnelse for November 7, 2022 i The New Yorker

On a recent evening at the Keystone Horse Center, in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, the fifty-eight-year-old Republican candidate for governor and a onetime insurrectionist, climbed onto a dais in the soft dirt of the show ring, surrounded by chrysanthemums. Columbia County occupies an edge of the state’s northeastern coal region. Mastriano, who is tall and bald, wore a black baseball hat. His wife, Rebbie, a chaplain, stood at his right hand, her jean jacket unzipped. Mastriano reminded the audience that he was running only because, a year earlier, in this very barn, a small group of followers had begged him to. “You urged us, even with tears in your eyes, ‘Please run for governor,’” he said. He had also received instructions from Heaven, Rebbie added: “God said go!” Mastriano…

Azadeh Masihzadeh’s family owned a VCR, a rare possession in their neighborhood in Shiraz, a city in the south of Iran. Using long cables, her father connected their machine to the televisions of seven other households, so they could watch, too. At night, after her father chose a movie, Masihzadeh, the eldest of three children, rode her bike down their alley to alert the neighbors. She honked her bike horn once if it was a foreign movie. If it was an Iranian film, she honked twice. Masihzadeh learned English by watching these movies, and, when she was eighteen, she became an English instructor, teaching her students the language through dialogue from films. To practice greetings, she told them to act out the moment in “The Matrix” when Neo says, “It’s…

In the still of nightold fears emerge. Those closest relativesyou’d found barelybearable, cornucopiasof family dystopiaspilling into“amusing anecdotes”decades laterlike a much-thumbedrosary, or litanyof the dead. Old vexations,tics and mannerisms,wincing at the pinchof the drunk uncle(so handsome!—butdied young),stooping to avoidthe hacking coughsoon to propelyour Hungarian grandfatherto his grave. Those years!Pride redacts the gravelong heartbreak of lovingthe one more thanhe’d loved you,who’d favored yoursister, and not youwho at twelve rolledyour eyes, suchboredom!—jawswrenched in yawns at Thanksgivingtwinge of nauseaclammy-white turkeycarcass and skin, stinkof eviscerated gutand in the “gravy boat”coarse curdles ofgrease. Pope’s nose,giblets and innards,“wishbone” carefullyremoved from the ravagedskeleton and perched atopthe fridge to dry,forgotten and forlornuntil rediscoveredin December, brittleand easily broken—Make a wish, Joyce!—butwhat could you havepossibly wished, so young?To be older?To be out of there?To be—where? Stunned now to recallhow all at…

In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges published “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a short story in which a spy travels to the home of an English scholar. There they discuss an odd book by the spy’s great-grandfather, Ts’ui Pên. Rather than follow a single plot, the book aims to explore countless story lines. “In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives he chooses one and eliminates the others,” the scholar says. “In the fiction of the almost inextricable Ts’ui Pên he chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.” Borges devoted most of his story to explaining the complicated idea that many different realities can coexist in a mazelike web of time lines. “This network of…

OUR SHARED STORIES I was surprised and delighted to read Joan Acocella’s review of a new translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed” (Books, October 17th). I was born, raised, and educated in Italy; eighteen years have passed since I studied the book, in my second year of high school. Acocella’s survey of the novel’s complex plot, with its countless tangents and digressions, made me laugh, but I was also pleased to rediscover characters I knew in my youth, from the novel that taught me and so many other young Italians what an omniscient narrator is, among many other things. As Acocella notes, “The Betrothed” created an entire body of national language and imagery which is drawn upon in the course of ordinary life. The word perpetua became a common noun…

In August, 2020, Williamson County Schools, which serves more than forty thousand students in suburban Nashville, started using an English and Language Arts curriculum called Wit & Wisdom. The program, which is published by Great Minds, a company based in Washington, D.C., wasn’t a renegade choice: hundreds of school districts nationwide had adopted it. Both Massachusetts and Louisiana—states with sharply different political profiles—gave Wit & Wisdom high approval ratings. The decision had followed a strict process. The Tennessee State Board of Education governs academic standards and updates them every five or six years, providing school districts with an opportunity to switch curricula. Williamson County Schools assembled a selection committee—twenty-six parents, twenty-eight elementary-school teachers of English and Language Arts. The committee presented four options to teachers, who voted on them in…

The biggest surprise of “Straight Line Crazy,” David Hare’s new play about the tsarist urban planner Robert Moses, is that it originated in London, where it received good reviews, earlier this year, at the Bridge Theatre. Moses is best known as the builder of a preponderance of New York City’s highways, and as the subject of Robert Caro’s masterly biography “The Power Broker.” In another life, I worked in city government; “The Power Broker” was a prerequisite for polite conversation among young technocrats. The book and its often maligned subject came up in passing chatter and in official speech, like Scripture quoted among preachers and Biblical scholars. But nobody in that scene, I can assure you, thought of Moses as a pop phenomenon worthy of international attention. Why, then, were…

NOVEMBER 2 – 8, 2022 Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth, the twenty-three-year-old British musicians behind the experimental pop band Let’s Eat Grandma, have been playing songs together since they were thirteen. After two stunning albums, the pair experienced turmoil—Hollingworth’s boyfriend died of cancer, their collaborator SOPHIE died in an accident, and the friends drifted apart for the first time. They slowly reconciled, working through grief to make their latest album, “Two Ribbons.” On Nov. 4, they continue to reconnect at Webster Hall. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. ART “Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces” In 1974, the now legendary gallerist Linda Goode Bryant, a single mother who had worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem, opened Just Above Midtown, or JAM, in its first space,…

One afternoon in June of last year, Natalie Mering, the indie musician who performs as Weyes Blood, was working on a new album at EastWest, a storied recording studio in Hollywood. The album, “And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow,” which comes out on November 18th, is her first since “Titanic Rising,” in 2019. For the cover of “Titanic Rising,” Mering had an elaborate recreation of her teen-age bedroom submerged in a back-yard pool, and was photographed underwater, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It was a nostalgic image rendered deeply eerie. The album, her fourth, was her breakthrough, critically acclaimed for the imaginative way Mering had recast the Laurel Canyon folk-pop of the nineteen-seventies for a new era of existential unease. Mering half-jokingly described the record to me as “a…

She tried the door. The door was unlocked. She went in. The moment was layered and complex, almost like a fairy tale, but where were the three bears? Upstairs, barking. Did bears bark? No, but dogs did, and that was what was going on here, dogs barking and scrabbling with their black shiny toenails—pawnails?—at the closed door at the top of the stairway, the stairway that was carpeted and strewn with soft, welcoming shadows cast by various objects in the dimmered glow of the lamp behind the couch that was only ten feet from where she was standing. There were pillows on the couch, a whole flotilla of them, and there were two armchairs flanking it, a coffee table, book-shelves, the black nullity of a flat-screen TV affixed to the…

The Other Side of Prospect, by Nicholas Dawidoff (Norton). The result of eight years of reporting, this deft chronicle delves into the story of Bobby Johnson, a sixteen-year-old from New Haven, who, in 2006, was coerced into confessing to a brutal murder he didn’t commit. Dawidoff presents portraits of the individuals involved, juxtaposed with research on segregation, the Great Migration, and mass incarceration. Bobby, though widely considered innocent, was convicted because he “fit a false stereotype about how things worked in poor neighborhoods.” The book details his childhood, his time in prison, and—after a single-minded lawyer secures his release, in 2015—the challenges and the disorientation Bobby experiences upon reëntering society. The Beloved Vision, by Stephen Walsh (Pegasus). This musical study charts the rise of Romanticism, in the nineteenth century, as composers…

To be a vampire is to be free. That’s the irresistible promise made to Louis de Pointe du Lac, a Black business owner and a closeted gay man living in the Jim Crow South, in “Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire,” on AMC. A lustily unfaithful adaptation of Rice’s 1976 novel of the same name, the historical fantasy drama is the first television series based on the author’s work. (AMC plans to develop several more, including “Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches,” set to début in January.) “Interview” marks an auspicious start to this I.P. venture; by taking lavish and clever liberties with the source text, the series may well surpass Rice’s vision in resonance and complexity. In the novel, which begins in the eighteenth century, Louis is a white Louisiana plantation…