Innholdsfortegnelse for November 14, 2022 i The New Yorker

John Lahr (“Acting Up,” p. 52) has written for the magazine since 1991. His latest book, “Arthur Miller: American Witness,” came out this month. Annie Ernaux (Fiction, p. 64) won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. “Returns” was originally published in French as “Retours,” in “Écrire la Vie,” by Éditions Gallimard, in 2011. Ian Parker (“End of the Road,” p. 40) contributed his first piece to the magazine in 1992 and became a staff writer in 2000. Liana Finck (Sketchbook, p. 61), a New Yorker cartoonist, is the author of, most recently, “Let There Be Light.” Martín Espada (Poem, p. 46) has published more than twenty books as a poet, an essayist, a translator, and an editor. His latest, “Floaters,” won the 2021 National Book Award for poetry. Amanda Petrusich…

If the Metropolitan Opera is going to produce a new work based on Michael Cunningham’s novel “The Hours” twenty years after Hollywood took a star-studded crack at it, then it has no choice but to line up its own trio of luminous leading ladies—Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato, and Kelli O’Hara—for the New York première of Kevin Puts’s opera (Nov. 22-Dec. 15). The Prototype Festival, the pacesetter for contemporary music theatre in New York, postponed its tenth-anniversary season in January, a casualty of the Omicron surge. It returns with a mix of new and rescheduled works. “Undine,” an operatic animated film about a mermaid who’s battling addiction and living in somebody’s aquarium, streams on demand, and Emma O’Halloran’s “Trade,” about a male prostitute and a closeted client, plays at Abrons Arts Center (Jan.…

The other night, as some friends and I left dinner at Ju Qi, in a new luxury mall called Tangram, in Flushing, we passed a group of patrons in the foyer behaving like kids in a candy store, literally, raiding bowls of complimentary treats with glee. They proffered handfuls for us to try, too: foil-wrapped disks of haw flakes, ruddy-pink wafers made from the red berries of the Chinese hawthorn; miniature twists of brown-sugar-glazed fried dough known as ma hua. One member of the group, a native of Beijing, wore a hazy glow of nostalgia that I imagine would please Ju Qi’s founder, Tong Han. In 2014, Han, a Beijinger, opened the first Ju Qi—which has twenty locations in China and one in Sydney—to showcase the culture of his home…

The other day, in West Hollywood, the twenty-five-year-old music producer Blake Slatkin stuck his hand into a doll house on his mantelpiece. “This is an exact miniature replica of my old recording studio,” he said, gesturing at a row of lamb-chop-size guitars and a shrunken photo grid of musicians he’d worked with. The former studio was at his mother’s house in Westwood, where he’d lived until January. Now he was on his own. “I’m very slowly learning how to be an adult,” he said. “It was super emotional. I was actually super nervous to move out of my mom’s, because I had so much good luck there.” It’s where he’d co-produced a large chunk of the songs on the Billboard Hot 100—by Lil Nas X, The Kid LAROI, 24kGoldn, Omar…

One morning in June, before dawn, cyclists began gathering at an intersection in Emporia, Kansas, to remember the victim of a recent murder. These were professional athletes as well as serious amateurs, on high-end bikes that click-clicked loudly while coming to a stop. The riders hugged; their bike lights blinked. By five-thirty, a few dozen women and men had collected in the dark. These cyclists had travelled to Emporia to compete in races the following day, in which most of them would ride for two hundred miles, on rolling unpaved roads, for at least nine and a half hours. The event is the biggest in the new niche sport of gravel-bike racing—a form of slog that presents itself as both a solo endurance test and a party in the mud.…

The emo, electronics-heavy music of the nineteen-eighties British New Wave band Tears for Fears is the unlikely—but oddly compelling—basis for “LOVETRAIN2020,” a cathartic evening of dance by the Israeli choreographer  Emanuel Gat (BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, Dec. 1-3). I’m not sure what I love more—the opulently deconstructed costumes, the moody vocals, or the jagged way the dancers move through space, like glamorous but dishevelled creatures of the night. The recurrence of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre’s annual season, at New York City Center (Nov. 30-Dec. 24), is a reliable source of joy, with its comforting mix of Ailey classics—the soul-stirring “Revelations”; the 1962 solo “Reflections in D,” a meditation on Duke Ellington—and new works. This year, the company unveils a dance by Kyle Abraham, whose silken, shape-shifting choreography feels particularly…

Barring an intrusion from you-knowwhat, the imminent cold-weather concert season should recover much of its pre-pandemic fastball, as musicians fan out across stages big and small. Recently hatched traditions come to light: the reignited LCD Soundsystem settles into Brooklyn Steel, as it did last year, for a residency that runs the length of some apartment sublets (Nov. 18-Dec. 17). Meanwhile, staples return from streaming purgatory to the flesh-and-blood realm. Carnegie Hall hosts the Tibet House U.S. Benefit Concert, which has long provided a meeting ground for wrinkled icons and young comers (March 1). GlobalFEST, a platform for acts from far-reaching pockets, reëmerges for its twentieth anniversary (David Geffen Hall, Jan. 15). Beyond globalFEST, concertgoers with classical-music allergies who are itching to see Lincoln Center’s newly renovated David Geffen Hall have…

As a rule, political candidates are not reliable historians of the present. In 2012, while in Minnesota campaigning for reëlection, President Barack Obama recounted his “tussles” with obstructionist Republicans in Congress before indulging in a bit of wishful thinking. “I believe that if we’re successful in this election,” he said, “the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that.” Not to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t been following along at home, but the fever did not break. Still, Joe Biden struck the same note in 2019, while campaigning in New Hampshire. “With Donald Trump out of the White House—not a joke—you will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends,” he said. But, as President, Biden started to…

Judd Hirsch climbed into an Escalade on the Upper East Side and directed the driver to the Bronx, where he spent most of his childhood. “I haven’t been to any of these places in years,” he rasped, dressed in a bright zigzaggy sweater. He asked the driver his name, which was Bernard. “I’m Judd,” he said. “We will probably have the same names by the end of the day, unless there’s a transformation of some sort.” Hirsch is eighty-seven but has the propulsive energy of an eight-year-old. He tends to start stories in the middle and end in the middle. Where was he? Oh, right: the time he met Colin Powell and informed him that they’d both lived on Kelly Street, in the South Bronx. “He could not believe I…

THIS PRODUCTION contains strobe lights, loud noises, and haze. THIS PRODUCTION contains a rain effect, which impacts only the sides of the audience. Luckily, this production has not sold a single ticket on the sides of the auditorium, as this production can barely sell out the middle section. THIS PRODUCTION contains strong language. But not in the literary sense. There are no memorable lines, witty jokes, or pithy observations whereby characters muse in a way that allows the playwright to make a larger point about the human experience. THIS PRODUCTION contains a scene in which the actors will be smoking. It may appear that one of the actors, the young man playing Cousin Jude, has never actually smoked a cigarette in his life, even though his character explicitly says, “I’ve…

It’s been a year since Stephen Sondheim died and, not surprisingly, his œuvre is getting a hefty workout. On the heels of a crowd-pleasing revival of “Into the Woods,” Sondheim’s 1979 musical thriller, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” slashes its way back to Broadway. Thomas Kail’s production, beginning previews on Feb. 26, at the Lunt-Fontanne, features Josh Groban as the murderous barber, the incandescent Annaleigh Ashford as his pie-making accomplice, and a twenty-six-piece orchestra. Downtown, New York Theatre Workshop revives “Merrily We Roll Along” (starting Nov. 21), Sondheim’s beloved problem child from 1981, which follows the disintegration of a three-way friendship in reverse chronology, from jaded middle age back to hopeful youth. Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, and Lindsay Mendez star in Maria Friedman’s production. Sondheim, oddly enough,…

“Yes, the Polling Warning Signs Are Flashing Again,” the Times, which has devoted a lot of resources to projecting election results, declared recently. The pronouncement was, depending on your party affiliation, the severity of your polling obsession, and your Nate allegiance (Cohn, of the Times, or Silver, of FiveThirtyEight), either an overdue corrective or a clever hedge. Polls were a liberal coping device in the early days of American democratic collapse, but we now live in a post-nine-point-errorin-Wisconsin world. Are we really ready to be hurt again? “Pollsters have gotten things wildly wrong,” Alex Shieh said the other day. He would know. He’s a pollster himself, although he can be excused for the sins of his profession; in 2016, he was eleven. After witnessing the statistical whiffs of recent cycles,…

“Life is hard and damned unfair!” the cartoonist George Booth liked to recite, in a booming voice, and then—guffaw!—crack up. It was a line he’d first heard from his former boss at the consortium of trade publications—Rubber World, Modern Tire Dealer, Fast Food—where Booth served as art director before setting up camp in the pages of The New Yorker, in 1969. Editors would come skulking into the boss’s office, begging for deadline extensions, only to be bawled out. Booth, meanwhile, was in there because he liked to take naps on the boss’s couch, and to enjoy the show. Booth, who died last week, at ninety-six (one year younger than this magazine), was a man who took in life, drew it up, and then laughed and laughed. A brief biography: He…

In May, the composer Carter Burwell flew to London to record his score for Martin McDonagh’s new movie, “The Banshees of Inisherin.” The sessions took place in Studio Two at Abbey Road—the Beatles’ old studio. The ensemble consisted of six violins, four violas, three cellos, two double-basses, a flute, a clarinet, and a harp. Burwell, who is sixty-seven, stood on a low platform and opened an annotated copy of the music on a large stand in front of him. He has wavy gray hair and a soul patch the size of a blob of shaving cream, and he was wearing jeans and an untucked collared shirt with a flower print. “For some reason, there’s a magnet and a nail on my music stand,” he told the group. “I hope I…

ACROSS 1 “Lost” character named for an English philosopher6 Trident-shaped Greek letter9 Mantelpiece item in some Hollywood homes14 “It’s no trouble at all”16 Abu ___ (capital of the United Arab Emirates)17 Site taken off the E.P.A.’s Superfund list in 2004, after twenty-one years of cleanup18 Early victims of human-induced extinction19 Environmental activist, derisively21 Malaria symptom22 Stone incorporated into the 2008 Olympic medals23 Green keeper?25 Leaves breathless27 Farewell to someone departing by car30 Vlasic’s mascot, for one31 Cheers at a fútbol match32 How oysters are often served33 Conjure34 Flower-to-be35 Cabinet member?37 Roam (about)38 Mob enforcer, e.g.40 Say what you want41 Digits at the start of digits44 Basis for awarding some financial aid45 Crept (along)46 Android purchases48 One of two on a brigantine49 People aren’t on board with it54 Not with the…