Innholdsfortegnelse for December 5, 2022 i The New Yorker

The frantic adding machineof a wasps’ nestin the eaves, its fizzing pregnancy, thrillingto lay an earto the plasterboard wall, let its raving fusionblur with the mind.The waspman cometh in T-shirt and shorts,pumps white dustunder a roof tile through an extendable wand.Insecticide clings to fine hairson the legs and wings; panicked, they ferry the powderdeeper and deeperinto the chambers and halls, through cloistersand vaulted naves,all the way to the throne. The collapsing soundand sinking heatof a city-state as it empties and falls. On fire,an ambulance rolls to a halton a soft verge; the last Trojan childtotters in wooden clogsthrough cobbled streets … He takes the dead nestsinto schools; kids squealat the monster’s skull and the mausoleumof opened brain,poke crayons and felt pens in the vacant tombs. I fitthe quelled atticback on…

Last night my husband dreamed I left him, though my husband never dreams, or if he does he dreams of nothing—of sending an e-mail, petting the cat. “I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future,” Rilke, and not my husband, said. My husband brought up his dream over breakfast, but I had an early day, errands, a million meetings. I was almost out the door. Later, on my way back home, I’m waiting for a westbound train, shifting a bag of groceries, when someone texts me a clip, so I tap my screen to watch. In it a man in a dark-blue suit steps up to a waiting group. His back is to the camera. He’s speaking to a woman and a…

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION Jeannie Suk Gersen does a brilliant job of laying out the stakes for the SCOTUS decisions in the cases filed by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard and the University of North Carolina (Comment, November 7th). I was in my first year of law school at Rutgers-Newark when the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case was argued, in 1977. The next year, the Court ruled against quotas, specifically against the sixteen out of a hundred slots reserved for minorities at U.C. Davis’s medical school. At the time, I remember, women and people of color regarded the decision as a defeat, as it replaced an objective criterion with a vague and necessarily subjective standard permitting race to be considered as only one of any number of…

Mick Herron is a broad-shouldered Englishman with close-cropped black hair, lightly salted, and fine and long-fingered hands, like a pianist’s or a safecracker’s. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and he is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony. He does not drive a car and he does not own a smartphone, and, in the softly carpeted apartment in Oxford where, wearing woollen slippers, he writes spy novels—the best in a generation, by some estimations, and irrefutably the funniest—he does not have Wi-Fi. He used to be a copy editor. He has never been a secret agent, except insofar as all writers are spies and maybe, lately, so is everyone else. Spy fiction got good and going in the years before the First World War, and took flight afterward. In 1927,…

What exactly is an “oral history,” and why would we need one? Most history begins and ends with personal witness, and even written documents, after all, were very often once spoken memories, with many of the best histories depending on recollected conversation, from Boswell’s life of Dr. Johnson to the court memoirs of Saint-Simon. Yet the term has become so much a part of our book culture that it tells us to expect something very specific: a heavily edited chain of first-person recollections, broken into distinct related bits, about a place or a system or an event. Although the contemporary version has roots in the oral histories compiled by the W.P.A. in the nineteen-thirties, it seems to derive, in form, from documentary films of the sixties like those of D.…

The Backstreets, by Perhat Tursun, translated from the Uyghur by Darren Byler and Anonymous (Columbia). The narrator of this dark, existential novel—a startling literary document of urban alienation—is an Uyghur man roaming Ürümqi in search of a room to rent. As he wanders, he encounters menacing strangers, disembodied screams, trash. At work, he is revolted by the falsity of his colleagues and fixates on a sheet of random numbers, searching for combinations that might make sense of his predicament. “I don’t know anyone in this strange city, so it’s impossible for me to be friends or enemies with anyone,” he says, but enemies clearly exist. The author disappeared in 2018, presumably into one of China’s Xinjiang detention centers. The Magic Kingdom, by Russell Banks (Knopf). Harley Mann, the son of…

NOVEMBER 30 – DECEMBER 6, 2022 On the principle that it takes one to know one, Bruce Weber celebrates the extraordinary life and work of another photographer, the nonagenarian Paolo Di Paolo, in the documentary “The Treasure of His Youth” (opening on Dec. 9, at Film Forum). Starting in 1949, Di Paolo bore witness to social changes in postwar Italy and created revelatory portraits of some of its culture heroes, such as Anna Magnani and Pier Paolo Pasolini—and then, in 1968, abandoned photography. In interviews, Di Paolo displays a personality that’s as original as his art. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. MUSIC Bitchin Bajas EXPERIMENTAL Since starting out, in 2010, with “Tones / Zones,” the Chicago ambient trio Bitchin Bajas has made a strong…

On September 24, 2021, Yam Karkai opened Twitter to see a direct message from Reese Witherspoon. Karkai is a digital illustrator in her late twenties with a warm smile and pale-blue eyes. During the pandemic, she and her partner, Raphaël Malavieille, had decided to pack up their home in Paris and live as nomads; they were staying with Malavieille’s mother in the South of France when Karkai received Witherspoon’s message. Having an actress whose movies she had grown up watching slide into her D.M.s felt “magical,” Karkai told me. Witherspoon was writing to ask for recommendations of female artists making non-fungible tokens, or N.F.T.s. Sales of N.F.T.s in the first half of 2021 had reached $2.5 billion, and the field had a distinct boys’-club sensibility. The actress was one of…

Over the years, Marsha Farmer had learned what to look for. As she drove the back roads of rural Alabama, she kept an eye out for dilapidated homes and trailers with wheelchair ramps. Some days, she’d ride the one-car ferry across the river to Lower Peach Tree and other secluded hamlets where a few houses lacked running water and bare soil was visible beneath the floorboards. Other times, she’d scan church prayer lists for the names of families with ailing members. Farmer was selling hospice, which, strictly speaking, is for the dying. To qualify, patients must agree to forgo curative care and be certified by doctors as having less than six months to live. But at AseraCare, a national chain where Farmer worked, she solicited recruits regardless of whether they…

She who never wanted children who took pills not to have them who took pills when she feared she would she who waited for the right job the right partner the right moment to even open to the idea of them she who carried them she whose organs went two-dimensional to make space who grew a new organ whose own body bowed to the needs of the idea of something she who vomited every day for eleven weeks who travelled with sour candies in a bag until her tongue bled she who bled calmly on the phone with the doctor she who slept on the floor of an empty office she who lowered her doses of all the medicines that made her want to live in the first place she…

The avant-garde writer Kathy Acker liked to say that she wasn’t one person but many. “I’m sure there are tons of Kathy Ackers,” she told an interviewer late in her career. A quick study of her life bears this out. She was the disappointing Karen Alexander, a self-described “good little girl” who didn’t dare challenge her parents until she was in her teens. She was the intimidating woman at the loft party, with “harsh makeup and amazing punk hair,” who nonetheless struck perceptive observers as “fragile” and “childlike.” She was a sex worker, an office temp, a college instructor, and one of the most famous writers on the London scene. Later in life, she was something of a feminist icon, a muscle-bound motorcycle rider who enjoyed being photographed topless, the…

The Irish playwright Gina Moxley, a spritely, spirited presence onstage, performs to raucous, cutting effect in “The Patient Gloria,” at St. Ann’s Warehouse (presented in collaboration with the Dublin-based company Pan Pan, and directed by John McIlduff). With a sharp nose, smartly trimmed blond hair, and bright-blue eyes, she has a way of smirking that implicates the audience in her mischievous thought patterns. She speaks in tones of sardonic wonder. It makes sense, then, that the first words of her play are directed toward the crowd, falsely undermining an authority that she loosely carries. “Can you see me?” she asks. Initially, as I watched the show, it wasn’t clear whether we should answer. When we finally did, at first feebly, then gradually getting into it, Moxley kept talking, almost conversationally:…