Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2-9, 2023 i The New Yorker

You can learn a lot about what’s trending by reading T-shirts. A few months ago, I saw someone on the subway whose chest announced, “My other car is an eBike.” The tee was onto something: e-bikes are the top-selling electric vehicle in the United States. In 2020, Americans bought more than twice as many e-bikes as they did electric cars (score: an estimated 500,000 to 231,000). In China, e-bikes outnumber all cars, e- and not e-, Edward Benjamin, the chairman of the Light Electric Vehicle Association, told me over the phone from his house in Fort Myers, Florida. He went on, “Can Americans change from a four-wheel culture to a two-wheel culture in the next century? I say absolutely! There ain’t enough roadway, there ain’t enough materials to build cars,…

Soliciting pedestrians in the Matongé neighborhood of Brussels, Kehinde Wiley, forty-five, looked more like a sidewalk canvasser than he did a world-famous artist. He sidled up to strangers in an orange hoodie and lime-green Air Jordans, extending a hand and flashing a gap-toothed grin. In nearly fluent French, he explained that he wanted to paint them, and offered to pay three hundred euros if they came in for a photo shoot the following afternoon. Most passersby ignored him or gave excuses: jobs, parking meters, and even a preference for being pictured exclusively from behind. For those who stopped, Wiley produced an exhibition catalogue, flipping through pages of classically posed portraits with models who were Black like them. It was early April, still freezing in the medieval city that Charles Baudelaire…

Before it was an edict, and a death sentence, it was a rumor. To many, it must have seemed improbable; I imagine my grandmother, buying her vegetables at the market, settling her baby on her hip, craning to hear the news—a border, where? Two borders, to be exact. On the eve of their departure, in 1947, after more than three hundred years on the subcontinent, the British sliced the land into a Hindu-majority India flanked by a Muslim-majority West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), a thousand miles apart. The boundaries were drawn up in five weeks by an English barrister who had famously never before been east of Paris; he flew home directly afterward and burned his papers. The slash of his pen is known as Partition. A tidy…

You always learn something new when you watch somebody drink. Not that vino leads to veritas in any literal way—but, over the span of a long, soggy night, small, revealing details, often more gestural than verbal, accumulate. How your fellow-partygoer holds a glass, or how often she takes a drink, or what counts, in her world, as a cocktail: all of this helps you to know her better, to figure out where she’s really coming from. Two recent productions—“Des Moines,” the final play by the late Denis Johnson, from 2007, and a revival of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer-winning “Between Riverside and Crazy,” from 2014, in its Broadway-première—feature alcohol as a spur and a guiding presence, a conduit to otherwise fugitive knowledge. The central event of “Des Moines”—directed by Arin Arbus,…

THE NEED FOR HOSPICE The cases of fraud that Ava Kofman documents in her article about the hospice industry are deeply disturbing (“Endgame,” December 5th). Almost the entire piece is devoted to detailing instances of wrongdoing—some of them hair-raising, all of them maddening. Yet it also notes that the more than a hundred and fifty interviewees, though concerned about exploitation of the system, all praised the hospice mission. Why not contrast the fraudsters with some places that are doing it right, like the services in Arizona and New York that allowed my mother, my father, and, most recently, my husband to die at home, with dignity and with family by their sides? I hope that Kofman’s investigation will bring about reform, but I also hope that it will not discourage…

When the British actor Bob Hoskins agreed to star in “Super Mario Bros.,” he had little sense of what he was getting into. The year was 1992, and, although the title on which the film was based had sold tens of millions of copies, a feature-length live-action adaptation of a video game had never been attempted. The movie’s eventual tagline, “This ain’t no game,” reflected a self-conscious distance from its source material: a convoluted parallel-universe plot recast the heroes as Italian American handymen from Brooklyn and the princess they set out to save as an N.Y.U. archeology student. Hoskins himself hadn’t even heard of the Nintendo franchise—but when his kids learned that he would be playing Mario they excitedly showed him the game. “This is you!” one said, gesturing to…

I once heard a woman say that immediately upon finding out, she’d felt the dawning of a strange inner power. It seemed as though she could undertake any task, could live through any hardship. This was a strength not of muscles, the woman said, but of light. In this new form of herself, she felt more alive than she ever had before. She was recounting all this once it was already over, after she’d had an abortion, but her memory of that brief experience was still tinted by her encounter with what she now believed to be immortality. The woman’s story stayed with me, and I thought about her words when I myself found out, searching my body and mind for signs of my own power. I can’t say that…

If Walls Could Speak, by Moshe Safdie (Atlantic Monthly). This richly detailed autobiography by the renowned architect weaves together memoir, a tour of select projects, and philosophical meditations. Born in Haifa in 1938, Safdie moved to Canada with his family when he was a teen-ager, and attained success at a young age: his master’s thesis, a system of modular housing units, was realized as Montreal’s Habitat 67 residential complex. It brought together many of his lasting pre-occupations, including access to nature and high urban density. Safdie’s reflections on his other projects, which range from Jerusalem’s Holocaust History Museum—a structure built into a mountain, “cutting through like a spike”—to Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands, combine intellectual convictions with intuitions about the effects of space, light, sound, earth, and water, illuminating the impulses that…

The TV adaptation of the novel “Fleishman Is in Trouble” begins with the mildest and least interesting of the simultaneous midlife crises plaguing the show’s three main characters. On a cloudless summer day in Manhattan, Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg), a recent divorcé, wakes up in his sparsely furnished apartment, alarmed that he is “suddenly, somehow, no longer living with Rachel,” his wife of fifteen years. His angry confusion that Rachel (Claire Danes) has dropped off their preteen children at his place, in the middle of the night with little warning, briefly distracts him from his general dismay that his off-spring have become products of the Upper East Side: his daughter (Meara Mahoney Gross) screeches that the clothes her mother packed for her are more suitable for the Hamptons than for…

After skipping two years, for obvious reasons, a beloved holiday tradition is back in the streets of East Harlem—El Museo del Barrio’s Three Kings Day Parade and Celebration, which is now in its forty-sixth year. Some revellers show up dressed as the wise men, but there are other Biblical trios: look for fresh faces self-styled as la Sagrada Família (pictured above, in 2020). Everyone is welcome to join the hour-long procession, which begins at 11 a.m., on Jan. 6, but registration, via elmuseo.org, is required. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. MUSIC The Aimee Mann and Ted Leo Christmas Show! ROCK Aimee Mann and Ted Leo began collaborating, under the inconspicuous band name the Both, in 2013. The pairing revealed two artists with more in…

If only I could live my life, not write it,I’d have double the experience and be better at nothingness, at being present.The page, I once believed, offers permanence, sanctifying time, making it longer,but now I see my words as susceptible, even if digital, to fire, flood, misplacement.To misinterpretation. To accidental download by enemy. I don’t yet want themto be lost, but I dread the possibility that they won’t self-destruct at the endof my life, or the end of my lucidity. Maybe I’ve been using paper all wrong,committing to ink what should live in my head, which is part of my body, which will not last.Long ago, in college, a friend once said he would never keep a journal; he preferredto live in the moment. Back home in June, I threw…

Robert Johnson walked to the crossroads,the place where the spirits chatter,and there he met a large Black man, some called him Satan,some called him Legba, some called him Blues.But, whatever he was, he took Robert Johnson’s guitar,and he played the guitar, and played it well,and when Robert Johnson returned to the landof the living, the small towns, the juke joints, the bars,and the fields of elation and suffering,he was transformed in ways that let folks knowthat he left something behind with that big Black man.There is a faint line between gratitude and loathing,the self, turning in on itself—for what does it deserve?And it is not even a question in search of an answer,for the answer, elegant as a prayer, is as ancientas the pathologies of desperate people in searchof a…

Part of what makes John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres’s show “Swagger and Tenderness: The South Bronx Portraits” (at the Bronx Museum) so remarkable is that it reminds you of two things that made New York City, predevelopment, so remarkable: chance and faith. Back in 1961, Jane Jacobs, in her prescient study “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” argued that urban planning—highways, high-rises, and malls—came at a terrible price. By obliterating communities, you obliterated all that they fostered: the happy accidents and impromptu encounters that could lead toan exchange of ideas that might expand your understanding of both the individual and the community as a whole. Ahearn, who makes plaster-cast sculptures of Black and Hispanic people he has known and admired in the four decades that he’s worked in…