Innholdsfortegnelse for February 6, 2023 i The New Yorker

I was on my way to Everything Mason Jars one day when I saw a fancy-candle store. I’ve been wanting a fancy candle for some time, so I popped in. Sandra (not her real name): Hi, welcome to Everything Candles! We have a hundred different fragrances. I’m Sandra. Can I help you? Me: Do you have a candle that smells like writing? Sandra: What does writing smell like? Me: Ozone, maybe? With top notes of burning, or metal, or burning metal. Or an electrical fire. Live wires sparking and smoking. Solder? Something that blends the flash of an idea and the slow burn of wrestling it into something real. Something that will get me fat stacks or fame. Do you have anything that smells like that? Sandra: I’m not sure….…

When it was time for the suffering to end, we powered downand sat on the steps as if waiting for a chariotdrawn by a loss for words. If only the mind were made to reflectthe world more completely, as if we agreed to it, we would be free of so many difficulties—the path ahead of us miraculouslywrinkleless, cleared of fallen things. What we saw or heard or feltwould be an echo of what was, a duplicate of the presentwillow traced by the sun on the fishpond of our wakefulness. Easier said than done! Turns out the frictionbetween what’s real and my take on it might be the batterythat keeps me awake to begin with, and I hadn’t stopped to considerwhat happens when we sleep—all those fudgy distortions and embellishments tricked…

LOST AT SEA As a journalist covering the refugee crisis in Greece, I commend Alexis Okeowo’s article about the many migrants who have disappeared while crossing the Mediterranean (“The Missing,” January 16th). The piece, however, could have further highlighted how European Union coast guards, particularly in Greece, are contributing to the deaths of asylum seekers by pushing them back out to sea, instead of rescuing them. According to the Guardian, E.U. member states have subjected some forty thousand refugees to such treatment during the pandemic, resulting in more than two thousand deaths. Last July, the European Court of Human Rights condemned the practice, even as the Greek government continues to deny that it is happening. This behavior must be called out, as it is an outright violation of the European…

The woman brings her hands together in front of her chest. Frowns, and looks up at the blackboard. “O.K., read it out,” the man with the thick-lensed, silver-rimmed spectacles says with a smile. The woman’s lips twitch. She moistens her lower lip with the tip of her tongue. In front of her chest, her hands are quietly restless. She opens her mouth, and closes it again. She holds her breath, then exhales deeply. The man steps toward the blackboard and patiently asks her again to read. The woman’s eyelids tremble. Like insects’ wings rubbing briskly together. The woman closes her eyes, reopens them. As if she hopes in the moment of opening her eyes to find herself transported to some other location. The man adjusts his glasses, his fingers thickly…

Pirate Enlightenment, Or the Real Libertalia, by David Graeber (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this posthumous volume, the late anthropologist and anarchist continues his reëxamination of the Enlightenment by expanding the story of communities that contributed to its thought. His focus is the pirate settlements founded on the east coast of Madagascar at the turn of the eighteenth century. Having conducted field research there and consulted historical sources, Graeber hypothesizes about a loosely organized pirate kingdom created from the inter-marriage of pirates and the Malagasy people. Graeber believes that pirates’ social organization was often more egalitarian than popular portrayals suggest: in a refuge far from European courts, radical political experiments were already under way. The Scythian Empire, by Christopher I. Beckwith (Princeton). Often regarded by historians as a collection of savage tribes,…

A backdrop, a stool, a beverage, a A microphone. A man wanders onstage and grumbles self-deprecatingly; the audience fidgets in anticipation. The world is in flames, and such familiar comforts are an escape. Please, let us laugh. We’re living through a comedy-as-theatre boom: metatheatrical quasi-autobiographies (Kate Berlant, Daniel Kitson), avant-garde character work (Natalie Palamides, Cole Escola), quicksilver candor (Jerrod Carmichael, Taylor Tomlinson), and Spalding Gray-esque evening-length storytelling (anything written or produced by Mike Birbiglia). But Colin Quinn, in his soothing, pseudo-cantankerous standup special “Small Talk,” at the Lucille Lortel, wants you to know right away that he won’t be bothered with all that young person’s guff. He’s skeptical of social media, if you can believe it. He mocks his own untucked shirt and his gym shoes. (“I’m an old man,”…

FEBRUARY 1 – 7, 2023 Madison Square Park hosts the acclaimed Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander’s first public project, “Havah … to breathe, air, life,” a striking pair of female figures, on view through June 4. One sculpture appears on the rooftop of the neighboring Courthouse of the Appellate Division, First Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York (pictured above, mid-installation). The second monument graces the park itself, where an augmented-reality component helps visitors locate her soaring companion. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. MUSIC DJ Holographic HOUSE A modern d.j. emphasizing disco—either in its spun-sugar seventies model or its sleeker, MIDI-driven early-eighties style—is in danger of seeming overly familiar. Ariel Corley, who performs as DJ Holographic, sidesteps these worries, or…

Disibodenberg, a nine-hundred-year-old Benedictine monastery in the Rhineland region of western Germany, is a majestically dismal ruin, its roofless buildings overrun by ivy and interspersed with stands of oak, ash, and beech. When I searched out the site, last May, I was the only visitor. I half expected to come across Caspar David Friedrich painting at an easel. One sector, consisting of scattered blocks and fragments of walls, is marked with a sign, in German: “Area of the Hildegard Convent (12th Cent.).” This, according to one guess, is where the nun, theologian, poet, and composer Hildegard of Bingen spent about forty years of her eight-decade life. In her teens, she was enclosed with two other nuns at the monastery, seemingly destined for a life of anonymous devotion. Something of the…

Late in the evening on April 2, 1974, the forty-sixth Academy Awards had already secured their place in the history books. At ten years old, Tatum O’Neal had become the youngest person ever to win an Oscar, for “Paper Moon.” Katharine Hepburn had attended the ceremony for the first time, to present an award. David Niven, sharing hosting duties with Burt Reynolds, Diana Ross, and John Huston, introduced Hepburn with the line “To conceal the identity of our next presenter has called for a security operation of truly royal proportions.” A little royalty—and a little decorum—was what the Academy desperately craved. As in recent years, with such surprise sideshows as the Best Picture envelope mixup (“Moonlight” or “La La Land”?) and Will Smith smacking Chris Rock, the Oscars of the…

My heart is completely simple, of onesubstance like a mole, a dark heap of pigment mired in a blandit doesn’t mind. My mouth is a promise in a driver’s-side mirrorand adjusts with a button that gives with a pinkie flick. My feet demurelycallused because I will work and work. I may as well have had just one organ,so simple am I, one tube, like a sea sponge with brine washing my osculum,crumbing up my fibrous pores. There is nothing scary, amiss, or unrelatable about me,who am comme il faut. You’d think I was a plant, you’d think, No problem!,getting closer. Nothing to see at all, folks, though no impediment to lingeringshould you choose. What the bleached coral don’t say: how they drank today’s hot chaliceall themselves. No one put me…

The molten monument that is Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is routinely described as the work of a man facing imminent death. It took shape in the summer of 1909, two years after Mahler was given a diagnosis of rheumatic heart disease. Leonard Bernstein liked to argue that the strange, staggered pulse of the opening bars replicates symptoms of Mahler’s condition. The immense emotional range of the symphonic narrative that ensues—desperate longing, false triumph, vertiginous collapse, desolate meandering, damaged nostalgia, rancid rage, full-throated lament—finds resolution in twenty-seven legendarily transcendent bars for strings alone. The markings tell the story: adagissimo (as slow as possible), mit inniger Empfindung (with deep feeling), aüsserst langsam (extremely slow), ersterbend (dying away). Mahler died in 1911, with his Tenth Symphony unfinished. The trouble with doom-laden readings of the…

TV sleuths tend to come tortured (“True Detective”) or brilliant bordering on clairvoyant (“Sherlock”). On Natasha Lyonne’s series “Russian Doll,” her character was closer to the former: a woman laden with familial tragedy trying to suss out why she keeps dying and then being resurrected on her thirty-sixth birthday. On her new show, “Poker Face” (Peacock), a murder-of-the-week series created by the film director Rian Johnson, she plays a human lie detector: her Spidey sense goes off when someone’s not telling the truth. This premise is so silly that a different development process might have taken the project to CBS. But Lyonne’s smirkingly wise presence, combined with Johnson’s fanciful yet humanistic approach to the mystery genre (most recently seen in “Knives Out” and its sequel, “Glass Onion”), renders their “Columbo”…