Innholdsfortegnelse for February 27, 2023 i The New Yorker

I don’t remember when I first saw Randall Park, only that one day he seemed to be everywhere. Park, a forty-eight-year-old Korean American actor, has been on television and in film for nearly two decades, becoming one of those faces you recognize instantly—but from what? For years, he had cameos and guest spots, playing a doctor, a friend of a friend, another doctor. He’s been on “The Office,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and “Veep,” and he is one of the few actors currently working in both the Marvel and the D.C. cinematic universes. His career has been defined by a kind of chummy adaptability, whether he plays a dictator (he made Kim Jong Un seem like a fun hang in “The Interview,” from 2014) or raps, as he did as a…

Late last year, as Israel swore in the most right-wing government in its history, a despairing joke circulated online. A picture broken into squares to resemble a captcha—the test designed to tell you from a robot—depicted the members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. The caption read, “Select the squares in which people who have been indicted appear.” The correct answer involved half of them. It was the kind of message that has become typical of Israel’s center and left in recent years: grim, cynical, ultimately resigned. A few weeks later, Netanyahu’s cabinet introduced the first stage in a judicial overhaul that would weaken the country’s Supreme Court and render the government largely impervious to oversight. Right-wing legislators had floated a similar measure before, but it was regarded as too…

It’s true I hate the stories about the other women,but I love the description of their daily lives, like the scenewith twelve raspberry cakes in a French café,or the drunkard asking for the way. A bottle of whiskeyon a heavy walnut table, my husband’s hands on a glass.No one’s muses are believable, said the painterwhom I loved for twelve weeks and who wouldrarely touch me. To him, the female bodywas a plant: it needed to be tended and spokento, but too much warmth would spoil the matter.In his paintings that I like best, women wander through citiesand notice objects. Lanterns. Hats they can’tafford. Little glasses of Pernod. I loved himto hurt the other one, whom I loved more. And so,most of my life, it passes like this: light touchingmy skin,…

This Other Eden, by Paul Harding (Norton). This historical novel takes inspiration from the formation, in the mid-nineteenth century—and, in 1912, the forced eviction—of a mixed-race fishing community on Malaga Island, Maine. Harding’s version is called Apple Island, and he movingly depicts the islanders’ dispossession. He imbues his characters with mythological weight—a world-drowning flood is the island’s foundational story—without losing the texture of their daily lives, which are transformed by a white missionary. Of his presence, one islander observes, “No good ever came of being noticed by mainlanders,” foreshadowing the arrival of eugenicist doctors wielding skull-measuring calipers, a project to remake the island as a tourist destination, and the destruction of the community. Daughter in Exile, by Bisi Adjapon (HarperVia). In this bildungsroman wrapped in a migrant story, Lola, a…

Two weeks ago, with his new dance, “Copland Dance Episodes,” Justin Peck finally became Justin Peck. And New York City Ballet emerged from its post-Balanchine sleep and found, at least for a moment, a new self. We have waited a very long time—through years of bitter disagreement over the company’s legacy, through the embattled leadership of Peter Martins, and through season after season of mediocre new ballets that suggested a company unable to move on. More recently, the company suffered a spate of egregious #MeToo scandals and embarked on a long-overdue racial reckoning. Peck grew up in this era. He arrived at the School of American Ballet in 2003, when he was fifteen; joined N.Y.C.B. as a dancer four years later; and soon began making dances. In 2014, he became…

THE REAL LYDIA TÁR In Michael Schulman’s interview with the director Todd Field, Field speculated that the fictional protagonist of his new movie, the conductor Lydia Tár, might have lied about studying with our father, Leonard Bernstein (Notes on Hollywood, January 14th, www.newyorker.com/tar). As representatives of Bernstein’s estate, and in the spirit of the ongoing hubbub over the film, we can assure Field that his heroine was a teen-age prodigy whose talents were so formidable that she was granted special permission to be one of Bernstein’s conducting students at Tanglewood in the summer of 1990, during the final year of Bernstein’s life. His impact on her artistry is indelible, down to her churning “washing machine” movements, an intriguing adaptation of Bernstein’s legendary podium style. Field added, “It would be good…

Identity evolves. Social categories shrink or expand, become stiffer or more elastic, more specific or more abstract. What it means to be white or Black, Indian or American, able-bodied or not shifts as we tussle over language, as new groups take on those labels and others strip them away. On August 3, 1989, the Indigenous identity evolved. Moringe ole Parkipuny, a Maasai activist and a former member of the Tanzanian Parliament, spoke before the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations, in Geneva—the first African ever to do so. “Our cultures and way of life are viewed as outmoded, inimical to national pride, and a hindrance to progress,” he said. As a result, pastoralists like the Maasai, along with hunter-gatherers, “suffer from common problems which characterize the plight of indigenous peoples…

I wanted to write a poem about delayThe white space between word and musicOne night in Ohio a decade agoUnder a thunderstorm’s bad blank verse As I counted aloud between lightning and clapA friend tackled me to the groundTo shut me up so he could hear it, the faintPercussion I could just call thunder If I wanted to be clearI’ve tried to write this poem for yearsBut can’t and won’t, as every lineFalls faster than I can chase it, acid raindrop Seeping into clover, garbage lyricsRising through its stem, poetry almostAs toxic as the citySpraying my neighborhood down A pesticide to x the little messengersSo megafauna can continuePlanting real estateSome sad poet named this chemical Duet The friend who tackled me got sickI visited as he received a drip of…

She heard their footsteps on the stairs. Water running in their bathroom. She sensed her daughters everywhere, but it was just her imagination. They were gone. Of course, they would come back. They were safe, and it was just till Sunday. It wasn’t death—it only felt like that. Her friends said, Now you can rest! You can think! You can work out! Theoretically, she could have done these things. She could have been thinking and going to the gym and resting, but when the girls left with their father Debra sat on the couch and cried. Which was fine. Crying was good. Divorce was hard! All she had to do was call, and her sister Becca would come right over, but Debra didn’t want sympathy, so no one saw her…

Nathan Lane and Danny Burstein are Broadway veterans and consummate showmen, greeted as beloved tummlers whenever they appear onstage. Purveyors of the same wry bonhomie, these two throwbacks to the vaudevillian era could almost be brothers—Lane is sixty-seven to Burstein’s fifty-eight—but in “Pictures from Home,” at Studio 54, they play father and son. What to do? The production has decided to fake an age gap with hair styling: a white swoosh for Lane and a glossy dark emocoif for Burstein. Whenever my mind wandered, I watched the lights play on these oddly reflective hairpieces. The shine—Burstein’s head occasionally turns a kind of bronzy purple—isn’t only a question of wigs. It also illuminates the deeper trouble with the playwright Sharr White’s stage adaptation of the photographer Larry Sultan’s book, an endeavor…

FEBRUARY 22 – 28, 2023 Ever since Nora, the heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s proto-feminist masterwork “A Doll’s House,” from 1879, walked out on her husband and out of her domestic cage, actresses have yearned to play her. Jessica Chastain (above, center), last year’s Best Actress Oscar winner, steps into the role for a sixteen-week Broadway run, now in previews at the Hudson, opening March 9. Jamie Lloyd directs a new adaptation, by Amy Herzog, featuring (from left to right) Arian Moayed (“Succession”) and Okieriete Onaodowan (“Hamilton”). As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. MUSIC Bill Crow JAZZ As an impeccable bassist, Bill Crow laid down a granite foundation for the élite of the cool-jazz school, including Gerry Mulligan and Stan Getz, plus a host of mainstream…

A few years ago, a mining company was considering reopening an old mine shaft in Welkom, a city in South Africa’s interior. Welkom was once the center of the world’s richest goldfields. There were close to fifty shafts in an area roughly the size of Brooklyn, but most of these mines had been shut down in the past three decades. Large deposits of gold remained, though the ore was of poor grade and situated at great depths, making it prohibitively expensive to mine on an industrial scale. The shafts in Welkom were among the deepest that had ever been sunk, plunging vertically for a mile or more and opening, at different levels, onto cavernous horizontal passages that narrowed toward the gold reefs: a labyrinthine network of tunnels far beneath the…

Maybe it was only a matter of time before the novel took on the podcast. You can barely crack the Times without encountering a heady profile of some hot new podcaster; when critics consider how stories are told—or even just use that language, how stories are told—they are as likely to be discussing podcasts as books. These same critics may belabor themes (the fugitive nature of truth, the slipperiness of memory) popularized by shows such as “Serial,” the 2014 blockbuster, narrated by Sarah Koenig, that investigated the killing of a Maryland girl. The series electrified group chats, provided rich loam for conspiracy theories, and turned hordes of millennials into experts on cell towers. Crucially, it also regarded its own genre, true crime, with ambivalence, wearing its nuance like a finely…