Innholdsfortegnelse for March 6, 2023 i The New Yorker

Stacy Spikes, the C.E.O. of Movie-Pass, was buying popcorn at the Angelika Film Center the other day, before a screening of Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale.” “I think it’s incredible,” Spikes said of the film, which he’d seen already. “You don’t see overweight people, you don’t see addiction, you don’t see a broken heart the same way as you did before.” He filled a cup with Diet Coke before making his way to Theatre 1, fourth row center. (He always studies the map before picking a seat.) Spikes is a movie nerd who has dedicated a chunk of his career to helping theatres survive the age of smartphones and streaming. In 2011, he co-founded MoviePass, a service that let users pay a flat monthly fee to see up to one movie…

Twitter launched a new verified program this winter with manual authentication and different-colored check marks for different types of users. The C.E.O., Elon Musk, tweeted, “Gold checks for companies, grey check for government, blue for individuals (celebrity or not) … Painful, but necessary.” The program has been so successful that Twitter is already upgrading, adding new colors to its verification palette. Choose your shade, and price range! NEW BLUES! Teal ($8/month). Account holders may impersonate anyone in their family, apartment building, workplace, health club, church, or H.M.O. Light, Light, Light Blue ($16.99/month). Account holders may impersonate any celebrities who have not had a movie or television credit since 1991. (Price includes monthly $8.99 IMDbresearch fee.) “Blue” ($7.99/month). The blue check mark is in quotes, which indicates a verified parody for…

Although we’ve spent so much time clearing fieldsit seems a plow does little more than scratchthe surface of the land we’d hoped would yieldone hundred pumpkins from the pumpkin patch and represent a hundredfold increase.Although we’ve spent so much time clearing fieldsand taken out quite a long leaseon this hacked rim of the Canadian Shield only recently has it been revealedit’s not just in our beds lovers must bundle.Although we’ve spent so much time clearing fieldsit seems we’ve simultaneously trundled granite blocks, boulders, and boundary termsinto a single tract where we’ve now sealedtheir fates and are quite bent on holding firmalthough we’ve spent so much time clearing fields.…

Put my houseinside theboat Can we dothat put my doginsideof yourdog put these birdsinside ofyours put my ocean put your oceanall overmy mountains put my mountainsin there put my dogin yours my dog walkis safeinside yourdog walk let meeat insideyou. Let me eatyour food let me eatyour house put your houseinside mydog put your dogon myboat naturalize put my heartin yours put my mouthon yourmouth put my hairin yours let me breatheinside you let me smell your guts put your boatin my eye let me eatyour friends put these hoursinside yourhours eat this birdcheep eat mydog’sfoot eat that ocean run to himo’er theo-o-cean run to themhear thesebirds cheap fly to meeat my foot put my houseinside yoursin yourmind thinkme fly this flyme homelove menow forget your phoneeat my heart run…

Vesna Goldsworthy’s life and work have involved multiple migrations: from Belgrade to London; from writing in Serbian to writing in English; from literary scholarship to memoir to poetry and then to the novel. To that last genre, she has now contributed three books, and the latest, “Iron Curtain: A Love Story” (Norton), is yet another departure, from skillful contrivance to full-throated voice. The emotions of this well-conjured novel are raw, its observations acute. Goldsworthy is so intent on getting where she wants to go that, from the book’s earliest pages, she repeatedly—and-artfully—telegraphs its bitter ending, thereby freeing a reviewer from the need to issue any spoiler alerts. (The first epigraph comes from “Medea”: “Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.”) The book’s prologue…

THE VALUE OF THE NEWS In his piece on public trust in the news, Louis Menand corrects the claim by Kathryn J. McGarr, the author of “City of Newsmen,” that the Washington Post did not hire its second Black reporter until 1972 (A Critic at Large, February 6th). Menand notes that, after the Post hired its first Black reporter, in the early fifties, two more—Dorothy Gilliam and Jack White—were hired in the sixties. But his correction is incomplete. It’s true that in 1951 Simeon Booker became the Post’s first Black reporter. He was followed by Luther Jackson, in 1959, and by Wallace Terry, in 1960. (Dorothy Gilliam was the next Black hire.) Other Black reporters who joined the staff in the sixties and early seventies include Jesse W. Lewis, Jr.,…

In the fall of 1802, the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt arrived in Callao, Peru’s major port, just west of Lima. Humboldt had timed his visit to coincide with a transit of Mercury, which he planned to observe through a three-foot telescope, in order to determine Lima’s longitude. He set up his instruments atop a fort on the waterfront, and then, with a few days to kill before the event, wandered the docks. A powerful stench emanating from boats loaded with what looked like yellowish clay piqued his curiosity. From the locals, Humboldt learned that the material was bird shit from the nearby Chincha Islands, and that it was highly prized by farmers in the area. Hedecided to take some home with him. When human beings invented agriculture, some ten…

In 1969, Edward Larry Gordon—a standup comedian, part-time jazz pianist, and aspiring actor—walked into a New York City pawnshop, hoping to hock his guitar for rent money. Instead, Gordon found himself preter-naturally drawn to an Autoharp, a type of zither popularized in the nineteen-forties by Mother Maybelle, of the Carter Family, and prominent in the folk revival then going on in Greenwich Village. He lugged it back to his apartment in Harlem and started tinkering, eventually prying off the chord bars (which allowed him to more easily experiment with pentatonic, modal, and minor tunings) and adding a contact pickup (which electrified the instrument). Soon, Gordon was playing the Autoharp through effects pedals, and cramming various odds and ends, including chopsticks, mallets, and pedalsteel slides, underneath the strings—a technique popularized, for…

Cobalt Red, by Siddharth Kara (St. Martin’s). Much of the world’s cobalt—vital to the batteries that power cell phones, laptops, and much else—comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mined in conditions that this intrepid exposé characterizes as “predation for profit,” carried out at “minimum cost and maximum suffering.” Kara draws from interviews with miners, some as young as ten, whose work puts them at risk of respiratory ailments and heavy-metal poisoning. Parents tell him of children lost when tunnels collapsed. His sympathetic, often enraging account is animated by the idea that the first step in ending such calamities is “advancing the ability of the Congolese people to conduct their own research and safely speak for themselves.” Three Roads Back, by Robert D. Richardson (Princeton). This posthumous treatise on grief,…

MARCH 1 – 7, 2023 Part spoken-word performance, part concert, part postmodern portrait of the making of a one-man show, Arinzé Kene’s “Misty” comes to the Shed, starting previews on March 3. As a Black Briton moving around London’s transit system, the actor-playwright-rhapsode found inspiration in the idea of people as a virus; accompanied musically by Adrian McLeod and Shiloh Coke (and sometimes challenged by them), Kene explores ways that overfamiliar constructs of Blackness infect his artistic expression, and the contagious impacts of gentrification. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. DANCE Batsheva Dance Company In Ohad Naharin’s “Hora,” no one is hoisted in a chair. The 2009 work takes place in a green room with a long bench along the back wall. Rising off that…

In the nineteen-sixties, Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at M.I.T., created a computer program called Eliza. It was designed to simulate Rogerian therapy, in which the patient directs the conversation and the therapist often repeats her language back to her: USER: My boyfriend made me come here. ELIZA: Your boyfriend made you come here. USER: He says I’m depressed much of the time. ELIZA: I am sorry to hear you are depressed. USER: It’s true. I am unhappy. ELIZA: Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy? Weizenbaum made Eliza as satire. He doubted that computers could simulate meaningful human interaction. He was alarmed, therefore, when many people who tried the program found it both useful and captivating. His own secretary asked him to leave the…

The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first. From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent. “It’s hard for students like me, who are pursuing an English major, to find joy in what they’re doing,” Meg Macias, a junior, said one afternoon as the edges of the sky over the campus went soft. It was late autumn, and the sunsets came in like flame on thin paper on the way to…

The guard on duty blocked the woman with his M16. She was slender, one shoulder slanted down as if the suitcase she carried in her hand were too heavy for her. As she spoke to him, the steam of her breath rose up in the cold air. The window of the guard post, which stood like a little tower at the entrance to the base, snapped open. “Hey, what’s she saying?” a staff sergeant called out. “Send her in.” The staff sergeant wore his winter cap mashed flat on his head. “What brings you here?” he asked when the woman came closer. “I came to visit Private Kim. Kim Young-min.” “What unit is he with?” “I’m not sure,” she said. “I wouldn’t know that sort of thing. I just know…

The bookstore in your neighborhood sits on a busy corner. You pass it on your walk to work in the mornings, and on your walk home in the evenings, and although you sometimes admire the clever geometries of its window display, rarely do you take a closer look. But, not long ago, the sight of a particular book made you pause. Your eye lingered on its pure-white cover and on a curious shape cut into it. Without thinking, you walked into the store. The clerk was working at her computer. The other customers were leafing through books lifted from the great pyramids of new releases on the front table. No one paid any attention to you. You reached for the book you had spotted. The author was Italo Calvino, whose…

By the time the cult sitcom “Party Down” began airing on Starz in 2009, after a six-year search for a network home, it had become a Great Recession comedy. Set at a different gathering or celebration each week, the show followed Los Angeles’s worst catering crew—a ragbag of struggling actors, writers, and comedians glued to their flip phones, who approach basic hospitality like an exotic custom. Naturally, their clients are even less sympathetic. In the second episode of the series, the servers attend to a group of college Republicans. With then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the part of Godot, the workers are forcedto make chitchat with the conservatives while they wait for the guest of honor to arrive. Henry (Adam Scott), a bartender whose brief stint as the star of…