Innholdsfortegnelse for March 20, 2023 i The New Yorker

For sixty years, the residents of Charles Street, in Greenwich Village, have known that if they’re in trouble, or if they want to find some, the guy to call is their neighbor George Capsis. Capsis, who is ninety-five, with white hair and the annoyed bearing of a man whose waiter is taking too long, is the publisherof the monthly newspaper the WestView News. WestView’s constituency skews old—the types of neighborhood holdouts who might grumble that they moved to the Village for Dawn Powell and Balducci’s and ended up with Marc Jacobs and “Sex and the City” bus tours. Over the years, the paper, which was founded in 2004 and has approached a circulation of twelve thousand, has fought against change in the neighborhood and its attendant problems: high rents, elder…

The novelist Hache Carrillo was admitted to a hospital in Washington, D.C., in April, 2020. He was fifty-nine years old, and had spent the previous several months receiving radiation treatment for prostate cancer. The first wave of the pandemic was cresting and a hospital was not a place anyone wanted to be. For two weeks, he and his husband, Dennis vanEngelsdorp, held out at their home, in Berwyn Heights, a Maryland suburb. VanEngelsdorp recalls this as “a sacred time” of chatting intimately and holding hands. They suspected that Carrillo’s medication was causing him to suffer seizures and dehydration, and after he collapsed in the shower the couple headed for the E.R. Carrillo was an admired figure in the literary world. His reputation rested on his one novel, “Loosing My Espanish,”…

As we know, there is a long and storied history of a certain kind of dealing on the part of Uncle Sam with his indians, and so there have also been times when America wakes up after a long weekend of terror only to rediscover its morals and decide a renewed effort is in order, and though I would not go so far as to say these efforts have been particularly… genuine… what did come from one such gesture was this thing people in my part of indian country—which is, indisputably, the best and most beautiful part, the Blackfeet Reservation—called a claim check, which in the end was money you might get when you turned eighteen. The check came from a land claim, settled with the Feds decades before I…

There was once a time when strangers talked to one another, sometimes eagerly. “In past eras, daily life made it necessary for individuals to engage with others different from themselves,” Paula Marantz Cohen explains. In those moments of unpredictability and serendipity, we confronted difference. There were no smartphones, message boards, or online factions. Maybe because life moved at a slower pace, and every interaction wasn’t so freighted with political meaning, we had the opportunity to recognize our full humanity. Nowadays, she argues, we are sectarian and “self-soothing,” having fallen out of such practice. What we need isto return to the basics: to brush up on the art of conversation. Cohen, a professor of English at Drexel University, is the author of “Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of…

One Thursday evening last month, the rapper Central Cee performed in New York City for the first time in his young and rapidly ascendant career. Central Cee—or Cench, as his fans affectionately call him—is British, and a Manhattan stage can sometimes feel like a proving ground for a newcomer. Instead, thanks to the familiarizing power of the Internet, the frenzied, sold-out show, which was at Irving Plaza, felt like a homecoming. Cench once rapped that he’s “not performin’ if I can’t come with all of the guys,” but in a gesture of confidence he began the show alone, backed only by an impassioned d.j., whoqueued up tracks behind his laptop, shouting lyrics into a microphone at key moments. This tactic, usually deployed to drum up excitement, was, by and large,…

QUESTIONING INDIGENEITY In Manvir Singh’s consideration of the use of the term “Indigenous,” he is right to point out that the word has often been attached to the idea of primitiveness—an idea associated with racist stereotypes rooted in colonialism (“You First,” February 27th). But, as he also notes, many communities prefer to self-identify as Indigenous in their political activism. Discussions among Indigenous Brazilian peoples in the wake of the recent election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as President are an interesting example of this. Lula’s government initially intended to establish a Ministério dos Povos Originários (best translated as Ministry for Original Peoples), a name chosen to avoid the primitivist stereotyping tied to the word “Indigenous.” The Indigenous peoples of Brazil, however, insisted on replacing “Originários” with “Indígenas,” a more…

Every week, at least two American newspapers cease publication—a major loss for readers seeking local scoops. Yet there remain some plucky holdouts. The other day, Jennifer Mills, the editor-in-chief (and only employee) of Jennifer Mills News, prepared to commemorate twenty-one years of her periodical with an exhibit at the Brick Aux gallery, in Williamsburg, on view through March 19th. Mills—who is also a writer and producer for the NPR news-quiz program “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!”—was taping more than two decades’ worth of single-page editions of J.M.N. to the gallery walls. “I used up two toner cartridges for this,” she noted, proudly. “And I went through a full ream of paper.” The thirty-eight-year-old newspaperwoman—who wore a gray sweatshirt, jeans, and green-and-orange Nikes, and had her hair in a messy…

Catch me alive? I am today—swept through the air in a flesh,thinky-feeling, lugging itself up the subway stairs& now back on Spring Street again in the dazing light pumping the marrow a breeze of breath a blood& still the minutes accelerate & we wake backweightedwith days will we waste them all & then when we get there we will think I wasted them all, stony before I was laidin stone, mourning before I was mourned& what was this velvet for? Spring didn’t know— flags of the grave? well also a jubilance not just a bawling& off again toward whatever, drinking exalted or coughingbut still can swallow & here all your parts are warm & mostly work & look it’s luck, while not yet a word from the underworld,the necklace of…

The magpie reasserts its stancewith a testy flap of black on white,a flash of blue, and a stone might do but doesn’t so I have to shoo it offwith a folded tartan picnic blanketand the baby rabbit— what is left of it—keeps screaming—and it happens that your options narrowsometimes drastically, and what you might do if the kidswere not here is walk to the car,and get in it and leave, turning up the radio, but they want to know,now, what one does with enormouspain when you see it, where you should put it, how might youstop it, and they’re watching,and the rabbit is done, past saving, so I lift the stone again and the birdhops off as I walk across, and looks onwith interest, and if at first I miss…

At the beginning of Maylis de Kerangal’s novel “Painting Time,” which was published in French in 2018 and in English in 2021, the central character, Paula Karst, is having drinks with two former classmates from the Institut de Peinture, in Brussels. All working trompe-l’oeil painters, the trio are both jazzed and trepidatious about the reunion; the intensity of their training, almost ten years before, bonded them as friends and cemented them as competitors.(And, O.K., possibly as lovers.) Possessed by a “desirable madness” for their craft, they should be spending the evening working, or resting in order to work more. But something draws themtogether. Paula, who has just painted a film set in Moscow, is entreated to “describe your exploits” first: Instead of panoramic impressions and sweeping narration, instead of a…

Three years ago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a blockbuster exhibition by Gerhard Richter—one of the most important artists working today—that was shuttered by the pandemic after only nine days. On March 16, at the Zwirner gallery, the German painter returns to New York City with a show of works made during the past seven years, including “Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting),” from 2016 (seen, in detail, above). A new, limited-run publication, titled “100 Abstract Pictures,” accompanies the exhibition. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. MUSIC Chineke! Orchestra CLASSICAL For the piece “Fate Now Conquers,” the composer Carlos Simon drew inspiration from a quote from the Iliad in Beethoven’s journals: “But Fate now conquers; I am hers; and yet not she shall share in my…

Which is the beet of your dreams? The Johnny’s Selected Seeds catalogue, out of Winslow, Maine, has the reliable if unexciting Zeppo—presumably named after the youngest of the Marx Brothers—which boasts “minimal root hairs.” Unfortunately, Johnny’s $5.50 packet is out of stock. Happily, you can still order five grams of Zeppo seeds for $4.35 from an outfit called Territorial Seeds, based in Oregon, by scribbling your beet deets on the order form in the back of its catalogue. Like most seed catalogues, the one from Botanical Interests, out of Colorado, sells the Detroit Dark Red ($2.69 for about a hundred seeds), “the standard for beetssince 1892,” the warhorse, a tastes-goodand-stores-well variety bred in Canada and first introduced, in the catalogue of Michigan’s D. M. Ferry Seed Company, the year Grover…

The Devils River, in southwestern Texas, runs, mirage-like, along the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, through some of the most barren countryside in the United States. Access to the river is limited; unless you’re in a kayak, the only way to travel upstream is along a skein of rutted dirt roads. It was on one of these roads that, a few years ago, David Wagner noticed a shrub that seemed to him peculiarly filled with promise. Wagner is an entomologist who teaches at the University of Connecticut. He has close-cropped silvery hair and a square jaw and bears a passing resemblance to George C. Scott playing General Buck Turgidson. The way other people might recall a marvellous restaurant or a heartbreaking vista, Wagner remembers a propitious plant. He has friends…

The Great Displacement, by Jake Bittle (Simon & Schuster). Roving across the United States, this survey explores the precarious environments in which many Americans now live, places irreversibly altered by floods, fires, hurricanes, and drought. “Managed retreat” is a popular term in climate discourse, but whole communities, from Arizona ranchers to Indigenous tribes in Louisiana, face disaster without any sort of plan. Victims of megafires in California find themselves at the mercy of the state’s housing crunch. Bittle argues that the approaches of both government and the insurance industry are totally inadequate for today’s dilemmas: Where should we build? What should we protect? And what do we owe those who lose everything? The Half Known Life, by Pico Iyer (Riverhead). This travelogue examines spiritual customs from around the world, meditating…

For the long quarter hour before “A Doll’s House” begins, Jessica Chastain sits looking at the audience in the Hudson Theatre as people fill up the seats. She’s in a plain dark dress on a plain wooden chair on a plain bleak stage. A turntable moves her in slow circles—she looks like the last lonely dish left on a lazy Susan. The air throbs with dread-inducing electronic tones; the five other cast members enter and sit with their backs to her, not yet caught up in her sad merry-go-round. Whatever else Chastain’s Nora will be, at least we know she has sufficient inner resources to keep herself company while staring through the fourth wall. In the current Broadway production of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 drama, adapted by Amy Herzog and directed…