Innholdsfortegnelse for March 27, 2023 i The New Yorker

The ideal female body of the past decade, born through the godless alliance of Instagram and the Kardashian family, was as juicy and uncanny as a silicone-injected peach. Young women all over the Internet copied the shape—a sculpted waist, an enormous ass, hips that spread generously underneath a high-cut bikini—and also the face atop it, a contoured hybrid of recognizably human mannequin and sexy feline. This prototype was as technologically mediated as the era that produced it; women attained the look by injecting artificial substances, removing natural ones, and altering photographic evidence. Dana Omari, a registered dietitian and an Instagram influencer in Houston, has accumulated a quarter of a million followers by documenting the blepharoplasties, breast implants, and Brazilian butt lifts of the rich and famous. Recently, she noticed that…

mask is strapped on now. The rubber bracegoes round myface then neck, they slip it on fast, it’s cold, then itsnaps on. They’ve putthe clamp in my mouthso I can’t bite offmy own tonguein amazement. Amazementcomes. Hello it says. Here I am. There is an arm, look, a tiny armon the dirt road, yes, it’s dirt after all, theroad, I pick itup, it fits in my palm,it’s coated with dust but I make out the lines ofdestiny, they are cracked,the line of fate iscurved,trying to turn around on the field of the palm,like a river when there were riversand geologic time,the arm something that grew up fast, out of dry soil, as if it were soil, or oncesoil and breath,when there was myth, when there wasthe fantasy ofcreation,but it’s my…

The Irish historian Roy Foster was recently asked to explain one of the great riddles of world literature. How was it, the interviewer wanted to know, that a sparsely peopled island on the margins of Europe had managed to produce such a hoard of canonical writers? At a bare minimum, the list would have to include Swift, Sterne, Yeats, Wilde, Shaw, Synge, Joyce, Beckett. Though how could you fail to mention Flann O’Brien? Or Frank O’Connor? For that matter, what about Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor, and Seamus Heaney? And this is to say nothing of the extraordinary crop of living talent—from Edna O’Brien to Sally Rooney—whose accustomed toil continues to enrich the tradition. Instead of reaching for grand theories to account for this remarkable literary surplus, Foster did that very…

You know Ni’Jah. Every last inch of her gleams: her hair, her eyes, her teeth, the beads and paillettes that shimmer with each hip thrust or arm swing, but, most of all, her skin. She looks the way royalty should. Her pronouncements, delivered in songs and music videos, move mountains. And, as with any queen, her domestic orbit is common knowledge: the rapper husband with the capitalist hustle and the wandering eye, their twins, the gifted but hopelessly overshadowed younger sister. Ni’Jah’s popularity alone is the subject of intense debate—the masses are perpetually at war over whether she’s overrated or underappreciated—but at the edges of her public image linger other controversies: the elevator brawl, the face bite, Becky. Yet the object of fascination in “Swarm,” Donald Glover and Janine…

WHY STUDY ENGLISH? Nathan Heller documents what may be the demise of the traditional English major as it once thrived in the wood-panelled seminar rooms of élite universities (“The End of the English Major,” March 6th). But schools of that kind make up less than five per cent of the country’s institutions of higher learning. At the other ninety-five per cent, the humanities are already combining traditional pedagogy with newer approaches. At my private, midsize university in lower Manhattan, enrollment in our English department has grown by forty-seven per cent in the past two years, to about a hundred and fifty majors. Our courses incorporate archival research and community collaboration. This academic year, one section of our introductory literature course worked with the Bowery Residents’ Committee to organize a book…

I think I forgot to turnoff the radio whenI left my mother’swomb In Hasidic Judaismit is said that before weare born an angelenters the womb,strikes us on themouthand we forget allthat we knew ofprevious lives—all that we knowof heaven I think that I forgotto forget.I was born into twoplaces at once— In one, it was chillylonely physical &uncomfortable in the other, I stayedin the dimension of Spirit. What I knew,I knew.I did not forgetVoicesThe world of spiritheld me in its arms.…

Duck boots, barn coats, and turtleneck sweaters seemed deeply eccentric in the sunny, laid-back suburb of Silicon Valley where I grew up, in the eighties and nineties. These garments—among the talismanic offerings of the J. Crew catalogue that somehow appeared in the mailbox—might as well have been for wearing on Mars, and my friends and I, many of us the children of immigrants, were only dimly aware of the heritage that they were inviting us to access. (I had no idea that a person could be called a Wasp, other than the Wasp in my comic books.) But we knew that J. Crew was, enticingly, just out of our reach. And, because these clothes communicated in an insider’s code, lacking the self-identifying mark of a little swoosh or a tiny…

I have always loved the dances of Pina Bausch and her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal. Their performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where they have appeared since 1984, were her own theatre of the absurd: I remember seeing, that year, her astonishing “Rite of Spring” (1975), with the stage thickly covered in dirt and the dancers flinging their spines with a violence that was almost frightening to watch. And the melancholy “Café Müller” (1978), in which Pina herself was a fragile woman in a white nightgown who walked barefoot, eyes shut, arms faintly extended, as a man rushed to shove tables and chairs aside to save her from smashing into them. She said that she could find her way into that ghostly body only if her eyes, behind closed lids,…

MARCH 22 – 28, 2023 Scattered whispers that the dramatic Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen is the real deal have grown into a roar of consensus almost as powerful as her molten high notes. But Davidsen is still building her repertoire intentionally on the international stage; she makes her role début as the Marschallin in Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” at the Metropolitan Opera, on March 27. It’s a relatively subtle assignment that derives meaning from intimacy, leading to the part’s big payoff, in the final trio, which closes the opera in a fit of rapture. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. ART Uta Barth The best way to approach Barth’s two-part show is to start upstairs, where an arresting group of images, made between the mid-nineties…

In 1905, at age seventeen, Vincent Maragliotti immigrated to the United States from Palermo, Sicily, to study art and architecture in Manhattan; he ended up painting not just in his new country but on it. In the decades that followed, Maragliotti painted murals in hotels (Waldorf-Astoria, Biltmore), in theatres (Majestic, Roxy, Shubert), in state capitols (Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington), in museums (in Harrisburg, on a William Penn theme), and, in 1930, on the ceiling of a room in the newly built home of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, later known as the 92nd Street Y. Maragliotti wasn’t Jewish, and he had only five weeks to complete the job, but his menorahs, lyres, and tablets have adorned the ceilingever since. The ceiling, recently restored after decades of wear and tear, will be…

I’m a great guest. For one, I will appreciate all your deep cleaning. The baseboards you scrubbed, the silverware you polished to a high gleam, the corners you awkwardly maneuvered the Swiffer into, to sweep the last crumbs and bits of cat hair out of sight. I, too, have stood in a room that no guest is supposed to enter and worried what someone who mistakenly stumbles in looking for the bathroom is going to think about me because there’s dust on the back of the TV. Speaking of the bathroom, I will notice that you wiped all the toothpaste flecks off the mirror and ran a wet washcloth across the scale you hide under the radiator, and I’ll appreciate that your toothbrushes are in a new toothbrush holder you…

I dream often of a man I knew more than thirty years ago. When I say “knew,” that is not accurate; I barely knew him at all. But my dreams of him are dreams of intimacy beyond what I usually mean by “knowing.” They are erotic dreams even when they are not about sex. That sounds romantic but it is not. The dreams are terrible and disgusting. Or they are banal. I cannot explain them. Even when they are affectionate and tender, the sweetness strikes a weak note amid the dominant noise and adds to my fading impression of a bewildered pain that must, for some reason, be accepted. Sometimes I go for as long as a year without having one of these dreams and I think they are gone.…

A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs, by Gulchehra Hoja (Hachette). This chronicle of the transformations of the Uyghur homeland of Xinjiang opens in 2018, on a night when more than twenty members of Hoja’s family were arrested, after she began reporting on the Uyghur internment camps run by the Chinese government. Hoja recounts sweet childhood memories of life in Ürümqi, and the way that locals gradually found themselves to be strangers in their own land, when activities like texting someone overseas or watching Turkish soap operas became excuses for arrest. Descriptions of catastrophe are interspersed with lines of quiet devastation. Hoja’s decision to move to America for her career ripped “a hole” in her family: “the hole would slowly close, like a wound healing over time. But it would…