Innholdsfortegnelse for April 3, 2023 i The New Yorker

Seven years ago, during the Republican Presidential primary, Donald Trump appeared onstage at Dordt University, a Christian institution in Iowa, and made a confession of faith. “I’m a true believer,” he said, and he conducted an impromptu poll. “Is everybody a true believer, in this room?” He was scarcely the first Presidential candidate to make a religious appeal, but he might have been the first one to address Christian voters so explicitly as a special interest. “You have the strongest lobby ever,” he said. “But I never hear about a ‘Christian lobby.’” He made his audience a promise. “If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power,” he said. “You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well.” By the time Trump reluctantly left office, in 2021, his…

Luk Kop didn’t seem to have the makings of a musical prodigy. He didn’t hum made-up tunes to himself as a youngster or shake his head when someone sang flat. He didn’t build instruments out of sticks and gourds or blow trumpet solos as a five-year-old. He had a brief moment of fame as a child actor, in the Disney film “Operation Dumbo Drop,” but grew into a sullen and ungainly teen. When the composer and instrumentalist Dave Soldier first met him, in Thailand, in 2000, Luk Kop spent most of his time eating grass and hanging around with the other elephants. He’d been deemed too truculent to mix with tourists. Soldier was in Thailand to recruit musicians for an elephant orchestra. He had hit upon the idea with Richard…

On April 20, 1848, Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates set off for the Amazon on a boat named Mischief. The two young men—Bates was twenty-three, Wallace twenty-five—had met a few years earlier, probably at a library in Leicester, in England’s East Midlands. Both were passionate naturalists, and both were strapped for cash. (Neither had been able to afford university.) To finance their adventures, they planned to ship specimens back to London, where they could be sold to wealthy collectors. For reasons that no one has ever been able to explain—but that many have speculated about—Wallace and Bates separated soon after they reached Brazil. In the decade that followed, Wallace amassed an immense trove of new species; lost most of them in a ship fire; set off again, for…

Ghosts of the Orphanage, by Christine Kenneally (Public-Affairs). In this investigation of abuse and murder in orphanages in North America and Australia during the mid-twentieth century, Kenneally pursues what she calls “cold cases, twice over”: disappearances of children for whom official records are inaccurate or lacking, the main proof of their existence being the memories of their peers. Building her narrative on circumstantial evidence and the testimonies of survivors, Kenneally portrays an “invisible archipelago” of institutions—most, but not all, run by the Catholic Church—that, while operating independently, shared so many horrifying traits that their violence can only be termed institutionalized. The result is a gripping chronicle of the ways in which those in power ignored, or even encouraged, the ill-treatment of children across borders, cultures, and decades. The Absent Moon,…

STATION TO STATION As someone who used to commute through Penn Station, I appreciated William Finnegan’s piece about the transit hub and its troubles (“The Way Things Work,” March 13th). In 2012, I moved from Brooklyn to suburban New Jersey. I work in urban planning; at the time, I described my new town as a planner’s paradise, owing to its walkability and to the fact that my journey to my midtown office seemed to be only about ten minutes longer than it had been when I was taking the subway. Over time, however, the extra ten minutes became an additional half hour, thanks to frequent delays caused by downed wires, signal troubles, and stalled trains. Because of this, when my office called us back to work in person, I decided…

One unlikely day during the empty-belly years of the Great Depression, an advertisement appeared in the smeared, smashed-ant font of the New York Times’ classifieds: WANTED. Five hundred college graduates, male, to perform secretarial work of a pleasing nature. Salary adequate to their position. Five-year contract. Thousands of desperate, out-of-work bachelors of arts applied; five hundred were hired (“they were mainly plodders, good men, but not brilliant”). They went to work for a mysterious Elon Musk-like millionaire who was devising “a new plan of universal knowledge.” In a remote manor in Pennsylvania, each man read three hundred books a year, after which the books were burned to heat the manor. At the end of five years, the men, having collectively read three-quarters of a million books, were each to receive…

By the time life was brought to perfection, old age had arrived. The last costly touch was a small bathtub, installed after a lot of reflection and searching. Some recommended that she get a stall shower, but Alisa resolutely rejected having a vertical bath with a door: what good is water raining down on your head? It’s so much better to lie in warm water with a rubber pillow under your head, your softened feet rolling two pleasantly prickly plastic balls…. Alisa belonged to the rare breed of people who know with perfect certainty what they want and what they don’t want under any circumstances. By an early age, the mixed blood—half Baltic, half Polish—she inherited from her mother had cooled off all Alisa’s passionate impulses, and the fear of…

In terms of its words, “Hang Time,” by Zora Howard, is a very subtle play. Its language is rich, and the themes that its characters usher forth chime suggestively, like harsh but precisely rung bells, never quite settling on a resolution. Its imagery, however, is awful and overt: even before the show starts, as the audience files in, three Black men are hanging in midair, their legs dangling, the motion of their bodies almost stilled. Walking into the small, dark theatre at the Flea and finding this scene is like happening upon the fresh aftermath of a crime. As the play gets going, it becomes like looking on helplessly—or, worse, passively, as a kind of entertainment—while lynching ensues. The stage direction in Howard’s script seems to make the matter of…

MARCH 29 – APRIL 4, 2023 It would have been enough if the comedian-activist Morgan Bassichis had merely helped us laugh at the pandemic (with their “quarantunes,” on Instagram, and a book of wry to-do lists); it would have been enough if Bassichis had only created sparkling, progressive standup, spoofing—and offering—self-care. But they’re now serving us “A Crowded Field” (at Abrons Arts Center, March 31-April 8), both a tribute to and a critique of Passover narratives, the last in a left-leaning, musico-comic trilogy about radical Jewish politics. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. MUSIC “American Songbook” POP To initiate this year’s “American Songbook” series, Lincoln Center delves into canonical works of the Irving Berlin era, by way of a rascal from the rock era—Harry Nilsson,…

New GPT chatbot learns slight tonal difference between “Hey” and “Heyyyy.” Scientists develop first A.I. police dog that does not require oiling. Concentration of untruths emanating from ChatGPT bot earns it the nickname “the new George Santos.” Futurist Michio Kaku tells “All Things Considered” that the iPhone is now officially steampunk. San Francisco’s OpenAI lab implants first human with his own autobiographical “Previously on this series…” trailer. Google engineers design virtual tumbleweeds to skitter macabrely across the company’s home screen. Stanford Vision and Learning Lab announces new DALL-E variant that is able to generate image and aroma. Novelists and poets galvanized by chatbots’ having provided new reason to embrace alcoholism. Proliferation of A.I.-derived art causes painters and sculptors to form union, Artists in the Meatspace. The Guardian decries humans’…

Sometimes when I look at our dog Jack I thinkhe might be my Radical American History professor come back to make amends—he gazes at me so sorrowfully. What is it Jack, I say, why do you look like that? But Jackdoesn’t answer; he lies down and rests his head on his paws. Black hair covered nearly all of that man’s body, thickunder his blue oxford shirt when I put my hand there.Perhaps that accounted for the bow tie,the pipe, the tweed cap. This time I can teach him to sit and to stay.Stay, I say to Jack, who looks at the treat in my handand then at me, and at the treat and then at me, and he stays. Come, I say to Jack, but Jack does not always come.Sometimes…

As I awake, iridescent light penetratespines in the back yard. On the television,helicopters and armored vehicles confront young people.Though I’ve lived in some faraway places,this was not when great events were decided.No one ever shouted in my face, “Damn your soul.”I live in a house, like a mouse in a date palm.Some nights, I dream of smoking opium,but mine is a cautious, quiet life: my belly is supple;I rent an upright piano; I feel sorry about Adam and Eve,but I cannot fix things. Inside the walls of my abode,I am a novitiate to the Art of Poetry.Though I dig home cooking more than threesomes,I would never say, “You are so fine, Henri.”…

Kelly Link is a writer whose work is easy to revere and difficult to explain. She began her career by publishing stories in sci-fi and fantasy magazines in the mid-nineteen-nineties, just when the boundary between genre fiction and the literary mainstream was beginning to erode, and, in the years since, her work has served to speed that erosion along. Thirty years into her career, she has received a formidable procession of prizes awarded to genrefiction writers: the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, to name just a few. More recently, she has begun to reap the accolades of the literary mainstream: in 2016, her collection “Get in Trouble” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and in 2018 she received a MacArthur, for “pushing the boundaries of literary…

Dickens gets debauched by sex, drugs, and gunfire in a new adaptation of “Great Expectations,” streaming on Hulu. The six-part FX/BBC miniseries is a slice of Victoriana soaked in Red Bull which avows, too brashly at times, that it is no staid PBS affair. The British writer Steven Knight (the creator of “Peaky Blinders,” who also adapted “A Christmas Carol” for television, in 2019) casts gothic and colonial shadows over the beloved bildungsroman, which follows Pip, an orphan whose aspirations to become a gentleman are bank-rolled by a mysterious benefactor. In Knight’s retelling, Pip learns that few fortunes are made without preying on the misfortune of others. Traditionalists will balk at the show’s many departures from the novel—and, likely, at its blue-lit, try-hard edginess—but this energetic remix doesn’t betray the…