Innholdsfortegnelse for April 17, 2023 i The New Yorker

This is not an account of a love affair, and it is not the story of a religious conversion, although elements of both pertain. Of course, in life, which is full of surprises, it is hard to know what anything is. My husband, John Felix, and I live, with our ten-year-old daughter, Alice, on the bottom two floors of a brownstone, in the neighborhood of an Anglican seminary, a collection of Gothic buildings and a lawn. In the spring, it is possible to watch priests and their families playing croquet on the grass. In summer, vaporous smoke from their tiny barbecues wafts through our front windows. If you were a complete psycho and could not tell one thing from another, the orderly workings of this place—its piper on St. Andrew’s…

It was a source of some annoyance to Charles Portis that Shakespeare never wrote about Arkansas. As the novelist pointed out, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, impossible: Hernando de Soto had ventured to the area in 1541, members of his expedition wrote about their travels in journals that were translated into English, and at least one of those accounts was circulating in London when Shakespeare was working there in 1609. To Portis, it was also perfectly obvious that the exploration of his home state could have been fine fodder for the Bard: “It is just the kind of chronicle he quarried for his plots and characters, and DeSoto, a brutal, devout, heroic man brought low, is certainly of Shakespearean stature. But, bad luck, there is no play, with a scene at…

The film scores of John Williams are beloved by untold millions. Philip Glass’s name is known to a good fraction of the population. Arvo Pärt’s sonic visions entrance audiences around the world. But, if cultural relevance is measured in sheer saturating ubiquity, the composer of our moment is the fifty-seven-year-old British minimalist Max Richter, who, according to his record label, Deutsche Grammophon, has produced the “most streamed classical record of all time.” That album, released in 2015, is titled “Sleep.” It lasts eight and a half hours and is designed to facilitate a full night’s slumber. Richter has also produced an extended compositional remix of “The Four Seasons,” transforming Vivaldi’s kinetic concertos into something spacey and amorphous. His customary mode, as in his soundtrack for the dystopian HBO series “The…

BEYOND OZEMPIC As a fat person dedicated to the cause of fat liberation who has followed media coverage of Ozempic closely, I found Jia Tolentino’s article to be the most nuanced one that I have read (“The Ozempic Era,” March 27th). But I wish that she had included the voices of fat people who are happy, healthy, not seeking thinness, and fighting for fat acceptance. We are the real experts on fatness as a social category subject to bigotry and bias. To borrow a phrase from the disability-justice community, there should be “no conversations about us without us.” It’s disappointing that a writer and a magazine I respect so much have missed an opportunity to tell a fuller version of this story. Savala NolanRichmond, Calif. I am an overweight man…

The train brakes to take the bend behind the grain mill. All night, at the motel, you listen to the ice machine’s cold labor.Does it ever stop? Thunk. No, says the vending machine as the next train goes by. On the highway, the big rigs whine,some carrying things that would kill you if one jackknifedoff the overpass. The chicken truck passes with its load of small-brained misery. You can’t hear the chickens, but you sort of think you can,the way you can almost hear the sounds of the bar car on the train— the bleary passengers trapped in their windows, peering through their doppelgängers at the blackfields of wheat as they whiz past. Childhood, did it ever exist? What about the bar your father drank in, giving youendless quarters for…

The arm I shattered on a bike,meticulously reassembled by surgeons,is now healing up in pain, and so it will befor long weeks to come. Over the eastern borderof my country there’s a war on, the able skeletonsof men are grabbing weapons and going to get deathor life, in their skulls yin and yang mergeinto one, as if they were parts of a spinningbullet before it hits the target. Meanwhile my arm,broken in three places, is slowly starting toheal, which means I’ll miss out this summeron bathing in the lake, Sunday trips to the beach,catching fish, and even the sweet burden of my oneyear-old daughter, who looks at the plaster and twistsher lips into a horseshoe. Meanwhile on the front lineshealthy skeletons are fighting in a righteous cause,crushing skeletons fighting in…

The Diary Keepers, by Nina Siegal (Ecco). Nearly three-quarters of the Dutch Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust, yet after the Second World War the Netherlands claimed a national memory of unified defiance. In a challenge to this account, Siegal has assembled the wartime diaries of seven Dutch citizens, among them a Jewish journalist, the wife of an S.S. official, and a shopkeeper active in the Resistance. Though diaries may be myopic and self-images fallible—as exemplified in the puffed-up scribblings of a Nazi-sympathizing policeman—it’s clear these diarists saw enough, Siegal writes, to respond to horror. She casts “bearing witness” as an impure but essential act and history as mutable, a story told and understood not by one but by many. The Dean of Shandong, by Daniel A. Bell (Princeton).…

The new musical “Shucked”—with music and lyrics by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally and a book by Robert Horn, directed by Jack O’Brien and choreographed by Sarah O’Gleby, at the Nederlander—is exactly what you think it is, if you’ve seen any of its many ads: a show whose often disparate parts are held together only by tough, silky fibres of sometimes indigestible corn. The story is set in a mythical place called Cob County; its inhabitants are implicitly Midwestern, and, as the name of their locale attests, they all have a relentless tendency toward puns and other kernels of wordplay. They’re cut off from the outside world, happily secluded, shielded by a high, lush wall of their favorite vegetable, which they use to fuel their economy and feed their people.…

APRIL 12 – 18, 2023 As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. For her turn in City Center’s “Artists at the Center” series, April 13-15, the ever-radiant tap dancer Ayodele Casel is sharing the spotlight. She has curated five short works from paired choreographers, mixing the well known (Michelle Dorrance, Caleb Teicher) with the up-and-coming. Loosely woven together, these pieces make up the program’s first half. The second is an expanded version of Casel’s 2021 work “Where We Dwell,” an earnest, engaging joyfest with live music by the singer-songwriter Crystal Monee Hall. ART Tauba Auerbach Materials in flux—and their mathematical modelling and visual indexing—is an enduring theme of this American artist’s mysterious abstract work. One suite of paintings in Auerbach’s new exhibition is based on microscopic…

At Webster Hall on a recent Saturday night, the rock band Larkin Poe was half an hour into a master class in massive guitar tone when Rebecca Lovell, who fronts the group, called out, “My big sis is going to preach now!” Megan Lovell stepped forward with a peculiar, wing-shaped instrument strapped awkwardly to her body at a perpendicular angle. The sermon would be preached on lap steel. Earlier in the day, at Le Petit Cafe, in Carroll Gardens, the sisters traced their path to blues-heavy Southern rock. It began in Tennessee about thirty years ago, when Rebecca, age four, started singing harmony with Megan, six, and their sister Jessica, the oldest. “Our mother taught us to sing a chord,” Megan said. They had “blood harmony,” the sound of sibling…

On a recent Saturday evening at the flagship branch of Slutty Vegan, an Atlanta-based burger chain, a hulking former strip-club bouncer was working the door, under a bright sign that read “EAT PLANTS YA SLUT.” A dozen people were queued up outside. Another employee, wearing a T-shirt with the restaurant’s name in the style of Run DMC’s logo, shouted through a microphone as each customer stepped forward, “It’s Slutty Saturday!” If the person was a first-time patron, and admitted it, the employee added, “Virgin slut!” Inside, a d.j. positioned near a rack of merch was playing Drake and Aaliyah at discothèque decibel levels. Three white guys in their late twenties—virgin sluts, all of them—peered up at the menu placard, which included such burgers as the Fussy Hussy (vegan cheese, caramelized…

In 1698, the Duc de Berry had a nosebleed. This calamity was brought on by his “overheating” during a partridge hunt. Three hundred and nineteen years later, the writer Anaïs Vanel quit her editing job and went surfing. What links this unlikely couple? Well, both of them earn a mention in “A History of Fatigue” (Polity), a new book by Georges Vigarello, translated by Nancy Erber. The book sets out to examine, in frankly draining detail, the many ways in which humans, often against their will, end up thoroughly pooped. Vigarello is not, as his name suggests, an irrepressible sidekick in a minor Mozart opera, egging his master on to commit extravagant japes, but a research director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris. He has…

In 1997, Buda Musique, a French record label, launched “Éthiopiques,” a multivolume CD series that collected songs from Ethiopia’s golden age of pop music—an era that began in the late sixties and lasted until the mid-seventies, when a military junta over-threw the Ethiopian Empire and smothered musical output with repressive policies, including curfews. Before the coup, the evening air over Addis Ababa was rich with sound: the pentatonic scales of traditional Ethiopian music, the chromatic scales of Western jazz, the bodied grooves of American soul and funk. Swinging Addis, as the city was later known, nurtured dozens of extraordinary musicians, including the Ethio-jazz titan Mulatu Astatke; the “Ethiopian Elvis,” Alèmayèhu Eshèté; and the beloved tenor Tilahun Gessesse, who was given a state funeral when he died, in 2009. For anyone…

As far as road rage goes, the outburst that sets off the rivalry in the wickedly loopy comic drama “Beef” is down-right piddling. Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), a handyman in Los Angeles, attempts to pull his beater pickup truck out of a hardware-store parking lot, when he’s met by an obnoxiously long honk from a gleaming white Mercedes S.U.V., then a middle finger thrust out the window. Danny is in a foul enough mood that he gives chase to the other driver, Amy Lau (Ali Wong). After the pursuit leaves him unsatisfied, he decides to slowly insinuate himself into her home, even her family, to wreak chaos. His choice of target proves unfortunate; Amy is even more desperate for a sense of control, and thus for revenge. Yet the most…