Innholdsfortegnelse for April 24-May 1, 2023 i The New Yorker

Carina Chocano (“The Language Game,” p. 44) is a contributing writer for the Times Magazine. Her book “You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks & Other Mixed Messages” won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Antonia Hitchens (“The Crunch Bunch,” p. 26), a former member of the magazine’s editorial staff, has also written for the Times, among other publications. Paul Rudnick (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25) will publish “Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style,” a novel, in June. Chantel Tattoli (The Talk of the Town, p. 16) has contributed to the Times, Wired, The Paris Review, and other publications. Rowan Ricardo Phillips (Poem, p. 57) has a new book of poems, “Silver,” coming out in 2024. Roz Chast (Sketchbook, p. 41), a longtime New Yorker cartoonist,…

In 1895, a police officer in Manhattan who had once worked for a telephone company, and whose name has been lost to history, suggested adding a hidden circuit to lines used by known criminals: a wiretap. The city’s mayor, William L. Strong, approved the technique, and for two decades wiretapping secretly flourished at the N.Y.P.D. In 1916, news of the practice leaked, resulting in an outcry and a public inquiry—not least because the police had been tapping the calls of priests. New York’s police commissioner, Arthur Woods, defended his officers’ methods, saying, “You can’t always do detective work in a high hat and kid gloves.” Crooks have always wanted to talk without being heard, and cops have always wanted to listen without being seen. Since the exposure of the wiretap,…

At a certain point in his career, the artist D, perhaps because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down. This is how I imagine it. At first sight the paintings looked as though they had been hung the wrong way round by mistake, but then the signature emblazoned in the bottom right-hand corner clearly heralded the advent of a new reality. His wife believed that with this development he had inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition, and wondered if it might have repercussions in terms of his success, but the critical response to the upside-down paintings was enthusiastic, and D was showered with a fresh round of the awards and honors that people seemed…

What is “creative nonfiction,” exactly? Isn’t the term an oxymoron? Creative writers—playwrights, poets, novelists—are people who make stuff up. Which means that the basic definition of “nonfiction writer” is a writer who doesn’t make stuff up, or is not supposed to make stuff up. If non-fiction writers are “creative” in the sense that poets and novelists are creative, if what they write is partly make-believe, are they still writing nonfiction? Biographers and historians some-times adopt a narrative style intended to make their books read more like novels. Maybe that’s what people mean by “creative nonfiction”? Here are the opening sentences of a best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Adams published a couple of decades ago: In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on…

In Memoriam, by Alice Winn (Knopf). This consuming and unstintingly romantic début novel begins in 1914, and centers on two teen-age boarding-school students: Ellwood, an aspiring poet, and Gaunt, a moody, half-German pacifist. The young men are taking tentative steps toward romance when Gaunt enlists in the British Army. Ellwood eventually follows, set on reunion, and determined that, “if something dreadful was being done to Gaunt, he wanted it done to him as well.” The story parses the extent to which pursuing forbidden love can feel like risking one’s life. Of his heart, Gaunt thinks, “It was only because he knew he would die that he could be so reckless with it.” Rombo, by Esther Kinsky, translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt (New York Review Books). Written in the…

FROM THE HEART One of the most remarkable features of the “I♥NY” logo, which Adam Gopnik discusses in his piece on Milton Glaser, is how Glaser’s use of the symbol for “heart” has expanded the meaning of the word (“Drawing Board,” March 27th). The movie “I Heart Huckabees,” for example, is a popular acknowledgment of the change; the movie is not called “I Love Huckabees,” even though the heart symbol appears on the film’s posters. In 2011, the Oxford English Dictionary added the heart symbol to the definition of the word “heart,” to reflect its use as a transitive verb. “I heart you” has become another way to express love. Several years ago, I e-mailed Glaser and told him that I was discussing his work with my design students, and…

The historian Eve Kahn met a reporter on the stoop of a building on the outskirts of the East Village recently. “So, you’re writing about a writer who is writing about a writer who wrote about writing,” Kahn said. The first writer was Kahn herself, who is at work on a biography of the second writer, Zoe Anderson Norris, also known as the “Queen of Bohemia,” or, as Kahn likes to call her, “the Nellie Bly you’ve never heard of.” Norris was born in 1860 in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, one of fifteen siblings impoverished by their father, an evangelist and an abolitionist who devoted much of his life to translating the New Testament from the ancient Greek. In 1901, three years after her first divorce, she moved to New York, where…

Out of the window of the Committeeon Preschool Special Education,a triangular intersectionof traffic at the uptown crossing.The parents, here without their children,to petition on their behalf, are lonelyonly in this passageway, the unaccompaniedshelter of the twelfth floor where they are signed inby a kindly woman to spend some hourswaiting for a supervisor alwayslate with the correspondent gates of paperworkbut who has primary authority to accedeor deny in many languages, forthere is no loneliness in the companyof children. With an air of apology,the young woman calls out Miss, Sir,not knowing the names, and they try to catchin her glance to whom she wishes to speak,but the optic axes of her eyescoincide divergently, catchingtwo families simultaneously, every faceresponds with apology to the summons,the clerk’s oblique eyes calling each of them,none of them,…

This time I got everything wrong again.The tree: it was red. And the sky was gray.Tomorrow ran off with today today.I’d swallowed time just so I could get thingsRight. I was a present to myself but wentRight past it. I called myself it and satWith it, sad with it, and yet couldn’t findThe lie in it. It suited me to aT. Without it, who would I be? I wasSo tired but scared to say it: knowingWhat tends to come after––I zipped it.I parabola’d between parables,Playing Bach’s Concerto in D-Minor,BWV 974, forThe despair I hear deep in it beforeIt falls toward the solutionOf its final chord. That’s when, in the greatSilver apogee of night, I stepped outInto the warm air and stripped the rowanThat had been growing there bare, until itWas…

More than fifty years before it was isolated as a drug, Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed up cocaine. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the poet was increasingly dependent on opium, a “free-agency-annihilating Poison,” as he called it, which sapped his will and made him despondent. “A Gymnastic Medicine is wanting,” he wrote in his notebook during the winter of 1808-09, “a system of forcing the Will & motive faculties into action.” The medicine he envisaged would be a kind of anti-opium, a tonic to kick-start the nerves, restore the mind’s athletic powers, and repair the broken link between volition and accomplishment. It would be a second, health-giving “poison” to work on the first. Coleridge’s hope was a characteristic expression of the drug culture he belonged to. He…

For many of us who love experimental theatre and the deep fringe, soap operas were a gateway entertainment. Any given arc on, say, “Days of Our Lives”—remember when Marlena was possessed twice, and she (re)married the priest who exorcised her?—can go toe-to-toe with the avant-garde’s dream-logic, postmodern approach to character and its calculated use of shock. Soaps also have old theatrical bones: they’re related to nineteenth-century melodrama, with its emotion-triggering musical underscoring and extravagant, even exuberant, treatment of female peril. It’s unsurprising, then, that two new formally adventurous shows are recognizably soapy: Julia Izumi’s “Regretfully, So the Birds Are,” at Play-wrights Horizons, and the Second Stage and Vineyard co-production of “White Girl in Danger” (at the Tony Kiser Theatre), a new musical by Michael R. Jackson, following up on…

ACROSS 1 Laze about 4 Ambience 8 Condition that may be treated with prolonged-exposure therapy, briefly 12 Not just online, to a texter 13 ___ odds 14 Wynwood Art District’s city 15 Arthur of stage and screen Bust 17 Island where Sappho was born 18 Forearm bones 19 “That’s enough,” in Toledo 21 Rep. who has appeared as a guest judge on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” 22 URL, e.g. 24 Meets, as a challenge 26 Overflow 27 Newsroom newbie Snap 29 Slip up 30 Austere 31 Toast topper, for short 32 Showed up Like unmoisturized skin 35 Medico 36 Muscles targeted by diamond pushups, familiarly 37 “Washington Week” airer 40 Simoleon Word said while pointing 43 “Dude …” 44 2013 ballad written about Chrissy Teigen 45 Cocktail that replaces the soda…

APRIL 19 – MAY 2, 2023 The artist Daniel Lind-Ramos, a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, finds the materials for his striking assemblages in his home town of Loíza, Puerto Rico, where he still lives. These monumental works channel both the joy of Afro-Caribbean culture and the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Maria. On April 20, moma PS1 opens the exhibition “Daniel Lind-Ramos: El Viejo Griot—Una historia de todos nosotros.” The artist is seen here with “Alegoría de una obsesión,” one of four new pieces created specifically for the show. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. THE THEATRE Fat Ham This play, by James Ijames, which won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, transfers to Broadway from the Public. It’s a sometimes faithful, sometimes dizzyingly disruptive riff on…

Lois Carson always wanted to find a new way to fold a tortilla. “Life’s like an experiment to me,” she said. For twenty-three years, when she worked for Taco Bell as a product developer, she thought and thought about how a tortilla might be wrapped around taco fillings in the shape of a hexagon. She wanted people to be able to pick up the stuffed tortilla with one hand, even while driving, without it falling apart. “It was just something that came into my mind,” she said, seated in a booth at a Taco Bell in Orange County, California. Carson is seventy-three and wears glasses, pink lipstick, and a Timex watch. She started her career in the nineteen-seventies, working in the kitchen at Perino’s, an Italian restaurant in Hollywood frequented…

In the fall of 2000, as the first dotcom bubble was bursting, the Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn attended a talk, at Carnegie Mellon, about ten problems that Yahoo couldn’t solve. Von Ahn, who had just begun his Ph.D., liked solving problems. He had planned to study math until he realized that many mathematicians were still toiling away over questions that had proved unanswerable for centuries. “I talked to some computer-science professors and they would say, ‘Oh, yeah, I solved an open problem last week,’” he told me recently. “That seemed just a lot more interesting.” At the talk, one particular problem caught his attention: millions of bots were registering for Yahoo accounts because the company couldn’t distinguish them from human beings. What the company needed was a rudimentary…

A mid the pageantry (and the horrible family intrigue) of the approaching coronation, much will be said about the endurance of the British monarchy through the centuries, and perhaps less about how the first King Charles ended his reign: by having his head chopped off in public while the people cheered or gasped. The first modern revolution, the English one that began in the sixteen-forties, which replaced a monarchy with a republican commonwealth, is not exactly at the forefront of our minds. Think of the American Revolution and you see pop-gun battles and a diorama of eloquent patriots and outwitted redcoats; think of the French Revolution and you see the guillotine and the tricoteuses, but also the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Think of the English Revolution that preceded…