Innholdsfortegnelse for June 19, 2023 i The New Yorker

My grandmother died the daythe missionaries came for our souls.To save them, I mean. They cycled up the driveas my mother and I carried her to the van,on our way to the hospital. We didn’t hear their rattling till they dismounted,we were so bent on moving herwithout pain. Their hands waved hello.There was nothingfor the bicycles to do, so I looked at the wheelsnot the missionaries, who asked,Do you have a source of happiness in your life? What was my answer, what is it now?My grandmother swayedlike a hammock between us, then stilled. They sprang to help.Bicycles clattered on asphalt—Did we use dogwood switches? Did we use stones?…

We’re sitting underneath the overpass, Molly and I, lights off, motor on, staring through the windshield at the row of houses up the hill. On Molly’s lap, propped against the steering wheel, is the clipboard with the street addresses, about fifty of them, listed alongside the pertinent info—name, age, etc.—culled from the Internet and written in her perfect handwriting, evidence that she had gone to a good school in the suburbs. It’s getting dark and it’s getting cold, and neither one of us has said more than a few passive-aggressive sentences to the other, like when I thanked her for putting her window up, as if she’d done me a big favor. “You’re welcome,” she said, but she only closed it halfway. The bickering had started after we both got…

Be Mine, by Richard Ford (Ecco). The fifth, and reputedly the last, of Ford’s books about the character Frank Bascombe, this novel finds Frank now in his seventies and confronting his son Paul’s devastating illness. After Paul, who has A.L.S. (or “Al’s,” as he jokingly refers to it), participates in an experimental protocol at the Mayo Clinic, Frank picks him up in a rented R.V. and they set out for Mt. Rushmore. A melancholy but banter-filled road trip ensues, in which they survey a swath of Middle America—kitsch stops along the way include the World’s Only Corn Palace, where everything is made of corn—and meet various vividly drawn characters. The startling and poignant conclusion unites father and son through love and grief as they learn to “give life its full…

CONFRONTING TRAUMA Rachel Aviv, in her piece about the intertwined lives of the writer Alice Sebold and Anthony Broadwater, the innocent man wrongfully imprisoned for Sebold’s rape, provides valuable insight in describing the complex harms endured by victims of sexual assault in cases of exoneration (“Words Fail,” May 29th). Both Sebold and Broadwater are victims of the actual rapist, and of a justice system that set Sebold up to fail as a witness. Instead of ignoring victims during post-conviction litigation, as routinely happens, we should recognize that conventional approaches risk retraumatizing all victims, and also take into account what assistance they might need during the process. There are organizations, such as the nonprofit Healing Justice, that are dedicated to helping everyone affected by these cases; in programs such as these,…

There’s an old video of the pitcher Daniel Bard that still surfaces from time to time. It’s a scorching Monday afternoon in August, 2010. The Red Sox are facing the Yankees, in the Bronx, and need a win to stay in the playoff chase. Bard, a right-handed reliever for Boston, has come into the game to replace the Red Sox ace, Jon Lester. The Sox are clinging to a 2–0 lead, but the Yankees have the bases loaded, with one out, and the superstar shortstop Derek Jeter is at bat. Trouble is a reliever’s common condition. Bard seems undaunted. His first pitch to Jeter is a fastball inside. Strike one. He hurls another, hitting the upper nineties again. Strike two. The third pitch, captured on the video, is just shy…

Critics are always bellyaching about the death of the monoculture—we no longer consume the same cultural objects at the same time or in the same way, and as a result we feel disconnected, adrift, lost. The mind-boggling inescapability of Taylor Swift’s latest endeavor—a sixty-date stadium romp known as the Eras Tour—offers one enormous exception. The tour recaps all ten of Swift’s studio albums, presenting each as an epoch, with its own elaborate sets, costumes, and vibes. (The scope of the show reinforces the hysterical demands on twenty-first-century pop stars: be something new every time you show up, or don’t show up at all.) Swift cancelled her previous tour, in 2020; the sweeping concept of this one, combined with the long delay to see her live again, guaranteed that the demand…

Is it possible to critic-proof a work of art? To angle it just out of the reach of our blundering hands? To render it opaque enough to resist interpretation, or maybe just to obscure our view with a shroud of baffing public utterances? Lorrie Moore has tried each of these moves. In the course of a long and celebrated career, she has maintained a cagey relationship with criticism, complicated by the fact that she herself is a frequent and accomplished practitioner. A collection of her reviews, “See What Can Be Done” (2018), begins with a line from the jazz musician Ben Sidran: “Critics! Can’t even float. They just stand on shore. Wave at the boat.” Her clearest countermove can be seen in her decision to arrange the contents of her…

JUNE 14 – 20, 2023 As “Summer for the City” kicks off, open-air performances and social-dance evenings take over the plaza at Lincoln Center, through Aug. 12. On opening night, June 14, couples dance salsa under a sparkling ten-foot disco ball (designed by Clint Ramos, and pictured above), to tunes by the band 8 y Más, featuring the Barcelonabased singer Lucrecia. Also in the first week, the choreographer Kyle Abraham curates a dance festival, and a Juneteenth celebration includes a piece by the soulful Ronald K. Brown, performed by his company, EVIDENCE. THE THEATRE Monsoon Wedding Translating a film to the stage stumps even the great Mira Nair, who conceived and directed this musical adaptation of her stunning 2001 film. It’s a violation of texture, not plot, since the book…

At the height of summer, a young woman arrives at the gates of Disneyland Paris. It’s hot. Water-bottle season. Most of the visitors are in groups. The woman has come alone. She’s in a basque-waisted gown with a corn-silkcolored skirt, a midnight-blue bodice, puffed sleeves with Vatican Swiss Guard-style stripes, and an apple-red cloak. She has black curls, tied up in a satin bow. She’s even wearing some kind of ruff, as stiff as a dog’s cone. People take her to be Snow White and start asking her to sign autographs and pose for pictures. This lasts for less than two and a half minutes. A security guard charges over and pulls the Snow White look-alike to the side. “It’s not possible to enter in this kind of clothes,” he…

Earlier this year, in a helicopter above the Mexican border, a team of Texas state troopers searched for people crossing into the United States. As they flew over a neighborhood west of El Paso, the radio crackled with the voices of Border Patrol agents on the ground below, calling out migrants who were evading them. “We got four bodies headed north.” “Five out in the northeast quadrant.” “Behind you—six bodies.” While people fled across the landscape, the troopers in the helicopter tracked them and passed their locations to the Border Patrol agents, who raced after them in trucks. “I got ten bodies to the southwest,” Captain German Chavez, the pilot, said into his radio. “There’s two,” he announced, maneuvering the helicopter above a row of houses, then said, “I lost…

My dream life started in L.A.’s concrete world,a cityscape of cheap apartments and palm trees,crowned asphalt streets, blacktop playgrounds aswirlwith immigrant, Black, and Asian kids, a wheezeof asthma in my chest, missing Hawai‘iand my playmate cousins, the sighing seashorethat had, in foaming curls of white stories,given a pastoral and all its loreto paint my daydreams, vanish distress,and bring back the lost words of pitching waves,itinerant sellers of kūlolo and fish,evenings of porch music and windward rains.I had these the way Muir had his Sierras,a splendor alive in all my waking,a green mural of folded cliffs, plumeriablooms on patchy lawns, litter for the taking. Throughout childhood, I had my secret place,a splendor of mind amid urban squalor,palimpsests of imaginings to trace,while a car wreck screeched from the corner.I conjured yellow hau…

In early December of 1989, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, Mikhail Gorbachev attended his first summit with President George H. W. Bush. They met off the coast of Malta, aboard the Soviet cruise ship Maxim Gorky. Gorbachev was very much looking forward to the summit, as he looked forward to all his summits; things at home were spiralling out of control, but his international standing was undimmed. He was in the process of ending the decades-long Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear holocaust. When he appeared in foreign capitals, crowds went wild. Bush was less eager. His predecessor, Ronald Reagan, had blown a huge hole in the budget by cutting taxes and increasing defense spending; then he had somewhat rashly decided to go along…

The Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, whose austerely sensuous opera “Venere e Adone” had its première on May 28th, at Staatsoper Hamburg, has long possessed his own inviolable sonic world. Born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1947, he is largely self-taught as a composer and at the age of fifteen was already winning notice at Italian new-music festivals. One of his earliest published scores, the Sonata for Two Pianos, from 1966, begins with softly sweeping gestures across the white keys, like the rapid strokes of a superfine brush. In keeping with the hectic spirit of the nineteen-sixties, Sciarrino dissolved conventional classical forms into atomized activity, but his exquisite touch, his lepidopterist’s regard for the slightest fluttering sound, set him apart from his thunderous avant-garde colleagues. Five decades on, he remains a musical…