Innholdsfortegnelse for July 24, 2023 i The New Yorker

In 2014, Erin Storch looked in the mirror and felt as if she were drifting leftward. It was a feeling she didn’t know how to fully describe. She had been on maternity leave, and had recently returned to her job at a hospital consultancy in Washington, D.C. Storch had been promoted while on leave, so she was learning something new at work—and it seemed strangely difficult to absorb the information. She was also pumping milk three times a day. People suggested that what she was experiencing might be profound exhaustion; she disagreed. “I knew in my gut that the way I was feeling was not within the spectrum of what you would consider normal,” she said. There were further unsettling sensations: “Coffee tasted like water. The left side of my…

Wear black and talk softly, with-draw from the crowd and train your mind on higher things—it’s strange how much of the etiquette of grief is also a shortcut to cultivating an aura of sexy mystery. Maybe that’s the logic behind casting Ato Blankson-Wood, an increasingly and justly busy actor around New York, in the title role of the new Shakespeare in the Park production of “Hamlet,” at the Delacorte. Blankson-Wood has a world-class sulk—onstage, he pouts and rolls his eyes and projects intense dissatisfaction before he ever delivers a line. A few years ago, in Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play,” he played Gary, a gay Black man whose partner couldn’t—or, more precisely, wouldn’t—acknowledge the repercussions of their racial differences. Gary was a magnetic malcontent, for whom pain and sex appeal…

REMEMBERING AN EDITOR I was tickled by David Remnick’s description of Robert Gottlieb, in his tender reminiscence, as “mindful of the anxious writer waiting by the telephone” (The Talk of the Town, June 26th). I was the exception that proved the rule. When I was a student at Princeton, Gottlieb’s wife, the actress Maria Tucci, was a friend of a friend, and through this channel I passed along the manuscript for a novel I had written (one befitting a young man with more ambition than talent). Weeks of waiting turned into months. I acquired a literary agent, who insisted that we not approach anyone else until we heard from Gottlieb, and so eventually I called Gottlieb’s office. He came right on the line and promised that he would call me…

If you know what John Wilson’s whole deal is, then you won’t be surprised to learn that he was wandering around a sewage-treatment plant in Hoboken on a recent Friday, wearing a hard hat and a reflective safety vest and carrying a handheld camera. Wilson is the creator, the narrator, the main writer, and the principal cinematographer of “How To with John Wilson,” a weirdly entrancing combination of dream-logic documentary and high-concept slapstick which is about to begin its third and final season on HBO. Taking his handheld camera to a sewage plant in Hoboken is a decent description of Wilson’s day job, except when he’s taking his camera to a plastic-slipcover store in Williamsburg, or to a referee-society dinner on Long Island. In “The White Lotus,” implausibly beautiful people…

When Gretchen Whitmer first emerged as the likely Democratic candidate for governor of Michigan, in late 2017, the mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan, circulated a memo urging labor unions and Democrats to find a better-known figure to lead the ticket. Duggan wanted Senator Gary Peters to run; the United Auto Workers preferred Representative Dan Kildee. But neither member of Congress wanted anything to do with Lansing. Mark Bernstein, a politically connected Ann Arbor personal-injury lawyer, recalled that, while watching a University of Michigan basketball game at Duggan’s house, the Mayor tried to persuade him to get in the race. By the end of the primary, Whitmer had outlasted the established alternatives, and went to Detroit to meet with the leaders of the U.A.W. (“Big talkers,” a Whitmer insider called them.)…

The same name as the famous actor IAm one of the last people to remember.It’s possible the two of them were cousins. I called him Uncle Leo. That was the customAmong that generation on the margins:Young in America, improvising cousins. Soon the computer itself will tell these stories.He was a plumber. My mother said his fingersHad oil-burner soot ingrained under the skin. He was their Eighth Grade Valedictorian.I wonder if the name goes back to Gorczyn,A town in Poland a bit southwest of Lodz. Public school was supposed to fill a voidBetween democracy and capitalism.Shakespeare and algebra and enough to eat. The computer says I need to mention the UncleLeo in “Seinfeld,” but that’s not who I mean.Maybe I live in the fifties more than the nineties. My father had…

JULY 19 - 25, 2023 The Museum of Modern Art’s “New Photography 2023” (through Sept. 16) marks the return, after a five-year hiatus, of a program that’s been introducing cutting-edge image-makers since 1985. This iteration celebrates seven photographers connected to Lagos, Nigeria—including Karl Ohiri, who prints images (as above, from the ongoing series “The Archive of Becoming,” which he began in 2015) from decomposing negatives he reclaims from the city’s portrait studios, questioning the durability of memory, history, and self. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. THE THEATRE The Doctor In “The Doctor,” the writer-director Robert Icke’s loose, modernized adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Professor Bernhardi,” from 1912, Juliet Stevenson maintains a sense of matter under strain; her motive force sometimes manages to muscle the show…

SALLAH: I miss waking up every morning wondering what wonderful adventure the new day will bring to us. INDIANA: Those days have come and gone. SALLAH: Perhaps, perhaps not. INDIANA: I don’t believe in magic… but a few times in my life I’ve seen things… things I can’t explain. —From the trailer for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” SALLAH: Indy, there’s an ancient scroll you need to see. INDIANA: I’ve told you a million times, I’m retired. SALLAH: Perhaps, perhaps not. INDIANA: Look, I’ve seen things, strange things, inside caves, mostly, but that doesn’t mean I have to start missing meals every time you show up with a scroll. Now, where are my damn reading glasses? —“Indiana Jones and the Pill Counter of Predetermination” SALLAH: Indy, you know…

Creatures at midnight: blinkingIn patio light I flick on, thinkingI’d heard a noise. And had. Here standA trio on hind legs, bandit masks, band- Of-outlaw grins at me behind the sliding glass.Before they hunch to drink at the fountain base.Deaf to the “On” clink of the timed waterfallSliding over the fountain face of Quan Yin, all Lit up. Goddess of Mercy, half-closed eyes of stone.“She who hears the cries of the world”: she alone.I cannot hear the lapping of thirst behind a glass doorOr, earphones on, the vast dying and just-born crying for One tender voice, her call. Surveillance sky is boundless.Each fearful face comes round, what terror’s taught is soundless.The goddess stares back at me. She can’t stop hearing it, cry on cry.My animal guests move on. The timer’s…

In her thirties, Lorraine was unfaithful once or twice; she didn’t tell her husband. Quentin owed her, she reckoned, in that long accounting of pluses and minuses which is marriage. Owed her not only because he was unfaithful, too—although he certainly had been, she didn’t doubt it, and more than once or twice—but also because he was impossible. He was one of those impossible men, attractive but also sleazy, in a way that was more popular then, in the eighties and nineties, than it is now. He was long-limbed and superskinny, fizzing and jigging and restless with energy, his ugly sharp face alight with cleverness and mockery of everything. Nowadays he wouldn’t get away with it. Quent didn’t once, not ever, attend any of the parents’ evenings at their children’s…

Fires in the Dark, by Kay Redfield Jamison (Knopf). In this loose sequel to a best-selling memoir of bipolar illness, Jamison, a writer and a psychologist, explores the process of prying a mind from disease or despair. Healing, she writes, depends on “harvesting the imagination” and navigating “the balance between remembering and forgetting”; it also, crucially, relies on support. The book comprises portraits of healers, including W. H. R. Rivers, who treated soldiers who suffered from shell shock during the First World War, and Paul Robeson, who found solace in intuition and in the irrational. Ultimately, Jamison emphasizes the importance of recognizing a diversity of sources of fortitude and models of accompaniment. A Madman’s Will, by Gregory May (Liveright). In 1833, the Virginia congressman John Randolph freed his nearly four…

“Neoliberalism” has been called a political swear word, and it gets blamed for pretty much every socio-economic ill we have, from bank failures and income inequality to the gig economy and demagogic populism. Yet for forty years neoliberalism was the principal economic doctrine of the American government. Is that what has landed us in the mess we’re in? What’s “neo” about neoliberalism is really what’s retro about it. It’s confusing, because in the nineteen-thirties the term “liberal” was appropriated by politicians such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and came to stand for policy packages like the New Deal and, later on, the Great Society. Liberals were people who believed in using government to regulate business and to provide public goods—education, housing, dams and highways, retirement pensions, medical care, welfare, and so…