Innholdsfortegnelse for July 31, 2023 i The New Yorker

In the summer of 2018, four years before he bought Twitter, the entrepreneur Elon Musk was facing legal consequences for two of his more reckless forays on the social-media platform. A boys’ soccer team in Thailand had been trapped in a flooded cave for more than two weeks, and a caver involved in the rescue said on CNN that a bespoke submarine Musk had sent to save the children was a “PR stunt.” Infuriated, Musk told his twenty-two million Twitter followers, without basis in fact, that the caver, Vernon Unsworth, was a “pedo guy.” The tweet went viral, and Unsworth’s attorney threatened to sue Musk for defamation. Soon afterward, Musk tweeted about Tesla, the electric-car company that he runs: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” To many…

1. —a plum and othering dusk,something renunciatory in the light,until the sparrow takes the old tree’s shapeand the trees untreed are everywhere. If I could let goIf I could know what there is to let goIf I could chance the night’s improvidenceand be the being this hard mercy means. 2. These lost and charnel thoughtsless thoughts than bits of stunI suddenly find myself among; that are the me I am when I am notsleeked to reason and pacific despairspeak to me of a pain that saves, some endmost ear to shrive the mind.…

The music came down the hall from a door marked 3-C in one of those neighborhood clusters of five-story walkups, which some years later a brutish city planner would raze in favor of an imperial highway. It was not a radio or a needle wobbling on a turntable; it was living notes cascading from piano keys, and it was temperamental. Sometimes it bleated meekly, hesitantly; sometimes it raged, like scales gone berserk. The piano was mainly in need of tuning. Sometimes you heard it, sometimes not. Coming home from school at three o’clock in the afternoon, I would now and then set my knapsack down on the zigzag tile floor in front of that door and listen, not to the music but to its absence. I pressed my ear hard…

The opposition of the raw and the cooked, to borrow from the title of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s most cited though not best-read book, seems basic to our ideas of nature and culture. A raw prawn is part of the sea; broiled, it becomes part of our art. But for Lévi-Strauss the real work was done by the third leg of his “culinary triangle”: the rotting. Spoilage, after all, is a natural tendency of food and the most urgent reason we transform nature into culture—we’re desperately trying to keep what we’re about to eat from going bad. The line between the raw and the cooked is, to be sure, nebulous; a plate of sushi is both raw and cooked, “made,” in the cultural sense, by a knife and seaweed. Sushi is the…

LIFE IN PLASTIC Elizabeth Kolbert, in her article about plastic contamination, mentions that microplastics “don’t just leach nasty chemicals; they attract them” (“A Trillion Little Pieces,” July 3rd). In Florida, where I live, the sargassum seaweed that is washing onto our shores this season has been found to contain not only microplastics but also, attached to the plastics, Vibrio vulnificus, a flesh-eating bacteria. This revelation suggests that, as Kolbert points out, we still have much to learn about the consequences of our unrestrained use of plastics. Stacie M. KinerHypoluxo, Fla. I admired Kolbert’s piece, which calls attention to plastic pollution without trivializing the difficulty of trying to avoid plastics in daily life. I also appreciated her emphasis on the fact that the relationship between our consumer choices and our plastic…

It was the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend on Further Lane, the best street in Amagansett, the best town in the Hamptons, and the art dealer Larry Gagosian was bumming around his eleven-thousand-square-foot modernist beach mansion, looking pretty relaxed for a man who, the next day, would host a party for a hundred and forty people. A pair of French bulldogs, Baby and Humphrey, waddled about, and Gagosian’s butler, Eddie, a slim man with a ponytail and an air of informal professionalism, handed him a sparkling water. Gagosian sat down on a leather sofa in the living room, his back to the ocean view, and faced a life-size Charles Ray sculpture of a male nude, in reflective steel, and a Damien Hirst grand piano (bright pink with blue butterflies)…

The new film from Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer,” starts and ends in the round. In the opening shot, ripples expand in puddles as raindrops fall. Three hours later, we get a vision of Earth beginning to burn, as nuclear explosions bloom across the globe. Nolan is always entranced by the vast and the tiny; “Inception” (2010), wherein city streets fold like paper under the pressure of dreams, concludes with a spinning top. This obsession with scale is well served by “Oppenheimer,” in which the amassing of refined uranium, for the construction of an atomic bomb, is indicated by marbles piling up inside a goldfish bowl. How much roundness can you take? The antidote to this circularity is J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Though named for his father, Julius, he insisted, with Prufrockian nicety,…

Thunderclap, by Laura Cumming (Scribner). This memoir of artistic appreciation is centered largely on seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, but focusses particularly on two artists, one Dutch, one not: Carel Fabritius, a pupil of Rembrandt’s, and the Scottish painter James Cumming, who was the author’s father. Laura Cumming, an art critic, challenges the common views of Dutch Golden Age art as being merely representational or as depicting symbols that unlock religious or moral meanings. Instead, she examines details in the paintings to illuminate the ways in which the artists shaped what they saw: the wit in a painting of a flower, the dramatic light falling on a bundle of asparagus. Through this kind of close attention, she finds in the art works both a way to grapple with her father’s death and…

Since 2008, Louis Armstrong’s house in Corona, Queens, where the trumpeter lived from 1943 until his death, in 1971, has been the Louis Armstrong House Museum, celebrating the heroic jazz soloist, beloved entertainer, and civil-rights activist. Across the street is the new Louis Armstrong Center, an archive, an exhibition space, and a theatre. The Museum extends Armstrong’s legacy in a concert series, which, on July 4, featured the singer Catherine Russell (above), whose father, Luis, was one of Armstrong’s main musical collaborators in the nineteen-thirties. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. MUSIC The Bad Plus JAZZ What’s in a name? In the case of the Bad Plus, it’s an invaluable asset that has allowed this band to morph from a piano-driven trio to a piano-less…

Bruce Willingham, fifty-two years a newspaperman, owns and publishes the McCurtain Gazette, in McCurtain County, Oklahoma, a rolling sweep of timber and lakes that forms the south-eastern corner of the state. McCurtain County is geographically larger than Rhode Island and less populous than the average Taylor Swift concert. Thirty-one thousand people live there; forty-four hundred buy the Gazette, which has been in print since 1905, before statehood. At that time, the paper was known as the Idabel Signal, referring to the county seat. An early masthead proclaimed “INDIAN TERRITORY, CHOCTAW NATION.” Willingham bought the newspaper in 1988, with his wife, Gwen, who gave up a nursing career to become the Gazette’s accountant. They operate out of a storefront office in downtown Idabel, between a package-shipping business and a pawnshop. The…

They say stand in line,so we stand in line. As the lineadvances, they say standstill. Around us, everythinggoing, going like cars or clouds.Us, the blur cars pass, the blueclouds dam. They say wait,so we wait, as if for somefragrant flower that unfurlsone night a year. They say shh,so, like trees, we mouth crosssounds of flags beaten to shredsby wind. Our heads twitch,birds watching for what mightbe stalking. Right beforethey deploy canines to bite,there’s a pause between wailsin which you hear your shuteyes dilate. Listen.…

“No, gentlemen of the jury, they have their Hamlets, while we still have only our Karamazovs!” Arguments are under way in the state’s case against Dmitry Karamazov, on trial for the murder of his father, Fyodor Karamazov, and for the theft of three thousand rubles from the old man’s room. In a crowded courtroom, the prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich, is reminding his audience of the unpredictable, inconsistent nature of the Russian character. Dmitry has a reputation for generosity (he was known to treat peasants to champagne), but this does not make a man incapable of murder, least of all in Russia. “We possess broad natures, Karamazov natures,” the prosecutor declares. “We’re capable of combining all possible contradictions and simultaneously contemplating both abysses at the same time, the abyss above, that…

The first thing that strikes you at “Here Lies Love,” David Byrne’s participatory pop musical about Imelda Marcos, is a color. As befits the summer of “Barbie,” the entire Broadway Theatre (the venue’s actual name) seems to have been submerged in a grenadine cocktail: pink L.E.D.s in the lobby’s chandeliers saturate the white plasterwork, and, farther inside, the space has been reconfigured into a huge warehouse-style disco, pulsing with fuchsia and purple neon. The audience members braving the dance floor appear to be swimming in raspberry sauce, herded by ushers in magenta jumpsuits, who wave pink light-up traffic batons. Thed.j. (Moses Villarama) supervises a preshow beat that goes oomph-oomph-oomph. We see pink with our eyes closed; even the shadows are having a hot time. After the introductory hype—we make some…