Innholdsfortegnelse for August 21, 2023 i The New Yorker

We were too late. For weeks, the Davidia—the ghost trees—had been shedding their loose white blooms, like translucent handkerchiefs. Jacqueline Rose pocketed them on her walks around her London neighborhood of West Hampstead—the kind of long, looping tour she had begun taking daily during the pandemic. She brought me on one such walk, late this spring, but the specimens we found were sad: squashed, yellowing smudges. “About two weeks late,” she assessed, studying them. Never mind. There was a handsome lime tree to admire. There was a florist to avoid (“racist”) and a florist to visit. We lingered over shaggy mumsand reluctant new lilies, bound tight in their buds. Groups of shouting boys ran by in ghastly magenta school blazers. “Who designed the jackets?” I wondered. “Who designed the boys?”…

His wife wanted to go with him, but her mother was still dying, really taking her time with it, as if it were something to savor. And maybe it was. You looked at these hopeless cases—the blinding pain, the loss of volition and dignity and even personhood—and wondered why they didn’t just kill themselves, but then you wouldn’t know until you got there, would you? For his part, he was determined to go by his own hand, and when he was depressed, which had to be at least eighty per cent of the time, he dwelled on the details of how he was going to do it (car, garage, exhaust), mentally composing his obituary as if it were a story he was writing. A physician friend of his had told…

War and Punishment, by Mikhail Zygar (Scribner). A young, distinguished, and wholly independent Russian journalist who was forced to flee his country for the West has written a superb account of all that led to Vladimir Putin’s brutal and misbegotten invasion of Ukraine. Zygar became well known as a reporter in Russia with his best-seller, “All the Kremlin’s Men.” Here, through his on-the-ground reporting from Ukraine and Russia, conducted during the past two decades, and an incisive grasp of history, he describes how Putin has willfully distorted the past to serve his purposes. Read in conjunction with works by scholars such as Serhii Plokhy and Timothy Snyder, Zygar’s book provides an ardent, informed understanding of the present. August Wilson, by Patti Hartigan (Simon & Schuster). As a child, the author…

GETTING THE PICTURE Patrick Radden Keefe’s Profile of the art dealer Larry Gagosian brought to mind an experience I had as an observer of the beginnings of the contemporary-art-market boom (“Money on the Wall,” July 31st). In November, 1964, I went to the vernissage for Andy Warhol’s “Flowers” show at Leo Castelli’s Upper East Side gallery. This was the initial exhibition of what would become some of Warhol’s most ubiquitous imagery, appearing on everything from shower curtains to the sides of buildings. The large silk screens displayed in the gallery were on sale for four hundred dollars apiece; the smaller versions were two hundred. (They now sell for millions.) At the time, I was a young movie-industry press agent, and the rent of my starter apartment, on Sixty-first and Lexington,…

In scene two, silence is a sleeve, I’m an arm in it.In an outdated Hollywood magazine, I found a photo of someone wearing my hair. How can that be?Now I can’t stop thinking about the synaptic sparks over which no one has any control. Or, they have somecontrol but not enough to count on in a crisis. I’m making sense all the time of all the senseless endings.A day is as long as the time it takes for the mind to consider life and death countless times.Which must make a day plus a night a highway we’re only vaguely aware of since we’re busysitting in a chair or lying on a bed with a floral-print bedspread or walking to the storepast someone with a dog on a leash and a…

It must have arrived in the handsof a salesman whose nameshall remain unrecorded. Let’scall him the handsome stranger.She saw him through the littlewindow next to the doorand knew although she did notbelieve she believed in suchthings she had loved himin a former life. She gave hima glass of her legendary teaand let him go. My grandfatherwas upstairs in the immaculateattic where after they diedI found this typewritersleeping among old blueprints.During the war he diagrammedroutes so trucks of soldierscould arrive precisely in timeto wait for their orders. Orhe worked in parts. I don’tremember. I can only picturethat afternoon he told meexactly who he had been,I hear the resignedtone but not what he said,I was as is my nature staringout the kitchen windowthinking some great hypothesisthat could easily be disproved,that day now…

Desert-bright weather in the south-western United States has long inspired architecture that opens itself to the land and the sky. Pueblo cliff dwellers carved shelters into walls of rock; Spanish settlers wrapped houses around courtyards that became, in the words of the pioneering California architect Irving Gill, “outdoor living rooms.” In a similar spirit, Los Angeles modernists like R. M. Schindler and Richard Neutra designed semitransparent homes with light frames and sliding doors. In the performing arts, dry summers fostered the building of Greek-style amphitheatres, the Hollywood Bowl being the most famous example. Schindler wrote in 1926, “The distinction between the indoors and the out-of-doors will disappear.” One of the most spectacular instances of indoor-outdoor architecture in the Southwest can be found on a hill north of Santa Fe, New…

Even in the playwright Annie Baker’s quietest pieces, ley lines of power lie buried in the soil; there’s a hum to her plays, a sense of old energies animating earthly matters. In “Infinite Life” (at Atlantic Theatre’s Linda Gross, starting Aug. 18), Baker introduces five ladies of various ages, resting on their chaise longues outside a medical clinic in Northern California, chatting about the absurdity of having a body that desires and suffers and dies. You might suspect Baker of sneaking in a tragedy, but the cast is a supergroup of our funniest stage divas, all mistresses of either the deadpan or the zany: (left to right) Kristine Nielsen, Christina Kirk, Marylouise Burke, Brenda Pressley, and Mia Katigbak. The mischievous Pete Simpson plays the snake in their garden.—Helen Shaw ABOUT…

Busloads of people from the other side of the internationally recognized Ukrainian border started arriving in Russian cities a few days before the full-scale invasion began. As Russia occupied more of Ukraine, more buses came. The Russians called the process “evacuation” and the people “refugees.” Most of the world was aware of Ukrainians fleeing the war for Western Europe, but millions travelled east. Some were forced to go. Others went because they have family in Russia, or see it as a familiar environment. But even these choices were often made because the Russian occupation effectively leaves Ukrainians with no alternative. Many stories of Ukrainians who have gone to Russia involve coercion, confusion, or doublethink. What happened to some of them may be a war crime, though most don’t seem to…

For the Tyrannosaurus rex, as for Elvis and Jesus, being extremely dead has proved no obstacle to ongoing fame. Last seen some sixty-six million years ago, before an asteroid wiped out three-quarters of the lifeforms on earth, it is nonetheless flourishing these days, thanks in large part to Michael Crichton, Steven Spielberg, and elementary-school children all over the world. In my experience, such children not only can rattle off the dinosaur’s vital statistics—fifteen feet tall, forty feet long, twelve thousand pounds—but will piously correct any misinformation advanced by their paleontologically passé elders. And here is the most surprising thing that all those ten-year-olds plus pretty much everyone else on the planet know about T. rex: the creature’s proper scientific name. That name is itself properly called a binomen, the smallest…

Forty-eight Junes ago, summer changed. A twenty-seven-year-old, as yet unknown Steven Spielberg released a shark movie, and thanks in part to some stunning casting choices—Roy Scheider as a decent police chief, Richard Dreyfuss in peppery scientist mode, the flinty British actor Robert Shaw as the Ahab-like fisherman Quint—the result ate the box office. “Jaws” shifted Hollywood, which shifted the culture as a whole. At sea, when a whale dies, it can fall to the ocean floor and decay into a nutrient-rich structural reef, the basis of a food web that can last for decades. When “Jaws” landed in 1975, it generated its own ecosystem, too. Themodern movie industry, with its summer tentpoles, youth-oriented programming, and marketing blitzes, was born in its guts. “The Shark Is Broken,” a play by Ian…