Innholdsfortegnelse for September 11, 2023 i The New Yorker

The 2005 young-adult novel “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” by Fiona Rosenbloom, a pen name of Amanda Stern, recounts the falling-out of two best friends, Stacy Friedman and Lydia Katz, over an unworthy boy, and Stacy’s quest to perform three mitzvahs before her bat mitzvah in order to make things right. It was updated and adapted (more texting, wokeness, lip filler) into a new Adam Sandler movie featuring his two daughters. The other day, Stern stopped by Bloomingdale’s to shop for the perfect bat-mitzvah dress for the bat mitzvah she never had. The store’s “Barbie”-themed window display promised “Best party ever!” “So, we’re thirteen,” Stern, who is several decades past thirteen, riffed, perusing the racks. “You’re my bestie. You’re my moral support sitting in the front…

At first I was lonely, but then I was curious. The original fault was that I could not see the lines of things. My mother could. She could see shapes and lines and shadows, but all I could see was memory, what had been done to the object before it was placed on the coffee table or the nightstand. I could sense that it had a life underneath it. Because of this, I thought I was perhaps bad at seeing. Even color was not color, but a mood. The lamp was sullen, a candlestick brooding and rude with its old wax crumbling at its edges, not flame, not a promise of flame. How was I supposed to feel then? About moving in the world? How could I touch anything or…

“Literature bores me, especially great literature,” the narrator of one of John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” says. George Eliot sometimes bores me, especially the George Eliot draped in greatness. Think of the extremities of nineteenth-century fiction: labile Lermontov; crazy, visionary Melville; nasty, world-hating Flaubert; mystic moor-bound Brontës; fanatical, trembling Dostoyevsky; explosive Hamsun. There’s enough wildness to destroy the myth of that stable Victorian portal “classic realism.” It was not classic—certainly not then—and not always particularly “real.” Instead, it was a storm of madness, extravagant allegory, tyrannical ambition, violent religiosity, violent atheism. Amid this tableau, at the calm median of the century’s religious belief and its unbelief, is wise, generous George Eliot: the saintly oracle consulted and visited by young Henry James and many other important admirers (Wagner, Emerson, Turgenev), sitting on…

WOMEN’S WORK Ariel Levy’s recent Profile of the painter Lisa Yuskavage makes a powerful argument for the importance of the artist’s work (“Bodies of Work,” August 7th). By building her career on pictures of big-breasted, hypersexualized figures that refuse to conform to élite standards of decorum, Yuskavage raises a giant middle finger to anyone who might suggest that there ought to be rules around the way we represent female bodies in public. I was, however, disappointed to see that Yuskavage’s vulnerability surrounding her decision not to have children was quickly followed by a confirmation from a former gallerist of hers that it allowed Yuskavage to “really push forward in her career at a pace that was on track with her male colleagues.” Yuskavage’s paintings reveal the misogyny still baked into…

1. The child is playing “charades.” She mimes a child hatching an idea— pacing the yard, eyes widening— she imitates an actor acting, mincing, parrying a blow, embracing the air, wriggling out of it— I know the answer, “charades,” but I won’t say it: let her win, let the “secret” be a secret. She turns her brother’s Sox cap, a Bazooka wrapper, a twig into props, but the meaning is just “evening,” “Mount Tabor,” “make believe.” 2. The child is flinging herself from a porch step, a knoll, a boulder, a cedar branch, but only when I least expect it— I have to catch and whirl her or she’ll hit granite. She’ll wait, she has that patience, until I’m watching the high clouds, thinking, soon I’ll be that drift, dew,…

The thing about horseradish vodka is that it makes you forget that you’re drinking vodka. The greenish color and the smell of hay bring to mind the kind of herbal infusions you’d get at a spa, and the taste is so sharp and bracing that it feels like an energy drink. Yes, an energy drink! You feel strong and vigorous as you down one shot after another. You’re delighted with everyone, but most of all with yourself, your witty, charming, quirky self, and you believe that everyone else is just as impressed by you as you are, until you suddenly realize that you’re so drunk you can’t fully control yourself—your movements, or your words, or that crazy laughter that makes your mouth twist and your eyes water—and your whole body…

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride (Riverhead). This wily, gleefully clamorous novel opens in 1972, with the discovery of a skeleton in a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, but it largely unfolds three decades prior, with the events that led to the skeleton’s existence. Though the Black, Jewish, and newly arrived immigrant residents of the tumble-down Pottstown neighborhood of Chicken Hill have clashing ideas about America, they band together to protect a deaf Black boy from the state’s clutches. The novel’s down-home cadences cloak its elaborate narrative circuitry, and McBride makes farcical use of the fear of newcomers held by white characters, such as the town’s physician, a Klansman. The Jewish woman who runs the local grocery store feels otherwise, saying, of Chicken Hill, “America is here.” My Husband, by…

Documentarians have made an art form of projecting expertise, and an air of professionalism is often essential to winning the trust of a source—or a viewer. But Patrick J. Pespas and Sam Lipman-Stern, the protagonists of the three-part docuseries “Telemarketers,” on HBO, don’t bother with the trappings of authority. Lipman-Stern is an untrained filmmaker who models himself after Michael Moore; Pespas, Lipman-Stern’s call-center co-worker turned co-investigator, conducts interviews wearing sunglasses and pauses between questions to fidget with his phone. The pair first met in 2003, when Lipman-Stern, a fourteen-year-old-high-school dropout, took a job at the only place that would hire him: a fund-raising organization in New Jersey called the Civic Development Group, which would soon be fined for what one news anchor called “the biggest telemarketing scam in American history.”…

SEPTEMBER 6 – 12, 2023 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Leslie Odom, Jr., has loved the Ossie Davis play “Purlie Victorious,” from 1961, since Odom began using its monologues for auditions; now, for his first nonmusical Broadway role, he stars in its long-incoming revival, opposite the meteoric—and two-time Tony-nominated—Kara Young. In “Hamilton,” Odom played Aaron Burr, a man perpetually kept outside the room where policy was made, but in this comedy he plays a man making change without asking permission, a quick-witted preacher rewriting the unrighteous bargains of the Jim Crow South.—Helen Shaw (Music Box Theatre; previews begin Sept. 7.) ABOUT TOWN CLASSICAL | Before Tom and Jerry, there were the comic-strip stars Krazy and Ignatz. At a free picnic concert, the American Symphony Orchestra plays…

My high-school piano teacher, Denning Barnes, liked to assign me pieces that I had no hope of being able to play. The idea was to experience the music from within, however pitiful the results. One day, he placed in front of me the score of Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor—a deceptively thin document of thirty-five pages. By the middle of the second page, I was floundering, but I had already received a constructive shock. Liszt was hailed in his lifetime as the demigod of the piano, the virtuoso idol who occasioned mass fainting spells, and in the hundred and thirty-seven years since his death no one has challenged his preëminence. Yet the Sonata begins with seven bars of technically unchallenging music, which anyone who reads notation can manage. The…

Ah, the world! Oh, the world!—“Moby-Dick.” David Gruber began his almost impossibly varied career studying bluestriped grunt fish off the coast of Belize. He was an undergraduate, and his job was to track the fish at night. He navigated by the stars and slept in a tent on the beach. “It was a dream,” he recalled recently. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was performing what I thought a marine biologist would do.” Gruber went on to work in Guyana, mapping forest plots, and in Florida, calculating how much water it would take to restore the Everglades. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on carbon cycling in the oceans and became a professor of biology at the City University of New York. Along the way, he got interested…

Salvador Allende’s election, in 1970, to a six-year term as President of Chile—though he got to serve only about half of it—was one of those rare moments which give the world reason to believe there might be an alternative to the rapacious, greed-based way we have always run things. He had campaigned on a series of profoundly power-threatening reforms he called the “Chilean road to socialism,” and his peaceful assumption of the Presidency—after three failed runs—seemed like something of a miracle. Over furious, often U.S.-backed opposition, he unleashed a torrent of changes, some of them socialist boilerplate (nationalizing the copper industry, redistributing farmland, supplying milk to schoolchildren) and others more visionary, such as the remarkable Project Cybersyn, aiming to link the then nascent technology of computers to factories and even…