Innholdsfortegnelse for September 18, 2023 i The New Yorker

This summer, Ross Douthat, liberal America’s favorite conservative commentator, wrote a piece about liberal America’s least favorite Democrat, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Douthat argued in his New York Times column that an unwillingness to debate Kennedy—who has claimed that childhood vaccines cause autism, that 5G networks are part of a mass-surveillance system, and that COVID was designed to spare Jewish and Chinese people—was an insufficient response to voters who are increasingly distrustful of the establishment. “If you don’t think he should be publicly debated, you need some other theory of how the curious canbe persuaded away from his ideas,” Douthat wrote. “Right now the main alternative theory seems to be to enforce an intellectual quarantine, policed by media fact-checking and authoritative expert statements. And I’m sorry, but that’s just a…

When I smelled the smoke, I knew Where I was. Okay. There is water Flowing along our flank here, and here Near our knee is an old church. But let us scroll up our leg A few times. Here, inhale the smoke. Our cold-tipped nose sniffing the back Of our fourth hand, we hand-heel Our lap’s thick turf. Houses with pastures That—give me an edifice—rub up Against the very fingernails! The grass continues Back to the brash water, and here I need a cave. Thank you. Perhaps Someone is holed up in there, tending To flames that tickle your palm warm. But never mind. Let us rove ahead To where I found—give me tree. Heavy with foliage. Can you feel that? Now a claw for the knobby roots Where I…

JANUARY: THE FORGETTING OLYMPICS Farah said, “Ladies’ Lunch at my place, my agenda: Forgetting as an Olympic sport. You know how TV uses competition to turn us on to baking, interior decorating, fashion, and what all? I propose the Great Ladies’ Forgetting Olympics.” Bessie said, “You mean whoever forgets the most names gets the gold?” “Forgets more words, words, words,” said Bridget. “And dates and appointments,” Farah said. Bessie said, “Addresses. I remember Lotte calling me several times for the address of the party that turned out to be—I forget, what do we call a Jewish wake?—for Sylvia’s deceased aunt. Poor Lotte spent the evening trying to remember from where she knew Sylvia or if maybe she had never met her.” “Forgetting people,” Ilka said. “I had an e-mail from…

In 1968, the Malian novelist Yambo Ouologuem won France’s prestigious Prix Renaudot for a bloody satire about a fictional African country called “Bound to Violence.” Opening in mock epic style with the brutality of a medieval empire, and ending amid baroque assassinations in the mid-twentieth century, it vents its spleen in every direction: at slave traffickers, native and foreign; corrupt clerics and mercenary anthropologists; and, especially, oppressive rulers who used idyllic visions of the African past to hoodwink their countrymen. (Among its targets seems to have been Senegal’s poet-President, Léopold Sédar Senghor, a leader of the Négritude movement and a future “immortal” of the Académie Française.) The book’s biggest dupe is an African student in Paris, cultivated as the “black pearl of French culture” and then installed as the puppet…

Sometimes what you see belongs to another world. Stars. City streets on a movie screen. The remembered face of someone gone. You know it is another world because you cannot touch what you see, or because it cannot see you. Sometimes, though, the border between this world and the other one seems to blur. An eight-year-old boy and his brother are taken by their mother’s friend to the Seattle Aquarium for a sleepover beneath its underwater dome. Sharks swim overhead. Food, the visitors are told, is strictly prohibited, but when the lights dim the mother’s friend produces a bag of orange candies: They seemed to glow in the dark. My brother was thrilled, but I was horrified, maybe because I was so rarely away from my parents at night that…

BRANCHING OFF Kathryn Schulz, in her review of Gunnar Broberg’s biography of Carl Linnaeus, discusses the fact that biologists have changed the classification of many species since Linnaeus’s time (Books, August 21st). But the article omits the central paradigm shift: whereas Linnaeus believed that groups simply reflect similarity, biologists now see them as generally indicating species’ ancestral relationships. Thus, scientists no longer count Monera among the kingdoms, because we now recognize that its former subgroups, Archaea and Bacteria—although both consist of single-celled organisms—are only very distantly related to each other; the split between them represents perhaps the deepest surviving fork in the tree of life. Daniel WeissmanAssociate Professor of PhysicsEmory UniversityAtlanta, Ga. Schulz quotes Charles Darwin as saying that he looked “at the term ‘species’ as one arbitrarily given, for…

Some three millennia ago, a blind bard whose name in ancient Greek means “hostage” is said to have composed two masterpieces of oral poetry that still speak to us. The Iliad’s subject is death, and the Odyssey’s is survival. Both plumb the male psyche and women’s enthrallment to its bravado. “Tell the old story for our modern times,” Homer entreats his muse, in the Odyssey’s first stanza. The translator Emily Wilson took him at his word. Her radically plainspoken Odyssey, the first in English by a woman, was published six years ago. Her Iliad will be published in two weeks. On a recent summer evening, Wilson surveyed the view from a precipice above Polis Bay, in the quiet village of Stavros, on the northwest coast of Ithaca. A shrine in…

In 2021, Elon Musk became the world’s richest man (no woman came close), and Time named him Person of the Year: “This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P. T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.” Right about when Time was preparing that giddy announcement, three women whose ovaries and uteruses were involved in passing down the madcap man-god’s genes were in the maternity ward of a hospital in Austin. Musk believes a declining birth rate is a threat to civilization and, with his trademark tirelessness, is doing his visionary edgelord best to…

Father and Son, by Jonathan Raban (Knopf). Like Edmund Gosse’s memoir of the same name, Raban’s posthumously published final work follows an English father and son whose lives take diverging paths. Raban juxtaposes an account of his rehabilitation after a stroke that occurred in 2011, when he was sixty-eight, with his father’s experiences as an artillery officer in the Second World War. The stories never connect, reflecting the divide between the liberal, literary son, who immigrated to Seattle in 1990, and the conservative father, who became a vicar in the Church of England. The war chapters, which excerpt correspondence between Raban’s parents, are compelling, but it is Raban’s reckoning with his own frailty that carries the emotional weight of the book. “What have I lost?” he asks. “And am I…

In the opening moments of Romy Madley Croft’s début solo album, “Mid Air,” the British singer makes a request: “Can you turn it up a bit more?” It’s an entreaty often heard from musicians, usually either onstage, as a rallying cry, or in the studio, as an urgent demand. Coming from Madley Croft, though, it’s a surprise. As a vocalist and guitarist for the British trio the xx, Madley Croft’s signature has been a kind of hushed timidity, her voice often barely rising above a whisper. It’s a key to the spare and downcast style of the xx—made up of Madley Croft, the bassist and vocalist Oliver Sim, and the producerand keyboardist Jamie Smith, known as Jamie xx—who have released three albums since they formed the group, as teen-agers living…

SEPTEMBER 13 – 19, 2023 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. The Perelman Performing Arts Center, a.k.a. PAC NYC, inaugurates its new facility with a five-night concert series that assembles thirty-odd distinguished artists from various musical disciplines. The opening show, on Sept. 19, dubbed “NYC Tapestry: Home as Refuge,” celebrates New York as a safe space and an incubator for music and culture from around the globe, featuring musicians who have made the city their creative home. Performances in the pay-what-you-wish series range from experimental music (Laurie Anderson) to erhu fiddle-playing (Wang Guowei), and include (pictured, left to right) the concert pianist Daniel Gortler, the soul fusionist Martha Redbone, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon (with a world-première commission), and Alberto Villalobos, of the world-music violin trio…

At the Brandy Library, in Tribeca, a man in suspenders led Steven Soderbergh down a spiral staircase, into an amber-lit V.I.P. lounge. Soderbergh, who calls the bar his “satellite office” (his real office is down the street), ordered “the usual.” The usual was singani, a Bolivian spirit made with Muscat of Alexandria grapes that are grown in the Andes, at an altitude of six thousand feet. Soderbergh first tasted it in 2007, while directing “Che,” and learned that it had never been exported from Bolivia. In 2014, he founded his own brand, Singani 63, and spent eight years on a quest to bring it to market. The spirit finally received U.S. government recognition this past winter. “Don’t go into the booze business,” Soderbergh warned, as the server poured him a…

Three winters in a row, Kate DiCamillo went into the hospital, never sure if she would come home and always a little scared to do so. One of those winters, when she was four years old and the air outside was even colder than the metal frames of the oxygen tents she’d grown accustomed to having above her bed, her father came to see her. He was wearing a long black overcoat, which made him look like a magician. “I brought you a gift,” he said, pulling something from his pocket as if from a top hat. DiCamillo studied the red net bag in her father’s hands, then watched as a set of wooden figurines tumbled out of it: a farmer, his wife, a cow, a pig, a chicken, a…

I think of the kids I may or may not have. I think about their hair, the possible dark-brown curls. Baby fingers tapping on my face. I haven’t made up my mind yet, but my body is making decisions before I am ready to make them. I can’t seem to say what it is I want out loud. I can almost see all my different lives, almost taste them, like trying to catch the tail end of a cinematic dream before it evaporates. I want to capture it, a glimpse, sneak a peek at each distant future before the View-Master reel clicks. I want to follow the perfume of each life I could live and linger in it: the vanillas. Milk leaking from my breasts. Cereal. The piquant odor of…

It was a cold day in Manhattan in 1969, and Patricia Burnett was wearing her fur. She had looked up Betty Friedan’s home address, and had made the trip to New York from Detroit, where the former beauty queen was a housewife and an occasional volunteer in local Republican politics. Inspired by Friedan’s 1963 best-seller, “The Feminine Mystique,” and by Friedan’s new feminist activist group, the National Organization for Women, or NOW, Burnett had formed a local chapter, and hosted a gathering at the Scarab Club to recruit her friends, the genteel women of Detroit’s white élite. She had expected it to be a harder sell. Burnett emphasized to the assembled group of mostly rich men’s wivesthat NOW was moderate and respectable, and would “take pains not to appear threatening…