Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2, 2023 i The New Yorker

In August, 2021, a new, shirtless figure appeared on Instagram and TikTok. With a great shaggy beard and muscles the approximate size and color of ripe pumpkins, he was part cowboy, part Conan the Barbarian. “I’m Brian Johnson,” he said in his third Instagram video. “My family and tribe call me Liver King.” He is the owner of Ancestral Supplements—which sells desiccated organ meat in capsule form—and a walking marketing campaign. Within eight months, the Liver King had amassed a million and a half followers on Instagram and nearly three million on TikTok. He was mellow at first, but he embraced the new persona, growing crasser and more meme-worthy, and less clothed. (On a podcast in March, 2022, he said that the Liver King “broke out of his cage, and…

A prerequisite is all of it everywhereDaffodils and a smell like hamstersAnd it pulsing and pulsingFrom out of the elevator They’ll play the music laterBut right now it’s quietIt just keeps pouring and pouringThere’s no real sound it makes Except from like a faucetThat strange sound of too much of itThe way that kisses escape youWhen you see something you love Or the way these poems found meAll of it, everywhereI am pouring something out of meWith every step that I take No one is surprised by any of thisLeast of which all of thisIt’s all just falling everywhereAnd then, somehow, it’s done…

Cicero, the Roman orator and politician of the first century B.C.E., spoke up over and over again—while stamping his feet for effect in between sentences, if his own testimony is to be believed—for the republic: that is, for a form of democratic government, perhaps limited, but unambiguously opposed to tyranny or boss-man rule. Supplying the rhetorical fuel, at least, for Julius Caesar’s assassination, he took up with some of Caesar’s successors, imagining them to be less autocratically inclined than the man they had assassinated. Before long, he found himself on the run from his new friends and was caught and killed by soldiers of the new regime. His head and hands were cut off and displayed in the forum where he had spoken, as a warning to others to be…

EXISTING SOLUTIONS Dana Goodyear’s article about the scientist He Jiankui captured the terrifying potential of gene editing (“Dangerous Designs,” September 11th). However, many of the problems that certain scientists are trying to remedy with the gene-editing tool CRISPR already have controversy-free solutions. Conditions such as Batten disease, caused when a baby inherits one pathogenic gene from each parent, can be prevented by preconception screenings of would-be parents. (If both parents are carriers, there are additional options to avoid having an affected child.) Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is inherited from one parent, can be averted using pre-implant genetic diagnosis, a common I.V.F.tech-nique. Gene editing will eventually have a place in clinical medicine, but its use will likely be minimal, compared with these currently accessible, effective, and less buzzworthy techniques. Gabriel DabscheckMelbourne, Australia…

Hey, guys! There’sbeen a lot of discussion going on lately and I just wanted to clear the air. I totally understand that people think I got my job because of my dad, but I definitely would have still been the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ even if my dad wasn’t God. Everyone says I would have been the Son of God even if I weren’t the son of God. Just because my dad is famous, it doesn’t mean I don’t have merits of my own. I am a very good listener, and nice, and I have a bag that has seven million fish in it. I’m pretty embarrassed by D-d—I don’t even really like telling people my last name. When people find out that my last name is Of Nazareth,…

But here, you said, at the time of our intrusion, you said this zone here is not one of the earth’s sentences but an overdub of stutters here where we’re walking on this slumbering crack, a complex, you said, of tensions right here, and you bent and touched your finger to the warm, ant-fenestrated dirt while I surveyed the hairpin turn in the arroyo beside us and then you stood and brought it, your finger, to my lips, you said here, and you watched me as the taste, part you part earth, brought a change to my face.…

“The quiet ones are the worst.” I’ve never understood that expression. What’s wrong with quiet? Surely it’s the noisy ones who are the worst. Surely it’s noise, generally, that there’s too much of. I don’t like noise. I had enough noise in the Hussars. But they say the quiet ones are the worst. If everything’s quiet, it means a bomb will go off. You can’t win. It seemed to be the issue when Shirley kicked me out. My quietness, I mean. I don’t mean Shirley literally kicked me out. There was no kicking. Shirley didn’t kick me. I didn’t kick her. It wasn’t a case of the “domestic violence” you hear about. It was my quietness that started it. Shirley could see that I’d gone into myself. That’s what I…

Cosmic Scholar, by John Szwed (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The Beat polymath Harry Smith—an eccentric, couch-surfing, bearded bohemian who repaired the holes in his jacket with duct tape and lived on pea soup, mashed bananas, and cigarettes—bears some resemblance to the protagonist of Joseph Mitchell’s masterpiece “Joe Gould’s Secret.” But, whereas Gould’s life’s work turned out not to exist, this biography argues persuasively that Smith’s contributions to art, anthropology, avant-garde film, and, most of all, popular music were profound. Szwed, also the author of an excellent biography of Billie Holiday, shows how the legacy that Smith left behind—including the six-LP “Anthology of American Folk Music,” from 1952—influenced the sensibilities of Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, and countless others. Up Home, by Ruth J. Simmons (Random House). In 2001, Simmons, a Romanticist by…

SEPTEMBER 27 – OCTOBER 3, 2023 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. This year’s edition of the New York Film Festival offers a wide variety of international features, including Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer” and two new works by the prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, as well as major films by such acclaimed Hollywood figures as Sofia Coppola (“Priscilla”) and Michael Mann (“Ferrari”), and even a hybrid—the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” starring Emma Stone. There are also a few American independent films; one of them, “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” (pictured), the first feature by Raven Jackson, is among the most impressive recent directorial débuts. It’s a historical drama with the power of legend, centered on the tragic small-town romance of a young couple…

Joan Baez was in a corner banquette at the Russian Tea Room the other day, plucking finger sandwiches from a tiered serving dish. “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise,” a deep and meditative documentary about the eighty-two-year-old singer’s life and work, will première in New York next month. The film features a bounty of archival material, including cassette recordings in which a young Baez narrates her experiences in the civil-rights movement and the folk revival. The tapes were found in a storage unit that Baez had turned over to the filmmakers Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, and Karen O’Connor seven years ago. “The big act of total trust was just giving them the key,” Baez said. “I really thought it was lampshades and old plates. I didn’t know that my father…

The video for “A Barely Lit Path,” the first single from “Again,” Daniel Lopatin’s tenth album as Oneohtrix Point Never, takes place on a dark road in a shadowy forest. Two CPR dummies wearing turquoise jumpsuits are strapped into a self-driving car. On the floor, there’s an artificial-intelligence manual, a book about understanding computers, and a copy of “Erewhon,” the 1872 satirical novel that imagines a future in which machines achieve consciousness. The dummies play chess; they nap. Their rubbery fingers reach across the seat for each other. It’s sweet. At some point, the road gets rough and the dummies start flopping around. A Stop button is affixed to the gearshift, but it’s just out of reach. One of the dummies starts to cry. The car is off course now,…

The Magistrates Court of the Bahamas, in Nassau, is situated in an imposing pink-and-white building edged with palm trees. On December 13, 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried, the former C.E.O. of the now bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, arrived there to ask for release on bail after being indicted on eight criminal charges. Bankman-Fried typically wearsT-shirts and shorts, no matter the occasion; on this day, he wore, like armor, an ill-fitting navy-blue suit. He’d spent the previous night in jail, where he hadn’t been given the medication he normally took for his depression. But of greater concern was the indictment, unsealed that morning in the United States, which accused him of fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and other crimes that could lead to more than a hundred years in prison. The evening…

An interviewer for the London Sunday Times once praised the acclaimed Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau for breathing some much-needed life into his instrument. The piano, the interviewer said, was “the most machinelike of instruments—all those rods, levers, little felt pads, wires, no intimate subtle human connection with it by breath, tonguing, or the string player’s direct engagement with speaking vibrations.” Arrau’s playing transmitted the sensation of touch, each note like a finger pressing down on the spine, relieving the tension of the day. Admirers of the musician often described his talent in bodily terms, reaching for physical metaphors to explain his interpretive gifts. The Argentinean-born conductor Daniel Barenboim said of Arrau, “The music really goes into his bones and his blood.” In “The Pole,” the new novel by the South…

Spark was not much of a magazine. Handwritten and mimeographed secretly with a primitive machine at a sulfuric-acid plant in a remote region of central China, the publication began in 1960 and never went beyond two issues. The first was hardly more than a poem and a few articles, critical of Mao Zedong’s ongoing Great Leap Forward campaign. The young men and women involved in the venture were arrested in the fall of 1960, and some of the contributors were executed as “counter-revolutionaries” after spending years in prison under horrifying conditions. Spark was read by very few people. And yet, as Ian Johnson makes clear in his superb, stylishly written book “Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future” (Oxford), the publication has had an afterlife of…

Technically, there are only four characters in Rebecca Gilman’s “Swing State,” a melancholy new drama, now at the Minetta Lane. There’s a retired guidance counsellor, Peg (Mary Beth Fisher); her troubled young neighbor, Ryan (Bubba Weiler); the local sheriff, Kris (Kirsten Fitzgerald); and Kris’s niece and deferential new deputy, Dani (Anne E. Thompson). They all cause problems for one another, even as they try their clumsy best to offer help. But the fifth character—and the one we should really be worrying about—is Wisconsin. Is anyone doing anything for Wisconsin? In 2021, the swing state of the title is teetering, both socially and ecologically, and Gilman deposits us in that trembling landscape, even though her play takes place entirely indoors. Peg’s sprawling house sits on more than forty acres of so-called…

Kindness is comedy’s boring first cousin, the very thing that most standup comedians and their rampant ids want to get away from, in order to be their worst and thus their funniest selves. Kindness suggests that there’s a moral universe out there, in which we’re all connected to one another, whereas standup is a willed isolation: a solo performer on a stage taking on the world. Standup artists like to stick pins in the voodoo dolls of convention and sentiment: “My kids are so ugly,” “I hate my dog,” “My marriage sucks,” and so on. And yet sentiment—even a little sentimentality—provides the framework for the actress and comedian Michelle Buteau’s new, eighty-minute show, “Full Heart, Tight Jeans.” (The show is touring through December, with a stop at New York’s Beacon…