Innholdsfortegnelse for November 13, 2023 i The New Yorker

On the morning of the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte was full of catastrophic confidence. His seventy-three thousand troops were camped on a ridge near a tavern called La Belle Alliance. His nemesis, the Duke of Wellington, occupied a slope across the fields, with a mere sixty-seven thousand troops. Over breakfast, Napoleon predicted, “If my orders are well executed, we will sleep in Brussels this evening.” When his chief of staff offered a word of caution, Napoleon snapped, “Wellington is a bad general and the English are bad troops. The whole affair will not be more serious than swallowing one’s breakfast.” He was already making mistakes. Underestimating his enemies’ capabilities and overestimating his own, he assumed that the woods behind the British would block their retreat, but Wellington had strategically…

The mirrors reveal when it’s time to clean again. A thin layer of dust on the one in the bedroom, toothpaste and fingerprints on the one in the bathroom, which doubles as a cabinet door. All the windows become mirrors at the end of the day, when it takes a subtle adjustment of the eyes to look through yourself instead of at yourself. But the windows will never be cleaned; the most that can be hoped for is a hard, purifying rain. There’s a yellow streak of bird shit on the glass in the living room, crusted over now, and the kitchen window still bears the ghostly pattern that Angela once traced on the fogged-up surface while waiting for something on the stove, she can no longer remember what: a…

You’re walking fast, late for work. The line into the subway is barely moving. A man is walking very slowly, holding up everyone behind him. You’re annoyed. And then you catch a glimpse of him. He’s walking with the shuffle of the very old. You’re inclined to be a little more tolerant; after all, he can’t walk any faster. You look again—no, he’s not old, just drunk. It’s too late for him to sober up, but, it occurs to you, it was once up to him not to be drunk. And now you’re annoyed again. But why stop there? There are bars everywhere, and billboards advertising the pleasures of spirits. The days are getting colder, and you live in a cold country—a cold country and a decadent one. Everyone…

MISGUIDED Julian Lucas, in his review of Teju Cole’s “Tremor,” quotes a passage in which the novel’s protagonist, Tunde, ruminates on a hero of his, Piailug, the great Micronesian celestial navigator (Books, October 16th). Piailug is also a hero of mine; I even wrote a book, “A Song for Satawal,” about traditional navigation in his Caroline Islands. Cole is winging it, however, when he has Tunde say of Piailug that “he sailed alone,” guided only by such things as “the movements of the stars by night” and “the swelling of the waves.” Micronesian navigators do not sail alone; their peculiar method of tacking requires several crewmen. Nor do they sail by the movements of the stars, but toward a star’s position at rise. And “the swelling of the waves” confuses…

Not churchgoers or joiners, still my people sang, up Highway 12 or Arnold Drive, depending on the traffic. “Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone,” my maternal grandfather would croon in a big put-on cowboy voice like Marty Robbins as we barrelled up the 79 from Julian to Calimesa after all their money disappeared in a savings- and-loan scam and they lost everything they thought was safe come hell or high water. On the other side, el otro lado, my grandfather would sing Lydia Mendoza rancheras and “Mal Hombre,” songs about la frontera, on our way from Oceanside to Laguna Beach. Also here, in the mountains, I remember driving up from Glen Ellen, the drive interminable, my brother’s pugilistic tendencies bruising me on the back seat’s sticky vinyl; even then,…

To the shadow I had left alone before Icrossed the border, my shadow that stayedlonely and hid in the dark of the night,freezing where it was, never needing a visa.To my shadow that’s been waiting for my return,homeless except when I was walking by its sidein the summer light.To my shadow that wishes to go to schoolwith the children of morning, but couldn’t fitthrough the classroom doors.To my shadow that has caught cold now, that’s beensneezing and coughing, no one there saying to it God bless!To my shadow that’s been crushed by cars and vans,its chest pierced by shrapnel and bulletsflying with no wings,my shadow that no one’s attending to,bleeding black bloodthrough its memorynow, and forever.…

The Dimensions of a Cave, by Greg Jackson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This cerebral thriller follows an investigative journalist as he attempts to expose a secret government program developing a lifelike virtual reality. His reporting raises profound questions: Are artificial beings alive? How do ambition and idealism transform each other? And “how, when you’re inside one story, can you see around it?” The character of the journalist takes shape through his relationships—with his girlfriend, a gallerist, who feels that their settled coupledom has run its course, and with a young, high-minded reporter who lacks the journalist’s ironic distance—suggesting that we best affirm our own realness by recognizing the reality of others. Jackson depicts the world as “stranger, wilder, deeper, more open than you’ve been made to know.” A Volga Tale, by…

It’s possible that John Turturro was born to play a dirty old man. The actor, one of my lifelong favorites, has a lurid, suggestive smile, curt at the edges, and eyes that shine with hidden information. He often seems to be holding back a disastrous secret, the kind that ruins families and topples friendships, and also often seems just about to spill the beans. In his affect, there’s a tinge of nihilistic fun: Let’s just forge ahead and see what happens! Turturro, now sixty-six, is the same slim and restless New York City sidewalk denizen he’s always been, but with a softened posture and a gentle white froth bubbling through the waves of his hair. The mischief’s still there, but alongside it, darkening its colors, is the shadow of experience.…

ART Zines, the Harlem Renaissance, Joan Jonas The American Folk Art Museum doesn’t get enough love, so it’s fitting that its big winter show should riff on the theme of neglect. “Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North” (opening Nov. 15) bills itself as a “corrective” to the notion that early American racism was a “largely Southern issue,” but that description seems too modest by half. Some hundred and twenty-five works, made between the late seventeenth century and the early nineteenth, offer a vibrant, occasionally tragic view of Black life above the Mason-Dixon Line. Later in November, the Brooklyn Museum gives another neglected subject some overdue attention. “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines” (Nov. 17) is the first major North American exhibition to explore the…

Daniel Yalke was twenty when he left Ethiopia and set off for Europe. One of six siblings from a poor family in Cherkos, a tough neighborhood in Addis Ababa, he had recently graduated from a technical college, where he’d trained to be an electrician. Some of his friends from Cherkos had paid smugglers to reach Europe. These friends now sent Yalke boastful texts about their better lives in Italy, France, and England. Yalke, a handsome youth with a wide smile, didn’t see much of a future for himself in Addis Ababa. It was difficult to make money as an electrician in the city, and the work was dangerous: a friend from school had been fatally electrocuted. In the summer of 2017, Yalke and his best friend from Cherkos, Israel Endale,…

The new film from Sofia Coppola, “Priscilla,” begins in 1959. Sitting at the counter of a diner at a U.S. Army base in Germany, Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) is asked whether she likes Elvis Presley. She answers with a question: “Of course, who doesn’t?” Priscilla is petite, polite, and fourteen—a little older than Juliet was when she first bumped into Romeo. The exciting, if alarming, news is that Elvis, the most unattainable of stars, has swung into her orbit. He’s currently stationed nearby, serving in the military, and Priscilla is invited to meet him at a party. Romeo is right there in the room. “You’re just a baby,” Elvis tells her. “Thanks,” she replies. Elvis is played by Jacob Elordi, who, by my estimate, is about three times taller than…

In 1926, Virginia Woolf wrote an essay about an innocent young art form: the silent cinema. Woolf argued that the movies were too literary. They would have to find their own artistic language, since they were currently imprisoned in a system of dead convention and mechanical semaphore: “A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse.” Once in a while, she had found herself in a darkened cinema with an apprehension of what film might achieve. “Through the thick counterpane of immense dexterity and enormous efficiency one has glimpses of something vital within,” she wrote. “But the kick of life is instantly concealed by more dexterity, further efficiency.” In the same year, the English writer W. Somerset Maugham published “The Casuarina Tree,”…