Innholdsfortegnelse for December 11, 2023 i The New Yorker

Jefferson Davis, the half-blind ex-President of the Confederate States of America, leaned on a cane as he hobbled into a federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. Only days before, a Chicago Tribune reporter, who’d met Davis on the boat ride to Richmond, had written that “his step is light and elastic.” But in court, facing trial for treason, Davis, fifty-eight, gave every appearance of being bent and broken. A reporter from Kentucky described him as “a gaunt and feeble-looking man,” wearing a soft black hat and a sober black suit, as if he were a corpse. He’d spent two years in a military prison. He wanted to be released. A good many Americans wanted himdead. “We’ll hang Jeff Davis from a sour-apple tree,” they sang to the tune of “John Brown’s…

At around 11:30 a.m. on the Friday before Thanksgiving, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, was having his weekly meeting with senior leaders when a panicked colleague told him to pick up the phone. An executive from OpenAI, an artificial-intelligence startup into which Microsoft had invested a reported thirteen billion dollars, was calling to explain that within the next twenty minutes the company’s board would announce that it had fired Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O. and co-founder. It was the start of a five-day crisis that some people at Microsoft began calling the Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck. Nadella has an easygoing demeanor, but he was so flabbergasted that for a moment he didn’t know what to say. He’d worked closely with Altman for more than four years and had grown to admire and trust…

How was your trip to New York?Well, we stayed at R’s. He was away. Asked us to not use the sheets—quitereasonably, he has no laundry and who likes coming home to an uncleanbed? Instructed to bring sheets, we forgot. But try to sleep slightlyabove the sheets, C with his chronic cough, I my insomnia. Wandering 3 A.M.bedroom to kitchen I find no teapot, scald myself on the kettle. C still coughing,racked, almost in tears. Chronic means no one can help. I blunder about, spillingthings on the floor. Pick up a book I’d thought to read on the plane.“Hölderlin’s Madness: Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806-1843,” by GiorgioAgamben. It begins with Agamben’s exegesis of Hölderlin’s critique ofFichte’s understanding of the sentence “I am I.” All three have much tosay about this…

Foreign Bodies, by Simon Schama (Ecco). This absorbing cultural history of vaccines surveys three centuries of controversy, beginning in England in the seventeen-twenties, with the first smallpox inoculation. For every enlightened champion of them—such as Voltaire, who praised the “strong and solid good sense” of their use—there were countless skeptics, reactionaries, and unscrupulous politicians who resisted them. Religious doctrine, the fear of outsiders, and personal attacks were among the tools these actors used: a central character in the book is Waldemar Haffkine, the creator of the cholera and plague vaccines, whose work administering them to the rural poor in India was cut short in 1902 after colonial officials campaigned to discredit him. In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl, by Merilee Grindle (Harvard). This vibrant biography follows the complex, captivating figure of…

It’s 1936, and Helen (Marin Ireland) and Joris (Andrew Burnap), the couple and filmmaking team at the heart of “Spain”—a new play by Jen Silverman, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theatre—have taken on a broad but curious challenge: make a movie about, you guessed it, Spain. Neither of them has ever been to the country. On a blackboard in their apartment, in the West Village, they write out all the words they can think of that might apply: “FIESTA,” “PAELLA,” “VINO”—the kinds of vague ideas that cling unconsciously to the brain and bubble up under ignorant duress. You might wonder why they’d choose a subject so unsuited to their experience, more but Silverman makes it clear from the start that they weren’t given a choice. Joris…

THE END OF AN ERA? James Somers’s reminiscence about his life as a coder struck home for both me and my wife (“Begin End,” November 20th). I started coding six decades ago, at the same time that my wife began a career as a reference librarian. She used to be able to answer, in an hour or less, any question that a customer brought to her desk; Google can do the same in no time at all. I used to make a computer the size of a Buick hum; my company would bring me a problem and a coding pad, and in a week or two I would have the machine sucking down punch cards and printing out reams of paper. Obsolescence overtook us both in the mid-nineties, more cruelly…

On the day that the poet Christian Wiman turned thirty-nine, he missed a phone call from his doctor. For months, he’d been playing with a bump above his collarbone, one so small he sometimes literally couldn’t put his finger on it. He had recently got married, and his wife had persuaded him to get it looked at. The voice mail, when he played it, informed him that he had lymphoma. This was on a Thursday, and the doctor was out for the weekend. The following Monday, Wiman learned that his was a rare form of lymphoma called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, and then, from a graph sketched sloppily on a napkin, that he likely had five years left to live. Somewhere between a thousand and three thousand Americans receive a diagnosis of…

I hope you won’t mind a fern on your grave. Standing on the shovel to dig a deep hole, I’m a year younger than you are now. I’ve written a will and reread the Old Masters. Swimming out to the breakwater, maybe a part of me is you touching buoy 328 before turning back to the borough beach. Maybe my hairy body is like a drone’s: eating pollen grains from a thousand flowers, spreading nectar across the comb in darkness, then flapping my wings to dry up the water and hasten the creation of viscous honey. If the lane to the dead is generative, as you said, let this hole be a point of light.…

By spring, he had got to the point of thinking that virtue was a matter of not saying things, which was a little problematic for him, as a writer, but not absolutely fatal. There was still something to be said for not saying everything, though not of course as much as there once had been. To the extent that there was a specific challenge he was facing, it was that he didn’t seem to be able to finish a book he had started writing a few years before. He didn’t seem to want to finish it. He seemed to be having the same problem with the half-dozen books he was ostensibly reading, several of which were, practically speaking, too long to be really finishable. Thoreau’s journal. Plato, a second time…

Was Robert Musil right with his sardonic quip “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument”? Cenotaphs, triumphal arches, bronze effigies frozen in time and space: we walk right by, barely noticing them. They may commemorate events of profound human cost, but, as physical relics, they seldom touch us. Now and then, a quiet presence of stone and light can move us: Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial; or Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, in Berlin; or the Lincoln Memorial, with Daniel Chester French’s serene image of the seated President. But such works are in the minority. More often, monuments fail to achieve their goal of prodding us to reflect. As Musil writes, in his “Posthumous Papers of a Living Author” (1936), part of the problem may be a…

DECEMBER 6 – 12, 2023 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. “Women Dressing Women,” which opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute on Dec. 7, was intended to début in 2020, as a sartorial complement to centennial celebrations of women’s suffrage—but the pandemic got in the way. It’s well worth the three-year wait. Fashion is an art form that relies on both women’s labor and women’s dollars to persist, and yet the work of female designers—who, it stands to reason, have the most intimate knowledge of the female form—has regularly gone unheralded. This show is a clear attempt at a corrective: the exhibit highlights the work of mid-nineteenth-century dressmakers, such as Olympe Boisse, along with twentieth-century mavericks like Claire McCardell and more contemporary names, including Marine…

The rule that Christmas preparations should wait until after Thanksgiving doesn’t apply to Hugue Dufour and his wife, Sarah Obraitis, the owners of M. Wells, a Québécois bistro in Long Island City. How could it when they’vegot more than six hundred tourtières to bake? The tourtière is a French Canadian meat pie with a history that goes back centuries. Traditionally served at réveillon, a late-night dinner on Christmas Eve, the tourtière is now a cult item among New York foodies. “It became a sort of club,” Dufour, a Quebec native, said the other day in the restaurant’s bar. “Mark Ladner—four meat pies every year. Sam Sifton—always two pies.” The couple’s meet-cute is like the plot of a culinary rom-com: Dufour was a rising chef in Montreal, and Obraitis was his…

What a fun night—I had a great time hanging out with you! Honestly, making new friends as an adult can be tough, so I’m thrilled that we got to know each other a little better. I’d love to do it again sometime, but first you’ll need to choose which Friendship with Jeff Plan™ is right for you. Acquaintance Basic A popular, no-frills package for people who aren’t looking for anything serious. You won’t have to hear about my emotional problems, and if you try to tell me yours be prepared for a response that could range from banal platitude to meaningless cliché. You just got put on Lexapro? Everything happens for a reason. Your dad got shingles? Easy come, easy go. You got laid off yesterday? That’s a spicy meatball.…

In the annals of literary revenge, critics come in for as much bludgeoning as you might assume, and, somehow, still less than we might deserve. John Updike, notably, had his fictional alter ego, the writer Henry Bech, bring all his imagination to bear as he serially dispatched his harshest critics (“satanic legions deserving only annihilation”). In a blunter mode, the romance novelist Jilly Cooper once named an incontinent goat for a reviewer who had savaged her work. But, to see the job done properly, call in a critic. In the novel “Max Jamison” (1970), which was lauded in its time and is now cruelly out of print, the critic Wilfrid Sheed paints a merciless picture of his profession. Max, a film and theatre reviewer, tramps up and down Broadway excreting…

In 1936, Isabel Morse Jones, a music critic for the Los Angeles Times, made a modest boast: “We in the west have been permitted freedom to develop our music in our own way to a certain extent, because of the distances between us and the musical politics of the east and Europe.” For sure: by the mid-nineteen-thirties, California composers were already striking new paths. Henry Cowell, a Bay Area native, was exploring cluster chords, drones, and open forms. Lou Harrison, an Oregonian gone south, was absorbing non-Western traditions. John Cage, a graduate of Los Angeles High School, was beginning to theorize a music of percussion and noise. Meanwhile, European composers were fleeing totalitarian Europe and making their way West. In 1934, the modernist titan Arnold Schoenberg took refuge in L.A.;…