Innholdsfortegnelse for January 1-8, 2024 i The New Yorker

The comedy historian Kliph Nester-off, forty-three, visited the New York Public Library recently, for an event at the Celeste Bartos Forum—a discussion with the comedian and podcaster Marc Maron, about Nesteroff’s new book, “Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars.” A former standup (“Iretired at twenty-six”), Nesteroff, who is wiry and feisty, with glasses and a bald head, has written three books about comedy history. He met Maron more than a decade ago, when their paths crossed for Shecky Greene-related reasons, and has appeared on his podcast. Nesteroff, who grew up in British Columbia and lives in Hollywood, was new to the N.Y.P.L., and arrived early. He stopped into “Treasures,” an exhibit of highlights from the library’s vast collection—a draft of the Declaration of Independence, a rehearsal photo…

Before screens, tipping, like a marriage proposal, was a private affair. Tips can reveal hidden values or the rumblings of the subconscious. A waitress’s breast size, for instance, correlates positively with tip size. “Mad Men”-era husbands tipped more when dining with someone else’s wife than with their own. The grief-inflected gratitude of the postpandemic period introduced new tipping behaviors. Etiquette experts studied the so-called guilt-tip boom. The gratuity, like everything else, has gone contactless—the swivelling of the iPad. In the past three years, according to data from the payroll company Gusto, tips in bakeries and cafés are up forty-one-per cent. Apparently, we now tip assistant sports coaches (up three hundred and sixty-seven per cent) and theatre-box-office staff (up a hundred and sixty-one per cent). Do you tip the cashier when…

This past June, at the height of kitten season in Los Angeles, Gail Raff got a call for help from the neighborhood of Valley Glen, where a young woman had trapped a cat that needed fixing. Although the City of Los Angeles subsidizes the sterilization of unowned cats, appointments at clinics are hard to come by, and Raff was known in the animal-rescue world as a trapper who secures as many appointments as she can. Arriving in Valley Glen, she learned that the young woman, alarmed by the number of cats in her neighborhood, had been doing her best to feed them. Now they were having babies all over the place, and she wanted to do the socially responsible thing. She gave Raff the address of a “problem” house, not…

1 For the moment a wave will make a splashas if it might be sent to testthe waters where so many wail and gnashtheir teeth and beat the breasts they’ve inadvertently bared.For the moment a wave will make a splashand no expense be sparedin a country so brash even the kids talk trashas they line up for the Tornado or Cyclone.For the moment a wave will make a splashthat will chill them to the bone when they might otherwise succumbto sunburn or a heat rash,the banker waiting patiently alongside the bumfor the moment a wave will make a splash. 2 One of these days the guy with a mustachewho’ll have tried to put his stampon Europe’s beaches will look back on the clashof armies as the Little Tramp looks back…

It’s one of the stranger anomalies of French intellectual life that Impressionist painting—by far the most influential of French cultural enterprises—has received so little attention from the most ambitious French critics and philosophers. One can page through André Gide’s journal entries, a lot of them on art, or through Albert Camus’s, and find very little on Claude Monet or Edgar Degas (and much more on the Symbolists, a group that was far easier for a literary man to “get”). Marcel Proust cared passionately for painting, and his hero-painter Elstir has touches of Monet, but in order to make him interesting Proust had to model him on the more histrionic James McNeill Whistler, with samplings from a forgotten American painter added in. The absence isn’t that hard to explain. Impressionism, though…

BEYOND SUFFERING I was deeply impressed by Casey Cep’s portrait of the poet Christian Wiman (“Close to the Bone,” December 11th). I find Wiman’s reckoning with spiritual themes to be honest and moving. I was surprised, however, by Cep’s account of a line in one of Wiman’s poems, which she reads as claiming that “there is no solution to the problem of suffering.” The Buddha found such a solution more than two thousand years ago, and distilled it in his Four Noble Truths, which are the basic tenets of the Buddhist tradition. Although not everyone partakes in Buddhism’s teachings, its ideas are a counterpoint to Cep’s sweeping statement. Tom MoseleyBoston, Mass. AMERICAN LAMENTS John Adams, in his review of “Time’s Echo,” Jeremy Eichler’s book about how music can memorialize atrocities,…

Spend five minutes in nature and you’ll see what everyone’s talking about, with the mountains and zoos and watermelons. It’s breathtaking. And what about salmon, just swimming around, completely unfazed by how wet they’re getting? If you want to see for yourself, there are some great documentaries about how wet they get. There’s such a breadth of animals besides just wet ones and dry ones. There are shy animals, like the hermit crab, and outgoing animals, like the gibbon, shaking you down for your KIND bar in the rain forest. Nature has trees all over the place. Without trees we wouldn’t have many of the leaves and branches that we enjoy today. If trees didn’t produce oxygen, we’d be dead. If they didn’t produce maple syrup, we’d be dead and…

Not the pleasure of lovers but the pleasure of letters,a pleasure like weather, delayed and prepared for,not the pleasure of lessons but the pleasure of errors,of nightmares, of actors in the black box of a theatre,not the pleasure of present but the pleasure of later,the pleasure of letters and weather and terror, asleepby the lake, unable to answer, the pleasure of candles,their wax on the table, not the pleasure of saviorsbut the pleasure of errors, not the pleasure of marriagebut the pleasure of failure, the pleasure of characterslike family members, their failures and errors, theirlaughter and weather, the pleasure of water, terriblerivers, not the pleasure of empire but the pleasureof after, our failure to keep an accurate record, notthe pleasure of tethers but the pleasure of strangers,the terrible strangers who…

DECEMBER 27, 2023 – JANUARY 9, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing. The theatre sector wobbled for a moment when it seemed that the vital Under the Radar festival—a showcase for experimental work and international scene-shakers—might be cancelled after it lost its home at the Public Theatre. Happily, that one home has now become a dozen: in January, venues such as Abrons Arts Center, Japan Society, and La Mama band together as a wide network, where the weird show(s) can go on. Thank heavens, because nowhere else do we get such a concentrated burst of formal transgression, including the fearless Nile Harris production “this house is not a home” (pictured below), a furious, dance-filled eulogy for Harris’s friend Trevor Bazile and a goad to a hipster scene that…

When the war comes to Gaza, my wife and I do not want to leave. We want to be with our parents and brothers and sisters, and we know that to leave Gaza is to leave them. Even when the border with Egypt opens to people with foreign passports, like our three-year-old son, Mostafa, we stay. Our apartment in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, is on the third floor. My brothers live above and below us, and my parents live on the ground floor. My father cares for chickens and rabbits in the garden. I have a library filled with books that I love. Then Israel drops flyers on our neighborhood, warning us to evacuate, and we crowd into a borrowed two-bedroom apartment in the Jabalia refugee camp. Soon,…

When Scott Frank was a child, his father, Barry, bought a small Cessna airplane, and on weekends the two of them would fly. This was the mid-nineteen-seventies, in Los Gatos, California. Barry was a Pan Am pilot, and he believed that in some lines of work, as Scott later put it, “fear is your friend.” Upon reaching an altitude of two miles, Barry would say, “Scott, if I had a heart attack right now and you had to land the plane, where would you land?” Scott would scan the horizon for a break in the trees, his heart pounding to the rhythm of the ticking clock Barry had imposed: The plane is going down. Scott was a sensitive child with a vigorous imagination, and these impromptu exercises in flight instruction…

The dead man decided to try the running app. He hadn’t run for years. Not since his mid-thirties. Now he was in his early fifties. Or he had been in his early fifties, recently enough. Would he be in his early fifties forever? He tapped the gray oblong and waited as the percentage-downloaded dial advanced, slowly. Much has yet to be revealed, he whispered to himself, in a tone he had used more often when he was a kid, when he had expected his life to resemble a tale of adventure, or of horror, or one with a mystery to solve, or a magical stone to obtain. He felt kind of embarrassed—but why, and in front of whom? He had heard good things about the app and he didn’t want…

The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, by Gregg Hecimovich (Ecco). In 2002, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., published an annotated edition of “The Bondswoman’s Narrative,” a novel thought to be the first written by an enslaved Black woman. Its author was unknown until Hecimovich, a scholar of Victorian literature, traced the manuscript to Hannah Crafts, a mixed-race captive who was born in 1826. Like her novel’s protagonist, Crafts was likely the offspring of rape, her first captor having been her biological father. As she was passed from one household to the next, she was taught to read and exposed to popular literature; her novel would eventually draw on Dickens’s “Bleak House.” Alongside Crafts’s story, Hecimovich recounts the painstaking process of his research, which included forensic analysis of paper and ink…

In “Appropriate,” now on Broadway at the Hayes, directed by Lila Neugebauer, the prologue is just a sound. In total darkness, we hear the metallic waterfall song of a billion cicadas, a night-marishly amplified version of the insects’ ancient mating call. According to the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s stage directions, the noise’s “pulsing, pitch black waves” should last long enough for the audience to wonder, Is this the whole show? It’s the sound of a thirteen-year cycle ending; it could be the sound of the Cenozoic waking up. Slowly, the curtain rises on the double-height entrance hall and parlor of an imposing nineteenth-century plantation home, crumbling a little and crammed with furniture, boxes, lamps, and teetering piles. In the course of the ensuing two hours and forty minutes, we sometimes…