Innholdsfortegnelse for January 15, 2024 i The New Yorker

When I was twelve years old, in 1969, my family moved to Reston, Virginia. It was a planned community near Washington, D.C.—a suburban utopia where C.I.A. agents and Foreign Service offcers like my father could raise their families. I hated Reston, and hated living in the United States. We had stayed in Northern Virginia for part of the previous year, between stints in Taiwan and Indonesia. During our time there, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated—one of the few times I saw my parents cry. While I was out selling “I Have a Dream” stickers in King’s memory to support the Poor People’s Campaign, a neighbor sicced his dogs on me. I ran away from home several times, and so my mother and father devised a solution for my restlessness:…

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has endured his share of mortifying moments in his journey to the American stage. There was the night in his early twenties when he met Tony Kushner at a birthday party and stood for so long in awestruck silence, pretending to text, that Kushner pityingly encouraged him to have a good time. Or the day he misspelled “heifer” in a spelling bee, earning so much mockery from friends of his mother’s, he told me, that “I almost had my race card taken away.” Two of his first plays stumbled into scandals before they even opened, with one of them leaked to and subsequently eviscerated in the Times. But the cake-taking incident occurred during a brief flirtation with performance art, when Jacobs-Jenkins appeared before his family in blackface. “My…

When I was ten, I had an imaginary friend. He lived on porkand beans and played the viola. People would look at us and hearsad music, turn away. That’s pretty much how it was, what it waslike, for most of 1977. A viola is slightly larger than a violin. Itmakes a deeper sound. The cello and the double-bass: larger anddeeper still. All, like Pinocchio, have hollow wooden bodies,though Pinocchio has more strings and is hollow only metaphorically.Guitars have strings. Harps also. If a harp lay down and fell asleepand you bludgeoned its dreams with felted hammers, then youwould have a piano. If you were wearing a tuxedo, you wouldhave a grand piano. If you knocked a clock to the floor and leftit there, on its back, staring at the ceiling,…

About a decade ago, a friend of mine and her husband moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. After landing at LAX, they went straight to Gjelina, a restaurant in Venice that exemplifies a certain image of life in Southern California: seasonal, sensual, wood-fired cooking; a sun-dappled patio near the beach. “We had this long, exquisite lunch,” she recalled recently. “And just as we were getting ready to pay the bill, feeling like ‘Wow, we’re Californians now!,’ something dropped out of the sky and landed in the middle of the table.” A passion fruit had fallen from one of the vines overhead, and as they sat there staring at it in delight a waiter appeared. “Wordlessly,” she said, “he cut the fruit into two hemispheres and handed each of us…

UNDERSTANDING CANCER Siddhartha Mukherjee, in his piece on the root causes of cancer, describes a moment of revelation, when he came to understand that mutations that give rise to cancer lie latent until the “insult” of inflammation occurs (“Sleeper Cells,” December 18th). He traces the development of that idea mostly through epidemiological studies. But it’s also interesting to consider one beautiful experiment, by Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück, in 1943, that provided clean data supporting the idea of preëxisting mutations. Luria and Delbrück showed that, in bacteria, selective pressure does not induce mutations; rather, the pressure reveals the cells in which mutations already exist. (When a virus was introduced into a petri dish, it killed bacteria that lacked disease-resistant mutations, leaving behind organisms that, by chance, had these mutations. The…

On a cold, clear weekday morning in early December, Shepria Johnson pulled up to a small house in Ecorse, Michigan, in an S.U.V. with a decal on the driver’s door which read “Student Wholeness Team.” She looked at an app on her phone. It was her third of ten visits that morning, and she was there to check on a girl and a boy, eleven and nine, who had missed enough days of school to put them on a list of “chronically absent” students at Grandport Academy, in Ecorse, an industrial suburb of Detroit. In case there was no one home, Johnson wrote the students’ names on a form letter and addressed the envelope to “the parent of Jisaiah and King.” She wrote “parent,” avoiding the plural as she had…

What would it be like to be a mantis shrimp,poorly understood, territorial, combative, with part of your brain housedin each eyestalk? I don’t think it’s exactly love, but some speciesare monogamous, sharing a patch of sea grass or underwater burrow for twenty years.My place is probably a hundred and fifty feet above sea level, and when my son comes back homehe sleeps in a captain’s bed above his old T-shirts. Sometimes he brings his dog,a rescue, and calls me Dogma, then they’re gone againand I rattle around again, mindlessly, listening to my neighbor sing.From the far end of the galley kitchen I can watch the Hudson tides rise and fall,can imagine being dredged in a net dropped by the sloop my son and his classmatessailed, long ago, when they were…

More than fifty years later, Zohra Drif could still picture the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956. It was white and shining, she recalled, awash in laughter, young voices, “summer colors, the smell of pastries, and even the distant twittering of birds.” Drif, a well-coiffed law student in a stylish lavender dress, ordered a peach-Melba ice cream and wedged her beach bag against the counter. She paid, tipped, and left without her bag. The bomb inside it exploded soon afterward. Looking back, Drif felt little regret about the three who died and the twelve—including children—who lost limbs from her bomb and from a second that detonated in another café minutes later. The European cafégoers weren’t civilians, in her view, but colonizers. Their “offensive carefree attitudes” made a painful…

Every artist confronts her past, and, in the case of the Indian dancer Bijayini Satpathy, that past is both a country and a colonial legacy. Satpathy performs Odissi, a dance style from the eastern state of Odisha which is one of India’s eight classical dance forms. Although Indian classical dance is commonly assumed to be ancient and reverential—and there is a documented history of devotional dancing extending back more than two millennia—all eight of these designated classical styles are modern, post-colonial inventions. Even before the British formally departed the country, in 1947, Indian authorities had set out to give their emerging nation its own indigenous theatrical arts, and gurus and dancers from various regions began assembling standardized forms out of a dizzying variety of local practices and traditions. By…

JANUARY 10 – 16, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Meshell Ndegeocello is the most significant bassist this country has produced since the advent of Charles Mingus and Flea. But, unlike those innovators, Ndegeocello, who performs an upcoming series of shows at the fabled jazz club Blue Note, doesn’t really stick to one genre. Her incredibly musical ear and voice—she’s a fine singer, too—takes from jazz, soul, pop, and opera (as in her tribute to James Baldwin) to make sounds that are resonant not only of the times but of her very deep and compassionate soul. Ndegeocello’s latest album, the sensational “The Omnichord Real Book,” is a testament to her continued belief that music, like life, only gets better when we make it together.—Hilton Als (Blue Note;…

LEGAL NAME OF DECEASEDYeniifer Alvarez-Estrada GlickDATE OF DEATH—ACTUAL OR PRESUMEDJuly 10, 2022MARITAL STATUS AT TIME OF DEATH☑ MarriedIF DEATH OCCURRED IN A HOSPITAL☑ ER/OutpatientIF FEMALE☑ Pregnant at time of deathLOCATION (CITY/TOWN AND STATE)Luling, TXMANNER OF DEATH☑ Pending Investigation Yeniifer Alvarez arrived in central Texas from San Luis Potosí, Mexico, in 1998. At three, she was just old enough to have a sense of a world left behind: the fire that warmed the house in the evening, the meat hung to dry outside the door, and la bisabuela, her adored great-grandmother, who had died shortly before Yeni and her mom went north. In Luling, Yeni, her parents, aunts, and grandmother settled into a cramped house with a tin roof that was down the street from her great-uncles, the first members of…

She was hoping he would leave her the beach house, counting on this actually, though he had told her he wasn’t going to. He’d said he would be leaving it to an organization that offered sanctuary to abandoned German shepherds, but that had to be a joke, right? The German shepherds wouldn’t be quartered in the beach house; rather, the shabby but invaluable property would be sold, the proceeds going to an organization that had to be fraudulent, unlicensed, a figment of her father’s imagination. Her father said that he loved her—he just wasn’t going to leave her the beach house, which to him had become not the beach house at all but, in truth, something else entirely. He believed he was going to pass soon, and he had been…

American Zion, by Benjamin E. Park (Norton). Park, a historian, traces Mormonism from its inception in New York, in 1830, to its struggle amid persecution in the mid-nineteenth century, to its present status as a global empire of more than seventeen million adherents. He posits that changes in the decade of Mormonism’s emergence—such as the vibrant growth of the American marketplace—eliminated élite education as a requirement for divine calling, creating an opportunity for a man like Joseph Smith, Jr., to found the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Throughout, Park delves into Mormon history and lore to produce a picture of the institution as one that is both marginalized and marginalizing. Unshrinking, by Kate Manne (Crown). Fatphobia, as defined by the author of this polemic, a Cornell philosophy professor,…