Innholdsfortegnelse for January 29, 2024 i The New Yorker

It was a midsummer afternoon and my old friend Dawn and I were walking from an un-air-conditioned Nepalese restaurant to our hotel in the dull, flat town of Montrose, Colorado. The sun seemed larger than usual, and brighter. It felt as if we were under a broiler. The road we were on was six lanes wide, or maybe eight. There was no sidewalk, so we were pressed right up against the curb, being passed by flatulent motorcycles—their riders helmetless—and eighteen-wheel trucks that were equally loud but at least generated a breeze. One of the many good things about Dawn is that she never complains about walking, never says, “You told me it was only another few blocksan hour ago,” never moans that her feet are tired or so swollen that…

When Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is there, just trying to focus.” The footage—which has been screened by the family multiple times over the years, and as part of a feminist art installation designed by Eleanor—was the first of many instances in which Sofia would be seen through her father’s lens. When she was just a few…

People who romanticize an Africa They’ve never seen Like to identify themselves With lions. It’s all roar and hunt, Quick fucks and blond manes. People love the word pride. Haven’t you seen the parades? Everybody adores a lion But me. I want to be a giraffe. I’m already tall and long-necked. In the real Sahara, a giraffe beats A lion’s ass every day On Instagram. I’ve seen A giraffe shake the leaping cat Off its back and toss it like litter. I’ve seen a giraffe stomp hooves Down hard on the lion’s face Before it got the chance To meow. I want to be a giraffe And eat greens of every variety Straight out the tree. I already Like to get high. Lions need Animals like us. We need no…

Come and Get It, by Kiley Reid (Putnam). Agatha Paul, the narrator of this fizzy campus novel, is the acclaimed author of a book on “physical mourning.” During a visiting professorship at the University of Arkansas, she intends to conduct research on weddings. Yet the subject prickles—she is still reeling from a painful separation—and she soon pivots to a new topic: “How students navigate money.” Paul herself quickly becomes an object of fascination for many of the students, and the stakes are raised when one of them offers Paul the use of her room to eavesdrop on conversations between the undergraduates. Almost on a whim, Paul accepts, and small transgressions soon give way to larger ones. Disillusioned, by Benjamin Herold (Penguin). This intrepid inquiry into the unfulfilled promise of America’s…

“Why isn’t she more famous?” The question has bugged me since I first saw the work of Emily Mason, one of the most ravishing post-New York School abstract painters, and my nominee for the most underrated. Not that these things are ever very fair; it’s just bizarre that an artist who knew everyone, and whose family everyone knew, ended up so close to unknown. Her distant ancestor John Trumbull painted a portrait of Alexander Hamilton that should look familiar to anyone who’s handled a ten-dollar bill, and her mother, the abstract painter Alice Trumbull Mason, hung out with Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler. Many artists have deserved glory, but few of them had Elaine de Kooning for a babysitter. Where’s nepotism when you need it? The simplest explanation is that…

MORE TO LOVE I loved Jennifer Wilson’s refreshingly generous overview of recent depictions of polyamory (Books, January 1st & 8th). As a psychotherapist who has long worked with couples exploring non-monogamy, I have found that one of the most helpful things about these depictions, even when they are flawed, is that they spur important conversations. All couples can benefit from reflecting together on what fidelity and commitment mean to them, so long as they do so in a curious, open-minded way—something that films, television shows, podcasts, and books can help them with. One recent film that might have this effect is “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s brilliant study of Leonard Bernstein’s unconventional marriage, which portrays a deep, loving fidelity that is not measured by sexual exclusivity. What an exciting era we live…

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Nineteen’s slow violence. Your arm a tusk slicing the air—whoa, habibti— for that first Jack-and-Coke. Here we go, take it slow, habibti. Soon, you’ll become an emergency: I.V. bag and emerald bruise. First love hammering your door, but you’re no habibti, no bait turned proposal. On the third page of an old journal, the same question in pale ink: Can I be my own habibti? You glaze-eyed. You lit like a county fair. The long twine of a decade, hold the tattoo needle to skin and sew habibti. Even the sea rots here. This prop city with its prop heart. The hot-eyed men whistling the streets: Hello, habibti. Hello, cream. Hello, daughter of men. Hello, almost-wife. I can’t teach you about metaphor; I’m stuck in the future. O, habibti, I…

Four very thin trees stand above their own reflections and hesitate, as cold girls do. She thinks of rhymes for girls do. Whirls through. Pearls anew. Use it in a sonnet? Eddy’s mother lives by a lake. It is a gray and glassy evening. Supper was all reminiscences, Eddy recalling slow white mists drifting over the schoolyard each day at five, when the chemical plant incinerated its Styrofoam, and how he broke his collarbone and no one believed him for three days, his mother at the head of the table smiling and continuing with her fruit cup, his brother sitting opposite with his head down, a man tall and thin as a door, closed like a door. He ate as if expecting more. Four, chore, whore, underscore ran through her…

“Mrs. Justice Holmes died on Tuesday night,” the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, William Howard Taft, reported on May 5, 1929. Mr. Justice Holmes—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—had relied on his wife, Fanny Bowditch, for nearly everything. They’d been married for fifty-seven years. Her death “seems like the beginning of my own,” Holmes wrote. And yet, on the very day of her death, Holmes, eighty-eight, drafted an opinion for the Court and sent it to the Chief. “I suppose there are a good many who are counting on his retirement,” Taft mused. “If so, they miss their guess.” In the end, it was Taft who went first, dying less than a year later, at the age of seventy-two. William Howard Taft is the only Chief Justice of the United States to have…

JANUARY 24 – 30, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. The dancers of Compagnie Hervé Koubi, which is based in Calais, could be mistaken for gods. They glide, spin, toss one another in high arcs through the air, exhibiting an uncanny mastery of the body, and a gravitas that renders their movements into poetry. Unlike Koubi’s previous works, his latest, “Sol Invictus,” includes women. At times, these grave, heroic figures hold their fingers to their brows in a shape that suggests a crown of sun rays; perhaps the idea is that we each contain a god within. The piece is animated by the unfashionable and romantic notion that a common humanity unites us all.—Marina Harss (Joyce Theatre; Jan. 23-28.) ABOUT TOWN ROCK | For nearly four…

When Beatriz Flamini was growing up, in Madrid, she spent a lot of time alone in her bedroom. “I really liked being there,” she says. She’d read books to her dolls and write on a chalkboard while giving them lessons in math or history. As she got older, she told me, she some-times imagined being a professor like Indiana Jones: the kind who slipped away from the classroom to “be who he really was.” In the early nineteen-nineties, while Flamini was studying to be a sports instructor, she visited a cave for the first time. She and a friend drove north of Madrid to El Reguerillo, a cavern known for its paleolithic engravings. “We stayed until Sunday and came out only because we had classes and work,” Flamini recalls. El…

One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and tune in to a CBS broadcast during which a young woman dropped acid. She sat next to a man in a suit: Sidney Cohen, the researcher who had given her the LSD. The woman wore lipstick and nail polish, and her eyes were shining. “I wish I could talk in Technicolor,” she said. And, at another point, “I can see the molecules. I… I’m part of it. Can’t you see it?” “I’m trying,” Cohen replied. Were some families maybe—oh, I don’t know—eating meat loaf on TV trays as they watched this nice lady undergo her mind-bending, molecule-revealing journey through inner space? Did they switch to “Father Knows Best” or “The Perry Como Show” afterward?…

Half a century later, they still return our gaze, staring back at us in their dark dresses and white stockings, their white headbands pinned in place. The seven-year-old identical twins Cathleen and Colleen Wade stand side by side, pressed together as if to create the illusion that they are conjoined. One twin smiles; the other appraises the photographer. There are remnants of chocolate cake in the creases of their mouths. Diane Arbus took this portrait, “Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. 1966,” at a Christmas party for families of multiples held at a Knights of Columbus hall. She’d been lurking at such events, prospecting for twins and triplets. Through her viewfinder, the sisters appear less like two separate children than like split aspects of the same soul, simultaneously innocent and foreboding. “I…