Innholdsfortegnelse for February 12-19, 2024 i The New Yorker

After Zac Brettler died, his parents struggled to decode the mystery of what had happened to him. They thought that they could pinpoint the moment he’d started to change: three years earlier, when, at sixteen, he began boarding at Mill Hill School, in North London. Zac had grown up in Maida Vale, a quietly affluent neighborhood in the city. His father, Matthew, is a director at a small financial-services firm; his mother, Rachelle, is a freelance journalist. As a child, Zac was bright and quirky, with curly red hair and a voice that was husky and surprisingly deep. He was an excellent mimic, and often entertained his parents and his brother, Joe, by putting on accents. Joe was nearly two years older than Zac, and he attended University College School,…

COMIC PREDECESSORS It was heartening to read Carrie Battan’s Profile of Jacqueline Novak and learn that a comic has found success in standup by focussing on sex from a woman’s perspective (“Detail Oriented,” January 22nd). But nothing happens in a vacuum, and it would have been nice for either Battan or Novak to give a nod to the many second-wave-feminist comics, both stage performers and writers, who came earlier, so to speak. Chief among those deserving mention were the numerous contributors to Gloria Kaufman and Mary Kay Blakely’s 1980 collection, “Pulling Our Own Strings: Feminist Humor and Satire.” Of those, none was bolder and funnier than the late Naomi Weisstein, whose account of growing up, “The Saturday Night Special: Rape and Other Big Jokes,” remains as outrageously hilarious and thought-provoking…

“I don’t really know how competitive I am by nature, because if you can’t consciously acknowledge something you can’t see where you are in relation to it.” I wrote this sentence to an acquaintance with whom I was having a long e-mail exchange about Elena Ferrante’s novel “My Brilliant Friend,” which follows the early phase of an intense, lifelong, and highly competitive relationship between two Neapolitan girls in postwar Italy. Like a lot of things one dashes off in e-mails, the sentence isn’t strictly true: I can acknowledge when I’m competitive, particularly in a professional situation—but the acknowledgment is muffled, half suppressed. The competitiveness always takes me by surprise, coming, for example, in the form of a sudden sneaky urge to best someone in a minor contest that means very…

More than seven hundred people came to the black-tie gala for the Studio Museum in Harlem last October. It was gala season, a time when, on an almost nightly basis, cultural institutions around the city congratulate themselves and raise money doing it, and this one draws the liveliest, the best-dressed, and by far the most diverse crowd of celebrants. Thelma Golden, the museum’s director, seemed to be everywhere at once as she moved around the room welcoming Spike Lee, Nicole Ari Parker, Questlove, Julie Mehretu, David Byrne, and many more. Golden, who is fifty-eight and five feet tall, with close-cropped hair and surprisingly large eyes, was wearing a long, sparkly dress. In this world, at least, she is one of those people who, like Elvis and Oprah, do not require…

Underneath the huge, old, rusty awning, it was three shades darker and ten degrees cooler than in the street. Theo had been sitting on the porch rocker watching Shirlee go back and forth. It was strange to see a girl walking alone, but Shirlee was always out and about by herself. She always looked the same, too: once-upon-a-time-white canvas shoes, T-shirt tied above her belly button, jeans pulled up into her crotch. With one hand on her hip and the other shading her eyes, she stepped into the yard. “Do a dude name Melvin stay on this street?” The girl’s hair was scraped up into a short peacock, styled with gelled baby hairs and curlicues. Her lips shined like she had just eaten chicken. Theo wanted to bust out laughing,…

You Dreamed of Empires, by Álvaro Enrigue, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Riverhead). This incantatory novel takes place in 1519, on the day when Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors arrived at Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. As they await an audience with the mercurial, mushroom-addled emperor, Moctezuma, the conquistadors navigate his labyrinthine palace, stumble upon sacrificial temples, and tend to their horses, all the while wondering if they are truly guests or, in fact, prisoners. Enrigue conjures both court intrigue and city life with grace. In metafictional flashes to present-day Mexico City, which sits atop Tenochtitlan’s ruins, and a startling counter-historical turn, the novel becomes a meditation on the early colonizers, their legacy, and the culture that they subsumed. Last Acts, by Alexander Sammartino (Scribner). The events of this…

A couple of weeks ago, Chris Crawford, a former restaurant chef who prefers to be called a cook, gave me a tour of the place that she refers to as her “factory.” The description is technically true, but it’s also funny, considering that it’s a single room in which Crawford usually works alone. The eleven-hundred-square-foot space, situated on a high floor of a building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, is equipped with an induction burner, a microscope, and a big sink, plus bouquets of lemon verbena and whole persimmons hanging from the ceiling to dry. About half the room is occupied by tall shelving units, lined with hundreds of large plastic pails. Crawford, a petite forty-one-year-old with elfin features, is the founder and the sole full-time employee of a…

It’s hard to know—or maybe, really, to admit—that you drink too much. After all, you might just be a fun guy. The sort who orders half the menu at a dinner for two, using each cocktail or glass of wine as a kind of musical notation, a mark of rest between courses, helping the unhurried night grow long and lively. Three drinks in, or four, neon signs blur with companionate charm, and the lights dotting bridges (you see them from the back of your car as you head to the next party) spread calmly over the water, offering you peace. Drink might help you speak up, speed your charisma. It might lift a scrim and put you in better contact with others, and with your own senses. Seamus Heaney once…

FEBRUARY 7 – 20, 2024 David Greenspan, one of downtown theatre’s exquisites, performs an entire psychedelic noir narrative in Joey Merlo’s “On Set with Theda Bara,” a one-person show for many voices. In Merlo’s delirious play—staged by the director Jack Serio with the audience seated at a long table in a pitch-dark room—a genderqueer teen is missing, and their detective father is on the case. The gumshoe finds that all roads somehow lead to Theda Bara, the real silent-screen sex symbol, nicknamed “the Vamp” for her iconic roles as a hypnotic, exotic lamia. Greenspan performs all the parts around, and sometimes on, the table. The show operates as a séance—phantasmal essences shift in your peripheral vision, and a chill breath finds the back of your neck.—Helen Shaw (The Brick;…

I am happy to announce that I have opened a new waiting list, for people who have been trying to get on my regular waiting list. When and if there are openings on the regular list, those on the new list will be eligible to move into one of the open slots, after paying a transfer fee. The new list is meant as an accommodation for people who have been unable to get on my regular waiting list, or even to get a response from me. It is my wish to give these applicants a glimmer of hope. However, I must confess, openings on my regular waiting list are few and far between. But they do occasionally happen: —Persons on the regular list are required to notify me at least…

All afternoon I stroll the plotless thirteen hundredpages of a Sanskrit dictionarywith its verbs for holy obsessions,the name for an alcoveof coin washers whose fingers glintall night with dark lead, grains of silver Here root vowels takean accent at high altitudes the way dictionariesspeak over mountains A single word to portray lightfrom that distant villagereflected in a cloud,or your lover’s face litby the moonlight on a stage Landscapes nudge the dialect.In far places travellers knowa faint gesture can meandesire or scorn, just asa sliver of a phrase thrown awayhides charms within its grammar —A guru“someone with a light touch”derives from that short vowel, aloneand before a single consonant Wherever you turndefinitions push open a door The precisely named odour of a manwho is a heart-thief a word for the highest…

as do your children, as does your husband.It’s strange even now to understand thatyou are a mother and a wife, that these giftswere given to you and that you received them,fond as you’ve always been of declininginvitations. You belong to the world. The handsthat put a peach tree into the earth exactlywhere the last one died in the freeze belongto the world and will someday feed it again,differently, your body will become food againfor something, just as it did so humorouslywhen you became a mother, hungry beingsclamoring at your breast, born as they’d beenwith the bodily passion for survival that isour kind’s one common feature. You belongto the world, animal. Deal with it. Even asthe great abstractions come to take you away,the regrets, the distractions, you can at any secondcome…

In March, 1668, Adriaan Koerbagh, a Dutch physician in his mid-thirties, hired Johannes Van Eede, a printer in Utrecht, to publish his new book, “A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Shed Light on Matters of Theology and Religion.” But Van Eede, after setting the first half of the manuscript, became uneasy about its highly unorthodox contents. Koerbagh argued that God is not a Trinity, as the Dutch Reformed Church taught, but an infinite and eternal substance that includes everything in existence. In his view, Jesus was just a human being, the Bible is not Holy Writ, and good and evil are merely terms we use for what benefits or harms us. The only reason people believe in the doctrine of Christianity, Koerbagh wrote, is that religious authorities “forbid people…