Innholdsfortegnelse for March 11, 2024 i The New Yorker

Partway through “The Effect,” by the British playwright Lucy Prebble, a clinical psychologist named Lorna James tells a joke: At a conference, a medic is attracted to a woman who pays him no attention. The medic, aware that the release of dopamine is associated with the onset of love, and that dopamine levels rise during novel, exciting experiences, arranges for himself and the woman to go bungee jumping. “They fall headlong into this incredible, adrenaline filled rush—their dopamine levels go wild,” James says. “He looks into her eyes and says, ‘Wasn’t that amazing?!’ And breathlessly she answers, ‘Yes! And isn’t the instructor handsome!’” James tells the joke to Connie, a subject in a clinical trial for a new antidepressant. Connie is a psychology student, and she knows that the antidepressant…

Should we take a trip?Find a room in the woodsWith a fireplace, the scent Of dry wood on fire, of pineBeyond the room where weCould be falling asleep, entangled? There might be a windThat breathes in the tree scentTo the bed where under blankets We could be assembling something,Or dissembling something else,Placing some disassembled pieces Back together with memory’s glue.The weather is only the weather,And like us resembles the moods That blow through us. That carry us.We could be here in a flickering lightOr somewhere we once were Where the wood was dampAnd the smoke off that woodCarried a heavy fragrance, unlike The pale and light eventual smoke off woodDrying now, imagined and unignited.Did we ever discuss distance? Was there a thought aboutWhat was yet to come whileLooking back, a…

Fetal, fealty, feet of clay,feeler, ferae naturae,ferret (Mustela putorius furo),feaze, feces, fear. Fear. OE faer, sudden danger.L periculum, peril. “An unpleasantstrong emotion caused by awarenessof danger.” Dread, fright, panic, terror. Painful agitation.Intense reluctance to face a personor situation. Aversion. Shock.Adjure, to command under oath, or penalty of curse. To expel an evil spiritby adjuration. The word is besidea pen-and-ink of an Exmoor sheep, almostround with wool and mutton, like a white-mother breast on four legs, with hoovesand horns. Mom, I adjure thee. Depart this child.…

There was a hymn we used to sing when I was a child, one of those lusty, murderous chants characteristic of the Anglican Church in its high-Victorian pomp. Written in 1894, it vibrates with imperial certainty—of salvation, election, sure destiny. God is working his purpose outAs year succeeds to year.God is working his purpose outAnd the time is drawing near.Nearer and nearer draws the time,The time that will surely be:When the earth shall be filled with the glory of GodAs the waters cover the sea. These words were mystifying to me before they were repellent. How could the waters cover the sea, given that the sea is made of water? (I didn’t know that the hymn quotes the Book of Isaiah.) Once I’d decided that the phrase simply meant a…

GOD AND NATURE Adam Kirsch, in his review of Ian Buruma’s new book about Spinoza, relates that “in Spinoza’s universe there is no place outside nature where we can stand in order to exert force on it, since we ourselves are part of nature” (Books, February 12th & 19th). Here Spinoza prefigures an important active discussion in modern science. Classical physics presumes a sharp division between observer and observed: an experimenter watches but must never interfere with an experiment, lest the results be flawed. But current research in quantum physics finds that no such separation is possible. Observer, observed, and everything else are part of one universe that is described by a single “wave function”—much as Spinoza intuited, three hundred and fifty years ago. John Sechrist Pittsburgh, Pa. Like Buruma,…

Lately, runways and red carpets have featured lots of spins and twists on covering one’s arms. Beyoncé wore dramatic sleeve styles—puffs, tufts, capes—on her Renaissance World Tour. At the Golden Globes, in January, the “Abbott Elementary” star Janelle James accessorized with chartreuse opera gloves that included yards-long, free-hanging fabric, which billowed beside her like a parachute. Fendi’s Spring/Summer 2024 show had double-sleeve sweaters. (The extra set is specifically meant for tying around the body, à la a vacationing Wasp.) Arms are the trending appendage. “I think that picked up during COVID, because suddenly we’re all seeing each other on Zoom calls from the waist up, and one of the interesting ways to express yourself is with an interesting sleeve,” Colleen Hill, a curator at the Museum at F.I.T., said recently.…

There’s a scene in Molly Roden Winter’s debut, “More: A Memoir of Open Marriage,” that should come with a warning. Winter is at her home in Brooklyn. She has just had sex with her boyfriend while her two children sleep upstairs. Her husband, Stewart, consented to her tryst, but feeling guilty, she dashes naked into the kitchen to text him: Don’t worry, she writes, “he has nothing on you as a lover.” But instead of texting her husband, she accidentally sends the message to her boyfriend, who leaves in a huff, and later breaks up with her.—The Times. My wife walks in from work. She says, “I just had sex with a stranger.” At least, I think she said that, as I wasn’t really listening. Am I bothered? No, I…

Last year, I drove south from Mexico City, along the highway toward Apango, a modest hillside town in the state of Guerrero. The highway ends at Acapulco, but there were no palm trees and no glamour where I was going. I turned onto a silent twolane road, and drove past villages where indigenous languages such as Nahuatl are still spoken. It was the dry season, and the scrub-forest hills had turned every shade of dust and brown, punctuated only by the soft white flowers of the casahuate trees. In Apango, I asked for Estanislao Mendoza Chocolate, or Don Tanis, as he is respectfully known. I had travelled here to ask him about his son, who vanished one night in 2014, along with forty-two other students from a rural teachers’ college,…

I first learned about Denise Murrell—the curator and scholar behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s big and shiny new spectacle, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” (through July 28th)—in 2018, when I saw her landmark exhibition, “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today,” at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, in Harlem. The show, which occupied a relatively small space but never felt cramped, apprised us of what had been left out of the available history (even the British art historian T. J. Clark’s essential 1984 study, “The Painting of Modern Life”): the importance and the resonance of the Black female presence in the early days of modernism. As someone who’d been enamored of nineteenth-century French literature in college, I’d longed to know more about the poet…

Smoke and Ashes, by Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A hybrid of horticultural and economic history, this book proposes that the opium poppy should be taken as “a historical force in its own right.” Ghosh touches on opium’s origins as a recreational drug—it was favored in the courts of the Mongol, Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires, each of which enhanced its potency in different ways—but he dwells on its use by Western colonizers. In the mid-eighteenth century, the British began a campaign to get the Chinese population hooked on opium produced in India, in the hope of correcting a trade imbalance. Ghosh details the illegal business that arose as a result—opium imports were banned in China—ultimately arguing that the British “racket” was “utterly indefensible by the standards of its…

CONTEMPORARY MUSIC Olivia Rodrigo, Sleater-Kinney, Davido This spring—which features perhaps the most loaded concert lineup of the covid era—jazz experimentalists both fresh and familiar put their work on display:  Herbie Hancock, a pop-bop legend of many innovations, brings his piano flair to Lincoln Center (March 26), and Jasper Marsalis, under the name Slauson Malone 1, explores intersections of pop music and performance art at the Park Avenue Armory (March 27-28). Other options range from the traditional (the saxophonist Melissa Aldana at Dizzy’s Club; April 10) to the progressive (the modern soul man BJ the Chicago Kid at Blue Note; April 30-May 5). In other venues, pathfinders who have defied and defined genres reveal their various breakthroughs. Brooklyn Steel welcomes the Scottish fringe-rap group Young Fathers (April 4) and the pop-rock reformist Amen…

Recently, the drag star RuPaul Andre Charles has taken to falling asleep while watching the documentary series “Secrets of Great British Castles.” He’s seen every episode, knows every turn in the bloody histories of landmarks like Dover Castle and the Tower of London. “The headline is: Humans have been horrible since the beginning of time,” RuPaul told me. “And the human ego can justify these terrible things that people do. You know, these kings, Henry VIII, and Edward II, and all these people who have just decimated hundreds of thousands of people because their feelings were hurt.” RuPaul is braced for conflict. “I’m fearing the absolute worst,” he said. “We are moments away from fucking civil war. All the signs are there.” He continued, “Humans on this planet are in…

“I’ll show you where Trump sat and watched the revolution,” Joe Biden said, stepping out from behind his desk in the Oval Office. It was noon on a Wednesday, in the doldrums of January. The Middle East was aflame, and Biden’s approval rating was among the lowest of any President in history, but, for the moment, he was preoccupied with Donald Trump. As he led the way through a door toward his private chambers, he startled two Secret Service agents in the corridor. They had expected him to remain at his desk for a while; agents, referring to him by his handle, had passed word: “Celtic is in the Oval.” Walking by, he said, in a whispery deadpan, “Hey, guys—it’s a raid,” and then moved on. Biden, always a little…

I’ve never told my husband this story, but I suppose I will eventually, on some sticky night in, say, February, as we lie naked in bed with the ceiling fan set at its highest speed. We’ll be waiting for a storm to bluster in from the south, and I’ll see the relevant part of him lying flushed and heavy against his thigh, and I’ll think about how I’d consider taking it in my mouth if the room were cooler by as little as two degrees. That will remind me of Roy and his wife, and I’ll feel like talking about them. And I’ll start by telling my husband that I used to know this couple who, on learning they were going to have a baby, began taking long walks together…

Mayor John Lindsay declared war on New York’s graffiti in 1972. It was a curious move, even in an era known for unwinnable conflicts. Many residents hated graffiti, of course, but it didn’t lack for fans in high places. The previous year, the Times had published an admiring profile of Taki, a teen-ager who scribbled his tag, TAKI 183, on walls and subway cars across the five boroughs. In 1974, Norman Mailer wrote a long essay for Esquire in which he compared Taki et al. to van Gogh. But the Mayor had spoken, and for the rest of the seventies the M.T.A. spent millions of dollars keeping the trains gray, which mainly seemed to encourage people to gussy them up again. By 1982, the year of Keith Haring’s career-making solo…