Innholdsfortegnelse for March 25, 2024 i The New Yorker

Not long after our twins turned three, my wife, Anna, accepted a transfer to the West Coast. The opportunity was lucrative, but that wasn’t why we were eager to go. Anna had spent that March and April involved with another man, a colleague, someone whose name I’d never heard until she told me about him. She said that it had been a terrible mistake, that it had only made her hate herself, and that this person had now begun almost to frighten her, continuing to call after she’d asked him to stop, declaring that he’d leave his family, demanding to speak with me. I was surprised to find that, more than anything, I felt sorry for her. The episode was the culmination of a long withdrawal that each of us…

Errand Into the Maze, by Deborah Jowitt (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This astute biography, by a veteran Village Voice critic, traces the long career of Martha Graham, a choreographer who became one of the major figures of twentieth-century modernism. Born in 1894 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Graham came of age in an era when Americans mainly thought of dance as entertainment, a conception that she helped change through such groundbreaking pieces as “Primitive Mysteries” and “Appalachian Spring.” While detailing many of Graham’s romantic and artistic collaborations, Jowitt focusses on how Graham approached her work—as a performer, a choreographer, and a teacher—with a philosophical rigor that expanded the expressive possibilities of movement and established a uniquely American idiom. A Map of Future Ruins, by Lauren Markham (Riverhead). In 2020, a fire broke…

DOOMSDAY PREP Kathryn Schulz beautifully explains the risks posed by solar flares and other space weather (“Starburst,” March 4th). In doing so, she cites FEMA’s finding that “only two natural hazards have the capacity to simultaneously affect the entire nation. One is a pandemic. The other is a severe solar storm.” Alas, there is a third: an impact by an asteroid or a comet. In the past thirty years, we have witnessed Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 striking Jupiter to massive effect, Comet Siding Spring narrowly missing Mars, and an asteroid exploding over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk with the energy of nearly thirty Hiroshima bombs. And yet, although various significant steps have been taken, we have hit the Snooze button when it comes to enacting a comprehensive defense plan against such…

I’ve heard people call sitting the new smoking. Others say that sitting is the new sugar. Both wrong. I’m here to tell you that sitting is the new sex. It feels so good, especially with the right partner. What started as a short fling to ride out a global pandemic became something more. Being confined together for months can test a couple, but the experience deepened our bond. I fell in love. I can’t speak for my desk chair from the office—well, maybe I can, since chairs don’t talk—but I feel like I know its heart. Chair-a-la is the pet name I’ve been using. Sometimes Chair-Chair. Or Chairy-boo (but only in private). Chair-a-la hasn’t reciprocated, but that’s O.K. Call me superficial, but I’ll take three-hundred-and-sixty-degree arms, adjustable lumbar support, variable…

Soiled sunshine on lawns and walls,the horizon-line melancholy,the mystery cults of interiors,the parlor, bedroom, luncheonette,the worship of empty spaces,the scummed-over good cheerof brickface and clapboard. Our optimism’s a darkening soulthat doesn’t know the dark is coming.The windows inflect an ethic of the watched,the overseen, the secretive: the hidden livesof architectures, the boxcars, factories,variety stores, and gabled homeswhere life went silent a moment ago. A woman’s Coca-Cola-red pumps,a moralistic lighthouse, a feral Buick grill,the arid creamy bumpy wet light.Our godless churchy solemnities.Austerity’s rapture. Each of us unreachable.Wind and sand our silenced voluptuaries.A woman in a slip on a plank of the sun.…

And a day goes by, and tanks, and the sky a festival of kids flying kites, and bloodflowed behind a panting car.And a day goes by, and the planes, and the tent of the displaced makes a betwith time: winter is late.And a day goes by, and the snipers, and the market itself has no salt: so I said:No worries, the merchants have plenty of sadness.And a day goes by, and artillery, but my neighbor’s funeral passes alongslowly, why rush at a time like this!And a day goes by, and the newscasts, and when evening came, it was a bitjoyous to find us all there with none missing, except the house. (Translated, from the Arabic, by Emna Zghal, Khaled al-Hilli, and Ammiel Alcalay for the Brooklyn Translation Collective.)…

The art of Gustav Klimt makes me feel as though I am face to face with God, if God is a charming, faintly trashy type who leers more than he enlightens and seems oddly desperate for my approval. Klimt’s mysticism is a kind of busy stagecraft, all confetti cannons and angels dangling from ropes. It drove people wild a hundred and twenty-five years ago and still does, though a closer look at his path from academic painter to Viennese radical to professional heiress-glorifier suggests a man stuck between nineteenth- and twentieth-century attitudes, and all the more fascinating for it. In a photograph taken around 1908, a decade before his death, he wears a floor-length smock and points his big, wolfish head at the darkness, arms crossed. He looks like acrook…

Early in “3 Body Problem,” the new Netflix adaptation of Liu Cixin’s acclaimed science-fiction trilogy, intelligent life from another corner of the universe decides that a spectacle is required to get humanity’s attention. On a cloudless night, the stars brighten, then flicker on and off, as if a kid were playing with a light switch, transmitting a series of numbers. Two physicists—one high and thus mesmerized, the other terrified—watch the phenomenon from a Gothic courtyard in Oxford, England. The next day, the stoner, Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), chalks the experienceup to an elaborate hoax; the rest of the world also saw the stars twinkle in code, but the celestial blinks went undetected by Earth’s most powerful telescopes. The otherworldly signal may have been a message just for Saul’s companion, a…

MARCH 20 – 26, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Since the dissolution of Sonic Youth, in 2011, its co-founder, the alt-rock luminary Kim Gordon, has remained busy, expressive, and patently cool—holding exhibitions of her paintings, writing a memoir, making an album with a pro surfer, and appearing in a Gus Van Sant film. She didn’t find time (or reason) to release her solo début, “No Home Record,” until 2019, and that was cool, too, as a sort of blaring, blasé late-career relaunch. Her second solo album, “The Collective,” released this month and inspired by the Jennifer Egan novel “The Candy House,” only furthers her legend, with industrial trap-rock that sets Gordon’s decades of noise experience in modern contexts. The new album’s daring beats and improvised…

The sidewalks of Lower Broadway in downtown Nashville are filled with people moving among neon-lit venues owned by celebrity musicians: Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk & Rock ‘n’ Roll Steakhouse, Jason Aldean’s Kitchen & Rooftop Bar, Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa. The Hard Rock Café, which opened in 1994, when the neighborhood could still reasonably be called eclectic, sits at the far edge of the strip, overlooking the Cumberland River. One evening last November, Julien’s Auctions took over a private room at the restaurant for a three-day sale in honor of the company’s twentieth anniversary. There was a spotlighted stage full of objects that musicians had worn or touched or played: a scratched amber ring that Janis Joplin wore onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival, in 1967; Prince’s gold snakeskin-print…

A is for apple (Malus domestica), a member of the rose family (Rosaceae), famously thought to be the fruit the serpent gave to Eve and Adam to eat. It had been the one thing they were forbidden to do, eat that fruit, and after they did they fell in love with the world around them—and understandably so, for they were in a garden. The fruit they ate could not have been the apple we know today, as that fruit is native to Central Asia. Most likely what Eve and Adam ate was a pomegranate. There is a legend that says there are as many seeds in a pomegranate as there are commandments in the Torah, the Bible of the Jewish people, known to many others as the Old Testament. Z…

In 1979, a group called Women Against Pornography opened an office in what was then, in the organizers’ view, the belly of the beast: Times Square. WAP members, predominantly white feminists, who believed that porn had the power to reinforce, and even breed, misogyny, led others who shared their views on eye-opening tours of the neighborhood’s peep parlors, X-rated movie theatres, and live sex shows, hoping to turn out shocked shock troops for what was then a growing branch of the women’s movement. There were some ironies, not to say cruelties, to this mission. The great nineteen-eighties debates known as “the feminist sex wars” and a lot of writing by queer critics and memoirists would help reveal them. In “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue,” from 1999, the Black gay…

On a recent Tuesday evening at 4 Charles Prime Rib, in the West Village, shortly after my party of four had settled in for dinner, a man who bore the gentle air of owning the place arrived at a neighboring table. As our server delivered our cocktails, she gestured at him and said, with a wink, “This is Gary. He’s a regular. I’m so sorry you have to sit next to him. Let me know if you want me to put up a curtain to block him out.” Everyone laughed. “Gary’s full of wisdom,” the maître d’ added as he passed by. Gary—round but trim, with a shaved, shiny pate and a distinct Long Island accent—smirked and said, “Yeah, like, drink a Martini if you’re driving, and tequila if you’re…

Ian Munsick was backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, and he seemed satisfied with what he saw in the dressing-room mirror: a shirt embroidered with roses, jeans secured by a belt buckle the size of a compact disk, long dark hair, a black cowboy hat with an eagle feather tucked into the band. Caroline Munsick, who is both his wife and his manager, provided some extra scrutiny. “Normally it’s, like, five hundred dollars for a makeup girl to come in here,” she said, corralling a few fugitive strands of his hair. “He gets it for free.” She handed him a bolo tie with a black clasp, to replace the turquoise one he had on. “This is the bolo I gave you,” he said. “I know,” she said. “But it looks…

ACROSS 1 E-mails discreetly 5 Outerwear that’s rarely worn outdoors 12 Tries for a three-pointer, say 14 Location of Palau and Tonga 15 “Toy boat” and “Unique New York,” for two 17 Short burst of wind 18 Nickname that omits “An” 19 Half of an umlaut 20 Wing it 22 Sigh of contentment 24 “You’re joking!” 27 Scavenger in the Serengeti 28 Handle on the fly 32 Goad 34 Send out again 35 Fitness fad with a portmanteau name 37 The “E” of O.E.D.: Abbr. 38 In the past 39 The ___ Five (nickname for the stars of “Queer Eye”) 40 Payment initials associated with snap 42 “All ___ in favor …” 44 Incontrovertible principle 46 Vegetable that provides a pop of color in a salad 47 Engage in excessive…