Innholdsfortegnelse for April 1, 2024 i The New Yorker

You can’t stop thinking about the characters and how you’d like to rewrite them as characters from books you’ve actually enjoyed reading. You find yourself regularly reaching for the book to squash the silverfish in your apartment. You keep having to reread the first chapter because you’ve been distracted by an article about Gary Oldman’s movies, ranked from best to worst. You’re ten pages into the book and think a murder investigation would really liven things up right about now. (You are reading “Little Women.”) You’re twenty minutes into reading the book and just now realize you’ve been asleep the whole time. You’re twenty years into reading the book and it’s the only book that hasn’t been burned or rewritten by our robot overlords, and yet you still can’t seem…

I know grief and you may know it too,but I have reached the age where itis perpetual—I didn’t know it would belike this so I’m telling you, who still havea whole lifetime to forget your grief the wayI forgot Angie, who wore too much eyemakeup, whose skirts were too short fora seventh grader or so the Girls V.P. said, whodid not come to school one Monday, havingdied over the weekend of spinal meningitisand disappeared from the life she wouldhave lived while I forgot her as I livedthose years she never had though now shecomes back often looking ahead of her timein her black skirts and torn fishnets. Andnow, when I do not have my whole lifetimeahead of me, the phone rings and anotherhas suddenly passed and she is as youngas…

It began as an almost inaudible hum,low and long for the solar windsand far dim galaxies, a hymn growing louder, for the moon and the sun,a song without words for the snow falling,for snow conceiving snow conceiving rain, the rivers rushing without shame,the hum turning again higher—into a riff of ridges,peaks hard as consonants, summits and praise for the rocky faults and crust and crevicesthen down down to the roots and rocks and burrows,the lakes’ skittery surfaces, wells, oceans, breaking waves, the salt-deep: the warm bodies moving within it:the cold deep: the deep underneath gleaming, some of us risingas the planet turned into dawn, some lying down as it turned into dark; as each of us rested—another woke, standingamong the cast-off cartons and automobiles;we left the factories and stood in…

Of all the arenas gone from New York, there are two that a sports-obsessed New Yorker may regret most never having seen. One is the old Madison Square Garden, with its Saint-Gaudens statue of Diana dancing on the skyline, and its memorable murder, when, in 1906, Evelyn Nesbit’s deranged husband shot and killed the architect Stanford White. The other is the Polo Grounds on 155th Street and Eighth Avenue, with its one-of-a-kind horseshoe shape, its oddly rural placement within Coogan’s Bluff, and a dramatic death of its own, when, fourteen years after the White murder, Carl Mays struck and killed Ray Chapman with an inside pitch, still the only on-field death of a player in the history of major-league baseball. There are other places it would have been nice…

I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself for missing the Thursday, March 14th, preview performance of Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” published in 1882 and revived at Circle in the Square, in a new version by Amy Herzog, under Sam Gold’s deceptively simple direction. At the climax of the play, there’s a town meeting in a raucous bar, the whole place fit to explode with civic tension and proto-Fascist violence. The theatre lights are up, as if to indicate that the audience is also attending the meeting, and Jeremy Strong, playing Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a scientist armed with the truth but lonely in its defense, is standing atop the bar, trying to get his point across. At that moment of high drama, one environmental protester in the…

BEFORE THE BRAND I was thrilled to see Jackson Arn’s review of a new biography of my dear friend Keith Haring, but I found Arn’s take on Haring’s “brand” a bit cynical (Books, March 11th). Believe it or not, back in the old days we actually did things for the joy of them. When I met Keith, I had starred in a number of beyond-low-budget films. I was strolling across Astor Place, dressed in a black straw picture hat and a bouffant dress, when Keith approached me in front of the Cube and asked to take my picture. I struck a pose. He then handed me one of his “Radiant Baby” buttons, explaining that he gave them to everyone. He ended up becoming one of the artists at the Fun…

The National Monument to Freedom, in Montgomery, Alabama, is a giant book, standing forty-three feet high and a hundred and fifty feet wide. The book is propped wide open, and engraved on its surface are the names of more than a hundred and twenty thousand Black people, documented in the 1870 census, who were emancipated after the Civil War. On the spine of the book is a credo written for the dead: Your children love you.The country you built must honor you.We acknowledge the tragedy of your enslavement.We commit to advancing freedom in your name. The history of slavery is one of elisions and silences, of moving on. The civil-rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, who designed the monument, has taken a different approach, displaying the realities of enslavement on a…

In June, 2018, the political commentator Fareed Zakaria found himself in the Campo de’ Fiori, in the center of Rome, with Steve Bannon, who was then President Trump’s chief strategist. Bannon—whom Zakaria describes as a “volatile personality” and as a conduit for the international resurgence of nativist sentiment—had come to Italy to help convince two populist parties, one on the left and the other on the right, that their interests were aligned. He drew Zakaria’s attention to a monument to Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century poet and cosmologist who held Copernican views about the universe and was burned at the stake for heresy. Where Galileo sold out and recanted, Bannon explained, Bruno was a real hero. Zakaria was surprised by Bannon’s admiration for Bruno, who is widely regarded as a progressive,…

If every label in “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” the eighty-first installment of the Whitney Biennial, were peeled off the walls and tossed into the Hudson, what would happen? Some sections would get more confusing, of course. When you walked through the yellow-lit gallery on the museum’s sixth floor, you probably wouldn’t suppose that the faint buzz came from a live electrical net floating overhead, let alone that the light, the buzz, and the net might represent “the tension between dissociation and hypervigilance,” according to the piece’s artist, P. Staff. Passing the cluster of translucent medicine cabinets, you wouldn’t know that the buttery stuff inside was Vaseline, and, even if you guessed right, you would still be ignorant of the fact that the artist, Carolyn Lazard, went with…

MARCH 27 – APRIL 2, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. The fall of the Soviet Union set the stage figuratively and, in the case of Almeida Theatre’s “Patriots,” literally, for the rise of Vladimir Putin. In the play by Peter Morgan (who also plied levers of power as the creator of Netflix’s “The Crown”), the patriots in question are corporate oligarchs concerned for Russia’s future, including the billionaire Boris Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg), who taps a St. Petersburg politician, a then obscure Putin (Will Keen), to succeed President Boris Yeltsin. After a year in London, where Keen’s performance garnered an Olivier Award, the production arrives stateside, just in time for our own momentous election. Helmed by the Almeida’s artistic director, Rupert Goold, “Patriots” marks Netflix’s…

One late-January day, the director Lila Neugebauer was at a gun range—or an antiseptic, fluorescent-white version of one—tucked inside the Specialists, Ltd., a theatrical-props behemoth in Ridgewood, Queens. Neugebauer, accompanied by two members of her team, had come to discuss a gun for her upcoming production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” at Lincoln Center Theatre. The production is a starry one, with Steve Carell in the title role, alongside Alfred Molina, Alison Pill, Anika Noni Rose, and William Jackson Harper. With a new translation by the playwright Heidi Schreck—who was nominated for a Tony for herwomen’s-rights jeremiad “What the Constitution Means to Me”—this is the first Broadway staging of Chekhov’s masterpiece in more than twenty years. Neugebauer is small and quick, with flyaway black hair, straight black brows crossing a…

My life divides, evenly enough, into three political eras. I was born in 1980, a year after Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street with the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi on her lips: “Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” The Conservative-run Britain of the eighties was not harmonious. Life beyond the North London square where my family lived often seemed to be in the grip of one confrontation or another. The news was always showing police on horseback. There were strikes, protests, the I.R.A., and George Michael on the radio. My father, who was a lawyer in the City, travelled to Germany to buy a Mercedes and drove it back, elated. Until Thatcher resigned, when I was ten, her…

A huge hand grabbed the back of my neck as I stepped out of the Rex Cinema, and, instinctively, I knew whose hand it was. “I beg you, forgive me, in Allah’s name,” I pleaded. Uncle Usama’s wide palm came down across my face, the force of the blow nearly capsizing me. “Shut up, you bastard child,” he shouted. With squinting, teary eyes, I watched the two friends I was with flee the scene, merging into the throng of cinemagoers. Uncle’s long fingers gripped my neck again, creating a noose of flesh and bone. “In Allah’s name, I beg for your pardon. I won’t do this again,” I managed to say amid dry sobs. I felt a throbbing pain in my head, and my legs began to buckle under the…

Ashoka, by Patrick Olivelle (Yale). This incisive biography aims to separate the historical Ashoka, who ruled a vast swath of the Indian subcontinent in the third century B.C., from the one of legend. Ashoka is commonly described as “the Buddhist ruler of India,” but in Olivelle’s rendering he is a ruler “who happened to be a Buddhist,” and whose devoutness was only a single aspect of a “unique and unprecedented” system of governance. Ashoka sought to unite a religiously diverse, polyglot people; his most radical innovation, Olivelle shows, was the “dharma community,” a top-down effort to give his subjects “a sense of belonging to the same moral empire.” Pax Economica, by Marc-William Palen (Princeton). A comprehensive account of the modern free-trade movement and a timely act of historical reclamation, this…

On March 28, 1949, at Times Hall, in midtown Manhattan, an unexpectedly large crowd materialized to hear the Juilliard Quartet play the second part of a two-concert survey of the six string quartets of Béla Bartók. According to the Times, so many seats were crammed on-stage that the quartet “had just enough elbow room, and no more, for its performance.” Mounted police monitored a crush of ticket seekers outside. The musical intelligentsia had turned out en masse. In attendance was the serialist composer Milton Babbitt, who, in a commentary on the event, hailed Bartók’s cycle as a “single, self-contained creative act.” Also present was Dmitri Shostakovich, who had come to New York at Stalin’s behest, in order to mouth propaganda at the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace. Shostakovich,…