Innholdsfortegnelse for April 8, 2024 i The New Yorker

David Van Taylor, a sixty-one-year-old documentary filmmaker (“Good Ol’ Charles Schulz”) who lives in Park Slope, returned recently to an old lunchtime haunt, the Peruvian-Chinese restaurant Flor de Mayo, on the Upper West Side. “I haven’t been here in thirty years,” he said. He ordered a soupy rice with chicken and a café con leche and looked around, taking it all in—noisy families, hulking fish tank, lack of the old maître d’ station and its microphone. “I remember walking in here and my friend grabbing that microphone and singing, ‘You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,’ ” Van Taylor said, appearing nostalgic. “It’s unbelievable that this place still survives.” In the late eighties and early nineties, Van Taylor lived nearby and frequented Flor de Mayo with friends, sometimes captured in…

When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good. (Leah is not her real name.) In the small town in central Ohio where she grew up, sex ed was basically like the version she remembered from the movie “Mean Girls”: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.” With her college boyfriend, the sex was rough from the beginning. There was lots of choking and hitting; he would toss her around the bed “like a rag doll,” she told me, and then assure her, “This is how everyone has sex.” Because Leah had absorbed an understanding of sex in which the woman was supposed to be largely passive, she told…

flashed her brights at me.She was driving straight into the sun.Her dark glasses flaredas she went by. Midday wintering lightoiled gently up every tree,half-brightening, half-darkening, stones here and there in wallspicked out & pointed toby the adamantwinter sun, and the branches in the air, and the branches draped across the roadsas shadowswere siblings of a kindI didn’t want to think about. I wondered why she flashed,had I made a mistake,I knew this place was full of mistakes,it was the most beautiful day ever, the burning bush was extravagantly presentingfables to the daylight, the hollyknowing it had forevertook on its wicked shine, and the vines up the old chestnutswere liquid and calm—the most beautiful day ever—the white picket fences plucked slowly by the minutes shonelimits & boundarieswe no longer understood,even the…

For years I have been haunted by a sentence from V. S. Naipaul’s great tragicomic novel “A House for Mr. Biswas” (1961): “In all, Mr Biswas lived for six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom and futility that they could be comprehended in one glance.” A sentence, indeed: imagine handing down this summary verdict, and then imagine writing a novel whose every page rises up against the very summation. The verdict belongs to historical time: it tells us that Mr. Biswas’s life, seen from above, is knowable only in its very unimportance, as an existence steadily disappearing into the careless comprehension of the cosmos. Historical time tells us that Mr. Biswas’s life was not worth writing. Novelistic time is more forgiving. Naipaul’s novel takes in…

For a while, in the late two-thousands, it was extremely fun to dunk on Vampire Weekend. Formed at Columbia University in 2006, the band made perky, bleating indie rock about Cape Cod, mansard roofs, and Oxford commas. The singer and guitarist Ezra Koenig wore khakis and sometimes loosely knotted a sweater around his shoulders, a look that everyone knows is the unofficial uniform of rich, scummy boyfriends in high-school movies. The band’s vibe was preppy but lightly debauched, somewhere between “Dead Poets Society” and “Less Than Zero.” Vampire Weekend felt slightly out of step with the arch, fuzzy, forward-thinking indie rock of the time. Its music was polished and sunny, a little cocky, with melodic sensibilities indebted to the dynamic, sensitive songs and songwriters of the seventies and eighties: the…

ETHICAL A.I. Andrew Marantz’s appraisal of two Silicon Valley camps that hold conflicting ideas about A.I.’s development—“doomers,” who think it may spell disaster, and “effective accelerationists,” who believe it will bring unprecedented abundance—offers a fascinating look at the factions that have dominated the recent discourse (“O.K., Doomer,” March 18th). But readers should know that these two vocal cliques do not speak for the entire industry. Many in the A.I. and machine-learning worlds are working to advance technological progress safely, and do not suggest (or, for that matter, believe) that A.I. is going to lead society to either utopia or apocalypse. These people include A.I. ethicists, who seek to mitigate harm that A.I. has caused or is poised to inflict. Ethicists focus on concrete technical problems, such as trying to create…

Today, my hope is vertical.Tomorrow it will be horizontal.The next day, cloudy.My hope is like a Greek myth:exchanging skin for bark,bark for scales,scales for the hollow bones of a bird.In these ways my hopeattempts to escape its fate.In myth, hope surely knows,escape is useless.Still, hope will try.I, who will someday leave behindthis three-dimensioned puzzle,pity my hope.Poorling, I say to my hope,even I cannot spare you,even I cannot make you mortal.Winged, rooted, finned,roofed or roofless,of all my shapes, only you, hope,know nothing of irony,only you cannot be cynicalor cloak yourselfin the objectivity of grammar.Only youcannot suffer suffering.You exempt, you deny,you protest with speech and with silence.You forgive—helpless to not—in speech and in silence.I, citizen of perspective,born into the tribe of time,will vanish into its blurring distance.But you—most intransigent,most stubborn of all…

The man stood in front of an arrangement of bottles and glasses. He knew what everything in those bottles tasted like, and what to pair them with. He was a bartender. He could make a drink for you, if you wanted. All you had to do was lean over and ask. I wanted something he could make. Something no one else had. I asked him if he could make this for me, and he nodded. I saw him pause and think. What he had in mind seemed to require him to go and look for things. He rummaged through a plastic bag and plucked something out. When he brought the drink to me, it looked like water. In the middle of the drink was a mint leaf in the shape…

It’s been a long, wild trip since 1969, when the opening chords of Pete Townshend’s “Tommy,” written with and recorded by the Who, first blasted onstage. The band toured the genre-defying album—a seeker’s rock opera in which a “deaf, dumb, and blind kid” discovers a messianic gift for pinball—for several years. Throughout the next decade, other artists took a crack at the Who’s material: there was a ballet, a symphony, and Ken Russell’s nutterbutter psychedelic film, in 1975. Then, about fifteen years after the Who had more or less put “Tommy” away, the director Des McAnuff convinced Townshend that, together, they could turn it into a musical. The result smashed onto Broadway in 1993. A whole bunch of folks won Tony Awards; certainly, everybody made money. So, thirty years later,…

APRIL 3 – 9, 2024 A prime offering in this year’s “New Directors/New Films” series, playing April 3-14 at MOMA and Film at Lincoln Center, is the opening-night work, “A Different Man,” written and directed by Aaron Schimberg. It stars Sebastian Stan as a struggling New York-based actor whose career and social life are hindered by a medical condition that causes tumors on his face. His prospects brighten when he meets a friendly new neighbor (Renate Reinsve), a playwright; he undergoes an experimental treatment in hopes of a cure, and it changes more than his appearance. Further complications ensue when he encounters another actor (Adam Pearson) with the same condition. Schimberg’s wide-ranging satirical film encompasses allegorical fantasy, anguished comedy, and harrowing melodrama of inner and outer identity.—Richard Brody ABOUT TOWN…

Near the end of February, the overhead bins on flights from Ireland to the U.S. start filling up with fiddles and bouzoukis, as Irish traditional musicians make their seasonal migration across the Atlantic to play during what the players themselves sometimes call St. Patrick’s Month. But toward April, in the aftermath of the parades, logistical constraints loosen. This was the case for three members of Dervish, a band from Ireland’s County Sligo—and the reason they were able to finally take a day off from their thirtieth annual U.S. tour, to make a trip to an old cemetery in the Bronx, in search of the grave of Michael Coleman, a Sligo fiddler. Tom Morrow, Dervish’s fiddler, was driving a rented Ford Explorer, and Liam Kelly, the flute player, was entering the…

Out of the Darkness, by Frank Trentmann (Knopf). Germany’s postwar transformation into Europe’s political conscience is often cast as a triumphant story of moral rehabilitation. This book points to the limitations of that narrative, arguing that, in the past eight decades, German society has been “preoccupied with rebuilding the country and coming to terms with the Nazi past” rather than with confronting its obligations to the broader world. Trentmann draws from a wide range of sources, including amateur plays and essays by schoolchildren. These lend intimacy to his portrait of a citizenry engaged in the continuous process of formulating its own views of right and wrong as it debates issues from rearmament to environmentalism. Whiskey Tender, by Deborah Jackson Taffa (Harper). This vibrant memoir recalls the author’s childhood on the traditional lands…