Innholdsfortegnelse for May 20, 2024 i The New Yorker

Mrs. Burgus sued Rush, Dr. Braun and her insurance company over claims that he and Dr. Sachs had implanted false memories in her head. They settled out of court in 1997 for $10.6 million. “I began to add a few things up and realized there was no way I could come from a little town in Iowa, be eating 2,000 people a year, and nobody said anything about it,” Mrs. Burgus told the Chicago Tribune in 1997. —The Times. My name is Margaret Jo Stinson, and I’d like to share my own perspective on this sort of thing. I live in Birchberry, Nebraska, population two hundred and thirty-eight, and my neighbor of more than fifteen years is Teresa Krell, who is sweet as a bug. Every morning, on my way…

Do you remember when I tried to be good.It was a bad time.So much was burning without a source.I’m sorry I was so young.I didn’t mean it.It’s just this thing is heavy.How could anyone hold all of it & not melt.I thought gravity was a law, which meant it could be broken.But it’s more like a language. Once you’re in ityou never get out. A fool, I climbed out the windowjust to look at the stars.It was too dark & the crickets sounded like people I knowsaying something I don’t.I think I had brothers.Think I heard them crying once, then laughing, until the laughingwas just in my head.That’s how it is here: leaky.One day, while crossing the creek, I met a boy.Lips red as a scraped knee.When our eyes met,…

Five years before my mother died, we had a violent argument—a thing that had never happened before. She was in her early eighties and still driving, and, because I am an inveterate back-seat driver, on one of our outings I suggested that she take a road she did not want to take. She resented it, and I could feel her anger growing. When we got to her house, she came at me, all hundred and ten pounds of her, flailing, screaming, and cursing. It was like being assaulted by a very short scarecrow. I shouted back at her, pushed her away, and left the house, resolved never to see her again. I did not speak to her for almost two years. A mistake, because, in the time it took for…

Revolusi, by David Van Reybrouck (Norton). This powerful account of the colonization of Indonesia takes the form of a people’s history, using interviews with those who lived under—and sometimes defied—Dutch rule. Van Reybrouck, a Belgian historian best known for his work about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, shows how the Dutch relied on genocide and slavery to piece together the Indonesian “jigsaw puzzle.” As one colonist put it, “Trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade.” Van Reybrouck also captures the hope that independence brought, showing how, before a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship ushered in a “crazed explosion of violence,” Indonesians’ fight against oppression inspired other nations to break free. Women and the Piano, by Susan Tomes (Yale). In this engaging survey of fifty female pianists, from the eighteenth century…

When Donny Dunn (Richard Gadd), the protagonist of the autobiographical Netflix sensation “Baby Reindeer,” recalls the act of kindness toward a stranger that would come to derail his life, his initial explanation is deceptively simple: “I felt sorry for her.” Donny is a fledgling comedian in his late twenties, tending bar at a London pub to make ends meet. Martha (Jessica Gunning) is a heavyset, middle-aged frump who claims to be a high-powered lawyer but simultaneously insists that a cup of tea is beyond her means. Donny—maybe amused, maybe intrigued, definitely pitying—gives her one on the house. She becomes a regular and, after finding his e-mail address on his personal Web site, inundates him with dozens of missives a day, many of them brimming with lust and misspellings. She follows…

WHEN CARS FLY As a longtime observer of the proponents of so-called flying cars, I read Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s piece with some amusement (“Flight of Fancy,” April 22nd & 29th). Flying cars have faced five technological hurdles since the earliest days of the concept: they cannot be effectively controlled by anyone but a skilled pilot; they are too noisy (heard any silent helicopters lately?); they can’t carry enough fuel for any but the briefest journeys; they require too much energy use per passenger, per mile; and they don’t offer a reasonable level of safety for pilots, passengers, or those on the ground. These were the same five hurdles faced by the inventor Paul Moller, who has made protracted efforts to devise a Skycar since the mid-twentieth century; since then, only one…

At the last Knicks game of the regular season, Cass Sunstein, the wellknown legal scholar, found himself in the nosebleed seats of Madison Square Garden, peering at the celebrities sitting courtside. Seth Meyers beamed for the jumbotron, his son jabbing a big foam finger. In the front row, Patrick Wilson leaned forward intently, eyes slit, black T-shirt snug. Tracy Morgan was there, too, as was Edie Falco. Nearby, a woman in an orange peacoat and silver aviators threw up jazz hands for the cameras. “That’s my friend—Connie Britton!” Sunsteinsaid, then glanced around, bashfully. Sunstein, who teaches law, public policy, and behavioral economics at Harvard, had a postgame train to catch and was dressed Acela casual, in a blue suit and Rockports. He sat clutching his suitcase awkwardly on his lap,…

Miranda July is good at plot. Stories will come to her fully formed, like a gift from the gods; all she has to do is unwrap them. In her Los Angeles office, a little house where she keeps more than three decades’ worth of papers, photographs, awards, cassette tapes, and costumes, is a notebook that she filled in a single feverish train ride with the bones of her first feature film, “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (2005). Something similar happened with her first novel, “The First Bad Man” (2015), and with her latest movie, “Kajillionaire” (2020): a sudden vision, a pause to ponder, then a rush to get it all down. July is a director, a performer, and an artist who likes to work in media that do…

Bernard de Menthon was born around the year 1000, near what is now the border of Switzerland and France. He was raised in a castle, given a first-class education, and, in time, affianced by his father to a noblewoman, as befit the scion of an ancient and wealthy family. By then, however, de Menthon had grown into a pious young man whose plans for the future did not include marriage. According to legend, the night before the wedding, he fled the castle by jumping out of a high window, whereupon a band of angels caught him and lowered him gently to the ground. Ordained as a priest, de Menthon began preaching in villages throughout the region of Aosta, a territory that included a mountain pass already in use for at…

CLASSICAL MUSIC A Philharmonic Farewell, “Inside Light” The summer season begins with a departure, when the New York Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, steps down, after six years. His final programs, laden with symbolism, shift from the mournful drama of Mozart’s Requiem (select dates May 23-28) to the new-day promise of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony (June 6-8), at David Geffen Hall. Having wrapped its subscription season, the orchestra basks in the sunshine of the city’s parks and of Randall Goosby’s violin tone in free al-fresco performances of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, led by Thomas Wilkins (June 11-14). The Metropolitan Opera also tours the boroughs with its free outdoor recital series (select dates June 18-28). At the Park Avenue Armory, the cavernous Drill Hall is set aglow for a spatial…

Last August, Lucy Letby, a thirty-three-year-old British nurse, was convicted of killing seven newborn babies and attempting to kill six others. Her murder trial, one of the longest in English history, lasted more than ten months and captivated the United Kingdom. The Guardian, which published more than a hundred stories about the case, called her “one of the most notorious female murderers of the last century.” The collective acceptance of her guilt was absolute. “She has thrown open the door to Hell,” the Daily Mail wrote, “and the stench of evil overwhelms us all.” The case galvanized the British government. The Health Secretary immediately announced an inquiry to examine how Letby’s hospital had failed to protect babies. After Letby refused to attend her sentencing hearing, the Justice Secretary said that…

Smoke and ash of November.A landscape of sediment and char,lead and gold leaf, mutilated sodracing on its planetary camber.On a kitchen table’s crude altara bowl of radishes is offered with a dish of salt for dipping whole.That’s how my father would eat them.My mother sliced them thin.Theirs was no house in a fairy tale.Yet the knife that trimmed the stemand scraped the blemished skin would halt at her intrepid thumb.Radishes of rosy cheeks, of snow,peppery radishes of yesteryear,which made my tongue go numb,why are you so much milder now?You don’t set the mouth on fire. Did something in your cultivation change,or does sensation wane with age?In a French film, I saw two friendsspread butter on radish halves; strange,I thought, but now it’s all the rageto sauté them. Their trailing ends…

Alexander Zemlinsky, who composed several of the most subtly entrancing operas of the early twentieth century, embodied the cosmopolitan chaos of the old Austrian Empire. His father came from a Slovakian Catholic family; his mother was a Sarajevo native of Sephardic Jewish and Muslim descent. Born in Vienna in 1871, Zemlinsky apprenticed there under Gustav Mahler; had an illustrious stint conducting at the New German Theatre, in Prague; and later landed at the radical-minded Kroll Opera, in Berlin. His mature works draw, variously, on Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Rabindranath Tagore, and Langston Hughes. To what nation or tradition does such a polymorphous figure belong? A sorcerer of orchestration, Zemlinsky wrote music that glimmers ambiguously in the air, and his life seemed to do the same. In April, I went to…