Innholdsfortegnelse for July 8-15, 2024 i The New Yorker

This story was written in the mid-nineteen-fifties, after E. L. Doctorow, then in his twenties, had completed his military service in Germany. It was found by the biographer Bruce Weber with Doctorow’s papers at the Fales Library and Special Collections, at New York University. In our town, as in most, we celebrated the Fourth of July with a parade around the square and a few speeches from the steps of City Hall. An indispensable part of the ceremony, of course, was the Civil War veteran, and at the time I’m telling about we still had one—a Confederate, naturally, an old man of bone and leather named John Sewetti. John had been a drummer boy with T. J. Jackson and was thought to have seen most of what happened in the…

On March 6, 2020, Andrew and I went to a rave. If it weren’t for what happened later, I don’t think it would have stood out in my memory. A couple of days before, I had met a friend at the movie theatre at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, to see “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” It was the first time I saw someone trying to open a door with his elbows. My friend and I ordered separate popcorns as a hygienic precaution. I remember someone behind us coughing, and being aware of it. On Friday night, before the party, I put a single drop of LSD into a glass of water. I drank half, and Andrew drank the other half. For the next couple of hours, while he…

Ivan is standing on his own in the corner while the men from the chess club move the chairs and tables around. The men are saying things to one another like: Back a bit there, Tom. Mind yourself now. Alone, Ivan is standing, wanting to sit down but uncertain which of the chairs need to be rearranged still and which are in their correct places already. This uncertainty arises because the way in which the men are moving the furniture corresponds to no specific method Ivan has been able to discern. A familiar arrangement is slowly beginning to emerge—a central U shape composed of ten tables, with ten chairs along the outer rim of the shape, and a general seating area around the outside—but the process by which the men…

For a long time, when I was younger and she was alive, I told stories about my mother. The stories were funny, meant to be funny, made funny in the telling. I might say to you, “Jesus, I just got off the phone with my mother.” “How is she?” you might say. “She wore one of her outfits to the symphony, and now she’s distraught because no one talked to her,” I would answer. “Outfits?” you’d ask. “She’s a seamstress and a tailor,” I’d explain. “She calls the things she makes creations.” From there I might describe, say, a gold jacket with floppy lapels and giant clown buttons. That would lead me to grievance and psychoanalysis: “She’s infuriating. She isolates herself from people, and her loneliness grows, and she wears…

Four years ago, when Ivan Cornejo was a junior in high school, he had a meeting with his family to announce that he was dropping out. His parents were alarmed, of course, but his older sister, Pamela, had a more sympathetic reaction, because she also happened to be his manager, and she knew that he wasn’t bluffing when he said that he had to focus on his career. By the time of his announcement, Cornejo was becoming a star on Instagram, where he posted videos of himself singing and strumming his guitar. But, unlike many Instagram kids, he hardly seemed like a kid at all. His specialty was plaintive love songs, delivered in a voice that suggested he was already starting to suspect that romance might be more trouble than…

The Silence of the Choir, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (Europa). In this ambitious, Goncourt Prize-winning novel, seventy-two African asylum seekers arrive in a fictional town in rural Sicily after a harrowing journey, only to find themselves at the center of an ideological battle that splinters the community. Sarr moves adroitly between the viewpoints of a wide cast of characters—refugees, politicians, advocacy workers, xenophobic vigilantes, a priest, an eminent poet—while probing the complexities of Europe’s debate over asylum. Ultimately, the novel suggests that it is not only members of the far right, “obsessed with their phobia,” who deserve excoriation but also those more sympathetic to migrants’ plights who nonetheless “reduce a refugee to a walking tragedy.” In Tongues, by Thomas Grattan (MCD x FSG). The protagonist of this moody novel is…

Marvel could only dream of a monoculture like the one found in “The Boys,” Prime Video’s pitch-black superhero parody, now in its fourth season. Stern-jawed or ready with a smile, “supes” can be seen on the streets of New York City, stopping criminals, but also on multiplex screens, spearheading a cinematic universe; in churches, spinning their powers as divine gifts; on cereal boxes, modelling athleticism; and on bedroom posters, inspiring millions of innocents across America. Vought International, a corporation that’s part Disney, part Fox News, part Big Pharma, first created superheroes as weapons, then turned them into celebrities. The members of the Seven, its élite, Justice League-esque squad, have proved both extremely lucrative and—between sexual-harassment scandals, struggles with addiction, and the odd manslaughter case—rather difficult to manage. The company’s stock…

SEEDS OF CHANGE Masha Gessen’s article brought much needed attention to the ideals of the coöperative Palestinian/Jewish village of Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom (“A Semblance of Peace,” June 17th). In 1996, a colleague and I, as part of our work developing conflict-resolution curricula in what is now North Macedonia, met and were inspired by people who worked in the village’s elementary school. In a way similar to Israel/Palestine, North Macedonia’s various ethno-linguistic communities are highly segregated and are therefore conditioned to view one another as enemies. We persuaded the Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom instructors to partner with us and help establish bilingual, multicultural schools in North Macedonia which came to be called Mozaik; this was likely the first time their model had been applied outside of Israel/Palestine. The goal of Mozaik has…

“I’ve dated all kinds of women in my life,” the man said, “but I have to say I’ve never seen one as ugly as you.” This came after they’d had dessert, while they were waiting for coffee to be served. It took a moment for his words to sink in. Three, maybe four seconds. The statement came out of nowhere, and Kaho couldn’t immediately read his intentions. As the man was pronouncing these blunt, alarming words, he was smiling the whole time. A gentle, mostly friendly type of smile. There wasn’t even a hint of humor in what he said. He wasn’t making a joke; he was completely serious. The only way that Kaho could think of reacting was to take the napkin from her lap, toss it onto the…

If to dust we returnAnd we doWhy spend a minuteChoosing wallpaperPatterns exquisite or dull Will be dust as wellYou may sayIt will say as well to youWhen you ponder Fruit upon branchesDelaying the endTrellises and semblancesMeeting meant-to-beSeams and angles Repeating what it is worthTo forget another hourLose oneself in a labyrinthDevoid of a minotaur What door never openedOpens once and for allIf only you findA flaw hidden in the designDisclosing a moment Time’s timeless printGone now Here tomorrowDeer at the edge of a woodTurning still…

Along the Pojoaque, cottonwoods form a swerving river of gold— a plumber’s daughter returned your call to say her father died— that moment slipped like water between your fingers— like light yellowing during an annular eclipse before it whitens intodaylight— you tremble at the surge of yellow-gold light at your fingertips— the stretch of desire in your body like stringing a bow— you love how she gathers herself then gazes point-blank into your eyes— a Himalayan crane’s-bill opens violet flower after flower before theoncoming frost— at Troy, you ignored the ruins and marvelled at how silt from two rivershad distanced the sea— they brag at building the largest sandcastle on a beach— you grieve at the thought of deep-sea mining— we pick a few blood-red strawberries among the desiccating leaves—…

When I am stuck on something I’m trying to write and have exhausted all the other options—ignoring the problem, staring blankly at the problem, moving the problem around to see if it’s less annoying in some other location, eating all the chocolate in the house—I eventually do what I should have done in the first place and go read some writer who is much better at this business than I am. The candidates are legion. But, from the whole long, idiosyncratic list of authors I regularly turn to for intellectual and aesthetic resuscitation, one of the most consistently useful is Norman Maclean. If you know Maclean, it is likely because of his first work, “A River Runs Through It and Other Stories,” a triptych of tales—about, among other things, families,…

The rich are always crying poverty when it comes time to pay a ransom: “Net worth and liquidity are not the same thing!” Across cinema, the moneyed and their auxiliaries question the kidnappers’ math. In the film “Fargo,” the wealthy father of Jean Lundegaard (of wood-chipper infamy) grumbles, “A million dollars is a lot of damn money.” In the action thriller “Rush Hour,” the men who kidnapped the daughter of a Chinese diplomat call to demand fifty million dollars, to which the L.A.P.D. detective James Carter (Chris Tucker) exclaims, “Fifty million dollars?! Who you think you kidnapped, Chelsea Clinton?” The real-life haggling can get just as protracted. In 1973, the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty did not agree to pay his grandson’s kidnappers until several months after the initial ransom…

JULY 3 – 16, 2024 Lincoln Center’s “Summer for the City” features plenty of dance, and not just the participatory kind that goes on under the ten-foot disco ball hanging over the plaza’s fountain for the season. As part of “India Week” (July 10-14), the Minneapolis-based bharata-natyam company Ragamala Dance (pictured) presents the spare, elegant “Avimukta: Where the Seeker Meets the Sacred,” composed of stylized movements related to rituals of death and mourning (Damrosch Park, July 10). Then the British dancer and choreographer Aakash Odedra, a kathak virtuoso, performs a collaboration with the Chinese contemporary dancer Hu Shenyuan, the duet “Samsara” (Rose Theatre, July 11-12). Imagine a fluid, constantly evolving conversation between contrasting movement languages.—Marina Harss ABOUT TOWN FOLK | When the singer-songwriter Cassandra-Jenkins was young, her father bought a…

On a recent afternoon, Alan Braufman, the jazz composer and saxophonist, stopped outside what used to be his home, at 501 Canal Street, by the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. In 1973, when he was twenty-two, he and four other musicians moved into a derelict building that was there at the time, to eat, sleep, practice, and perform; this was the loft in their iteration of loft jazz, a term for the style and the era of avant-garde music germinating in the then ghostly districts of downtown. “The two sax players lived on the second floor,” he said. “The pianist on three. Bassist on four. Drummer on five.” The building didn’t have heat, or much of anything, although there was a pay phone in the entryway which, if you touched…

For nearly a year after Jennifer Croft, a translator, sent a submission to Jacques Testard, a publisher in London, in the summer of 2015, the manuscript languished unread. Testard had launched Fitzcarraldo Editions the previous year, with the goal of creating a distinctive list of literary fiction and essays, many in translation. He was only thirty, and fiercely ambitious, but his publishing house was barely more than a one-man operation, and he fell behind on his reading. It wasn’t until after the Brexit referendum of June, 2016, when U.K. citizens voted narrowly to leave the European Union, that Testard reviewed the text that Croft had sent him: a two-hundred-page extract from “Flights,” an expansive novel first published in Polish, in 2007, by Olga Tokarczuk. Testard, a French citizen who…

Arwen Rasmont waits hours at Keflavík International for his flight; they call it as he leaves the men’s room. He walks past the mirrored wall and is assaulted, as usual, by his dead father’s handsome image: high-arched nose, yellow hair. A difference in the contact glance—the father’s a hard squinting challenge, the son’s sidelong and measuring. A week earlier the luxury-real-estate-rental mogul Rodrig Cushion had sent Arwen to Reykjavík to examine and make a judgment on a rare nineteenth-century whaling captain’s house perched above a fjord with a view of dripping icebergs. Now, as he stands in the boarding line, he checks the snapshots on his phone. The most recent shows the interior entryway of that house; an umbrella jar holds several walking sticks and two ancient Inuit harpoons with…

On time, as anticipated, they have returned, tunnelling into view, leaving their sooty signature. Pale in the sudden light, they fan and flutter their wings. It’s time to sing. Me, they sing. Me, again. Cicada season has come and gone; it is another class of organism I refer to, in the throes of a parallel drama of ceremonial unwrapping and full-throated song of the self. As if compelled by biological imperatives of their own, these writers—serial memoirists, they’re sometimes called—burst forth with regularly timed tales of tribulation, of molting, of transformation. And each time they tell us they have it figured out. This time, they’ve got the real story for us, the real handle on themselves, on what it’s all about. It’s about living with the ambiguity. Accepting the light…

When I was little, five or six, I was taken to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running juggernaut musical “Cats.” My parents knew that I was already a big fan of cats (the species), and they had strategically hyped Lloyd Webber’s source material, T. S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” What they didn’t know was that I was extremely nearsighted—I had never thought to mention it, but I couldn’t see anything more than three inches from my face. I remember my blurry toddler life before “Cats” (and glasses) as a mist, out of which books and snacks gently materialized. But in the night-black New London Theatre, during a bit of “fun,” fourth-wall-breaking crowd work, a spandex-clad dancer in leg warmers with a glowing cat-eye light on her head pounced onto…