Innholdsfortegnelse for July 29, 2024 i The New Yorker

In May, I came across an ad in the subway promoting the months-long residency at the Sphere, in Las Vegas, of Dead & Company, the current permutation of the Grateful Dead, featuring two surviving members, Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, and the pop star John Mayer. The ad read, in a brassy “Star Wars” font, “Dead Forever.” I remembered what David Letterman said years ago when he saw a billboard in Times Square for the musical “Cats”: “‘Cats: Now and Forever’—is that a threat?” And yet, a month later, I found myself on the way to Las Vegas, where the band was a dozen shows into thirty at that glimmering new Sno Ball of a hall just off the Strip. Half the seats on the flight seemed to be occupied…

Nothing made Gay Courter happier than being on a ship. She and her husband, Phil, had travelled the world by everything from hydroplane to hot-air balloon, but something about the sea air and the rocking motion of the water gave her an unparalleled feeling of well-being. In late January of 2020, the Courters embarked on their twentieth cruise together—a two-week tour of Southeast Asia aboard a ship called the Diamond Princess. They began their adventure in Tokyo, where they dined on fugu, the occasionally fatal puffer fish. Gay had a tradition of giving every trip a name. She was calling this one Seventy-five and Still Alive. They assumed that they’d already survived the most harrowing bit. The Courters live by the water in Crystal River, Florida. They have three children…

The baby’s father left before the Cesarean incision had fully healed, when it was still a raised red line, tender to the touch, glistening with Vitamin E oil. Perfidy! This from a man who’d once said he’d die without her, who’d written her piles of letters after she’d rejected him, back in graduate school—though graduate school makes it sound more serious than it was. They’d gone to a university to become fiction writers. The degree took two years. During this time, Toni slept with several of her peers but not with the man who eventually became her child’s father. He left letters in her mailbox about how much this pained him. But he was too odd, she thought, terribly intense, with a work ethic that made her ashamed of her…

Double Exposure, by Robert Sullivan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Beginning in 1867, the photographer Timothy O’Sullivan explored the American West as part of government-sponsored geological surveys. He was already known for his images of Civil War battlefields, which defined the conflict for many Americans, and the photographs he took during his later travels attest to the nation’s transformations following the war. Retracing O’Sullivan’s itinerary more than a century later for this study, Sullivan deftly takes up such themes as the political power of both photography and geology, the United States’ tortured racial hierarchies, the exploitation of natural resources—including land, gold, and silver—and the dispossession of Indigenous communities. Loving Sylvia Plath, by Emily Van Duyne (Norton). This impassioned reassessment of Sylvia Plath’s life and work blends feminist theory and biography to challenge various…

TAIWAN’S FUTURE Ian Buruma, in his review of two new books about Taiwan, outlines the stakes of a potential conflict over the island’s independence (Books, July 1st). As he notes, for the U.S. to successfully deter China from trying to reclaim Taiwan by force will require tactics far beyond military ones, which occupy much of the establishment’s focus. These might include sanctions and other economic statecraft tools, or working to bolster Taiwan’s nonmilitary capabilities, such as food production. Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine that such considered steps will come to pass. Buruma describes the Eisenhower Administration’s opposition to China as “more an attitude than a well-thought-out policy.” With American politics in such chaos, there is an enormous risk of continuing this history, at great economic and human cost. William PierceBuffalo,…

Sometimes when the experimental composer Patrick Grant tells acquaintances about his group, Tilted Axes, they’ll respond, “Oh, you’re an electric-guitar parade,” whereupon Grant will say, “It’s not a parade—it’s a procession.” “What’s the difference?” they’ll ask. To which Grant replies, “Intention.” If it’s ninety-four degrees outside—as it was the other afternoon, when Tilted Axes began playing in Richard Tucker Park, a tiny spot of green just across Broadway from Lincoln Center—the intention had better be dogged. Grant calls the band’s performances “tilts,” but this one, involving fourteen musicians, was more of a melt. Grant, seven other electric-guitar players, three electric bassists, a keytar player, and two drummers—dressed in black pants, most of them loaded down with Vox amplifiers slung over their shoulders—celebrated the rising strawberry moon by wending their way…

My friend and I had a cat we called Mother.I took the couch; my friend got the one bedroombecause he often had sex and neededthat private darkness. I had not yet had sexof my own volition. No one knewI had been raped. I was so unknowingI barely knew it myself, how lost I wasto myself. I was maybe twenty. We loved that catthat had wandered into our lives, rubbing our legs,needing love and milk and a safe placeto sleep like any creature arriving on this earthfrom God knows where and God knows why.One hot August day I was sitting outsidewhen Mother joined me and sat on my lap,a thing she had never done before.And that was where she died. I called Jeff,who had gone to a motel somewherewith his girl…

In 1979, an article by Blake Fleet-wood in the Times Magazine reported a surprising phenomenon: young people were moving to big cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. This was news because America’s metropolises, New York especially, had been given up for dead, gutted by white flight, a deteriorating economic base, and financial mismanagement. In the nineteen-seventies, New York had lost eight hundred thousand people, ten per cent of its population. Yet the evidence suggested, Fleetwood wrote, “that the New York of the 80’s and 90’s will no longer be a magnet for the poor and the homeless, but a city primarily for the ambitious and educated—an urban elite.” It was an uncannily accurate call. Those “ambitious and educated” gentrifiers were the young urban professionals, the yuppies. The term first…

In summer, life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, is idyllic and fairly simple: among the few decisions a visitor has to make is whether to attend Tea (short for Tea Dance), a party held daily from 4 to 7 P.M., on the enormous pool deck of the Boatslip, a hotel and beach club in the town’s West End. Every day around three-thirty, a migration begins: bodies, in various states of undress and drag, drawn, as if by magnets, down Commercial Street. At the height of the season—during Bear Week, in July, or Carnival, in August—the deck might be hundreds deep, bass thumping, drinks sloshing, and the possibility of friendship, or more, palpable in the air. Attendance was sparse on the sunny Tuesday I went to Tea, this past June, but a handful…

JULY 24 – 30, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. The poignancy at the heart of “David’s Friend”—Nora Burns’s tender show about her best friend David, who succumbed to aids at the age of thirty-one, in 1993—is a question: How do we survive immeasurable loss? Set primarily amid the club cultures of late-seventies and early-eighties Boston and New York, the play evokes a swirling world characterized by physical freedom and sexuality—a defiantly queer world where a straight cis woman could find herself, and a romantic friendship in the bargain. It runs in repertory with Burns’s “The Village! A Disco Daydream” (at SoHo Playhouse, through Aug. 10). Here, Burns, part of the fast-paced comedy trio Unitard, slows things down, drawing our attention to what she hears, as…

For more than two decades, Isabella Ducrot, an artist who was born in Naples in 1931, has lived in an apartment on the top floor of the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, in the center of Rome. When I knocked on her door for the first time, this past spring, she greeted me with an emphatic pronouncement in English: “I must tell you immediately that I have never been so happy in my life!” It was a Tuesday evening in April, and I’d landed in Rome just a few hours earlier. Originally, Ducrot and I had arranged to meet for lunch the next day, but when she learned of my schedule she invited me to come over sooner, for a drink and a light dinner, noting in an e-mail that she “would…

Every age treats its penal system as natural, inevitable, and regrettable. When men were hanged in the public square, intellectuals explained that the practice was as helpful to the hanged as it was instructive for the audience. Samuel Johnson, as instinctively humane a man as might ever be found, was indignant when, in mid-eighteenth-century London, hangings—often for crimes as petty as pickpocketing—were moved from Tyburn, today’s Marble Arch, to more discreet premises inside Newgate Prison. “Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators,” he said. “If they do not draw spectators, they don’t answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the publick was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it.” Public hangings were simply part of street life. Pickpockets attended the hangings of…

Early in the first episode of the brilliantly allegorical new HBO show “Fantasmas,” written and directed by the thirty-seven-year-old comedian and writer Julio Torres, an artist also named Julio—quirky and creative, soft-spoken and slightly sad—is making an informal presentation to a crayon company. He wants to make a crayon that is perfectly clear. If you used it on a piece of paper, nobody but you would know that your marks existed. Your sentence or drawing or deeply coded message would stay hidden forever. The executive he’s pitching sounds intrigued by the weird idea. Julio wants to name this new “color” “fantasmas,” but the exec thinks he should drop the “S.” It’s just one crayon, after all. This fleeting bit makes for a zany opening, one that prepares you for the…