Innholdsfortegnelse for August 12, 2024 i The New Yorker

In the archives of Israel’s military courts, there is a six-page document, handwritten in Hebrew, that records an interrogation of Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar, the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip. The document, dated February 8, 1999, gives him identification number 955266978. Sinwar was thirty-six at the time, and had been imprisoned for eleven years. Before being jailed, he had led a Hamas unit called Munazamat al-Jihad wa al-Da’wa, or the Majd—an enforcement squad that punished those who collaborated with Israel or who committed offenses against orthodox Islamic morality, including homosexuality, marital infidelity, and the possession of pornography. Sinwar was serving four life sentences in a facility in the Negev Desert for executing Palestinians accused of working with the enemy. As his interrogator, a sergeant named David Cohen, recorded, he…

The county had recently put in a light at the intersection of 14 and 273, because of all the semis that were coming through. The Old Spot was a little south of that. It was a bar in what had once been a Mexican place, and a big wooden board with the old menu, painted by hand, was still standing in the empty lot beside it. When Jane drove by, on her way home, she was pretty sure she saw her husband’s truck parked out front. A red Ford F-150. But it was almost dark, and she wasn’t sure. This would be the third night in a row, if it was him. There was no red F-150 in her and Lindy’s carport when she got home. She pushed open the…

Sex, like hemlines, follows fashions of its own, if novels are to be believed. The eighteen-hundreds was the peak era for the covert carriage assignation, and early-twentieth-century fiction revelled in sex al fresco—leave your britches on the riverbank, step right in for your marshy and mystical Lawrentian communion. The nineteen-sixties saw some awestruck, and genuinely ghastly, odes to anal sex by Norman Mailer and James Salter (from “A Sport and a Pastime”: “She rolls over and in the full daylight he slowly inserts this gleaming declaration”). Sadism bordering on snuff was all the rage in the nineties, in the work of Dennis Cooper, Heather Lewis, and Susanna Moore. In the past decade, in what has been called the “millennial sex novel,” masochism had a heyday, as sad-eyed young women…

“A secret appointment exists between past generations and our own,” Walter Benjamin wrote. “Our arrival on earth was expected.” At pivotal moments, the philosopher argued, voices from the past reach out to us with prophetic force, escaping oblivion as a result. The past is not a fixed, eternal image; it is shaped by present concerns. A few years back, Will Crutchfield, the artistic director of the Teatro Nuovo opera company, happened upon the name of Carolina Uccelli, a Florentine composer, singer, and poet who lived from 1810 to 1858. Her opera “Anna di Resburgo” had its première in Naples, in 1835, and then dropped from sight. The idea that a woman had gained a foothold in the otherwise all-male world of Italian operatic composition intrigued Crutchfield, and he got hold…

BRONX CHEER Ian Frazier, in his article about the Bronx, reminds us of the storied visit to the borough by President Jimmy Carter, in 1977 (“Paradise Bronx,” July 22nd). The scenes of devastation that he witnessed seemed like the epitome of urban blight. But few remember Bill Clinton’s visit in 1997, when Clinton was persuaded to go to the South Bronx by his Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, who had been impressed by the extent of the rejuvenation that had occurred there and that was so contrary to the image that people had of the area. As the New York Times reported, Clinton spent part of an afternoon walking the streets and talking to residents. The revitalization came about in large part because of the leadership provided by local…

Here is a good story: It’s 2003 and a childhood friend is stationed at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina—which will be renamed Fort Liberty in 2023—where she’s in the 82nd Airborne Division. She is done jumping out of planes for the day, heading off the base, when she hears meowing coming from a warehouse. Inside, she finds a stray cat, proud but mangy, and decides to take her home. The cat is pregnant. My friend e-mails me a photograph of the kittens, arranged on her lap, one surfing on her kneecap. She writes, “Don’t these remind you of your cats growing up?” She knows a target when she sees one. A few weeks later, the kittens are loaded onto the back seat of a Jeep and driven north. Two are…

I Suddenly it seems there is nothing more fragile than a landscapeOne motion of the eyelid annihilates a mountain range buries the AlpsA head turned away dries up the ocean of memory an ocean transformedinto a lump of saltAn abandoned forest is as hard to remember as a hotel roomOnly the landscape of childhood only that landscapewe carry always in the depths of all memoriesits colors are muted a drawing concave as a stampan intense smell of roots and unexpected glimmerings shaded by aneyelash II The landscape of childhood overgrown with reedsthe landscape of youth passed by at a gallopThrough the cracks of distraction between parted legs the pages of anopen newspaperthrough a windowpane through a breath we see the landscape of maturityAll of this should fall apart somedayturn black…

the boy plays with the wooden horse il ragazzo gioca con il cavallo di legnothe seasons change le stagioni cambianoI have never seen a volcano non ho mai visto un vulcanowe need wood for the fire abbiamo bisogno di legno per il fuocothe wet wood is not good il legno bagnato non è buonohe saw smoke in the sky ha visto fumo nel cielothen it is a volcano allora è un vulcanothere is sand in my shoes c’è sabbia nelle mie scarpethe children build sandcastles i bambini costruiscono i castelli di sabbiathe clouds were getting darker le nuvole stavano diventando più scurewe could see nothing but fog non vedevamo niente a parte la nebbiathe fog is a cloud on the ground la nebbia è una nuvola sulla terrathe fog doesn’t…

Fifteen Cents on the Dollar, by Louise Story and Ebony Reed (Harper). The title of this deeply researched book points to the authors’ sobering calculation that, for every dollar of wealth that a typical white family has, a typical Black family has about fifteen cents. The writers attribute this stark gap to, among other culprits, the 2008 financial crisis, predatory lending practices, discrimination, and risk-based pricing models used by the insurance industry. Focussing on Atlanta, Story and Reed relate the lives of several residents, including a former president of the Georgia N.A.A.C.P. and the son of a man shot by a police officer, to elucidate both the Black-white wealth gap and the “Black-Black wealth gap”—the divide between wealthy Black Atlantans and their poorer counterparts. Jane Austen and the Price of…

It’s fitting that the first time Maddie Schwartz and Cleo Johnson, the two women at the center of the stylish new murder mystery “Lady in the Lake,” lay eyes on each other, it’s through a department-store display window—that engine of female desire. Maddie (Natalie Portman), a Baltimore housewife, quickly makes up her mind to buy the yellow dress modelled by Cleo (Moses Ingram), one of the store’s living mannequins. Cleo’s attention is caught by the rivulet of blood on Maddie’s mustard-colored skirt suit. The year is 1966, and both will soon be on their way to political gatherings—Maddie to a fund-raiser for a Jewish civil-liberties group, Cleo to a rally for Maryland’s first Black woman state senator—though nothing as nebulous as social change can fulfill either woman’s long-stifled aspirations. In…

AUGUST 7 – 13, 2024 “Searching for Goya,” which Noche Flamenca débuted at the Joyce in April, was a production typical of the great flamenco company, complete with talented guests and a climactic, soul-bearing solo by the group’s star, Soledad Barrio. But, for a twist, the program used images from Goya as jumping-off points, taking the Spanish artist’s themes, moods, and compositions as material for flamenco elaboration—a surprisingly apt match of sensibilities. At Joe’s Pub (Aug. 7-10), the troupe presents “Bulls and Butterflies,” which repeats parts of “Searching for Goya” and swaps others. This tinkering is a common practice for the company, whose bare-bones shows, ever searching, lose little when experienced up close, in tight quarters, with drinks.—Brian Seibert ABOUT TOWN BROADWAY | There’s a bait and switch at the…

Yvan Goll was born in 1891. In his twenties, he moved to Paris, where he wrote antiwar poetry and absurdist drama, met Picasso and Chagall, and gorged himself on the era’s avant-garde buffet. Photographs show us a laser-eyed face that is either wrapping up a sneer or embarking on a new one. He looks like the kind of person who would pen an attack on the young rascals who called themselves Surrealists, and, in 1924, he did. By making “Freud a new muse,” Goll wrote, Surrealists were “confusing art and psychiatry,” producing glib, trivial work that strained to “shock the public.” The good news was that it would “quickly disappear from the scene.” I should add that Goll considered himself a Surrealist, and that he was jabbing at his rivals’…

How many who piously lament the “disenchantment” of the secular world would have been able to bear ordinary life in, say, seventeenth-century Europe? We are bereft, the elegy goes, because modern knowledge has stripped us of ancient magic. We can’t wander like our ancestors in the spirit-filled woods, or hear the music of the spheres, because the sacred spaces became concrete deserts. The cathedrals were displaced by malls. To “understand” the solar system, the charge continues, is to be dead to it. No longer open to the pressing torque of divinities and djinns, we moderns are closed off and shut down, buffered and buttressed, marching efficiently through our merely material world, grim-faced assassins of mystery. But consider for a moment the nature of those early modern supernaturalisms. In a classic…