Innholdsfortegnelse for November 4, 2024 i The New Yorker

If the movie hairstylist Michelle Côté is going to work on a period picture, she prefers the restrained elegance of the nineteen-fifties. But neither restraint nor elegance was on hand with a recent job, for which she was tasked with recreating the pouffy locks of the nineteen-eighties. The movie was “The Apprentice,” which dramatizes Donald Trump’s rise from outer-borough hustler to the pinnacle of, if not status or wealth, at least Trump Tower. “I tried to stay away from the subject,” Côté said on a recent afternoon. She added, “When one of the producers approached me about the project, I was, like”—here she vocalized something halfway between a groan and retching, from the privacy of her office in Montreal, where she lives. (The film was shot in Canada, with Toronto…

The Musée du Quai Branly is a long ark of a building perched over a garden, whose foliage screens the museum from its busy namesake thoroughfare on the banks of the Seine. Literally overshadowed by the Eiffel Tower, it houses more than three hundred thousand pieces of art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, most of them legacies of France’s colonial empire. Its opening, in 2006, was billed as an enlightened departure from the practice of exhibiting non-European works as anthropological specimens; the building’s architect, Jean Nouvel, described it as a place of spiritual regeneration, where the Western curatorial apparatus would “vanish before the sacred objects so we may enter into communion with them.” But the vibes within are less enchanting than uncanny. The cavernous main gallery is a…

On a warm, gray morning in mid-September, a small group of reporters waited under the wing of a plane at a private terminal at Ronald Reagan National Airport, anticipating the arrival of the Vice-Presidential candidate J. D. Vance. Earlier in the week, a would-be assassin had tried to ambush Donald Trump on his golf course in West Palm Beach, the second attempt on Trump’s life this summer, and the apparatus accompanying Vance had the feel of an armed brigade. The travelling party included a dozen staffers and about the same number of Secret Service officers. When Vance’s motorcade pulled up to Trump Force Two—a Boeing 737 with the names of anonymous donors (Edward M., Victoria W.) painted on the tail fin—it contained twelve cars. In the only other political campaign…

When I thought myself most honestI was merely movingaside from the relevant surface and not getting downto the nature of things. Me in my rattletrapbaring the black roadso the sweeper truck touchesits gray skirts there and departswith ratty nibbled leaf. Then I would roll my vehicle backto the lip of stone fringed abovewhat’s happening in the street.Little changed. I mean to announce the coming of a child.Not a god, not more particularthan all particulars,but I get lost in simple repetitionsand forget to speakwith my whole heart. I was what’s knownas a good girl, completing the exercises,claws trimmed, a zip on my coat.O diagnosis! I see myself now in those forgotten unbelovedpresidents of the nineteenth centurygaunt even when they were fat— zones of flesh who lieda bit, bluffed, bought itemsnot quite…

Historians championing previously marginalized intellectual and literary figures are often caught on the horns of an odd dilemma. On the one hand, the subject—the woman scientist, the Black composer, the Indigenous military strategist—must have met with some degree of social acceptance in their day or the work would never have had enough support and attention to have flourished and survived. Since historians wish to draw on the wiser judges of the era to establish the importance of their subjects, we are told about whom they wowed and how they wowed them. On the other hand, the point must be made that such subjects have had far less attention than they deserve. So they must be shown to have been keenly appreciated by the better spirits of their time as well…

In Billy Wilder’s ur-camp masterpiece “Sunset Boulevard,” from 1950, Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond, an aging grande dame of silent film, who slides from self-regarding eccentricity into homicidal delusion. Intent on a comeback, Norma has seduced a young screenwriter named Joe Gillis (William Holden), but, when both he and the studio reject her, she swerves into a permanent dream. “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup,” she famously purrs to a wall of crime-scene photographers, her face smoothed flat with grease and powder. In the film, Gillis still narrates—though he’s just been shot dead, like Jay Gatsby, in the pool. Andrew Lloyd Webber débuted his musical adaptation of “Sunset Boulevard” (co-written with Don Black and Christopher Hampton) in 1993, returning to the dark sensibility of his then recent…

UNION STRONG Eyal Press’s piece about the political shift among blue-collar workers reminded me of my own experience (“The Worker Revolt,” October 7th). I grew up in a union household, and, when both my parents got sick, we became poor. Despite this, with the help of Social Security, Medicare, and union benefits, we were lifted up by a strong social safety net. I received a good education and became a lawyer and then a judge. It helped that my youth and my early professional life occurred from the nineteen-forties to the eighties, a period when income inequality and wealth inequality were actually decreasing. Then came the Reagan revolution, and those inequalities began a steep rise, which continues to this day. It amazes me how little the Republican Party in general,…

Clever in the fold, you bendbackbend (uplift, clouds),bend again as if the spine,excited to perform,thinks without uncertaintythat it is dance itself. Uncertainly, we seegrace, fracas, memory—we are always seekinggood inversions, chieflybecause we know discomfortand want to conquer it. I wonder how it feelsinch by inch to find the floorand, forsaking safety, leave it.So much your body is meshedin flex and yet yields tougherthan softness suggests. But do you ever feel your bodyis a noose? Do you seemy shoulders moving in my seat?I think you must be limberin the heart the way I used to be.You are the opposite of an elegy. I almost look away, thinkingwe pay for each performance,to sit there in our vanishings—life is cold, the stage is hot,you backbend to eternityhalf in air, and firmly on your…

One morning in the rainy season, I went to bed at 6 A.M. after working all night and was on the verge of falling asleep when I was startled by the sound of my father’s voice coming through the air-conditioner next to my bed. Ever since the device was embedded in my bedroom wall, my sleep has been frequently interrupted by the noise of construction in the neighborhood or electioneering from a passing campaign truck. No matter the season, the air-conditioner conducts sound from the outside as efficiently as if it were a speaker. My parents live on the same property as me and my family, in a separate wing. At their advanced age, they wake up early; there are times when they get up before I’ve gone to bed.…

The Barn, by Wright Thompson (Penguin Press). Thompson, who was born into an old Mississippi planter family, grew up only miles from the barn where Emmett Till was tortured and killed. This book is not only a retelling of the crime—a story that Till’s family, among others, has already published—but also a rich and wandering history of the township in which Till died: the few square miles of plantations that helped birth both the blues and the Ku Klux Klan. Thompson writes movingly of more than one “enormous web of interconnected people” in the Delta, and of the ongoing fight to commemorate its lynchings. He brings a local’s intensity to the project: the book is as much about his neighbors, and even his kin, as it is about his country.…

OCTOBER 30 – NOVEMBER 5, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Few, if any, dance performances of the nineties provoked more controversy than Bill T. Jones’s “Still/Here,” débuted by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in 1994. Originating in workshops with volunteers who had faced, or were facing, life-threatening illnesses (Jones himself was H.I.V. positive), the piece incorporated video interviews into a multimedia work performed by conspicuously healthy dancers. When The New Yorker’s dance critic, Arlene Croce, refused to see it but wrote about it anyway, decrying it as “victim art,” the amens and the outrage in readers’ letters and op-ed pieces grew into a signal event in the era’s culture wars. Now a thirtieth-anniversary revival at BAM (Oct. 30-Nov. 2) offers a chance to consider…

In an unheated warehouse in Rafah, Ahmad Najjar ran a power cable from the battery of a banged-up company car to his laptop and sat down to work. Najjar, a thirty-eight-year-old pharmacist, is a medical-donations officer for American Near East Refugee Aid, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. It was a cold day in March, and he wore a jacket and a vest as he inventoried towers of shrink-wrapped cartons of donations. There were blood-pressure cuffs, disinfectant, and medicine, but no crutches or oxygen cylinders. Trucks headed for Gaza that contain any metal are sent back at the border. Najjar had jerry-rigged a workstation: two stacked boxes for a chair and a larger one for a desk, where he propped his laptop to set up a distribution plan. The supplies…

The Virginia opossum, according to John Smith—that explorer of all things Virginia—“hath a head like a Swine, & a taile like a Rat, and is of the Bignes of a Cat.” Had Smith looked closer, he might have discovered that it also has opposable thumbs, fifty teeth (more than any other land mammal except the equally improbable giant armadillo), and, if female, thirteen nipples, which are arranged like a clockface, with twelve in a circle and one in the middle. These nipples are concealed inside a pouch on its belly, because the Virginia opossum is a marsupial, the only one native to North America. All this is strange, but none of it is as strange as the behavior for which this possum is most famous: playing possum. Contrary to what…

The National Bunraku Theatre, in New York recently for the first time in more than thirty years, presented an evening of suicides. The performance, at the Japan Society, consisted of excerpts from two of the company’s most celebrated productions. In the Fire Watchtower scene from “The Greengrocer’s Daughter,” by Suga Sensuke and Matsuda Wakichi, from 1773, the titular character sacrifices herself to save a temple page boy she loves. In a scene from “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki,” by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, from 1703, two lovers are driven to take their own lives. Both plays were inspired by real events, and Chikamatsu’s was followed by a wave of double suicides that led to a ban on further performances. This mirroring of life and art is all the more astonishing given the…