Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2, 2024 i The New Yorker

Eight months after the fall of Roe v. Wade, Vanessa Garcia lay on a hospital table in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, as a technician performed an ultrasound. Garcia had given birth to two children with no complications, but her third pregnancy seemed alarmingly different. The ultrasound revealed that her placenta was covering her cervix—a condition, known as placenta previa, that heightened her risk of hemorrhage or preterm birth. Garcia was referred to a maternalfetal expert at D.H.R. Health Women’s Hospital, in Edinburg, Texas, and began going in for weekly ultrasounds. She approached the visits as an opportunity to catch a glimpse of her daughter, whom she had named Vanellope. Before driving to appointments, she got in the habit of drinking half a gallon of water, hoping that it would contribute…

In the first days of my son’s life, during the fall of 2023, he spent much of the time when he wasn’t sleeping or eating engaged in what some cognitive scientists call “motor babbling.” His arms and legs wiggled; his eyes wandered and darted, almost mechanically. One night, as he was drifting off to sleep, he smiled for the first time. As I admired him, wondering what he might be thinking about, his expression suddenly went blank—and then, in quick succession, he looked upset, then surprised, and then happy again. It was as if the equipment were being calibrated. That is apparently the purpose of motor babbling: random movements help the brain get acquainted with the body it’s in. Our intelligence is physical long before it is anything else. Most…

Xiaoguo had a terror of thirst, so he kept a glass of water on the table beside his hospital bed. As soon as it was empty, he asked me to refill it. I wanted to warn him that this was unhealthy—guzzling water all night long puts pressure on the kidneys, and pissing that much couldn’t be good for his injury. He was tall, though, so I decided his insides could probably cope. Even though he was a Beijinger, Xiaoguo didn’t have a hint of an accent. He told me he’d sung Peking opera for a few years as a kid, but then he got too tall and his voice broke. It was a shame because not many kids can sing Lord Guan the way I did, he said, as he…

On the Calculation of Volume (Book I), by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara Haveland (New Directions). This philosophical novel consists of the diary entries of a woman for whom the days have ceased to pass. After a seemingly quotidian afternoon in Paris, the antiquarian bookseller Tara Selter wakes up in her hotel room the next morning only to find the same day happening again. As Tara relives the day—November 18th—she tinkers with variations, considers possible explanations, describes her plight to her husband, and writes. At once a meditation on climate change (because Tara’s calendar never turns, neither does the weather) and an experiment with fictional form, Balle’s novel is also a startling exploration of profound questions about language, human connection, and time. The Mortal and Immortal Life…

In a Faustian bargain, there’s little suspense about how things will end. The Devil doesn’t hand anything over—beauty, knowledge, power—without first laying down some heavy hints. And so it goes as the lights dim for the musical “Death Becomes Her,” by the songwriters Julia Mattison and Noel Carey and the book writer Marco Pennette, at the Lunt-Fontanne. As thunder rumbles and lightning flickers, Isabella Rossellini’s disembodied voice, insinuating and delicious, purrs a warning: “Silence your cell phones.” The camp-o-meter is already overloading, and the show, directed by Christopher Gattelli, hasn’t even begun. (Soon to come: a quick change for an actress into a Judy Garland-as-Dorothy costume, complete with a stuffed Toto tossed up into her arms from the orchestra pit.) Rossellini is not physically in this show—she played the Mephistopheles…

LOST AND FOUND I enjoyed reading Sam Knight’s article about the people who dedicate their lives to searching for sunken treasure (“The Shipwreck Detective,” November 11th). Knight mentions what many consider the holy grail of colonial shipwrecks—the San José, a ship loaded with gold bullion that was sunk off the coast of Cartagena by the British naval squadron of Commodore Wager, in 1708—and writes that it was discovered by the Colombian government in 2015. In fact, I feel sure that it was positively located by my father, Eugene Lyon, in the early nineteen-eighties. My father, who passed away in 2020, was arguably the most successful “shipwreck detective” of his era. (I don’t think he would have used that term, but it is, in essence, the profession he helped pioneer.) He…

It started, like many good things, as a joke. NBC was filming a preview of its 1984 lineup, and Selma Diamond, a comedian in her sixties, had been tasked with introducing “Miami Vice,” a flashy affair of Ferraris, cocaine cartels, and designer sports jackets. She pretended to misunderstand. “‘Miami Nice’?” At last, a show about retirees, with their mink coats and cha-cha lessons. She got a laugh. And some execs thought it might not be a terrible idea. The network proposed Diamond’s concept to two producers, Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas. The show, an executive explained, should feature ostensibly “over the hill” characters who were nonetheless “young in attitude.” Witt brought the idea to the writer Susan Harris, his wife, who came up with a pilot script. Harris had…

didn’t change muchat first. Atfirst itdidn’t change much, at first Ididn’t—I don’t—change much.At first we didn’t & theydidn’t & the atmospherestayed the sameor enough to seem the same. The same.I say the wordout loud to myself.Who changed I think. What started out & thendisappeared withoutactually disappearing.It’s so quiet in here. It’s soquiet now. The nowused to be a noisyplace & now it is sostill. Where is everyoneI think. What is itthat is dis- possessed. Can it ever be re- possessed. Never?Now and again your soulwakes up inspurts asking what is—or is there—a just struggle. Then you,then I, cry outwhere are youeveryone. We were in one world & then was it u orus or them or no one inparticular—inparticular my heart leaps at that—ohin particular—but no oneanswers & no onecame along…

One of the more reliable chemical reactions in European culture occurs when particles of German mental matter enter Italy. Suddenly, German writers discover that life is worth living again, as they succumb to the view from the veranda. For going on three centuries, the Italian scene has disarmed some of the most distinctive spirits from the north. Goethe, Heine, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Theodor Fontane were each its willing captive. Even Nietzsche, master exposer of escape fantasies, treated Italy as a life preserver. “How have I merely endured living until now!” he wrote. Beholding the sky over Naples, tears welled in his eyes; he felt like someone approaching death, yet “saved at the last moment.” When, in the mid-nineteen-twenties, a group of German academics took a series of extended holidays…

NOVEMBER 26 – DECEMBER 3, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Luna Luna was a short-lived amusement park in Hamburg, Germany, that featured attractions designed by artists including Salvador Dalí, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and David Hockney. The passion project of a poetsongwriter-pop star named André Heller, the park (pictured) opened to the public in 1987, largely funded by a gossip rag, and stayed that way for a summer. Whatever else it was or wasn’t, it was a masterpiece of networking—Heller used his connections to Dalí and Andy Warhol to recruit a veritable Ocean’s 11 of famous artists young and old. After spending thirty-five years in shipping containers, the park has been partly reassembled at the Shed, in the exhibition “Luna Luna, Forgotten Fantasy,” through Jan.…

At a benefit concert for Ukrainian children, at Carnegie Hall, Nathalie Lysenko and Gayle Corrigan walked up to the bar and paid forty-six dollars for two glasses of a Ukrainian sparkling wine that Lysenko had helped smuggle out of Bakhmut under Russian bombardment. “I didn’t realize they were charging for it,” Corrigan said. “It’s a good cause,” Lysenko said. Lysenko, who is tall and has large, round eyes, is the export manager for Artwinery, which until recently was one of the largest wineries in the former Soviet Union. Corrigan, who wore a black cocktail dress, is her American importer. Before the Russians occupied Bakhmut, the city was a major center of sparklingwine production. During the Cold War, Stalin, facing a champagne ban, ordered the establishment of a high-end facility there,…

The filmmaker Malcolm Washington, son of Denzel and Pauletta, flew to Pittsburgh the other day, and went straight from the airport to the August Wilson House, in the city’s historically Black Hill District. He had last been to the place—a community center that celebrates the legacy of the late playwright—two years ago, before he began directing a movie adaptation of Wilson’s play “The Piano Lesson.” Washington, who is thirty-three, wore a blue jacket, stiff jeans, and leather Nikes, and had plaits pulled into a ponytail. At the Wilson House, he surveyed a new exhibition on “Jitney,” Wilson’s eighth play. Prepping for his movie, the director had spent days digging through Wilson’s archive for what he called “nuts-and-bolts research”—scraps of dialogue written on napkins, correspondence with editors. He’d tried to see…

I used to go to games in Candlestick ParkJust for a little rest, a little solitudeAway from her voice so I could writeA poem for her. The poem I never finished.I didn’t like or dislike baseball, I simplyDidn’t understand it. It was a good placeTo work until it got too exciting. I mean,Sometimes the game got too exciting: you’dSee Mays trotting in from the outfield,This relaxed look on his face, & suddenlyYou knew the exceptional was about to happen.Even after we broke up, agreeing we were justToo different (she liked money; I preferred,In those days, drugs), I still went out there,Such was the nature of my devotion toThis task, all readiness with my fountain pen—Modest in size but everlastingly erect—A Parker 51 with a gold nib whereMy angel resided, &…

If you remember anything about this painting, may it be that the dog’s name is Noble. The black poodle in the bottom left greets us as a silhouette with a few shiny parts: teeth, eye, damp nose, pink tongue. The teeth could crack bone; the tongue wants to be friends. Not a very dignified pose for a creature called Noble, but humans love to saddle animals with teasingly grand names—Rex, Princess, King, Queenie. It’s one of our many little ways of being modest and boastful in the same breath, of displaying our possessions and hinting that we are, in both senses, above it all. The man girthily looming over Noble is not a noble. You might be able to tell by his coat, which blends into the blackness as easily…

It’s fitting that the title of the new HBO comedy “The Franchise” makes no direct reference to the superhero movie around which it revolves. That would be “Tecto: Eye of the Storm,” a hundred-and-fifty-milliondollar work in progress that has already been deemed an also-ran by its Marvellike studio. The executives view it as a money grab—an opportunity to dangle before fans a three-minute cameo by a character from one of the studio’s more popular tentpoles in the hope that they bite. Accordingly, no one actually working on “Tecto” is thrilled about being there, regarding it, instead, as a means to an end. The film’s lead actor, Adam (Billy Magnussen), is betting that it’ll be the vehicle that catapults him onto the A-list. The producer, Anita (Aya Cash), wants its success…