Innholdsfortegnelse for December 16, 2024 i The New Yorker

Hugh Herr, the director of an M.I.T. laboratory that pursues the “merging of body and machine,” grew up in a Mennonite family outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He and his brothers—he was the youngest of five children—often helped their father, a builder, lay shingles, install drywall, and strip wires. During the summer, the family visited places like Alaska and the Yukon in their camper van, and the kids frequently set out alone to hike and rock climb. “When I was eleven, I was this climbing prodigy, climbing things most adults couldn’t do,” Herr told me. “When I was fifteen and sixteen, I started climbing things that no adults had ever done. And then, when I was seventeen, the accident happened.” Rock climbers call bouldering moves “problems,” and the most diffcult section of…

Conceptual art has been with us for more than fifty years, and it still defines the work of a great many contemporary artists. But what is it? The term “concept art” was first used in 1963 by the philosopher Henry Flynt; it quickly morphed into “conceptual art” and was applied to art work in which the idea behind it is as or more important than the work itself. An early example was Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs,” which consisted of a straight-backed chair, a photograph of that chair, and a mounted dictionary definition of the word “chair.” The idea was clear enough, and conceptual artists have been struggling ever since to make works that are not as boring as this one. Those who succeed have usually been influenced by…

“Your heart is photogenic, but it’s shy,” the nurseannounces, sliding her jellied wandover my left breast and under, along the ribs as the bright green line of my lifescoots and blips and scoots in reassuring intervalson the TV monitor affixed to the wall. “I’m truly posthumous,” my favorite enfantterrible declared, “and no extra charge,”but I packed up an entire apartment like practicing for death. From an old passport, my younger selfstares at me: full-cheeked, with anxious eyes,she wonders at the crepe-paper crinkle above my upper lip, my cheekbones carved by shadow, my wisping hair.And I stare back: there’s nothing I can tell her,no warning or advice she’d hear. Em dashes scar my diaries. The doctor’s screenshivers in the blizzard static of an ancient black-and-whiteTV where snow, once started, falls and…

Every Valley, by Charles King (Doubleday). This history casts Handel’s “Messiah,” which King calls the “greatest piece of participatory art ever created,” as both quintessentially of its time and an oddity; when it premièred, in 1742, its blend of secular and sacred was unprecedented. Delving into the era’s political and social turmoil, King argues that the primary theme of Enlightenment art wasn’t the triumph of reason but, rather, “how to manage catastrophe.” That theme is evident in King’s astute reading of the libretto (a collection of Bible verses that move from despair to hope), but he also locates it in the lives of key figures who had a hand in shaping and popularizing “Messiah.” The result amounts to more than an account of a piece of music. It is also, as…

MOB MENTALITY As a cop who was at the Capitol on January 6th, I read Adam Gopnik’s article on mobs with interest (A Critic at Large, November 25th). Gopnik invokes many fascinating precedents to help illustrate the distinction between crowds and mobs. I wish, though, that he had focussed more on contemporary social-scientific insights, especially concerning the more destructive elements of crowds; as is, his historical focus evokes a sense that the social and psychological factors driving our current conflicts are nothing new. While comparisons with lynch mobs and medieval rustici may be constructive, they should not overshadow the massive, multidisciplinary contemporary study of social action and crowd psychology, including recent insights into digital media and influence operations. This urgent and important scholarship is precisely the kind of “hard work”…

I really wish peoplewould dance at receptions.It’s awful, trying to make conversationand hard to forgive one another.A valiant person should dance,and let anyone else stand and watchlike someone judgmental out of Milton.It’s like we’re just so much baggage to our skeletonseven though we climbed themour whole lives long.I like those videos where the chimpanzee motherslings her baby onto her backfor him to hold on to nothing but hair.I’m trying to remember if I everhad a good time at a reception.I’ve wanted to be like my friendswith beautiful chest tattooswho go topless in blizzards.They know they’re a form of artand the world’s worst winecan’t ruin them.I imagine a goatherdat the reception.Dance like that.Have you ever heldin your palm the hoofof a baby goat? I bet you have.It’s like holding a perfect…

It’s harder to adapt a great book than an average one. Literary greatness often inhibits directors, who end up paying prudent homage to the source rather than engaging in the bold revisions that successful adaptations require. And even uninhibited directors may lack the stylistic originality of their literary heroes. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that the director RaMell Ross, in his first dramatic feature, “Nickel Boys”—adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel, “The Nickel Boys”—avoids both obstacles with a rare blend of daring and ingenuity. Few films have ever rendered a major work of fiction so innovatively yet so faithfully. In a year of audaciously accomplished movies, “Nickel Boys” stands out as different in kind. Ross, who co-wrote the script with Joslyn Barnes, achieves an advance in narrative form,…

One way of being a modernist writer is to pay attention to the most saliently modern objects and experiences. So it is that Proust recounts the arresting novelty of a telephone call or an airplane sighting. For T. S. Eliot, the products of industrial capitalism can appear either literally (“a record on the gramophone” in “The Waste Land”) or as a metaphor for inner states, as when he describes the hour of dusk at which “the human engine waits/Like a taxi throbbing waiting.” Sometimes newfangled technology seems to enter into the nature of the writing itself. John Dos Passos’s trilogy, “U.S.A.,” features passages explicitly mimicking newsreels, and even in cases where the evocation of modernity is less self-conscious something similar is often detectable: it’s not just that Hemingway’s heroes shoot…

DECEMBER 11 – 17, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Barbara Hannigan (pictured), who hails from Nova Scotia, began her career as a singer. After years of creative success, she took a unique turn—unique, at least, for a soprano—to conducting, making her maestro début in 2011, at Théâtre du Châtelet, in Paris, at the age of forty. Nourished by a passion for contemporary music, Hannigan leads ensembles with vibrant abandon; on Dec. 12, she returns to her roots for a night of singing at the Park Avenue Armory. Hannigan and the esteemed French pianist Bertrand Chamayou will step into Messiaen’s deeply biographical “Chants de Terre et de Ciel,” Scriabin’s capricious Opus 61 and aqueous Opus 72, and John Zorn’s labyrinthine “Jumalattaret.” ABOUT TOWN OFF BROADWAY |…

The final day of shooting for “Babygirl,” a new erotic thriller, was devoted to a sequence that the film’s writer and director, Halina Reijn, had deliberately saved for last. In the movie, which will be released on Christmas, Nicole Kidman plays Romy, the hyper-competent C.E.O. of a robotics company, who feigns pleasure in her marriage and flirts perilously with a younger man at work until he tempts her into a kinky affair. In this scene, Romy and her paramour, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), were alone in a cheap hotel room in Manhattan, attempting to define their new dynamic. The environs were unsavory—Reijn had chosen blood-red curtains and carpeting specifically to evoke a womb—but there was a charge in the air. The end of the encounter would be the literal consummation of…

At the end of July, Lucie Castets was planning to go to Italy with a group of friends. Every year, they rented a house and followed the same ritual: pool, spritzes, a viewing of “Gladiator.” For the past year, Castets had worked as the finance director for the City of Paris. On July 22nd, shortly after noon, she was in the bike garage of her office building, in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, when her phone started buzzing. The caller was Olivier Faure, the head of the French Socialist Party. Just before picking up, Castets texted her wife, then took the call. “What does he want?” her wife wrote back. “I don’t know,” Castets replied. “Maybe he’s gonna ask you to be Prime Minister or something.” “Haha.” After Castets hung up, the…

They had lived together for twenty-five years in the old stone house on a bend in the river. They were young when they first saw the place, wildly in love, and so poor they could afford only one of two dwellings in the valley: a battered trailer huddled against the cold wind, and the antique house in foreclosure, a breath from letting the weeds muscle it back into the earth. Willie had wanted the trailer; when you flicked on the lights there, no shower of sparks fell from knob-and-tube wiring. But Eliza had vision. We’ll be happy in this house, she said, watching the green river slide through the willows. So they spent the first spring, summer, and fall living in a tent in the largest bedroom, cooking with a…