Innholdsfortegnelse for February 3, 2025 i The New Yorker

Lidia often went to the third floor of the Graziano Institute and sat down on the wooden bench there, right across from her mother’s room. If she arrived after lunch had been distributed, most of the old people would be asleep, and then she could sit and read in silence for a long time with her back to the sun. Sometimes she dozed off, too. She almost never went in to see her mother, who in any case no longer recognized her. But Lidia thought it was important to spend some time at the home every week, just to keep an eye on things. If she stayed long enough, a nurse would come by and Lidia could say hello, ask about any changes in her mother’s medications, and let the…

Black in Blues, by Imani Perry (Ecco). This cultural history of the color blue, and how it threads through Black lives and “the peculiar institution of slavery,” opens with the indigo trade in the sixteenth century. The dye’s production by enslaved individuals was, Perry writes, “an early and clear example of a global desire to harness blue beauty into personal possession.” Touching on a range of historical, artistic, musical, and literary references—from the color’s significance in Yoruba cosmology to the blue candles used in hoodoo rituals to the “tremor” of the “blue note”—Perry illuminates how the color has been variously associated with mourning, spiritual strength, and forces of freedom and oppression. American Laughter, American Fury, by Eran A. Zelnik (Johns Hopkins). This sobering history tracks how humor, with “its double-edged nature,” was…

RECKONING WITH MUNRO Rachel Aviv’s article about Alice Munro—and how she stayed married to her husband, Gerry Fremlin, even after finding out that he had molested her daughter—took me back to Munro’s short story “How I Met My Husband” (“You Won’t Get Free of It,” December 30th & January 6th). In the story, which was written in 1974, the year Munro began her relationship with Fremlin, a character named Edie remembers a cherished episode when, at fifteen, she met Chris, an itinerant pilot, who, crucially, did not marry her. Edie visited Chris in his tent and later recalls “lovely kisses” and “some other things, not bad things.” Her adolescent sexuality and vulnerability catch the attention of the story’s mother figure, who blames Edie for the affair. Edie’s relationship with the…

Amazon has agreed to pay $40 million to license a Melania Trump documentary, as Jeff Bezos makes overtures to Trump. —Rolling Stone. Memo from Jeff to all “Melania” personnel: • Show “human side” of the First Lady, using body doubles and voice-over. • Remove thought bubbles of gold bars in scenes with her husband. • Speed up footage of her thinking. • Emphasize scenes of her speaking with children, but please edit out the one in which a little girl asks, “Where can I meet a rich, obese man twice my age?” and Melania answers, “Upscale restaurants and saunas.” • Melania told Fox that the doc will show her “unpacking, moving, and redecorating.” Eliminate scene of her shrieking at a housekeeper, “The box marked ‘new body parts, etc.’ goes in…

How many stories among the stars.The boats come in. The boats go out. Our friend is dying. He writes,he says, more often. Yet more sparely. Now to see what wasn’t seen before. We stay up all night again to scanthe sky from our deck above the bay. How slow the constellations spin.Invincible heroes. Unrequited loves— until, it seems, we’ve lost all count. Soon we’ll go, too. Star, therefore, to start.A cargo freighter pulls across the waters. We can tell from the placement of the lights,the slow procession of it all. And so it’s dawn. Did I say invincible? I mean invisible.…

Can’t you see her at her stopIn her gingham skirt, thinning? Inside, her groan growsLouder, growling. False Spring nibbling her ankles stings like a slapAs she asks for her Social Security Check, her needle entering herThimble and thumb. Her bus comes and goes while she daydreamsPressing her left wrist to her iron Until her arteries become artillery. Her bus was a boatShe didn’t take to her toothless mothers Calling for her, asleep on banana leavesAlive with ants. QuiveringAs if under a monsoon with a secret tearing in half Her baby sister’s chronically beautiful smile, a country cut acrossThe seventeenth parallel, she’s a woman after Trading her name for her future.Nobody’s daughter. Nobody’s mother. Nobody’s bride.She unwraps her Cheese sandwich, a moon moth splaying its iridescent wings.Hunger has her. In the…

A few months ago, when Tom Brady was beginning his career as an N.F.L. commentator for Fox Sports, a commercial aired. It begins with Brady, his face all angles, sitting at a desk in a nondescript room, looking at videos on two big monitors in front of him, laptops to his right and left, and a big TV affixed to a wall. Why he needs so much stimulation all at once isn’t totally clear, but it’s got something to do with extreme efficiency. Retired or not, the world’s greatest quarterback does not have the luxury to indulge in sequential action—one thing at a time is for slowpokes and losers. On the TV, pundits are yelling about the hubris of his career change. “I just don’t get it,” one of them…

JANUARY 29 – FEBRUARY 4, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Bruce David Klein’s documentary “Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story” (opening Jan. 24, at IFC Center) shows how hard Liza Minnelli has worked, and in a number of genres—stage, screen, television—as one of the last of the great actor-singer-dancers. The film considers how Minnelli, the child of the performer Judy Garland and the director Vincente Minnelli, set out to make herself as an artist through perseverance, and how her charisma could touch many diffierent people all at once. The seventy-eight-year-old Minnelli conveys, still, an inner pathos and wit that speaks of her great power, and her will to survive and express herself. ABOUT TOWN OFF BROADWAY | The Australian comedian Sam Kissajukian spends part of…

It was the fifth of September, 2023. The street where I was standing was full of people, most of them on their way in or out of London’s British Museum, which sat right behind me. The sky was perfectly blue, the air was warm, and the sun’s rays, I had noticed only a few seconds before, glowed against my skin. Everything around me cried summer—the tourists wore shorts, T-shirts, skirts, sunlight flashed off glass and metal and made the white stone of the museum shine—but the sensation I had was of autumn. It wasn’t the date, I wasn’t thinking of the fact that it was September, it was something about the light, it had a diffierent fullness, and that created a diffierent space. It was as if summer, self-assured after…

A little while back, I met a capybara, the world’s largest rodent, for a coffee-and-carrot date at a café in Tokyo. This has become a ritual when I visit the city. I sat on a couch next to Pisuke, who stared ahead with the two eyes perched atop his enormous head connected to his coconut-shaped body, generating what seemed like friendliness and calm across the room, which was filled with his equally substantial brother Kohaku and about ten human admirers from around the world. I stroked his straw-like fur and the pinkish skin beneath, thick as sailcloth. His ears looked like morel mushrooms, and sometimes they would twitch, to the delight of my fellow human visitors. I scratched under his chin, and he half closed his eyes and lifted up…

It’s a mite soon to start grieving, but scientists now project that life on Earth will probably end in about a billion years. A Monday in February, 1,000,002,025, would be my guess. On that inhospitable day, give or take a few million years, the sun will become so hot that the oceans will boil, Earth’s oxygen will disappear, and photosynthesis will cease, as will all living things. We should be so lucky. There’s a pretty fair chance that life could be wiped out well before then—say, in early June, 2034, or on a cloudy Sunday in November, 3633. Then again, who knows? Plenty of people do, as it turns out, and, if you want to know who they are, Dorian Lynskey’s “Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the…

The first edition of Monday Evening Concerts, the world’s longest-running new-music series, took place on April 23, 1939, in a house on Micheltorena Street, in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. The hosts were Peter Yates, a functionary at the California Department of Employment, and his wife, the pianist Frances Mullen. The couple had commissioned the modernist architect R. M. Schindler to build an enclosed, cantilevered performance space atop their bungalow home. Nineteen people showed up for the first concert, at which Mullen played works by Béla Bartók. Two months later, Evenings on the Roof, as the series was initially called, presented a tribute to Charles Ives. Word had spread sufficiently that the mighty émigré conductor Otto Klemperer turned up, raving about Ives’s originality. Soon, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, modernist giants in exile,…

Sanaz Toossi began writing “English,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, now at the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre, as her graduate-school thesis. The play, a portrait of an English-language class in Iran, was, she has said, her furious reaction to the “Muslim ban”—as Donald Trump’s executive order from 2017 was known—enacted as she was pursuing an M.F.A. at N.Y.U. Toossi has described “English” as her “scream into the void.” The actual show, then, is a surprise: a gentle, subtle experience that calibrates our ears to shifts in pedagogy and understanding. “English” débuted at the Atlantic, in a co-production with the Roundabout, in 2022. It’s primarily a school-room comedy, directed then as now by Knud Adams with an eye to wry wistfulness. The show tracks an advanced English course, in the city…