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24 Articles

Evan Osnos (“Undecided Voter,” p. 34) writes about politics and foreign affairs for the magazine. His new book, “Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury,” will be out in September. Anne Carson (Poem, p. 42) recently published, with the artist Rosanna Bruno, a comic-book adaptation of Euripides’ “The Trojan Women.” Sam Knight (“Dream Weaver,” p. 28), a staff writer since 2018, is a frequent contributor to the column Letter from the U.K., on newyorker.com. Camille Bordas (Fiction, p. 56) teaches creative writing at the University of Florida. She is the author of the novel “How to Behave in a Crowd.” Barry Blitt (Sketchbook, p. 33) won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, for work that appeared in this magazine. His latest book is “Blitt,” a compendium of his illustrations. Nicole Rifkin (Cover), a cartoonist and…

A HOSPITAL’S LEGACY Chris Pomorski did an extraordinary job of describing how the investor-led, misguided leadership of Hahnemann University Hospital hastened its shutdown and disrupted the lives of patients, staff, medical residents, and students (“Death of a Hospital,” June 7th). As Pomorski highlights, hospitals—even those with nonprofit status—have become businesses. The demise of Hahnemann thus illuminates a larger issue: the patchwork approach to delivering health care in the U.S. is inadequate. All developed countries face challenges in paying for health care, but most have made access to it a right, and have instituted systemic approaches to funding and managing it in order to insure that access. Hahnemann failed, in part, because the majority of its patients were enrolled in Medicaid and Medicare, which pay less than private insurers. Should hospitals and…

Goings On About Town: This Week

JUNE 23 – 29, 2021 With a nearly four-decade career, Angélique Kidjo is a towering figure of cross-cultural music. Her work, which extends from Afrobeat and jazz to Afro-pop and world fusion, grows only more inclusive and curious with time. On her new album, “Mother Nature,” created during the pandemic, she teams up with younger pop stars from West Africa and the African diaspora—Burna Boy, Mr. Eazi, EarthGang, Sampa the Great—to promote messages of unity and healing, unpacking complex realities with cheer and aplomb. DANCE Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre Looking on the bright side is the company’s preferred posture, but the themes of its virtual spring gala—hope, promise, and the future—are both perennial and timely for the affluent stage troupe in this moment of cautious optimism. Free on Ailey’s Web site, July 24-26,…

Goings On About Town: This Week

Goings On About Town: Television

Bo Burnham’s “Inside” One of the leading auteurs of the mediated mind—a brain broken into shards by a steady stream of social media, open tabs, and reality television—the comedian Bo Burnham captures, with frenzied and dexterous clarity, the unmoored, wired, euphoric, listless feeling of being very online during the pandemic. The ninety-minute Netflix special, which Burnham wrote and directed, is not a traditional comedy special but, rather, a virtuosic one-man musical extravaganza, and also an experimental film about cracking up via Wi-Fi while trying to make said extravaganza. Burnham never explicitly mentions the pandemic, a purposeful omission that allows the show’s title to take on multiple meanings. He leaps among visual and musical references with swaggering fluency, and, as the special goes on, it gets sadder and stranger. During filming, he…

Tables for Two: Waiting for Pizza

The other night, as I prepared to venture outside, the sky took on the ominous tone of gunmetal, and my phone lit up with a warning: severe thunderstorm approaching, flash floods and hail likely, seek cover. All of my instincts told me to retreat, and yet I had an appointment that I simply could not miss, come hell or literal high water. I’d finally been granted the chance to order from Stretch Pizza, a pop-up by the chef Wylie Dufresne, tucked into Breads Bakery, just off Union Square. Perhaps this sounds like the ravings of a madwoman; maybe you’re wondering if any pizza could be worth it. But what’s a little tempest, really? It felt strangely refreshing to experience such heightened drama around something as low stakes as pizza. I headed…

Tables for Two: Waiting for Pizza

Comment: Morality Plays

The lives of the saints do not alter the fate of nations—except when they do. In 1953, a young physicist named Andrei Sakharov was working at a secret research site in Kazakhstan. The facility was near a forced-labor camp, one of countless outposts of the Gulag Archipelago. Every morning, Sakharov watched lines of prisoners marching in the dust, guard dogs barking at their heels. Yet when the news arrived, early that March, that Joseph Stalin had died, Sakharov did not connect the fallen generalissimo with the misery near his door. “I am under the influence of a great man’s death,” he wrote to his first wife. “I am thinking of his humanity.” Five months later, Sakharov donned a pair of protective goggles and watched the detonation of his horrific creation, the…

Comment: Morality Plays

Best Medicine: Uplifting

N.Y.U. Langone Hospital commissioned a three-story-tall plexiglass sculpture of a Dalmatian balancing a yellow taxi on its nose. A branch of NewYork-Presbyterian recently bought around three hundred blue-chip art works, including a Kehinde Wiley painting. Executives at Northwell Health, the state’s largest health-care provider, realized that the drab landscapes and still-lifes of flowers adorning its waiting rooms weren’t cutting it anymore. Northwell’s problem was solved not long ago when it received an unprecedented loan from a wealthy Houston couple, Sandi and Bill Nicholson: four hundred and four paintings and sculptures composing a never-before-exhibited collection of women artists, spanning twenty-five hundred years and seven continents. “We lived with these girls for twenty years,” Sandi explained the other day, while touring Lenox Hill Hospital, on the Upper East Side. Twelve of the works…

Best Medicine: Uplifting

Self-Narration Dept.: Policing the Police

Last week, Edwin Raymond—thirty-five, fit, not tall, long dreadlocks—walked into Kaché, a Haitian restaurant in the Marine Park section of Brooklyn, ready, as always, to tell his story. All political candidates are serial self-narrators, but Raymond, who is running for a seat on the City Council, has an unusual biography: at a moment of stark opposition between police officers and radical critics of policing, he is both. He made his way from table to table, dispensing familial greetings (a hand on the shoulder, a pleasantry in English or Haitian Creole) to those he knew, and a grip-and-grin to those he didn’t. A loudspeaker played Sinatra—“New York, New York,” “My Way.” Celeste Saint-Jean, eating alone but not guarding her solitude, struck up a conversation about the mayoral race. “I like the guy…

Self-Narration Dept.: Policing the Police

Second Wind Dept.: Deadpan

Two weeks after the comedy writer and performer Paula Pell moved to the Hudson Valley, last month, along with her wife, four dogs, and a cat, she heard a crash out back. “Five minutes later, there is a bleeding man on our front porch in swim trunks,” she recalled recently. “Second fucking week, and this guy is bleeding all over our porch, saying, ‘I got disoriented on the trail.’ And he was so lying. He had broken into the guesthouse and cut himself.” Pell called the paramedics, and the guy was arrested. “But the beautiful thing about it is that then we met all the neighbors,” she went on. “They were all coming over, going, ‘I’m vaccinated! Can I hug you? Don’t be scared!’” The move was already chaotic, coinciding with…

Second Wind Dept.: Deadpan

Postscript: Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm, who wrote for this magazine for fifty-eight years, died last week in New York City, just a half mile or so from the building on East Seventy-second Street where she spent most of her childhood. Her family came from Prague in 1939, when she was almost five and her sister, Marie, was two and a half. Starting kindergarten with very little English, she had to guess at what was going on; every day, at the end of class, the teacher would say, “Goodbye, children.” She knew what “goodbye” meant but thought “children” must be the name of one of her classmates, and she hoped that one day the teacher would choose her, and say, “Goodbye, Janet.” Her father, Joseph, who changed his name from Wiener to Winn, was…

Postscript: Janet Malcolm

American Chronicles: Pet Projects

Jeffrey Beri arrived in Guangzhou near the end of April and spent two weeks quarantined in a hotel. A few times a day, officials in hazmat suits came to check on him. He watched television news and stewed over what he perceived to be Communist Party propaganda and a crackdown that China was launching on pet dogs. “You just want to throat-punch everyone on TV,” he told me by phone, half whispering, certain that the room was bugged. “You feel like a caged animal, watching your kids get slaughtered.” By kids, he meant dogs, the ones he couldn’t save from the Chinese meat market while he languished in quarantine. Beri, a fifty-six-year-old former jewelry designer, is a co-founder of an organization called No Dogs Left Behind, which rescues dogs in East Asia…

American Chronicles: Pet Projects

Shouts & Murmurs: People of Earth: Hello

We have been observing you for millennia, from a great distance. Your development, your cultures, your wars. Your ways fascinate us. Recently, you have seen our crafts in your air-space. Yes, we are real. And, yes, we are ready to initiate contact. In earthly terms, we have progressed beyond the concepts of nations, division, and conflict. We are a peaceful civilization, built on coöperation, technological progress, and the power of thought. We have gathered from our observations that currently the most powerful Thought Leader in your most powerful nation is a human known as Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson. Is that correct? Because, frankly, this … confuses us. What is his deal, exactly? He is decent at speaking on television, we understand that. But he is far from your most intelligent or most capable…

Shouts & Murmurs: People of Earth: Hello

Family Life: Dream Weaver

There is a telephone number that is passed among the parents of babies and young children in London who have reached the limits of their struggle with sleep deprivation. The number belongs to Brenda Hart, who is a sleep trainer. Hart’s Web site advertises other services, too: she can help with fussy eaters, potty training, and newborns. But sleep is her overwhelming source of business. Hart claims to be the most effective sleep trainer in the city, and the bliss of unbroken nights is the reason that parents who have used her services speak of her with wonder and bewilderment and recommend her to friends, relations, and near-strangers whom they happen to meet by the swings and in whose eyes they recognize a dull and glassy look. Hart’s number comes with…

Family Life: Dream Weaver

Profiles: Undecided Voter

On a frosty night in February, Joe Manchin III, the senior senator from West Virginia, invited a few colleagues over for dinner aboard the houseboat he docks on the Potomac. In the past, opponents have sought to highlight the vessel for political effect; a 2018 advertisement by the National Republican Senatorial Committee called it a “$700,000 D.C. luxury yacht.” (In response, Manchin’s office reported that he bought it, used, for two hundred and twenty thousand dollars.) The boat—which he named Almost Heaven, after John Denver’s description of West Virginia in “Take Me Home, Country Roads”—resembles a small ferry; it is sixty-five feet long and boxy, with tinted windows. It serves as a residence on the nights he is in Washington, but also as a political prop. For voters who dislike…

Profiles: Undecided Voter

Bright as boatwashwe head for Montreal,to Will’s house.Will’s birthday.Here’s Will!New green sofa, glass of Malbec,roughhousing with the dog on the rug.I love the rug.It’s blue like a swimming pool.Will gives us T-shirts from Japan.We give him bath bombs.Ruben and Ed show up from Buenos Aires.We set off for Parc X. Get lost.Find Parc X.Sit at outdoor tables.Waiter draws a breath of horrorwhen I put an ice cube in my winebut then, discoveringit’s Will’s birthday, brings us course after courseincluding an octopus flavored with pine.Dinner goes on and on.Birthday gâteau to finish and all the waitersstanding round to sing, handing out Calvados.It rains. But we are under an awning.That seems perfect.Drive Ruben and Ed to their hotel.Everyone hugs everyone.Back at Will’sWill says best birthday since 1968.I have some reservations but they are narcissist: once again too…

Annals of Religion: Women on the Verge

Soline Humbert was a seventeen-year-old studying history and politics at Trinity College in Dublin when she first felt a calling to enter the priesthood. She did not welcome it. A cradle Catholic who was born and raised in France, Humbert knew that in the Roman Catholic Church only men could be priests—it was an indisputable rule anchored in official teachings and traditions. This was in the early nineteen-seventies, and in other religions, and in society at large, women’s roles were being recast under the influence of second-wave feminism. Most of the major Protestant denominations had already either recognized the ordination of women or were moving toward it. Reform Judaism had just ordained its first female rabbi. But the Catholic Church, so ingrained with symbols, held fast to the notion that…

Annals of Religion: Women on the Verge

Fiction: Offside Constantly

I read a lot about famous people and how they died. Or just what diseases they had. I started with actors and writers, but now I’m down to congressmen. Painters, too, I read a lot about, but only because my brother has so many books about them. (Is it “has” or “had”? The brother is gone, but the books are still here.) My brother loved painters, paintings. Me, I don’t really know what to do with a painting, how long I’m supposed to look at it. I prefer movies. Before I watch a movie, I check how long it will last. My brother was always going to die young (he had cystic fibrosis), but still he thought maybe he’d last long enough to study art history at the Sorbonne, and then…

Fiction: Offside Constantly

Poem: Bioluminescence

There’s a dark so deep beneath the sea the creatures beget their ownlight. This feat, this fact of adaptation, I could say, is beautiful though the creatures are hideous. Lanternfish. Hatchetfish. Viperfish.I, not unlike them, forfeited beauty to glimpse the world hidden by eternal darkness. I subsisted on falling matter, unawarefrom where or why matter fell, and on weaker creatures beguiled by my luminosity. My hideous face opening, suddenly, to take theminto a darkness darker and more eternal than this underworld underwater. I swam and swam toward nowhere and nothing.I, after so much isolation, so much indifference, kept going even if going meant only waiting, hovering in place. So far below, so faraway from the rest of life, the terrestrial made possible by and thereby dependent upon light, I did what I had to do. I…

Books: Tied to the Tracks

A more discouraging word in American English than “infrastructure” would be hard to find. And yet it’s one not seldom but often heard; to be home on the range, we have to get from the range to home, and using “infrastructure” of some sort, whether steel rails or asphalt road, is how we do that. But calling it “infrastructure” doesn’t make it sound the way we want it to sound. The word, of military origin, is meant to encompass all the conveyances that enable us to go and do our work, yet it somehow reduces projects of great audacity and scale—the Erie Canal, the transcontinental railroad, the great tunnels that run beneath the Hudson—to matters of thrifty, dull foresight. Although we’ve coined wonderful words in politics (“spin doctor,” “boycott,” and…

Books: Tied to the Tracks

Books: Briefly Noted

Journey to the Edge of Reason, by Stephen Budiansky (Norton).This expansive biography of the mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel places his achievements in their social and political context. Born in 1906, Gödel witnessed the flourishing of logical empiricism as a member of the Vienna Circle before joining a wave of brilliant European mathematicians who fled to universities in the United States. Budiansky evokes the protectiveness of Gödel’s colleagues in mordant detail (the logician Gerald Sacks said that speaking to Gödel was like talking to “a very bright eleven-year-old”). This community buoyed him in his later years, as he succumbed to the debilitating paranoia that had shadowed him for much of his life. Projections, by Karl Deisseroth (Random House). This hybrid memoir, by an emergency-room psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry and bioengineering,…

Books: Briefly Noted

Musical Events: Sing It Loud

Caedit nos pestis: “The plague falls upon us.” The dire opening of Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” should have had a chilling effect when L.A. Opera presented the work at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, on June 6th. The chorus sings of the Plague of Thebes over five darkly screaming chords in the key of B-flat minor, with an obdurate bass line grating against the upper harmonies. Flutes and trumpets slide from the first chord to the second in an anguished whoop. L.A. Opera’s orchestra and chorus executed a series of impeccable attacks, each sonority landing with a splendid thud. This is the sound of an inescapable catastrophe, one that leaves its human victims in a state of fear andfury. Stravinsky wrote “Oedipus” in the nineteen-twenties, in the wake of the twin disasters…

Musical Events: Sing It Loud

The Art World: Drawing Conclusions

Some of us don’t like the inarguably great artist Paul Cézanne as much as we know we are supposed to. I, for one, have struggled with him all my art-loving life. Others, as I’ve confirmed in recent conversations with Cézanne devotees, are astonished and appalled to hear anything with even a trace of negativity said about him. “Cézanne Drawing,” at the Museum of Modern Art, with some two hundred and eighty works on paper (too many? Not really, because quantity intensifies the works’ qualities), has a cumulative impact that is practically theological for both believers and skeptics, akin to a creation story, a Genesis, of modernism. It’s a return to roots for MOMA, which initiated its narrative of modern painting in 1929 with a show that included van Gogh, Seurat, and…

The Art World: Drawing Conclusions

On Television: The Host

It would not be in Oprah’s nature to pick an heir. But this is of no matter to Ziwe, the mononymous twenty-nine-year-old Nigerian-American performer who is in the midst of becoming our national inquirer’s unauthorized spawn. Everything that the pleasantness of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” made invisible—the theatrical artifice of the interview structure; the host’s interest in a gendered performance art; the flirtatious conflation of journalism and narcissism; the over-all raging camp of the daytime enterprise—is easy to see when watching the media that Ziwe produces. I cannot say that “Baited with Ziwe,” an interview series that débuted on YouTube, in 2017, is enjoyable to watch, and that’s the point. On “Baited,” Ziwe subjects non-Black people to interviews about race that quickly become inquisitions. It is a fantasy comedy of entrapment…

On Television: The Host

Puzzles & Games Dept.: The Crossword

ACROSS 1 “Absolutely!”4 New Orleans’s Dirty Dozen ___ Band9 “Go on, then!”14 Draw16 Dinner invitation?17 Phenomenon whose unusual color comes from refraction of the sun’s rays through Earth’s atmosphere18 Prop for Groucho Marx19 Nickname for the Basketball Hall of Famer Oscar Robertson20 Typewriter component22 Phife ___ (founding member of A Tribe Called Quest)23 Mushroom in ramen, often25 Snare27 Jemison who was the first Black woman in space28 ___ of iniquity29 “___ me?”32 Person whose works were catalogued chronologically by Ludwig von Köchel34 Poetic licenses?36 Ones who are likely to go in to labor early37 “Diving Into the Wreck” poet and coiner of the term “compulsory heterosexuality”39 Cause40 Émile Zola’s “La ___ Humaine”41 Fairy queen whose chariot is an empty hazelnut, per Mercutio, in “Romeo and Juliet”44 Word with wealth or achievement45…

Puzzles & Games Dept.: The Crossword

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