Innholdsfortegnelse for July 22, 2024 i The New Yorker

These days, many New York storefronts are designed by committee. The heads of corporate branding cook up a brief, a design firm answers with a litany of slides, and, after iterations, interventions, and internal quarrels, the sign arrives in the physical plane, with glossy acrylic letterforms and antiseptic light. But New York used to be an exciting aesthetic hodgepodge: blinking marquees and boldly painted letters, and no mystical branding concepts, just facts—LIQUOR, PORK, SHOES. David Barnett, the founder of the New York Sign Museum, said the other day that such signs represented “a conversation between two people, a shop owner and a sign-maker.” Barnett’s museum is a nonprofit that rescues historic advertising throughout the boroughs. A patient, soft-spoken man in his thirties, Barnett seems to know every storefront in New…

The ocean is a lonely, perilous place. It is especially so when you are aboard a leak-prone wooden vessel laden with a rich cargo of sugar, silks, and opium, like the traders sailing the Quedagh Merchant around India’s southern tip in 1698. They surely panicked when they spied a massive warship with thirty-four mounted guns bearing down on them—or would have, had it not been flying French colors. The Quedagh Merchant had a document, written in an elegant hand, guaranteeing safe passage from France. French ships posed no threat; they might even offer protection, information, or supplies. The Quedagh Merchant sent over a boat with a French gunner carrying the pass. As he stepped aboard the warship, though, it hoisted a new flag: the English one. The gunner soon realized…

One evening in April of 2022, a hundred people milled around a patio at Mar-a-Lago, sipping champagne and waiting for Donald Trump to arrive. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, stood in front of an archway fringed with palm trees and warmed up the crowd with jokes about the deep state. The purpose of the gathering was to raise money for the Center for Renewing America, a conservative policy shop whose most recent annual report emphasized a “commitment to end woke and weaponized government.” Its founder, Russell Vought, a former head of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, and a leading candidate to be the White House chief of staff in a second term, was in attendance, chatting amiably with the guests. He is trim and bald,…

We are driving the Middle West, lostas Oklahoma or Kansas slowly spinsinto darkness. Hard red winter wheatleans with the wind while the knife of 83bisects sunlight barely overthe near horizon. I try not to remember what has happenedhere, bloody grass prairie, Comancheand Kiowa Wars— wondering why I can’t forgetand simply love that she is here with me, unfoldinga map to determine where we areand how long it isuntil Salina or Amarillo, Wichita Falls or Muskogee. With painted nailshe idly traces a crossroads and I imagine her conjuring a younger selfon a screened porch on a gravel county road, conducting love songsfrom the radio, but before I finishcomposing my fantasy she frownsand notes that we are traversing the Greater Seminole Field, and I am startledto notice the oil pumps and derricks—the…

The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore (Riverhead). Told from rapidly shifting points of view across several decades, this expertly paced thriller tracks the disappearance of a young woman named Barbara Van Laar from a summer camp in the Adirondacks, which is owned by her fabulously wealthy family. The Van Laars and their associates are a shady bunch, and the novel plays dexterously with the tension between the opulent family and the working-class environs in which they live. Barbara’s vanishing is further darkened by rumors that a recently escaped serial killer, who “does not believe in any god except himself,” is stalking the forest. Driven by a sprawling plot, Moore’s novel explores adolescence and social class and has the kineticism of a well-crafted miniseries. Gretel and the Great War, by…

PLUMBING THE DEPTHS Paige Williams’s informative piece on Maine’s glass-eel fishery and the many mysteries associated with the life cycle of the eel brought back fond memories of my time as an oceanography graduate student at the University of Rhode Island, in the late nineteen-sixties (“Ghosts on the Water,” June 24th). The primary research interest of my adviser, Howard Winn, was communication among whales, but he had a tremendous fascination with American eels. Winn dreamed of achieving the holy grail of eel research: capturing a sexually mature eel on its spawning ground. To that end, during research cruises devoted to recording and playing back the calls of humpback whales, several days and nights were always spent idling in the Sargasso Sea and deploying nets deep in the ocean. We would…

In Chicago, there is a wintertime tradition known as dibs. If you shovel out a parking space, you can lay claim to it for the season by blocking it off with a lawn chair or a lamp or some other household loot. Move the snow, own the spot. Can’t do that here, bub. Still, East Coast summertime has its own dibs situations: the territorial beach umbrella, the Great Lawn Philharmonic blanket grab, the incumbent at the top of the national ticket who won’t cede his perch. In these parts, unlike in Chicago, the prerogative is often disputed. A weekend in the Berkshires, on the grounds of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams: the biennial Solid Sound arts-and-music festival, convened and headlined by the band Wilco. MASS MoCA…

He appeared one day on Instagram. He had noticed my posts and asked if I wanted to talk. I routinely ignore these things, but he caught me in a weak moment. My only relationship was heavily one-sided, between me and the lordly Russian physical therapist who, twice weekly, rolled up the sleeve of my T-shirt, squirted lotion on my shoulder, and pressed on it with his gloved hands, relieving the intense nerve pain that I had suffered for months. I adored him. Maybe the preponderance of flowers and cityscapes, and the dearth of human beings, on my feed had tipped off my admirer. A follower had pointed it out: “You don’t have people in your posts.” That’s because I don’t have people in my life, bitch. So I was vulnerable.…

In 2017, when the singer and songwriter Claire Cottrill was nineteen, she uploaded a song called “Pretty Girl” to You-Tube, under the nom de plume Clairo. Cottrill had recorded the clip from atop her bed, in front of a taped-up map of France, a poster for the indie-rock band the Shins, and a sagging stretch of Christmas lights—a classic American teen-age tableau. She periodically held up a plastic Funko-Pop toy in the shape of Gizmo, the furry protagonist of “Gremlins,” or fussed with a pair of pink cat’s-eye sunglasses. Everything about the clip felt unpretentious, easy, and magnetic. “Pretty Girl” is about resisting the urge to dissemble and reinvent oneself in service of love: “And I could be a pretty girl/Shut up when you want me to,” Cottrill sang, making…

JULY 17 – 23, 2024 The giddy joy you may feel when you enter moma’s Projects Room to see Tadáskía’s installation, “ave preta mística mystical black bird” (2022), co-presented by the Studio Museum in Harlem, is due in part to the show’s scale. The thirty-one-year-old mononymous Brazilian artist (pictured below) has taken the room’s very tall walls and created an intimate yet expansive atmosphere. Working deftly, lyrically, with charcoal and colored pastels, Tadáskía produced a multi-panel display inspired by the Sankofa—a mythical black bird, among the Akan people of Ghana, whose head turns toward the past while its feet move forward. The depiction juts off in many directions but coheres, finally, through her investment in Brazil’s political and spiritual life, and in the history of her ancestors—as well as her…

In January, Al Jazeera English aired a segment with a sound analyst named Lawrence Abu Hamdan. He was asked to assess a video that had gone viral online. In the clip, a woman wearing a hijab claimed to be a nurse at a hospital in Gaza. She said that Hamas was attacking the hospital and ransacking its supplies. The sound of bombs could be heard in the background. In the Al Jazeera segment, Abu Hamdan explains how he knows the video is bunk: “The way that those explosions resounded were not consistent with the way her voice was resounding in that room and resonating.” He determined that the sound of the explosions had been added on to the video after the fact. Abu Hamdan goes on to tell the…

I was in Istanbul for a few days and on my way to visit my grandfather. He’d moved in with my father at the beginning of the pandemic because we had been worried about him living alone, in the town by the Black Sea where he’d retired. We’d urged him to come to the city, just for a short time. It had been a wise decision; my grandfather’s health deteriorated rapidly in those months, and his stay became indefinite. He could no longer go out for long walks as he used to, or even remain upright for extended periods. My grandfather had always spent his days outdoors. Whenever he came to Istanbul, he’d take buses and ferries all over the city, sometimes going as far as the city’s gates. He…

It’s easy to imagine why a clever Englishwoman of the eighteenth century might have wished to move about the world as a disembodied mind. Virginity was a corporeal asset that could lose all its value in an instant. Your bed partner might well be suffering from a raging S.T.D., for which a common treatment was a mercury douche (just as ineffective and as toxic as it sounds). Childbirth, before the advent of obstetric anesthesia, in the mid-nineteenth century, was a harrowing and not infrequently deadly trial. In 1764, when the talented writer and salonnière Hester Thrale gave birth, after three days of agonizing labor, to the first of her children, her attending physician pronounced, “It is a Lady, Madam; destined to bear what you are this Moment freed from.” Thrale…

Ever since I was a child, I have been drawn to dance because it expresses emotions and bodily impulses without words. Once, when I was a young dancer, standing in the wings and nervous that my mind was blank, a senior colleague told me not to worry. “It’s when the words come that you’re finished,” she said. “They destroy everything.” Words are now my trade, but I still harbor a dancer’s suspicion of them, and this is perhaps one reason that I have been reluctant to embrace the recent trend toward dances that tell stories or make statements. I appreciate classics like “Swan Lake,” pure dance stitched into a story with pantomime and gesture, but I experience them as music and dance; to this day I can’t quite remember the…