Innholdsfortegnelse for June 22, 2020 i The New Yorker

On TV, on the radio, they never called it genocide. As if that word were reserved. Too serious. Too serious for Africa. Yes, there were massacres, but there were always massacres in Africa. And these massacres were happening in a country that no one had ever heard of. A country that no one could find on a map. Tribal hatred, primitive, atavistic hatred: nothing to understand there. “Weird stuff goes on where you come from,” people would tell her. She herself didn’t know the word, but in Kinyarwanda there was a very old term for what was happening in her homeland: gutsembatsemba, a verb, used when talking about parasites or mad dogs, things that had to be eradicated, and about Tutsis, also known as inyenzi—cockroaches—something else to be wiped out.…

LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA Ben Taub’s account of Victor Vescovo’s extraordinary mission to reach the five deeps of the world’s oceans left me in awe (“Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” May 18th). I became concerned, however, about the implications that it may have for the future of private exploration. As one member of Vescovo’s motley crew puts it, the group’s accomplishment is akin to a “daily flight to the moon.” But a key difference is that the quest to put a man on the moon was not only a collective enterprise in spirit; it was also overseen by a national government. Though Vescovo’s willingness to collaborate with scientists is admirable, he admits that someone with a private submarine like his could become a “Bond villain,” capable of disrupting markets for profit…

DeMarco Raynor, who is incarcerated at Cummins Unit, a penitentiary in southeast Arkansas, had been approved for its most prestigious job: working at the governor’s mansion. Prison labor at the mansion is a “longstanding tradition, which kept down costs,” Hillary Clinton wrote, in a memoir. (She noted that “onetime murderers” proved to be the best employees.) Raynor saw the position, which was unpaid, as a chance to meet people with the power to grant him clemency. But, shortly before he was to begin, an officer said that he had violated prison rules by wearing slippers that he had made himself. The job was revoked. Raynor believed that the officer had intentionally thwarted his opportunity. “I still maintain my manhood, and he felt like that was too much,” Raynor said. Another…

You can be a bother who dyeshis hair Dennis Rodman bluein the face of the man kneeling in bluein the face the music of his wristwatch your mouth is little morethan a door being knockedout of the ring of fire aroundthe afternoon came evening’s bellof the ball and chain around the neckof the unarmed brother ground downto gunpowder dirt can be inhaledlike a puff the magic bullet pointof transformation both kills and firesthe life of the party like it’s 1999 bottlesof beer on the wall street peoplewho sleep in the streets do not sleepwithout counting yourself luckyrabbit’s foot of the mountainlion do not sleep withoutmaking your bed of the riverboat gambling there will beno stormy weather on the waterbored to death any means of killingtime is on your side of…

Have we come, at last, to the end of morally instructive Nazis? After eight decades, Nazis may seem to have retreated into a class with orcs and cable-TV sharks, fantastic creatures representing evil, rather than historical figures who actually were evil. It is fine to say we should look past the History Channel Nazis—“Hitler and the Occult”—to the real thing, but there comes a time when the iconic imagination really does overwhelm the historical imagination. No one any longer objects to jokes about the Spanish Inquisition, which burned skeptics and Jews alive, but which exists now first of all as a Monty Python sketch (“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”), while Henry VIII and the Tudors, who burned men, too, and brutalized thousands, are a soap opera before they are a…

In 1943, eighteen-year-old Mary Flannery O’Connor went north on a summer trip. Growing up in Georgia—she spent her childhood in Savannah, and went to high school in Milledgeville—she saw herself as a writer and artist in the making. She created illustrated books “too old for children and too young for grown-ups” and dryly titled an assemblage of her poems “The Priceless Works of M. F. O’Connor”; she drew cartoons and submitted them to magazines, noting that her hobby was “collecting rejection slips.” On her travels, she and two cousins visited Manhattan: Chinatown, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Columbia University. Then they went to Massachusetts, and visited Radcliffe, where one cousin was a student. O’Connor disliked both schools, and said so in letters and postcards to her mother. (Her father had…

In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, New York City museums, galleries, theatres, music venues, and cinemas have closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found online and streaming. JUNE 17 – 23, 2020 In 1990, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, one of America’s most important and emotionally eloquent contemporary artists—who died of AIDS-related causes, in 1996, at the age of thirty-eight—made a simple but radical piece: a pile of fortune cookies, free for the taking, which was replenished when it was depleted. This meditation on the sweetness of life and the inevitability of loss is being re-created by some thousand people worldwide through July 5; images are online at the Web sites of the Andrea Rosen and David Zwirner galleries. MUSIC Ambrose Akinmusire: “on the tender spot” JAZZ…

On June 1st, a week after the killing of George Floyd sparked a national uprising that touched every state, convulsed major cities, activated the National Guard, and sent President Donald Trump into a secure bunker underneath the White House, Terrence Floyd, George’s younger brother, visited the intersection in South Minneapolis where his sibling had died. During the previous seven days, Thirty-eighth Street and Chicago Avenue had become the site of an uninterrupted public vigil, designated by signs and banners as “sacred ground.” Barricades around the four surrounding blocks impeded traffic and law enforcement. The sidewalk outside the Cup Foods grocery store—where an employee had called the police after suspecting George Floyd of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill—was buried under bouquets, mementos, and homemade cards. Activists delivered speeches between the gas…

A new grad student far away from home,I took every step on trembling ground.I knew no one. Who were my friends?The other black student in the programducked and rushed away when our eyes met.Seminar rooms were full of hungry dogssnapping up scraps of nodding approval.At the end of a campus receptionI accepted the offer of a ridefrom campus to my downtown room-with-bath. October. Evenings were getting cool.The walk over the bridge downtownfelt dangerously long when it was dark.Did the young man who offered me a ridetell me his name? What was it about himthat made me say Yes thanks, like a damn fool?When we were in his car and he said oops,he had forgotten something at his placehe had to pick up, and asked if I’d mindif we stopped there,…

In 1954, a pair of identical twins—creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair—flee a small town in Louisiana and the narrow future it affords: nothing but more of the same. Desiree and Stella Vignes are sixteen and headed to New Orleans. They scrape by for a while, and eventually Stella applies for a position as a secretary at a fancy department store, a job only white girls get. She doesn’t mention she’s black, and no one asks. She’s apprehensive—has she done something wrong?—but her sister is adamant: why should the two of them starve “when Stella, perfectly capable of typing, became unfit as soon as anyone learned that she was colored?” Stella gets the job. Every morning, on the ride to the office, she transforms into her double, Miss Vignes—“White Stella,”…

Lincoln on the Verge, by Ted Widmer (Simon & Schuster). In February, 1861, crowds in eight states greeted the train carrying Abraham Lincoln, as President-elect, from Springfield, Illinois, to the nation’s deeply divided capital. In an account of some hundred speeches and countless handshakes that occurred along the way, Widmer, a former White House speechwriter, traces Lincoln’s rapid growth as a statesman. The train draws “wild multitudes” both in towns “awakened” to the antislavery cause and in those whose allegiance is uncertain, and Lincoln is shown ably working the press to rally support. Widmer portrays a politician who has a populist touch but exercises this power responsibly, achieving what Frederick Douglass later called “wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them.” The Shapeless Unease,…

In recent weeks, the vinyl surface known as marley, which covers the floor of many dance studios and stages, has been cut into pieces and shipped around the world to professional dancers exiled to their homes. I have been watching some of these dancers, standing on these outposts of abandoned theatres, in their kitchens and living rooms, as they take their daily ballet class on Zoom, Instagram, YouTube. They are doing it for one another and for themselves: class preserves the body, but above all it tames the mind. It is logical, rigorous; there are rules to be followed, tasks to perform, ideals to achieve. It breaks things down, ordering the limbs in repetitive exercises that every dancer knows by heart, like a daily prayer. Ordinarily, dancers begin class…