Innholdsfortegnelse for September 27, 2021 i The New Yorker

László Jakab Orsós lives in Brooklyn Heights, where busy men on bicycles will deliver just about anything: Thai food, craft cocktails, firewood, cocaine, deli sandwiches. Orsós, a cultural curator at the Brooklyn Public Library, recently took on some part-time work as a delivery guy, dispatching poetry and political speeches throughout Brooklyn. “We’re sneaking into people’s minds!” he said the other day, as an Emily Dickinson poem blared from a Bluetooth speaker mounted on his bicycle. “My heart sings!” Orsós, who is fifty-seven, grew up in Gellénháza, a model village in western Hungary, which was developed by an oil company. He first visited New York in his twenties, to learn English while painting apartments in the East Village: “My stepbrothers were here studying history and philosophy, driving cabs, and I was…

One morning in March, 2020, Diana Berrent, a photographer and a mother of two from Long Island, woke up with a fever. She had chills, diarrhea, and a heaviness in her chest, and grew concerned. Her daughter was hosting a sleepover; Berrent made her way to the basement and asked the other girls to leave. Then she went into isolation for eighteen days. Berrent had followed the news of the coronavirus from Wuhan to Lombardy and Tehran. But, she told me recently, “in suburbia, no one expects to be the first person on their block to get the plague.” She tried to get tested, but testing was limited mostly to people who’d been hospitalized. She eventually received a COVID-19 diagnosis, after an acquaintance connected her to a local congressman who…

know myself Isay to myself so Icannot be led astray. Ledastray I say Iknow myself morefully now so I cannot be madeto do some-thing I asan other wld neverdo. But Idid it. Didn’t Ido it. It wasn’t me to do sucha thing or believesuch a thing Itell myself as I look carefully intothe only mirror Iam given—myself in there—me looking carefully &hard. I am honest inmy looking Ithink as I see someone else in there opening, will in theireyes wild like a sailin the wind, windrising now as I look in, be-wildered. The oldgentleness where isit. I put my hand to my face but ittouches glass. Whereis my body toguide me I think. I tap atthe prisoner inthere, is that theschoolroom, the blank in the lesson,is that my soulgradually by…

You don’t encounter the fiction of Joy Williams without experiencing a measure of bewilderment. Williams, one of the country’s best living writers of the short story, draws praise from titans such as George Saunders, Don DeLillo, and Lauren Groff, and many of her readers, having imprinted on her wayward phrasing and screwball characters, will follow her anywhere. But the route can be disorienting, like climbing an uneven staircase in a dream. Her tales offer a dark, provisional illumination, and they make the kind of sense that disperses upon waking. For years, Williams has worn sunglasses at all hours, as if to blacken her vision. The central subject of art, she has written, is “nothingness.” Williams is now seventy-nine. In her stories, and in her five novels, she opens cracks in…

WHO WAS LAFAYETTE? Adam Gopnik, in his essay about the legacy of the Marquis de Lafayette, points out that Americans rarely understand why Lafayette does not enjoy the exalted reputation in France that he does in America (Books, August 23rd). As Gopnik mentions, supporters of the French Revolution blamed Lafayette for not preventing the royal family’s flight from France, in June, 1791. He was responsible, as the commander of the Paris militia, for security at the palace. When the King’s disappearance became known, Lafayette colluded in saying that he had been kidnapped, an explanation that quickly fell apart when the King’s denunciation of the Revolution was published. Soon afterward, protesters gathered to rally behind a petition objecting to the restoration of the King to the throne, and the National Guard…

Among the portraits that hang in the National Gallery in London, few subjects look as amused, self-confident, and unassailable as Jacques Cazotte, the eighteenth-century French writer and public administrator. As painted by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Cazotte is wearing a powdered white wig befitting his social standing, but his posture is youthful, his eyes are gleaming, and his smile is irrepressible. His attire is strikingly showy: a plush jacket of rose-colored silk, with extravagantly flared sleeves ornamented with gold buttons, and a matching vest. White lace spills from his collar and cuffs, and a black silk band hangs from his neck. Next spring, the portrait is scheduled to be displayed across town, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, as part of an exhibition, “Fashioning Masculinities,” which will explore the role of menswear…

I’m forever living between Aprils.The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;it’s sunset before I know it. I’m supposedto rest, but that’s where the children live.In the hot mist of sleep. Dream after dream.Instead, I obsess. I draw stars on receipts.Everybody loves the poem.It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwaukee.It’s done nothing for Palestine.There are plants out West that emerge only after fires.They listen for smoke. I wrote the poemafter weeks of despair, hauling myselflike a rock. Everyone loves the poem.The plants are called fire-followers,but sometimes it’s after the rains. At night,I am a zombie feeding on the comments.Is it compulsive to watch videos?Is it compulsive to memorize names?Rafif and Ammar and Mahmoud.Poppies and snapdragons and calandrinias:I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you under the missiles.A plant waits for…

It is a bad day for Miles, a mild-mannered trucker. Not two minutes into the pilot of “Reservation Dogs,” on FX on Hulu, some boosters jack his delivery van, full of Flaming Flamers hot chips. He loses his job. His wife leaves him, taking all his money. As he recounts all this to the owner of a local catfish joint, he laments, “Only thing left in the house was a bag of sugar. Now you know what’s gonna happen. Diabetes.” Unknown to him, the culprits, our Reservation Dogs, are celebrating the caper at a table nearby. Bear, their leader, overhears Miles, and feels remorse. Into the booth he sinks. His guilt takes the shape of an apparition, a sinister-looking Miles, who hisses in his ear, “When I catch your ass,…

SEPTEMBER 22 – 28, 2021 When Charles M. Blow (left) was working on his memoir, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” he immersed himself in songs from his North Louisiana childhood—hill-country blues, gospel, folk—and they became, he says, “a soundtrack for the writing.” It wasn’t strange, then, to hear that Terence Blanchard set Blow’s story to music. “If you were interpreting that today, what would it sound like?” Blow says. “That is what Terence did.” The adaptation, starring Will Liverman (right), opens the Metropolitan Opera’s fall season, on Sept. 27. ART Ellsworth Ausby In 1972, this Afrofuturist abstract painter—who died in Brooklyn in 2011—wrote of his desire to “mirror the dynamo of our antecedent heritage despite the temerarious and presumptuous canons of the established art world.” Those poetic words introduce…

There are arguably few routes less glamorous than that which snakes westward from the Lincoln Tunnel to the New Jersey Turnpike and on to Newark. (Carbon-monoxide vibes!) Unless you’re a fan of “The Sopranos,” in which case that gray path takes on a mythic quality. “We should be playing the song,” the actor Alessandro Nivola said on a recent morning, as his car sped past the industrial chimneys of North Jersey, just as Tony Soprano’s does in the opening credits of the show. Nivola began to sing the first bars of the theme—a morning, a gun—unshowily but with conviction. Nivola, who is forty-nine, was wearing jeans and a gray button-down, and a heavy silver I.D. bracelet. Next month, he will star in the movie “The Many Saints of Newark,” a…

Just inside the Athletic Brewing Company’s headquarters, in Stratford, Connecticut, there is a long wooden bar with a selection of non-alcoholic craft beers on tap. When I visited the brewery and public taproom on a sunny afternoon in June, during our fleeting summer of freedom before the emergence of the Delta variant, I could smell the hops—the flowers that give beer its sour-sweet fruit flavor—while I was still outside. Behind the bar, Bill Shufelt, a thirty-eight-year-old former hedge-fund trader, who co-founded Athletic in 2017, drew me a pint of Two Trellises, one of the company’s seasonal N.A. brews—a hazy I.P.A. that he and the other co-founder, John Walker, Athletic’s forty-one-year-old head brewer, were test-batching. I had not raised a pint drawn from a keg since I quit drinking alcohol, exactly…

I’m not particularly interested in collecting things, but there is a kind of running motif in my life: despite my basic indifference, objects seem to collect around me. Stacks and stacks of LPs, so many I’ll never listen to them all; books I’ve already read and will probably never open again; a ragtag assemblage of magazine clippings; dinky little pencils, so worn down they don’t fit into a pencil sharpener anymore. All sorts of things just keep on piling up. T-shirts are one of those things which naturally pile up. They’re cheap, so whenever an interesting one catches my eye I buy it. People give me various novelty T-shirts from around the world, I get commemorative T-shirts whenever I run a marathon, and when I travel I often pick up…

“The three of you are sisters, surely?” A man, awash with drink, waylaid us as we fought through to the lounge. Our mother smiled, eyes fixed on an empty row of seats, while Bea and I stepped sideways to avoid the steam cloud of his breath. “Quick.” A couple were snaking their way toward our chairs and, lifting Max, Mum rushed to intercept them. The boat was cheaper than the plane, the night boat cheaper still, and it was possible, if you were fast, to find enough seats to allow you to lie down. The man, red-faced, lost his footing and, one arm flailing, caught Bea around the waist. “Fuck off,” she said, yanking herself free. “Remember, not a word about the move,” our mother said when we were settled,…

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, by Wole Soyinka (Pantheon). The Nobel Prize-winning playwright’s first novel in half a century is a riotous satire set in a thinly fictionalized Nigeria, where a “National Board of Happiness,” comprising the media, the government, and organized religion, distracts the public from rampant corruption by bestowing titles of rococo dubiousness (“People’s Steward,” “Yeomen of the Year”). A celebrated surgeon and his engineer friend uncover a black market for human body parts which implicates the highest rungs of society. With caustic wit, Soyinka’s carnivalesque depictions of venality ferret out hypocrisy from behind its elaborate guises and condemn crimes that challenge “the collective notion of soul.” Savage Tongues, by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi (Houghton Miffin Harcourt). In this cerebral novel, an Iranian…