Innholdsfortegnelse for March 4, 2024 i The New Yorker

Before a recent performance of “Blind Injustice” at the Alexander Kasser Theatre, at Montclair State University, in suburban New Jersey, a wispy horizontal cloud drifted across the stage. You almost might not have noticed it as you took your seat for the Sunday matinée. If you did, you would have had to stare at it for a while to see that it was moving almost imperceptibly from right to left. Why would there be a cloud in a ninety-minute opera about people wrongly convicted in the state of Ohio who were later freed through the efforts of Mark Godsey, a professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, and the organization he co-founded, the Ohio Innocence Project? Once the performance started, the cloud, which you soon forgot about, and…

Grasshoppers devour the sunflowersPetal by petal to raggedy yellow flags—Squash blossoms of small suns blessedBy dewdrops flare beauty in the morningUntil an army of squash bugs landAnd eat, then drag their belliesFrom the carnage—Field mice chew their wayInto the house. They eat anythingSweet and leave their pebbled shitIn staggered lines to the closet door.Hungry tree frogs cling to the screen.Their curled tongues catch anythingWith wings driven to the light—We find a snake hidden on the porch,There are rumors in the yardOf fat mice frolicking here.The night is swallowingDaylight. We sit down to eat.…

I’m terrible at parties, secrets, and money. I want my stars sexy: fast lightthat’s prophetic. No nonsense about physics, refraction, past light. Even in Barcelona, I can’t turn a bike. I let you change my mind: free willand wet hair. One night, I let you pour white wine. I drink its aghast light. Happy now? We’re both like this—full of risk and nowhere to put it.We sidle up to strangers with dry cigarettes and ask, Light? I want small churches and noisy continents. I want you. I want you better.I want you moved by what moves me: God, glass, light. You like the line about men bored with beautiful women, as thoughboredom’s the prize, as though those peonies weren’t a gaslight. It’s O.K. I play dumb. I count codes under…

Throughout her life, the novelist Carson McCullers struck observers as preternaturally young. The biographer Leon Edel, who met her when she was thirty-seven, remarked on her “childish wonder.” The French novelist Françoise Sagan wrote that she had the “laugh of a child forever lost.” Like a child, she loved sweets, Christmas, and receiving presents on her birthday. Though she was tall—a “slender wand of a girl,” in the words of her protégé turned rival, Truman Capote—she was often described as “little”: “an odd little 22-year-old,” a “little star.” If seemingly everyone agreed that McCullers was a child, they indulged her because she was a genius. The author of four novels, one novella, two plays, and sundry short stories and poems, McCullers ascended to literary fame when she was only…

INTO THE LIGHT D. T. Max’s account of Beatriz Flamini’s experience of living alone in a cave for five hundred days was fascinating (“Cave Woman,” January 29th). Near the end of the story, however, Max wonders if Flamini’s accomplishment “might provide information on, say, whether survival on the dark side of the moon is possible.” Pink Floyd not-withstanding, there is no “dark side” of the moon. Being gravitationally locked to the Earth, the moon always presents the same near-side face to us. This means that someone on the moon’s far side would never see our planet in their sky. But, since the moon orbits the Earth approximately monthly, nearly the entire surface is gradually exposed to the sun. Observers on both near and far sides would experience a day and…

In February of last year, Donggang Jinhui Foodstuff, a seafood-processing company in Dandong, China, threw a party. It had been a successful year: a new plant had opened, and the company had doubled the amount of squid that it exported to the United States. The party, according to videos posted on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, featured singers, instrumentalists, dancers, fireworks, and strobe lights. One aspect of the company’s success seems to have been its use of North Korean workers, who are sent by their government to work in Chinese factories, in conditions of captivity, to earn money for the state. A seafood trader who does business with Jinhui recently estimated that it employed between fifty and seventy North Koreans. Videos posted by a company representative show machines labelled…

It is almost two hundred years since the death of Lord Byron. He succumbed to a fever on April 19, 1824, in the town of Missolonghi, on the west coast of Greece, at the age of thirty-six. As was far from unusual at the time, medical professionals did much to hasten the end that they were supposed to prevent. In Byron’s words, “There are many more die of the lancet than the lance.” Leeches, enemas, and blistering—the deliberate raising of blisters on the skin—were part of the treatment. Byron was reluctant to be bled by his physicians, whom he slighted as “a damned set of butchers,” but eventually surrendered to their efforts. One modern expert has estimated that, in his final days, they drained at least two and a half…

“Shōgun” is the kind of Hollywood product that assumes a defensive crouch from the outset. The FX series—a ten-part adaptation of James Clavell’s best-selling 1975 doorstopper, which centers on an English sailor who lands in seventeenth-century Japan and rises through its samurai ranks—was announced six years ago with reassurances from John Landgraf, the network’s chairman, that this version would be au courant with modern sensibilities. “It’s not an easy thing to get right,” Landgraf admitted, adding that the show’s creative team would consult experts in “feudal Japanese culture” and feature a cast of “almost entirely Japanese actors.” (A previous miniseries, from 1980, hadn’t bothered to subtitle the Japanese dialogue: producers felt that if the British protagonist, John Blackthorne, couldn’t comprehend what was being said then neither should American audiences.) These…

FEBRUARY 28 – MARCH 5, 2024 Around a decade ago, the PigPen Theatre Co., a seven-man theatrical collective and band, made a stir with its banjo-forward, Mumford & Sons-esque music, breaking through with lo-fi shows such as “The Old Man and the Old Moon,” a sweet folktale from 2012 told with lamplight and shadow puppets. Now the company is back, composing songs for the much brighter lights of Broadway, joining the book writer Rick Elice to adapt Sara Gruen’s Depression-era romance, “Water for Elephants,” from 2006, in which a veterinarian runs away and joins the circus. Shana Carroll, of the Montreal acrobatic troupe Les 7 Doigts de la Main, designs the show’s circus choreography, which guarantees a certain lighter-than-air quality; Grant Gustin, of “The Flash,” plays the sawdust-struck newcomer, and…

In 1928, a forty-one-year-old woman named Adeline Ovitt, née Rivers, drowned in the Schroon River, in upstate New York. The circumstances of her death are largely unknown, but she left behind a husband and five children, including a ten-year-old son named LeRoy, who later had six children of his own, including a daughter named Anita. Anita eventually settled down with Robert Hoover, a pipe fitter for General Electric, in the town of Knox, about forty minutes west of Albany. In 1978, Anita and Robert had their first child together, a daughter named Elizabeth. Two more daughters would follow. Elizabeth Hoover, who is now forty-five years old, describes her childhood as “broke”—her father worked odd construction jobs and was periodically unemployed—but idyllic. “I spent most of my time running around outside,”…

Ken Tegnell’s first home was on Alcatraz. At the time—this was in the nineteen-fifties—there was, in addition to the federal penitentiary, a preschool, a post office, and housing for prison employees and their family members. That included Tegnell, who lived with his mother and grandfather, a guard, while his father was stationed in Korea. The whole of Alcatraz Island is less than a tenth of a square mile, so, despite all the security measures and “DO NOT ENTER” signs, the inmates and civilians were never very far apart. Yet even given the proximity to the likes of Whitey Bulger, it was a peaceful place to live. The view was spectacular, almost none of the non-incarcerated residents locked their doors, and almost all of them knew one another and shared the…

Kevin didn’t have a rain jacket and for that reason he wasn’t wearing one. A pair of “Bananas in Pyjamas” pajama bottoms bunched over the shafts of his rain boots. From his left shoulder, a flat laptop bag dangled. It had been consigned to his school’s lost-property box and had remained there more than four months before he’d claimed it for himself. Now it flapped rhythmically against his hip. It contained next to nothing, but he felt that it lent him a professional air. It was a Tuesday, early evening, and Kevin was the only person out. Darkness had descended upon him since he’d left home. Drizzle beaded his face. He’d told his father that he was going out to get some fresh air. He wasn’t actually sure that his…

Bitter Crop, by Paul Alexander (Knopf). This ambitious biography of the jazz singer Billie Holiday uses 1959, the tumultuous final year of her life, as a prism through which to view her career. Drawing its title from “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching that was Holiday’s best-selling recording, the book focusses on her experiences of racism and exploitation, and on her anxiety about government surveillance. In tracing Holiday’s longtime drug and alcohol use, which damaged her health and led to her spending nearly a year in prison for narcotics possession, Alexander also delves into the unwarranted sensationalism with which the press often covered these matters at the time. Holiday died at forty-four. Toward the end, she was frail—at one point weighing only ninety-nine pounds—but, as one concertgoer noted, “She still had…

Theatre is a mirror, but for what? We quote “Hamlet,” saying that performance should hold a “mirror up to nature”; in an interview, the play-wright Dominique Morisseau cited Nina Simone, who said that an artist’s duty is “to reflect the times.” Nature, right; the times, of course—the theatre should reflect those things. But a play might also be positioned to show us the person who wrote it. In “Sunset Baby,” now at the Off Broadway Pershing Square Signature Center, Morisseau, best known for her play cycle, “The Detroit Project,” invites us to look at the fraught final encounters between a woman and her activist father. When Nina (Moses Ingram) was five years old, her dad, the Black Power revolutionary Kenyatta (Russell Hornsby), went to prison for an attempted armored-truck…