Innholdsfortegnelse for June 10, 2024 i The New Yorker

In November, 2020, Lauren McLane, a professor at the University of Wyoming College of Law, was forwarded a letter from Christopher Hicks, an incarcerated man who’d been sentenced to life without parole for his role in a murder. The letter was part of a petition, prepared by Hicks, laying out “all the pertinent information, charges and reasons” that he deserved consideration for a pardon. The murder, he wrote, had been carried out fifteen years earlier by another man, who entered the victim’s house while Hicks remained in the back seat of a car, intoxicated. Noting that he was a teen-ager at the time, Hicks claimed that he’d been pressured into participating in the crime by a third, older man, who lived in the trailer where Hicks had been residing. McLane…

It’s going to be a lunar eclipse. It’s going to be critically acclaimed and winnone of the awards. It’s going to start as an argumentover what’s buried inside the tombbut end in silenceover what’s discoveredbeneath it. It’s going to happen on your birthdayin front of the mailman,while you’re receiving the letter for your sistersent by her murderer. It’s going to appear once a weekin your back yardfor decadeswithout ever speaking. It’s going to ruin the cakewhen you throw an urn full of cat ashesin your ex-best friend’s faceat her baby shower.Do it. It’s going to make you get underthe tableand drink there. It’s going to exploderight therein the dairy aisle. It’s going to make you laugh. It’s going to remind youwhy you can’t go in mosh pits anymore. It’s going…

A WIDER VIEW I was disappointed by Nina Berman’s photo portfolio, which appeared with text by Jelani Cobb, of protests at Columbia University (“A Campus in Crisis,” May 13th). For many years, I refrained from subscribing to The New Yorker despite the many excellent pieces forwarded to me by friends; living in the Midwest, I thought that I would find it too narrow. Since subscribing, more than a decade ago, I have been pleasantly surprised to learn that I was wrong. Of course, some sections are, by definition and design, New York-centric. But most of the long-form articles, fiction, and reviews have a broad reach, and I find my-self reading every word. It’s against this backdrop that my disappointment emerged. I sympathize with the concerns of the protesters and am…

In January, the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton gave a lecture to Are We Doomed?, a course at the University of Chicago. He spoke via Zoom about whether artificial intelligence poses an existential threat. He was cheerful and expansive and apparently certain that everything was going to go terribly wrong, and soon. “I timed my life perfectly,” Hinton, who is seventy-six, told the class. “I was born just after the end of the Second World War. I was a teenager before there was AIDS. And now I’m going to die before the end.” Most of the several dozen students had not been alive for even a day of the twentieth century; they laughed. In advance of Hinton’s talk, they had read about how A.I. could simplify the engineering of synthetic bioweapons…

There was a protest outside Thomas Jeffersonand children were lying down histrionically,pretending the blast had killed them,or radiation, or nuclear darkness, closing their eyesno doubt to better picture it, and I took my placeamong them gingerly: let that searing asphaltruin my jeans, not scorch my wrist— but my father looked down from his office towerand said, “That’s my son, there,in the ranks of the dead”—when the police cameand began swinging clubs, giving free reinto their prancing horses, my father’s eyes narrowed and he said, “It’s over, some are running,some willing themselves to be even more dead,some hiding in each other’s arms”—gas cannistersflew and my father said, “That was long ago,that war never came, when he opened his eyesmy son found himself in his lover’s arms”— “All around him the city…

In mid-nineteenth-century London, which had a population upward of two million people, the journalist and social researcher Henry Mayhew set out to survey the lives of the working and nonworking poor. One of the now obsolete categories of labor he investigated was that of the cats’-meat men: sellers of boiled horseflesh, who purchased their stinking wares from knackers’ yards, then wheeled it in barrows along appointed routes each day, selling it to the public as cat food at two and a half pence per pound. By Mayhew’s reckoning, there were a thousand such venders in the capital, serving the needs of a feline population of three hundred thousand: roughly one cat per dwelling house. Cats had a liminal status, perceived by the humans they lived alongside as being somewhere between…

The Playbook, by James Shapiro (Penguin Press). This perceptive history, by a Shakespeare scholar, centers on the Federal Theatre, a short-lived New Deal-era relief program that staged more than a thousand plays and employed more than twelve thousand artists before it was disbanded for allegedly disseminating “Communist propaganda.” Under the stewardship of Hallie Flanagan, a Vassar professor, the theatre produced plays that combined social commentary with documentary realism; its critically acclaimed shows included a voodoo-inflected “Macbeth” set in nineteenth-century Haiti. The theatre ultimately lost its funding after it was targeted by Martin Dies, the director of the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose tactics, Shapiro wryly notes, are still employed by culture warriors seeking to defund or censor the arts. I Cannot Control Everything Forever, by Emily C. Bloom (St. Martin’s). This remarkable…

JUNE 5 – 11, 2024 What we’re watching, listening More than two hundred photographs by Vivian Maier, whose work was discovered in some Chicago storage lockers in 2007, appear in Fotografiska’s “Vivian Maier: Unseen Work” (through Sept. 29). Innocence is nowhere to be seen in them, possibly because it doesn’t exist. Children look world-weary even when they’re horsing around. When adults show up, even their leisure looks laborious. Like all the best street photographers, Maier had a fine eye for bathos: a doll in a trash can, an old lady selling pretzels near a sign for a beauty school, a marquee for a Bing Crosby movie shining down on what looks like a corpse. Her finest images may be her self-portraits: she finds her frank, sharp, “Whistler’s Mother” face in…

Before the announcement of the verdict in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, on Thursday afternoon, the scene outside the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse had tended toward the mood of a small, fervent MAGA rally: a sideshow of eager players strutting and fretting in aggressively branded Trumpwear. American-flag clothing (dresses, sneakers) abounded, as did clothing that swore at you (“fuck joe biden and fuck you for voting for him”) and signs insulting the prosecutors bringing the case (a drawing of the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, styled like the “Fat Albert” cartoon, with the caption “Fat Alvin and the Commie Kids”). Some fervor was impassioned—a beefy guy in an anti-Biden shirt screaming to cops that a slight, calm guy in a Met Museum shirt had hit him—and some just seemed performative, like the…

One morning this spring, Alicia Bárcena, Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs, stood at the edge of the Rio Grande, ready to board an airboat manned by U.S. Border Patrol agents. Settling into the front row, Bárcena put on protective glasses as the blades behind her started to whir. The current seemed mild—the water rushing below was barely audible—but agents said that this was the stretch of river where the most migrants had drowned. Earlier this year, the bodies of a Mexican woman and her two young children were recovered there, after they attempted to cross by night. Bárcena took office last July, with a mandate from Mexico’s President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to oversee immigration matters. She was at the border to assert her country’s presence in a series of…

Jock Sutherland’s childhood home, on Oahu’s North Shore, was a picturesque ruin when he brought me there. It was built after the attack on Pearl Harbor: a wooden barracks at the water’s edge, part of the military’s frantic preparations for a second attack. The building had a soft V shape, as if embracing the ocean, with a line of louvred windows opening onto a basic deck. Waves pounded the rocky point below. Sutherland’s mother, Audrey, bought the house in 1961, for fifteen thousand dollars, and lived there for nearly sixty years. I thought the place looked salvageable, but Sutherland said no. “Dry rot. Rust. The walls are racked. It’s a teardown.” He sounded so unsentimental. “Anyway, look at the neighborhood.” He gave me an eyebrow signal that I had to…

RUTH Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on. They were going to die. It was now several years since Lotte had died in an assisted-living facility. Then, when Covid worried their children, Ruth had undertaken to Zoom ladies’ lunch. She suggested that anyone who had something to say should show a hand. Farah put up her hand. She said, “I don’t find it difficult to think about…, ” then paused in surprise at not being able to say “dying,” “about choosing not to live if I’m going blind.” Bessie, Zooming from…

There are more than thirty full-length biographies of Sigmund Freud in circulation today. Why keep writing them? Generally, there are two justifications for a new biography: an obscure archive may come to light, changing what is known about the subject, or it can become clear that earlier biographers have misunderstood—or even abused—existing sources. In the absence of a discovery or a scandal, what hangs in the balance for the second or third or thirtieth biographer must be a significant reinterpretation of the subject’s ideas—where they came from, what they mean, and how they have been transmitted to us from increasingly alien times and places. With Freud, the possibilities for interpreting his life are limitless, as he well knew. In an 1885 letter to his wife, Martha, written when he was…

Fair warning: after you leave the Guggenheim’s summer blockbuster, “Jenny Holzer: Light Line,” words will misbehave. Basic signage may seem newly cryptic, ad slogans slacker. Pleasantries of the “What’s up with you?” variety may leave an unpleasant taste in your mouth. The verbal machinery that ordinarily moves things forward will grind and screech until you remember how to tune out the noise. The part of the show which will pry open your senses is called “Installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.” It is made of phrases, enough of them that it takes the words several hours to crawl up an L.E.D. spiral lining the museum’s interior. Many of the phrases (“You have a sick one on your hands when your affection is used to punish you”) are wacky. Some…