Innholdsfortegnelse for August 26, 2024 i The New Yorker

Jessie Stone likes to call herself a medical doctor with a kayaking problem. For much of the year, she runs a clinic in Uganda that provides primary care as well as malaria education. The clinic sits next to the Nile, near its headwaters. “Lucky for me!” she said recently, though the more she elaborated, the less luck seemed to play a part. Stone, who is fifty-six, is a six-time member of the U.S. women’s freestyle-kayaking team. In 2003, she was descending the Nile with some other pros when their expedition leader, the occasional world champion Eric Jackson, fell ill with malaria. They were in Uganda at the time. While treating Jackson, Stone grew curious about the local population’s familiarity with how the disease spreads. She founded Soft Power Health, a…

In the mid-fifteen-hundreds, a Swedish peasant named Nils lived on an island called Iggön in the Baltic Sea. He was known to his neighbors as Rich Nils, apparently because of the plenitude of fish in the waters near his home and, even more lucrative, the seals that showed up to hunt them. There was one rock in particular where seals liked to haul themselves out of the ocean to rest and bask in the sun. Nils, for his part, liked to visit this rock with his harpoon. Eventually, though, Nils noticed that the seals had begun gathering on a lower part of the rock, rather than on the high point, as they once did. It seemed that the water level no longer gave them access to the very top. This…

Everyone hopes for a miracle. And in Kenya—where evangelical Christianity is so popular that the President frequently prays with preachers during official events—the more miracles a pastor performs, the more followers he will gain. Some swiftly build large congregations and become multimillionaires. In 2018, Halua Yaa, a woman in the coastal town of Malindi, heard about a pastor named Paul Mackenzie, who, it was said, could heal the sick. Yaa’s eight-year-old granddaughter, Bright Angel, had mysterious symptoms: she had severe stomach pains and often threw up after eating. “She looked like she was going to die,” Yaa told me recently. Doctors gave her medicine and an I.V. drip, but nothing helped. “I went to the hospital for almost a year and a half, and there were no changes,” Yaa said.…

“Hum,” Helen Phillips’s third novel, begins with a needle being drawn, steadily and irreversibly, across a woman named May’s face. She is participating in a paid experiment in “adversarial tech,” undergoing a procedure that will ever so slightly alter her features, making her harder for surveillance cameras to identify. As the book opens, May is mid-op, the needle advancing its “slender and relentless line of penetration” across her temple, toward the skin of her eyelid. What lies on the other side of the surgery? “Some sort of transformation, undeniable but undetectable,” Phillips writes. “Faint shifts in shading … her features wavering a bit between familiarity and unfamiliarity, the way she might look in a picture taken from a strange angle.” The novel takes place in a dystopian world that is…

THE SHOW GOES ON Nick Paumgarten’s critique of Dead & Company’s residency at the Sphere, in Las Vegas, is an amusing account of his reckoning with nostalgia for the Grateful Dead, but it’s a missed opportunity to consider this new iteration of the band on its own terms (“Dead Reckoning,” July 29th). Having attended nine of Dead & Co.’s Sphere shows (and about fifteen of their shows before that), I would argue that their approach to both the music and the visual elements of their live performances is a rich and ecstatic continuation of the ever-evolving, improvisatory philosophy that guided the original troupe. Paumgarten seems unwilling to part with his own rigid notions about the aesthetics that surround the music—the new band members’ style, the crowd, the theatrics of the…

I saw M.’s sex for the first time on the night of January 22, 2003, in the entryway of my house, at the foot of the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. There is something extraordinary about the first sight of the other’s sex, the unveiling of what was hitherto unknown. So that is what we’re going to live with, live our love with. Or not. We’d had dinner together in a restaurant he knew well on Rue Servandoni, near the Jardin du Luxembourg. He had just left the woman he’d been living with for several months. During the meal, I said, “I’d like to take you to Venice,” and immediately added, “but I can’t at the moment because I’ve got breast cancer, and I’m having an operation next week…

Colton Brown, who lived with his father and stepmother in a single-story house outside Seattle, earned about fifty thousand dollars a year as an assistant electrician—but his real passion was fascism. In recordings of his private conversations, he argued that an “international cabal” of “hook-nosed bankers” was conspiring to replace white Americans like him with people of non-European descent, and he expressed alarm that the U.S. population would soon be less than half “ethnic American.” This so-called “great replacement” may have felt personal: his stepmother was Vietnamese. Brown, who has blue eyes and short, wavy blond hair, wore clothing with Nazi iconography, believed that white people deserved their own ethnostate, and told his dad that other races could “go to hell.” In 2021, when Brown was twenty-two, he became a…

Mrs. Narayan was small, dark-skinned, oval-faced. She had a wonderful singsong voice. She’d come up to you at temple on Holi or Diwali and offer congratulations so heartfelt you’d feel as if it were the first time the day had ever been celebrated. We all liked her. She was an immigrant, too, but she didn’t seem to have jangled nerves the way we did. She cooked for many of us and regularly tried to refuse payment. “This is from my side,” she’d say. “A horse can’t be friends with grass,” we might answer. Mr. Narayan we didn’t like. He was short and squat. He spoke roughly to his wife. He owned a television-repair shop and described himself as an engineer, even though he hadn’t finished high school. Our kids would…

THE THEATRE Double Acts, Stars Galore Broadway sheds its summer lassitude with a season of starry double acts: Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow cohabitate in Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate” (Booth; starting previews Aug. 29); Ayad Akhtar’s “McNeal” stars Robert Downey, Jr., and his “metahuman digital likeness” (Vivian Beaumont; Sept. 5); Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher swoon in Delia Ephron’s romance “Left on Tenth” (James Earl Jones; Sept. 26); Helen J. Shen and Darren Criss play lovestruck robots in the musical “Maybe Happy Ending” (Belasco; Oct. 16); and, in David Henry Hwang’s Obiewinning “Yellow Face” (Todd Haimes; Sept. 13), Daniel Dae Kim stars as the playwright’s own conflicted doppelgänger. London sends Broadway its most emotional fare with “The Hills of California,” Jez Butterworth’s seventies family drama (Broadhurst; Sept. 11); Jamie Lloyd’s…

Other people were always talking in the cafés,the girls were young, the women were old,the men were always just men.Turenne to Bretagne, Bretagne to Charlot,it’s good to walk slowly,to feel what’s under your feet,it’s good to breathe the heavysooted air,to pass the men smoking in front of Le Progrès,the dogs having their walks, les enfants.On Rue Debelleyme the paintings hang jade and cyan,an azure shining so alive it startles,and the pigeons are lulling, a seduction …careful what you’re gonna do.Must I be abstemious. Must I be pure.A woman enters summer leaving behind a past,its fizzled magic. Salut says the sky.The days go on and on, a diminishing blissseeping out of the horizon,down by the river people are dancing,a kind of sex in the open air,and the birds have something to…

The T’ang Chinese did it best, a poet’s soloin progressions gathered from wilderness,while he stood beside the long, vertical scroll of a cataracthung by a natural god,its script the Heraclitean flow of the Way.Or sitting on mats at tea with a friend and fellow bureaucratposted on borderlands far from the capital of their educations,the two of them engaged in brisk repartee,citing amiably from “The Book of Songs,”their light banter a fellowship of otium,the lyric axis of contemplation,while the world persists awhirl in famine, regional war,or harvests of plenty. What they took from one another, gazing at the festival moonas it rose over crags of mountains,the slithers and fountains of riverssurrounding their hut, ten-foot square,was a joyous loyalty to reflection,a stilling of the mind that invites the soft thoughtsof an unknotted…

Hitler’s People, by Richard J. Evans (Penguin Press). Through a series of biographical essays on prominent Nazis—including Hitler, Adolf Eichmann, and Leni Riefenstahl—this book explores how members of the initially small but violently fanatical National Socialist movement came to dominate German politics and carry out unprecedented atrocities. Evans, a noted historian of modern Germany, complicates earlier portrayals of these figures as either bloodthirsty psychopaths or the inevitable product of historical forces. Instead, he foregrounds the ways that their individual psychologies and sociocultural backgrounds primed them to make self-interested and ideologically motivated decisions that ultimately resulted in the horrors of the Second World War. The Salt of the Universe, by Amy Leach (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This volume of comic essays recounts Leach’s upbringing in the Seventh-day Adventist Church and her…