Innholdsfortegnelse for October 14, 2024 i The New Yorker

My parents’ apartment had never looked better than on the day it was photographed to sell. As I walked through the rooms, the only thing that seemed out of place was the Statesman, which was the name of the wooden cube that my mother had selected from a catalogue to hold my father’s ashes. (He had been a writer, not a statesman, but somehow the name had stuck.) It wasn’t just that the Statesman looked incongruously modern amid the English antiques and Persian carpets; it was the four plastic bags of gray dust inside. Even though I knew they were proof that my father was gone, I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I just quickened my step I would find him in the next room. Growing up, I’d always…

My daughter was going on a trip to Europe that she’d been dreaming about for a year and planning for months, with the boyfriend she’d dumped and then got back together with a few weeks earlier. Lucas was already over there with two friends, and as we drove to the airport I had the feeling that her flying alone across the dark, empty ocean was practice for her real departure, to college, a month from now. There was the sound of us not speaking as I drove, then the stiff, formal quiet of me keeping out of Leah’s way as we parked and she hefted her backpack, twenty-eight pounds of teen-age clothing, and followed me into the Dulles terminal and up the stairs to the atrium, with its soaring cement…

Clean, by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Riverhead). This tense and devilishly well-paced thriller is narrated by Estela, the housemaid of a wealthy couple in Santiago, Chile. Estela’s duties include cleaning, cooking, and—most important—taking care of the couple’s daughter; the novel consists of her recollection, delivered in an interrogation room, of the events leading up to the daughter’s untimely death. With increasing agitation, Estela relates the family’s dark dramas and her own mounting feelings of detachment, creating an outsider’s portrait of bourgeois unravelling, deftly entwined with reflections on class and oppression. Scaffolding, by Lauren Elkin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Two linked story lines drive this loosely plotted but finely etched début novel, which centers on two women who lived in the same apartment at different…

WHAT’S GOOD As a scholar of philosophy, I sympathize with Manvir Singh’s unsettling acceptance of moral nihilism (“The Post-Moral Age,” September 16th). I experienced a similar reckoning nearly two decades ago. I now call it my anti-epiphany. Singh writes about how, despite his intellectual qualms, he ultimately made peace with a particular response to moral nihilism known as moral fictionalism, according to which we pretend as best we can that there really are objective moral truths, because it is eminently useful to do so. What that approach overlooks, however, is that a belief in objective morality also has considerable downsides. In a meta-ethical sense, it encourages hypocrisy, arrogance, and the adoption of intransigent positions that promote endless conflict. Fortunately, a number of ethicists have come to the conclusion that humans…

Maybe you’ve seen the shot, from 1971, of the photographer Gordon Matta-Clark and a few friends—including the composers Philip Glass and Dickie Landry, with a carving knife—arrayed around a fire pit, under the Brooklyn Bridge, with a whole pig roasting on a spit. This was art, as well as nourishment and, in retrospect, an apt representation of a more feral time. At looker’s left, in the photo, is a longhaired conceptual artist from the Bronx named Lee Jaffe, then twenty-three, a Lower East Side loft mate of Matta-Clark’s. Jaffe made a film of the stunt, called “Pig Roast.” Soon, Clark wrote Jaffe a letter suggesting that Jaffe, in a crowning gesture of artistic self-sacrifice, offer up his own body to be eaten in a restaurant. A couple of years later,…

The wind walks through the pine forest. Heavy seething; light breathing.In the middle of the island the Baltic is also sighing; deep in its forest you’re out on the open sea.The old woman loathed that sound in the trees, and she stiffened with sorrow at the rising wind:“You have to think of them—out there in the boats.”But she heard something else in the sighing—we both do, being kin.(We’re walking together now, though she’s been dead these thirty years.)The wind sighs yes and no, understanding and misunderstanding.The wind sighs three strong children, one consumptive and two gone.The gust that breathes life into some flames, blows others out.The conditions.The wind sighs: Save me, Lord, for the waters have compassed my soul.You walk on, listening, for a long time, finally reaching a point…

Even here I can’t stop arguing with myselfI have mouths to feed in my sleep—they jostle and hover for nights at a timeThey live in different countries and aren’t even from hereI pray for soft bridges and leeches at nightfall—I pray to God knows whatI make lavish announcements about reality here, about how good we have it thereI advocate for my waking selves like talking through a hole in a mirrorBut enough about meThere’s the man who lives downstairs, up hereRattling on about his lost receipt—of course it’s not really him but his essenceWhich becomes mine and it practically diffuses meThe look of him fumbling in the bushes of a street neither of us lives onEither of us could be either of us, our souls tasteless by grand design of…

The narrator of “Creation Lake” (Scribner), Rachel Kushner’s new novel, is the pseudonymous Sadie Smith, a thirty-four-year-old American who specializes in infiltrating tight-knit groups of rebels, radicals, and subversives. She has penetrated a criminal biker gang and attempted to entrap eco-anarchists committed to animal liberation. Her current mission has landed her in France, where she is tasked with surveilling an anarchist commune called Le Moulin, in the southwestern region of Guyenne. The Moulinards farm; they raise their children collectively; and, though the government cannot yet prove it, they are suspected of sabotaging local infrastructure in order to cripple—or at least hobble—the capitalist state. Six months before the novel’s action begins, five costly excavators that were being used to dig a “megabasin,” a huge, plasticlined reservoir intended to store water for…

Claire Devon, the protagonist of Missy Mazzoli’s seductively nightmarish opera “The Listeners,” is living contentedly as a suburban schoolteacher somewhere in the Southwest when she is beset by an inexplicable, inescapable sound. It is described as a “dull hum,” an “aggressive drone,” which renders daily existence intolerable. As she searches for the source of the noise, her life unravels by degrees. She develops an ill-defined, ill-fated attachment to one of her students, who also hears the hum. Her husband and her daughter move out; the school fires her. She falls in with a psychiatrist, Howard Bard, who presides over a cultish association of Listeners—people attuned to the hum. When one of them, a conspiracy theorist, fires a gun at a cell tower, the police spring into action and violence ensues.…

What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. The Brooklyn Museum was founded as a public library, the first free, circulating one that the borough ever had. This month, the museum, which now holds more than a hundred thousand art works, celebrates its bicentennial with “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” (through Jan. 26), a group show of the installations, drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos, and collages of some two hundred artists. (Vernando Reuben’s “Shanty Town Gym Club,” from 2023, is pictured.) The selection committee, which includes the likes of Mickalene Thomas and Jeffrey Gibson, has kept its criteria nicely indifferent to credentials: you must have lived or maintained a studio in Brooklyn at some time in the past five years, and you must be good.—Jackson Arn ABOUT TOWN BROADWAY | In…

“The Wind and the Rain,” a play about Sunny’s Bar, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, begins in the fall of 2012, as floodwaters from Hurricane Sandy rise through the floorboards, laying waste to a gentrifying neighborhood and its most beloved institution. The play is staged on a railroad barge—the Waterfront Museum, a long fly ball from Sunny’s—and, if a recent rehearsal is any indication, audience members will have little trouble reckoning with the persistent threat posed by the harbor. “I could be a witch!” one cast member recited, in the middle of a flirtation scene, and the barge lurched, as if on cue from Poseidon. (More likely: wake from a passing ferry.) Bells clanged. Actors swayed. Laughter. Not long afterward, in the barge’s southeastern corner, a professional juggler in bare feet…

One morning in February, Katie Porter was sitting in bed, futzing around on her computer, when she learned that she was the target of a vast techno-political conspiracy. For the past five years, Porter had served in the House of Representatives on behalf of Orange County, California. She’d become famous—at least, C-span and MSNBC famous—for her eviscerations of business tycoons, often aided by a whiteboard that she used to make camera-friendly presentations about corporate greed. Now she was in a highly competitive race to replace the California senator Dianne Feinstein, who had died a few months earlier. The primary was in three weeks. A text from a campaign staffer popped up on Porter’s screen. The staffer had just learned that a group named Fairshake was buying airtime in order to…

In the early weeks of 2008, as Barack Obama was fighting Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Presidential nomination, many Party members felt obliged to pick a side, and to lend their voices to the side they picked. Few of these voices were as powerful as that of John Lewis, a congressman from Georgia and a veteran of the civil-rights movement. Lewis was skeptical of Obama, who was then a first-term senator from Illinois, known less for any particular accomplishment in Washington than for the inspirational speeches he gave. “He is no Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Lewis told the Washington Post, at a time when those speeches were helping Obama eat into Clinton’s once formidable lead in the polls. “I knew Martin Luther King.” King had been Lewis’s mentor, and then…

The setting for “The Hills of California,” Jez Butterworth’s often comic, secretly heartsick drama, now at the Broadhurst, is an unfashionable guesthouse in the seaside resort town of Blackpool, in the North of England. Do not go in expecting a hill, or the sunny American West: the title comes from a Johnny Mercer song, which we hear during the play, in assorted wistful strains. (“The hills of California are somethin’ to see/the sun will kinda warm ya—” the song promises ambivalently.) The astonishing Laura Donnelly, who starred in Butterworth’s Tony Award-winning tragedy, “The Ferryman,” plays the guesthouse’s owner, Veronica Webb, a martinet we meet issuing orders to her four teen-age daughters in the nineteen-fifties. Veronica is a mum on a mission: she’s determined to launch her daughters as a close-harmony…