Innholdsfortegnelse for October 21, 2024 i The New Yorker

On August 20, 2020, during a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow, the Russian opposition leader and anticorruption campaigner Alexei Navalny thought he was dying––he was disoriented, and felt his body shutting down. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and Navalny was hospitalized. Two days later, thanks to the persistence of his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and international pressure, the Russian authorities allowed a German plane to take him to Berlin for treatment. Navalny emerged from a coma on September 7th. A week later, he announced his intention to return soon to Russia, despite the obvious danger. Doctors concluded that Navalny had been poisoned with a deadly nerve agent called Novichok. While recovering in the German countryside, he began writing his memoir, “Patriot,” and investigating the…

In the darkest hour, stars are falling over waterAnd nothing sentient feels itExcept the mirror of the lake. Even the deerAre still sleeping in the hollows They press with their bodies in tall grass.One doe in labor stirs but doesn’t see her fateEtched before her on the black surface.The distance from birth to the other shore Is meniscus-thin. She kicks as the membraneBreaks. The herd sleeps. All around herThe future is scattered, written in scat,And the limp fawn waits for its arrival, breathless. The old wake early, so I’m awakeWhen the sky fractures at the horizon.I walk on the path the deer makeFrom their safe-house copse to the water And find the dead fawn abandoned in Johnsongrass.Our clear sky is perfect. Of course it is.When I reach the lake, its…

CITY BIKES As a longtime rider of Rivendell bikes (fourteen years and counting), I was overjoyed to read Anna Wiener’s profile of the Rivendell Bicycle Works founder, Grant Petersen (“Joy Ride,” September 23rd). These bikes are cult objects for a reason—they marry form and function, and encourage a playful approach in an increasingly competitive marketplace. But what about those of us who don’t live a stone’s throw from nature, or who don’t have the means to put our bikes in a car and drive to a winding trail? I am one of many Riv riders who use bikes as urban transport: commuting to and from work and school, schlepping groceries and Craigslist purchases, or zipping around town to movies and ballgames. In most of the U.S., cycling is a hobby…

On a drizzly day in Grünau im Almtal, Austria, a gaggle of greylag geese shared a peaceful moment on a grassy field near a stream. One goose, named Edes, was preening quietly; others were resting with their beaks pointed tailward, nestled into their feathers. Then a camouflaged speaker that scientists had placed nearby started to play. First came a recorded honk from an unpartnered male goose named Joshua. Edes went on with his preening. Next came a honk that was lower in pitch than the first, with a slight bray. Edes looked up. As the other geese remained tucked in their warm positions, incurious, Edes scanned the field. He had just heard a recorded “distance call” from his life partner, a female goose whom scientists had named Bon Jovi. Edes…

Mother I went in the rose gardenIn the middle of the nightTo find the things I lost thereMother I searched for youFor seven nightsAnd could not find youThey left your perfume everywhereA kind of toying aspectAnd scratched your pictureWith their talonsI replaced itDespite their angerAnd still got up in the morningTo feed the babiesTheir first mealMother I wore a lilac dressAnd stepped through the thistleThe alligators had already overtakenThe endless landscapeYour body was somewhere thereAnd it was my job to bury itIn my head your voice rang outWith the strangest aromaThe gods had left you in the rose gardenMother I went in before dawn to find youI didn’t know they leftSo many noxious animalsThere to hurt meTerrible fear upon fearMother I was motherlessSo I became myself finallyI wandered in the…

In 1960, the twenty-nine-year-old Alvin Ailey premièred his landmark work, “Revelations,” with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, the company he’d founded to showcase Black culture through dance. This marked the end of his apprenticeship as a young choreographer who’d grown up revering Katherine Dunham, Lester Horton, Martha Graham, and Jack Cole—American masters with an international perspective. It also launched him into critical purgatory. From the start, the thirty-six-minute piece, which depicts Black resilience and Christian faith, and is set to various spirituals, was a hit with audiences, both because of Ailey’s preternatural talent for constructing graphic stage pictures and because it took us to church without our having to go to church. You do not need to have been raised in the South, as Ailey was, or to have…

The Burning Earth, by Sunil Amrith (Norton). In this expansive book, a historian places the earth’s ecological plight in the context of human exploitation. Amrith’s inventory of crucial events begins with the Charter of the Forest of 1217, which granted common people rights to England’s forests. Surveying gold-mining operations in South Africa and oil extraction in Baku, among other enterprises, Amrith recognizes the inseparability of environmental distress and political, economic, and social factors. As he recounts attempts by human beings to squeeze value out of natural resources, he also examines changing attitudes about our relationship to the natural world, which we have long regarded—erroneously, he argues—as separate from, rather than symbiotic with, our species. The Notebook, by Roland Allen (Biblioasis). The profound cultural and intellectual impact of the notebook is the…

OCTOBER 16 – 22, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. During a Supreme Court Justice’s confirmation process, the prospective lifetime appointee undergoes a questioning period that has become increasingly theatrical. The theatre in question is, occasionally, Greek tragedy. In “The Ford/Hill Project,” Lee Sunday Evans stages two gripping, traumatic testimonies—Anita Hill’s revelations about harassment by Clarence Thomas and the sexual-assault accusations by Christine Blasey Ford against Brett Kavanaugh—by using verbatim text from their respective Senate hearings. Elizabeth Marvel co-conceived the event and plays Ford, with similarly stunning talents in other parts: Amber Iman, a Tony nominee for her work in “Lempicka,” plays Hill, and Dylan Baker and Eric Berryman give voice to the many men arrayed against them.—Helen Shaw (Public Theatre, Oct. 16-20.) ABOUT TOWN INDIE…

A long trip on an American highway in the summer of 2024 leaves the impression that two kinds of billboards now have near-monopoly rule over our roads. On one side, the billboards, gravely black-and-white and soberly reassuring, advertise cancer centers. (“We treat every type of cancer, including the most important one: yours”; “Beat 3 Brain Tumors. At 57, I gave birth, again.”) On the other side, brightly colored and deliberately clownish billboards advertise malpractice and personal-injury lawyers, with phone numbers emblazoned in giant type and the lawyers wearing superhero costumes or intimidating glares, staring down at the highway as they promise to do to juries. A new Tocqueville considering the landscape would be certain that all Americans do is get sick and sue each other. We ask doctors to cure…

When Joe Biden called Kamala Harris on the morning of Sunday, July 21st, she was in the kitchen at the Vice-President’s residence, a turreted mansion on a hill in Northwest Washington. Harris was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie from her alma mater, Howard University. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, was in Los Angeles, but the house was bustling with relatives. She had just finished making bacon and pancakes for two grandnieces before sitting down with them to work on a jigsaw puzzle. Biden was calling from isolation, both literal and political; he had spent the previous night socially distanced at his vacation house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, recovering from COVID and absorbing the reality that he had lost the confidence of the Democratic Party. Twenty-four days earlier, Biden’s addled performance in…

Human nature, yes. Nature nature, no. I know nothing about it. A rose is a rose is my tradition, but then feelings lead us outside tradition, they lure us beyond it, and I feel nature deeply. I feel its lack of interest in me, its lack of humanity jibing with my inner emptiness; I like how its trees come together to make a forest that shows me how to breathe, and how its boulders show me how to concentrate. I’m content with having these immature, idealizing poetic-romantic emotions about the great outdoors and don’t want to know anything more, chiefly because I’ve always regarded the outdoors as a refuge from knowledge—a haven of ignorance to flee to whenever the city news runs me down. In the summer of 2023, this…

It is a truth only fitfully acknowledged that whom the gods wish to destroy, they first give an opinion column. “A live coffin,” a former newspaper colleague of mine once called hers. (She quit.) Such a space seems an impossible remit, created to coax out vague, vatic pronouncements as the writer, mind wrung dry of ideas, sets about a weary pantomime of thinking and feeling, outrage and offense. Few writers have seemed as aware of the hazards of professional opinion-mongering as Ta-Nehisi Coates. “Columns are where great journalists go to die,” he once wrote. “Unmoored from the rigors of actually making calls and expending shoe leather, the reporter-turned-columnist often begins churning out musings originated over morning coffee and best left there.” And yet few writers have been pressed so needily…

Something’s bugging me about the way political happenings unfold these days. How do we—all of us who, during the past decade or so, have been baptized in the waters of public unreality—come to process passages of history which feel like heedless locomotion through plot points that make no sense? Take the last several months: An aging President loses control of his cognition on television, prompting questions about a coverup, and a national referendum on whether he should continue his pursuit of a second term. He surrenders the nomination, and a fresh surrogate steps in with choreographed speed. A different candidate, a former President (almost as old as the deposed one), chooses a running mate with the rhetoric of a cartoon Nazi: something about unwanted visitors abducting and ingesting pets. Somewhere…