Innholdsfortegnelse for December 23, 2024 i The New Yorker

A week or so ago, the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz” sold at auction for thirty-two and a half million dollars. Expensive slippers. For thirty-two and a half million dollars, you could buy the Wicked Witch of the West’s hat, which sold at the same auction, plus Marilyn Monroe’s dress from the subway-grate scene in “The Seven Year Itch,” and still have twenty-five million left over. How to spend the rest? “I would go for the gingham dress on Dorothy, but that’s for the resale value,” Paul Tazewell said the other day. “I’d think about Gene Wilder’s coat and hat from ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.’ The green velvet dress in ‘Gone with the Wind.’ Any of Vanessa Redgrave’s costumes from ‘Camelot.’ Those…

In the autumn of 1984, my parents and I paid our first visit to Venice. They flew, and I joined them there, having gone happily astray on European trains in the preceding fortnight, arriving at Santa Lucia station in a dawn that appeared to be steeped in mother-of-pearl. One day, we took a boat to the island of Burano, three-quarters of an hour from the city’s heart, and lunched at the Trattoria da Romano. Ordering at random from the menu, I chose risotto, and, after a puzzling delay, it was placed before me. Off-white, unobtrusive, and modestly freckled with parsley, it was as plain to the eye as it was revolutionary to the palate. Never had I tasted such a thing. The flavor, far from strong, was mysterious and mild.…

I love that in the final fevered surge,Hectic and heartsick and hemorrhaging time,He had the art, the nerve, the need, the urgeTo cup one last fair couplet with a rhyme.Not “zest,” so much. It hints of spice and tart.The dash of z does nothing to concealA young man’s penchant to neglect the heart—The convoluted kernel—for the peel. “Unrest” suggests the sleeplessness that turnsA burning saint upon a brazier bed—Where bright with brazen martyrdom he yearnsFor hotter fires, not pillow to his head.But “waist,” now—that’s a handhold when she tipsAn overbrimming cupful to my lips.…

The Black Utopians, by Aaron Robertson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, liberation theology—which holds that “holiness starts from below, in the experiences and aspirations of the disinherited”—inspired Black Christian nationalists to find “new frameworks” for living. This history focusses on one such experiment: Detroit’s Shrine of the Black Madonna church, led by Albert Cleage, Jr., a visionary preacher. Cleage believed that Black churches had to be “actively engaged in social struggle”; to that end, the Shrine attempted to empower Black communities with innovations including a communal-child-rearing movement and a national food-distribution network. As the congregation sought to “re-create” God “in their own image,” its members strove to create a world that was meant for them. Blue, by Rachel Louise Moran (Chicago). Moran’s concise history of postpartum illness…

CASTING CALL In a recent episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour, and in the promotion for the episode on the Web site, it was implied that I have argued that Audra McDonald’s casting as Rose in “Gypsy” was a mistake because she is Black (www.newyorker.com/radio-mcdonald, December 6th). This would be a rather stunning argument from a Black writer such as myself. I am in fact ecstatic that McDonald is playing the role; my argument was that, given the show’s sociohistorical specificity, McDonald should not play the role as a specifically Black character, just as she has not done in the past when portraying (always to perfection) other white characters. John McWhorter New York City LIFE OR DEATH I read Stephania Taladrid’s account of Tony Ogburn’s efforts to treat women…

Peal, Christmas bells! Ring loud and long!May choral groups rejoice in song!Though not a few of us are bummed outLet gloom and doom be hereby drummed out.As days grow short, and hot, and dry,And smoke from somewhere dims the sky,Dear friends, we’re primed to wish you blissIn even such a time as this,With greetings fond, and full of cheer,And hopes for better luck next year,And years to come—we’re gonna need it!Major mojo, may God speed it!To Kamala and Doug and GwenAnd Tim, you gave your ten times tenPer cent, i.e., you gave your all,Then did it right and made the call,Conceded that you hadn’t won—Please note, opponents, how it’s done.So—what about those Yankees, yo?Well, yes, the Dodgers beat ’em, thoughThe Yanks hung tough and looked askanceAt the Dodgers’ silly dance.Now,…

DECEMBER 18 – 24, 2024 The Criterion Channel, which adds to its streaming offerings every month, now features several recent, thrilling restorations, including “Not a Pretty Picture,” from 1976, one of the most significant of all American independent films, in which the director, Martha Coolidge, a survivor of rape, constructs a dramatization of the crime, while depicting herself working with the actors in an attempt to film the experience both truthfully and ethically. Also now available is a long-unseen extended cut of Frank Borzage’s Depression-era romance “Man’s Castle” (pictured), from 1933, starring Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young as two unhoused New Yorkers who meet on a park bench and start living together—before marriage—in a shanty town. ABOUT TOWN DANCE | Fifty years ago, Arlene Croce, then this magazine’s dance critic,…

For stunt doubles, direct contact with a film’s director is rare; usually they’re brought in by a stunt coördinator. For “Nightbitch,” the new movie in which a depressive mother escapes her ennui by nocturnally transforming into a red husky, the director, Marielle Heller, took a more deliberate approach. A movie in which Amy Adams becomes a dog has to nail the part where Amy Adams becomes a dog, after all. “I was on all fours in this office, digging a hole in the rug,” Taylor Krasne, Adams’s stunt double, said the other day. “Marielle wanted me to do this stuff”—Krasne mimed a dog pawing its ear—“and make noises.” She got the job. “It was my favorite hiring process,” she said. Krasne was in town from Los Angeles, spending a morning…

The filmmaker Brady Corbet lives in New York City, but he is not often at home. He estimates that he has been away for all but five months of the past two years; for reasons both artistic and financial, he prefers to work abroad. On an overcast Saturday afternoon in late September, though, Corbet found himself back in town. His latest movie, “The Brutalist,” had just screened at the New York Film Festival, and an after-party was under way at the Leopard at des Artistes, a restaurant near Lincoln Center. Hors d’œuvres circulated, golden arancini and small white dishes of fregola studded with zucchini and roasted tomatoes; wine was poured, red and white. Adrien Brody, who stars in the film as the eponymous László Tóth, a Jewish Hungarian architect who…

The awakening began for Gabriel in Oxford, in May, 2009. As final exams approached, everybody was talking about the girl who had walked up to the front desk of the social-sciences library and stabbed herself in the eyes with a pen. She survived, they said, but was permanently blind, and currently lying in the John Radcliffe infirmary, awaiting the arrival of her parents. There were rumors that students at Oriel College were being monitored through the bar codes on their library cards, but the story was spun in different ways. Some saw it as a dystopian conspiracy, with data being harvested for a eugenicist research project run by the head of the college. Others told it as a tale of the élite: the students who were found to be falling…

On winter nights in the early sixteen-sixties, a blind poet lay awake in his bed and dreamed of the universe. Before his eyes swam suns and stars. A celestial light, visible to him alone, revealed a procession of images: first, a great battle in Heaven, between Satan’s rebel angels and the armies of God, who chased the rebels into a new realm, Hell; next, God’s creation of Earth and the inhabitants of Paradise, chief among them Adam and Eve; then a glimpse of Satan, who flew from Hell to tempt Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; and, finally, man’s exile from Paradise. Into the poet’s mind flowed twenty or thirty unbroken verses. Alas, his blindness meant that he had to wait until morning for an amanuensis…

The American industrialist and financier John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) was a serious collector of objects, books, and ephemera for most of his life, and his avidity and the diversity of the materials he acquired—from pages of a fourteenth-century Iraqi Quran to the original manuscript of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”—are a testament to both his American determinism and his wide-ranging tastes. One of the founders of U.S. Steel, and a key figure in the creation of General Electric, Morgan, who helped President Grover Cleveland avert a national financial disaster, in 1895, by defending the gold standard, didn’t have much patience for those who felt there were things that couldn’t get done. Jean Strouse, in her extraordinary, definitive biography “Morgan: American Financier” (1999), describes a man whose physical attributes (broad shoulders,…

The first image of Leslye Headland’s family drama, “Cult of Love,” on Broadway at the Hayes, looks like a Christmas card. Behind a gauzy scrim, most members of the ten-person cast pose in festive symmetry, carefully arranged around a living room glowing with a thousand holiday lights. We consider this tableau for a moment, before the scrim rises and the action begins. The prefatory pause gives the audience a chance to applaud a starry ensemble. It also signals that what we’re about to see is glossy—and a little false. We’re in the seemingly blissful home of an intensely Christian family, the Dahls, and the elders—Ginny (Mare Winningham, Tony-nominated in 2022 for “Girl from the North Country”) and her mentally deteriorating husband, Bill (David Rasche, who played a consigliere on…