Innholdsfortegnelse for December 30, 2024-January 6, 2025 i The New Yorker

In late 2012, Dan Erickson was a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring screenwriter in L.A., working a dull job in office management at a door-parts company. Day after day, he sat at a computer monitor cataloguing hinges and cabinet pulls. He longed to escape the drudgery, but he needed the money; he was saddled with debt, and drove a dinky scooter to save on gas. One morning, while walking into work, Erickson had a thought: What if I could skip ahead to the end of the day, and my work would magically be done? During his lunch breaks, he began turning this idea into a pilot for a high-concept workplace thriller called “Severance.” The result was part “The Office,” part “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” A sinister corporation called Lumon Industries has…

“I am a writer or used to be a writer,” Alice Munro wrote in 2014, in one of the last stories she tried to compose. A year earlier, she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But she had Alzheimer’s and had been in decline for several years. Her partner of four decades, Gerald (Gerry) Fremlin, had recently died, and she was living near her daughter Jenny, in Port Hope, east of Toronto. “I’m a writer, as I said, and I suppose that sticks for a while even though you don’t due do due it anymore,” she wrote, in shaky longhand. “I am going to write what happened yesterday, though at first I did not mean to, didn’t think of it, as I don’t anymore.” The day before, Alice had…

For a week we walkedthe roadside without pavement to the lake, cooked meals in the heavyiron pan, slept in the afternoons and talked easily, bare feetpropped against the furniture The year, that year, had been especiallycruel. Sickness and war. I slept chemically inside the hospitalwhile my first country fell my grandmother leaving behindbooks and gold to flee into the desert home shrinking into the rearviewmirror and then gone Before cutting into my bodythe surgeon asks about my name correctly pronounces the حthe letter fizzing in his throat After crossing into Egypt my uncle sendsa photo, my grandmother’s hair undyed for the first time, shock of whiteagainst her unlined face I know I am being strange with my friendson this holiday, disappearing for hours into sleep, walking barefootbetween the back yard…

Nothing kills your appetite, they say, like discovering how the sausage is made. In the realm of superhero cinema, origin stories explain our protagonist’s driving motivations. But in the realm of faith and values? I stopped believing everything the tabloids said after I went on a school trip to the offices of my local paper. Others have grown disillusioned once they scrutinized the early history of their religion as historians, not as adherents. It’s harder to keep believing some things once you find out why you believe them. Naturally, I hold slavery to be an abomination and liberal democracies to be better than totalitarian dictatorships. But why? I could draw on my years of education to tell you it has something to do with my belief in freedom, autonomy, the…

In the nineteen-thirties, Gypsy Rose Lee, perhaps the world’s most famous stripper, helped transform burlesque from a vulgar pastime to café-society entertainment, simply by acting refined. She made arch references as she stripped—dropping names like George Bernard Shaw next to her garter. You can find one of her routines on YouTube, in an excerpt from the 1943 film “Stage Door Canteen.” Even in the sanitized movie clip, her coy allure comes through. Men gather before her, their eyes avid, but she stays playfully aloof, as cool and elegant as an opera glove. Promise the audience something, then make’em wait; that’s also the strategy of the fifth Broadway revival of the legendary musical “Gypsy,” from 1959, now at the Majestic. The key promise here lies in Audra McDonald, the once-in-a-generation soprano…

BEAR WITH US Paige Williams’s piece about bears in Lake Tahoe repeatedly refers to “euthanizing” bears (“Wild Side,” December 2nd). I saw the same euphemism used in my small town, in Washington State, a couple of summers ago, when bears encroached too much on the human side of the human-wildlife interface. (One went through our neighbor’s house.) Let’s call this act what it is: we’re killing them. What’s happening isn’t euthanasia, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the act or practice of killing or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals (such as persons or domestic animals) in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy.” I hope that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife is using painless methods, but its actions do not reflect “mercy.” These killings are…

Melancholy, most beautiful word,like a sound some ancient instrument unearthed—or earthed, its fusion of cave and cloud. Or cloud, come to think, so close to could,how the mouth rounds, soundsnot just the shape itself but a sky in which to float, gentle hills, a home in the distance,then a whole fall filled with cool sun and stuttered colorsthrough which one’s walking, considering the long and polar O of alone,which has its own beauty,and a silent one, hiding like the seal I saw in the strait of San Juanwhen the pod of killer whales glided past the rocks.Another life, as they say, though there is always only one, sound and mind so mysteriously alignedone strains to tell if memory’s foghorn is realor if that’s simply the sound that memory makes. I…

Like countless other people around the globe, I stream music, and like more than six hundred million of them I mainly use Spotify. Streaming currently accounts for about eighty per cent of the American recording industry’s revenue, and in recent years Spotify’s health is often consulted as a measure for the health of the music business over all. Last spring, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry reported global revenues of $28.6 billion, making for the ninth straight year of growth. All of this was unimaginable in the two-thousands, when the major record labels appeared poorly equipped to deal with piracy and the so-called death of physical media. On the consumer side, the story looks even rosier. Adjusted for inflation, a monthly subscription to an audio streaming service, allowing convenient…

Kyle Abraham is one of today’s most sought-after choreographers. He has been on the downtown contemporary-dance scene for more than two decades, and in 2006 he founded his own company, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham (the initials stand for Abraham in Motion), focussing on Black and queer culture. Abraham’s career took off, with international tours and commissions from major companies; in 2018, he brought the music of Kanye West into the sanctum of New York City Ballet. The dances I’ve seen are always accomplished and full of ideas, but now he has done something truly extraordinary: “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful,” which had its world première recently at the Park Avenue Armory, is a deeply personal portrait of his depressed inner state, set against the splendor of the world around him.…

DECEMBER 25, 2024 – JANUARY 7, 2025 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre is dedicating its current season to Judith Jamison (pictured, from 1973), who died in November. In the nineteen-seventies, Jamison was the company’s star: statuesque, superhuman, warm, witty. After Ailey’s death, in 1989, she became the group’s savior, leading it into financial stability and unparalleled popularity. This season, her spirit can be felt in “Revelations”—no one undulated as the Umbrella Lady quite like she did. And her influence can be sensed in how the dancers give their all to premières by choreographers such as Jamar Roberts. But the greatest tribute to Jamison is the revival of Ronald K. Brown’s extraordinary “Grace,” which she commissioned in 1999. It’s about a mother god who…

In 2010, a new goddess, about two feet tall and cast in bronze, was set to appear in a village within the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. She looked nothing like the deities of Hindu mythology. In lieu of Durga’s bright saris or Lakshmi’s opulent jewels, she wore a wide-brimmed hat and the robes of the Statue of Liberty. She wasn’t riding a lion or a swan; she stood on a desktop computer. Instead of a sword or a spear, she held a pen in one hand and the Indian constitution—with its promise of legalized equality—in the other. Her name was Angrezi Devi, the Goddess English, and she was intended for India’s Dalits, or “untouchables.” “The Goddess English can empower Dalits, giving them a chance to break free from centuries…

… to survive, to hang on, waiting for the new world to dawn, what can you do but become a leper nobody in the world would deign to touch?—From “Windy Evening,” by Kim Seong-dong. Before I knocked, I took a moment to calm my breathing. But even a couple of deep breaths did nothing to lessen my anxiety, and, to the sound of voices on the other side, I carefully pushed open the thick door. A female clerk sat at a desk just inside. “How may I help you?” she asked. The room wasn’t as large as I’d imagined. Directly in my line of sight from the door, I could see a man in his forties sitting with his back to the window. He seemed to be the boss of…

Giant Love, by Julie Gilbert (Pantheon). Fusing biography and Hollywood history, this book chronicles the creation of Edna Ferber’s novel “Giant” and its transformation into a film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. Ferber, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright (and the author’s greataunt), spent nearly thirteen years “assembling the stones and bricks and mortar and metal” for her novel, which was set in Texas. As Gilbert recounts Ferber’s duodenal-ulcer-inducing work ethic and her impressions of the state as “bombastic; naïve, brash,” she also delves into the drama behind the 1956 film, directed by George Stevens, which heightened the novel’s focus on racial prejudice by, among other things, featuring a climactic diner fight not present in Ferber’s original text. Anima, by Kapka Kassabova (Graywolf). This lyrical but unsentimental book is…

In the new mystery thriller “Black Doves,” the purview of secret agents can include school plays, bedtime stories, and holiday decorations. By day, Helen Webb (Keira Knightley) is a model wife to the U.K.’s Defense Secretary (Andrew Buchan) and a doting mother to their two young kids; by night, she relays intelligence to her handler, Mrs. Reed (Sarah Lancashire), who sells information gathered by “black doves” like Helen to the highest bidder. That’s when things go right. In the second episode, things go wrong: an assassin breaks into Helen’s kitchen, where she and the intruder tussle in the dark, their knockdown-drag-out brawl lit by the glow of a Christmas tree. Upon gaining the upper hand, Helen threatens him in the manner of a wrathful domestic goddess. “I have a cheese…