Tag Archives: The New Yorker

Jon Fosse, the Nobel Prize, and the Art of What Can’t Be Named

In his novels and plays, the Norwegian author has continually probed the limits of the perceptible world.

By Merve Emre, October 6, 2023

Photograph by David Levene / eyevine / Redux

In Oslo, in September, I attended the preview of Jon Fosse’s play “I Svarte Skogen Inne” (“Inside the Black Forest”).

The theatre was small and dark, without a stage, and the scenery was minimal: a large illuminated rock in the middle, some scattered trees, and the audience members, many of whom were seated in folding chairs ringed around the rock. A trumpeter entered first, blowing long, melancholy notes, followed by a young man. The man explained that he had gone for a drive and, when his car had stalled, he had wandered into the woods. It grew darker and colder, and the audience heard the voices of an older man and an older woman speak about the young man, expressing their distress at the direction his life had taken. Then, without warning, a young woman appeared.

She was called a younger woman in the script, but it would have been better to describe her as a presence—or, to borrow the title of Fosse’s new novel, “Kvitleik,” a shining. She was a modern angel, a peroxide blonde with stern cheekbones, in a glittering white slip dress and a white fur stole. Her hair was cropped. Her feet were bare and beautiful and caught the light from the rock with each step. She spoke to the man, urging him to return home. As he roamed the theatre, trembling, followed by her voice and the trumpet, he stopped right next to the chairs of the audience members to argue, to plead, although it was not always clear for what. “My own shame is bigger than myself,” he screamed. I watched the faces of the audience; most of them remained impassive, stony. They looked down at their hands or feet and away from his stricken face. In their withdrawal, they seemed no different from the trees that surrounded them.

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/jon-fosse-the-nobel-prize-and-the-art-of-what-cant-be-named

Retirement the Margaritaville Way | The New Yorker

At the active-living community for Jimmy Buffett enthusiasts, it’s five o’clock everywhere. Letter from Daytona Beach…

By Nick Paumgarten, March 21, 2022

A beach scene with relaxed elders.
“We like the idea of being happy,” the head of the Jimmy Buffett-branded communities said of the residents’ attitude.Illustration by Nada Hayek

The first person I met at the Bar & Chill was a bald guy in a black T-shirt, black drawstring shorts, and flip-flops, with a Harley-Davidson tattoo on his right arm and a claddagh ring on his left hand. He was drinking and laughing with a few friends. He gestured to the empty stool next to him and said, “We don’t bite.”

I offered an expression of if-you-insist, and he said, “Bring it.” His tone was cheerful, as you might expect at the Bar & Chill, the principal drinking-and-dining establishment that looks out on the town center of Latitude Margaritaville, an active-living community for Jimmy Buffett enthusiasts, aged “55 and better,” in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The Bar & Chill was open to the evening. A gentle breeze fanned the lanai. On a flat-screen, the Providence Friars led the Vermont Catamounts by a few buckets. A bartender brought a Perfect Margarita in a plastic cup.

The bald man, drinking a vodka soda, said his name was Phil. Phil Murphy, from Arlington, Massachusetts, aged sixty-four. Formerly a research director at Forrester, retired since 2015. “I was in the air for twenty years,” he said. He looked and sounded less like my idea of a Parrothead, as Jimmy Buffett’s diehard fans are called, than like Mike Ehrmantraut, the melancholic fixer in “Breaking Bad.”

Standing off his left shoulder, his wife, Betty, red hair cut short, added a dash of urbanity, a spritz of Allison Janney. Phil and Betty had organized an emergency fund for the restaurant’s staff during its Covid shutdown. One of their friends declared them “the king and queen of the Bar & Chill.”

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/28/retirement-the-margaritaville-way/

The New Trump Indictment and the Reckoning Ahead

With the former President still far ahead of the rest of the Republican field, the American electorate is headed for a crucial test.

By David Remnick, August 1, 2023

The former President continues to attract millions of supporters who have such antipathy for Biden and the Democrats that they interpret Trump’s deviance as defiance and his fury as their fury.Photograph by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty

To read the stark criminal indictment, returned by a federal grand jury on Tuesday, charging Donald Trump with conspiring to steal the 2020 Presidential election is to realize more deeply than before that the country is headed for a great reckoning—in the courts and at the ballot box.

It suggests a question that cannot be escaped: Will the American electorate show itself capable of overlooking a conspiracy to undermine democratic rule and return the chief conspirator to power?

The third and latest indictment against Trump sets out four charges and makes the case against him in the plainest terms. “Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power,” the introduction to the forty-five-page document reads—and where have you seen a more succinct summary of criminal intent?

Editor’s note: Featured image is mine, free to re-use.

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-new-trump-indictment-and-the-reckoning-ahead

When the Culture Wars Come for the Public Library | The New Yorker

A Montana county’s battle shows how faith in public learning and public space is fraying.

By E. Tammy Kim, April 20, 2023

Illustration by Emmanuel Polanco

Every public library is an exception. The world outside is costly and cordoned off, but here no one is charged, and no one is turned away. People browse for books and go online. They learn English, meet with friends, dawdle, nap, and play. For children, the public library is a place to build an inner life, unencumbered by grownups. Story time is an invitation to that experience. A librarian reads a book aloud to a huddle of kids seated cross-legged on the floor.

It’s part early-literacy tool, part theatre, and looks basically the same wherever it happens. The public libraries in Flathead County, Montana, a region of mountainous beauty bordering Canada and Glacier National Park, offer seven story times per week, for babies on up. Three scattered branch locations—in Kalispell, Columbia Falls, and Bigfork—serve a population of a hundred and eleven thousand people, spread out over five thousand rugged square miles.

When the Culture Wars Come for the Public Library | The New Yorker

The “Dazed and Confused” Generation | The New Yorker

People my age are described as baby boomers, but our experiences call for a different label altogether.

By Bruce Handy, March 2, 2023

Article screenshot…

It has long been fashionable to hate baby boomers, “America’s noisiest if no longer largest living generation,” as the Times critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote recently. But I remain on the fence.

I believe that you can appreciate the late David Crosby’s music, for instance, while not endorsing buckskin jackets, walrus mustaches, and lyrics that address women as “milady.”

What I most resent about baby boomers is that, technically, I am one. The baby boom is most often defined as encompassing everyone born from 1946 to 1964, but those nineteen years make for an awfully wide and experientially diverse cohort. I was born in 1958, three years past the generational midpoint of 1955. I graduated from high school in 1976, which means I came of age in a very different world from the earliest boomers, most of whom graduated in 1964.

When the first boomers were toddlers, TV was a novelty. We, the late boomers, were weaned on “Captain Kangaroo” and “Romper Room.” They were old enough to freak out over the Sputnik; we were young enough to grow bored by moon landings. The soundtrack of their senior year in high school was the early Beatles and Motown; ours was “Frampton Comes Alive!” Rather than Freedom Summer, peace marches, and Woodstock, we second-half baby boomers enjoyed an adolescence of inflation, gas lines, and Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. We grew up to the background noise of the previous decade, when being young was allegedly more thrilling in every way: the music, the drugs, the clothes, the sense of discovery and the possibility of change, the sense that being young mattered.

Source: The “Dazed and Confused” Generation | The New Yorker

The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things | The New Yorker

Jane Bennett argues that the stuff that surrounds us isn’t inert—it has a will of its own.

By Morgan Meis, February 28, 2023

Illustration by Sean Dong

I often watch the television show “Hoarders.” One of my favorite episodes features the pack rats Patty and Debra. Patty is a typical trash-and-filth hoarder: her bathroom contains horrors I’d rather not describe, and her story follows the show’s typical arc of reform and redemption.

But Debra, who hoards clothes, home decorations, and tchotchkes, is more unusual. She doesn’t believe that she has a problem; in fact, she’s completely unimpressed by the producers’ efforts to fix her house.

“It’s just not my color, white,” she says, walking through her newly de-hoarded rooms. “Everything that I really loved in my house is gone.” She is unrepentant, concluding, “This is horrible—I hate it!” Debra just loves to hoard, and people who want her to stop don’t get it.

Source: The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things | The New Yorker