Tag: splitscreenimagerightfullbleed
Pandemic Novels, Reviewed | The New Yorker
In the early, self-improvement phase of the pandemic, people would sometimes comment on the opportunities that lockdown presented for art and artists. They’d observe that Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” during plague times, or that Tony Kushner and Larry Kramer snatched inspiration from the AIDS crisis. It was the slenderest of silver linings, jumbled up with terror and frustration—the idea that COVID might, if nothing else, produce enduring fiction.
Were the “Lear” people right? Four years after the virus began its
Class Consciousness for Billionaires | The New Yorker
Around the start of the twenty-first century, the Oxford sociologist Jonathan Gershuny noticed a change in the way the privileged behaved: the leisure class that the economist Thorstein Veblen had described during the Gilded Age seemed no longer to exist. The farther up people were on the income ladder, the harder they worked. “Busyness,” Gershuny concluded, was “the badge of honor for the new superordinate working class.” These days, even the highest-profile billionaires tend to be a little grim-faced. Mark
Can Forgetting Help You Remember?
Four times a year, I attend the Yizkor service at synagogue. Yizkor in Hebrew denotes “remembrance,” and the official name of the service, Hazkarat Neshamot, means a “remembering of souls.” During the service, I call to mind loved ones who have died—parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, close friends—reliving shared times that were cherished, and some that were fraught. I think about what I learned from these people, several of whom were in my life from my first moments of awareness. I
“The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz,” Reviewed
Delmore Schwartz died in the early morning of July 11, 1966, in an ambulance on the way to Roosevelt Hospital. He’d been living alone in a seedy hotel near Times Square, reading compulsively and scribbling in the many notebooks that he kept during his last, itinerant years. At fifty-two, he was no longer the precocious young writer and critic—“blazing with insight, warm with gossip,” as his friend John Berryman described him—who had charmed poetry’s old masters and young upstarts alike.
The Truth Behind the Slouching Epidemic
At the bottom right of my computer screen, just out of my direct line of vision, lurks an animated scold: a cartoon giraffe named Rafi. He is the playful icon of an app called Posture Pal, which works in concert with a wearer’s AirPods to warn against slumping while sitting at a computer. So long as I keep my line of vision trained on this text, Rafi stays discreetly out of sight. The minute I rest my chin in my
Did the Year 2020 Change Us Forever?
Which were the pivotal years of the past century? An argument could be made for 1929, when the worldwide financial crash ushered in the crisis that led to the rise of Nazism (and of the New Deal) and, eventually, to the Second World War; for 1945, when the United States emerged from that war uniquely victorious—having, like Hercules, strangled two serpents in its cradle, as Updike thought—and in possession of the most lethal weapon the world had ever known; for
When America First Dropped Acid
One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and tune in to a CBS broadcast during which a young woman dropped acid. She sat next to a man in a suit: Sidney Cohen, the researcher who had given her the LSD. The woman wore lipstick and nail polish, and her eyes were shining. “I wish I could talk in Technicolor,” she said. And, at another point, “I can see the molecules. I .
Hisham Matar’s Latest Novel Explores a Divided Soul
St. James’s Square, like many others in London, appears with little forewarning or fanfare. You leave the expensive ruckus of Piccadilly, cut down a narrow side street, and there it suddenly is: a holiday from the city, with a public garden islanded in its center. One gentle corner is home to the London Library, founded in 1841 by the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, who complained that the British Museum Library was giving him “museum headache.”
In the early nineteen-eighties, the
Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and the Dawn of the Celebrity Power Couple
After a run of sensitive British men, Taylor Swift appears to be dating a stubbled American in a No. 87 jersey, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. The coupling has put America into something akin to a state of emergency, but on NBC’s “Today” show, Kelce’s mother, Donna, offered a display of calm. “It’s fairly new,” she told the show’s co-anchor Hoda Kotb. “Just another thing that’s amped up my life.” When asked how she’d liked hanging out
A Friend Died, Her Novel Unfinished. Could I Realize Her Vision?
The last time I visited Rebecca in the hospital, in September, 2022, we spent the afternoon researching hospice options and talking about her novel. Rebecca had been working on it for a decade, and for the past four years she’d been sick: lung cancer that spread to her bones, and then her brain. If I was being honest with myself, and I probably wasn’t, there was a kind of magical thinking embedded in the pleasure of hearing Rebecca talk about