The comic Jacqueline Novak wears the same outfit each time she performs her solo show, “Get on Your Knees”: a loose gray T-shirt, jeans, and a broken-in pair of white-and-gray sneakers. The clothes allow her a kind of anonymity and neutrality, as well as comfort. “Get on Your Knees” is part standup act, part coming-of-age story, and part philosophy lecture. It is also an athletic feat, so she often wears a sports bra, a practical choice that nonetheless warranted extensive consideration before a performance one evening in the summer of 2021. Novak had dedicated the previous four years to the show, but she was still tinkering, refining, and annotating each creative decision she made, particularly as she anticipated taping the show for a Netflix special. “I love sports bras,” she said in front of a mirror in the greenroom at the Cherry Lane Theatre, in the West Village, where she was doing a ten-week run. “But there’s this belief, inherently, that I’m not supposed to be wearing a sports bra. Do you know what I mean? It’s too athletic.”
Novak, who is prone to self-narration, doubled back: “But then I’m, like, why do I feel the audience is owed a separation of my breasts?” Novak is forty-one, but she has a girlish face and a long-standing interest in elaborate skin-care rituals that, to an audience member, might make her look like the high-school version of herself she explores in the performance.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة January 22, 2024 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة January 22, 2024 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.
