In a narrow, windowless room at the University of Southern California, a group of graduate students is workshopping a short story. Its author is silent as her classmates deliver gentle feedback. Some suggest minor improvements of pacing, setting, and tone. One student would appreciate a more robust description of the protagonist’s emotions, but enjoys the sparseness, too. “I like this version,” another adds. “I don’t think I have much in the way of critique.”
While they speak, their professor, the novelist Percival Everett, sits quietly at the head of a too-large table, one palm steadied against it, his body swivelling almost imperceptibly from side to side. His head, decorated with errant coils of dark gray hair, is framed by a gargantuan television that hangs behind him, its screen a black expanse. He wears the uniform of a professional Everyman: slacks, button-down, glasses. He talks at a low volume, but the sounds he makes have the electric quality of speech being filtered through a mike.
“I think you guys must be a whole lot smarter than me,” he says, pushing his glasses to his forehead. “Because I’m just a dumb old cowboy, and I can’t figure out what’s going on.”
Esta historia es de la edición March 18, 2024 de The New Yorker.
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Esta historia es de la edición March 18, 2024 de The New Yorker.
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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.
