The New Yorker

“ ‘Morgiane’ displays sufficient inspiration that it would have merited attention no matter who had composed it.” Alex Ross writes about how the composer Edmond Dédé’s 1887 opera shows how diversity initiatives can promote works of real cultural value. https://lnkd.in/gC9qaUtx

In April 2023, the Ukrainian intelligence officer Roman Chervinsky was arrested by investigators from the Security Service of Ukraine, his former employer, and charged with abuse of authority. To many of his former colleagues, the criminal charges seemed absurd. https://lnkd.in/ggbdyeFa

A cartoon by Teresa Burns Parkhurst. #NewYorkerCartoons https://lnkd.in/g5gMKNWB

While at a bus stop in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, Michael Holtz struck up a conversation with a man in his early 40s named Mykola Hryhoryan. He said that he was a solider who had been wounded last summer, when a blast from a grenade fractured his right shoulder blade, a bullet hit him just below his right collarbone, another tore through his left shoulder, and a third broke three ribs. He was now waiting to undergo a series of medical examinations that would determine whether he was fit to go back into service. “I don’t think they’ll send me back,” he said. But, with the ranks of the Ukrainian armed forces severely depleted, his wife, Olha, wasn’t so sure. “War is just our reality now,” Olha said. “It’s sad, but in many ways we’ve gotten used to it.” What they hadn’t gotten used to yet was the barrage of news coming from Washington. When Holtz spoke to war amputees at a rehabilitation center where Mykola had convalesced, many of them said that they felt betrayed by Donald Trump’s seeming willingness to negotiate an end to the war on Vladimir Putin’s terms and to relegate Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to a supporting role. Olha said that she had felt more hopeful last year at this time. “It feels like now we have no control over what happens,” she said. “It’s scary. I don’t see how it will end.” Read Holtz’s dispatch from Lviv, in which he spends time with the Hryhoryan family, three years into the war in Ukraine: https://lnkd.in/g3igiJXt

After decades as one of Hollywood’s best-regarded cinematographers, Rodrigo Prieto made his directorial début with “Pedro Páramo,” an adaptation of a mysterious Mexican novel that has fascinated and baffled generations of readers, which was released in November. Prieto has worked with a succession of prominent directors, including Martin Scorsese, Ang Lee, and Greta Gerwig, creating the visual world of movies as distinct as “Barbie” and “Eight Mile.” But, for his first film as a director, he’d picked a singularly difficult project. The novel “Pedro Páramo” is wildly ambitious: a consideration of nation-building, oppression, and familial trauma, written in an elliptical, allusive style. Many filmmakers believed that it was impossible to bring to the screen: the language was too intricate, the narrative too circuitous. Three attempts, in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, had resulted in bracing disappointments. In 2021, Netflix approached Prieto, who knew the book and recognized the challenges that it posed. But, he recalled, “I didn’t want that to stop me. Perhaps irresponsibly, I said yes.” Read a new interview with Prieto, who reflects on his directorial début, where his visual language comes from, and how he broke into Hollywood as the cinematographer for the 2000 film “Amores Perros”: https://lnkd.in/gAFcrHcX

A cartoon by Rich North. #NewYorkerCartoons https://lnkd.in/gVG-vq7H

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Ellen Liebenthal. #NewYorkerCartoons https://lnkd.in/g7D_XQTk

Earlier this week, James Carville published an op-ed in the Times arguing that Democrats should “roll over and play dead”—in other words, wait for Donald Trump and his cronies to implode from their own chaos and incompetence and then “make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular.” The political strategist underestimates the anger that many liberal voters feel toward their own party, not only for its inactivity in the past month but also for allowing Trump to win in the first place. “Carville may very well be correct in saying that the endless alarms of the first Trump Administration ultimately desensitized the public, but the Democrats also just spent the past year and a half telling us about Project 2025, the dissolution of democracy, and looming authoritarianism,” Kang writes. “When you tell people that hell is coming, some of them will actually believe you and expect their leaders to do everything in their power to stop it.” A new type of resistance is beginning to form, Kang argues: one that feels far more angry, oppositional, and ideologically chaotic than what we’ve seen before. Small coalitions of immigration advocates, environmentalists, labor organizers, reproductive-rights activists, and perhaps even some disenchanted Republicans are starting to amass, looking for someone to stand up and say anything. “For now, these dissenters represent the best hope that a grassroots movement might instill some energy into the moribund and, frankly, embarrassing Democratic Party.” Are we about to see an internal revolt that will shape the future of liberal politics? Read Kang’s latest column: https://lnkd.in/g9T4-HYf

In the past week, President Trump has issued an executive order telling agency heads to prepare for “large-scale” layoffs by mid-March, fired thousands of additional government employees, and ordered Elon Musk, deputized as his chief job-slasher, to “GET MORE AGGRESSIVE.” He’s axed bird-flu inspectors in the midst of a bird-flu epidemic and got rid of thousands of I.R.S. personnel at the height of tax season. He’s ordered the U.S. to stand not with Ukraine but with Russia in a U.N. vote that put America on the side of dictatorships and against most of our own democratic allies. His White House abolished a century-old tradition by decreeing that only news organizations handpicked by the President’s staff would be allowed in the press pool. He vowed to impose stringent 25-per-cent tariffs next week on Canada and Mexico next week, as well as additional levies on Chinese goods—which, if he follows through, are likely to result in higher prices for American consumers already concerned about inflation. Popular uprisings presumably would have convulsed Paris or any other European city if the President of the republic suddenly and unilaterally reoriented the nation’s geopolitical strategy, turned on its major trading partners, and allowed the world’s richest man to cut hundreds of thousands of federal workers and billions of dollars in government services. Why isn’t it happening here? In a recent Op-Ed, the legendary strategist James Carville suggested that Democrats “roll over and play dead.” This call for “strategic political retreat” “sure seems like something a lot closer to unilateral disarmament,” Susan B. Glasser writes. “There’s also a partisan cynicism embedded in this calculation—that Trump’s second term isn’t really the fascist threat that Democrats warned about on the campaign trail but a regrettable interlude that must be waited out. Talk about a risky assumption, one that seems premised on the idea that the damage from Trump 2.0 can be undone in four years just as quickly as it’s being done.” Read her latest column: https://lnkd.in/gy6aVrEu

A cartoon by Barbara Smaller. #NewYorkerCartoons https://lnkd.in/gdfVnAwp