What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me

Plus: Haiti held hostage; the rise and fall of neoliberalism; and “Barbie,” reviewed. View in browser | Update your preferences Saturday, July 22, 2023 In today’s newsletter, The Weekend Essay, and then: • Haiti held hostage • The rise and fall of neoliberalism • “Barbie” is brilliant, beautiful, and fun as hell What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me I’ve spent my life working on virtual reality—but my instruments have revealed the real world. By Jaron Lanier Photograph by Michael Turek It started after my mother died. She was a concentration-camp survivor—a prodigy concert pianist in Vienna who was taken when she was only a girl. She taught me the piano by holding her hands over mine, bending my fingers into arches above the keys. When I was just a boy, she died in a car accident. Afterward, I was both boundlessly angry and attached to the piano. I played it with extreme force, sometimes bleeding onto the keys. I still feel her hands when I play. I feel them even more when I’m learning a new instrument. As I write this, on a laptop in my kitchen, I can see at least a hundred instruments around me. There’s a Baroque guitar; some Colombian gaita flutes; a French musical saw; a shourangiz (a Persian instrument resembling a traditional poet’s lute); an Array mbira (a giant chromatic thumb piano, made in San Diego); a Turkish clarinet; and a Chinese guqin. A reproduction of an ancient Celtic harp sits near some giant penny whistles, a tar frame drum, a Roman sistrum, a long-neck banjo, and some duduks from Armenia. (Duduks are the haunting reed instruments used in movie soundtracks to convey xeno-profundity.) There are many more instruments in other rooms of the house, and I’ve learned to play them all. I’ve become a compulsive explorer of new instruments and the ways they make me feel. Keep reading From the News Desk Letter from Port-Au-Prince Haiti Held Hostage Gangs control the capital. Foreign help is scarce. Can the embattled island nation save itself? By Jon Lee Anderson Letter from the U.K. Wrestling with the Ghost of Boris Johnson An election for the seat in Parliament once held by the disgraced former Prime Minister goes down to the wire. By Sam Knight Daily Comment Behind Washington’s Decision to Supply Cluster Bombs to Ukraine As Ukraine begins using the widely condemned munitions, what will the consequences be? By Jeffrey Frank The Political Scene Podcast What Happens if Donald Trump Is Elected While on Trial? The fund-raising race among the 2024 Presidential contenders heats up as Trump, the G.O.P. front-runner, braces for a third indictment. With Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos Editor’s Pick A Critic at Large The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism The free market used to be touted as the cure for all our problems; now it’s taken to be the cause of them. By Louis Menand Books We Recommend This Week Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction. Fires in the Dark, by Kay Redfield Jamison (Knopf). In this loose sequel to a best-selling memoir of bipolar illness, Jamison, a writer and a psychologist, explores the process of prying a mind from disease or despair. Healing, she writes, depends on “harvesting the imagination” and navigating “the balance between remembering and forgetting”; it also, crucially, relies on support. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. A Madman’s Will, by Gregory May (Liveright). In 1833, the Virginia congressman John Randolph freed his nearly four hundred slaves while on his deathbed. This detailed history untangles the much publicized legal dispute that ensued, wherein Randolph’s relatives, some of whom argued that he had gone mad, fought against the slaves’ manumission. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Elsewhere, by Yan Ge (Scribner). This collection of stories, the English-language début of an acclaimed Chinese novelist, spans continents and centuries in its depictions of displacement. A band of poets seeks shelter after the devastating earthquake that struck Sichuan Province in 2008; a Chinese woman who moves to Dublin with her Irish husband recalls their fateful honeymoon in Burma; a construction worker who has never left his home town visits New York City; an eleventh-century scholar attempts to finish his book under a death sentence. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Snow Road Station, by Elizabeth Hay (Knopf Canada). At the center of this sensitive novel, set in Ontario in 2008, is Lulu, a middle-aged actress who has returned to the hamlet of her youth for her nephew’s wedding. The town is populated with familiars: her brother, her best friend, a new lover, a new grandniece. Despite experiencing a terrifying sexual assault, Lulu savors the town’s pace of life and decides to stay there, giving up her career and her apartment in Montreal. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The best books of 2023 so far What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. Culture Dept. The Front Row “Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell Greta Gerwig’s giddily stylized vision of a doll coming to life makes a serious case for the art of adapting even the most sanitized I.P. By Richard Brody Culture Desk Time-Travelling with My Father Accompanying my dad to dialysis doesn’t feel like the promise of the future I had imagined. By Navied Mahdavian Fiction “The Maths Tutor” The wolf wasn’t at the door, she thought then, with that sort of grimly satisfied, righteous outrage it was too easy to get addicted to. The wolf was inside the house! By Tessa Hadley This Week in Fiction Tessa Hadley on Marriage’s Metamorphoses The author discusses her story from the latest issue of the magazine. By Deborah Treisman Fun & Games Dept. Name Drop Play the Quiz Can you guess the notable person in six clues or fewer? By Will Nediger Shouts & Murmurs Future Indiana Jones Sequels “Sallah, I keep telling you, I’m retired! We’re both so old we can barely walk, much less find a priceless ancient object.” By Jay Martel Thanks for reading. Let us know your thoughts about today’s edition. Plus, browse more newsletters and invite a friend to sign up for The Daily. You’re receiving this e-mail because you signed up for The Daily from The New Yorker. Manage your preferences | View our Privacy Policy | Unsubscribe Copyright © Condé Nast 2023. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.