The New Yorker Media Bias

Kendrick Lamar Doesn’t Want to Be a Savior

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A few days before Kendrick Lamar premièred “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” his first album in five years, he released a song called “The Heart Part 5,” a diatribe about Black culture and the celebrity’s place in it. In the song’s music video, Lamar stands alone, using deepfake technology to morph into famous doppelgängers. “As I get a little older, I realize life is perspective / And my perspective may differ from yours,” he says in the intro. The face-swapping happens in tandem with lyrics that correspond to various controversial men, ranging from the recently scandalous to the infamous: Will Smith, Kanye West, the late rapper Nipsey Hussle, Jussie Smollett, Kobe Bryant, and O. J. Simpson. The video previewed the new album’s big provocations and themes: Black masculinity and responsibility, the cyclical relationship between Black art and Black trauma. Lamar has clearly grown weary of his role as an anointed genius, and his cynicism bleeds into the music, which is increasingly possessed by discourses on cancel culture and the demands that the public makes of artists.
The New Yorker     May 16, 2022

The Larger Meaning of China’s Crackdown on School Tutoring

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The Chinese film “American Dreams in China,” released in 2013, was an instant box-office hit in China, capturing the country’s optimism about Western-style entrepreneurship. It tells the story of a young man who lands a seat at a prestigious university in Beijing and launches a wildly successful tutoring company called New Dream. The events are loosely based on the real-life journey of Michael Yu, the founder of China’s largest tutoring company, New Oriental. The character who resembles Yu studies Dale Carnegie mantras, tutors students over K.F.C., and woos a gorgeous classmate while preparing for an American-visa interview. By the story’s end, he’s swapped his schoolboy outfit for a business suit and transformed his tutoring service into a billion-dollar company. He ultimately doesn’t end up with the girl or the visa, but he acquires glory and capital—the American Dream, in other words, right at home in China.
The New Yorker     May 16, 2022

Mary-Louise Parker and the Pleasure of Speech

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The most pure, ear-tickling pleasure I’ve got from a speech this year came from the book “Peter Hujar’s Day,” by Linda Rosenkrantz. You might know Rosenkrantz’s first book, “Talk,” a collage of real-life tape-recorded conversations between the author and her friends during the Warhol-redolent summer of 1965. “Peter Hujar’s Day” is similarly simple in premise and surprisingly thrilling in execution. In 1974, Rosenkrantz asked several of her friends—among them the photographer Peter Hujar—to log everything they did on a single day, and Hujar chose December 18th. (It happened to be a Wednesday, that least memorable, most revealingly normal day of the week.) Hujar forgot the assignment and let his day go unledgered, but, at Rosenkrantz’s prompting, he went to her apartment and talked about the day from beginning to end while her tape recorder spun.
The New Yorker     May 16, 2022

Nobody Plays Guitar Like Bill Frisell

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Bill Frisell owns sixty-three guitars, according to his biographer. Both parts of that sentence are surprising. It’s surprising that Frisell, whose records are linked by the tone that he gets from his guitar—bright, lucid, at once warm and dry, like tea with more lemon than honey—should use so many different instruments to get it. And it’s surprising that, in 2022, a living musician who doesn’t sing is the subject of a full-on biography. The book is “Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer: The Guitarist Who Changed the Sound of American Music,” by Philip Watson, and it’s the story of a man who has made music without stopping for more than forty years—in small-group jazz and chartless experimentalism and so-called Americana, and also as a guest artist alongside great pop singers—sounding like himself all the while.
The New Yorker     May 16, 2022

Overheard in New York: Riding the L Train

Dialogue and drollery from beneath the streets.
The New Yorker     May 16, 2022

Twitter in Chaos After the Elon Musk Who Offered to Buy It Turns Out to Be a Bot

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The bid for Twitter is believed to be the largest corporate takeover ever proposed by a bot, mergers-and-acquisitions experts say.
The New Yorker     May 16, 2022