The New Yorker

A cartoon by Asher Perlman. See all the cartoons from this week’s issue: https://lnkd.in/ewPWBGDE

Martha Graham’s contributions to the world of dance were nothing short of outstanding—but struggles plaguing The Martha Graham Dance Company since her death, in 1991, threaten to eclipse her legacy, Jennifer Homans writes. A series of five performances celebrating the Company’s 100th anniversary brought to light the tensions between her work and its current preservation. Disappointing contemporary dances interspersed between Graham’s epics, and moments where the impulse to preserve overwrote Graham’s radicalism, contended with moving performances of her early choreography. Dancers honored her by performing pieces including “Appalachian Spring,” about which Homans writes, “I have been watching it on and off for fifty years and still find it a marvel.” “In Graham’s life, technique and choreography were the same thing. But if we think of them as separate, the technique becomes anyone’s tool,” Homans writes. Read Jennifer Homans’s consideration of the current state of Martha Graham’s groundbreaking choreography: https://lnkd.in/eTZuqcwK

Clint Buffington is one of the world’s most prolific hunters of messages in bottles. Since 2007, he has recovered nearly 150 specimens, ranging from love letters to promotional stunts, science projects, pleas for help, and drunken ramblings. Buffington’s exploits are particularly impressive given that he’s the default parent of two young kids and lives in a landlocked state. He is 41 and has a master’s degree in English literature; for some years, he did technical writing for a nuclear-waste-removal company. As his LinkedIn profile notes, he is also a musician, playing “guitar, harmonica, and mandolin across genres.” “A lot of people think of messages in bottles as being sort of flippant or silly or whatever,” he told Lauren Collins. “My experience has shown me quite the opposite. I don’t know exactly what the impulse is, but it’s deep, it’s fundamental, and it’s foundational. I think it’s core to being human.” Collins goes on a bottle-hunting expedition with Buffington: https://lnkd.in/eTcMa_Cx

For new Broadway musicals, camp has become the go-to aesthetic mode. Two new shows have traded that ironic distance for something more earnest. “Schmigadoon!,” adapted from the television show of the same name, follows a love affair between two doctors. One loves Broadway musicals; the other hates them. In the fictional village of Schmigadoon, where the streets are alive with songs from “The Music Man,” “Oklahoma,” and more, everyone in the audience is transformed into a Broadway lover. Meanwhile, In a new Broadway adaptation of Joel Schumacher’s 1987 vampire romp “The Lost Boys,” cheesy characters are given emotional complexity and political stakes, even if the songs can be frustratingly limp. Read Emily Nussbaum’s review of “Schmigadoon!” and “The Lost Boys”: https://lnkd.in/em6K4vtu

When silent cinema gave way to talkies in the 1920s, Hollywood had already assimilated the restrictions of the form—whether they were technological, or enforced by Hays Code-era censorship. The writer and director Arnaud Desplechin, as a good student of classic cinema, has created a modern melodrama that adopts film’s historical constraints with his latest, “Two Pianos.” The movie traces the concert pianist Mathias Vogler (François Civil) as he returns to his homeland in Lyon at the behest of an old mentor. In Lyon, he reunites with a former lover who spurned him. A series of coincidences ensue, bringing him closer to his career, his love, and his past. Read Richard Brody’s review of “Two Pianos”: https://lnkd.in/e6SzsUsu

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Enrico Pinto.

“The Fast and the Furious” films may have become bloated, with back-from-the-dead stars and a Pontiac Fiero in outer space, but the series was remarkably influential in establishing the capabilities of a Hollywood mega-franchise. The widespread popularity of the movies was a welcome surprise, and as they charted international locales and platformed intentionally diverse cast members, they began to create a new model for blockbuster film series. Rather than relegating a story to a single film, or perhaps a trilogy, “The Fast and the Furious” created a cinematic universe, within which sequels could prioritize common history and familiar characters over linear storylines—even as stars such as the late Paul Walker were no longer around. A new book by the media scholar Dan Hassler-Forest argues that understanding the “Fast” series is essential to understanding Hollywood. Hua Hsu interrogates the far-reaching appeal of a series of high-octane car-chase movies, the complications of racial ambiguity and technological reconstruction, and how the story of “The Fast and the Furious” is the story of over two decades of Hollywood’s evolution: https://lnkd.in/gxPVH3mf

A cartoon by Liana Finck. See more cartoons from this week’s issue: https://lnkd.in/eKzYVayr

Charlie Kirk took off as a meme just after his assassination last September. Across the internet, social media users have been proffering memes of his A.I.-generated likeness—often face-swapped with figures such as Taylor Swift, Shaquille O’Neal, or Bart Simpson. But what is it that makes Charlie Kirk so memeable? The volume of content he created, his radical ideology, and the misinformation he promoted might be able to tell us. With public and high-profile punishments doled out to those deemed not properly remorseful after he was killed, many people on the internet turned to a sort of dark humor to metabolize the situation. As such, “Kirkslop” took off. Today, these slop methodologies are being used as geopolitical propaganda, memeing the wars in the Middle East with Lego-styled brain-rot videos. Brady Brickner-Wood dives headlong into the slop pile, and considers how our Kirkification reflects the brutal realities of contemporary political life: https://lnkd.in/eDH9Cz9Q

Trump’s use of pardon power is unprecedented, a law professor who specializes in Presidential clemency said. https://lnkd.in/e6nfrWE7