The New Yorker

The French movie “Being Maria,” which opens in the U.S. this Friday, tells the story of the actress Maria Schneider, who starred alongside Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris”—and the abuse she suffered at the hands of Brando and the director Bernardo Bertolucci. In a notorious scene, Brando’s character, Paul, violently rapes his lover Maria, played by Schneider. As “Being Maria” makes clear, that scene wasn’t in the original script of “Last Tango.” Maria in the film, like Schneider in real life, is shocked and outraged, and, as the camera rolls, she cries and resists. What follows is Maria’s swift and anguished decline. “As a creative work, it’s mild, but it’s audacious nonetheless, and its audacity lies in its very existence—its dramatization of the making of one of the most famous (and, now, infamous) movies of all time, its portrayal of two of the greatest actors of all time, and its reconstruction of the scene of a moral crime and the crime’s agonizing aftermath,” Richard Brody writes. Read his full review: https://lnkd.in/gKd-ZqMk

“Mayhem,” Lady Gaga’s new album—her first record in nearly five years—is a return to a kind of classic Gaga, Rachel Syme says. But it’s also the freshest collection of songs she’s released in years. Read Syme’s full review: https://lnkd.in/eGCwiAjY

For too many years, Donald Trump’s theatrics have clouded public perception about the threat he poses to the country, Susan B. Glasser writes. https://lnkd.in/gbnwjrgQ

For too many years, Donald Trump’s theatrics have clouded public perception about the threat he poses to the country, Susan B. Glasser writes. https://lnkd.in/gbnwjrgQ

A new book argues that the Irish famine was a particularly virulent form of exploitative capitalism that left millions of people exposed to the instability of short-term rental of land, to fluctuating food markets, and to insufficient wages: https://lnkd.in/ggeZnsiK

In October, 2013, the video-game designer Davey Wreden and a collaborator, William Pugh, released the Stanley Parable HD, a polished and expanded version of a prototype that Wreden had developed in college. Wreden and Pugh hoped that they might sell 50,000 or so copies of the new version in the course of its lifetime. They sold that many on the first day. Wreden followed the Stanley Parable with a second critically acclaimed title, the Beginner’s Guide, and cemented his reputation as a designer who defies convention. But his search for new forms never yielded a sense of personal uplift or fulfillment. It took him years, he said, to see that he had built a kind of mental prison. After the release of the Beginner’s Guide, in 2015, he found that he could no longer write at all. In January, 2016, Wreden began drawing for upward of five hours nearly every day. He would produce hundreds of pictures in the course of a six-month span, all of them variations on a simple scene: a pastoral clearing with a quaint-looking tea shop surrounded by trees, rocks, and brooks, which became the seeds of his new project, Wanderstop. The game, which was recently released, belongs to a burgeoning genre of nonviolent titles devoted to relationships, crafting, exploration, and routine—to building, rather than destroying. In a 2015 lecture, Wreden declared that a “fearful state of mind” within the mainstream video-game industry had led to “an art form in which by far the most ubiquitous form of expression is that of firing a gun.” We have, he went on, “a culture where violence is understood and implied to be the central means of problem-solving.” Wanderstop is a kind of rebuttal, prizing dialogue and contemplation over heroic acts. Read a profile of the influential game designer, whose career has gone from the absurd to the practical: https://lnkd.in/gfQ2-NJs

In the stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s proto-horror novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Sarah Snook plays 26 characters and speaks for nearly two hours straight. To prepare, the actor took a page from Taylor Swift’s playbook, practicing her lines at pace on a treadmill. “I heard that and thought, That’s a genius idea. I’m gonna do that,” Snook told Helen Shaw. In Wilde’s story, a young man’s portrait ages and shows the imprint of his sins, while his own lovely face stays youthful forever. How does art stamp a soul, and can a soul stamp itself on art? Perhaps four seasons of playing the morally deteriorating Shiv Roy on “Succession” have made questions like that feel particularly urgent to Snook. “I think the thing that Oscar was writing about in the novel, and that we display in the play, is the multiplicity of humankind, irrespective of gender,” the actor said. “We can all be seduced by the prospect of eternal life and beauty.” Read a new interview with Snook, in which she talks about ghost encounters, beauty filters, and the forces that drew her to Wilde’s work: https://lnkd.in/gHe3gjzp

A cartoon by Emily Bernstein. #NewYorkerCartoons Sign up for our Humor newsletter and get cartoons delivered straight to your inbox: https://lnkd.in/gfmk697T

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Sarah Kempa. #NewYorkerCartoons https://lnkd.in/gFEjWC3b

Today, we find archeological remnants of earlier civilizations—tools, tablets, monuments—and use those to guess at what it was like to be them. In another couple of decades, we might use our genomes to store every pixel from every camera, every datum from every scientific observation, every record, statistic, or transaction. “There’s a sense in which the DNA in our bodies never forgets. Even though it mutates and recombines, we can still track its lineage back billions of years,” Matthew Hutson writes. “What would it mean for society if we harnessed DNA to store everything forever?” Read about the scientists who want to store our data using our genetic material: https://lnkd.in/gckaJCPF