26 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
1
GROWNUPINTHEROOM
CHEERFULSHADE
W
hat becomes a legend most? On
a brisk day last week in down-
town Newark, the answer was a floor-
length plaid wool coat; a pair of Uggs
with half-dollar-size Swarovski crystal
buttons; big glasses with violet lenses;
what appeared to be a hand-tooled
leather fanny pack; and a tan baseball
followers and has been the subject of a
“Saturday Night Live” impersonation by
Ego Nwodim. Her online voice is so well
established that, like Jack Benny, she can
get a laugh with the Twitter equivalent
of a raised eyebrow. A simple but pierc-
ing “What?” was her riposte to some re-
cent gobbledygook from @Meta about
the coming wonders of “the metaverse.”
She added, in a jab at the company’s pre-
tensions and also at her own Golden Girl
persona, “I still call it ‘Book Face.’”
Today was her first chance to see
the art exhibit, titled “Dionne Warwick:
Queen of Twitter.” Dignitaries greeted
her, including the mayor, Ras Baraka.
Warwick, who grew up nearby, in East
Orange, and now lives in South Orange,
allowed that she felt “not only blessed
but overwhelmed.”
Strolling through the gallery, she
smiled as several of the artists explained
their works, occasionally at some length.
A large installation by Dianne Smith fea-
tured a proscenium made from braided
butcher paper, surrounding a screen play-
ing a video that intercut current and his-
toric clips of Warwick with scenes from
the civil-rights struggles of the nineteen-
sixties and today. The work was inspired
in part by Warwick’s tweet about the
killing of Daunte Wright by police, last
April, in Minnesota: “Before I go I would
like to ask when will this madness stop!”
On a lighter and more Instagrammable
note was a neon sign spelling out “Aun-
tie.” This was the artist Pamela Coun-
cil’s response to Warwick’s 2021 New
Year’s Day proclamation: “I am every-
one’s Auntie.”
On the whole, Warwick seemed both
delighted by the fuss and a little amused.
“It’s amazing what these artists have
been able to accomplish,” she said. “And
off of tweets? Come on, please.” She be-
trayed a maybe understandable ambiv-
alence toward her new platform. (After
all, she still sings and tours!) “I don’t do
it every day,” she insisted. “I don’t get up
in the morning and say, ‘Oh, I gotta
tweet, I gotta tweet.’”
All the same, she said she enjoys
being Twitter’s “grownup,” throwing
mostly cheerful shade as an antidote to
the usual toxicity—the “bashing” she
disliked when her nieces and nephews
first introduced her to the medium. Al-
though one of those nieces handles her
other social-media accounts, she saidDionne Warwickcap. It was a look that said, “I’m older, I
like comfort, but don’t you dare picture
me in a tracksuit.”
The legend was Dionne Warwick, a
month shy of her eighty-first birthday
and still possessed of cheekbones that
could slice open a thumb. The occasion
was an art exhibition partly inspired by
her six decades as an award-winning
entertainer, but fully in thrall to her
late-blossoming Twitter account, which
in the past year has added a new and
sometimes crotchety dimension to her
public profile. As a singer, she is known
for the light, soulful touch with which
she navigated tricky Burt Bacharach
melodies in such hits as “Walk On By”
and “I Say a Little Prayer”—performances
celebrated for their precision. Millen-
nials may have first encountered her in
the nineteen-nineties, as the genial star-
next-door host of infomercials for the
Psychic Friends Network, always hit-
ting her marks but sometimes allowing
a hint of aggrieved incredulity to flicker
across her face. On Twitter, she just lets
fly, dispensing straight talk, blunt ad-
vice, wit, and non sequiturs in roughly
equal measure.
Although she’d had a quiet, backwa-
ter account for years, she went unex-
pectedly viral last December 5th, after
tweeting at Chance the Rapper, “If you
are very obviously a rapper why did you
put it in your stage name? I cannot stop
thinking about this.” A half hour later,
she took aim at the Weeknd: “Why? It’s
not even spelled correctly?”
She now has more than half a millionmasks that made it look as though they
had turquoise nebulae for noses. “The
average person in the United States prob-
ably doesn’t understand just how reliant
their day-to-day life is on space capabil-
ities,” Raymond told those assembled. “If
you use your smartphone, you’re using
space. Your smartphone would be called
a ‘stupid phone’ without space.”
He sat for a Q. & A. with SIPA’s dean,
Merit E. Janow, who asked about China’s
recent test of a nuclear-capable hyper-
sonic missile, a development said to have
taken U.S. intelligence by surprise. “What
keeps me awake at night is the speed at
which China is moving,” Raymond said.
The Chinese, he’d noted earlier, have a
satellite (the Shijian-17), equipped with
a robotic arm, that has the potential to
grab other satellites and disable them.
Even scarier is a bit of Russian technol-
ogy that Raymond described as a “nest-
ing doll”: a satellite that releases a smaller
satellite armed with a projectile capable
of taking out our own orbital tech.
Afterward, a student approached Ray-
mond with a question about whether we
were entering a space arms race. “That’s
why the Space Force was so important
to create—to move fast and stay ahead
of that,” Raymond said. Then the stu-
dent pivoted to a less dire topic: “Have
you watched Steve Carell’s ‘Space Force’?”
He had. “The only thing is, they
picked the wrong actor,” he said. “They
should have picked Bruce Willis.” He
expressed curiosity about an unexplained
plot point. “In Season 1, ‘my wife’ is in
jail for, like, forty years,” he said. “Nobody
knows why. So I keep teasing my wife:
‘What did you do?’”
—Mark Yarm