Innholdsfortegnelse for Jul-27-15 i The New Yorker

FOR MANY YEARS, SPANIARDS HAVE been agitating for the mass graves left over from the Spanish Civil War to be opened up and DNA tests done, in the hope that people who disappeared during those years—the poet Federico García Lorca is only the most famous case—might be identified and properly buried. In 2008, Baltasar Garzón, one of the country’s most prominent investigating magistrates, ordered the exhumations. A month later, the case was removed from Garzón’s jurisdiction, with some saying that, whatever the crimes involved, they were covered by an amnesty passed in 1977. Two years later, Garzón was suspended from judicial activity in Spain—a great victory for the country’s right wing. “I read that in the paper,” Martín Santangelo, the artistic director of New York’s Noche Flamenca, says, “and I…

When Greeks want to gesture “No,” they nod: a little upward snap of the head. The confusion that this can produce in visitors has long been an object of amusement for the locals—and the source of rueful anecdotes by tourists who have found themselves inadvertently refusing bellhops or a sweating glass of frappé after a hot afternoon on the Acropolis. Lately, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Greeks themselves have been having a hard time understanding the difference between “yes” and “no.” On July 5th, at the ostensible encouragement of the Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, an overwhelming majority voted no to punishing new austerity measures in return for continued membership in the euro zone—“a bed of Procrustes,” as The American Interest described the dilemma. A week later, however—after an…

If there’s one message that Greece should take away from its recent confrontation with the euro zone, it’s that it will never get the help it really needs. Assuming that the deal goes through, Greece should be able to reopen the banks and keep the economy from total collapse. But, with that economy having shrunk by a quarter in five years and an unemployment rate over twenty-five per cent, it needs real stimulus spending and a much looser monetary policy. Neither is on offer. Even if Greece gets the debt relief that the I.M.F. is recommending, the next few years will be grim. As James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, who assisted the former Greek finance minister during this year’s negotiations, told me, “What’s going…

Olga Flores, the seventh of eleven siblings, was born in a small town in the central Mexican state of Hidalgo thirty-nine years ago. “There was no work,” she told me recently. “The only thing for a woman to do was to get married, have children, and cook for her whole life.” A job in a nearby city would have required a high-school certificate, but her education ended in middle school. So in January of 1998, when she was twenty-one, Flores arranged to come to the United States illegally. She took her first trip on an airplane, to northern Mexico, and made her way to Sonoyta, a town on the Arizona border. One of her brothers had immigrated to Columbus, Ohio, a few years earlier, and he helped her make arrangements…

FEINSTEIN’S BATTLE Connie Bruck’s piece on Senator Dianne Feinstein tracks the often morally irreconcilable positions she has held on human-rights violations committed by U.S. intelligence services and the military (“The Inside War,” June 22nd). In spite of her inconsistent stances, Feinstein has done a commendable job of fighting for greater transparency concerning the C.I.A. torture program under the George W. Bush Administration. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that the people who authorized and engaged in torture under the U.S. flag will be held accountable. A more urgent problem is that neither President Obama’s 2009 executive order nor the Senate’s recent passage of the McCain-Feinstein amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act has completely closed torture loopholes. The 2006 Army Field Manual—in effect, the guiding standard for interrogations— lies outside the…

“At a bar like this, what could disappoint you?” a man asked the other night, at Johnny’s, in the West Village. There might be one or two things, but it depends on your expectations: earlier in the evening, a slick of yuppies, perhaps attracted by the exposed brick, had walked into the narrow room looking confused, and walked out, noses pointing upward to the chess set that’s glued to the ceiling. But those with an appreciation for a good dive bar stuck around, unlike a couple of the ceiling’s knights and bishops, which have fallen in a battle against gravity. Happily, the drinks are priced for a pawn: Rolling Rock on draft is $3.50, refreshing in a city overflowing with precious beer. Also appealing to the boozing bargain hunter is…

There must be a list somewhere of the professions of New York City residents. Non-farm jobs. There are a lot of them here. Tortilla manufacturer, beauty ambassador. One you probably won’t see, though, is “professional mountaineer.” This isn’t much of a town for Alpinists, except when they come to give their slide shows and raise funds. Still, you can’t quite say that their number here is zero. Two years ago, Jimmy Chin, a prominent climber and photographer from Jackson, Wyoming, married a New Yorker, a documentary filmmaker named Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. They had a daughter. Now Vasarhelyi lives with the child on Park Avenue, while Chin lives in Jackson, to the extent that he can be said to live anywhere. But he is so often in New York these days,…

As the diplomacy on Iran’s nuclear program entered a final phase, in Europe, I visited the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, the ideologue of Iran’s 1979 revolution, in Tehran. One of the grandest mausoleums in the world— its shimmering dome is visible for miles—was under expansion. The Imam’s bare receiving room, in his home, was preserved after he died, in 1989, in tribute to his modesty, but renovations at his tomb featured vaulted ceilings, lined with intricate mosaics, that soared stories high, and epic arches adorned with tiles in many shades of blue. In death, Khomeini’s body is in surroundings grander than the palaces of Persian kings. Editorials compared the opulence to Hollywood sets and condemned the costs at a time of poverty among the living. The shrine has a metro…

The line for lawyers and family members to get into Lefortovo prison starts to form around five in the morning. The building, on a quiet street just east of Moscow’s Third Ring Road, now officially belongs to the Ministry of Justice, but it’s still informally known as the prison of the F.S.B., a successor agency to the K.G.B. Early on June 16, 2014, one of the prisoners awaiting visitors was Boris Kolesnikov, a general who had been the deputy head of the Interior Ministry’s anticorruption department. Along with nearly a dozen other officers from his unit, he had been charged with entrapment and abuse of authority, running an “organized criminal organization” that illegally ensnared state bureaucrats in artificially provoked corruption schemes. Kolesnikov’s lawyer, Sergei Chizhikov, arrived around dawn and stood…

Ann Gallagher was listening to the wireless, cutting out a boxy short jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves, in a pale-lilac wool flecked with navy. She had cut the pattern from her own design—there was a matching kneelength pencil skirt—then pinned the paper shapes onto the length of cloth, arranging and rearranging them like pieces of a puzzle to make them fit with minimum waste. Now her scissors bit in with finality, growling against the wood surface of the table, the cloth falling cleanly away from the blades. These scissors were sacrosanct and deadly, never to be used on anything that might blunt them. Ann and her friend Kit Seaton were renting the back basement of a big house in a residential area of Bristol for their dressmaking business; because the house…

INDEPENDENCE LOST, by Kathleen DuVal (Random House). This intrepid history of the American Revolution shifts the focus from the rebellious thirteen colonies to the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi valley, where Native Americans, African slaves, and Spanish, French, and British colonials were fighting very different battles. Here, DuVal writes, the vision for the continent was one of “multiple empires and powerful Indian nations”; it was highly unlikely that the rebels would win, much less that what Thomas Jefferson termed their “empire of liberty” would later destroy an intricate array of economic alliances and territorial agreements. The rebels’ vision of independence came at the expense of others’. Its realization involved the erasure of one people and the enslavement of another, and was a disaster for women of all races. THE…

JULY 2015 WEDNESDAY 22 ND THURSDAY 23 RD FRIDAY 24 TH SATURDAY 25 TH SUNDAY 26 TH MONDAY 27 TH TUESDAY 28 TH THE SWEDISH SISTERS Klara and Johanna Söderberg, who perform as First Aid Kit, were fifteen and seventeen, respectively, when they uploaded a candid cover of Fleet Foxes’ “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” to YouTube, in 2008. The bashful, stunning performance won the teen-agers international recognition, and they have since developed as songwriters in their own right, delivering heartfelt country and folk numbers with ravishing harmonies. Their third album, “Stay Gold,” recorded late last year with members of the Omaha Symphony Orchestra, is the duo’s most mature and opulent work to date. First Aid Kit plays Central Park’s SummerStage on July 27, sharing the bill with the poppy…

Waterfight NYC When Brian De La Cruz and Joshen Abreu, who are cousins, created this annual event, four years ago, they were surprised to receive some two hundred R.S.V.P.s on Facebook. That was nothing—this year, they already have tens of thousands of potential attendees. Promoted primarily on social media with the hashtag #StayWet, the free-for-all calls for water-gun enthusiasts to load up their plastic weaponry and shoot it out on the Great Lawn of Central Park. The organizers recommend that participants bring five or more water bottles, a backpack, goggles, and trash bags to clean up after themselves. All are welcome (though it’s advised that kids under sixteen have parents with them), but water balloons are verboten. (facebook.com/WaterfightNYC. July 25.) “Tape Festival: A Celebration Of Public Radio” Thanks largely…

At the Church Street Boxing Gym, a basement grotto in lower Manhattan, goads to activity include peeling posters of Marvelous Marvin Hagler, the trainers’ “FIGHTING SOLVES EVERYTHING” shirts, and the rap soundtrack. Also, there aren’t any chairs. Jake Gyllenhaal, who worked out there twice a day for six months, said that his trainer, Terry Claybon, insisted, “Never sit down, never lean against the ropes, never cross your arms.” Surrounded by boxers who were skipping rope and hitting mitts, the thirty-fouryear-old actor wore his Nikes unlaced and had Ray-Bans hooked over the collar of his T-shirt, but he stood erect as a poplar. In “Southpaw,” which opens this week, Gyllenhaal plays a light-heavyweight champ named Billy Hope, an impulsive mauler. After his wife is shot and killed during his scuffle with…

Mitt Romney is having a slumber party this weekend at his New Hampshire compound with some very interesting guests: Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, along with their families. —The Times. I decided to ask the Republican Presidential hopefuls Chris and Marco to sleep over because I wanted to get to know them and offer some tips. Because folks are always saying to me, “Mitt, you almost became President, but not really. What happened?” Plus, I thought it might be a heckuva lot of fun to stay up late and raid the fridge and loosen our neckties. Who knows? By the end of the night, we might all have frosted bangs! I knew that Chris might be sensitive about his weight, and I didn’t…

The turkey’s strung up by one pronged foot,the cord binding it just below the stiff trinityof toes, each with its cold bent claw. My eyesare in love with it as they are in love with alldead things which cannot escape being looked at.It is there to be seen if I want to see it, as myfather was there in his black casket and could notelude our gaze. I was a child, so they askedif I wanted to see him. “Do you want to see him?”someone asked. Was it my mother? Grandmother?Some poor woman was stuck with the job.“He doesn’t look like himself,” whoever it wasadded. “They did something strange with his mouth.”As I write this a large moth flutters againstthe window. It presses its fat thorax to the glass.“No,” I…

The heavily hyped appearance of Harper Lee’s new or very old, or, anyway, indistinctly dated, novel, “Go Set a Watchman” (HarperCollins), reflects an ambitious publishing venture— complete with slow, striptease-style press leaks and first chapters and excited prepublication surmise—in which all the other apparatus of literature, reviewers included, is expected to serve, and has. Not since Hemingway’s estate sent down seemingly completed novels from on high, long after the author’s death, has a publisher gone about so coolly exploiting a much loved name with a product of such mysterious provenance. It may well be that what the procurers of the text have said about it—that it is an earlier novel set in the world of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” only recently discovered, and published with the author’s enthusiastic assent—is so.…