Innholdsfortegnelse for Sep-14-15 i The New Yorker

Affordable Art Fair In 1999, the gallerist Will Ramsay shone a light on local up-and-coming artists with the first Affordable Art Fair, in London. Since then, the fair has grown to sixteen editions in ten countries. All art on offer costs between a hundred dollars and ten thousand dollars, which, compared to the recent Picasso painting that sold at Christie’s for $179.4 million, is pretty true to the fair’s name. Whereas other major fairs can be stuffy and intimidating to first-time buyers, this gathering, which includes more than seventy galleries from all over the world exhibiting works by thousands of artists, is designed for neophytes. A Web site includes tips for the uninitiated, including poetic advice from the German philosopher Schopenhauer: “Treat a work of art like a prince.…

Four weeks before Oliver Sacks died, I received a letter from him. In our all too brief correspondence, he never e-mailed. He wrote beautiful, longhand letters on heavy, cream-colored stationery with a blue fountain pen, the script slanting to the left. They were always peppered with cross-outs and insertions that gave a glimpse of his overflowing mind. “I’m writing a piece on EYES—all sorts, from those of jellyfish and scallops and jumping spiders and octopi to our (vertebrate) eyes,” he reported. “I am also trying to write something about the (deadly) effects of ‘socialmedia’ when they absorb people, to the exclusion of everything else, throughout their waking hours.” He told of his delight in coming upon a century-old E. M. Forster short story called “The Machine Stops.” “Do you know…

As we rode into the village we came upon a convergence of old customs: there was an empty house and the door stood wide open. The men from the village lugged a cupboard into the house. The men from the village hauled a table into the house. The men from the village heaved a bed into the house. And the women of the village bore dishes and plates and glasses and something to make the bed habitable into the house. Then the men pushed a son inside. Learn to light a fire, they said, learn to put out a fire, they said, we’re latching the shutters. Then the women pushed a daughter inside. Learn to be hot, they said, learn to be cold, they said, we’re barricading the door. (Translated,…

In 2009, a British television producer named Erika Mitchell began writing fiction inspired by “Twilight.” Initially written under the pseudonym Snowqueens Icedragon, her stories, which she first published on the Web site FanFiction, are erotic thrillers about a sadomasochistic romance between a graduating college student and a powerful businessman. Mitchell wrote them almost like daydream diaries. “I can’t own people’s reaction to the books,” she has said. When the first installment was published, in 2011, with the title “Fifty Shades of Grey,” it quickly became one of the best-selling books in history. Christian Grey, the businessman, became a household name, bringing sexual deviance to the pulp-fiction-reading masses. The same year, a spiritual ally of Grey’s emerged in the world of R. & B. Abel Tesfaye, the Canadian singer known as…

THE SHOTS What is striking to me about Jake Halpern’s Profile of Darren Wilson is that the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed teen-ager, by a cop who fired ten shots into the street, is somehow considered by the Ferguson Police Department, the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney, and the Justice Department to be regrettable yet unpunishable (“The Cop,” August 10th & 17th). My late father, a tough lawenforcement officer on the piers in New York City, shot one person in his more than fifty years of service: an armed robber whom he hit in the leg during a running gun fight. By training and by temperament, he told me, he never drew his gun unless he intended to shoot. Violence, sometimes even as he fought for his life,…

For a time, Bruckner Boulevard, in the South Bronx, was known mostly for being a wrong turn off the Triborough Bridge in “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” These days, it’s the pulsing heart of the scene known as SoBro. At the Mott Haven Bar and Grill, at the end of Bruckner, you can sit at a marble bar top and watch competitive arm wrestling on a screen while listening to nineties dance hits. What’s good to drink? “Mott Haven and the Bronx,” says Javie, the hoop-eared master of ceremonies, naming two beers on tap. Ask him nicely and he’ll muddle up a Jameson mojito, which tastes a little like a mojito, but mostly like Jameson. Fridays are packed with Bronx politicians, local business folk, and teachers. “Hipsters came here for…

Bernie Sanders recently complained when a Times Magazine reporter asked him about his hair. “When the media worries about what Hillary’s hair looks like or what my hair looks like,” he said, “that’s a real problem.” Americans love to talk about hairdos. There are at least six hair-themed reality shows airing right now, including “Shear Genius” (“Hell Breaks Loose Over Hedge Clippers”), “Hair Battle Spectacular” (“The Final Hairdown”), and “Cutting It: In the ATL” (“The Tale of Two Weaves”). “Hair is a language,” Penny Howell Jolly, a professor of art history at Skidmore, wrote in a 2010 Times piece, comparing the coiffures of U.S. Presidents. “It announces our gender, class and even our politics.” A Baltimore hairdresser named Janet Stephens has taken the national preoccupation farther—certainly farther back—than anyone. Stephens…

She didn’t know what had possessed her to participate in such a thing. A little boy had been run over by a sheriff’s deputy, and there was a memorial fundraiser at the Barbed Wire, a biker bar in a somewhat alarming part of town, and Ruth had gone and bought a beer and put thirty dollars into an empty terrarium, for funeral expenses. The place was loud and crowded, and she was given a plate with a tamale on it. Outside, someone had brought a pony and was providing pony rides for the dead boy’s friends. No one spoke to her directly, but she learned that the boy’s name was Hector and that his father was suing the sheriff’s department. Good, Ruth thought. But Hector’s death, it seemed, was Hector’s…

Awful days, like childhood summers, flow together in a vague, compounding blur. Could your bad luck have begun on Monday, when a jumbo bottle of shampoo fell on your foot? Or were you fine until Tuesday, when your charming dinner partner—you were on a promising second date—made an excuse and bailed after the appetizers? Wednesday, fumbling to take an ill-timed call from your impatient boss, you dropped your smartphone in the toilet. By the time you got it fixed, on Thursday, you were quarrelling with your best friend, who did not appreciate your real talk on the subject of her fiancé. Now it’s Friday, and you’re due to give a terrifying presentation in three hours. Ragged and frayed, you leave the office for a cup of coffee and are served…

SEPTEMBER 2015 WEDNESDAY 9TH THURSDAY 10TH FRIDAY 11TH SATURDAY 12TH SUNDAY 13TH MONDAY 14TH TUESDAY 15TH AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME that Steve Reich and Philip Glass were laying the foundation for American minimalism by studying African and Asian music, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt was delving into the mysteries of medieval European music and coming up with something equally fresh. The results of that inquiry— works of profound melancholy, yet teeming with life—have enthralled the world. The Metropolitan Museum opens its performance season on Sept. 11 at the Temple of Dendur with an eightieth-birthday tribute to the composer that features members of the New Juilliard Ensemble as well as the New York City Ballet principal dancers Amar Ramasar and Rebecca Krohn, who will physicalize the hard-won serenity of…

As Leslye Headland boarded the Circle Line for the Statue of Liberty, she cocked her head at the guide’s boomingly folksy welcome. “It’s Garrison Keillor!” she cried, because it clearly wasn’t. The thirty-four-yearold writer-director wore a jumper and a sweatshirt whose sleeves half covered the tattoos on her forearms: “How Would Lubitsch Do It?,” Billy Wilder’s memo to himself to think like his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch, and “The Only Winning Move Is Not to Play,” from “WarGames.” She also has “Redrum” on her back, from Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” Movies are her compass points. “My kids”—as yet hypothetical—“ will be totally hating my tattoos; that whole generation will be grossed out,” she said. “But you’re going to fuck up your kids no matter what, so why not do it with…

At Time in the nineteen-fifties, the entry-level job for writers was a column called Miscellany. Filled with one-sentence oddities culled from newspapers and the wire services, Miscellany ran down its third of a page like a ladder, each wee story with its own title— traditionally, and almost invariably, a pun. Writers did not long endure there, and were not meant to, but just after I showed up a hiring freeze shut the door behind me, and I wrote Miscellany for a year and a half. That came to roughly a thousand one-sentence stories, a thousand puns. I am going to illustrate this with one, and only one, example. A person riding a bicycle on a street in Detroit fell asleep at the handlebars. My title was “Two Tired.” If a…

One day last fall, Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, appeared on “Meet the Press” to talk about the tense relationship between many African-American communities and the police departments charged with protecting them. In Ferguson, Missouri, the governor had declared a state of emergency as a grand jury considered whether to indict Darren Wilson, the white officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American. (In the end, Wilson was not indicted.) Chuck Todd, the host, asked about white officers patrolling African-American neighborhoods, but Giuliani wanted to talk about crime, not punishment. “I find it very disappointing that you’re not discussing the fact that ninety-three per cent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks,” he said, adding, “It is the reason for the heavy police…

BRIEF LOVES THAT LIVE FOREVER, by Andreï Makine, translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan (Graywolf). This elegant, powerful novel—about love in Brezhnev-era Russia— unfolds in a series of “insistent and elusive” encounters recalled by the narrator, a middle-aged man who grew up in a Soviet orphanage and realizes that the Communist utopia is a “failed project.” Like Proust, he pursues the “fleeting paradise” found in unexpected moments of tenderness. But the constraints on life in a totalitarian state linger around the edges of the novel: an early love goes unconsummated because hotels won’t accept unmarried couples; the narrator bristles at “officialdom,” censorship, and restrictions on travel. “Love is in essence subversive,” he recognizes, but he is a reluctant dissident. THE SUNLIT NIGHT, by Rebecca Dinerstein (Bloomsbury). This darkly…