Innholdsfortegnelse for Sep-28-15 i The New Yorker

The actress Mamie Gummer spent a recent morning in midtown, in a bright, bare room in the middle of which was a desk, a bucket of ice, and the virtual-reality apparatus necessary to throw balls at cartoon otters seen standing on their hind legs in a landscape of mountains, woodland, and caves filled with glowing green crystals. Gummer was wearing jeans torn at the knee, and had her hair tied up, in the businesslike style adopted by her mother, Meryl Streep, when collecting awards. Gummer and a dozen others involved in the Roundabout Theatre’s production of “Ugly Lies the Bone,” a new play, were meeting for the first time, and the dominant tone was one of measured courtesy—as at a continuing-education class, or a funeral, except for the fact that…

History was in open rebellion in Dumbo the other day. Cars had fins, and men wore boxy suits. Pacing up and down the block was a tall septuagenarian named Lenny Shiller, from Midwood, Brooklyn. He was on the set of Steven Spielberg’s new movie, “Bridge of Spies”—about a U.S.-Soviet prisoner swap at the height of the Cold War. “There’s a lot of waiting around on movies,” he said. “It causes agita.” Shiller held a flip phone to his ear and wore greasestained bluejeans and a tattered hat. “You see this jacket and cap?” he said. “All authentic stuff. I even have a period hearing aid!” A few weeks earlier, Shiller had received a call: Spielberg needed “period cars,” and one vehicle in particular—a six-ton evergreen-colored 1947 International KB-6 soda truck.…

I often write in my diary the obsolete poem of selfwith my obsolescent pen and ink.So I throw a poem for a lark, like my hat,off the Brooklyn Bridge, where Hart Crane, bless him,“dumped the ashes of his dad in a condom,”I was told.I watch my hat glide toward the Atlantic,wait for a miraculous rescue—but my poem-hat alights, drifts, sinks downamong the bottom feeders,the fluke, crab, catfish in sewageof the East River, still musical, distantly relatedto the North Sea. I hope my drowned hatshelters blind, half-dead newbornsthat lip the taste of my sweatband,the taste of me their first breakfastof undigested unleavened waste.The River Styx has clean water where Elijahswims with the Angels Gabriel and Raphael.So the poem of self gone,poetry must face, may two-face,must honor the language, point out to…

Neutrality is a privilege. The rocks we throwourselves onto are a privilege. It is hard to hatecreation on the first day of warmth, but I am vigilantand a sac still fills up my mother and a sac fills upmy father and a sac deflates my grandmotherand I have no sense of sac. Tory Dent describesher slow dying as “sham orgasms” and I’m thinkingof expansion, how I read “HIV, Mon Amour” first in the sun on a dayin May with my beach-body and my coffee to stay.I know what I’m doing with this poem is a shamthe way I knew I knew my vivacious privilegewas a portrait of a bad institution, capitalism fingeredmy throat with its delicious incentives of eatand I did eat because I had touched love and love knew…

TRUMP’S SUPPORTERS I read the Evan Osnos piece about Donald Trump and his white-nationalist fans with interest (“The Fearful and the Frustrated,” August 31st). It is natural to deplore Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric as he has emerged as a surprise Republican front-runner in the 2016 Presidential race. But clearly America’s long-standing racial orthodoxy, premised on a white majority’s overdue acknowledgment of non-white disadvantage, is gradually losing its legitimacy. The demographics of the United States are shifting, and the Trump supporters interviewed by Osnos were responding to this with dread and hostility. They may be angry and afraid, but they don’t seem merely ignorant; Trump’s candidacy may be an outrage, but the tensions it reveals cannot be wished away. Eventually, even the most moderate politicians will be obliged to address the…

79-81 Macdougal St. (212-982-5275) When the original Caffé Dante opened on Macdougal Street, in 1915, neighborhood Italians anointed it their second home. In the seventies, sidewalk tables faced Bob Dylan’s front door. So when the beloved café closed this spring, and the sprightly Australian restaurateur Linden Pride promised a replacement with “aquatic delights” and “kicked-up” cocktails, such as a Pimm’s cup “garnished extravagantly with ‘salad,’ ” he became the neighborhood’s de-facto villain. But on a recent evening at the revamped Dante, Pride was embraced by newcomers and locals alike. A woman in her sixties presented him with a decades-old photo of herself waitressing in the café. Nearby, a group of young professionals raced to order Negroni Coffee Swizzles— “tastes like tobacco,” one said admiringly—before the Negroni happy hour ended. “It…

On a balmy Sunday not long ago, Sewall Hodges stood on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, paintbrush in hand, regarding a garbage can. It was rusted, its black paint was chipped, and it had been marked by several dogs. “I could do the top in green and the rest in black, or I could alternate green and black every other bar,” he said. He wore sneakers and work gloves, and carried a canvas bag filled with brushes and cans of paint. “Or I could throw in some red. I’m not van Gogh over here, but it’s fun to get creative.” He approached a woman sitting on a nearby bench and solicited her opinion. “I’d go with all black,” she said. “I’m pretty simple.” “I’m a very complex guy,” Hodges said. “You…

In the winter of 2008, Barack Obama was in no way guaranteed the African- American vote in the Democratic primaries. He had split the opening contests, Iowa and New Hampshire, with Hillary Clinton, and had narrowly won more delegates in Nevada, yet the black voters of South Carolina, particularly the middle-aged and graying churchgoers who come out to the polls in great numbers, were torn. At first, some knew so little about him that they were not sure he was black. Others, following the lead of wellknown figures in the old civil-rights establishment, felt warmly toward the Clintons and saw no reason to break with them. There was also a more visceral concern: many African- American voters told Obama’s volunteers in South Carolina that they could not shake the memory…

Mrs. Quantrill lived in a beautiful old Prairie-style house built in the twenties, which she had restored to its original elegance with Mr. Quantrill, a patent attorney attached to Montana’s burgeoning natural-gas industry. Mrs. Quantrill had raised all kinds of hell getting the house listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The Quantrills were known for their philanthropy and for elegant parties, featuring such high jinks as horses in the living room and mock gunfights on the lawn. Hereditary landowners who no longer lived on their land, they plied it for energy leases. They hung on to their cattle brands long after the last cow had gone down the road, beautiful single-iron brands from territorial days. When their son, Spencer, inherited the house many years later, he demolished it…

BEST BOY, by Eli Gottlieb (Liveright). Todd, a middle-aged autistic resident of Payton LivingCenter, and the narrator of this novel, describes the disturbances that ensue after an employee starts using him in a nefarious scheme. He dreams of living with his brother’s family, whose carefully managed dynamics he upsets in ways he scarcely understands. The novel pokes gentle fun at well-meaning psychobabble, and Todd’s voice is arresting: the employee looks “like I’d just kicked dirt onto the white cake of his life.” Discussions of autism-spectrum disorder sometimes stick out a little, but the book’s empathy is bracing: people with ASD “can have children and suits and wear watches while flying on planes. . . . Maybe they’re even marrying you.” THE PRIZE, by Jill Bialosky (Counterpoint). This sharp-eyed novel…

SEPTEMBER 2015 WEDNES DAY 23 RD THURS DAY 24TH FRI DAY 25TH SATUR DAY 26TH SUN DAY 27TH MON DAY 28TH TUES DAY 29TH IN 1950, ERNEST HEMINGWAY told Lillian Ross, in a Profile for this magazine, “I learned to write by looking at paintings in the Luxembourg Museum in Paris.” (Never mind that he published his first short story when he was in high school.) Now a museum is looking at him. On Sept. 25, the Morgan Library opens “Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars,” an in-depth assessment of a key period in the writer’s development, from 1918, when, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Red Cross and was wounded in Italy, through his years in Paris, Key West, and Havana, to his Second World War reportage.…

The Hills on Governors Island New plans for the centerpiece of the park on Governors Island feature four man-made hills assembled atop the rubble of buildings left over from the island’s days as a Coast Guard base. Construction won’t be completed until 2017, but the Hills will be open for a preview on Sept. 26-27. This is the first time the site has been accessible to the public and the first opportunity to see the Hills at their full height of seventy feet—offering an entirely new view of the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan. (govisland.com.) World Maker Faire The maker movement embraces a wide swath of innovators, inventors, and tinkerers who, in the face of modern convenience, have continued the tradition of hands-on crafting while often incorporating new…

On a recent Monday morning, Ruth Reichl, the sixty-seven-year-old food writer and adoptive hippie mom to scores of the gastronomically inclined, stood at the corner of Grand and Mott, prying open a plastic container of white mush. “This old lady over there had doufu hua in this big pot!” she said. “It’s hot tofu with sweet sauce. It’s, like, one of the best things you can buy in this city for a dollar and a half.” She took a couple of rapturous bites, then offered it to a new acquaintance—“We just have one spoon, you don’t have anything wrong with you, do you?” The evening before, Reichl had driven in from Spencertown, upstate, where she and her husband, Michael, have decamped while their son, Nick, occupies their Upper West Side…

Primo Levi did not consider it heroic to have survived eleven months in Auschwitz. Like other witnesses of the concentration camps, he lamented that the best had perished and the worst had survived. But we who have survived relatively little find it hard to believe him. How could it be anything but heroic to have entered Hell and not been swallowed up? To have witnessed it with such delicate lucidity, such reserves of irony and even equanimity? Our incomprehension and our admiration combine to simplify the writer into a needily sincere amalgam: hero, saint, witness, redeemer. Thus his account of life in Auschwitz, “If This Is a Man” (1947), whose title is deliberately tentative and tremulous, was rewrapped, by his American publisher, in the heartier, how-to-ish banner “Survival in Ausch…

Last May, George Stephanopoulos disclosed that, while working at ABC News, he had donated seventy-five thousand dollars to the Clinton Foundation, headed by his former boss. For a couple of news cycles, political operatives and journalists argued about whatever line might have been crossed, furrowing their brows over the well-established migratory patterns of their two species. While a few individuals, like David Gergen, move between the professions in a sort of commute, more frequently a short career in politics now leads to a longer, permanent one on television, as with Tim Russert and Chris Matthews and Stephanopoulos himself. Rarer—if one discounts newspeople who become Presidential press secretaries (Pierre Salinger, Tony Snow)—are those who depart journalism for the top inner precincts of the political realm they used to cover. In his…