Innholdsfortegnelse for December 12, 2016 i The New Yorker

Robin Wright (“After the Islamic State,” p. 30), a joint fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has been covering the Middle East since 1973. Larissa MacFarquhar (“Out and Up,” p. 54), a staff writer, is the author of “Strangers Drowning,” which is out in paperback. Jennifer Gonnerman (“Bronx Tale,” p. 36) became a staff writer in 2015. She received the 2016 Front Page Award for Journalist of the Year from the Newswomen’s Club of New York. George Booth (Sketchbook, p. 59) has been a New Yorker cartoonist since the nineteen-sixties. “About Dogs” is one of his many books. Alexis Okeowo (“The Away Team,” p. 42) is a staff writer and a fellow at New America. Louis Menand (A Critic…

EARLY IN 2010, Cheryl Strayed got an e-mail from an acquaintance, Steve Almond, who wrote an advice column—Dear Sugar—for the literary Web site The Rumpus. Strayed was living in Portland with her husband and their two preschoolers, and had just turned in the first draft of her memoir, “Wild.” She’d written Sugar a fan letter, not knowing that it was Almond. He asked if she was interested in taking over the column. “He said all the reasons I shouldn’t do it,” Strayed recalled the other day. “ ‘It doesn’t pay, nobody’s reading it.’ And I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ ” Strayed’s approach was unconventional. She would answer each question with a winding personal anecdote— about her divorce, about her abusive grandfather. “It was very much the Age of Snark in…

IT IS CERTAINLY possible to view “Exhibitionism,” the travelling show of Rolling Stones artifacts, costumes, and memorabilia which recently opened in the West Village, as yet another attempt by the group—whose most famous song is a stinging critique of consumerism— to wring every last dollar out of that big, lascivious tongue. (Tickets are thirty-five fifty; V.I.P. treatment is seventy-six fifty.) But for the true Stones fan “Exhibitionism” also gives satisfaction, and a good deal of it comes from the immersive environments created by the show’s curator, Ileen Gallagher. A few days before the show opened, Gallagher, wearing a leather motorcycle jacket, was wandering through the event space looking for somewhere to sit. “I know just the place!” she declared. Seventeen thousand square feet have been given over to “Exhibitionism,” which…

Ritchie Torres, the youngest elected official in New York City, grew up in a small apartment in Throggs Neck Houses, a public-housing project in the East Bronx, with his mother, his sister, and his twin brother. The complex is isolated—the closest subway station is a forty-minute walk away—so Torres and his friends found ways to entertain themselves. They staged W.W.E.-style wrestling shows on the playground, with fake blood, and Torres in the role of the Rock. His grandparents, who lived in a building nearby, had been among the project’s original residents, moving in soon after it opened, in 1953. In the summer, his grandfather sat on a bench in front of his building, spraying kids with a hose, while his grandmother gave out icies from her third-floor window, putting…

Let us pause. If you could be saved then yes, ok. If you could be contained in life then yes.But diligent, foolish, I count off the dates—your days, your breaths—as if this mistrust of the natural were not enough—looking for the starting point—one of these will be your last word—what will we have just said when you stop—what will the phrase be which is interrupted by your final breath—did they warn us about this freedom—that there are no regulations—that we do not run out of patience, we run out of time—they wrench out the life, just like that—everything is innard and then it is not—that one day you are no longer at home here—also that there is no room left, your room runs out—the next move is no move—who told…

“I LIKE MUSIC a ton, but the problem is I like weird stuff,” Donald Glover said during a filmed standup-comedy performance in 2011. “I like weird, crazy music. Weird people making music.” He went on, repeating the word “weird.” “But, as an adult, we’re not really allowed to be weird anymore,” he said. “The older you get, the less you can take weird stuff.” Glover, the restless polymath who launched his career as a writer on the TV show “30 Rock” and eventually made a fitful migration to the world of hip-hop, was expressing a timeworn sentiment that falls into the same category as “I don’t even own a television.” It was a posture that looked like self-deprecation but was meant to signal taste. Since then, Glover’s assessment of our…

Contrary to what, Googling around, you might assume, obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment. “There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt.” Those sentences are from the opening pages of Henry Miller’s first novel, “Tropic of Cancer,” which was published in France in 1934. Are they obscene? It took thirty years, but American courts eventually decided that they are not, and therefore the book they appear in cannot be banned. To get to that result, judges had to ignore the usual understanding of “obscene”—most people probably think that if “cunt” isn’t obscene, what is?—and invent a new definition for constitutional purposes. But the decision changed the way books, and, soon afterward, movies and music, are created,…

AFTERSHOCKS That was quite an assemblage of articulate voices you brought together to respond to Trump’s election (“Aftermath,” November 21st). None of the sixteen writers, however, represented the perspective of either an active- duty service member or a veteran. Combined, we number more than twentyone million, nearly ninety-four per cent of us veterans. Many of us are concerned about a Trump Presidency, which will directly affect our benefits and our health care. We worry, too, about the threat of even more sabrerattling and war waging, the burden of which will be borne by our children and grandchildren. Our nation has had other Commanders- in-Chief who have not served in the military. But none of them, I daresay, invoked five draft deferments during a war (Vietnam), when each and every…

THIS YEAR IS the twenty-fifth anniversary of “The Hard Nut,” Mark Morris’s version of “The Nutcracker.” (It plays at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House Dec. 10-11 and Dec. 14-18.) In that quarter century, almost all the original 1991 cast members have gone on to other jobs, other lives, or at least other roles in “The Hard Nut.” (Morris, originally the party guest who kept getting his leg humped by the Stahlbaums’ hormonal teen-age daughter, Louise, is now Dr. Stahlbaum.) Only one person from the starting lineup remains in place, and appropriately—since that character seems, from the curtain-call decibels, to be the most beloved—it is the Stahlbaum family maid, played, in drag, by Kraig Patterson. There she still stands, in her little French maid’s outfit, plus black point shoes, on…

On a recent night at the door to Otto’s Shrunken Head, the bouncer’s lip piercing dangled into his snow-white beard, and he told a story: the name of the bar, he thinks, has something to do with a sailor who got lost at sea and went mad. Just past him, the fourteen-year-old establishment feels like an island haven for odd souls, with a dark, submarine air. The teal ceiling is crowded with paper lanterns and colored lights made from taxidermied puffer fish; hanging just above the front door is a yellow surfboard with a skeleton clinging to it, bony limbs locked around the board for better purchase. One Thursday, the d.j. Pat Pervert played punk’s greatest hits, and the murmurs of patrons in black leather jackets sank beneath the throbbing…

ALAN DERSHOWITZ, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and a prolific author, has defended many unpopular clients: O. J. Simpson; neo-Nazis in Skokie, Illinois; Claus von Bülow; Jeffrey Epstein. It can sometimes seem that, whenever there is a public controversy, Dershowitz appears on TV explaining, with what he would call nuance and his critics would call cunning, why both sides are wrong. So it wasn’t surprising to see him surface recently amid the controversy surrounding Donald Trump’s choice of Steve Bannon to be his chief White House strategist. Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, has implied that Asian-born C.E.O.s threaten American “civic society”; he was accused, by an ex-wife, of calling Jewish children “whiny brats.” But Bannon also seems to have pro-Israel, pro-Likud views. So, while his appointment…

LAST MAY, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, the second most powerful leader in the Islamic State, hinted that the caliphate was crumbling. “Whoever thinks that we fight to protect some land or some authority, or that victory is measured thereby, has strayed far from the truth,” he said, in a long audio message that was released to fellow-jihadis. He also suggested a shift in strategy. “It is the same— whether Allah blesses us with consolidation or we move into the bare, open desert, displaced and pursued.” Adnani, a thirty-nine-year-old Syrian, ran the organization’s propaganda shop and a secret foreign-operations unit that recruited, trained, and assigned élite forces to the toughest missions. He orchestrated the terror attacks at the Bataclan theatre, in Paris, last year, and at the Brussels airport, in March.…

I A small bird cries could-be, could-be, above my head, mousy little thing,one of those drab gray birds in this dry land, December sun streamingin low, December rain jostling the arroyo.Could-be, could-be calls Drab Gray.The state of the universe, physicists say, is a cosmologicalrelic—a glass ark with hammered-gold seams, pip trapped inside, god’sknucklebone, nanosecond high-energy outward burst—kaboom!—and space &lls up with proto-stars. I crouch at the edge of the arroyo.Wind strokes my hand with its map of rivers.O helium, lithium, hydrogen, you comfort me, O carbon, you are my'esh and bone. II Here on the river’s verge, I could be busy for months without changing my place, simplyleaning a bit more to right or left. So says Cézanne. And now the sun leanswest like Cézanne, striking a rippling mirror of…

THE FIRST DAY of his first semester at the University of California, Berkeley, Danny Murillo walked into the Cesar Chavez building and saw a white man with tattoos on his arms. Something about the man felt familiar. He could tell from the tattoos that the man was, like him, from Los Angeles, and he was around his own age, mid- thirties, but it was something else that he recognized. He went up to the man and said, “Damn, I feel old around all these youngsters.” The man said, “Yeah, me, too.” Murillo said, “I haven’t been in school for a long time.” The man said, “Yeah, me, too.” Murillo said, “I was on vacation.” The man said, “Yeah, me, too.” Murillo said, “I was in the Pelican Bay SHU.” The…

IN THE EARLY nineteen-sixties, when the Australian writer Helen Garner was a student at the University of Melbourne, she had a brief relationship with a twenty-four-year-old man who was her tutor. With characteristic briskness, she tells us that she learned two things from him: “Firstly, to start an essay without bullshit preamble, and secondly, that betrayal is part of life.” She continues, “I value it as part of my store of experience—part of what I am and how I have learnt to understand the world.” A writing lesson and a life lesson: Garner’s work as a journalist and a novelist constantly insists on the connection between writing about life and comprehending it; to try to do both responsibly and honestly—without bull shit preamble, or, for that matter, bullshit amble—is…

FOR MOST OF the twentieth century, Los Angeles was the only American metropolis without a full-fledged opera house. This turned out to be no bad thing for the city’s spirited, unpredictable modern scene. In bygone days, the moneyed classes of L.A. showed little interest in parading their finery in opera boxes, as the Morgans and the Vanderbilts had done at the Met, in New York. The all-powerful Chandler family, which owned the Los Angeles Times and controlled vast tracts of real estate, threw its weight behind the L.A. Philharmonic, which now has an annual budget of a hundred and twenty-three million dollars and remains, by far, the wealthiest classical-music organization in Southern California. On the other hand, when opera finally took root, with the founding of L.A. Opera, in…

Andrew Bird whistles well enough to consider the skill an instrument, implying that words can get in the way. “You used to be so willfully obtuse, or is the word ‘abstruse?’ ” he asks on the title track to his latest album, “Are You Serious.” “Semantics like a noose, get out your dictionary.” Bird, who performs at Carnegie Hall on Dec. !", has excelled at such skull-chipping lines throughout his twenty-year career. And a lifetime of violin playing has trained his ear for melodies that ground his lyrics and jostle them into flight. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera Plácido Domingo more or less gets carte blanche when it comes to choosing his roles at the Met, and this season the beloved Spanish tenor continues his vocal descent into baritone…

The Glass Room This interactive exhibit looks like just another shiny retail space from the outside, but step in and you’ll find an investigation of our digital footprint and how it might manifest in the physical world. On display are satirical works concerned with Web privacy and security, including an eight-book directory of real passwords gathered from a leak at a major online company, facial-recognition software that scans church pews to take attendance, and an “inGenious” bar, where visitors can detox their data. The space hosts daily talks and tours: highlights this week include discussions about how the Web works, tips for avoiding an increasingly omnipotent Google and its many services, and tricks for mobile-phone security that may be hidden in plain sight. (201 Mulberry St.theglassroomnyc.org. Through Dec. 14.)…

A BLACK MERCEDES MINIVAN stopped in front of the H&M on Eightysixth Street, near Lexington Avenue, on a recent Saturday morning. Three youngish married couples got in. Their destination: the mysterious and occasionally scary territory known as the suburbs of Westchester. “This is our luxury tour,” Zach Harrison said, as the van merged onto the F.D.R. Drive and then sped over to the Hutchinson River Parkway. Harrison, an attorney who resembles Stephen Colbert, and his wife, Heather, a former TV news reporter who talks in rapid-fire bursts, co-founded Platinum Drive Realty. The company’s mission is to convince millennials that the suburbs have soul. The Harrisons know the territory. (Their Web site says, “We grew up here. We live here. We sell homes here.”) Lately, the financial news has been helping…

THE POET Mark McCain received an e-mail, which had been sent to numerous American poets, inviting him to sign a “poetition” requesting that President Barack H. Obama pardon Edward Snowden. The request took the form of a poem written by Merrill Jensen, whom Mark knew to be twenty-eight years old, a full nine years his junior. The poempetition rhymed “Snowden” with “pardon.” And “pardon” with “Rose Garden.” And “Rose Garden” with “nation.” And “nation” with “Eden.” It rhymed— or, as Mark preferred to put it, it echoed—“Putin” and “boot in” and “Clinton” and “no disputing.” “Russia” echoed “U.S.A.”; and “U.S.A.” “Thoreau”; and “Thoreau” “hero.” Mark forwarded the e-mail to the poet E. W. West. He wrote: Am I crazy to find this enraging? Within seconds Liz wrote back: No. They…

North Korea’s Hidden Revolution, by Jieun Baek (Yale). This account of North Korean life focusses on the porous nature of the regime’s information infrastructure, showing a country that isn’t quite as closed off as we assume. Drawing on interviews with dozens of defectors, Baek asserts that more than half the country’s adults make money in private markets (selling everything from rice to perms), and keep up with shifts in demand via foreign radio broadcasts and South Korean TV programs that are smuggled in, sometimes by balloon. Though punishments for disseminating foreign media are extreme, many defectors estimate that up to eighty per cent of the people they know have access to foreign media, which can be an impetus to defection. Baek draws the guardedly hopeful conclusion that even the…