Innholdsfortegnelse for November 28, 2016 i The New Yorker

Jelani Cobb (Comment, p. 31) teaches in the journalism program at Columbia. He has been writing for the magazine since 2013. Nicola Twilley (“Cold Remedy,” p. 36), a writer for newyorker.com, is the author of the blog Edible Geography and a co-host of the podcast Gastropod. Patricia Lockwood ( “Quote Marks,” p. 42) is the author of the poetry collection “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.” Her memoir, “Priestdaddy,” will be published in the spring. Daniel Zalewski (“The Factory of Fakes,” p. 66) is the magazine’s features director. Amanda Petrusich (Pop Music, p. 82) writes for newyorker.com and is the author of “Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records.” Hilton Als (The Theatre, p. 94), The New Yorker ’s theatre critic, is an…

Thanksgiving Parade Balloon Inflation For a behind-the-scenes look at the biggest Thanksgiving celebration in the country, visit Macy’s Giant Balloon Inflation on the afternoon before Thanksgiving, when seventeen iconic parade staples and all-new additions will bob to life. Arrive early to beat the crowds: most balloons have taken shape by five, and they’re inflated and ready to march by nine, held to the concrete by hundreds of feet of netting. It’s the best pre-party for the ninetieth annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, on Nov. 24, which will draw more than eight thousand participants, with performances by Miranda Lambert and Sting, as well as from Broadway’s “The Color Purple,” “On Your Feet!,” and “School of Rock.” (American Museum of Natural History, 79th St. at Columbus Ave. Nov. 23 at 3.)…

LAST WEEK, Francesca Comencini— the director of fourteen films, a mother of three children, and a political organizer—woke up in her apartment in Rome to the news that Donald J. Trump would be the next President of the United States. “We all felt this American loss as a personal loss, as women,” Comencini said the day after the election. “But this is wrong! We must not allow this feeling to grow inside us. It’s in the strength of women that this kind of leader can find resistance.” Comencini was speaking from experience. In 2011, with her sister, Cristina, she masterminded a massive feminist manifestazione protesting the former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a series of impassioned demonstrations that stretched through cities and villages all across Italy. Comencini pointed out that Trump…

When the men arrived, finally, to haul the big table away, I ran my hand down the battered length of it, as if along the flank of some exhausted workhorse, overcome by a sudden rush of absurd remorse. I’d never loved it, being as it was first too shabby, then too grand for the way we lived (or should have lived, at least). Six chairs, green velvet pressed flat, two more with sculpted rests broad enough for a king’s muscled forearm (growing dusty in the basement, season upon season). Two carved leaves should unexpected guests drop by, and these still gleamed with polish though the tabletop itself was bleached and scarred: ruthless curator of memory. When the younger man went to fetch a blanket I bent and laid my cheek…

IN 1999, AT the age of twenty-eight, Charlie Brooker, the British satirist who is now a television auteur, was at a low ebb. He’d spent most of his twenties freelancing for PC Zone, a little-read gaming magazine, where he was able to indulge his obscene and misanthropic sense of humor. Among other items, he contributed a regular comic strip about video-game culture, “Cyber twats,” and a back-page column, “Sick Notes,” in which he would solicit hate mail from subscribers and respond in kind. But Brooker, a gaming addict who’d left Westminster University without a degree, was feeling directionless. At parties, it was an ordeal to explain how he earned a living. “They’d look at you like you’d said, ‘I do coloring in,’ ” he once told a reporter. “ ‘I’ve…

TRUMP’S VOTERS Larissa MacFarquhar’s report from West Virginia created one of the clearest portraits of Trump’s base that I’ve encountered to date (“Trumptown,” October 10th). MacFarquhar succeeds in lifting these voters out of mere caricature, and expresses with nuance the issues at stake for many of the Americans who voted for Trump. Not all Trump voters are bigots and racists; attempting to understand the complicated facts of other voters’ political motives will be important in order to facilitate public dialogue as people process the outcome of a deeply divisive election. This dialogue is one of the media’s central responsibilities. I found it ironic that Douglas McGrath’s “The Pences Visit Manhattan,” a parody of the Midwestern conservative, appeared in the same issue. Though I thought the piece was quite funny,…

SCOTT LOBAIDO, THE most famous person in Staten Island, walked into Da Noi restaurant last week, victorious. Taking a corner table, the artist known for his gigantic paintings of the American flag talked almost non-stop to the same visitor who had sat with him two months ago, in the same place but in a previous world. Back then, a giant Donald Trump-promoting “T,” which LoBaido had erected on a friend’s lawn, had been torched, and LoBaido rebuilt it bigger, and Trump spoke to him on the phone, and news organizations all over the world picked up the story. Now he was more paint-spattered, wired, and gesticulatory than ever. “Since the election, I haven’t stopped going for a second,” he said. “On Election Night, I was watching the results with about…

“I AM THE KING of debt. I love debt,” Donald Trump said in the heat of the campaign. He was, for once, telling the truth: Trump’s business career was built on borrowing piles of money that he then spent with careless abandon. When he opened the Taj Mahal, in Atlantic City, in 1990, it was the biggest and most expensive casino ever built; he called it “the eighth wonder of the world.” It also had a debt load of almost three-quarters of a billion dollars. Now Trump plans to bring that ethos to Washington, borrowing trillions to finance a huge tax cut and an ambitious infrastructurespending bill. Trump’s addiction to debt has often been disastrous for his companies—the Taj filed for bankruptcy within eighteen months—but national debt is different, and…

It was just after the war of course which everyone had been so excited about. And everyone was doing the math while the buses gave them back, all the town’s families adding themselves up. Oh, it was a great year to be a queen. We restored the old barn of good intentions and our dilapidated sense of adventure, which had been, for several years preceding the return of frontier days, co-opted for the war effort. Mothers, who came to us from the French, were made of the finest lace and exquisite fringe. It was a great year to be a queen, did I say that already? Well, O.K., but it was! It was just before the war of course when they still made the sun out East. She carried them…

THE SCHOOLMARM IS playing poker in the town saloon. The stake is the saloon itself. As she is preparing to deal the cards, one of the men demands that she cut the fuckin’ deck, and she shoots him from her lap. “Sorry, but I simply cannot allow . . .” The others tip their crumpled hats. “No, ma’am, you just go ahead and deal.” The men of the town find the schoolmarm difficult but are awed by her refined and lofty character, and generally do what she tells them to do. The sheriff likes to say that she’s as pure as the spotless lily of the lake, though they have no lake, and there are no lilies in it. No damn lilies. The men cuss a lot—in fact, all the…

The Framers’ Coup, by Michael J. Klarman (Oxford). This history of the Constitutional Convention, in 1787, highlights the extent to which our Constitution was geared “toward constraining democracy.” The reason was that the delegates charged with reforming the Articles of Confederation (the Constitution’s forerunner) feared that rising populism might lead to civil war. Klarman details the resulting debates about “peacetime standing armies,” executive term limits, and who should have the power to elect the people’s representatives. Antifederalists “charged the Framers with seeking to establish an aristocracy of sorts,” objecting to such anti- democratic elements as the Electoral College and Supreme Court appointments— complaints that resonate today. Avalanche, by Julia Leigh (Norton). This intimate memoir of in-vitro fertilization starts when the author, a novelist and filmmaker in her late thirties,…

WHEN I WAS a boy, I went to shows—plays, concerts, recitations— with my older sister Bonnie. This was in Brooklyn, in the early nineteenseventies. The venue we liked best was the East, in Crown Heights, which had been established, in part, in response to the Black Arts Movement, which was itself founded in reaction to the death of Malcolm X. In those days, anti-honky fever was high, and, just as I flinched when I encountered racial slurs in books or on TV, I backed away from the militancy of the plays I saw at the East and elsewhere. Watching those spectacles, I wondered why, if whiteness was supposed to be rendered powerless on a black-owned stage, it was still dictating the action. I didn’t know then that what I was…

ART MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Met Breuer “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry” The subject of this exhilarating retrospective, who is sixty-one and based in Chicago, has depicted African- American life and experience since 1980, when he made “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.” Executed in the antique medium of egg tempera, the painting is in blacks and grays, save for the whites of the eyes, a shirt collar, and a gap-toothed grin. Small in size but jolting in impact, the portrait bears hints of ghastly blackface caricature but turns them around into astute ironies of a self-aware, unconquerable character—not an “identity,” a term that is as reductive in art as it is in politics, and which Marshall bursts beyond. Most of his imagery is celebratory,…

The staircase that leads to this bar is utterly beguiling— evocative photographs of present-day Cuba line the walls, globe chandeliers cast a golden light. Visitors are welcomed with complimentary Daiquiris, perfectly sour and so smoothly blended that they taste nearly of cream. One expects nothing less from a new perch dreamed up by Sean Muldoon and Jack McGarry, co-owners of the perennially awarded Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog. Their new project turns the tired trope of the speakeasy on its head by asking what the Prohibition era was like for Americans abroad—BlackTail takes its inspiration from the grand hotel lounges of nineteen-twenties Havana. (It’s named for the planes that once flew between the States and Cuba.) The staff members wear citrus-hued guayaberas and white fedoras; each seat at the bar…

“AT THE MOMENT, the mode in France is to compare the American election with the situation at home,” Frédéric Lefebvre said, on the phone the other day from Portland, Oregon. Lefebvre, who served as the secretary for trade and tourism under Nicolas Sarkozy, is now a member of the Assemblée Nationale, representing the approximately two hundred and ten thousand French citizens living in Canada and the United States. “To quote Verlaine, there’s a ‘bad wind’ blowing across the entire world,” he continued. “For me, the lesson is that Marine Le Pen can be elected in France.” Le Pen, the leader of the Front National, the far-right party that her Holocaust-denier father helped start, in 1972, is one of the most obvious international beneficiaries of a Donald Trump Presidency. “A new…

BRANDON LITTLEJOHN WAS shot just after 11 p.m. on Saturday, April 23, 2011. The day had started out cold and rainy, but by evening the temperature hinted at the summer to come. Littlejohn was playing basketball on a court at a corner of Harlem Square Park, in West Baltimore, when his girlfriend drove by to pick him up. He jogged over to her car, said he’d be back in a minute, and returned to the basketball court to tell his friends that he was leaving. “She heard the gunshots,” Littlejohn’s aunt Roxanne Cunningham told me. “She looked, and he was falling.” One of Littlejohn’s friends helped his girlfriend get him into the car, and she drove him to the hospital. He had been shot multiple times in the chest and…

THE MORNING AFTER Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Barack Obama summoned staff members to the Oval Office. Some were fairly junior and had never been in the room before. They were sombre, hollowed out, some fighting tears, humiliated by the defeat, fearful of autocracy’s moving vans pulling up to the door. Although Obama and his people admit that the election results caught them completely by surprise—“We had no plan for this,” one told me—the President sought to be reassuring. “This is not the apocalypse,” Obama said. History does not move in straight lines; sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it goes backward. A couple of days later, when I asked the President about that consolation, he offered this: “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes. I…

THE COVER OF “Bella Donna,” Stevie Nicks’s first solo album, shows the artist looking slender and wideeyed, wearing a white gown, a gold bracelet, and a pair of ruched, kneehigh platform boots. One arm is bent at an improbable angle; a sizable cockatoo sits on her hand. Behind her, next to a small crystal ball, is a tambourine threaded with three longstemmed white roses. Nicks did not invent this storefront-psychic aesthetic— it is indebted, in varying degrees, to Hans Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina, de Troyes’s Guinevere, and Cher—but, beginning in the mid-nineteen-seventies, she came to embody it. The image was girlish and delicate, yet inscrutable, as if Nicks were suggesting that the world might not know everything she’s capable of. This intimation is newly germane: a vague but feminine mysticism is…

THE MORE SERIOUS you are about modern art, the more likely you are to be stupefied by “Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction,” a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The merrily nihilistic Frenchman strewed the first half of the twentieth century with the aesthetic equivalent of whoopee cushions. As a painter, a poet, a graphic artist, an editor, and a set designer, he mastered, and mocked, canonical styles, with an emphasis on Dada—a movement in which he co-starred with his friend Marcel Duchamp, and which raised travesty to a beau ideal. “A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself,” he said, and he proved it, during the Second World War, with garishly realist paintings, often based on photographs in porn magazines,…