Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2, 2017 i The New Yorker

Yiyun Li (“To Speak Is to Blunder,” p. 30) is the author of several books, the most recent of which, “Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life,” will be published in February. Dexter Filkins (“Before the Flood,” p. 22), a staff writer, is the author of “The Forever War,” which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Camille Bordas (Fiction, p. 56) is a French writer. “How to Behave in a Crowd,” her first English-language novel, will be out next August. Joan Acocella (Dancing, p. 74) has written for The New Yorker since 1992, and became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998. Ian Frazier (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 29) recently published “Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces” and is working on a book about the…

In a photo published in 1982 by the small zine Maniac!, Paul Hudson, known then as H.R., stood over a pile of bricks and soil in a scraggly garden, his legs spread apart and every inch of his shirtless upper body tightly flexed. He called it his “last official punk pose,” and in the accompanying interview he explained why he was stepping away from his band, Bad Brains, changing his name to Joseph I, and starting a new, Rastafarian-influenced reggae outfit, Zion Train. “I was desperately searching for revolution and truth and freedom. I thought I could find it in punk rock,” he said. “It took me about three years to discover that I was just beating my head against a wall.” As teen-agers in Washington, D.C., in 1978, Hudson,…

This alluring corner hideaway is on Williamsburg’s south side, where expensive cocktail bars have replaced the dwindling Puerto Rican neighborhood’s once ubiquitous bodegas, barbershops, and social clubs. So it’s fitting, if somewhat tragic, that the clientele drinking Donna’s signature cocktail, a rum-heavy spin on the piña colada, are more likely to associate it with spring break than with its status as the national drink of America’s largest territory. Donna’s version is frozen and strong, but the clever inclusion of BrancaMenta makes it agreeably refreshing, if something entirely different from the original. Until recently, battery-powered tea lights on the tables were a quiet reference to the electrical fire, in 2013, that forced the bar to close just over a year after it opened. It was rebuilt exactly like the original, with…

As snow settled on the silent New York Stock Exchange one recent Sunday, a nearby boutique was abuzz with activity. Inside the Hermès store, Pascale Mussard, the fifty-nine-year-old great-great-great-granddaughter of the saddle-maker Thierry Hermès, presided over the petit h Holiday Factory, where fans of the brand toiled at craft tables, in the presence of hundred-thousand-dollar handbags. Mussard, an impish woman in lime-green cashmere and an orange smock, looked on as customers took scraps of “ex-scarves,” as she called them, backed with silver and gold foil, and cut and bent them into angel-shaped holiday ornaments with felt-ball heads, which they could then take home free of charge. “The leftover of any product of Hermès has in itself a quality that you must look at and try to find a use for,”…

Early on an unusually blustery day in June, Kevin Esvelt climbed aboard a ferry at Woods Hole, bound for Nantucket Island. Esvelt, an assistant professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was on his way to present to local health officials a plan for ridding the island of one of its most persistent problems: Lyme disease. He had been up for much of the night working on his slides, and the fatigue showed. He had misaligned the buttons on his gray pin-striped shirt, and the rings around his deepblue eyes made him look like a sandyhaired raccoon. Esvelt, who is thirty-four, directs the “sculpting evolution” group at M.I.T., where he and his colleagues are attempting to design molecular tools capable of fundamentally altering the natural world. If…

“Most die young,” Professor Croze admitted. “Define ‘young,’ ” I said, not looking up from my notebook. Professor Croze was not a pretty sight. There were white spots on the back and the sides of her tongue, and she seemed unaware of them, or unconcerned, at least—she opened her mouth wide to say even the smallest things. “Under the age of thirty-eight,” she said. I wrote, “Young < 38,” and underlined it twice. It didn’t matter that I’d just turned thirty-eight. I never took anything personally. Professor Croze went on to list the main causes of death among the Pawong, a Malaysian tribe that she’d studied as a young anthropologist. “They get murdered, of course— they’re such an easy target—or they go hang themselves in the forest when they’ve had…

The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s annual Next Wave Festival, as its name indicates, usually brings us work that is new, or new to New York. But in this year’s festival you could see Kyle Abraham’s “Pavement” looking very much as it did when it premièred, at Harlem Stage Gatehouse, four years ago. Nowadays, you don’t retire a dance that is both concerned with race and very good. In any case, this 2012 piece shows us, with no need of updating, that the circumstances underlying the Black Lives Matter movement preceded its actual founding, in 2013, in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer. Indeed, as Abraham has said, the dance was inspired by John Singleton’s movie “Boyz n the Hood,” now twenty-five years old. Singleton’s boys, all African-American, lived…

TURKEY’S PREACHER Dexter Filkins’s article on the Muslim scholar and preacher Fethullah Gulen, the founder of the social and religious movement Hizmet, of which I am a participant, misrepresents Gulen and leaves unchallenged a series of claims against him (“Turkey’s Thirty-Year Coup,” October 17th). Filkins refers to statements that Gulen made decades ago regarding Jews, but does not explain the evolution of his views, which Gulen has clarified in other interviews, or mention his consistent criticism of terrorist attacks in Israel and support for interfaith dialogue. Gulen has also repeatedly condemned the July 15th attempted coup against Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and he has vehemently denied any involvement. This article perpetuates many of the dangerous myths and false allegations against Gulen that President Erdoğan has used to justify…

Good Riddance Day Look around your apartment, dig through your desk, flip through your wallet—it shouldn’t take long to find a physical relic of 2016 that you’d like to leave behind. In a self-promotional public service, the information-destruction servicer Shred-It is offering New Yorkers the chance to purge their unwelcome artifacts before the ball drops, by handing them over to be permanently and securely shredded in the middle of Times Square. The remains will be recycled, unlike año viejos, the puppets of Latin America whose annual stuffing and burning are the inspiration for this event. (Times Square Plaza. timessquarenyc.org. Dec. 28 at noon.) New Year’s Eve Ride Most New Year traditions, whether a countdown with thousands or a kiss with one, call for a static gathering. But this annual…

In late August, just as Donald Trump was making his improbable pitch to black voters (“What the hell do you have to lose?”), an unusual and tender video began to make the viral rounds. It showed Heather McGhee, the president of the progressive think tank Demos, responding to a caller on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal.” Mc-Ghee is black. The caller was white, and, he said, prejudiced against black people, because of things he’d seen in the news. But he didn’t want to be. “What can I do to change?” he asked plaintively. “You know, to be a better Amer ican?” McGhee, moved, offered some advice: get to know black people, read up on black history, stop watching the nightly news. Eight million people viewed the video, leaving comments like “Hear, hear,…

After watching a double feature of “Sully” and “Star Trek Beyond”: From the proceedings of the National Transportation Safety Board: Report on the Flight of the Starship Enterprise Through the Nebula to Rescue a Stranded Crew on a Mystery Planet; the Subsequent Crash; and the Actions of the Crew of the Enterprise, Up to and Including Its Return to Yorktown, the Resupply Planet. Submitted to the United States Congress and the Rulers of the Federation. Summary of events leading up to the incident: On January 14th, at 10:55 A.M., the Starship Enterprise took off from LaGuardia Airport on a flight to the nebula. Three minutes and four seconds after takeoff, geese were struck, and Krall, a lizard-type alien, after crashing his own spacecraft into the Enterprise, went running around inside…

Fall will touch down in golden Orient, where ospreys float and peace comes dropping slow. There will be pumpkins by the ton at Latham’s. The trees will re-rehearse their yearly show. But now crape myrtle ornaments the village, rose of Sharon, autumn clematis. The oyster ponds are dark and tranquil mirrors basking in the sunlight’s brazen kiss. On Skipper’s Lane, Sebastian and Sarah have packed up with their brood, as one expects, and Madeline and Chris, and Jane and Eddie. No more artists! No more architects! Just Miriam and Grayson, Sylvia and Fredi. Gone: writers, agents, publishers, and all! The real people, proudly holding steady, will reap the blond munificence of fall. Goodbye to the disturbances of summer, when Stevie’s singers jazzed in Poquatuck and a Supreme Court Justice read…

“O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!” The words of the Psalm look bright on the page, but the music pulls them into shadow. The key is G minor. The bass instruments drone on the tonic while the violins weave sixteenth notes around the other notes of the triad. On the third beat of the first bar comes a twinge of harmonic pain—one oboe sounding an E-flat against another oboe’s held D. Oboes are piercing by nature; to place them a half step apart triggers an aggressive acoustic roughness, as when car horns lean on adjacent pitches. In the next several bars, more dissonances accumulate, sustaining tension: F-sharp against G, A-flat against G, E-flat against D, B-flat against A-natural. The ensemble wanders away from…

August Wilson’s life work was his “Century Cycle,” a ten-play portrait of black life in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, each set in a different decade. (“Fences,” the nineteen-fifties entry, is now a movie.) Until this month, only one had not played on Broadway: “Jitney,” about gypsy-cab drivers in the seventies. Manhattan Theatre Club’s production, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson and featuring John Douglas Thompson, Carra Patterson, and André Holland, starts previews Dec. 28, at the Samuel J. Friedman. THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Coil 2017 P.S. 122’s annual festival returns, with works including Yehuda Duenyas’s “CVRTAIN,” which uses virtual reality to create a cheering audience of thousands; Forced Entertainment’s “Real Magic,” an absurdist take on the art of illusion; and Yara Travieso’s “La Medea,” which recasts the Euripides tragedy as a…

In 1979, Donald Trump and the City of New York cut a deal. His flagship skyscraper, Trump Tower, could be fiftyeight stories tall—about twenty stories taller than would normally be allowed so close to Central Park—if parts of the lobby, balcony, and terraces were designated as “privately owned public spaces,” accessible to anyone who wandered in. So now, as a daily trickle of businessmen, politicians, and celebrities pass through the marble lobby on their way upstairs, to pay homage to the President-elect, a crowd of spectators— reporters, tourists, Trump supporters, Trump opponents—is allowed to gather and enjoy the circus. On a recent Wednesday morning, about two dozen members of the press clustered behind a velvet rope, pointing their cameras at a bank of four goldplated elevators. “The tourists are out…

Ruth Draper was born in New York in 1884. When she was very young, she entertained her siblings by sitting on a window seat in the nursery of her family’s brownstone, on East Forty-seventh Street, and imitating grownups they knew, among them the tailor who made their clothes. By the time she was in her mid-thirties, she was performing, alone, on stages all over the world. She wrote all her own material. She abhorred publicity and gave virtually no interviews until the end of her life, when a new manager insisted, yet she filled theatres, often for long runs, on Broadway, in the West End, and elsewhere. Uta Hagen went to see her sixty times. The English critic Bernard Levin wrote that she induced “real hallucination” in her audiences, making…

In a dream the other night, I was back in Beijing, at the entrance of my family’s apartment complex, where a public telephone, a black rotary, had once been guarded by the old women from the neighborhood association. They used to listen without hiding their disdain or curiosity while I was on the phone with friends; when I finished, they would complain about the length of the conversation before logging it in to their book and calculating the charge. In those days, I accumulated many errands before I went to use the telephone, lest my parents notice my extended absence. My allowance— which was what I could scrimp and save from my lunch money—was spent on phone calls and stamps and envelopes. Like a character in a Victorian novel, I…

The Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who came to power in a coup that, in its aftermath, resulted in the massacre of more than a thousand supporters of his predecessor, has a reputation for speaking very softly. This quality often disarms foreigners. “When you talk to him, unlike most generals, he listens,” a European diplomat told me recently. “He’s not bombastic.” An American official told me that Sisi reminds her of a certain Washington archetype. “You have the political people who always want to be the loudest voice in the room,” she said. “And then there are people who are creatures of the system, who are just as capable but not necessarily the loudest.” She said of Sisi, “I also think the quiet, reserved posture is a forcing function to…

Evelyn Waugh, by Philip Eade (Henry Holt). This crowded, witty biography follows Waugh from the ancestral home in Somerset (“The only bathroom featured a stuffed monkey that had, improbably, died of sunstroke”) to the jungles of Brazil. The supporting characters seem stranger, blunter, and more lovable, or hateable, than their doubles in “Decline and Fall” and “Vile Bodies”—in this case, life exceeded art. Eade plunges into correspondence and unpublished family papers to explore the writer’s obsessions with social status and Catholicism, his jackknife turns from affection to contempt, and his torturous ambition. “I know I have something in me,” a young Waugh wrote, “but I am desperately afraid it may never come to anything.” The Glamour of Strangeness, by Jamie James (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Artists and writers who…