Innholdsfortegnelse for January 23, 2017 i The New Yorker

Sarah Stillman (“Good Behavior,” p. 46) is a 2016 MacArthur Fellow. She runs the Global Migration Project, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. John Seabrook (“My Father’s Cellar,” p. 22) has published four books, including, most recently, “The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.” Elif Batuman (Fiction, p. 56) has been a staff writer since 2010. Her first novel, “The Idiot,” will come out in March. Frank Bidart (Poem, p. 40) will publish “Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2017” later this year. Jesse Eisenberg (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 29) is a playwright and an actor, and the author of “Bream Gives Me Hiccups.” Jonathan Blitzer (“Called Away,” p. 30), a member of the editorial staff, was a finalist for a 2016 Livingston Award. Reporting for this piece was facilitated by…

When the outgoing President warned, in his farewell speech, of the ways in which inequality corrodes the social fabric, he probably wasn’t referring to commercial airline travel. But, with its ever-expanding system of subclasses and legroom fees, is there any better symbol of our self-sorting tendencies? Until recently, airborne animals were unaffected. While their owners squabbled over medallion status, they generally sat, crated, in the cargo hold—the last vestige of airline equality. All that changed this year, with the opening of the ARK at JFK, which calls itself “the world’s first privately owned, 24/7 animal airport terminal.” Situated “airside”— near the tarmac—it offers luxurious amenities, including climate-controlled stalls for horses and, for dogs, a bone-shaped splashing pool and a spa that gives “pawdicures.” Fees for dogs start at around a…

ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, at a party to celebrate the opening of the longawaited Second Avenue subway, Governor Andrew Cuomo said the project showed that government “can still do big things and great things.” What he didn’t say is that the project also shows that government can do really expensive things. The line, which so far consists of just three stations and two miles of track, is, at a cost of roughly $1.7 billion per kilometre of track, the most expensive ever built. And it will keep that record as Phase 2 begins, at a projected cost of $2.2 billion a kilometre. Construction projects everywhere are subject to delays and cost overruns. Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish economic geographer, has found that nine out of ten infrastructure megaprojects worldwide ran over…

EDDIE ANZORA was sitting in his cubicle at a call center in El Salvador one day a couple of years ago, making a hotel reservation for an impatient American customer, when he spotted someone he knew from a past life. The man, who was part of a group of new employees on a tour of the office, was tall, with a tattoo of a rose on the back of his neck. His loping stride caught Anzora’s attention. Salvadorans didn’t walk like that. “Where you from?” Anzora asked, when the man reached his desk. “Sunland Park,” he replied. It was a neighborhood in Los Angeles, more than two thousand miles away, but Anzora knew it. A decade earlier, when the two men belonged to rival street crews, they had got into…

A WEEK AFTER Donald Trump’s election, a thirty-year-old cognitive scientist named Maya Shankar purchased a plane ticket to Flint, Michigan. Shankar held one of the more unorthodox jobs in the Obama White House, running the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, also known as the President’s “nudge unit.” When she launched the team, in early 2014, it felt, Shankar recalls, “like a startup in my parents’ basement”—no budget, no mandate, no bona-fide employees. Within two years, the small group of scientists had become a staff of dozens—including an agricultural economist, an industrial psychologist, and “human-centered designers”— working with more than twenty federal agen cies on seventy projects, from fixing gaps in veterans’ health care to relieving student debt. Usually, the initiatives had, at their core, one question: Could the growing body…

SINCE NOVEMBER 9th, we’ve heard a lot of talk about unreality, and how what’s normal bends when you’re in a state of incipient autocracy. There’s been a lot written about gaslighting (lies that make you feel crazy) and the rise of fake news (hoaxes that displace facts), and much analysis of Trump as a reality star (an authentic phony). But what killed me last year were the jokes, because I love jokes—dirty jokes, bad jokes, rude jokes, jokes that cut through bullshit and explode pomposity. Growing up a Jewish kid in the nineteen-seventies, in a house full of Holocaust books, giggling at Mel Brooks’s “The Producers,” I had the impression that jokes, like Woody Guthrie’s guitar, were a machine that killed fascists. Comedy might be cruel or stupid, yet, in…

THE DANGER OF TRUMPISM Kelefa Sanneh on conservative intellectuals’ man-crush on Trump is one of the odder pieces to appear in The New Yorker in some time (“Secret Admirers,” January 9th). In addition to Sanneh’s choice to devote so much space to the musings of an obscure blogger who lacks the courage to use his real name, there is the strangeness of the effort, on the part of the blogger and others, to place Trumpism in the context of a coherent intellectual world view that Trump himself clearly doesn’t possess. The President- elect is the ultimate transactional politician: every position he takes is up for negotiation. Before the election, he claimed that the Electoral College was corrupt and untrustworthy; after his victory, he called it a pillar of democracy.…

Barack Obama, judging by his approval rating, is a President with whom people might like to have a beer. His recent farewell party at the White House was an opportunity for some to do just that, but, if you didn’t get an invitation, the next best thing might be Tip Top Bar & Grill, a low-ceilinged, vinyl-signed dive in the southwest elbow of Bed-Stuy. The walls are lovingly covered with images of the outgoing President: he’s smiling on a clock next to a watermark of Martin Luther King, Jr.; speaking at a lectern with a “Change We Can Believe In” sign above him; and, slightly less convincing, alongside Michelle, in an advertisement for a “first couple farewell sculpture,” a hand-painted porcelain number standing eleven inches tall. Tip Top’s drinks are…

“IF YOU DON’T mind smoke, you can sit here,” Paolo Sorrentino said, indicating the seat beside him. “If you do”— he pointed to a distant couch. Sorrentino, the Italian writer-director of the new HBO series “The Young Pope,” was ashing his Toscanello cigar out a window in the living room of his pied-àterre, sixty-eight floors above Manhattan. A blueberry-scented candle flickered. Beneath his nest of graying hair and his Roman nose, Sorrentino’s smile was melancholy. “I smoked cigarettes for twenty years, two box a day,” he went on. “I love smoke, but seven years ago I change to cigars so I don’t . . .” He sucked in. “Inhale,” suggested Sorrentino’s translator, Michael Moore, a partly bald man with a worried face. “Inhale, yes,” Sorrentino said, pluming white smoke. In…

BY 2010, BILL HAYNES had spent almost four decades under attack from the inside of his skull. He was fifty-seven years old, and he suffered from severe migraines that felt as if a drill were working behind his eyes, across his forehead, and down the back of his head and neck. They left him nauseated, causing him to vomit every half hour for up to eighteen hours. He’d spend a day and a half in bed, and then another day stumbling through sentences. The pain would gradually subside, but often not entirely. And after a few days a new attack would begin. Haynes (I’ve changed his name, at his request) had his first migraine at the age of nineteen. It came on suddenly, while he was driving. He pulled over,…

I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT e-mail was until I got to college. I had heard of e-mail, and knew that in some sense I would “have” it. “You’ll be so fancy,” said my mother’s sister, who had married a computer scientist, “sending your e-mails.” That summer, I heard e-mail mentioned with increasing frequency. “Things are changing so fast, Selin,” my father said when I visited him that August. “Today at work I surfed the World Wide Web. One second, I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One second later, I was in Anýtkabir.” Anýtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum, was located in Ankara, where my parents had gone to medical school. I had no idea what my father was talking about, but he lived in New Orleans and I knew there was no…

“ZAMA,™ A BRIEF, indelible novel by the Argentinean writer Antonio Di Benedetto, is a work of waiting—of enforced lassitude, excruciated anticipation, and final frustration. The story of a man holding out for deliverance from the backwater that turns out to be his destiny (if “destiny” isn’t too dignified a word for where character and circumstance conspire to deposit us), it was written by a man likewise toiling in provincial obscurity and had itself to wait decades after its publication, in 1956, before it was recognized in the Spanish-speaking world as a classic. Only now, some sixty years later, and thirty after the death of its author, has the book appeared in English, in a sensitive translation by Esther Allen (New York Review Books). Yet to the late Juan José Saer,…

MINIMALISM, THE LAST great scandal-making revolution in twentieth- century music, has become venerable. This season, Steve Reich and Philip Glass are being celebrated worldwide on the occasion of their eightieth birthdays. (Reich’s was in October; Glass’s is on January 31st.) Arvo Pärt, the auratic “mystic minimalist” from Estonia, received similar genuflections when he turned eighty, in 2015. Boxed sets have been issued, academic conferences organized, books published. Kyle Gann, Keith Potter, and Pwyll ap Siôn’s “Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music,” the most comprehensive treatment to date, covers everything from John Adams’s “Harmonielehre” to the electronic drone pieces of Éliane Radigue. With the canonization of minimalism has come a reconsideration of its mythology. According to the familiar narrative, a group of composers led by Terry Riley, Reich, and…

Madame X, meet Ladies in Sequined Dresses and Sneakers. For “The Museum Workout,” which starts a four-week run on Jan. 19, Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass, Everywoman dancers of deadpan zaniness, guide tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art before public hours, leading light stretching and group exercises as they go. Recorded commentary by the illustrator Maira Kalman, who planned the route, mixes with Motown and disco tunes. Might raised heart rates and squeaking soles heighten perception? CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera With a new production by Bartlett Sher, the Met finally has a gRomeo et Julietteh that suits both Shakespearefs tragedy and Gounodfs rhapsodic music. The curtain rises on a handsome Veronese piazza (designed by Michael Yeargan), where the chorus is bedecked in glinting jewelry and lavishly…

Software for Artists This tech festival invites software coders and enthusiasts to a day of demonstrations and exhibitions that consider software’s capacity for art. Demos include Fundroid, a robot that uses G.P.S., speed, and facial recognition to deliver pizza and beer, and Hope Floats, a console that automates calls to local government officials. (Pioneer Works, 159 Pioneer St., Brooklyn. pioneerworks. org. Jan. 22 at 10 A.M.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES Collectors head back to Sotheby’s this week for sales of American art and Americana. Capitalizing on the current enthusiasm for all things Alexander Hamilton, the house puts a collection of letters and documents, long held by a group of his descendants, up for sale on Jan. 18. The lots, some of which have been out of the public eye for…

THE MOOD WAS anything but sombre. Eighteen thousand people left the cold and rain of a Chicago night and milled about inside the cavernous McCormick Place, waiting for Barack Obama. As a slide show of images from Obama’s Presidency was projected on giant screens, a succession of pointedly chosen songs, from Foo Fighters’ “My Hero” to Maxine Nightingale’s “Right Back Where We Started From,” played. Soon, Eddie Vedder and the Chicago Children’s Choir would take the stage to perform “People Have the Power.” And, like a Pearl Jam fan going to a show in 2016 wearing a concert T-shirt from 1991, attendees at President Obama’s farewell were not shy about demonstrating just how far back they went. Dee Fox wore a button from 2008, with a picture of Barack and…

We were born into an amazing experiment.At least we thought we were. We knew there was noescaping human nature: my grandmothertaught me that: my own pitiless naturetaught me that: but we exist inside an order, Ithought, of which historyis the mere shadow—Every serious work of art about America has the sametheme: Americais a great Idea: the reality leaves something to be desired.Bakersfield. Marian Anderson, the first great black classicalcontralto, whom the Daughters of the American Revolutionwould not allow to sing in an unsegregatedConstitution Hall, who then was asked by EleanorRoosevelt to sing at the Lincoln Memorial before thousandswas refused a room at the Padre Hotel, Bakersfield.My mother’s disgustas she told me this. It confirmed her judgment aboutwhat she never could escape, where she lived out her life.My grandmother’s fury when,…

There are clues.At the dinner table, he refers to Julian of Norwich as “he”;I say, politely, “Isn’t it ‘she’?”The next day I am in Washington, D.C., at the library,looking for “The Man in the Wooden Hat.”He’s not on the shelf.Having dismissed the “G”s I turn around; there are the “D”s: O.K.I go home with Kathryn Davis. When I finish the novela day later, I wish it were real. true. life.I ask, as one does, when ravished: Where did you come from?Why didn’t I know?And here, again, is Julian of Norwich, here in this book.More than once.Q. Who hadn’t thought of Julian of Norwich in twenty years?(I estimate)A. I (I estimate)Given: A myriad of such delicate chimes,unlikely rhymes and synchroniesTo prove: How I am/the world isQ.E.D. (not alone)…

Bellevue, by David Oshinsky (Doubleday). This taut, masterly portrait of Bellevue Hospital operates much as that fabled institution has since its founding, in 1736: the entire history of New York seems to pass through. The hospital was on the front line of numerous battles that defined both the city and modern medicine: the waves of immigration in the nineteenth century; the fight against Tammany Hall for stricter public- health standards; the AIDS epidemic; the homeless crisis of the nineteen-eighties. Bellevue, often overwhelmed and underfunded, never failed to accept a challenge. But perhaps its biggest fight is one that continues today: navigating a health-care landscape in which commitment to public care isn’t secure. Naming Thy Name, by Elaine Scarry (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This study of Shakespeare’s sonnets suggests that…