Innholdsfortegnelse for January 30, 2017 i The New Yorker

Jill Lepore (“Autumn of the Atom,” p. 22), a professor of American history at Harvard, is writing a history of the United States. Adrian Chen (“The Troll of Internet Art,” p. 30) became a staff writer in 2016. Judith Thurman (The Talk of the Town, p. 18) has written for the magazine since 1987 and been a staff writer since 2000. Among her books is “Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire,” a collection of her New Yorker essays. Colin Stokes (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 29) is a member of the magazine’s editorial staff and a contributor to the Onion. He has written humor pieces for The New Yorker and newyorker.com since 2014. Laura Miller (Books, p. 68), the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia,” is…

In 2004, Philip Roth published “The Plot Against America.” The four main characters of the novel, which takes place between June, 1940, and October, 1942, are a family of American Jews, the Roths, of Newark—Bess, Herman, and their two sons, Philip and Sandy. They are ardent supporters of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but, in Roth’s reimagining, Roosevelt loses his bid for a third term to a surprise Republican candidate—the aviator Charles Lindbergh—whose victory upends not only politics in America but life itself. The historical Lindbergh was an isolationist who espoused a catchphrase that Donald Trump borrowed for his Presidential campaign, and for his Inaugural Address: “America First.” The fictional Lindbergh, like the actual Trump, expressed admiration for a murderous European dictator, and his election emboldened xenophobes. In Roth’s novel, a foreign…

Pete Holmes is a comedian whose work has taken many forms: a shortlived talk show on TBS, several standup specials, cartoons for this magazine, a podcast called “You Made It Weird.” “Some jokes want to be tweets,” he said recently. “Some jokes want to be funny paintings. Sometimes, on the podcast, there’ll be a funny premise, then nothing for a hundred minutes, and then a perfect callback, and you go, ‘Oh, that was a joke that wanted to be a two-hour conversation.’ ” Holmes was in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on the set of a joke that wanted to be an HBO series called “Crashing.” He is thirty-seven, tall and unchiselled, with an eager smile and a cascade of brown hair; he has referred to his look as “lesbian Val Kilmer.” After…

On a recent afternoon, Brad Troemel showed me an image of a sculpture that seemed beyond belief: seven hundred monarch butterflies stacked on a levitating magnetic pedestal. Troemel had devised the sculpture six months before, and listed it, for twelve hundred dollars, in his online art store, Ultra Violet Production House. The work looked catalogueslick, but it didn’t actually exist; the image had been created in Photoshop. The buyer would receive the components to make the work, along with directions for assembling it and a certificate of authenticity. Then she would build it herself, gluing on the butterflies one at a time. Troemel had calculated that the butterflies would weigh about thirteen ounces, the heaviest load that the pedestal could withstand. The sculpture would probably last for just an instant,…

The days when you lean your head forward, then pull your head back, to see the sun is only a chrysanthemum, the eye is a white lake with a black boat moored at a particle pier that says what you want back isn’t coming. The white speck says there is a light source that shines day and night far from a balcony on which an audience waits to see us open our doll eyes and close them again. I keep my face facing front to see every last thing that is coming. What is coming is this: a hat to be worn when taking a train, a compact in a pocket, a letter in a pocket, two hands, a waterfall pouring its contents into a well-worn shuddering mind. I’m as…

For the past several years, John Cale, the Welsh musician and cofounder of the Velvet Underground, has been selectively reissuing his back catalogue. Some of these efforts are straightforward: an old record is remastered, and given new packaging, an updated set of liner notes, and perhaps a new video. Others are wild reimaginings. This spring, Cale will be seventy-five. Lou Reed, his collaborator in the Velvet Underground, died in 2013, followed by other friends and peers: Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. It can feel, at times, as if Cale is tidying his legacy—dusting the house before company comes by. Last month, Cale reissued “Fragments of a Rainy Season,” a live album recorded at various stops on a 1991 world tour. He was usually accompanied only by…

The Met Breuer is not yet a year old, but it has already distinguished itself as a site of beguiling and serious surprises: a huge survey of unfinished works by masters of Western art, a provocatively ingenious installation of Diane Arbus photographs, and a terrific retrospective (soon to close) of the African-American painter Kerry James Marshall. The latest is “Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space,” the first major retrospective of the Italian artist in the United States. Merz is the least-known and, perhaps not incidentally, the only female member of Arte Povera, a movement shepherded into existence, in 1967, by the art critic Germano Celant, as Italy’s ambitious riposte to American Pop and minimalism. About a dozen artists participated, creating large, often sprawling abstract sculptures in humble materials—dirt,…

FINDING JUSTICE I was inspired by Rachel Aviv’s article on Albert Woodfox, one of the Angola 3, whose commitment to the principles of the Black Panther Party helped him endure four decades of solitary confinement, even after the Party itself had fallen apart (“Surviving Solitary,” January 16th). But I disagree with the friend of one of his fellow-inmates, who said that this commitment to the Party was like that of Japanese fighter pilots who were still fighting thirty years after the war ended. For most African- Americans, the war is not close to over. It rankled me to read that the only way out of prison for Woodfox was through a plea bargain—admitting guilt where there was overwhelming evidence of innocence. This is one of many mechanisms by which black…

New York has long been an epicenter of standup comedy; Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, and George Carlin got their starts here, and countless comic legends have followed. But in 2017, when a spot on a late-night show or a turn at the Comedy Cellar no longer holds the promise of success, the many little fish of the New York standup world swim toward the Creek and the Cave, a digitally savvy and sprawling comedy complex that sits at the lip of Queens. It includes a Mexican restaurant at street level, which has churro ice-cream sandwiches and an abundance of beers on tap; a bare-bones theatre accessed under a bright marquee; and a basementlevel bar flanked by pinball machines, where comics rehearse their acts in lieu of conversation. On most Wednesdays,…

NO. 20 West Twentieth Street looks like an ordinary office building, but go down to the basement and you’ll hear an unusual sound—gunshots, frequent and close. On a recent evening, a group of around a dozen creative types—funky jewelry, high-minded tote bags—arrived at Westside Rifle & Pistol Range and nervously milled about as they waited to shoot at blown-up blackand- white photographs of themselves, in the name of art. The majority of them had never touched a gun before. “We’re virgins,” Juliana Patiño, who works in advertising, said, gesturing toward her friend Josh Silberberg. “I build for startups,” Silberberg said. They giggled at a novelty target on the wall featuring a cartoon zombie holding a box of pizza. Their portrait targets were made by the artist Bayeté Ross Smith, who…

Bridget lived in Barcelona for a year. First she stayed with her college friends Maya and Andrew, who were trying to be poets, and then she sublet from a man named Marco, whom she’d met at a grocery store. She had a fling with a woman named Bernadette, who was from New Zealand and shared a flat with a Scot named Laurie, whom Bridget also slept with, and that was the end of things with Bernadette. Bridget smoked Fortuna cigarettes and wrote furiously in her journal about people she’d known and slept with, or wanted to sleep with, or had slept with and then been rejected by. She was twenty-three years old. One night at Marco’s apartment, she was awakened by loud knocking. Still semi-drunk from an evening with Maya…

According to a currently popular line of philosophy, a self is merely the sum of all the stories we tell about a particular human body. It’s an idea that resonates through the work of the writer Paul Auster, in whose fiction both selves and stories are precarious constructions, fascinating but unstable, more illusion than reality. In “4 3 2 1” (Holt), Auster’s first novel in seven years and, at eight hundred and sixty-six pages, the longest by far of any book he has published, a single man’s life unfolds along four narrative arcs, from birth to early adulthood. “Clearly you’ve read Borges by now,” the faculty adviser remarks to one of these iterations of Archie Ferguson, a character who, like most of Auster’s heroes, is fanatically bookish. “4 3 2…

This hand-colored portrait of an unidentified woman was taken by an unknown photographer circa 1935. But to a contemporary eye, trained by social media, it may suggest hashtags from #ThrowbackThursday to #BlackLivesMatter. It’s one of some hundred still and moving images, spanning a century and a half, in the International Center of Photography’s exhibition “Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change,” which considers how advances in technology have politicized visual culture. Opens Jan. 27. NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Julie Byrne Byrne has been engrossed in music since she left Buffalo, at the age of eighteen, with stops in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Seattle, and New Orleans. Not long after moving to New York, this country-folk…

Lunar New Year There are several ways to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year, and most involve lavish displays of fireworks. Red and gold, the traditional shades of good luck, burst over the Hudson River and color the Empire State Building on Jan. 26; in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, on Jan. 28, more than six hundred thousand firecrackers will be set off to ward away evil spirits. The park will also host lion dances (distinct from the more famous dragon dance in its use of just two performers), decorations giveaways, craft venders, and food booths. Organizers suggest that the more dumplings attendees eat, the more money they’ll earn that year, an easy enough proposition. The New York Philharmonic welcomes the Year of the Rooster with a concert and gala…

Daniel Barenboim, the matchless Argentine-Israeli pianist (his two Mozart-concerto cycles remain references), conductor, activist (the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which he founded with the late Edward Said, bringing together Israeli and Palestinian musicians, is now in its seventeenth year), and general bon vivant (his taste for cigars led him to meet with a reporter at a cigar club opposite Carnegie Hall), came to town last week, for the sixtieth anniversary of his first appearance in New York City. Since he was only fourteen then, this dates him less than it might seem. “Of course, I remember every moment of it,” he said, sipping pineapple juice in the cigar club. He had politely declined a smoke after contemplating the club’s menu, still lamentably short on Cubans. (“Itzhak Perlman,” he said, “used to…

Simon has taken his father, Peter,to the town’s museum on No Through Roadto see for himself the world’s smallest dog.Six inches at most from his mouse’s noseto the tip of his outstretched paintbrush tail,“Tiny” was born to pedigree pointersof true proportion the same year Lasselldiscovered Triton—Neptune’s largest moon—and Britannia stole the Mountain of Light.He was raised as a regular working houndbut at three years old chased a rat down a hole,caught a fatal chill, and was later embalmed.Under a glass dome, skewbald and well groomed,he’s tracking a scent through a dioramaof matchstick fence posts and pipe-cleaner trees;a warped sky of roof beams and lightbulbs swimsin the bulged, unblinking eye of the case.Simon says, “Do you think he’s real? I thinkhe’s real—look at the fine nap of his coat.”But Peter is…

The Original Black Elite, by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor (Amistad). In the decades following the Civil War, a proud “colored aristocracy” emerged. This history focusses on two of its members— Daniel Murray, the son of a former slave, who, in 1897, became chief of periodicals at the Library of Congress, and his wife, Anna, a descendant of one of John Brown’s raiders. Taylor documents the inaugural balls they organized, the properties they owned, and their political efforts on behalf of their race. Ultimately, affluence, respectability, and their light complexions couldn’t save them from the humiliations of Jim Crow. By 1919, Murray had been demoted, his salary slashed, and he was forbidden to dine in the library’s public cafeteria. The Genius of Judaism, by Bernard-Henri Lévy, translated from the French by…