Innholdsfortegnelse for February 6, 2017 i The New Yorker

Luke Mogelson (“The Avengers of Mosul,” p. 34) has written for the magazine since 2013. He is the author of the short-story collection “These Heroic, Happy Dead.” Tess Gallagher (Poem, p. 67) is the author of twelve poetry collections, including “Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems” and the forthcoming “Is, Is Not.” Jelani Cobb (“Prodigy of Hate,” p. 20), who has been a staff writer since 2015, teaches in the journalism program at Columbia University. Alexandra Schwartz (Books, p. 73) is a staff writer. Paul Rudnick (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 27) is the author of “It’s All Your Fault,” which was published last year. Abigail Gray Swartz (Cover) has contributed illustrations to the Times, Lenny Letter, and Taproot. She is working on a feminist coloring book for adults and…

WHEN I FIRST started hanging out in downtown clubs—Area, in Tribeca, before it was Tribeca; MK, in the Flatiron district; Save the Robots, in the East Village—I would trail behind people I’d fallen in love with by sight. I didn’t know Teri Toye, one of the first transgender models—she was the late designer Stephen Sprouse’s muse—but I was taken with her blond cool, which was like a light in those dark clubs. The beauty and style of the late filmmaker Bobbie Dereck tor, with his brave mixing of male and female looks and behavior, filled me with a yearning to be above it all, too. Another person I followed was Stormé DeLarverie. Everyone knew Stormé, especially if they went to the Cubby Hole, which later became Henrietta Hudson, where she…

ON THE AFTERNOON before Inauguration Day, Cassandra Fairbanks was in her living room, in Silver Spring, Maryland, putting the final touches on her outfit: a Stars-and-Stripes manicure, a strapless red ball gown, a rifle-casing pendant, and a poncho—“in case the protesters decide to throw paint on me,” she said. Fairbanks was one of the organizers of the DeploraBall, a party for the ultra-nationalists and Twitter trolls who, as they put it, “memed Donald Trump into the White House.” Protesters had threatened to disrupt the event, at the National Press Club, and had listed Fairbanks, a pro-Trump journalist and social- media demi-celebrity, as one of several “high-value targets.” Fairbanks took a sip from a canned Starbucks latte, her hand trembling. “I’m either overcaffeinated or just nervous,” she said. Her two-month-old puppy—…

NO AMERICAN PRESIDENT has ever had such huge conflicts of interest as Donald Trump. Ever since his election, Democrats and the press have hammered him for it. Trump will use the Presidency to enrich himself, they’ve said, and foreign governments will curry favor by o/ering his companies handouts. They’ve pointed to the hundreds of millions that Trump owes to foreign banks and the ways in which his business interests could shape his regulatory decisions. Just last week, the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued Trump for violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bars federal o!cials from receiving any “present” or “emolument” from a foreign state. Trump has shrugged it all o/, refusing to divest himself of his businesses and handing them over to his sons instead. He…

ON WENT HIS sharpest threepiece, the Saxony tweed, followed by the double monk straps, in burnished caramel, which Michael knew would trigger a coo from dear old Mom. Her stylish son. So handsome. A throwback from her side of the family, those oh-so-attractive Pfei(ers, with their thick manes and their broad shoulders and their clear complexions, none of the men standing below six feet one. No doubt she would comment on how he was graying—for the past few years, this had been a regular topic of conversation— and then tell him how distinguished he looked. Like Cary Grant. Or, no, George Clooney—yes, yes, yes, George Clooney, she would amend, as if George Clooney made all the di(erence. And Michael would smile the smile he had perfected in boarding school, around…

THE NARRATOR OF Katie Kitamura’s third novel, “A Separation” (Riverhead), is a literary translator, a job that appeals to her because of its “potential for passivity.” She could just as well have been a medium, she says. Now that she’s in the exposed position of telling her own story rather than someone else’s, she takes a certain refuge in reticence. She doesn’t disclose her name. Even the book’s title, with its meek indefinite article, broadcasts a reluctance to set much store by what she has to say; a more robust ego would surely have opted for the possessive punch of “My Separation.” (Karl Ove Knausgaard is thanked in Kitamura’s acknowledgments as an early reader.) The narrator’s husband, Christopher, informs her that such reserve comes o) as arrogance. Doesn’t she know…

“I WAS DROPPED INTO a cave, and you were my flashlight,” Eleanor Shellstrop, a bad person, says to Chidi Anagonye, her tutor in morality. This Platonic declaration of love shows up in the finale of the sitcom “The Good Place,” but it winds up illuminating everything around it. The NBC comedy, which was created by Michael Schur, débuted in September, then went on hiatus just before the election, returning in January—when it ran a mere four more episodes, thirteen total, a rarity for network television. The finale aired the night before Trump’s Inauguration. Many fans, including me, were looking forward to a bit of escapist counterprogramming, something frothy and full of silly puns, in line with the first nine episodes. In stead, what we got was the rare season finale…

PAYING DOCTORS TO CARE Atul Gawande, in his article on the importance of primary care, frames the shift from rescue medicine to lifelong incremental care as a decision that will save both lives and money, but he doesn’t fully address the unpalatable choices required to effect this transformation. (“Tell Me Where It Hurts,” January 23rd). In order to fund more primary care and preventive services, our society could increase the percentage of G.D.P. devoted to health care at the expense of other social goods, such as education and infrastructure. Alternatively, we could ration expensive rescue endeavors and spend the savings on incremental care. Rather than expending a “mountain of resources,” as Gawande says, to separate conjoined twins, or on costly neonatal surgeries like the one that benefitted Gawande’s son,…

Duff’s Brooklyn 168 Marcy Ave., Brooklyn (718-599-2092) On a recent Saturday night, at half past midnight, Jimmy Duff pulled up in a hearse to the heavy-metal bar that bears his name. (“Honk if you love dying and being dead,” a bumper sticker on the rear window instructed.) Duff describes his style outside of work as “very casual to borderline homeless,” but here he was in full regalia: leather top hat, large silver cross pendant, half-sleeve tattoos on display. Ask him what his idea of earthly happiness is and he’ll invite you to look around: Slayer on the jukebox, walls and ceiling garlanded in surrealist art and medieval weaponry, a mass of sombrely clad headbangers shrouded in red light. “A lot of these people are outsiders, and they found a…

AMONG THE PRESENTATIONS that have been o!ered to heal the country’s post-election wounds is the notion that Americans in red and blue states should do a better job of understanding one another. Trump supporters in Oshkosh might benefit from attending a block party in Bed-Stuy. And the eighty per cent of New Yorkers who backed Hillary Clinton could try spending a day on a soon-to-be-automated assembly line, or learn to chop their own firewood. “We’ll do the axe throwing here,” Brett McLeod, an emissary from Trump country— his upstate-New York county went for Trump by seven points—said the other night, in Brooklyn, as he prepared to give a demonstration on the finer points of being a lumberjack. McLeod, who is thirty-six and wore a sandy goatee beneath a camouflage baseball…

EARLY ON THE morning of December 7th, a dozen o+cers from the Department of Homeland Security were stationed outside the federal courthouse at ,- Broad Street, in Charleston, South Carolina. It was warm out, and the o+cers looked both relaxed and alert, talking among themselves as they kept watch. The federal building is a bunker, all right angles and gray concrete, completed in 1987. Across the street stands the county courthouse, designed by James Hoban, the architect of the White House, and diagonally opposite is the city hall, built in .,0.. The federal building would mar what the American Planning Association calls one of the nation’s “great streets,” except that it is hidden by a red brick antebellum structure that faces the street—an architectural sleight of hand that says much…

With steps freshenedby wearing a man’s cast-o! shoes,I follow the rain-rutted roadas far as the fishing boatsturned upside downon the soggy bank, their oarssecured elsewhere to provideagainst thieves.Mottled light throughwaterside trees over the bowsand sterns means tradingfish for birds.I take up the invisible oarsput by for just thisoccasion: a banishingscald of sun blotted inexactlyby a succession of windblown cloudsable to lift the entire *otilla.A bird*ies through me. Thena fish.…

The True Flag, by Stephen Kinzer (Henry Holt). In just four years at the turn of the twentieth century, the United States invaded and established de-facto control over Cuba, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. “Never in history has a nation leaped so suddenly to overseas empire,” Kinzer writes in a well-researched account, which also gestures toward subsequent U.S. interventions. The most vocal expansionist was Theodore Roosevelt, for whom hegemony was an end in itself. He was opposed by the Anti-Imperialist League and Mark Twain, who saw in his imperial designs a betrayal of America’s founding principles. “It was impossible to save the Great Republic,” Twain lamented. “Lust of conquest had long ago done its work.” A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea, by Melissa Fleming (Flatiron). Written…

Dvorák’s "#$" opera, “Rusalka,” didn’t arrive at the Met until "##%, but it soon became a major vehicle for the burgeoning career of the soprano Renée Fleming. Now this tender piece (beloved for its aria “Song to the Moon”) features another star in the making, Kristine Opolais, who has long made the title role part of her repertory. The new production is by Mary Zimmerman, whose radical interpretations of such comfy classics as “La Sonnambula” and “Lucia di Lammermoor” caused much controversy in the early Peter Gelb era. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera The theatre direc—known for her adaptations o! literary works like Ovid’s Metamorphoses—was an early favorite o" Peter Gelb’s administration, but her three stagings o# bel-canto operas for the company were at times awkward and stylistically indistinct.…

“Art of Food” New York-Presbyterian Hospital and the local newspaper Our Town present a “quintessential New York evening,” during which Upper East Side chefs prepare and serve dishes based on famous works o" art curated by Sotheby’s. The concept leans on the presence o$ food in enduring works o" art—soup cans, fruit bowls, feasts—and reverses the !low o" inspiration, with chefs from 1633, Crave Fishbar, Magnolia Bakery, Shake Shack, and other restaurants creating original menu items, accompanied by live music courtesy o$ Metro Strings. A portion o" the event’s proceeds will be donated to City Harvest. (Sotheby’s, 1334 York Ave. artoffoodny.com. Feb. 4 at 7:30.) Winter Village Bryant Park, lowered and landscaped in 1992 to discourage crime and welcome midtown strollers, will host various winter-themed stations and activities surrounding…

AFTER THE FULMINATION on the Capitol steps from the pouting boy with the toys, the helicopter escape by the grownups, the jubilant resistance by millions of marching women (and men), and, finally, the long (or short) rides home, as dusk fell on Sunday a sane, soft-spoken man addressed a gathering. “It’s very good of all of you to come,” said Allan Miller, a co-founder of Symphony Space, at Ninety-fifth Street and Broadway, in one of the least Trump-friendly of Zip Codes. “I think we all have something to say.” The occasion: “Open Mic at Symphony Space.” Subtitle: “Pathways to E.ectiveness in a New Political Climate, How to Stay Positive in an Uncertain Time.” Sub-theme: The Upper West Side will always be with us. Standing before the stage at the Leonard…

DEAR DIARY, I have just returned from the Women’s March, and I’m feeling much better. Of course, I was in disguise: I’d removed the formfitting powder-blue Ralph Lauren bolero I’d worn over my Inauguration dress and added a down vest, Uggs, and one of those fun pink knitted hats that everyone was wearing. I had such a good time chanting “Keep your tiny hands o' my reproductive rights!” and “Free Melania!” No one recognized me, although when one lady commented on the resemblance, I replied, “No, Melania is much younger and more wistfully melancholy.” The Inauguration wasn’t easy for me. Mostly, I pretended that Donald was an elderly real-estate broker showing me homes in the D.C. area. While Donald was being sworn in, Ivanka kept whispering in my ear, “If…

The infinite yawns and keeps yawning.Is it sleepy?Does it miss Pythagoras?The sails on Columbus’s three ships?Does the sound of the surf remind it of itself ?Does it ever sit over a glass of wine and philosophize?Does it peek into mirrors at night?Does it have a suitcase full of souvenirs stashed away somewhere?Does it like to lie in a hammock with the wind whispering sweet nothings in its ear?Does it enter empty churches and light a single candle on the altar?Does it see us as a couple of fireflies playing hide-and-seek in a graveyard?Does it find us good to eat?…

WHEN SAMPHA SISAY appeared on late-night television for the first time, in +,-., he was—like many others at the time—an accessory to Drake, who was promoting an album on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.” Seated at a tiny keyboard, Sisay played the plaintive melody of “Too Much,” in which Drake lays bare the kinds of struggles—over finances, illness, thwarted ambitions—that most superstars would keep under wraps. Drake has made his name by toggling between rapped verses and emotionally sung hooks, but for this song he deployed Sisay, a Londoner who goes by Sampha, as a kind of sentimental counterweight. “Money got my whole family going backwards,” Drake rapped forcefully into the camera, and Sampha delivered the chorus from the wings, just above a whisper: “Don’t think about it too much,…