Innholdsfortegnelse for June 20, 2016 i The New Yorker

Ryan Lizza (“Occupied Territory,” p. 26) is the magazine’s Washington correspondent and an on-air contributor for CNN. Roger Angell (The Talk of the Town, p. 24), a longtime New Yorker senior editor and writer, won a 2015 National Magazine Award for his essay “This Old Man.” A collection of his writings, under that title, was published last November. D. T. Max (“Confessional,” p. 34) is a staff writer and the author of “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace.” Marie Howe (Poem, p. 48) has published three books of poems, including “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.” Her next collection, “Magdalene,” is due out early next year. Barry Blitt (Cover; Sketchbook, p. 67) has contributed to the magazine since 1992. His illustrations are featured…

Mermaid Parade Every June since 1983, the siren song of Surf Avenue on Coney Island draws even more freaks than usual, as aquatic revellers don fish-scale suits and seashell bras to celebrate the start of summer. The Mermaid Parade was created by Dick Zigun, the founder of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, known locally as the Mayor. Each year, the parade crowns a King Neptune and a Mermaid Queen: past royalty includes David Byrne, Marty Markowitz, Queen Latifah, Lou Reed, and Laurie Anderson. Attendees can register to march in family-friendly or “artsy” clusters (for mermaids taking advantage of the city’s leniency on toplessness), or cruise along in antique cars and custom-designed floats. (Parade begins on Surf Ave. at W. 21st St. coneyisland.com/programs/mermaid-parade. June 18.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES The auction…

The playwright and actress Halley Feiffer doesn’t know how she got chronic Lyme disease, but she thinks it was from a tick on Martha’s Vineyard. Two years ago, she was acting in an Off Broadway play and could barely get through the second act. “Profound fatigue, profound brain fog. I couldn’t remember the word for, like, spoon. I couldn’t write,” Feiffer said recently. She was leaving a clinic on Park Avenue South, where, as part of her treatment, she’d just been injected with an antioxidant that makes her feel “like a superhero.” Illness is the subject of her new play, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City,” which MCC Theatre is producing at the Lucille…

Last month, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for President, and Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, met at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, two blocks from the Capitol. Ryan, the Vice-Presidential candidate in 2012, is widely regarded in the G.O.P. as a policy intellectual and has fashioned himself as the guardian of conservative ideology. Trump, one of the most opportunistic candidates in the Party’s history, had just knocked out the last of sixteen Republicans who had, to varying degrees, campaigned on Ryan’s ideas. In July, at the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland, Trumpism’s victory over Ryanism will create a potentially humiliating moment for the Speaker, who will serve as the chairman of the Convention, which will formally nominate Trump. The candidate’s visit to Party…

Derrick Hamilton’s legal education began in 1983, when he was seventeen and in the jail for teen-age boys on Rikers Island. He’d been an enthusiastic student as a child— his family called him Suity, because he liked to wear a suit to school. But in high school he’d begun skipping classes and getting into trouble. At fifteen, he was charged with robbery and sentenced to sixty days in jail. The arrests continued, for petty larceny, assault, criminal use of a firearm. Then, in March of 1983, a bread deliveryman was fatally shot near Lafayette Gardens, the publichousing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where Hamilton lived, and he was charged with the murder. He insisted that he had not done it, and entered a plea of not guilty. His father, a livery-cab…

The young turf-cutter fell hard for his first girlfriend while operating heavy machinery in the peatlands. His name was Cillian Eddowis, he was fifteen years old, and he was illegally employed by Bos Ardee. He had celery-green eyes and a stutter that had been corrected at the state’s expense; it resurfaced whenever he got nervous. “Th-th-th,” he’d said, accepting the job. How did Cillian persuade Bos Ardee to hire him? The boy had lyingly laid claim to many qualities: strength, maturity, experience. When that didn’t work, he pointed to his bedroom window, a quarter mile away, on the misty periphery of the cutaway bog, where the undrained water still sparkled between the larch trees. The intimation was clear: what the thin, strange boy lacked in muscle power he made up…

The subject of Tom Vanderbilt’s “You May Also Like” (Knopf) is taste, the term he uses for whatever it is that guides our preference for chocolate over vanilla, taupe over beige, “The Bourne Supremacy ” over “The Bourne Ultimatum,” and Artur Schna bel and Joseph Szigeti’s recording of Beethoven’s tenth violin sonata over Vladimir Ashkenazy and Itzhak Perl man’s rendering of the same work. Vanderbilt’s widely admired previous book, “Traffic,” examined a dangerous and complex activity that people pay about as much attention to while they’re doing it as they do to washing the dishes: driving a car. Making sense of driving was tough. Not nearly as tough, however, as taste. Vanderbilt’s premise is: “We are strangers to our tastes.” He doesn’t mean that we don’t really like what we…

BREAKING THE CYCLE Ian Frazier illustrates the town-by-town, city-by-city battle that is under way to diminish our reliance on single-use plastic bags (“The Bag Bill,” May 2nd). The very properties that make single-use plastic bags attractive are the same ones that cause environmental harm: they are light, flexible, extremely durable, and, above all, cheap. In theory, these bags can be recycled, although the fifteen-per-cent rate that Frazier quotes, which comes from the American Chemistry Council, is misleading. This number includes other kinds of recycled waste—not just the single- use shopping bags in question. Most experts agree that the actual rate for post-consumer shopping bags is dramatically lower. According to calculations using U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data, the national rate is less than three per cent. Furthermore, the bags cause…

EIGHTEEN MONTHS AGO, Donald Trump and the Spanish-born chef José Andrés made a deal: Trump was developing a luxury hotel near the White House and wanted Andrés to open a restaurant inside. Andrés signed on. But then, last summer, Trump got talking about building walls and accused Mexico of sending rapists to the United States. Andrés, a naturalized U.S. citizen, wanted out. Trump sued for breach of contract. Andrés countersued, arguing that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric had “torpedoed” the restaurant’s prospects. Unbowed, Andrés joined the I Am an Immigrant movement, and has spoken out against the Republican Presidential candidate’s policies, on Twitter and in person. “Who is going to be feeding America if we kick everybody that is feeding America out?” he said, not long ago. One day last week, Andrés…

IN PERSON AND in his drawings, Frank Modell presented his friends and fans with different but companionable reactions— attention, concern, and an imminent expectation of delight. His gaze was mature and alert, but a wry smile often flickered near the corners of his mouth: something awaited. He was seriously, invariably funny. Also boyish, even in his nineties. Women adored him—some of them all his life—but so did his male friends, without envy. Years ago, when my wife Carol and I were coming home after a party, she said, “Frank Modell is the most charming man in the world!” “But what about me?” I said. “Oh, you, too,” she managed. His line was deft, and his ideas unpredictable; a unicorn on a unicycle, for instance. Also a man who is leaping…

MUHAMMAD ALI UNDERSTOOD that one of the requirements of an icon is to let the iconographers through the door. He happily greeted photographers in his gym, his dressing room, his mosque, even his hotel room, where he held court for reporters and posed in bed, naked. And in the days after his death we returned to the myriad images of Ali in his glory: scowling in triumph and looming over the fallen Sonny Liston; shadowboxing underwater; peeking under the toupee of his adenoidal Boswell, Howard Cosell. Ali, the most extraordinary athlete of the past century, was ordinary only in his refusal to stop. Like his idols Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, he ached for the action and the adulation. As he told a friend, “There’s nothing like the sound…

Steer your way through the ruins of the Altar and the MallSteer your way through the fables of Creation and the FallSteer your way past the Palaces that rise above the rotYear by yearMonth by monthDay by dayThought by thoughtSteer your heart past the Truth you believed in yesterdaySuch as Fundamental Goodness and the Wisdom of the WaySteer your heart, precious heart, past the women whom you boughtYear by yearMonth by monthDay by dayThought by thoughtSteer your path through the pain that is far more real than youThat has smashed the Cosmic Model, that has blinded every ViewAnd please don’t make me go there, though there be a God or notYear by yearMonth by monthDay by dayThought by thoughtThey whisper still, the injured stones, the blunted mountains weepAs he died…

The Cultural Revolution, by Frank Dikötter (Bloomsbury). Drawing on previously classified documents and on memoirs by individual citizens, this history of China’s most infamous social movement shows how a program based on denouncing reactionaries escalated into a witch hunt that took millions of lives and ruined millions more. Books were burned, Mongols tortured, “bourgeois” art confiscated, bourgeois pet cats slaughtered, students banished to the countryside to be reëducated by the peasantry. Kitsch objects embodying the cult of Mao proliferated. The decade-long upheaval so terrorized the population that some people killed themselves rather than even risk denunciation. The book is often crushingly grim, but Dikötter also relates many stories of resilience and subterfuge, of ordinary people who paid lip service to “empty slogans” and tried to get on with their…

The most recent season of “Call the Midwife” began with bloody fingertips. Thirteen minutes into the opening episode, a woman in labor groaned in distress, and the nurse-midwife, Patsy, used a gloved hand to check her progress. As Patsy explained that her patient’s baby had “got himself into a bit of a pickle,” two of her fingers hovered in the lower left corner of the screen. They were stoplight red, an alarm set against the scene’s demure cream-and-yellow backdrop. The image felt like a metonym for the series, which, for five seasons, has waved a flag of provocation against a background of tender, socially conscious, occasionally gooey humanism, an opiate combination that has made it a secret addiction for many women of my acquaintance. On the surface, the series offers…

For fifteen years, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s River to River Festival (June 16-26) has been staging free events in public places. The current crop is strong on magnetic female performers. Okwui Okpokwasili (above) revisits Nigerian protest movements, in a Governors Island fort; Alicia Hall Moran sings about African-American finance, in Federal Hall; and the wraithlike Japanese dance legend Eiko indicts Wall Street. THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Minor Character In the company New Saloon’s riff on Chekhov, sixteen actors perform a mashup of different translations of “Uncle Vanya,” from a standard 1916 version to the garbled results of Google Translate. (Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen St., Brooklyn. 347-560-3641. Previews begin June 17. Opens June 20.) Oslo Bartlett Sher directs J. T. Rogers’s play, which recounts how a…

If you’ve ever longed to follow your Katz’s pastramion-rye experience with an Elyx spritz, served poolside and al fresco, you’re in luck. Mr. Purple, a rooftop bar fifteen stories above Ludlow and Orchard Streets, atop the Hotel Indigo, opened in November, amid controversy. Aiming for a kind of neighborliness, the proprietors named the bar after the eccentric L.E.S. icon Adam Purple, a community-garden activist with a dark past, offending locals and relatives alike. The luxury- on-Ludlow vibe is equally uneasy. The interior, meant to evoke an artist’s loft, leads to two outdoor patios, with chaise longues, purple chairs, staggeringly gorgeous views, and a swimming pool. “This is horrible!” a neighborhood man said on a recent night, scowling. “It’s like a disco bar in Thailand in 1995.” Other patrons, shouting over…

A. Scott Berg has almost singlehandedly rescued Maxwell Perkins from the anonymity he desired. Berg’s 1978 biography, “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius,” was a masterly look at a reticent Yankee who buried himself in manuscripts, wore a fedora everywhere, and deplored innovations—even as he discovered and published Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe. The glamour of these figures prompted a Hollywood studio to option the book. Then, Berg recalled hearing, “the head of Universal got to page 3 of the script and said, ‘This is about a book editor?’ ” Thirty-eight years later, “Genius”— which makes Perkins an action hero who wields his red pencil like a scimitar—has just opened, at last. The other morning, Berg, now sixty-six, stood in front of Perkins’s old town house, in Turtle Bay. The writer was…

IN THE MID-NINETEEN-SEVENTIES, the Canadian province of Manitoba ran an unusual experiment: it started just handing out money to some of its citizens. The town of Dauphin, for instance, sent checks to thousands of residents every month, in order to guarantee that all of them received a basic income. The goal of the project, called Mincome, was to see what happened. Did people stop working? Did poor people spend foolishly and stay in poverty? But, after a Conservative government ended the project, in 1979, Mincome was buried. Decades later, Evelyn Forget, an economist at the University of Manitoba, dug up the numbers. And what she found was that life in Dauphin improved markedly. Hospitalization rates fell. More teen-agers stayed in school. And researchers who looked at Mincome’s impact on work…

For three years, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro worked as a producer on the reality show “The Bachelor.” Her task, as she recalls it, was to get the contestants to “open up, and to give them terrible advice, and to deprive them of sleep.” She sees it now as “complicated manipulation through friendship.” To insure that intense emotions were captured on camera, she sometimes misled contestants who were about to be rejected. “The night they were going to get dumped, I would go to the hotel room where they were staying and say, ‘I’m going to lose my job for telling you this, but he’s going to pick you—he’s going to propose,’ ” Shapiro said. After the contestant left the set, disconsolate, Shapiro joined her in a limousine while the stereo played…

Like many skilled lyricists, the twenty- five-year-old singer-songwriter Mitski doesn’t like her words to be taken too literally. In April, when she released “Your Best American Girl,” her most straightforward indie-rock single to date, some music blogs assumed that the song was a provocation, designed to position Mitski as a female corrective to the predominantly male world of D.I.Y. rock music. “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me / But I do, I think I do,” she sings, not quite defiant. “And you’re an all-American boy / I guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl.” Mitski took to Facebook. “A lot of reviews have agreed on the narrative that she wrote this song to ‘stick it to the white boy indie rock world!’…