Innholdsfortegnelse for June 27, 2016 i The New Yorker

Evan Osnos (“Making a Killing,” p. 36) writes about politics and foreign affairs for The New Yorker. His book “Age of Ambition” won the 2014 National Book Award for nonfiction. Amy Davidson (Comment, p. 17), a staff writer, contributes regularly to Comment and to newyorker.com. Jill Lepore (“The Woman Card,” p. 22) is a professor of history at Harvard. She is writing a history of the United States. Ben Taub (“The Shadow Doctors,” p. 28), a 2015 graduate of Columbia University’s journalism school, is a contributor to the magazine. Michael Schulman (The Talk of the Town, p. 18), the theatre editor of Goings On About Town, published his first book, “Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep,” in April. Frank Viva (Cover) is an illustrator and a graphic designer. “Sea Change”…

IN JACKSON HEIGHTS, there is a cluster of gay bars and clubs on either side of Roosevelt Avenue, with the elevated No. 7 train rumbling down the middle. They are the nucleus of New York’s Latino gay scene, especially on Saturday nights, when salsa, merengue, Spanish pop, and house music are blaring, and people come from Long Island, New Jersey, and the Bronx to drink and dance. Mauro Julca moved with his mother and sisters from Lima, Peru, to Mill Basin, Brooklyn, in 2003, and felt isolated until his first boyfriend took him dancing at Club Evolution, a big venue in Jackson Heights. “It was amazing just to go out and see Latin people dancing to Latin music,” he said last Wednesday. “It wasn’t just the club. It was the…

BORN IN York, Pennsylvania, but reared in North Carolina and Virginia, the country singer Robbie Fulks came to New York in 1980, to get off the farm (his parents were back-tothe-landers) and enroll at Columbia: “I didn’t know that there wouldn’t be women there, or even that it was in the Ivy League,” he said the other day. He dropped out after two years to give the singer-songwriter thing a go, while working as an assistant to Donald Fine, a publisher of mid-list thrillers. In 1983, he moved to Chicago, where, except for a three-year dalliance with Nashville (memorialized in his song “Fuck This Town”), he has lived ever since. In the early nineties, he started making records on the Bloodshot label, often with the recording engineer Steve Albini. After…

ON A RECENT Tuesday evening in London, the surgeon David Nott attended a dinner at Bluebird, an upscale Chelsea restaurant. The room was packed with doctors, renowned specialists who had come for the annual consultants’ dinner of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, one of Britain’s leading medical establishments. As waiters set down plates of lamb and risotto, Nott checked his phone and found a series of text messages. “Hi David,” it began. “This is an urgent consultation from inside Syria.” Attached was a photograph of a man who had been shot in the throat and the stomach. The image had been sent by a young medical worker in Aleppo. He had removed several bullets from the patient’s small intestine, but he wasn’t sure what to do about the wound in…

VASLAV NIJINSKY ( 1889-1950), the great Polish-Russian dancer who, in his early twenties, introduced modernism into ballet and then went floridly insane, is a subject that was just waiting for the experimental theatre director Robert Wilson. Wilson has always been interested in mental aberrations. Indeed, as a child he had a “processing disorder,” as he has called it. He was slow to read and slow to learn, and he had a terrible stutter. Once he overcame those problems, he addressed problems in others. When he was a young man, he worked as a therapist for brain-damaged children. Later, he cast an autistic teen-ager, Christopher Knowles, in a number of his shows. So it’s easy to see why Nijinsky’s condition, which is thought to have been schizophrenia, would have attracted him—as…

FREEZE FRAME Andrew Marantz’s article on how filmmakers are embracing virtual reality— and the technical, narrative, and visual challenges they face when they do— seemed to me to reveal the unnatural fit between V.R. and movies, rather than depict how well they work together (“Studio 360,” April 25th). Talented story tellers show the audience exactly what they want the audience to see: no more and no less. They create a condensed and sculpted reality. So how does a storyteller function if his audience can see and hear everything that’s happening outside the intended field of view? V.R. will be transformative, but in other areas, like gaming, and in still undeveloped creations blending experiential images and sound. V.R. technology is finally reaching its technical and economic tipping point, and the…

Magical things happen on the first summery night in New York. The East River Ferry seems like the most necessary form of transportation, Walt Whitman’s odes to the city summon themselves from the depths, and the much-awaited Brooklyn Barge bar finally opens. Strung with fairy lights, the bar floats in the East River, anchored off WNYC Transmitter Park, on an edge of Greenpoint best reached by that ferry. It aims to be a community center in addition to a watering hole, with paddleboard and sailing lessons. On opening night, though, all that was a distant dream; the kitchen was closed and the bar was cash only. But after a permitbeleaguered inaugural season last year (blink and you missed those two weeks of service), summerhungry New Yorkers weren’t feeling picky. It…

BRIAN DE PALMA tucked his napkin under his chin and said, “I woke up in the middle of the night with this idea for a script. In the last big scene, my lead character is photographing a movie set at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Meanwhile, my other story line is winding up on top of the tower.” Noah Baum bach and Jake Paltrow leaned in over their kale salads at Gotham Bar and Grill. De Palma, bearded and bulky at seventy-five, wore a safari jacket, as befits a Hollywood director; his clean-shaven, slimmer, much younger friends from the indie world bracketed him in navy suits. De Palma went on, “So I asked myself, ‘What movie could be shooting at the foot of the Eiffel Tower?’ And I said,…

“IT MEANS FREEDOM for WOMEN TO VOTE AGAINST THE PARTY THIS DONKEY REPRESENTS” read the sign on a donkey named Woodrow who, wearing a bow, was paraded through Denver by the National Woman’s Party during its campaign against the Democratic incumbent, President Wilson, in 1916. This year, the hundredth anniversary of the Woman’s Party arrived, unnoticed, on June 5th. Two days later, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to claim the Presidential nomination of a major party: the Democratic Party. If elected, Clinton will become the first female President in the nation’s history. She will also join John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, Martin Van Buren, and James Buchanan as the only Presidents to have served both in the Senate and as Secretary of State. If she loses the election to…

When it was warm enough, you came with your nighttimeshow, costing us nothing. We caught you in Masonjars, hoping to create a new kind of bedsidelamp. Leave days rationed out by the computer,hoarded for a vain flicker of freedom. Weekends,I zone out on “Homeland.” Sordid. I do enoughcareful work to satisfy my bosses. I savefor retirement—to my bohemian eyes,a fortune—though they say you need morethan a million. Immerse yourself in the exponentialpower of dividends. And what about decoratingyour rental apartment? At least put up somecurtains after fourteen years. I don’t mindthe metro, eavesdropping on other people’slives. I don’t die down there every daya little. And you rise up once moreunsolicited from the fields, with your equalmeasure of appearing and disappearing.…

My genes are in mice, and not in the banal waythat Man’s old genes are in the Beasts.My doctors split my tumors up and scattered theminto the bones of twelve mice. We givethe mice poisons I might, in the future, wantfor myself. We watch each mouse like a crystal ball.I wish it was perfect, but sometimes the death we seedoesn’t happen when we try it again in my body.My tumors are old, older than mice can be.They first grew in my flank, a decade ago.Then they went to my lungs, and down my femurs,and into the hives in my throat that hatch white cells.The mice only have a tumor each, in the leg.Their tumors have never grown up. Uprootedand moved. Learned to sleep in any bedthe vast body turns down.…

SOMETIME AROUND October 20, 1788, Patrick Henry rode from his seventeen-hundred-acre farm in Prince Edward, Virginia, to a session of the General Assembly in Richmond. Henry is now famous for having declared, on the eve of the Revolution, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”—a phrase it’s doubtful that he ever uttered—but in the late seventeen-eighties he was best known as a leader of the Anti-Federalists. He and his faction had tried to sink the Constitution, only to be outmaneuvered by the likes of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. When Henry arrived in the state capital, his adversaries assumed he would seek revenge. They just weren’t sure how. “He appears to be involved in gloomy mystery,” one of them reported. The Constitution had left it to state lawmakers to determine…

“WHAT COMPOSERS do is, without exaggeration and without any shred of hyperbole, the most important thing that is happening in music at any given time.” So said Alan Gilbert, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, at this year’s NY Phil Biennial, a sprawling three-week survey of new and recent music in the classical tradition. In a better world, the statement would have been tediously obvious. If an art-world figure were to say, “What artists do is the most important thing that is happening in art at any given time,” an audience of gallerygoers would smirk. In classical music, though, the artistic leader of a major institution still comes across as a bit of a Jacobin if he or she pays more than minimal attention to living composers. The…

Charlotte Brontë complained of Jane Austen, “The Passions are perfectly unknown to her.” But Brontë never saw the Bedlam company’s hurtling, ardent staging of “Sense & Sensibility,” which has returned to the Gym at Judson for an encore. Under the direction of Eric Tucker, Kate Hamill (who adapted the novel) plays the impetuous Marianne Dashwood and Andrus Nichols is the more circumspect Elinor, two sisters rendered financially impecunious and emotionally adrift following the death of their father. MOVIES OPENING Free State of Jones A Civil War drama, based on the true story of a Mississippi farmer (Matthew McConaughey) who leads a revolt against the Confederacy. Directed by Gary Ross; co-starring Keri Russell, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Mahershala Ali. Opening June 24. (In wide release.) • Independence Day: Resurgence Roland Emmerich…

“Games for Change” “If,” a subscription-based game for the iPad, is designed to help children develop decision- making skills through an emphasis on empathy and compassion: two populations of cats and dogs are warring in the fictional town of Greenberry, and the player must find a way to bring about peace. The video game’s developer, Trip Hawkins, created the hugely successful “Madden NFL” franchise, but calls “If” his biggest accomplishment yet. The “Games for Change” festival elevates socially minded games like these, cultivating investors and providing platforms for designers and publishers hoping to leverage gaming technology’s enormous appeal for public good. This year’s festival will include programs on early-childhood development, gender dynamics, and V.R.’s potential as an educational tool. (Parsons School of Design, 66 Fifth Ave. 212-242-4922. June 23-24.)…

A FEW YEARS AGO, Andrew Hacker, the political scientist, wrote an Op-Ed for the Times titled “Is Algebra Necessary?,” in which he proposed eliminating mandatory high-school math. “Think of math as a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves,” he wrote. Although some of the article’s readers suspected Hacker of satire, he was as serious as calculus, and has extended his argument in a book called “The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions.” Recently, the National Museum of Mathematics, on East Twenty-sixth Street, invited Hacker to defend his assertions in a public debate with James Tanton, the mathematician at large of the Mathematical Association of America, and an educator and consultant. “I may be the only non-mathematician in the house,” Hacker said in opening,…

BARS IN THE Old City neighborhood of Philadelphia let out at 2 A.M. On the morning of January 17, 2010, two groups emerged, looking for taxis. At the corner of Market and Third Street, they started yelling at each other. On one side was Edward DiDonato, who had recently begun work at an insurance company, having graduated from Villanova University, where he was a captain of the lacrosse team. On the other was Gerald Ung, a third-year law student at Temple, who wrote poetry in his spare time and had worked as a technology consultant for Freddie Mac. Both men had grown up in prosperous suburbs: DiDonato in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia; Ung in Reston, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. Everyone had been drinking, and neither side could subsequently remember…

EVERY VISIT TO an aged parent is in the nature of a farewell. When I got a save-the-date postcard for Mother’s ninetieth, I thought, Oh, God. A birthday can seem like a kind of funeral. Then I saw an opportunity, and said yes, and made my arrangements, and looked forward to the event. But the private function room at the Happy Clam was funereal, with bouquets and long faces—Rose with her back turned, Gilbert and Fred conferring, Franny fussing over her son, Jonty. We all stood gaping and glassy-eyed, as though we were about to bury Mother. I had arrived on time, resolved to see it through. The spouses were rattled— Franny’s husband, Marvin, ill at ease out of his security-guard uniform, Fred’s wife, Erma, sighing and snatching at her…

American Maelstrom, by Michael A. Cohen (Oxford). In 1968, the Kerner Commission warned that America was becoming two societies, “separate and unequal.” This book makes the case that that year’s Presidential election offered an even more ominous warning: American voters were falling prey to the politics of extremism. Cohen assesses the campaigns of nine Presidential candidates—including insurgents like Eugene McCarthy and George Wallace—and outlines how their response to a “national nervous breakdown,” precipitated by Vietnam, the counterculture, and the civil-rights movement, paved the way for antigovernment conservative populism and the rise of the so-called “backlash” voter across the spectrum. Although the book does not make an explicit comparison to our current political moment, the parallels are hard to ignore. Bullies, by Alex Abramovich (Henry Holt). This memoir recounts the…