Innholdsfortegnelse for July 4, 2016 i The New Yorker

George Packer (“The Theorist in the Palace,” p. 32) is the author of seven books, including “The Unwinding,” for which he won a National Book Award. Jelani Cobb (Comment, p. 15) received the 2015 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism for his New Yorker columns. Jill Lepore (“How to Steal an Election,” p. 20), a professor of history at Harvard, is writing a history of the United States. Lauren Collins (The Talk of the Town, p. 17) reports from Europe for the magazine. Her book, “When in French,” will be published in September. Hilton Als (“Dark Rooms,” p. 26), The New Yorker ’s theatre critic, is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Barry Blitt (Cover) has contributed to the magazine since 1992.…

Danny Lyon’s career would make a great bio-pic. The New York City photographer, who, at seventy-four, is the subject of the Whitney’s terrific survey “Message to the Future,” has led an improbably adventurous life, beginning with his involvement in the civil-rights movement. In 1963, when he was twenty-one, he became the staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The year before, on his first trip to the South, Lyon ended up in a Georgia jail, with Martin Luther King, Jr., in a nearby cell. Over the next few years, he documented marches, sit- ins, arrests, and the aftermaths of bombings. Lyon’s 1963 picture of a boy shouting while confined in a choke hold by an Atlanta policeman became an icon of the civil-rights movement and a breakthrough for the…

The United Kingdom is an oxymoron. That much is clear from the crazed events that unfolded in Britain last week. On June 23rd, a referendum was held, asking U.K. citizens whether the country should remain in the European Union. The reply, to global amazement, was “No.” Almost fifty-two per cent of voters expressed a desire to leave the E.U. In effect, the country has turned to Europe, with a brave smile, and declared, “We’re sorry, but it’s over. To be frank, we never loved you anyway. All we can do now is try to make the split as painless as possible. Who knows, you may be happier without us. Oh, and, by the way, we’re keeping the cat.” Reaction to the result was swift. The pound fell out of a…

Norman Lear has fathered six children, aged twenty-one to sixtyeight, but the modern TV show remains the unruliest of his offspring. One recent morning, Lear, who created such groundbreaking sitcoms as “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons,” and “Maude,” and who once had six of the top ten shows on the air, remarked, “Friends keep saying, ‘You’re not watching ‘Game of Thrones,’ or ‘Empire,’ or ‘That one with a robot’? There’s a hundred of them!” He bent eagerly to the home-theatre module in his living room, high in Mandeville Canyon, overlooking Santa Monica Bay. The producer’s face is seamed with wrinkles—he is ninety-three— but he still exudes a rescue dog’s pep and gratitude. He recently published a memoir, and a documentary about his career, “Norman Lear: Just Another Version of…

Just as certain works of literature can radically alter our understanding of language and form, there are a select number of books that can transform our sense of what makes a photograph, and why. Between 1972 and 1992, the Aperture Foundation published three seminal photography books, all by women. “Diane Arbus” (1972), published a year after the photographer’s death, documented a world of hitherto unrecorded people—carnival figures and everyday folk—who lived, it seemed, somewhere between the natural world and the supernatural. Sally Mann’s “Immediate Family” (1992), a collection of carefully composed images of Mann’s three young children being children—wetting the bed, swimming, squinting through an eyelid swollen by a bug bite—came out when the controversy surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe’s “The Perfect Moment” exhibition was still fresh, and it reopened the question…

At dawn, the birds storm the back yard like a country they are astonished to have won without a single shot fired. There is no end to its richness, every seed tasting like a year. They have no superstitions. They celebrate in monosyllables. They cannot feel the god who lives in the wires strung over our houses no matter how tightly they grasp him with their feet. The sky is one long drink. They will never know the quiet hands with which we hold them when we find them under the hedge at dusk.…

Jean Edward Smith’s biography of George W. Bush goes on sale a day before the former President’s seventieth birthday, and it’s safe to say that no one will be bringing it as a present to the ranch outside Crawford. Smith, a well-regarded practitioner of military history and Presidential-life writing, comes straight to the point in the first sentence of his preface: “Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.” By the book’s last sentence, Smith is predicting a long debate over whether Bush “was the worst president in American history,” and while the biographer doesn’t vote on the question himself, the unhappy shade of James Buchanan will feel strongly encouraged by his more than six hundred…

One of the first voices you hear on “Freetown Sound,” the third album from Blood Orange, is that of a young slam poet named Ashlee Haze. Last year, Haze performed a poem about the first time she heard the gleeful, futuristic hiphop artist Missy Elliott, and the way this experience changed her. She had never before encountered a pop star, someone to be idolized, who looked like her. Seeing Elliott dancing exuberantly in a “black trash bag” opened Haze’s eyes to the power of representation and feminism, and to the possibility of demanding more from the world around her. “I did not grow up to be you,” she tells Elliott, “but I did grow to be me / and be in love with who this woman is.” Haze’s performance went…

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW I wish that Lizzie Widdicombe’s article on co-living spaces—shared housing that functions like a dormitory for affluent grownups—had focussed more on the issue of gentrification (“Happy Together,” May 16th). Brad Hargreaves, the founder of one of these startups, Common, says that his company was able to find “a wholly vacant multifamily building” in rapidly gentrifying Crown Heights, Brooklyn, that enabled Common to move into the neighborhood without evicting longtime residents. However, it’s common practice for property flippers to evict a building’s tenants, or to intimidate them into leaving, before putting it up for sale, thereby making the property more attractive to landlords intent on charging higher rents. This is one of the most troubling myths about areas undergoing gentrification: that they are “up-andcoming” neighborhoods…

The other night, at this dimly lit hotel bar, an impossibly skinny d.j. faded into “You’re So Vain,” and two impossibly skinny patrons—she in a black romper, he in sailor stripes—burst from a banquette for a boogie. The Blond, created by the restaurant-and-property baron Aby Rosen, is apparently the season’s new “it” bar for the in crowd. The entrance smells aggressively of cologne; the path to the bathroom is lined with vaguely suggestive art work hung Petersburg- style; the coasters are bedecked with images of famous pouting blonds. At the beginning of the night, dancers coalesce around a disco ball, lit blood red, at one end of the room, and progressively spread until most of the joint is hopping. All down the length of the long bar, balding men can…

“You can’t fall in love with the single market,” Jacques Delors, an ardent Europhile and the eighth president of the European Commission, once said. But there was a lot to be attached to, even to swoon over, before last week’s Brexit vote. There was the Eurostar, rendering London and Paris and Brussels a sort of ravishing Northeast Corridor. There was Erasmus, Easyjet, love affairs, bilingual babies, four weeks of paid vacation, unchlorinated chicken, and cheap Bordeaux. Was the European dream, which supported three and a half million British jobs, bought half of British exports, and insured equal pay for men and women, an élitist metropolitan fantasy, as its critics insisted? Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson and all the other ventriloquists demanded, “Let the people speak.” So here are the people…

Ashraf Ghani, the President of Afghanistan, wakes up before five every morning and reads for two or three hours. He makes his way daily through an inch-thick stack of official documents. He reads proposals by applicants competing for the job of mayor of Herat and chooses the winner. He reads presentations by forty-four city engineers for improvements to Greater Kabul. He has been known to write his own talking points and do his own research on upcoming visitors. Before meeting the Australian foreign minister, he read the Australian government’s white paper on foreign aid. He read four hundred pages of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report on the day of its release, and the next day he apologized to General John Campbell, the American commander in Afghanistan, for having not…

They told him he had to wear a mask in public. Which was ridiculous. It made him feel like he had a target painted on his back—or his face, actually, right in the middle of his face. But if he wanted to walk out the door of the clinic he was going to walk out with that mask on— either that or go to jail. Outside, it was raining, which made everything that much harder, because what were you going to do with a wet mask? How could you even breathe? Here, inside the office, with the doctor and his caseworker from Health Services, there was no sound of the rain, or if there was he couldn’t hear it—all he could hear was the rasp and wheeze of his own…

The Other Slavery, by Andrés Reséndez (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). The author estimates that from the time of Columbus through the nineteenth century up to five million Native Americans were subjected to captivity, trafficking, and servitude. Largely illegal, this slavery took many forms: convict leasing, debt peonage, compulsory “apprenticeships.” One slaver rationalized, “We do not consider that we buy and sell them; we consider that we transfer the debt, and the man goes with the debt.” Chronicling the stories of indigenous people who labored on plantations and in mines, Reséndez corrects a blind spot in our understanding of North American history and illuminates mechanisms by which present-day versions of the practice endure. Frederick the Great, by Tim Blanning (Random House). To his dazzled subjects, Frederick I, who led Prussia in…

This season on “Game of Thrones,” Tyrion Lannister—a salty dwarf with a Wildean wit—cuts a deal with some powerful slave owners on behalf of his boss, the flame-resistant abolitionist desert queen Daenerys. If they agree to stop funding regime change, they will get seven years to phase out slavery. Tyrion’s aides, former slaves, object. “Slavery is a horror that should be ended at once,” Tyrion shoots back. “War is a horror that should be ended at once. I can’t do both today.” In the colossal, bloody, flawed, exhausting, occasionally intoxicating phenomenon that is “Game of Thrones,” the best bits are often moments like this: seductive mini-meditations on politics that wouldn’t be out of place in “Wolf Hall,” if “Wolf Hall” had ice zombies, or “Veep,” if “Veep” featured babies getting…

“Meridian (Gold)” is a new project by the New York artist Mika Tajima, produced by SculptureCenter, at Hunter’s Point South Park, in Long Island City. Visitors can sit in the sculpture—it looks like a hot tub, from which a geyser of vapor is rising. The mist changes color based on the fluctuating value of gold; computerized lights are fed data, in real time, from global markets. Maybe this is what Marx and Engels envisioned when they wrote, about capitalism, “All that is solid melts into air.” MOVIES OPENING The BFG Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening July 1. (In wide release.) • The Legend of Tarzan Alexander Skarsgård stars in this adventure film, based on the novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, about a conspiracy in the Belgian Congo that ensnares…

Festival of Independence The South Street Seaport is humming back to life. East River walkways tucked under the F.D.R. are again rife with bikers, skaters, and stroller shovers routing a bit of waterfront sun into their evening commutes and weekend romps, not to mention adventurous fishermen casting lines over the rail. There are few better spots to view the annual Macy’s Fourth of July fireworks, now in their fortieth year—two barges will be set up just off Pier 17—and this two-day festival of concerts, food, and family activities provides a picturesque backdrop. Noisey, VICE’s music and culture channel, has picked a stacked lineup of independent artists to perform on Peck Slip across the long weekend, including indie acts like Wild Nothing, Porches, and Public Access T.V. and soul-stirrers like…

The L.A. architect and environmentalist David Hertz has a knack for repurposing stuff: planks of wood into skateboards, the wings of a Boeing 747 into the roof of a house, crushed LPs (smashed by teens in a gang intervention program) into flooring for a record label’s headquarters. But when a former client told him, last year, that he knew a guy who had invented a way to turn air into water, Hertz was incredulous. “I was, like, sure, let’s try it,” Hertz said. “It sounds like alchemy. And it sounds too good to be true, but let’s try it.” Hertz connected with Richard Groden, a general contractor in Florida and one of the inventors of the machine (called the Skywater). Last year, Groden flew to meet Hertz at his Venice…

Christie’s, the auction house, celebrates its two-hundred-andfiftieth anniversary this year, and over time the origins of certain company traditions have become obscure. Nobody is certain, for example, why the examination that art works undergo upon arrival is called a “hilling session,” though one theory is that it derives from the necessity of rolling paintings and sculptures up a slope to reach the company’s first warehouse, in West London. On an afternoon in March, Loïc Gouzer, a specialist in contemporary art at Christie’s New York, attended a hilling session to survey several works that had been secured for an upcoming auction. A team of cataloguers and fellow-specialists was present when Gouzer arrived at the Christie’s office in Rockefeller Center. He was dressed with cultivated dishevelment— well-cut blue suit, crisp white shirt,…

Let’s say men and women begin as slime, and some of us crawl out of the sea, and fall into circumstance fraught with danger, and cannot survive, but do, slithering into a cave where the stories evolve, first as pictures on the walls, then as grunts that turn into something like words. For years, though, biology reigns. Our bodies go this way or that. Our culinary wisdom is to eat more than get eaten. Our good sense is to follow a guess. Let’s say sometimes the accidental is the beginning of possibility. We discover that when we’re most afraid, when catastrophe looms, opportunities abound. We learn the power of slings and stones. And the best storyteller emerges from all of those wishing to explain. Let’s say he knows we need…

In December, 1989, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was expelled from power by American forces. To escape capture, he took refuge in the Papal Nunciatura in Panama City. When an American general arrived to confer with the papal nuncio, the U.S. Army blared music from loudspeakers to prevent journalists from eavesdropping. Members of a psychological-operations unit then decided that non-stop music might aggravate Noriega into surrendering. They made requests for songs on the local armed-forces radio station, and directed the din at Noriega’s window. The dictator was thought to prefer opera, and so hard rock dominated the playlist. The songs conveyed threatening, sometimes mocking messages: Alice Cooper’s “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Although the media delighted in the spectacle, President George H. W.…