Innholdsfortegnelse for February 13-20, 2017 i The New Yorker

Patrick Radden Keefe (“Journeyman,” p. 52) is an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and the author of “Chatter” and “The Snakehead.” Dana Goodyear (“Valley Cats,” p. 44), a staff writer, has published three books, including “Honey and Junk” and “Anything That Moves.” Thomas Mallon (Books, p. 89) is a novelist, an essayist, and a critic. “Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years” came out in paperback in August. E. Tammy Kim (The Talk of the Town, p. 33), a member of the magazine’s editorial staff, co-edited the book “Punk Ethnography.” John W. Tomac (Cover) has contributed illustrations to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Village Voice. Rae Armantrout (Poem, p. 59) is the author of “Partly: New and Selected Poems.” A poetry chapbook,…

Venetian Valentine Commedia Masked Ball The Grand Prospect Hall, in Brooklyn, hosts a surrealistic formal as part of Carnegie Hall’s “La Serenissima: Music and Arts from the Venetian Republic.” Dances of Vice, a night-life agency specializing in baroque costumed events, has helped conjure this Valentine’s Day ball inspired by the Carnevale di Venezia. Participants are treated to live music, opera, circus acts, sinuous burlesque performances, and immersive theatre, with appearances by the troupe Company XIV. Black tie, fantasy dress, and Carnevale-themed attire are welcome, and tables can be reserved for a 7 P.M. dinner, which will be served before doors open to the general public. (263 Prospect Ave. 718-788-0777. Feb. 11 at 9.) The Orchid Show This edition of the New York Botanical Garden’s annual Orchid Show, now in…

TWENTY YEARS AGO, when Michelle Gelernt was a rookie public defender, she would often meet her older brother, Lee, an A.C.L.U. attorney, at a Tribeca pub called Walker’s. “We’d work till 2 a.m. and then come here,” Michelle said one evening last week. They had a lot to catch up on. The Trump era, just eleven days old, had thrown the Gelernts into the highest- profile litigation of their careers. Michelle, who is now a federal defender, had spent Inauguration Day (a.k.a. the National Day of Patriotic Devotion) at Brooklyn’s federal courthouse, advocating on behalf of Joaquín Guzmán, known as El Chapo, the extradited Mexican drug lord. A week later, in the same building, Lee, the deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, argued for an emergency stay of…

A COUPLE OF YEARS ago, I spent the summer in Portland, Oregon, losing things. I normally live on the East Coast, but that year, unable to face another sweltering August, I decided to temporarily decamp to the West. This turned out to be strangely easy. I’d lived in Portland for a while after college, and some acquaintances there needed a house sitter. Another friend was away for the summer and happy to loan me her pickup truck. Someone on Craigslist sold me a bike for next to nothing. In very short order, and with very little effort, everything fell into place. And then, mystifyingly, everything fell out of place. My first day in town, I left the keys to the truck on the counter of a coffee shop. The next…

THE MOVIE MOVES, and James Baldwin moves in it. Sometimes he looks like a graceful queen, as he sits, poised, his back erect with grand indulgence or tolerance or love. His expressive hands cut through the air during this or that interview, speaking a wordless language of their own, as the former boy preacher from Harlem, small, dark, and compact, talks and talks about race, sounding like no one else on earth. It’s Baldwin’s voice— his luminescent words describing and analyzing dark matters—that ties together Raoul Peck’s latest film, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which is about many things, including the writer’s relationship to racial politics and the fantastic yet undermining power of the cinema’s racially defined images. One of the chief pleasures of the movie is watching Baldwin, who…

Rumi’s Secret, by Brad Gooch (Harper). Rumi, the great Persian poet, was a religious scholar in Anatolia when, in 1244, he encountered a man named Shams who recognized him as “a poet and a mystic, not a gatekeeper for rules.” Their friendship transformed Rumi’s life, and transports this biography into an exquisite, joyous realm. Shams, gruff and guileless, badgered Rumi into risking a more vulnerable approach to the concealed and inexpressible—that is, the essence of God and of love. Gooch narrates their friendship as a love story gone awry: Rumi releases his most uninhibited poetic self only after Shams disappears. Thankfully, more nurturing, less abrasive friendships followed, allowing Rumi to compose the spiritually pantheistic, enigmatic, and witty work for which he is famous. The Men in My Life, by…

APOCALYPSE NOW The cowardice and the greed of most of the subjects in Evan Osnos’s article on the hyper-wealthy’s preparations for disaster and apocalypse scream out from the page (“Survival of the Richest,” January 30th). Where are the philanthropists and the large-minded benefactors? Eradicating diseases is great and eye-catching, but where is the concern for one’s own community? If today’s billionaires worked together to house the homeless or to guarantee a basic income for the less fortunate, the “revolution” wouldn’t be necessary. And, with the so-called leaders of society refusing to pay their share of taxes, it’s easy to imagine the majority of people following suit. With no morally sound role models to emulate, it’s now up to each individual to formulate her or his own ethos. Woe to…

IN 1964, PETULA CLARK had a hit with “Downtown.” But the songwriter Tony Hatch has said he was inspired by Times Square—a solecism forgivable from a Brit. In native parlance, the word denotes Manhattan below Fourteenth Street. “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965,” a jam-packed show at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, surveys a defining epoch in the geographical mythos. Streets previously almost barren of art spaces—in Greenwich Village, on the Lower East Side, and in what came to be christened by real-estate agents the East Village—sprouted do-it-themselves co-op and shoestring galleries, some with the life spans of mayflies but others in for long hauls. (The Tanager gallery, hospitable to overlapping circles of abstract and figurative painters, lasted ten years; the similarly oriented Hansa, largely showing…

THERE’S AN OLD saw about Washington, D.C., that staffers in their twenties know more about the minutiae of government than their bosses do. Whether they wield real power is a different question. Julia Hahn, the twenty-five-year-old Breitbart News reporter who has just been named a special assistant to the President, could be a test case. Hahn is a protégée of Stephen Bannon, the White House chief strategist and former Breitbart chairman, who has been referred to as “Trump’s Rasputin.” (On Twitter, he is often called #PresidentBannon.) When Hahn wrote for Breitbart, her primary beats were immigration (she wanted less of it, especially from Muslim countries) and the perfidy of Republicans who, in her view, sold out American interests—especially the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. In dozens of vituperative articles,…

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S executive order on immigration overshadowed almost everything else in the first week of his tenure. But tactically the order has a lot in common with more day-to-day policies, especially his plan to slash federal spending. Both rely on scapegoats (immigrants, on the one hand; on the other, things like foreign aid and legal assistance for the poor). Both cater to the misconceptions of Trump’s base: no fatal terrorist attack here has involved anyone from the seven countries covered by the executive order, nor does the alleged waste that Trump has vowed to cut amount to more than a tiny fraction of the total budget. And both are acts of political theatre, enhancing Trump’s image as a tough-talking outsider while doing little to solve the underlying problems. During the…

THE UNDERSTANDING IS that, after Casey’s iPhone alarm goes off at 6:15 a.m., Kirsten wakes the boys, nudges them to get dressed, and herds them downstairs, all while Casey is showering. The four of them eat breakfast as a family, deal with teeth-brushing and backpacks, and Casey, who is the principal of the middle school in the same district as the elementary school Jack and Ian attend, drives the boys to drop-off. Kirsten then takes her shower in the newly quiet house before leaving for work. The reality is that, at 6:17, as soon as Casey shuts the bathroom door, Kirsten grabs her own iPhone from her nightstand and looks at Lucy Headrick’s Twitter feed. Clearly, Kirsten is not alone: Lucy has 3.1 million followers. (She follows a mere five…

SEEKERS OF PRESIDENTIAL frisson cherish the synchronous deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, on July 4, 1826, a temporal thrill doubled by the date’s being the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Another eerie conjunction belongs to February 20th, which delivered to the White House, on two occurrences a century apart, some of the keenest joy and deepest sorrow to enter the building. At 4:10 p.m. on Tuesday, February 20, 1962, John F. Kennedy was on the phone congratulating John Glenn, who had just completed three orbits of Earth. Amid a clamor of national pride, the President quietly observed, “I have just been watching your father and mother on television, and they seemed very happy.” A hundred years earlier, almost to the hour, the set…

THE ENIGMATIC, fantastically erudite artist Raymond Pettibon takes to Twitter like a bird to sky. My favorite of some fifty tweets that he posted on a recent day offers a reason that Donald Trump can’t be the Antichrist: “Not charming, goodlooking, endearing enuff.” In his art, Pettibon only sometimes addresses topical politics, or topical anything, but he knows his archetypes, and it’s nice to have eschatological expertise on current events. How seriously to take it is an uncertainty that haunts all of Pettibon’s art, which is surveyed in “A Pen of All Work,” a retrospective at the New Museum of some seven hundred creations, mostly drawings with text. He has intrigued and befuddled a growing audience since the late nineteen-seventies, when he emerged, in Hermosa Beach, California, as a bookish…

Twin City locals might describe their home-town temperament as a genial passivity combined with a fondness for the last word. The Minneapolis group Bad Bad Hats brings fluid indie rock to Baby’s All Right on Feb. 12, in which the vocalist Kerry Alexander’s doe-eyed stylings defang her first-person screeds. “I bought this dress to spite you, I wear it ’cause I hate you,” she sings lovingly on “Things We Never Say”; such couplets litter the band’s superb début, “Psychic Reader,” and suggest that the young songwriter is rarely left speechless. OPENING Fifty Shades Darker An erotic-thriller sequel, based on the novel by E. L. James, starring Dakota Johnson as a woman in a masochistic relationship with a rich man Qamie Dornan). Directed by James Foley. Opening Feb. 10. (In…

These days, clandestine bars are more likely to elicit groans than curiosity. We have, in other words, surpassed peak speakeasy. So a drinking establishment must be very good to be worth seeking out, by, say, first roaming through Walter’s, a brunch mainstay in Fort Greene. Behind a door at the back of the restaurant, Karasu’s lounge materializes like a photographic negative of what came before. Where there was light, there is inky, elegant darkness. Where there was bright chatter, there are jazz records spun at a volume that underpins conversation without overtaking it. On a recent Saturday night, the bartender Frank Cisneros, who once worked in Japan, waxed rhapsodic about the beauty of ceremony in that country’s drinking culture. That fascination pervades Karasu, where even a whiskey neat is crafted…

ONE OF THE many organizations thrown into chaos last week because of the Trump Administration’s travel ban was the Arab-American Family Support Center, in Brooklyn. “It’s been incredibly hectic,” Ambreen Qureshi, the center’s deputy executive director, said recently. Her office had been inundated with stories of anti-Muslim harassment and travel emergencies. “A lot of anxiety, a lot of worry, stress, tension,” she said. There were subtler challenges, such as figuring out how to explain the travel ban to people who had come to the A.A.F.S.C. to study for the U.S.-citizenship exam. Volunteers spend weeks drilling the students on American rights and values, such as freedom of religion. They lead field trips to the Statue of Liberty. Qureshi said, “It’s very hard for us to reconcile what we’re teaching them with…

NEW YORKERS VIEW their subway system with reproachful pride. We fixate on its virtues and faults, as though the subway lines were our children. We want so much for them, and yet they so often disappoint. When their latest report cards arrived, just after Christmas, the top grades went to the 1 line, the 7, and the L. The goats were the 5 and the A. The A train at least has an anthem, and the vestigial grandeur of connecting old Harlem to Bed-Stuy. The 5, odeless, has passengers massed five deep on the platform, with herders in fluorescent vests blowing whistles and barking out commands (“Let the people off the train first!”) and riders adding their own gloss (“If you don’t fit, get out the fucking train!”). Along with…

When the President of the United States travels outside the country, he brings his own car with him. Moments after Air Force One landed at the Hanoi airport last May, President Barack Obama ducked into an eighteen-foot, armorplated limousine—a bomb shelter masquerading as a Cadillac—that was equipped with a secure link to the Pentagon and with emergency supplies of blood, and was known as the Beast. Hanoi’s broad avenues are crowded with honking cars, storefront venders, street peddlers, and some five million scooters and motorbikes, which rush in and out of the intersections like floodwaters. It was Obama’s first trip to Vietnam, but he encountered this pageant mostly through a five-inch pane of bulletproof glass. He might as well have watched it on TV. Obama was scheduled to meet with…

Listen to it the way everybody here was naughty today, of how broad it is. Foreign man with an affluent cigar, he used to live on top of this bed on the local rails he was so proud of among the recyclables, this morning, spouting words that I thought were other. Yes, and they became addictive. Oh, make me a boy again! Do something! But the little candle just stood there, reflected in its lozenge-shaped mirror. Maybe that was “something,” a lithe sentence. He’s only going to do it for the first time. It’s snowing hard. Hand me the orange.…

CONSIDER THE DISTINCTIONS between the words “expat,” “immigrant,” “refugee.” “Expat” suggests a cosmopolitan spirit and resources that allow mobility; to be an “immigrant” suggests some measure of need. A “refugee” is, by definition, desperate: he has been displaced from his home, has been rendered stateless, has few or no resources. The expat retains an identity as he retains his citizenship, his privileges; the refugee loses his identity amid the anonymity of many others like him. In the way that enslaved persons are truncated by the term “slaves,” defined by their condition, there’s a loss of identity in the category term “refugees.” It might seem to be more humane, and accurate, to give someone who is forced to seek refuge a more expansive designation: “displaced person.” Viet Thanh Nguyen, one of…

NOAH HAWLEY’S “LEGION,” on FX, the latest Marvel production based on the X-Men, has an aesthetic that might be described as caustic whimsy. It’s a sleek, stylized diorama of alarming imagery, as much about fear orange and misery avocado and rage yellow as it is about anything else. You don’t actually have to understand much about the X-Men to enjoy watching it. This is good news, since the X-Men, a byzantine superhero mythology that launched, in 1963, as a comic-book series, has always intimidated me. I’ve got a layman’s knowledge of the movies, and I enjoyed Marvel franchises like “Jessica Jones” and “Luke Cage,” spinoffs from adjacent mythologies. On occasion, I’ve tried to absorb the Wikipedia page about the comic books, a document that makes the Talmud look like SparkNotes.…