Innholdsfortegnelse for February 27, 2017 i The New Yorker

Nicholas Schmidle (“General Chaos,” p. 40), a staff writer, is a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton. Elizabeth Kolbert (Books, p. 66) is a staff writer and the author of “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2015. Ian Frazier (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 33) recently published “Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces” and is working on a book about the Bronx. Ada Limón (Poem, p. 39) is the author of four poetry collections, including “Bright Dead Things,” a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award. Alex Ross (Musical Events, p. 74), a staff writer, is the author of “The Rest Is Noise” and “Listen to This.” Jeffrey Toobin (The…

When Loretta Lynch started work as an Assistant United States Attorney in Brooklyn, in the early nineteen-nineties, Peter Norling, her first supervisor, had some reservations. “I was concerned that she’s very soft-spoken,” he recalled, “but then, on about her second or third day on the job, I walked by her office and I overheard her conversation with a defense attorney. She was saying, ‘I think we’ve said all we have to say to one another,’ and she hangs up the phone. And I said to myself, ‘Lack of spine will not be a problem for Loretta.’ ” Norling, who remains a prosecutor in the office, was reminiscing the other night at a raucous dinner for about three hundred alums of the U.S. Attorney’s office. Lynch, who is fiftyseven, worked her…

Lisa Henson and Emma Walton Hamilton met only recently, but they have something rare in common: each has a parent who likely held a deep, enchanted place in your childhood. Henson, who is fifty-six, is the oldest daughter of Jim Henson, the creator of “Sesame Street” and the Muppets; she is now the C.E.O. of the Jim Henson Company. Walton Hamilton, who is fifty-four, is the oldest daughter of Julie Andrews, with whom she has written more than thirty children’s books. “We met by Skype,” Walton Hamilton said the other day, sitting next to Henson in director’s chairs. They were at a sound stage on Long Island, on the set of “Julie’s Greenroom,” a Netflix series that premières on March 17th; both women are executive producers. The show, aimed at…

“Here’s the interesting thing about Islam,” Keith Ellison, the Minnesota congressman currently running for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, said. It was a sunny, gelid afternoon just after Christmas. “The Prophet Muhammad—peace and blessings be upon him—his father dies before he’s ever born. His mother dies before he’s six. He’s handed over to a foster mom who’s so poor, the stories say, her breasts are not full enough to feed him. So he grows up as this quintessential orphan, and only later, at the age of forty, does he start to get this revelation. And the revelation is to stand up against the constituted powers that are enslaving people—that are, you know, cheating people, trying to trick people into believing that they should give over their money to…

In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones. Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twentyfive pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances. As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the…

Jill Lepore’s article about the history of climate science and nuclear-winter theory is important, but her story is incomplete (“Autumn of the Atom,” January 30th). Although Lepore states that the nuclear-winter debate has “long since been forgotten,” research done in the past ten years, using modern climate models, has shown that the theory of nuclear winter—which says that smoke from fires started by nuclear detonation will block sunlight, causing the Earth to become drastically colder— was correct. Lepore also refers to Stephen Schneider’s alternate theory of nuclear “autumn,” from the nineteeneighties, as if it refuted the nuclearwinter theory. But it failed to take into account the Earth’s stratosphere, was never published in a scientific journal, and was certainly not accepted by the scientific community. It was, however, used by…

On whom or on what can we blame the night of vomiting that followed one patron’s evening at Super Power, a festive tiki bar in Crown Heights, nestled between a construction site and a dingy lounge named Secrets? Was it the fault of shirtless Tom Selleck, whose portrait rests high on a shelf above the bar, the mischievous arch of his brows and the dense forest of his chest hair a siren call to world-weary New Yorkers? Could we blame the bartender, whose Jimmy Buffett vibe and red Hawaiian shirt belied the fury of his mixology? It could have been thanks to the Jonn the Beachcomber, slurpy and delicious, with three types of rum, allspice, grenadine, pineapple, lime, and crushed ice in a goblet the size of a fishbowl, topped…

The East Room, with its chandeliers and gold damask drapes, is the largest room in the White House; it might also be, to use a word favored by the President, the most elegant. Last Thursday, President Trump invited the White House press corps to assemble there so that he could debase them, while relying on them to air said debasement on live television—the mass-media equivalent of the schoolyard move known as “Why are you hitting yourself ?” The event was to begin at noon. At 11:50 a.m., the press corps stood outside the West Wing in the cold. Normally, a seating plan for an East Room press conference is drawn up well in advance. This conference, organized on a Presidential whim, would be a freefor- all. A few correspondents tried…

I like to imagine even the plants want attention, so I weed for four hours straight, assuring the tomatoes feel July’s hot breath on the neck, the Japanese maple can stretch, the sweet potatoes, spider plants, the Asiatic lilies can flourish in this place we’ve dared to say we “own.” Each nicked spindle of morning glory or kudzu or purslane or yellow rocket (Barbarea vulgaris, for Christ’s sake), and I find myself missing everyone I know. I don’t know why. First come the piles of nutsedge and creeper and then an ache that fills the skin like the Cercospora blight that’s killing the blue skyrocket juniper slowly from the inside out. Sure, I know what it is to be lonely, but today’s special is a physical need to be touched…

Only one complete poem remains. The rest of it is berries left in the bramble after a visit from midday starlings. For years I couldn’t understand how this redaction moved anyone to tears. She was a dampness in the matchbook. But the world is patient. Eventually the diamond travels from the mantle to the finger of the woman you love. Eventually the light from an exploded star arrives to confirm the emperor’s power. It’s clear now that a very old bruise can tell us how hard someone was punched. The detective solves a murder with the help of a single hair. Archeologists find a molar and build a face to fit.…

The Blood of Emmett Till, by Timothy B. Tyson (Simon & Schuster). This history of the lynching, in Mississippi in 1955, of Till, a black fourteen-year-old, contains a shocking revelation: the white woman who claimed that he flirted with her and grabbed her, after which her family members killed him, now says that there was no physical assault. For Tyson, this confession reveals the workings of a racial caste system that insured the murderers would be acquitted, and which, even decades later, makes it possible for young black men to be killed with impunity. Journalists and civil-rights advocates identified several eyewitnesses to the murder, both black and white, but intimidation silenced many. An exception was the dramatic testimony of Till’s uncle Reverend Moses Wright, from whose house Till was…

There is a good argument to be made for retiring the words “genius” and “masterpiece” from critical discourse. They are artifacts of the Romantic religion of art, implying a superior race of demigods who loom above ordinary life. Such terms are rooted in the cult of the male artist—the dishevelled Beethovenian loner who conquers an indifferent world. Above all, these words place an impossible burden on contemporary artists, whose creations are so often found wanting when compared with the masterpieces of the past—not because the talent pool has somehow evaporated but because the best of the present diverges from the past. In a decentered global culture, a few great men can no longer dominate the conversation. Nonetheless, in the face of a work as comprehensively astounding as Kate Soper’s “Ipsa…

ART MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES New Museum “Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work” The American artist has intrigued and befuddled a growing audience since the late nineteen-seventies, when he emerged, in Hermosa Beach, California, as a bookish surfer who made flyers and album covers for the punk band Black Flag (his older brother Greg Ginn was the founder and guitarist) and a flurry of zines. His fame took hold slowly, and it remains confined largely to fine-art circles. Seeing this show of some seven hundred creations, mostly drawings with text, is like being lost in a foreign but strangely familiar city, where polyphonic disembodied voices whisper, yell, or sputter wit and wisdom that you’re rarely sure that you heard quite right. The show’s title is from Byron’s “The Vision of…

New York International Children’s Film Festival This annual festival, founded in 1997, is the largest film event for children and teens in the country, hosting shorts, features, Q. and A.s with directors, and national premières. Past installments have showcased stop-motion vignettes and deep dives into fifty years of French animation, as well as documentaries and experimental works aimed at younger audiences. (The festival-winning films are eligible for Academy Award consideration.) This year’s highlights include a C.G.I. adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “Revolting Rhymes” and the New York première of the Japanese romantic anime “Your Name,” about a man and woman who find themselves sporadically switching bodies. (Various locations. nyicff.org. Feb. 24-March 19.) AFROPUNK: The Takeover Harlem Stage, the Apollo Theatre, and AFROPUNK, the long-running music festival, join forces to produce…

The first thing the exercise impresario Taryn Toomey did after she leased the third floor of 22 Park Place, a former construction office, last November, was to pour concrete over the scuffed floorboards and scatter hundreds of bits of smashed crystals on top. Black onyx, hematite, and black tourmaline, to “draw energy out,” and transparent quartz, rose quartz, and amethyst, for “clearing, love, and processing.” Then she covered them up with new oak planks. “I so strongly believe in the power of intention,” she said, tugging at the sleeves of her black bodysuit. “Whether or not it works, it’s there.” One morning last month, forty of Toomey’s acolytes flocked to the studio for its inaugural edition of the Class, a yoga-cardio-strength workout that Toomey, who is thirty-eight, began offering in…

Nowadays, when I tell prospective employers to consider mummies, the other undead temp option, I am met with blank stares. How is it that in just a few short years we’ve forgotten about our old reliable standbys, the mummies? Simple: We live in the golden age of zombies. I often remind personnel directors at competitive companies that mummies work eighty per cent cheaper than zombies. Mummies are also slightly more articulate, and they are easier to deal with if they become enraged. If a mummy starts to chase you, merely pull on a loose end of one of his bandages and spin him like a top, unwinding him until he collapses in a pile of bones. Unlike zombies, ninety-seven per cent of mummies are not unionized, and some have even…

Two days before the Inauguration of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth President of the United States, Michael Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and former intelligence officer, sat down in a Washington restaurant. On the tablecloth, he placed a leather-bound folder and two phones, which flashed with text messages and incoming calls. A gaunt, stern-looking man with hooded eyes and a Roman nose, Flynn is sharp in both manner and language. He had been one of Trump’s earliest supporters, a vociferous booster on television, on Twitter, and, most memorably, from the stage of the Republican National Convention. Strident views and a penchant for conspiracy theories often embroiled him in controversy—in a hacked e-mail from last summer, former Secretary of State Colin Powell called him “right-wing nutty”—but Trump rewarded Flynn’s loyalty by…

It mattered that Lotte’s apartment was commodious. Lotte liked to boast that when she lay in bed and looked past the two closest water towers, past the architectural follies and oddities few people notice on Manhattan’s rooftops, she saw all the way to the Empire State Building. On the velvet sofa in Lotte’s living room, from which she could observe the Hudson River traffic as far as the George Washington Bridge, the caregiver sat watching television. “Get rid of her,” Lotte said. Samson dropped his voice, as if this might make his mother lower hers. “As soon as we find you a replacement.” “And I’ll get rid of her,” Lotte said. Sam said, “We’ll go on interviewing till we find you the right one.” “Who will let me eat my…

When I was young, and new to modern art, I doted on the Expressionist heads and faces by the Russian- born artist Alexei Jawlensky, which he painted in thick layers of clamorous color, and wondered why a bigger deal wasn’t made of them. A flavorsome retrospective of the artist, at the Neue Galerie, renews that appeal. Jawlensky was associated with a group of painters that included, most notably, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Franz Marc, who met in Munich around the turn of the twentieth century. Jawlensky was more a follower than an innovator, having had a relatively late start as an artist. He was an eighteen-year-old military cadet in Moscow, committed to a career in the tsar’s army and completely ignorant of art, when he was thunderstruck by the…

Drag is as old as Xenophon’s fear of women, but in our transgender, anti-binary age transvestism onstage can seem quaint, a relic from a shameful past when gay people adhered to certain patriarchal assumptions about what made a man and what made a woman. Although the work of such sui-generis theatre artists as Charles Ludlam—who was inspired, in part, by Hollywood archetypes and penny dreadfuls, stories in which sexuality was performed with ridiculous, automatic vigor—was hugely important in the nineteen-sixties, it doesn’t necessarily play well anymore. Gender politics has moved on from that kind of arch radicalism As the options for drag performance have dwindled—and I’m referring here not to the kind of sleek crossover machinery you see on the TV program “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” say, but to the funky,…