Innholdsfortegnelse for March 13, 2017 i The New Yorker

Ariel Levy (“Secret Selves,” p. 58), a staff writer, is the author of the memoir “The Rules Do Not Apply,” which is out this month, and is based on her New Yorker article “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” Jake Halpern (“A New Underground Railroad,” p. 32) is the co-creator of “Welcome to the New World,” a graphic narrative about Syrian refugees, which runs regularly in the Times. Anne Enright (Fiction, p. 68), the current Laureate for Irish Fiction, is the author of several books, including, most recently, “The Green Road.” Jelani Cobb (Comment, p. 27) teaches in the journalism program at Columbia University. Robert Pinsky (Poem, p. 64) is the author of, most recently, the poetry collection “At the Foundling Hospital.” Sarah Hutto (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 41) has contributed humor…

Antiquarian Book Fair The Park Avenue Armory gathers more than two hundred American and international dealers for the fifty-seventh annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair, a four-day meet-up for lovers of rare books, maps, manuscripts, and other ephemera, covering subjects including art, medicine, literature, and photography. Veteran collectors await this fair, which attracts a sizable number of titles from European dealers, because, as the former Grolier Club president Eugene Flamm says, “it’s twice as far for them to go out to California.” (Park Ave. at 66th St. 212-616-3930. March 9-12.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES At Sotheby’s, Asia Week begins with a selection of South Asian (mainly Indian) art—not Mughal miniatures or medieval sculptures but modern and contemporary works (March 14). The paintings section is led by a Romantic scene by…

THREE WEEKS BEFORE the Academy Awards, Jeremy Zimmer, the C.E.O. of United Talent Agency, set about reviewing a guest list for the firm’s annual pre-Oscar party. He paused when he got to the name Asghar Farhadi. The Oscar-winning Iranian director, whom U.T.A. represents, had said that he would not attend this year’s ceremony—where his movie, “The Salesman,” was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film— to protest President Trump’s travel ban. “Suddenly, it all coalesced,” Zimmer said. He fired off an e-mail to the agency’s board of directors, proposing that they scrap the bash and donate the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars allotted for champagne and canapes to the American Civil Liberties Union and the International Rescue Committee. (The agency’s clients and supporters chipped in another seventy thousand dollars online.)…

IN THE COURSE of a thirty-year career, the photographer Catherine Opie has made a study of the freeways of Los Angeles, lesbian families, surfers, Tea Party gatherings, America’s national parks, the houses of Beverly Hills, teen-age football players, the personal effects of Elizabeth Taylor, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Boy Scouts, her friends, minimalls, and tree stumps. But her most famous photographs are probably two that she took of herself, early in her working life. In “Self-Portrait/Cutting,” which Opie made in 1993, when she was thirty-two years old, she stands shirtless with her back to the camera in front of an emerald-green tapestry, which offsets her pale skin and the rivulets of blood emerging from an image carved into her back with a scalpel: a childlike scene of a house,…

The English novelist Angela Carter is best known for her 1979 book “The Bloody Chamber,” which is a kind of updating of the classic European fairy tales. This does not mean that Carter’s Little Red Riding Hood chews gum or rides a motorcycle but that the strange things in those tales— the werewolves and snow maidens, the cobwebbed caves and liquefying mir rors— are made to live again by means of a prose informed by psychoanalysis and cinema and Symbolist poetry. In Carter’s version of “Beauty and the Beast,” retitled “The Tiger’s Bride,” the beast doesn’t change into a beauty. The beauty is changed into a beast, a beautiful one, by means of one of the more memorable sex acts in twentieth-century fiction. At the end of the tale, the…

IN THE NINETEEN-EIGHTIES, before YouTube and streaming services made nearly the entire history of popular music instantly available, intrepid artists knew that fishing deeper waters tended to yield a better catch. Why stick to what the present culture was offering? Early hip-hop crews ransacked used-record bins, taking samples from old LPs without regard to genre or origin. For them, everything was compatible—context didn’t matter, because context was too hard to come by. In the Internet age, this is how almost everybody listens to music, minus the dust: songs arrive free of circumstance. For artists working today, rec ords from any time and place are easily juiced for inspiration. Maggie Rogers, a twenty-two-year-old singer and songwriter from Easton, Maryland, feels like the apotheosis of this sensibility. Recently, Rogers released “Now That…

MATTERS OF FACT Elizabeth Kolbert’s review of three books about the psychology of human reasoning will help readers understand the intransigence of Trump supporters in the face of facts, but I’m a bit annoyed that psychologists are getting a lot of new mileage out of ideas that philosophers have held for many years (Books, February 27th). As if we need data to prove that human reason has its limits! For more than fifty years, philosophers have argued that each of us has what Willard Van Orman Quine called a “web of belief,” and that we accept or reject a belief on the basis of how well it fits into this web. Beliefs at the center are entrenched, because changing them would require rebuilding large parts of the web, while…

DONALD TRUMP HAS a friend named Jim, “a very, very substantial guy.” We don’t know much else about Jim, except that, as Trump recently told a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “he loves the City of Lights, he loves Paris. For years, every year during the summer, he would go to Paris. It was automatic with his wife and his family. Hadn’t seen him in a while. And I said, ‘Jim, let me ask you a question: How’s Paris doing?’ ‘Paris? I don’t go there anymore. Paris is no longer Paris.’ ” Trump can remind you of Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennet. For all his talk of fake news, he seems to get a decent amount of information over whatever the Fifth Avenue equivalent is of the garden fence.…

MIKAL AMIN LEE, the manager of the Arts & Justice program at BAM—an after-school workshop, in which a group of high-school students examine social-justice issues through performance— selected this year’s theme, immigration, before last year’s election made it especially timely. “I have a feeling that Donald Trump is going to give us a whole lot of material over the next four years,” he said the other day. Lee was speaking in a dance studio at BAM’s Fisher theatre, where the nineteen students selected for the program— many come back year after year—had been working in small groups, using songs from their childhoods to create original theatre pieces. Now it was time to walk around the block to the Howard Gilman Opera House, to see “A Man of Good Hope,” a…

LAST SUMMER, Jack White bought a house in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that he had seen only in photographs. He wasn’t planning to live in it, except perhaps occasionally on retreats—he lives in Nashville. He was drawn to its past. The house was designed by George Nelson, a figure in American modernism, who mostly designed furniture. “A George Nelson house, there’s not too many of those,” White said in a car on the way there. White is forty-one, and since his adolescence, in Detroit, when he was an upholsterer’s apprentice, he has been av idly interested in modern design. He used to drive around the city looking for thrown-out furniture, and sometimes he found Nelson sofas and chairs and restored them. He saw himself more as a custodian of the Nelson house…

Ralph Branca was the fifteenth of seventeen children.This poem is not the poem of “the speaker.”His father was an immigrant from Calabria.These words are those of Robert Pinsky. Speaking.Branca wore Dodger uniform number 13.“Speaking” is the punch line of a Jewish joke.Some Romans call Calabrians “Africani.”Brooklyn had its own daily, the Brooklyn Eagle.At eighty-five Branca learned about his mother.He was twenty-one when Robinson joined the Dodgers.At eleven, I loved Robinson for his daringRunning the bases. Stealing home. His fire.Branca was one of the few who befriended him.I was too young to understand his mission,The fuel of that dancing to taunt the pitcher.Robinson never forgot Branca’s kindness.What the old man found out about his motherIs she was born a Jew in Hungary: Kati.After he gave up the most famous home run…

The Schooldays of Jesus, by J. M. Coetzee (Viking). Coetzee’s austere sequel to “The Childhood of Jesus” picks up in an indeterminate country populated by refugees who are “washed clean” of their memories on arrival. David, the central figure, is a disconcerting and precocious six-year-old, who attends an academy that teaches numerology through dance. A brutal murder triggers a crisis, but plot is not the point: in almost Socratic dialogue, the characters explore questions about memory, passion, and death. Full of allusions to Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Rafael Alberti, and the Bible, the book feels like an allegory without a key. If David is a Christ, he’s one who offers little guidance through “the maze of the moral life,” preferring the “unceasing Why.” A Book of American Martyrs, by Joyce Carol…

ONSTAGE, AS IN life, cynicism can be hard to take. In Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 mid-career masterpiece, “Sweeney Todd” (a Tooting Arts Club production, at the Barrow Street, under the direction of Bill Buckhurst), the title character’s misanthropy drives some of the plot, but it is not a cynical work. Despite the bitterness and grief that infuse and guide the story, “Sweeney Todd” is filled with so much wonder—about the magic of words and of music, of character and of plot—that, especially when you have a cast and a director as talented as those involved in this London import, it can temporarily erase the memory of the cynicism or knowingness that informs so many other current productions. Buckhurst brings to his re-creation of nineteenth-century Fleet Street an Englishman’s knowledge of how…

Growing up in Detroit in the nineteen-eighties, Carl Craig was relieved of the burden to invent. D.j.s like his mentor, Derrick May, had already hatched techno, leaving the teen-ager to toy with its lofty limits. Since 1991, when Craig released his first EP, “4 Jazz Funk Classics,” he has rethought the cavernous 808 drums of his city’s sound; his 2013 record “Masterpiece” included sparse, ambient tracks inspired by David Lynch. On March 11, Craig’s “Detroit Love” party returns; as is underground custom, coordinates will be announced the day of. OPENING Actor Martinez Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening March 10. (In limited release.) • Kong: Skull Island Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening March 10. (In wide release.) • Personal Shopper Kristen Stewart stars in this thriller, directed…

43 Franklin St., Brooklyn (718-383-5030) Tucked away in Greenpoint, a couple of blocks from the East River, is the Diamond, which curates its calendar as carefully as its beer list. The mix of high-end brews on tap includes Brooklyn’s ubiquitous I.P.A.s, a tangy Trappist pint, and a dry, malty Pilsner. It’s a neighborhood joint, with a curved mahogany bar and a shuffleboard table, complete with an abacus to tally scores, open to ironic, boozy competition. (“No Yelling/Screaming During Play,” a sign advises, though on a recent visit that rule wasn’t strictly enforced.) But what inspires fierce loyalty to the Diamond is its persistent staccato of events: slot-car races on a brand-new racetrack; three-dollar-buy-in, winnertakes- all Mario Kart tournaments; a film festival on Tuesdays, which syncs movies like “The Dark Crystal”…

IN THE UNITED STATES, Bassem Youssef is usually called the Jon Stewart of Egypt. He no longer lives in Egypt, but, he said recently, “I guess the rest of the comparison holds true, because now Jon is off the air, and I’m off the air, too.” Soon after the Tahrir Square uprising, in 2011, Youssef began hosting a satirical news show; it eventually earned the highest-ever ratings in the country. (In that respect, he was unlike Stewart.) When Mohammed Morsi was elected President, in 2012, Youssef made jokes about Morsi’s party, the Muslim Brotherhood. The next year, an Army general, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, seized power, and Youssef made jokes about the military. “Religious fundamentalists and military fundamentalists are basically the same,” he said. “They both want to ignore the truth…

HEYDAR ALIYEV PROSPEKTI, a broad avenue in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, connects the airport to the city. The road is meant to highlight Baku’s recent modernization, and it is lined with sleek new buildings. The Heydar Aliyev Center, an undulating wave of concrete and glass, was designed by Zaha Hadid. The state oil company is housed in a twisting glass tower, and the headquarters of the state water company looks like a giant water droplet. “It’s like Potemkin,” my translator told me. “It’s only the buildings right next to the road.” Behind the gleaming structures stand decaying Soviet-era apartment blocks, with clothes hanging out of windows and wallboards exposed by fallen brickwork. As you approach the city center, a tower at the end of the avenue looms in front…

IT WAS THE year’s turning. These few hours like the blink of a great eye—just enough light to check that the world is still there, before shutting back down. Sometime in the midafternoon, he had an impulse to go home, or go somewhere, and when he lifted his head, of course, it was dark outside. It just felt wrong. Two hours later, he was in the multi-story looking for his car and he couldn’t find the thing. It was like a lost dog. He clicked the key fob over and over, but there were no answering lights flashing orange on Level 2, where he usually parked, or on Level 3. He went up the little stairs to Level 4, then along the tiny path on the side of the ramp…

ON MARCH 18, 1817, Jane Austen stopped writing a book. We know the date because she wrote it at the end of the manuscript, in her slanting hand. She had done the same at the beginning of the manuscript, on January 27th of that year. In the seven weeks in between, she had completed eleven chapters and slightly more than nine pages of a twelfth—some twenty-three thousand five hundred words. The final sentence in the manuscript runs as follows: “Poor Mr. Hollis!—It was impossible not to feel him hardly used; to be obliged to stand back in his own House and see the best place by the fire constantly occupied by Sir H. D.” This is a joke. Mr. Hollis and Sir Harry Denham are dead, and it is their…