Innholdsfortegnelse for March 20, 2017 i The New Yorker

Emma Allen (“Mom-and-Pop Shop,” p. 72), who will become The New Yorker ’s cartoon editor in May, has been a member of the magazine’s editorial staff since 2012. Lorenzo Vitturi (Portfolio, p. 62) is a photographer and sculptor based in London. His latest exhibitions were at the Photographers’ Gallery, in London, and the Yossi Milo Gallery, in New York. D. T. Max (Portfolio, p. 62) is the author of “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace.” Anthony Lane (The Current Cinema, p. 100) has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. Michelle Brittan Rosado (Poem, p. 60), a Ph.D. candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California, is at work on her first poetry collection. Charles…

The other day, the composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen sat in a sparsely decorated office in West Los Angeles, eying the score of his new cello concerto, which Yo-Yo Ma, Alan Gilbert, and the New York Philharmonic will perform on March 15-18, at David Geffen Hall. The state of the world was weighing on him, and he wondered what a large-scale instrumental work could offer. “I suppose that to write a piece like this is, in itself, an optimistic gesture,” he said. “To devote thousands of hours to such a thing, over two years—you have to hope that people out there can accept a certain degree of complexity. I’m always suspicious of things that see themselves as art. That has to be earned. But if you happen to sit down…

Norman Ohler is the author of the international best-seller “Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich,” which advances the case that large swaths of the German population, the Nazi Party, and the Wehrmacht used and abused an array of stimulants and narcotics. Chief among them was methamphetamine, in the form of a pill called Pervitin. According to Ohler’s reading of Hitler’s medical records, late in the war the Führer himself was hooked on a proto-speedball that consisted of cocaine and an opiate called Eukodal, administered by his private physician. The book, while delightfully nuts, in a “Gravity’s Rainbow” kind of way, has been praised for its meticulous research. A couple of critics have mistaken it for an apologia, a plea to cut the Nazis some slack, but Ohler said last week,…

When it comes to America’s technology industry, Donald Trump takes a dim view of foreign workers. “I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program”—it provides visas for technical and skilled employees—“and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers for every visa and immigration program,” he said in a statement a year ago. “No exceptions.” When it comes to the hospitality industry, though, Trump is much more, well, hospitable. His Administration recently made it harder to get H1-B visas, but he has expressed no objection to the visa category that hotels and resorts use— the H-2B—to attract low- cost, lowskilled seasonal labor. In fact, at Mara- Lago, his Palm Beach club, the visas are still in active use. Why the exception to the no-exception…

Five actors gathered in a room on Lafayette Street, in downtown Manhattan, to start rehearsing a new work for the Public Theatre, “Joan of Arc: Into the Fire.” Written by David Byrne, formerly of the Talking Heads, the show recast the enduring, improbable story of Joan—a teen-age girl in medieval France who experienced divine visions, led an army to defeat an occupying power, and was burned at the stake for heresy—as a rock musical that spoke to the current political moment. It was early January, and, that morning, U.S. intelligence officials had arrived at Trump Tower to brief the President-elect, Donald Trump, on the findings of an investigation into the recent election, in which they had concluded that President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, had acted to insure the defeat of…

Nor the police, hyenas on hearing five confessions, four false and one too irresistible. Nor the mental-health elephant, tusked by the state. Nor the common-sense stork twisting at the prosecutor’s feet. Nor the one the one juror, uneasy facing eleven pale sheep that bay all day all night for conviction. Nor the Governor, sir! Nor the common-sense stork, now in a knot. Nor the shots. Nor the clause, unbending. Nor the clause, bending. Nor, seeing his fitful approach, did one turn back to flip the window latch for the lifeform nearly breaking himself on glass. Nor the next Governor. Nor the state—carriage horses trotting ever steady blinders acute to the eye. Nor the widower how could he, puma in pull-focus. Nor the defense counsel, not for lack of it. Nor…

Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry (Viking). This prize-winning novel imagines nineteenth-century America through the eyes—and in the sparkling dialect—of an Irishman who emigrates during the Great Famine. Joining the Army, he is sent out West to slaughter Native Americans and fights on the Union side in the Civil War, nearly starving to death in a prison camp. Increasingly preferring to wear dresses, he has a romance with a man. By presenting these actions— whether cruel, noble, or tender—without judgment, Barry creates a sense of America as a huge canvas of juxtaposition and possibility, and of human life as something similar. “We have our store of days,” the protagonist says. “We spend them like forgetful drunkards.” Ghachar Ghochar, by Vivek Shanbhag, translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur (Penguin).…

PUTIN, TRUMP, AND THE U.S. David Remnick, Evan Osnos, and Joshua Yaffa’s fascinating, and horrifying, article on Russian interference in the U.S. Presidential election was highly informative, but it seemed to avoid making a definitive statement about whether Russia’s involvement had a direct impact on the election’s outcome (“Active Measures,” March 6th). Everybody—including The New Yorker—seems to be following Obama’s lead in not doing or saying anything too concrete, for fear of seeming too “political.” But surely the time to worry about appearing partisan has passed, now that we’re in the hands of a President who encourages pollution, deregulation, and a profit-based educational system, and who exhibits a raw hatred of anyone who isn’t white, male, straight, Christian, and native born. Despite all the knowledge and the evidence in…

As Merce Cunningham was trying, in the nineteen-fifties, to cleanse his dances of story and symbol—that is, more or less, to throw off the influence of Martha Graham, the most celebrated choreographer of the period—one of the main things beckoning him forward, apart from just mid-century modernism, was nature. He grew up in the small town of Centralia, Washington. He knew trees and birds and dirt roads, and he knew that however lovely nature is it is not sweet, and it won’t tell us what it means. Furthermore, it’s huge. A bird that you can hear, maybe even see, in a hedge one minute is gone the next, and someone else is hearing it somewhere else. A key piece that Cunningham made at this time was “Summerspace” (1958), in which…

85 E. 4th St. (212-505-3360) If you haven’t yet made plans for where to celebrate the centennial of the 1917 Russian Revolution, consider KGB. During the Cold War, this second-floor barroom was the headquarters of Little Ukraine’s own semi-secret Socialist club. “The F.B.I. used to watch the comings and goings from an apartment across the street,” Dan Christian, the longtime barkeep, said on a recent evening, as patrons made their way in for the evening’s literary event (there’s one nearly every night). One of the readers, Liza Featherstone, an advice columnist for The Nation, arrived with her husband, the economics journalist Doug Henwood. They’d been coming here for seventeen years; it was “the site of our failed first date,” Henwood said. At a nearby table sat a young woman in…

In January, 2013, Donald Trump’s special counsel, Michael Cohen, sent a letter to the Onion. The satirical online newspaper, whose Latin motto is Tu Stultus Es (“You Are Dumb”), had just published a piece under Trump’s byline, titled “When You’re Feeling Low, Just Remember I’ll Be Dead in About 15 or 20 Years.” The attorney threatened legal action. “Let me begin,” Cohen wrote, “by stating the obvious . . . that the commentary was not written by Mr. Trump. Secondly, the article is an absolutely disgusting piece that lacks any place in journalism; even in your Onion. I am hereby demanding that you immediately remove this disgraceful piece from your website and issue an apology to Mr. Trump.” The Onion gleefully declined to comply “We never apologized,” Cole Bolton, the…

At the start of 2016, I had a bad feeling. Time was not working right. Some weeks were as snappy as days, others were as elastic as months, and the months felt as if they were either bleeding into one another three at a time—Jabruarch—or segmenting into Gregorian-calendar city-states. Feb. Rue. Airy. Something was wrong with the world. One day in February, I took a ride on the subway. This was a rare occurrence. Since turning forty, I’d started to suffer from a heightened sense of claustrophobia. A few years ago, I was stuck for an hour in an elevator with a man who weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds and his two grocery carts crammed with bags of Tostitos and bottles of Canada Dry, an experience both frightening…

In normal times, White House press briefings make for boring television. Robert Gibbs, Jay Carney, and Josh Earnest, the three generic-looking white guys who served as successive press secretaries under President Barack Obama, could walk unmolested through the streets of most American cities. Only on rare occasions was a clip from one of their briefings—for example, a testy exchange between Carney and Jonathan Karl, of ABC News, debating the logistics of Obamacare enrollment—remarkable enough to make headlines. President Trump seems to have no tolerance for boring television. His press secretary, Sean Spicer, now a recurring character on “Saturday Night Live,” is often tongue-tied, enraged, or both. Spicer’s briefings, broadcast live on C-SPAN, are among the most highly rated programs on daytime TV, beating out “General Hospital” and “The Bold and…

OF ALL THE prejudices of pundits, presentism is the strongest. It is the assumption that what is happening now is going to keep on happening, without anything happening to stop it. If the West has broken down the Berlin Wall and McDonald’s opens in St. Petersburg, then history is over and Thomas Friedman is content. If, by a margin so small that in a voice vote you would have no idea who won, Brexit happens; or if, by a trick of an antique electoral system designed to give country people more power than city people, a Donald Trump is elected, then pluralist constitutional democracy is finished. The liberal millennium was upon us as the year 2000 dawned; fifteen years later, the autocratic apocalypse is at hand. Thomas Friedman is concerned.…

WHY DID WHITE women vote for Trump? For one source of insight, try “Feud,” on FX, a barbed and bittersweet fable about female self-sabotage. The latest provocation from Ryan Murphy, “Feud” is a dramatization of the making of the 1962 camp-classic movie “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” which starred Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Beneath the zingers and the poolside muumuus, the show’s stark theme is how skillfully patriarchy screws with women’s heads—mostly by building a home in there. A prolific auteur with an abiding interest in glamour and cruelty, Murphy is a thrillingly ambitious risk-taker, bending old genres into fresh forms; he’s also famously inconsistent, a Rumpelstiltskin who can spin seemingly offensive concepts into gold—as in last year’s outstanding “The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story”—or…

ART MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Museum of Modern Art “Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction” The more serious you are about modern art, the more likely you are to be stupefied by this retrospective, elegantly curated by Anne Umland, of the merrily nihilistic Frenchman who strewed the first half of the twentieth century with the aesthetic equivalent of whoopee cushions. As a painter, a poet, a graphic artist, an editor, and a set designer, Picabia mastered, and mocked, canonical styles, with an emphasis on Dada—a movement in which he co-starred with his friend Marcel Duchamp, and which raised travesty to a beau ideal. Most of what’s on view crackles with immediacy, popping free of its time to wink at the present, but not much of…

On a recent, bitterly cold Saturday, the 3 Million Majority Marching Band was assembling on the steps of the main branch of the New York Public Library, under the gaze of Patience, the library’s southernmost marble lion. Around the musicians demonstrators were preparing to march up Madison Avenue to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. The marchers carried signs that said “Can’t Drink Oil” and “Water Is Life.” By 1:07 p.m., four band members had shown up. “Should we play?” Jared Engel, the band’s leader and sousaphonist, asked. “Are you the boss?” Jim Fryer, a trombonist, said. “Or is this an anarchosocial commune or something?” The 3 Million Majority Marching Band was started in February by Engel, a musician who usually plays the upright bass and the four-string banjo at jazz…

“PEOPLES AND OTHER PEOPLES” (Formerly “Guys and Dolls”) In Times Square, two friends, Good Choices McGinley and Participation Trophy Masterson, try to raise enough money to keep their independent bookstore afloat. The show features such updated hits as “A Person Could Develop a Deeper Understanding That People with a Different Skin Color Are Not Otherwise Unlike Him or Her”; “Luck Be a Self-Actualized Person”; and, of course, the title number, “Peoples and Other Peoples,” with its immortal line “You know a someone’s only doing it for a someone else!” “ELIZA WITH A ‘Z’!” (Formerly “My Fair Lady”) In modern-day London, a feisty urban female youth turned doctoral candidate teaches her rich male capitalist mentor about the depth and the variety of language and expression, causing him to abandon his snobbish…

Twin shorelines at the end of my name, traffickers of white space, you could last on the tongue forever, lolling, longing, an endless drawing out of the little stream between you. Fill my life. I drink from the narrowest canal, flowing between two countries that, half of the time, claim me. Double “l,” bring me back to the in-between where my breath has always lived, without containment, like two legs pointing toward the ocean, or these arms reaching into sky. From birth you have doubled my grief and my wonder, shown me forever the parallel which can never touch— the way I run alongside my love without entering his true mind. Rivulet of secrets, slim as a eucalyptus leaf, airplane runway of the heart. Double “l,” let my days always…

The above is not my real name— the fellow it belongs to gave me his permission to sign it to this story. My real name I shall not divulge. I am a publisher. I accept long novels about young love written by old maids in South Dakota, detective stories concerning wealthy clubmen and female apaches with “wide dark eyes,” essays about the menace of this and that and the color of the moon in Tahiti by college professors and other unemployed. I accept no novels by authors under fifteen years old. All the columnists and communists (I can never get these two words straight) abuse me because they say I want money. I do—I want it terribly. My wife needs it. My children use it all the time. If someone…