Innholdsfortegnelse for March 27, 2017 i The New Yorker

Jane Mayer (“Trump’s Money Man,” p. 34), a staff writer, is the author of “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.” Victor Lodato (Fiction, p. 56) published his latest novel, “Edgar and Lucy,” this month. Frank Ormsby (Poem, p. 43) lives in Belfast. His collection “The Darkness of Snow” will come out in September. Luci Gutierrez (Cover), an illustrator based in Barcelona, contributes regularly to the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine. She is currently working on a new book. Bruce McCall (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 29) has painted more than seventy-five New Yorker covers and contributed more than eighty pieces for Shouts & Murmurs since 1980. Sheila Marikar (The Talk of the Town, p. 16) has been a contributor since…

Eight years ago, the artist Michael Anthony Simon, then thirty, was living in Chicago and feeling complacent, creatively. So he moved to South Korea. “I wanted to isolate myself, close the studio doors, see what happened,” he said the other day. What happened was that, after settling in the city of Gwangju, he found himself wandering out of the studio and into the woods, and painting on leaves and spiderwebs—canvases, of a kind. The only traces of these variegated apparitions, once the elements had done them in, were photographs. “This whole thing of making bronze statues to last five thousand years—if everyone did that, there’d be no space left,” Simon said. Still, he wanted to take his art inside. He began catching spiders and putting them to work in his…

Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Slowly, that changed. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and combined. Some hit upon the trick of making copies of themselves that, in turn, made more copies. The replicating chains were caught in oily bubbles, which protected them and made replication easier; eventually, they began to venture out into the open sea. A new level of order had been achieved on Earth. Life had begun. The tree of life grew, its branches stretching toward complexity. Organisms developed systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems, layered in ever-deepening regression. They used these systems to anticipate their future and to change it. When they looked within, some found that they had selves—constellations of memories, ideas, and…

The New Odyssey, by Patrick Kingsley (Liveright). This chronicle of the refugee crisis—since 2014, more than a million people from Africa, the Middle East, and beyond have tried to reach Europe—argues that it is largely a manufactured disaster, the result of insufficient political will. The author accompanies migrants on perilous journeys across mountains, deserts, and the Mediterranean. He interviews traffickers, volunteers, and overwhelmed bureaucrats. His lead character is a Syrian refugee, Hashem al-Souki, who makes a harrowing boat trip from Egypt to Italy, navigates Europe by foot and rail, and seeks asylum in Sweden. As seen through Hashem’s tired, tense eyes, the Continent is a place of mystery and danger. To avoid detection, he makes a show of reading local newspapers in each town he passes through. My Utmost,…

TRUMP AND FRAUD President Trump’s entire individual and business tax returns—far more pertinent and informative than the two pages from his 2005 return that were leaked last week—may provide some answers to questions about his puzzling legal and financial ties in Azerbaijan, which Adam Davidson wrote about in his recent piece (“Donald Trump’s Worst Deal,” March 13th). A 1924 law, the result of conflict-of- interest concerns about the Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and executive- branch officials involved in the Teapot Dome scandal, gives Congress the authority to examine Trump’s returns and reveal them to the public without the President’s consent. Members of Congress cannot blame the absence of information solely on the President’s intransigence. Instead, they must explain why they favor the same secrecy that the President does. George…

Last Monday, the actress turned life-style entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow summoned a small group of employees to her bright Santa Monica office. Goop, the weekly newsletter she founded nine years ago, has grown into an e-commerce empire, and she wanted to discuss the online marketing plan for the company’s latest enterprise: pills. In 2014, sales of dietary supplements in the United States reached $36.7 billion, so it makes sense that Goop would expand its stock of wellness wares (Ayurvedic ashwagandha powder; a vaginalmuscle- toning egg made of jade) to include vitamins. One of the meeting’s principal participants was Dr. Alejandro Junger, a Uruguayan cardiologist and one of the four doctors whose help Paltrow enlisted for her vitamin business. The two met in 2007, when, intensely fatigued, Paltrow summoned Junger to a…

The town of Gander, Newfoundland, has six traffic lights and a population of less than thirteen thousand. Snowmobiling is popular, and people leave their car doors unlocked while they’re at the grocery store. Its distinguishing feature— and the reason it exists—is its airport, which opened in 1938 and was once the largest in the world, making Gander a crucial transatlantic refuelling stop in the days before long-range jet travel. On September 11, 2001, after flights were rerouted to their nearest airports, thirtyeight jets suddenly landed in Gander, stranding some seven thousand passengers for up to five days in a town with only five hundred hotel rooms. “The first thing I did was declare a state of emergency,” Claude Elliott, the Mayor of Gander since 1996, recalled the other day. A…

The playwright Lynn Nottage sometimes doesn’t know what her plays are about until well after she’s finished them. At the Yale School of Drama, in the late nineteen-eighties, she based a play on a news item about a Brazilian town where locals had found a glowing capsule thought to have supernatural powers; it turned out to contain radioactive waste, and more than a hundred thousand people were contaminated. Sometime later, Nottage realized that she had been writing about AIDS, which had claimed the lives of a number of her classmates and teachers. After her mother died, of Lou Gehrig’s disease, in 1997, she wrote a play called “The Emperor and the Scribe,” about a dying African ruler and his amanuensis. “It wasn’t until a year later I was, like, ‘Oh,…

She’s carrying two skateboards, two backpacks, the banjo in its scratched-up case—a husk of molded leather that’s always looked to her like a giant key but now seems more like a coffin. Maybe because she hasn’t played in weeks. This time of year, people don’t stop; the coins in their pockets stay there. Are you too good for fifty cents? Evan had scolded her. If Evan had his way, she’d be playing every day. He doesn’t understand how much it takes to stand in front of strangers and summon up songs she learned as a child. Especially on dark afternoons, with the mist spitting in her face like some pissed-off ghost. She refuses to play under such conditions. Anyway, she wants to protect the instrument— the pretty cherry wood, the…

In 1982, Jerzy Kosinski, the Polish- American novelist and literary celebrity, appeared on the cover of the Times Magazine, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Naked to the waist, his shoulder leaning against a stable door, he wore polo boots and tight white riding pants; horse tack dangled whiplike from his left hand. His skin was bronzed and glistening, his chest hairless, his expression opaque: stern, wary, perhaps a little confrontational. The accompanying article, a fawning profile by Barbara Gelb, labelled him “the ultimate survivor.” Calling herself a “connoisseur of survivors,” Gelb wrote that of all the Holocaust survivors she knew Kosinski was both the most damaged—“ psychically and physically”— and the most candid about it: “starkly in his fiction, wittily in the drawing room.” In the nineteen-sixties, Kosinski had become famous…

MOVIES OPENING I Called Him Morgan Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening March 24. (In limited release.) • Life A science- fiction film, directed by Daniel Espinosa, about a Martian organism that gets loose on a spaceship and threatens to conquer Earth. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Rebecca Ferguson, and Jake Gyllenhaal. Opening March 24. (In wide release.) NOW PLAYING Frantz The new film from François Ozon takes place just after the First World War, and the action is shared between enemies; the first part is set in a small German town, and the second is centered in Paris. Reconciliation, however well meant, turns out to be an elusive ideal. Paula Beer, whose performance gains momentum as the plot unfolds, plays Anna, who lost her fiancé, Frantz (Anton von Lucke), in the…

American food activism was born in the seventeen-seventies, when the Boston Tea Party turned that town’s harbor into a souchong-scented scene of rebellion. In 2003, the cafeteria in the U.S. House of Representatives, in a somewhat literal protest of France’s position against the Iraq War, rechristened fried potatoes freedom fries. Last year, the Spanish-American chef José Andrés, offended by Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric, pulled out of a restaurant deal with the candidate’s new Washington, D.C., hotel. Trump’s election has inspired dissent in a variety of spheres, the culinary among them. As Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, put it, “Protest is the new brunch.” The occasion for Lieberman’s comment was a benefit dinner, last month, called “Breaking Bread,” which featured the cuisines of the seven…

On a morning not long after Michael Flynn, having lied about conversations with the Russian Ambassador, was forced to step down as national- security adviser, but before Jeff Sessions, having lied about conversations with the Russian Ambassador, was forced to recuse himself from any Justice Department investigation involving the Trump campaign, Chuck Schumer rose from his desk on the floor of the United States Senate to reflect on the state of the union. “We are in a moment of profound unease about the stability of the executive branch of our government,” he began. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. “I’ve been in Congress a long time and I have never, ever seen anything like this,” he went on. “At this juncture, we would all do well to remember…

Last month, when President Donald Trump toured a Boeing aircraft plant in North Charleston, South Carolina, he saw a familiar face in the crowd that greeted him: Patrick Caddell, a former Democratic political operative and pollster who, for forty-five years, has been prodding insurgent Presidential candidates to attack the Washington establishment. Caddell, who lives in Charleston, is perhaps best known for helping Jimmy Carter win the 1976 Presidential race. He is also remembered for having collaborated with his friend Warren Beatty on the 1998 satire “Bulworth.” In that film, a kamikaze candidate abandons the usual talking points and excoriates both the major political parties and the media; voters love his unconventionality, and he becomes improbably popular. If the plot sounds familiar, there’s a reason: in recent years, Caddell has offered…

O n the night of April 9, 1931, James M. Kiley, thirty-nine, was shot with a .32-calibre pistol at a gas station in Somerville, Massachusetts, during a botched holdup. Kiley, the night manager, had twenty-four dollars in his pocket; the cash in the register was untouched. Herman Snyder, nineteen, was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. “Well, that’s that,” Snyder said, when the jury delivered the verdict. But that wasn’t that. Snyder filed an appeal arguing that his constitutional rights had been violated: during his trial, when the judge, the jury, lawyers for both sides, and a court stenographer visited the gas station, the judge refused to allow Snyder to go along. Even Lizzie Borden had been offered a chance to go with the jury to the…