Innholdsfortegnelse for April 3, 2017 i The New Yorker

Tad Friend (“The God Pill,” p. 54) has been a staff writer since 1998. David Owen (“Pardon?,” p. 38) is the author of the forthcoming book “Where the Water Goes,” based on his article “Where the River Runs Dry,” from the May 25, 2015, issue of the magazine. Margaret Talbot (Books, p. 86), a staff writer, is the author of “The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century.” Siddhartha Mukherjee (“The Algorithm Will See You Now,” p. 46) has published three books, including “The Emperor of All Maladies,” for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and, most recently, “The Gene: An Intimate History.” Malika Favre (Cover) is a French illustrator who lives in London. Jerome Groopman (Books, p. 92), the Recanati Professor of Medicine at Harvard, has written…

A FEW YEARS AGO, after he starred in “Transformers,” the actor Shia LaBeouf seemed poised to become the next Johnny Depp; instead, he started behaving more like the next James Franco. In 2014, he showed up at the Berlin Film Festival wearing a tuxedo, with a brown paper bag over his head. This was a piece of performance art called “I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE,” which he had created with the artists Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner. The trio went on to produce a skywriting project, a hitchhiking project, and, most recently, “HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US,” a piece of anti-Trump protest art, launched on Inauguration Day. The work, according to a statement, consisted of “a camera mounted on a wall outside the Museum of the Moving Image,” in…

ON JANUARY 22, 1930, not quite three months after the stock-market crash and the ensuing economic collapse, the Times, in a front-page article, quoted President Herbert Hoover saying that “the tide of employment has changed in the right direction.” His Secretary of Labor, James J. Davis, citing reports on America’s industries, pronounced the country “well on the way to complete recovery.” Reading the article, Frances Perkins, the industrial commissioner of New York State, was horrified. She knew that the President was relying on data from the U.S. Employment Service, a notoriously inaccurate source, rather than from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed that huge numbers of people were being laid off. She imagined the psychological harm that Hoover’s words would inflict on the unemployed, writing in her memoir that…

ONE EVENING LAST November, a fifty-four-year-old woman from the Bronx arrived at the emergency room at Columbia University’s medical center with a grinding headache. Her vision had become blurry, she told the E.R. doctors, and her left hand felt numb and weak. The doctors examined her and ordered a CT scan of her head. A few months later, on a morning this January, a team of four radiologists- intraining huddled in front of a computer in a third-floor room of the hospital. The room was windowless and dark, aside from the light from the screen, which looked as if it had been filtered through seawater. The residents filled a cubicle, and Angela Lignelli-Dipple, the chief of neuroradiology at Columbia, stood behind them with a pencil and pad. She was training…

At a town-hall meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin, last March, Donald Trump was prompted for his views about abortion. He’d been pro-choice once, but as a Presidential candidate he was an eager, if ill-informed, pro-lifer. Much of his answer took the form of free-floating clauses, like dialogue from a bad experimental play, which made his actual positions challenging to parse. But Trump did manage to make one point clearly, and to repeat it. When the interviewer, Chris Matthews, of MSNBC, asked whether women who’d had abortions should be punished, Trump answered in the affirmative. Politically speaking, this was not good. In recent years, the anti-abortion movement has tried hard to show that it cares as much about women as it does about fetuses. Right-to-life groups criticized Trump’s wayward messaging, and,…

UNENLIGHTENED In Adam Gopnik’s review of recent works on the crisis in liberalism, he discusses Joel Mokyr’s theory, laid out in his book “A Culture of Change,” that the successful exchanges between scientists and artisans are often what propel the growth of a civilization (Books, March 20th). But Mokyr’s true concern is a more fundamental cultural question: Why did some sixteenth-century Europeans start thinking that they could materially improve their lives? He concludes that, in the course of the previous two hundred years, Europeans came to believe that progress was possible, and thus became willing to discard the intellectual heritage of earlier eras. This huge cultural shift allowed them to overcome what Mokyr calls Cardwell’s Law: the fact that technological innovation, historically, tends to fizzle out—and with it goes…

583 Vanderbilt Ave., Brooklyn (718-857-5777) It was noon on a freezing Saturday when most of the patrons of Woodwork, a bar in Prospect Heights, arrived for a pint. The early hour might suggest that some were seeking the hair of the dog, but none were, at least not noticeably—they were drinking for a different time zone. In London, it was five o’clock, and Arsenal was about to play Lincoln City in the FA Cup quarter-finals. A woman wearing red Arsenal gear walked in and shouted, “Come on, you Gunners!”—her team’s nickname—and was met with cheers. The day had started even earlier for one Everton enthusiast, who had performed fist pumps over a coffee and a whiskey (in separate cups) as his team beat West Bromwich Albion, 3–0, after a kickoff…

LAST MONDAY, TWENTY-ONE public- school students burst through the door of a building at Thirty-ninth Street and Lancaster Avenue, in West Philadelphia, for a session of Fake News Finders, an after-school workshop run by the nonprofit group Mighty Writers. An eight-year-old named Thomas parked his scooter opposite a framed photograph of Barack Obama beneath a “Black Lives Matter” banner. A ten-year-old named Musa carried his violin sheet music. James, eleven, had a backpack filled with snacks. All but three of the students were boys. Most found seats at a conference table. “How many people know what fake news is?” the instructor, Annette John- Hall, asked. She is a former Philadelphia Inquirer columnist who now reports for public radio. “News that is fake,” a student said. “A made-up story,” said another.…

WHEN MY MOTHER’S mother was in her early twenties, a century ago, a suitor took her duck hunting in a rowboat on a lake near Austin, Texas, where she grew up. He steadied his shotgun by resting the barrel on her right shoulder—she was sitting in the bow— and when he fired he not only missed the duck but also permanently damaged her hearing, especially on that side. The loss became more severe as she got older, and by the time I was in college she was having serious trouble with telephones. (“I’m glad it’s not raining! ” I’d shout, for the third or fourth time, while my roommates snickered.) Her deafness probably contributed to one of her many eccentricities: ending phone conversations by suddenly hanging up. I’m a grandparent…

ON A VELVETY March evening in Mandeville Canyon, high above the rest of Los Angeles, Norman Lear’s living room was jammed with powerful people eager to learn the secrets of longevity. When the symposium’s first speaker asked how many people there wanted to live to two hundred, if they could remain healthy, almost every hand went up. Understandably, then, the Moroccan phyllo chicken puffs weren’t going fast. The venture capitalists were keeping slim to maintain their imposing vitality, the scientists were keeping slim because they’d read—and in some cases done—the research on caloric restriction, and the Hollywood stars were keeping slim because of course. When Liz Blackburn, who won a Nobel Prize for her work in genetics, took questions, Goldie Hawn, regal on a comfy sofa, purred, “I have a…

A giant step up into the dip— the unavoidable tremble of cocktail tumblers against bottles of bourbon and bitters droning the spitoon. All dim, unwoken, shut as the Duchess’s (née Clare Singleton’s) dust-caked woodcut gramophone as the frail jail of Limoges and miniature salt shakers belling at my footfall recalled country wenches doing the quadrille with speculators’ sons, and Ben the tavern houseboy, in canary pantaloons wafting a fan sewn from the tails of fifty peahens to keep off the Luciferian flies.…

Divided We Stand, by Marjorie J. Spruill (Bloomsbury). In 1977, thousands of feminists flooded Houston for the federally funded National Women’s Conference, bringing together a diverse, bipartisan group of women to adopt a National Plan of Action— the culmination of an era of rapid legislative gains for women. The same weekend, anti-feminist forces, led by the charismatic and caustic Phyllis Schlafly, held a nearly all-white Pro-Life, Pro-Family Rally across town, mobilizing a radical- conservative movement that was to grow rapidly. This timely history anatomizes two bitterly opposed women’s movements, tracing a connection between 1977 and 2016, when Donald Trump, looking to replace an avowedly feminist President, assiduously courted Schlafly. What the years between Houston and Trump teach us, Spruill writes, is that “progress is not linear.” Ancient Worlds, by…

Near the counter of the old, lamented Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston, there were boxes of ephemera: the standard hodgepodge of mangy postcards, wedding announcements, lobby cards, 45s, hippie stickers and patches, Civil Defense pamphlets and evacuation maps, poker chips, Old Maid decks, and the like, along with skinny small-press or homemade books, some even handwritten. It was in one of those boxes, in the early nineties, that I found a copy of “Are You Ready, Mary Baker Eddy???,” published, in 1970, by Cloud Marauder Press, out of Berkeley. Its four authors—Bill James, Knott Tate, James Bill, and Tate Knott— were, in point of fact, two people. One was James Tate, the American surrealist poet. The other was Bill Knott, an obscure but equally intriguing figure: a poet, artist,…

Vince Staples and Kilo Kish are brainy rappers who record primarily to de-thorn their sharp thoughts. Staples, from Long Beach, California, dishes angular stanzas about family, friends, and the ills of fame with a back-ofthe- classroom cool, and Kish, from Orlando, saunters through airy half-raps, weaving tales of quarter-life crises. Their pairing on a tour, including a stop at Terminal 5 on March 30, is just as intriguing as their lyrics: two vivid personalities who sidestep common pop tropes, and who stoke young devotees aspiring to a similar tone. ART MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Metropolitan Museum “The Mysterious Landscapes of Hercules Segers” The museum owns only one print by the seventeenth- century Dutch printmaker, but it has borrowed the Rijksmuseum’s entire Segers collection for this thrillingly comprehensive show. Segers was…

Mocca Arts Festival For two days, thousands of illustration enthusiasts will enjoy a buffet of independent comics and cartoons at Manhattan’s largest festival of its kind. This year, the festival honors the work of Christian Hincker, known to fans as Blutch, a pillar of the contemporary comics community; his graphic novel, “Peplum,” from 2016, follows a group of bandits in ancient Rome and draws influences from Shakespeare and the Satyricon. Hundreds of additional guests will showcase their work, including R. Sikoryak, whose “Terms and Conditions” grafts Apple legalese onto iconic cartoon panels; Israel’s Rutu Modan and David Polonsky; the French Web-comic author Penelope Bagieu; and Wojciech Stefaniec, from Poland. (Metropolitan West, 639 W. 46th St. societyillustrators.org. April 1-2 at 11 A.M.) April Fools’ Day Parade “Our satire knows no…

Not long ago, Fay Ennis, a retired market-research executive who just celebrated her ninety-second birthday, was telling family members stories from her past, which turned into an occasion for bringing out a box of moody black-and-white photographs. She had posed for them seventy years ago, as a graduate student at Columbia, where Margaret Mead was one of her professors. The pictures were taken by Saul Leiter, who later became well known as a member of the so-called New York School. At the time, Leiter was an impoverished would-be painter, with a crush on Ennis’s younger sister, Sarah—or so Ennis recalled recently, when she and her twin daughters, Betsy and Susan, took the images to the Howard Greenberg Gallery, Leiter’s dealer. They wanted to show Greenberg and Margit Erb, the director…

We were cold. All day we were cold. We thought of bitter gods (hard not to think of gods so close to the heavens) and were frightened. The mountain is divided. On one side the sun spilled its brilliance. The snow glistened. The aspen and birch trees stood tall and tiny mountain chickadees chased one another in strange and compelling harmony. If there was terrorism in our midst, we did not know it. If there was an animal that threatened us, we did not sense it, though one of us saw a wolf lurking in the forest. All the birch trees wore different spots on their long and beautiful spines. What the small children liked to do most was slide down on their bums. All of us were in mourning.…

I tried to give the children an etiquette lesson while we were waiting at King’s Cross on December 30th. “You aren’t allowed to ask for the Wi-Fi password before you say hello,” I said. “That’s the main thing.” “Uncle Mike won’t care,” said Toby, who was nine. “He’s nice,” said Mia, who was seven. “Both of those things are true,” I said. “Uncle Mike is nice, and he wouldn’t care, but this is a life lesson. It’s just not what you do. You say hello, you chat for a bit, and then you ask for the Wi-Fi password. It’s just one of the rules.” “Fear? That’s the other guy’s problem,” Toby said. We had recently let him stay up too late to watch “Trading Places,” and this line had made…

In the early nineteen-sixties, when cholesterol was declared an enemy of health, my parents quickly enlisted in the war on fat. Onion rolls slathered with butter, herring in thick cream sauce, brisket of beef with a side of stuffed derma, and other staples of our family cuisine disappeared from our table. Margarine dethroned butter, vinegar replaced cream sauce, poached fish substituted for brisket. I recall experiencing something like withdrawal, daydreaming about past feasts as my stomach grumbled. My father’s blood-cholesterol level—not to mention that of his siblings and friends—became a regular topic of conversation at the dinner table. Yet, despite the restrictive diet, his number scarcely budged, and a few years later, in his mid-fifties, he had a heart attack and died. The dangers of fat haunted me after his…

Riverdale,” which airs on the CW, has a witty conceit: take the “Archie” comic-book characters, then peer at them through the neon-noir lens of “Twin Peaks.” Riverdale is now a rundown maple-syrup town, where snooty founding families are hiding dark secrets. Veronica Lodge is a Bettie Page-style bombshell; Archie Andrews is a sensitive jock with a six-pack; Betty Cooper is a virgin with a blond ponytail, but she’s also an amateur detective who takes Ritalin. The show’s banter is up to date— “What do you say, Archiekins, be the Jay to my Bey?”—and yet when teen-age girls get pregnant they’re sent away to cruel convents straight out of the nineteen- fifties. It’s camp lite, essentially, all abs and arched eyebrows. But even air quotes need something worth quoting. Unfortunately, “Riverdale”…