Innholdsfortegnelse for April 10, 2017 i The New Yorker

Ben Taub (“We Have No Choice,” p. 36) has previously written for the magazine on jihadism, war crimes, and battlefield medicine. Reporting for this piece was facilitated by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Kelefa Sanneh ( “On the Contrary,” p. 50) is a staff writer. Calvin Tomkins (“Troubling Pictures,” p. 30) covers art and culture for The New Yorker. “The Bride and the Bachelors” is one of his many books. Beth Bachmann (Poem, p. 33) is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. Her most recent book of poems is “Do Not Rise.” Glenn Eichler ( Shouts & Murmurs, p. 29) writes for television and is the author of the graphic novels “Stuffed!” and “Mush!: Sled Dogs with Issues.” Adam Gopnik (Books, p. 71), a staff…

We all want to leave something behind when we go. The architectural historian Christopher Gray, who died this month, at the age of sixty-six, left a richer legacy than most. There is the Office of Metropolitan History, the business he founded, which is dedicated to digging up blueprints for old New York City buildings. And there’s the nearly thirty years’ worth of “Streetscape” columns he wrote for the Times, which chronicled the city’s unheralded architectural treasures. But Gray had one more bequest. Just before he died, suddenly, from complications from pneumonia, his lawyer alerted his family to an e-mail he’d sent to his alma mater, St. Paul’s School, in Concord, New Hampshire: “It is my wish, when I die, that my skeleton be flensed (don’t ask!) and articulated and given…

“Let’s start the tour at Frank Campbell,” Lindy Woodhead suggested, from the back seat of a limo. Woodhead—blond, vivacious, and ample—is the author of “War Paint,” a joint biography of the duelling beauty queens Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, which has been turned into a Broadway musical of the same title, starring Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole. Woodhead, a former fashion publicist who lives in London, was revisiting her subjects’ haunts. They dissed each other with a quaint feline ferocity, competed like two cage fighters, and avoided crossing paths. Yet they lived in palatial splendor a stone’s throw apart, the approximate distance between their flagship salons, in the East Fifties. Arden kept a chauffeured Bentley (“racing green with pink rugs,” Woodhead said, in her Noël Coward accent) that ferried her…

Dana Schutz’s studio, in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, may not be as catastrophically messy as Francis Bacon’s used to be, but there are days when it comes close. Last July, she was making paintings for a solo show, in the fall, at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, and for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, in New York. Large and medium-sized canvases in varying stages of completion covered most of the wall space in the studio, a long, windowless room that was once an auto-body shop, and the floor was a palimpsest of rags, used paper palettes, brushes, metal tubs filled with defunct tubes of Old Holland oil paint, colored pencils and broken charcoal sticks, cans of solvent, spavined art books, pages torn from magazines, bundled work clothes stiff with paint, paper…

Tucker Carlson started wearing a bow tie in 1984, when he was in tenth grade at St. George’s, a Rhode Island prep school with a dress code. He stopped wearing a bow tie on April 11, 2006, acknowledging the change in the final minutes of the show he hosted on MSNBC. “I like bow ties, and I certainly spent a lot of time defending them,” he said. “But, from now on, I’m going without.” The affectation had come to define him: Carlson was primarily known—and, in no small number of television households, reviled—as the self-assured young conservative who dressed like a spelling-bee champion. MSNBC advertised his program with posters that read, “The Man. The Legend. The Bow Tie.” He had been wearing a bow tie when, in 2004, Jon Stewart…

One of the Boys, by Daniel Magariel (Scribner). In this haunting début novel, two unnamed brothers move from Kansas to New Mexico with their mercurial, charming father in the wake of a divorce and custody battle. They initially see the move as a grand adventure, but slowly discover the extent of their father’s addiction to crack cocaine. As he becomes increasingly paranoid and violent, the brothers, trapped with him in a claustrophobic apartment, desperately form a pact to escape. “Our dad was an act with a single end,” the younger boy observes. “And it wasn’t that I didn’t care anymore. He was my father. It was just that we had spent far too long as his audience.” Class, by Lucinda Rosenfeld (Little, Brown). Karen, a self-proclaimed liberal whose inner…

THE BILLIONAIRES’ PRESIDENT As a former corruptions investigator for New York State during the nineteen- seventies, I was pleased to see Jane Mayer’s article on the libertarian billionaire Robert Mercer and his family, who spent many millions of dollars to elect Donald Trump (“Trump’s Money Man,” March 27th). Unfortunately, little attention has been paid to what one Mercer organization, Reclaim New York, has been doing in this state. As Mayer reported, Reclaim, ostensibly a nonprofit advocacy group that opposes government spending, has shared an address with Cambridge Analytica, as well as a corporate officer—Steve Bannon. Reclaim’s strategy is to demand extensive data from municipalities and school districts, requests that are used to burden and shame public employees, furthering Reclaim’s libertarian and so-called alt-right political agenda throughout the state. The…

The N.C.A.A. brackets have come and gone, but “March Madness” prevails in the meatpacking district, where a terrific group show by that name is installed at Fort Gansevoort, an idiosyncratic gallery (and occasional barbecue joint) in a three-story town house at 5 Ninth Ave. As its title implies, the show’s theme is sports, which, on its own, is nothing novel. A quick spin through the Met will turn up figures of wrestlers painted on an Ancient Greek amphora in 500 B.C., a Mesoamerican stone carving of a ballplayer made roughly a thousand years later, and mid-nineteenth-century portraits of matadors by Édouard Manet. But Fort Gansevoort flips the script on millennia of male-dominated athletics with art works by thirty-one women made between the mid-twentieth century and now, from Elizabeth Catlett’s jubilant…

The door of this snug Harlem local is often kept locked, even when the place is open. A couple of Wednesdays ago, after a rap on the window, a thin, quiet man wearing a gold cross and wraparound glasses swivelled on his bar stool to unlock the door. In burst a group of young men headed by Frank Nitty, in a red velvet coat. Nitty, who d.j.s smooth hip-hop and R. & B. at the bar every Saturday, was in a celebratory mood. Several flyers, festooned with clip art of champagne bottles and googly eyes, announced that tonight was his birthday (“So When You See Him Bottoms Up”). Nitty plunged in, bumping fists and trading hugs. “Jack, my man,” he saluted a sleepy-looking gentleman in a leather coat drinking pink…

Most New Yorkers, according to one poll, didn’t much like it when, in 2011, the city renamed the Queensboro Bridge for former Mayor Ed Koch. The response may not have had much to do with their feelings for Koch. The bridge already had a perfectly good name, and a no-baloney alias as well: the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, perhaps best blurted in the voice of the late columnist Jimmy Breslin. (Breslin, for what it’s worth, didn’t like Koch. He was more of a Mario Cuomo guy. Cuomo doesn’t have a bridge, or a tunnel, yet.) The new name didn’t really stick. But navigation systems are deferential to the authorities; algorithms are squares. The other day, a traffic-jam aficionado, curious to see how various nav apps would direct a driver who wanted…

It was close to midnight on the coast of Libya, a few miles west of Tripoli. At the water’s edge, armed Libyan smugglers pumped air into thirty-foot rubber dinghies. Some three thousand refugees and migrants, mostly sub-Saharan Africans, silent and barefoot, stood nearby in rows of ten. Oil platforms glowed in the Mediterranean. The Libyans ordered male migrants to carry the inflated boats into the water, thirty on each side. They waded in and held the boats steady as a smuggler directed other migrants to board, packing them as tightly as possible. People in the center would suffer chemical burns if the fuel leaked and mixed with water. Those straddling the sides could easily fall into the sea. Officially, at least five thousand and ninety-eight migrants died in the Mediterranean…

Close to five hours on the train. And then twenty minutes by taxi from the station to the school. He would have time to call the lawyer, work through the options. He had the number of a consultant, in case Rowan needed to apply somewhere else. Maybe the school legally had to contact the college he’d got into, but Richard wasn’t sure. And maybe it wouldn’t come to that. The school wouldn’t want to make anything public. The thought calmed him—good, good. They were on his side, even if they had not said so in so many words: they weren’t stupid. The trains were housed underground, in cool alleys of concrete, and Richard headed for the first car. It was only half-full, the interior air recirculated to an unnatural chill.…

Reformers are famously prey to the fanaticism of reform. A sense of indignation and a good cause lead first to moral urgency, and then soon afterward to repetition, whereby the reformers become captive to their own rhetoric, usually at a cost to their cause. Crusaders against widespread alcoholism (as acute a problem in 1910 as the opioid epidemic is today) advanced to the folly of Prohibition, which created a set of organized- crime institutions whose effects have scarcely just passed. Progressive Era trade unionists, fending off corporate thugs, could steer into thuggish forms of Stalinism. Those with the moral courage to protest the Vietnam War sometimes became blinded to the reality of the North Vietnamese government— and on and on. It seems fair to say that a readiness to amend…

Classical-music presenters are placing big bets on new venues, such as Williamsburg’s dynamic National Sawdust. But some of the most evocative spaces may be hiding in plain sight—take the Church of the Intercession, a grand Episcopalian pile way uptown on Broadway at 155th St. “The Crypt Sessions” (which has hosted the violinist Amy Schroeder, of the Attacca Quartet, above) is drawing capacity audiences; on April 5, it presents “Labyrinth,” a concert by the fascinating Israeli pianist David Greilsammer. THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Anastasia Darko Tresnjak directs this new musical, by Terrence McNally, Stephen Flaherty, and Lynn Ahrens, drawn from the 1956 and 1997 films about the Russian Grand Duchess. (Broadhurst, 235 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. In previews.) The Antipodes The playwright Annie Baker (“The Flick”) returns, with a…

Tartan Day Parade Last year, the actor Sam Heughan, of “Outlander” fame, suited up in his kilt and boots and led a procession through midtown Manhattan for Tartan Day, an annual celebration of Scottish culture and heritage. This year, Tommy Flanagan, of “Sons of Anarchy,” will do the honors. A week of events leads up to the official Tartan Day, April 6, before the parade on Saturday, April 8, when bagpipe bands, drummers, and dancers will march up Sixth Ave. from 45th St. to 55th St. (In 2010, the route was shortened from thirteen blocks to ten, to the delight of some bagpipers.) (nyctartanweek.org. April 8 at 2.) The Orchid Show This edition of the New York Botanical Garden’s annual Orchid Show, now in its fifteenth year, focusses on…

The Vice-President can’t get a burger with Lisa Murkowski without arousing suspicion or, possibly, himself ? After the Washington Post pointed out, last week, that Mike Pence once told a reporter that he never dines alone with a woman who is not his wife—a variation of the so-called Billy Graham rule—people had a lot of questions. Are after-sunset encounters allowed if they don’t include food? Do canapés count? Pretzels on an airplane? It seemed like a good time to get on the phone, for some perspective, with Billy Graham’s forty-two-year-old evangelist grandson, Will. “I’m going to give you a little history, is that O.K.?” Will said, speaking from Pachuca, Mexico, where he was preparing to lead a revival. “Think about 1948—the times were different, but one of the things that…

The two nuns I saw I urged to convert to Luther or better yet to join the Unitarians, and the Jews I encountered to think seriously about Jesus, especially the Lubavitchers, and I interrupted the sewer workers digging up dirt to ask them how many spoonfuls of sugar they put in their coffee and the runners in their red silk to warn them about the fake fruit in their yogurt since to begin with I was in such a good mood this morning, I waited patiently for the two young poets driving over from Jersey City to talk about the late Forties and what they were to me when I was their age and we turned to Chinese poetry and Kenneth Rexroth’s “Hundred Poems” and ended up talking about the…

F or at least a decade, senior aides at Buckingham Palace have been quietly finessing arrangements for the moment when the Queen dies and her son Prince Charles becomes sovereign. One of their chief concerns, apparently, is that republicans may try to use the interval between the death of the old monarch and the coronation of the new one to whip up anti-royal sentiment. In order to minimize the potential for such rabblerousing, they propose to speed things up as much as decorum will allow: in contrast to the stately sixteen-month pause that elapsed between the death of King George VI, in February, 1952, and the anointing of the Queen, in June, 1953, King Charles III will be whisked to Westminster Abbey no later than three months after his mother’s…