Innholdsfortegnelse for April 17, 2017 i The New Yorker

Rebecca Mead (“The Prophet of Dystopia,” p. 38) has been a staff writer since 1997. “My Life in Middlemarch” is her latest book. Peter Hessler (“Talk Like an Egyptian,” p. 48), a staff writer, is working on a book about the five years he spent reporting from Egypt. Akhil Sharma (Fiction, p. 58) is the author of two novels and the story collection “A Life of Adventure and Delight,” which comes out in July. He teaches at Rutgers University, Newark. Rebecca Morgan Frank (Poem, p. 45) teaches at Brandeis University. Her third poetry collection, “Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country,” will be published in October. Steve Coll (Comment, p. 19), a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. Emily Nussbaum…

IF YOU’RE WALKING along Madison Avenue and suddenly feel undone by the stress of minding your own business, you can duck into the glass-enclosed atrium of the old I.B.M. Building, at Fifty-sixth Street, and take a seat at one of the many bamboo-shaded café tables. The atrium is one of the city’s five hundred- odd Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS)—areas that developers have created in exchange for the right to build buildings that are bigger than the city would otherwise allow—and it’s such a pleasant place that it makes POPS seem like a good idea instead of just another way for weaselly real-estate types to screw everybody else. Once you’ve had enough tranquillity, you can cross the atrium to the adjacent high-rise, Trump Tower, which also contains a POPS. The…

ON A RECENT evening, Martin Shkreli was drinking beer at Tuttles, a bar in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan that has sticky wooden tables and sports playing on TV. He was taking a break from two activities that now consume much of his time: writing computer code for a new company he heads and meeting with his lawyers in anticipation of his upcoming criminal fraud trial. “I think they’ll return a not-guilty verdict in two hours,” he said. “There are going to be jurors who will be fans of mine. I walk down the streets of New York and people shake my hand. They say, ‘I want to be just like you.’ ” Shkreli achieved infamy as the founder and C.E.O. of Turing Pharmaceuticals, where he applied strategies honed…

ON THE FINAL evening of Desert Trip, a classic-rock extravaganza Paul Tollett staged on two weekends last October, the impresario was sitting in the Who’s friends-and-family area, an acre-size V.I.P. tent on the grounds of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, near Indio, California. The mountains on both sides of the valley were visible through the clear side panels in the spotless white canvas, their peaks turning purple as the sun went down and showtime approached. Outside, it was still very hot, but the tent was air-conditioned, and there was soft grass underfoot, partly covered with throw rugs; in the winter months, polo is played on the turf. The allure of the musical paradise that Tollett has conjured in the desert helped him sell almost two hundred thousand tickets…

WHEN YOU MOVE to another country as an adult, the language flows around you like a river. Perhaps a child can immediately abandon himself to the current, but most older people will begin by picking out the words and phrases that seem to matter most, which is what I did after my family moved to Cairo, in October of 2011. It was the first fall after the Arab Spring; Hosni Mubarak, the former President, had been forced to resign the previous February. Every weekday, my wife, Leslie, and I met with a tutor for two hours at a language school called Kalimat, where we studied Egyptian Arabic. At the end of each session, we made a vocabulary list. In early December, following the first round of the nation’s parliamentary elections,…

FOR LONGTIME Stephen Colbert fans— and I’ve been one ever since “Strangers with Candy,” from 1999—the comedian’s move, in 2015, from Comedy Central to CBS, where he replaced David Letterman, was not a promotion. It was a gamble: he was trading a mod Vespa for something more like a pre-owned cruise ship, contractually obligated to make stops in Aruba. But nobody wants to be a hipster buzzkill, dinging a hero for selling out. “If anyone can jolt a genre that feels near-paralyzed, he’s the guy,” I wrote, the year before his début on “The Late Show.” On “The Colbert Report,” Colbert created a persona—a Bill O’Reilly-inspired blowhard—that evolved into a surprisingly flexible instrument. By wearing a mask made of his own face, he inflected every interaction with multiple ironies, keeping…

HOW TO LIVE FOREVER Tad Friend’s article about Silicon Valley’s anti-aging visionaries—ranging from people who want to make “death optional” to those who will settle for living to a thousand—notes only at the end that there is some public ambivalence about such goals (“The God Pill,” April 3rd). I found it interesting that, with just a few exceptions, Friend’s lengthy list of eager entrepreneurs and researchers are all middle-aged men captivated by the science of this endeavor— which he describes in great detail. But, beyond hand-waving, they don’t engage much with some basic questions that might be of concern to the rest of us: Will much longer lives guarantee better lives, or better societies? Will they make it any easier to deal with our present global crises—climate change, poverty,…

Skinny Dennis 152 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn On a recent Tuesday night in Williamsburg, the muffled sounds of live honky-tonk rumbled from Skinny Dennis, a pleasantly boisterous barrelhouse. Inside, a stocky third-generation Nashville musician named Andrew Sovine was performing an eighties ode to heartache. “Ain’t no woman gonna change the way I think,” he crooned. “I think I’ll just stay here and drink.” If you are going to stay and drink, Willie’s Frozen Coffee—a decadent caffeine- andwhiskey sludge named for Willie Nelson—is a must. Baskets of peanuts are laid out on the bar, and the house rule is to toss the shells onto the floor. Upon them, locals and out-of-towners alike, emboldened by boozy sweet tea or vodka lemonade, pair off and dance in the lead-and-follow tradition. “I’ve played in fifty-year-old…

IN 2015, the British writer Robert Macfarlane published “Landmarks,” a book about the language of place. In it, he catalogued regional words for things like fields and streams and icicles, which, he found out, were called “clinkerbells” and “dagglers” in Wessex, and “cancervells” in Exmoor; “ickles” in Yorkshire; “tankles” in Durham; “shuckles” in Cumbria; and “aquabob” in Kent. The book became a best-seller, an excerpt in the Guardian went viral— Britain!—and, since then, Macfarlane has found himself on the receiving end of a “speat” (sudden flood, Cumbria) or “cenllif ” (torrent, Wales) of mail. He’s acquired so many “gift words,” as he calls them, that he appended to the paperback edition a list of five hundred entries culled from readers’ letters. He said the other day, “The one word that’s…

WHEN MARGARET ATWOOD was in her twenties, an aunt shared with her a family legend about a possible seventeenth-century forebear: Mary Webster, whose neighbors, in the Puritan town of Hadley, Massachusetts, had accused her of witchcraft. “The townspeople didn’t like her, so they strung her up,” Atwood said recently. “But it was before the age of drop hanging, and she didn’t die. She dangled there all night, and in the morning, when they came to cut the body down, she was still alive.” Webster became known as Half-Hanged Mary. The maiden name of Atwood’s grandmother was Webster, and the family tree can be traced back to John Webster, the fifth governor of Connecticut. “On Monday, my grandmother would say Mary was her ancestor, and on Wednesday she would say she…

1. After the accident, when summer brings slow afternoons with nothing left to do, I take what used to be your garden chair and park it underneath the wayward ash that sidles forward where the garden swerves and hides the house from view. In secret then I conjure up the notebook I have found among your bedside things and open it. Blank pages. Thoughts you never had, or had but could not bring yourself to say. Should I imagine them or write my own instead? I close my eyes and scrutinize the white that also lies inside me while the ash rattles its pale-green keys above my head. 2. The milk float with its thin mosquito whine straining through larch and elder from the lane, the nervous bottles in their…

THE WAGER was ten dollars. It was 1944, and the law students of Howard University were discussing how best to bring an end to Jim Crow. In the half century since Plessy v. Ferguson, lawyers had been chipping away at segregation by questioning the “equal” part of the “separate but equal” doctrine—arguing that, say, a specific black school was not truly equivalent to its white counterpart. Fed up with the limited and incremental results, one student in the class proposed a radical alternative: why not challenge the “separate” part instead? That student’s name was Pauli Murray. Her law-school peers were accustomed to being startled by her—she was the only woman among them and first in the class—but that day they laughed out loud. Her idea was both impractical and reckless,…

I LOOK FORWARD TO an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty”: John F. Kennedy’s words, carved in the white marble cliffs of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C., have always seemed more wistful than hopeful. These days, with brutality and ugliness in the ascendant, they have a critical edge. On a recent visit to Washington, I often had the sense that the graven voices of the memorials were speaking in admonishing tones. Jefferson: “Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” F.D.R.: “We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.” Kennedy again: “This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.” I was…

Shortly before his retrospective opened at the Guggenheim, in 2011, Maurizio Cattelan (seen above, in a recent self-portrait) announced his retirement. Then, ever the prankster, he hung virtually all of his sculptures midair, by ropes, in the museum: he killed his career. “Be Right Back,” Maura Axelrod’s documentary about the irreverent Italian artist, which opens at the newly refurbished Quad Cinema on April 14, includes footage of that show. Meanwhile, Cattelan has unretired—last year, he installed a solid-gold toilet in a Guggenheim rest room. 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…

Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival Held annually in New York City, the Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival has long been a nationwide symbol for the blend of religion, pageantry, and whimsy that has come to define the holiday. In the mid-nineteenth century, patrons of St. Patrick’s Cathedral began displaying floral arrangements at Easter services, and high-society women in attendance followed suit and brightened their church apparel; soon, the stroll from the Cathedral down Fifth Avenue became a flamboyant showcase of bonnets, ribbons, and floral prints. On Easter morning, participants will march in headwear featuring elaborate models of the skyline, live animals, and countless other outlandish ornaments, in keeping with the event’s spirit of one-upmanship. As the poet Rosyrie Schulman declared, in this magazine in 1946, “This year I’m being…

ALLISON JANNEY SPIRALLED, cranelike, up the ramp of the Guggenheim Museum. She stopped in front of a Kandinsky—“Black Lines” (1913), a jumble of Technicolor splotches—and gasped. “My gosh, that’s so beautiful,” she said. She was wearing chunky glasses and a dark blazer over a leopard-print blouse. “I felt an energy go through my chest.” It was her day off from “Six Degrees of Separation,” a Broadway revival of the 1990 John Guare play. Janney plays the wife of a Manhattan art dealer whose life is upended by a young con artist claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier. “One of the things that Paul, the con man, learns about the couple is that they have a double-sided Kandinsky in their apartment,” Janney said. “One side is chaos and one…

Every three seconds, to recall captivity,the mind slipping in on itself and its past,and knowing it. She sounds like a politician:I cannot recall. I am afraid I do not remember.If only the mind could bury itself at the bottomof the sea, wavering tentacles flexibleto the new currents. Instead it rides the risingwaves, bobbing up again and again,drifting farther away from land it was notmeant for, from everything familiar.And yet sometimes a detail will emerge, like a nosepressed up against the aquarium glass,the jellyfish trying to make sense of the nostrils,the dim lighting, how it came to be, and be here.…

“BREAK HER ARMS, break her legs,” Lakshman’s grandmother would say about her daughter-in-law, “then see how she crawls to her bottle.” What she said made sense. Lakshman’s father refused to beat his wife, though. “This is America,” he said. “I will go to jail and you will be sitting in India eating warm pakoras.” To Lakshman, it seemed unmanly of his father not to take charge. It happened every time the family went to a party. Before they left the house, his father would wipe down his comb. He would tuck a handkerchief into his pants pocket. He would get out the notebook in which he had written down the lyrics of movie songs, because he liked to sing and hoped that somebody would ask him to. The parties…

Phenomena, by Annie Jacobsen (Little, Brown). Drawing on declassified material, this richly researched book examines a bizarre historical episode: the U.S. government’s secret investigations of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. Starting in the early years of the Cold War, psychics were given clearance to assist various agencies with operations that included tracking Soviet submarines, locating fugitives, and mapping the interior of the Chinese Embassy in Rome. In more mind-bending assignments, they were asked to find the Ark of the Covenant and go back in time to discover who shot J.F.K. There were uncanny successes, such as the prediction of a Pentagon official’s kidnapping, and information obtained occasionally prompted government action. Jacobsen shows that, in the face of inexplicable events, even “the most pragmatic, commonsense thinkers found themselves uncertain.” This Long…