Innholdsfortegnelse for April 24, 2017 i The New Yorker

Rachel Monroe (“#Vanlife,” p. 40) has contributed to the Guardian, New York, and Texas Monthly. Lauren Collins (“Secrets in the Sauce,” p. 66) is the author of “When in French: Love in a Second Language,” which was published in September. Anthony Lane (The Current Cinema, p. 102) has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. His book, “Nobody’s Perfect,” is a collection of his writings for the magazine. Lizzie Widdicombe (“High Cuisine,” p. 48) is a New Yorker writer and an editor of The Talk of the Town. Hua Hsu (Pop Music, p. 98), a contributing writer for the magazine since 2015, is the author of “A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific.” Rebecca Mead (The Talk of the Town, p. 37) has been…

St. Jordi Festival In Barcelona, St. Valentine’s seat is occupied by Jordi, a knight who, according to medieval legend, slew a dragon and saved an entire village, including the daughter of a king; the dragon’s blood produced a rosebush where it dripped. Catalans celebrate St. Jordi each April, by exchanging roses and books with their loved ones. The Farragut Fund for Catalan Culture in the U.S. and the Catalan Institute of America aim to broaden the festival’s global influence with a week of events, including a reading by the Catalan poet Maria Cabrera, at El Born Restaurant (April 19), and a bookstore crawl that includes Housing Works, McNally Jackson, and Rizzoli; in keeping with tradition, each attendee who purchases a book will receive a rose. (Various locations. ciofa.org. April…

LAST AUGUST, Ben Shanahan thought Hillary Clinton had the election in the bag. So the twenty-five-year-old Bernie Sanders supporter, who grew up in Washington Heights, in Manhattan, spent the fall “hitting thousands of doors,” as he put it, for Zephyr Teachout, the Democrat, backed by Sanders, who ended up losing her bid to represent New York’s Nineteenth Congressional District. When Trump was elected President, Shanahan became something of a canvassing vigilante. Lately, he’s been in the suburbs of Atlanta, working on behalf of Jon Ossoff, a Democratic candidate for Georgia’s Sixth District seat, relinquished in February by Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price. A thirty-year-old documentary filmmaker who’s never held office, Ossoff hopes to flip Newt Gingrich’s conservative former district and ignite a congressional backlash against the…

TSAR NICHOLAS CRADLES a rare albino coconut, a gift from the Sultan of Jub. When no more specimens could be found, a crestfallen Nicholas secured, as substitutes, dozens of ostrich eggs from M. Fabergé, a Russo-French poultryman. The albino coconut was rendered another of history’s might-have-beens. THE CANADIAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE adopted the impossible-to-deflate smooth-husked Borneo coconut for the 2016 season. It was cheap and sturdy but also slipperier than wet soap, so no pass receiver could hold on to it. Every C.F.L. game that year ended in a 0–0 tie. THE LAPLAND PINE grows wild in northern Finland. Its close resemblance to the coconut palm has puzzled many botanists and maddened more than a few. UNSUSPECTING G.I.S in the South Pacific fell for this Japanese stink bomb, cunningly designed to…

The city wraps itself up in me. Covers its ears in me. Tried me on in one of those public nudity dressing rooms they used to have at Loehmann’s. How I loved in my loneliness the comfort of those pantings & unpantings. How that dressing room is no longer there, as many people from that dressing room just got up and walked out, onto the next myth, died or bore a child or didn’t. Perhaps it was an accident. Haven’t thought of me since. Should I stop hating my own nostalgia, which places me here on the corner of my sadness so many years later on a mild evening, looking up into lit windows, dinnertimes not my own? The city wraps me up in itself, does with me as air…

In February of 1880, the whaling ship Hope sailed north from Peterhead, Scotland, and headed for the Arctic. Her crew included a highly regarded captain, an illiterate but gifted first mate, and the usual roster of harpooners, sailors, and able-bodied seamen—but not the intended ship’s surgeon. That gentleman having been unexpectedly called away on family matters, a last-minute substitute was found, in the form of a middling third-year medical student making his maiden voyage: a young man by the name of Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle was twenty when he left Peterhead and twenty-one when he returned. On Saturday, May 22nd, in the meticulous diary he kept during that journey, he wrote, “A heavy swell all day. I came of age today. Rather a funny sort of place to do…

NEAR THE END of his life, John Coltrane decided to buy a harp. The visionary saxophonist and bandleader hoped that having one in his home studio would help him rethink his approach to harmony and texture. The harp he ordered took months to build and wasn’t delivered until after his death, of liver cancer, in July, 1967. It sat in the house in Dix Hills, Long Island, where he and his wife, Alice, were bringing up their young children. If the windows were open, Alice later recalled, a strong breeze would make the strings hum, as though some invisible force were strumming them. Alice and John met in the early sixties in New York City, when she was gigging and he was already a star. She was born in Detroit…

ART AND APPROPRIATION The debates around Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till’s body, “Open Casket,” which Calvin Tomkins discusses in his recent article about Schutz, highlight the need for contemporary artists to rethink what it means to express solidarity with the suffering of others (“Troubling Pictures,” April 10th). Much has been said in Schutz’s defense about art as empathy and the importance of resisting self-censorship. These are failsafe points in discussions of artistic freedom, and they sidestep a foundational problem: the decision to make art without regard for the lives involved, and no matter the consequences. Even well-intentioned artistic empathy can become a form of trespass when it comes uninvited and replays the damage done to the people with whom the artist seeks to stand. The kind of racist…

LAST MONTH, THE Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, unveiled the newest addition to its Rapid Response Collecting gallery: a pink pussyhat that was worn at the Women’s March in Washington, the day after Donald Trump’s Inauguration. The hat sits on a faceless mannequin head, ears slightly splayed, behind nonreflective glass. Next to it is a mounted card bearing the simple outline of a pussyhat in black pen, like a woke hieroglyph. The pussyhat’s elevation was the result of what Corinna Gardner, the Acting Keeper of the museum’s Design, Architecture, and Digital department, called a “robust conversation” among the members of the Rapid Response team in the days surrounding the march. The department, which was founded three years ago, is dedicated to acquiring contemporary objects of topical importance; recent additions…

WE ARE LIVING in the age of malodor amelioration. You smell better now—and will smell even better in the future—because of the advances that are occurring along Interstate 95 between Philadelphia and Newark. You could call that stretch of road “the stink highway.” This revolution began in 1990, when George Preti, a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, isolated the specific molecule (3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid) that produces the distinct odor of underarm sweat. Before Preti’s discovery, you had to, in his words, “carpet bomb” smells by applying a perfume strong enough to overwhelm and erase all odors. Once Preti cracked the code, scientists could create scents that adhere only to the nasal sensors that are most sensitive to 3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid. Deodorant designers are now able to create precisely…

To get rid of the sound of his voice you take off your ears but then they grow back. You try a sharper blade, two hours hunched over the whetstone, and, rid of the sound of his voice, for a day you hear nothing until they grow back. You are not happy. In birdsong you just hear I’m hungry or Fuck me, everything threaded with the sound of his voice you core out your eardrums to escape and you do for a while until they grow back. Little flesh tom-toms announcing the night-march from within the ridged whorls of your ears which to get rid of the sound of his voice you burn off this time with a blowtorch. They grow back sooner than your hair does. Smoother, this time,…

The Family Gene, by Joselin Linder (Ecco). When the author was sixteen, her father fell ill with a mysterious, debilitating, and ultimately fatal disease. “We were not a family who routinely dealt with catastrophe. We lived in Ohio,” she drolly observes. Twelve years later, she had contracted the disease. By then, researchers were closer to identifying the cause—a genetic variant unique to her Ashkenazi Jewish family. This surprisingly buoyant book chronicles the search for a cure as well as the family’s life stories, rich in their ordinariness. Describing how it feels to face the likelihood of a shortened life—including her conflicted desire to be a mother, despite the risks for any child—Linder reminds us that hope “isn’t the same thing as truth.” Somebody with a Little Hammer, by Mary…

ART MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Metropolitan Museum “Sara Berman’s Closet” Berman came to New York from Belarus, by way of Palestine, in 1954. But only when her marriage of thirty-eight years ended did she realize her true calling, as a West Village eccentric who dressed exclusively in shades of white. This intimate show, assembled by the artists Maira and Alex Kalman (Berman’s daughter and grandson), re-creates her regimentally organized closet from the Horatio Street studio apartment where she lived until her death, in 2004. Berman favored slacks and tailored shirts, which hang tidily near shelves, on which precisely folded garments commingle with other belongings (a bottle of perfume, a potato grater, a jar of buttons); ecru and beige oxfords form a neat row on the closet floor. This tableau is positioned…

60 Henry St., Brooklyn (718-624-1444) On a Brooklyn Heights block, near a wine bar and an alehouse, the Binc is inconspicuous, its presence marked most boldly by a sandwich board. The interior is suffused with a warm, orangey glow, and, though it just celebrated its one-year anniversary, it feels curiously unfocussed in time. There is a faded portrait of a mustachioed man from an indeterminate era, and antique marionettes of soldiers hanging on a cloudy, wall-size mirror; the rest-room signs are done in careful Art Deco lettering. On a recent Saturday night, the bar top was crowded with rows of multicolored tinctures, like cardamom bitters and sweet-potato shrub, which added complexity to cocktails such as the Whitaker (vodka, ginger) and the Fall of Roebling (tequila, habanero). Twelve barflies gave the…

WHAT DOES IT all mean? Why are we here? These are questions with which philosophers have wrestled from the time of the ancient Greeks to—well, two weekends ago, at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Simon Critchley, a professor at the New School, brought several of his Ph.D. students to the library to conduct seminars with young thinkers, part of the Tilt Kids Festival. “From ages eight to eleven, kids are natural philosophers—before puberty and those awful inhibitions creep in,” Critchley explained. “All you have to do is trigger the question and let it roll.” First up: the six-to-eight-year-olds. One of Critchley’s students, Joseph Lemelin, whose research interests include the history of ancient philosophy, was discussing the idea of change with them. “What is philosophy?” he asked, in…

EMILY KING AND Corey Smith had been dating for five months when they took a trip to Central America, in February, 2012. At a surf resort in Nicaragua, Smith helped a lanky American named Foster Huntington repair the dings in his board. When the waves were choppy, the three congregated in the resort’s hammock zone, where the Wi-Fi signal was strongest. One afternoon, Huntington listened to the couple have a small argument. Something about their fond irritation made him think that they’d be suited to spending long periods of time together in a confined space. “You guys would be great in a van,” he told them. The year before, Huntington had given up his apartment in New York and his job as a designer at Ralph Lauren, and moved into…

IN FEBRUARY OF 2015, Kathleen Purvis, the food editor of the Charlotte Observer, drove to Birmingham, Alabama, to attend Food Media South, an annual symposium. The keynote session, “Hey, You, Pitch Me Something,” was meant to be a friendly winddown to a weekend of talks. Partici - pants were invited to get up in front of the editor of the Web magazine the Bitter Southerner and, well, pitch him something. There were several hundred people in the room. Purvis knew that in the name of politeness she should probably stay quiet, but she couldn’t resist the opportunity to “toss a good word grenade,” she recalled later, into a clubby crowd that she felt tended to overlook, along with chiffon cakes and canning, some of the most complicated questions about Southern…

THIS DEAF AND blind man, my mother’s friend’s lover, was on his way to spend the evening. His name was Sasha. My mother’s friend’s name was Olga. I had known her since I was a baby, so I considered her my friend, too. She was beautiful. More beautiful than my mother. She had a long soft body and pitch-black hair that reached to her waist. My mother and I also had dark hair, but ours was messy and thin and forgettable, while Olga’s hair made people stare at her. Olga lived in a town on the Black Sea, but she visited Moscow often and she always brought a gift for me. My favorite was a necklace made of seashells. I loved to put it on and dance, while Olga clapped…

Rachel, the twenty-eight-year-old narrator of Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel, “Borne,” lives in a harrowed, poisoned, semi-ruined city, where she scavenges scraps of food and tradeable detritus from the wreckage, a dangerous enterprise in a landscape haunted by the similarly desperate. Her lover and partner, Wick, remains holed up in their boobytrapped, warrenlike refuge, a former apartment building disguised as a midden. It’s essential that their home, a place they call the Balcony Cliffs, be unidentifiable from above, because their unnamed city is intermittently terrorized by a ravenous giant bear named Mord, and Mord can fly. This is postapocalyptic fiction, a genre that, for all its lamentation over the loss of the world we live in now, often runs on a current of nostalgia for an earlier age. What is a…

“Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction,” at the Museum of Modern Art, looks like a typical march-of-styles historical survey, tracking high points in the boom decades of abstract art. There are ninetyfour works by fifty-three international artists, all but one of them drawn from the museum’s collection, dating from 1942 to 1969. They are grouped in categories of gestural, geometric, reductive, and “eccentric” abstraction, supplemented with fabric arts, ceramics, and decoration. The show’s curators, Starr Figura and Sarah Meister, with assistance from Hillary Reder, have exercised just one unusual criterion: nothing by a man. This isn’t to say that no male presence is felt. Rather, the contrary: most of the works were achieved in an art world—and a culture—that discounted the feminine, presenting women less with glass ceilings than…