Innholdsfortegnelse for May 22, 2017 i The New Yorker

Ian Parker (“Are You My Mother?,” p. 46) has contributed to the magazine since 1994, and became a staff writer in 2000. Fred Kaplan (“Kind of New,” p. 34), a columnist for Slate, is the author of “Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War.” His last piece for the magazine was about John Zorn. Samantha Hunt (Fiction, p. 70) is the author of “The Seas,” “The Invention of Everything Else,” and, most recently, “Mr. Splitfoot.” Thomas Mallon (Life and Letters, p. 81) is a novelist, an essayist, and a critic. “Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years” came out in paperback in August. Emily Nussbaum (On Television, p. 78), The New Yorker’s television critic, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2016. Carrie Fountain (Poem, p. 54) has…

What can a brand stand for these days? Social justice is problematic (see Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner ad), and sex doesn’t sell the way it used to (for the 2017 Pirelli calendar, the formerly oiledup models went makeupfree). So last year, when Lululemon, the athleisure pioneer, decided that it wanted to be known for something bigger than sumptuous yoga pants, Duke Stump, an executive vicepresident at the company, interviewed dozens of advertising and marketing agencies. He ended up hiring Virtue, the inhouse creative agency of Vice Media. Vice, he said the other day, at the company’s offices in Venice, California, “made us feel uncomfortable in a really good way, and they do ‘real’ better than anybody.” Stump, who has a headful of wavy hair and was wearing a breezy blue shirt…

Dear— Wait, O.K., how do I address this letter? Who are you now, exactly, in relation to me? Because I was part of you for thirty-five years, right? We were one. So does that mean I’m addressing this letter to myself? No, because I live in a freezer now, with a dozen of your other eggs, and you don’t. So I guess you are a “you” now, and I am a “me.” But am I still thirty-five, like you? Will I continue to be thirty-five until you defrost me? And if we’re going with that theory for a second—and I have temporarily stopped aging for the duration of the time that I am in this freezer, and am therefore currently in a state of suspended animation—does that mean I have…

Just now it has come to me again: the sudden knowledge of everything that remains to be done though I worked my ass off this week, doing things, doing things. What is my style? is a question I have never asked until now, in the waiting room at my dentist’s, when this article in O Magazine encouraged me so cunningly to do so. Maybe it is not my job to surprise you, not anymore, says the spirit. O.K., I say. O.K. But still, I want one more crisp image, just one, though I know I don’t deserve it, I want it to appear the way money once or twice in my life has appeared in my line of vision on the street: some bill, nearly alive, green god, its skin…

No more at home here than the lambs, though no less so among the Banks Peninsula’s steep, grassy, and almost pathless declivities, the paired-off stalks can grow to the height of a house cat; they slouch, almost as much at ease as a cat would be, amid the taller foxglove blooms, whose buttered-popcorn and flameorange bells emerge so early in the Southern summer’s game, as if to ring in the new year. Too soft to be called teeth, too thick, except in direct sunlight, to see through, the diminutive lobes on their immature aluminum-gray or Statue-of-Liberty-green leaves’ edge look faded even when brand-new. Their paler fur will catch a drop from a hiker’s water bottle if it spatters, if that hiker happens to slide down the unexpectedly parabolic curve of…

Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead). The central character of this vivid, unrelentingly funny memoir is the author’s father—a Catholic priest whose first stirrings of faith came, after he was already married, by way of repeated viewings of “The Exorcist” while he was serving in the Navy. Lockwood, a poet, is a “long and fatally lapsed” Catholic, but, she writes, “All my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we.” Her stories of growing up immersed in the pro-life movement and in Church arcana—and, later, of taking her ailing husband to live with her parents in their rectory— are both savage and tender, shot through with surprises and revelations. Six Encounters with Lincoln, by Elizabeth Brown Pryor (Viking). By…

YOU’RE FIRED! Evan Osnos, in his article on the ways that Donald Trump could be removed from office, focusses on options outlined in the Constitution (“Endgames,” May 8th). But the example of Spiro Agnew, the Vice- President under Nixon, who was removed from office in 1973, suggests another possible approach. Agnew’s fall was not directly connected with the Watergate scandal but, rather, was connected with allegations of corruption during his term as governor of Maryland. Charged with that crime, he resigned the Vice-Presidency as part of a plea deal. If Trump turns out to have gained the Presidency, in part, by coöperating with Russian efforts to smear Hillary Clinton, that not only might open him up to further investigation in Congress, as Osnos suggests, but could also end in…

When Donald Trump accused his predecessor Barack Obama of wiretapping him, James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, told colleagues that he considered Trump to be “outside the realm of normal,” and even “crazy.” Many Americans share this view, but the professionals who are best qualified to make such an assessment have been forced to remain mum. “I’m struggling not to discuss He- Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” a psychiatrist named Jerrold Post said last week, speaking on the phone from his office, in Bethesda, Maryland. Post, who is the director of the political-psychology program at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, and the founder of the C.I.A.’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, has made a career of political-personality profiling. However, he is also a distinguished life fellow of…

“A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society,” Henrik Ibsen wrote in 1878, proving himself, in 2017 parlance, to be a woke bae. He was writing about “A Doll’s House,” his proto-feminist masterwork, which concludes with Nora Helmer, a restive Norwegian housewife, walking out on her husband, Torvald. The play ends with a slamming door, one of dramatic literature’s greatest cliffhangers. Enter the playwright Lucas Hnath, who has, fourteen decades later, written a sequel. In “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” which has been nominated for eight Tony Awards, Nora (played by Laurie Metcalf ) returns fifteen years later, having written a popular anti-marriage novel under a nom de plume. “It’s something I’d been threatening to do for a while, to…

Melissa and Ashley, identical twins from Georgia, shared a bedroom while growing up. They had the same best friend, took classes together in high school, and dreamed of becoming artists in their own collective. “We’re like two different people with one brain,” Melissa liked to say. In the spring of 2011, during their junior year, they decided to apply to college in their usual way—in tandem. The University of Georgia, in Athens, the state’s flagship university, was their first choice. “All my life, I knew I wanted to go to college, even before I understood what that would entail,” Ashley said. “My parents didn’t go to college, so they didn’t know how to navigate all this. We had to figure out the process for ourselves.” As soon as they started…

When Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” débuted, in April, nearly every review commented on its grotesque timeliness. It’s true that, early on, the Trumpian parallels are hard to miss. It’s a story about a government that exploits fear of Islamic terrorists to crush dissent, then blots out women’s reproductive rights. It’s about fake news, political trauma, the abnormal normalized. There’s a scene that so directly evoked the Women’s March that I had to hit Pause to collect myself. But, for many readers of my generation, “The Handmaid’s Tale” is also a time machine back to the Reagan era, a mightily perverse period for sexual politics. Just a decade earlier, a woman could be denied a credit card without a man to co-sign, and yet, by…

In his poem sequence “The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion,” the Jamaican writer Kei Miller has a Rastaman engage the title character in a debate. The cartographer explains his work: What I do is science. I show the earth as it is, without bias. I never fall in love. I never get involved with the muddy affairs of land. But the Rastaman has his doubts: . . . draw me a map of what you see then I will draw a map of what you never see and guess me whose map will be bigger than whose? Guess me whose map will tell the larger truth? The richness and heft that is lost in the making of official accounts of the world is one of Miller’s favorite…

Alexei Ratmansky’s new ballet for American Ballet Theatre, “Whipped Cream” (premièring on May 22, at the Metropolitan Opera House), is an extravaganza for the eyes and ears. Dancers dressed as candies, pralines, and liqueur bottles move to Richard Strauss’s decadent, swooping melodies from 1924. Their surreal world, conjured by the artist Mark Ryden, is a blend of kitsch and Old Masterly detail. The story is slight, but, then, isn’t that true of many of the old ballets? Most of it occurs in a dream. “It’s a ballet féerie,” Ratmansky says. “Ballet in its purest form.” American Ballet Theatre The season opens with a bit of skirt-swishing fun: the Spanish-themed “Don Quixote.” The production, full of colorful crowd scenes, offers ample opportunities for showing off with fans, capes, guitars, and…

128 W. Houston St. (929-399-5853) This new cocktail bar has made it a priority to celebrate women. The menu features female-produced wines from around the world and cocktails devised by Becky McFalls-Schwartz and Natasha Torres, veterans of the New York mixology scene, who were trained by the late Sasha Petraske, at Milk & Honey. On a recent Sunday afternoon, cool breezes and early-spring light poured in through Moga’s large casement windows, which are left open, weather permitting. (Wild nights find patrons crawling in and out of them.) Japanese surf guitar filtered through the moody space, which is dim in the back, even during the day. On the walls are prints of revelling Japanese women from the nineteen-twenties, who were called “moga” (short for “modern girls”), marked by their independent, Western…

Chuck Wepner placed his giant hand on Liev Schreiber’s spine and felt a tender spot. “You gotta be careful lifting weights,” he said. Wincing, the actor said, “I thought I had to get big to play you!” “Nah,” Wepner said, “you’re plenty big.” It was a few hours before the film “Chuck” was to première at the Tribeca Film Festival, and the men were having lunch nearby, at Little Park. Schreiber, who co-wrote the film, plays Wepner, the brawny, easily bloodied boxer from Bayonne, New Jersey, who inspired Sylvester Stallone to write “Rocky.” The actor, forty-nine, wore dungarees and a work shirt; the fighter, seventy-eight, wore a blazer with a jaunty pocket square. Wepner earned his nickname, the Bayonne Bleeder, in 1969, when his fight against Sonny Liston rained blood…

On a Thursday evening a few months ago, a long line snaked along Seventh Avenue, outside the Village Vanguard, a cramped basement night club in Greenwich Village that jazz fans regard as a temple. The eight-thirty set was sold out, as were the ten-thirty set and nearly all the other shows that week. The people descending the club’s narrow steps had come to hear a twentyseven- year-old singer named Cécile McLorin Salvant. In its sixty years as a jazz club, the Vanguard has headlined few women and fewer singers of either gender. But Salvant, virtually unknown two years earlier, had built an avid following, winning a Grammy and several awards from critics, who praised her singing as “singularly arresting” and “artistry of the highest class.” She and her trio—a pianist,…

The week before Labor Day, 2016, Circe Hamilton, a freelance photographer in her mid-forties, was preparing to move back to the U.K., after twenty years in New York. She had begun to think of the city as an obstruction; she had recently struggled to make a living, and felt that she was depriving her young son of a gentler, slower childhood in west London, with access to English relatives, the National Health Service, and muddy playgrounds under gray skies. Hamilton is an American citizen—and, she recently learned, a descendant of Alexander Hamilton— but she grew up in England, sounds English, and has a British passport. When her friend Valentina Rice hosted a farewell dinner for her, on August 30th, Hamilton was surrounded by expatriate British women with careers in the…

“A coyote ate a three-year-old not far from here.” “Yeah?” “My uncle told me.” “Huh.” “He said, ‘Don’t leave those babies outside again,’ as if I already had.” “Had you?” “Come on.” An answer less precise than no. “Why’s he monitoring coyote activity up here?” “Because.” “Because?” “It’s irresistible.” “Really?” A wild dog with a tender baby in its jaws disappearing into the redwoods forever. My uncle’s so good at imagining things, he makes them real. “Yeah. It’s just what he does, a habit.” Or a compulsion. “I don’t get it.” But I do. Every real thing started life as an idea. I’ve imagined objects and moments into existence. I’ve made humans. I tip taxi-drivers ten, twenty dollars every time they don’t rape me. The last time my husband and…

On November 8, 1960, I voted for Richard Nixon. I had turned nine the week before. According to my fourth-grade report card, from that September, I stood four feet one and a quarter inches tall and weighed fifty-five pounds: small enough to be permitted entry into the curtained voting booth in the Stewart Manor School, on Long Island, where my father let me pull the lever for Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge. It was a reach: during Nelson Rockefeller’s long Albany reign, the Republican ticket occupied the top row on New York State’s mechanical ballot. John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism cut little ice with many of the Irish ex- New Dealers who lived on our street. Their liking of Ike proved to be more than a fling, and by 1960 they…

Concert-hall design has entered its grand mannerist phase, or, some might argue, its age of decadence. Two years ago, the sensation of the music world was the Philharmonie de Paris, a silverand- black cultural spaceship that had landed in the Parc de la Villette. This season, it is the Elbphilharmonie, in Hamburg, Germany—a brick-and-glass colossus that resembles an avant-garde ocean liner docked in the city’s harbor. The new European halls seem to be competing with one another to see which can run up the most staggering bills and generate the most outraged headlines. With a price tag of three hundred and ninety-one million euros, the Paris Philharmonie held the crown for a little while, but its notoriety was soon eclipsed by that of the Elbphilharmonie, which took a decade to…

In June, 2010, Jerrilynn Patton sent a Facebook message to Mike Paradinas, a British producer who runs the adventurous electronic-dance-music label Planet Mu. She had heard that Paradinas was putting together a compilation of footwork, a niche form of club music that originated in Chicago. Many of footwork’s practitioners were surprised at Paradinas’s plans; they were barely known outside the Midwest, and it was hard to imagine that people in Europe had been paying attention. Patton, who records as Jlin, shared a track she had been working on, called “Tetris Freak.” It was a fine distillation of footwork’s at times overwhelming sound: a controlled deluge of skittering snare and kick drums, bass lines that you feel rather than hear, and a chopped-up sample of the theme from the famous computer…