Innholdsfortegnelse for May 29, 2017 i The New Yorker

Ryan Lizza (“Firing Back,” p. 20) is the magazine’s Washington correspondent and an on-air contributor for CNN. Samanta Schweblin (Fiction, p. 56) is the author of four books, including “Fever Dream,” which was published in January in a translation, from the Spanish, by Megan McDowell. Her short-story collection “Mouthful of Birds” comes out in English next year. Tobi Haslett (Books, p. 63) has contributed writing to n+1, Artforum, and Bookforum. Dora Malech (Poem, p. 52) has written two poetry collections. Her third, “Flourish,” will be published next fall. Joshua Yaffa (“Oligarchy 2.0,” p. 46) is a New Yorker contributor based in Moscow and a fellow at New America. Adam Kirsch (Books, p. 67) directs the M.A. Program in Jewish Studies at Columbia. He is the author of “The People…

210 W. 55th St. (646-756-2077) A lot of physical effort goes into the signature offering at Fishbowl. It’s an eponymous jumbosized pitcher, meant to serve eight, that easily holds a litre or more of Dark and Stormies, or another cocktail from a short list. It causes the wasp-waisted barmaids in strappy green minidresses to grunt audibly as they muddle handfuls of cherries, and scoop ice as if shovelling a driveway. For ninety dollars, you can share your Fishbowl with several friends in the downstairs bar at the Dream Hotel, on a spiritless midtown block. The crowd, which seems to be made up mostly of mid-tier financiers, takes up the offer as if it’s a happy- hour bargain, well into the night. There’s a plethora of paunchy men in ill-fitting suits,…

“Is this your first visit to the Museum of Sex?” a docent asked Griffin Dunne. “Yes, my deflowering!” Dunne said. Though the sixty-one-year-old actor wore an untucked pin-striped shirt, sported a two-day beard, and carried a cappuccino, embodying the urbane New Yorker, he seemed eager to be amazed. In the new Amazon series “I Love Dick,” co-created by Jill Soloway, of “Transparent” fame, Dunne plays a smug Manhattan writer named Sylvère, who moves with his younger wife, Chris, to Marfa, Texas. The show’s title comes from the erotic letters that Chris (Kathryn Hahn) writes to a broody sculptor named Dick (Kevin Bacon)—and the double entendre is deliberate. The show is about the female sexual gaze, which men can find withering. Or amazing. Or both. Dunne, who gained early lustre starring…

It is hard to locate when President Trump first declared war on the government establishment, but the story may well begin on the night of January 30th. Three days earlier, Trump, prodded by his most ideological aides, had issued an executive order banning travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries. On the 30th, Sally Yates, the acting U.S. Attorney General, refused to defend the order, saying that she was not convinced that it was lawful. Trump reacted with a fury not seen in the White House since the Nixon era. Yates had been working in her office at the Department of Justice, several blocks away. A twenty-seven-year veteran of the department, she knew that she would not occupy the office long. Jeff Sessions, a Republican senator from Alabama, was Trump’s choice to…

On January 22nd, two days after President Trump was inaugurated, he received a memo from his new Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, recommending that the United States launch a military strike in Yemen. In a forty-year career, Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general and a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, had cultivated a reputation for being both deeply thoughtful and extremely aggressive. By law and by custom, the position of Defense Secretary is reserved for civilians, but Mattis was still a marine at heart. He had been out of the military for only three years (the rule is seven), and his appointment required Congress to pass a waiver. For the first time in his professional life, he was going to the Pentagon in a suit and tie.…

Our friends are getting married in Duluth in July, a city I had always pictured in my mind’s eye as ice in rivers, ice in lakes, months of frozen glitter in shades of the silver wedding invitation held in place on my refrigerator through my own cold months by a gift a child once made for me, magnet glued to paper with my name in pastel letters beneath a flat-bottomed clear glass “gem” stone, its strength not quite enough to keep the heavy cardstock from slipping a fraction of an inch each time I reached for milk or eggs, so by the time summer arrived in earnest the betrothed names were shimmering askew on a level with my shins and the vegetable crisper. In the snap a winter back, the…

The true breakout moment for Lil Yachty, the Atlanta hip-hop artist, didn’t come in the form of a hit single. Instead, it occurred when he modelled for Kanye West in his marathon fashion show at Madison Square Garden, in 2016, which doubled as a release party for his album “The Life of Pablo.” Yachty, whose playful songs like “1 Night” and “Minnesota” had achieved modest success online, remained standing for hours, dressed in an oversized red sweatshirt, even as other models, exhausted, began to sit. As he stood, a captive audience got a good look at his trademark: a mop of short, fire-enginered braids, coated in clear plastic beads. Since then, Yachty has become a highvelocity crossover star in hip-hop. He could teach a workshop on the art of simple…

TERRORISM AND THE COURT In William Finnegan’s article about Zainab Ahmad, a federal counterterrorism prosecutor for the Eastern District of New York, I was surprised to see an anonymous quote from a prosecutor implying that lawyers from my office—the federal defenders—pleaded out a client even partially because of Ahmad’s reputation (“A Righteous Case,” May 15th). Contrary to what prosecutors may wish to believe, the reputation of a prosecutor rarely makes a difference in how we approach a case. The evidence, yes. The judge, yes. It’s disheartening that Finnegan would write an uncritical piece on terrorism prosecutions. The article fails to investigate the use of evidence gained from torture by foreign law enforcement; the domestic use of informants to encourage peo ple to express and to act on jihadist sentiments;…

“I’ve never been a girl-woman,” Elizabeth Marvel said recently. “I’ve always been a Woman with a capital ‘W.’ ” With her deep timbre and penetrating eyes, the forty-seven-year-old actress knows how to make her presence felt; the women she plays demand to be reckoned with. Lately, Marvel’s roles could be seen as a collective essay on female political authority. On “House of Cards,” she played Heather Dunbar, a U.S. Solicitor General and Presidential candidate, whose moral righteousness vexes Kevin Spacey’s curdled Frank Underwood. On the new season of “Homeland,” she plays President-elect Elizabeth Keane, the first woman to hold the office. Why is she suddenly being cast as politicos? “Maybe it’s because I have a very low, strong voice,” she said. “It’s hilarious, because, for people who know me, I’m…

Let’s say you are Maurice Marciano: small of stature, sun-kissed, dapper, with a rough Gallic timbre, hooded chestnut eyes, white hair. You smell—sh-h-h— of Hermès, though with your three brothers you founded Guess, the eternally eighties apparel, fragrance, and accessories company that celebrates blondness, buxomness, and acid-washed jeans. Several years ago, you and your younger brother Paul, seeking a place to house a large collection of contemporary art, bought a hundred-and-ten-thousandsquare- foot travertine-and-marble Scottish Rite Masonic temple on Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles. You wanted to run away from this thing—forget it!— but you couldn’t. Now all you want is for the visitors to your museum to have the same experience that you had upon entering: Whoa. Built in 1961 by Millard Sheets, a prolific mosaic artist and bank architect,…

Hmm, what’s my process? Funny, I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that before. I don’t really have a “process,” per se, just a simple routine that I meticulously follow every day like a disciplined genius robot. I usually wake up around 5 or 5:05 A.M., and get out of bed immediately. I do not press snooze. I do not start scrolling through Twitter so that the brightness of my phone’s L.E.D. screen will force my eyes into awakeness, but then continue reading tweets for so long that my eyes adjust to the brightness and I get sleepy again. I meditate first thing in the morning. I do this sitting down on a meditation pillow (which is not painful, because I have naturally good posture). I do not use a…

Whatever else the orchestra says, the cello insists, You’re dying. It speaks from the core of the tree’s hacked-out heart, shaped and smoothed like a woman. Be glad you are not hard wood yourself and can hear it. Every day the cello is taken into someone’s arms, taken between spread legs and lured into its shivering. The arm saws and saws and all the sacred cries of saints and demons issue from the carved cleft holes. Like all of us, it aches, sending up moans from the pit we balance on the edge of.…

I knew that Enrique Duvel had inherited a lot of money, and also that, though he was sometimes spotted with women, he still lived with his mother. On Sundays, he cruised around the plaza in his convertible, self-absorbed, never looking at or greeting any of his neighbors, and then he’d disappear until the following weekend. I’d kept the toy store I’d inherited from my father, and one day I caught Duvel in the street, peering dubiously in through the display window of my shop. I mentioned this to Mirta, my wife, who said that maybe I’d got him confused with someone else. But then she saw him herself. Yes, on some afternoons, Duvel stood outside the toy store for a while, looking in through the window. The first time he…

In July, 1950, Czeslaw Milosz, the cultural attaché at the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C., received a letter from Jerzy Putrament, the general secretary of the Polish Writers’ Union. The two men had known each other for many years— they had been contributors to the same student magazine in college, in the early nineteen-thirties—but their paths had diverged widely. Now the arch- commissar of Polish literature told the poet, “I heard that you are to be moved to Paris. . . . I am happy that you will be coming here, because I have been worried about you a little: whether the splendor of material goods in America has overshadowed poverty in other aspects of life.” The language was polite, even confiding, but the message could not have been clearer.…

Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble, the “musical priesthood” formed by Tei Blow and Sean McElroy, finds mystical absurdity in modern life by splicing found media and ancient ritual. In “The Art of Luv (Part 1): Elliot,” the group explored toxic masculinity by repurposing YouTube videos by the mass murderer Elliot Rodger while dressed like pagan gods. Part 5 of the series, “Swipe Right / ROKÉ Cupid” (above), at the Bushwick Starr May 24-June 10, draws on dating profiles and ecstatic poetry to create a postmodern courtship ceremony. MOVIES OPENING Baywatch A comedy, based on the television series, about two lifeguards (Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron) who team up to solve a murder. Directed by Seth Gordon; co-starring Alexandra Daddario and Priyanka Chopra. Opening May 25. (In wide release.) • Hermia…

Three weeks after Donald Trump’s election, Miro Cerar, the Prime Minister of Slovenia, spoke to the President- elect and offered his services as a mediator with Vladimir Putin. It seemed appropriate: Slovenia was the location of the first meeting between George W. Bush and Putin, in 2001, and it is the birthplace of the First Lady, Melania Trump. After the call to Trump, Cerar told reporters, “I know that Mr. Trump is very aware of the difference between Slovenia and Slovakia.” Not everyone is as well informed as the President of the United States. Confusion over the two countries is common. Slovenia and Slovakia are both tiny, Slavic nations, with a combined population smaller than New York City’s. Both acceded to the European Union in 2004. Their flags both have…

William Stanley Jevons, the nineteenth- century English economist, once wrote to a friend that he’d had no special ambition as a young man. He just did what he had to do. After his father went bankrupt in the iron business, in 1848, Jevons reluctantly left London for Sydney, to take a job analyzing the quality of the coinage at the Australian Mint. Somehow, this combination of work, family history, and deep boredom led Jevons to spend his days developing a theory about value, helping to start what is known as the marginal revolution. Before Jevons, economists thought that prices should be based on the cost of making goods. Jevons showed that prices should reflect the degree to which a consumer values a product. The marginal revolution taught a seeming paradox:…

The final event of last year’s beachvolleyball world tour was held in Toronto, in September, in a parking lot at the edge of Lake Ontario. There’s a broad public beach nearby, but few actual beaches meet the Fédération Internationale de Volleyball’s strict standards for sand, so the tournament’s sponsor had erected a temporary stadium and imported thirteen hundred and sixty tons from a quarry two and a half hours to the north. The shipment arrived in thirty-five tractor-trailer loads. I visited the site shortly before the tournament, and spoke with Todd Knapton, who was supervising the installation. He’s the vice-president of the company that supplied the sand, Hutcheson Sand & Mixes, in Huntsville, Ontario. He’s in his fifties, and he was wearing a white hard hat, a neon- yellow-green T-shirt,…

While creating the universe, did God have in mind that, at a certain point, a stuffed goat with a car tire around its middle would materialize to round out the scheme? It came to pass, in New York, with “Monogram” (1955-59)—goat, tire, and also paint, paper, fabric, printed matter, metal, wood, shoe heel, and tennis ball— which is now on view at the Museum of Modern Art, in “Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends,” an immense retrospective of the protean artist, who died in 2008, at the age of eighty-two. Of course, anything may feel inevitable after it has happened, but some things feel more consequentially so than others. Early in his career, Rauschenberg specialized in talismans of destiny, such as, in 1951, a series of uninflected allwhite paintings that inspired the…

Richard Nixon, by John A. Farrell (Doubleday). Nixon’s reputation as an insecure upstart from a poor background in Southern Californian is well documented. But this balanced biography emphasizes aspects of his character which led to assessments like that of Martin Luther King, Jr., who called him “one of the most magnetic personalities I have ever confronted.” Nixon was an actor and a musician, a romantic whose tough childhood and distant mother left him yearning for approval. Perhaps the greatest victim of his megalomania, Farrell suggests, was his wife Pat, who stood by his side as he refined his gift for political devilry. When a friend asked her about her newfound fame in the White House, she replied, “I just hate it.” Making Gullah, by Melissa L. Cooper (North Carolina).…