Innholdsfortegnelse for June 5-12, 2017 i The New Yorker

The loudest, fastest song on Mount Kimbie’s 2013 record, “Cold Spring Fault Less Youth,” is ironically titled “Slow.” The rest of the album is a patient play—soft, taut melodies and drums that sound muffled, as if heard through a wall—but “Slow” crackles open with stomps of kick and snare drums and a throbbing, hazy siren, like a nuclear reactor or something out of a chase scene in a “Matrix” sequel. The British production duo specializes in the kind of agile, quiet electronic music favored by James Blake and the xx, developed in East London as a reaction to the frantic relentlessness of E.D.M.; if the genre pushes listeners over the edge, Mount Kimbie and its ilk dull those edges. But “Slow” isn’t as much a departure as it is a…

In the Trump era, political performance, like so much else, is in the eye of the beholder. Liberals see an Administration in a tailspin. But Trump’s base sees it differently: a recent Pew survey showed that, among Republicans, the President’s approval rating is eighty-two per cent. A similar dynamic exists when it comes to Rodrigo Duterte, the President of the Philippines, whom Trump recently invited to the White House. American newspapers describe a murderous strongman who has ordered thousands of extrajudicial killings as part of his “war on drugs.” But to Trump, and to many Filipinos, Duterte is a hero. In a phone call, Trump congratulated him for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.” As Joann Carman, the president of the Filipino Social Club of New York, said…

In December, 2015, a new startup called Juno entered the ride-hailing market in New York City with a simple proposition: it was going to treat its drivers better than its competitors, notably Uber, did theirs—and do “something that was socially responsible,” as one of Juno’s co-founders, Talmon Marco, told me last fall. In practice, that meant drivers would keep a bigger part of their fares and be eligible for a form of stock ownership in the company. But, on April 26th, when an Israeli company named Gett announced that it was buying Juno for two hundred million dollars, that changed. The merged company is dropping the restricted stock plan for drivers, and those who already hold stock are being offered small cash payments, reportedly in the hundreddollar range, in exchange.…

A t some point, a rich old man named Ryland W. Peaslee had made an enormous donation to the program, and this was why not only the second-year fellowships he’d endowed but also the people who received them were called Peaslees. You’d say, “He’s a Peaslee,” or “She’s a Peaslee.” Each year, four were granted. There were other kinds of fellowships, but none of them provided as much money—eightyeight hundred dollars—as the Peaslees. Plus, with all the others, you still had to teach undergrads. Our professors and the program administrators were cagey about the exact date when we’d receive the letters specifying our second-year funding, but a rumor was going around that it would be on a Monday in mid-March, which meant that, instead of sitting at my desk, I…

A CRITIC AT LARGE I met W. G. Sebald almost twenty years ago, in New York City, when I interviewed him onstage for the PEN American Center. Afterward, we had dinner. It was July, 1997; he was fiftythree. The brief blaze of his international celebrity had been lit a year before, by the publication in English of his mysterious, wayward book “The Emigrants.” In a review, Susan Sontag (who curated the PEN series) had forcefully anointed the German writer as a contemporary master. Not that Sebald seemed to care about that. He was gentle, academic, intensely tactful. His hair was gray, his almost white mustache like frozen water. He resembled photographs of a pensive Walter Benjamin. There was an atmosphere of drifting melancholy about him that, as in his prose,…

WHAT MAKES A PARENT? I read with great interest Ian Parker’s article on the contentious custody battle between a separated gay couple, a case that has the potential to change the ways in which the courts define parenthood and family (“Are You My Mother?,” May 22nd). For gay parents, parenthood necessarily requires an immense amount of planning. There is no accidental pregnancy. In my own experience, motherhood did not begin the moment my daughter was born. It didn’t even begin nine months earlier, at her conception. In the case of Circe Hamilton and Kelly Gunn, it was Hamilton who first instigated the adoption, and Hamilton who continued to pursue it after she and Gunn separated. Hamilton acted as a mother during this time, while Gunn distanced herself from the…

The head bartender of the exceptionally pleasant Grand Army—airy yet cozy, well stocked but unpretentious, on a leafy residential corner—is Damon Boelte, a self-described “dude from Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, who rides choppers and plays in a country band.” He’s got a Gandolfian beard and collects turquoise. As it turns out, he’s also a big fan of the wholesome television dramedy “Gilmore Girls” (quirky small town, motormouthed mother-daughter duo), which emboldened scores of nerdy brunettes to embrace their inner Rorys. Boelte’s “Gil more Girls” fandom sparked something else: a themed seasonal cocktail menu, on offer until later this summer. “ ‘Gilmore Girls’ is very inspiring,” Boelte explained. “There’s an episode called ‘Cinnamon’s Wake,’ and it’s when they have a wake for the cat, Cinnamon. How can you not make a cocktail…

The actor Danny McBride looked around the Jekyll & Hyde Club, in the West Village, and said, “This is where the New York bankers do all the big deals, huh?” It was shortly after noon, and the putatively scary horror-themed restaurant—skeletons in top hats, chattering mummies—was empty. “I worked in places like this in Los Angeles,” the actor continued, “and I recognize that disgusting stale-beer stink.” A waiter dropped by and delivered a rapid spiel: “There’s-going-to-be-acrazy- guy-walking-around-don’t-maketoo- much-eye-contact-and-you-shouldbe- fine.” Unconcerned, McBride ordered a Caesar salad with chicken, then suggested that the menu was a missed opportunity: “The names should be more horror-infused, more ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon’ Wings.” He snickered genially. In Ridley Scott’s new film, “Alien: Covenant,” the latest installment of the actually scary horror franchise about…

Khost, Afghanistan: One rainy night, in March, 2009, we crossed a muddy field to intercept a group of Taliban who’d come out of the mountains of Pakistan. They were walking west. We were patrolling north to arrive at a point ahead of them, where we’d set up an ambush. The field was actually many fields, inundated by snowmelt and rain. Piles of rocks, laid by farmers, demarcated the flooded borders. Every so often we’d come across evidence of what had once grown in those fields: an island of blighted corn stalks, a soybean shoot— as perfect as a laboratory specimen— floating in a shin-deep lake. Someday, I figured, the sun would come out, the land would dry, and the farmers would be back to re-stake their claims. That night, however,…

There was no reason for the investment bankers who interviewed me to hire me. I knew nothing about finance and wasn’t even really clear as to what bankers did; all I knew was that they wore snazzy suits and looked coolly impatient. My reason for wanting to be a banker was simple: I was a student at Harvard Law School, and I figured that, instead of working very hard as a corporate lawyer, I might as well work the same amount in finance and make even more money. Many of my fellow-students appeared to be thinking the same thing; as I remember, almost a third of the people I knew who were graduating in my year applied to become bankers. To interview with the less prosperous investment banks, we waited…

The Trouble with Reality, by Brooke Gladstone (Workman). This brisk piece of media criticism, by the host of WNYC’s “On the Media,” draws on philosophy and literature to show the extent to which the American press has been ill-equipped to deal with a major political figure—Donald Trump—who creates a parallel reality rather than working within the realm of consensus. The book’s main concern isn’t dishing out platitudes but providing a battle plan for individuals anxiously “watching the edifice of reality collapse.” Instead of “spiking your cortisol levels” by dwelling on President Trump’s tweets or on the Administration’s “ceaseless cascade of lies,” Gladstone recommends protest and “preserving your outrage,” because, ultimately, “facts are real and will reassert themselves eventually.” Slight Exaggeration, by Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare…

Here are the plots of some new dystopian novels, set in the near future. The world got too hot, so a wealthy celebrity persuaded a small number of very rich people to move to a makeshift satellite that, from orbit, leaches the last nourishment the earth has to give, leaving everyone else to starve. The people on the satellite have lost their genitals, through some kind of instant mutation or super-quick evolution, but there is a lot of sex anyway, since it’s become fashionable to have surgical procedures to give yourself a variety of appendages and openings, along with decorative skin grafts and tattoos, there being so little else to do. There are no children, but the celebrity who rules the satellite has been trying to create them by torturing…

Opera that merges the personal and the political is a longtime transatlantic tradition that began with works by the German Kurt Weill and the American Marc Blitzstein. So is it all that surprising that the operatic adaptation of Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America” was undertaken by a European master, Peter Eötvös? First heard in Paris in 2004, this powerful work finally gets its New York première, in a limited run at Jazz at Lincoln Center, starting June 10, thanks to New York City Opera, which is rebounding smartly under its new director, Michael Capasso. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA New York City Opera: “Angels in America” Tony Kushner’s sprawling play, operatic in its extravagant theatricality, was convincingly condensed into a single evening of music by the esteemed Hungarian composer Peter…

Live at the Archway The Archway, in Dumbo, is a seven-thousandsquare- foot park that sits beneath the southern end of the Manhattan Bridge. It was used, by the Department of Transportation, for storing scrap metal before its conversion, in 2007, to a public space for performances and events. This summer, the Archway hosts a weekly series of free performances and interactive art installations, presented in a pop-up gallery called the Space Station. At 6 P.M. each Thursday, starting June 8, musicians and dance troupes will perform salsa, Italo dance music, Afrobeat, Japanese pop, and more. The opening evening features the Colombian-fusion group Los Cumpleaños and an all-female Brazilian drum line, FogulAzul. (The Archway, Water St. between Adams St. and Anchorage St. June 8-Sept. 28.) BookCon This annual convention offers access…

The sculptor Joy Brown creates enormous bronze humanoid figures, and, on a recent Monday night, nine of them arrived in the city on flatbed trucks, to be installed on the Upper West Side. The bodies, zaftig and bald, stand as high as eleven feet tall. Each weighs well over a thousand pounds. They’re like Teletubbies that grew up, chilled out, lost their headgear, and took up nude sunbathing. New Yorkers would awake to find them encamped on the medians of Broadway, from West Seventy-second Street to 166th, as if giants had stomped into town overnight and found a nice place to rest. “Tell you what, this got more attention than the Wienermobile,” the driver, Mike Jennett, said as he disembarked from his truck at Seventy-second Street, around 10 p.m. “I…

The used condoms stopped bothering Marie after a while. At least the people were being safe during their motel sex. She was Catholic and didn’t believe in abortion. But she was more flexibly Catholic than strictly Catholic, so she did believe in birth control—pills, devices, procedures. That’s good science, she thought. And God created everything, including science. One of God’s other names is Big Bang. Sometimes, when she prayed, she said “Dear Big Bang,” and she was half certain that God enjoyed the inside joke. Nobody was allowed to be fully certain about God. And she’d never trusted anybody who claimed to be certain about God. You cannot be confident and faithful at the same time, she thought. Marie’s fear of used hypodermics had lessened over the years. She got…

In the summer of 1967, I took a job working for the Neighborhood Youth Corps in Little Rock. It was not a job I wanted—just one I could get. I was living in my mother’s apartment. She had assured me that I was welcome there. But I would need to work and bring in money if I meant to stay. I had worked at some job, been gainful at some mode of employment, every single day since I was twelve. Not to work, not to have a job, and to be idle was an unrecognized human state in my family. We were working people. That summer I was twenty-three. I had a second-rate college degree. I’d just spent a difficult year teaching junior high and coaching baseball in inner-city Flint,…

What use is knowing anything if no one is around to watch you know it? Plants reinvent sugar daily and hardly anyone applauds. Once as a boy I sat in a corner covering my ears, singing Quranic verse after Quranic verse. Each syllable was perfect, but only the lonely rumble in my head gave praise. This is why we put mirrors in birdcages, why we turn on lamps to double our shadows. I love my body more than other bodies. When I sleep next to a man, he becomes an extension of my own brilliance. Or rather, he becomes an echo of my own anticlimax. I was delivered from dying like a gift card sent in lieu of a pound of flesh. My escape was mundane, voidable. Now I feed…

One of the women greeted me. I love you, she said. She didn’t Know me, but I believed her, And a terrible new ache Rolled over in my chest, Like in a room where the drapes Have been swept back. I love you, I love you, as she continued Down the hall past other strangers, Each feeling pierced suddenly By pillars of heavy light. I love you, throughout The performance, in every Handclap, every stomp. I love you in the rusted iron Chains someone was made To drag until love let them be Unclasped and left empty In the center of the ring. I love you in the water Where they pretended to wade, Singing that old blood-deep song That dragged us to those banks And cast us in. I…

Arundhati Roy’s “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” (Knopf ) is a book that people have been waiting twenty years for. In the late nineteennineties, when Roy was in her thirties, she did some acting and screenwriting— she had married a filmmaker, Pradip Krishen—but mostly, she says, she made her living as an aerobics instructor. She had also been working on a novel for five years. In 1997, she published that book, “The God of Small Things.” Within months, it had sold four hundred thousand copies and won the Booker Prize, which had never before been given to a nonexpatriate Indian—an Indian who actually lived in India—or to an Indian woman. Roy became the most famous novelist on the subcontinent, and she probably still is, which is a considerable achievement, given…

In 1966, at an event protesting the Vietnam War, Anne Sexton read, in a quiet voice, “Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman,” a meditation on her daughter’s eleven-year-old body. As Adrienne Rich recalled it, Sexton’s poem stood out from the men’s “diatribes against McNamara, their napalm poems, their ego-poetry.” By evoking, indirectly, war’s victims, the poem reframed the question of what makes art political. Right now, it’s hard for TV viewers not to see duplicates of civic turmoil everywhere, in satire and melodrama, in sitcoms and superhero fantasies. People joke that “Veep” is a documentary; maybe “The Americans” is, too. But Damon Lindelof ’s “The Leftovers,” in its third and final season on HBO, is a different sort of show of the moment: it reflects global anarchy, but soulfully,…