Innholdsfortegnelse for June 19, 2017 i The New Yorker

Rachel Aviv (“Memories of a Murder,” p. 36) received the 2015 Scripps Howard Award for her story on police shootings, “Your Son Is Deceased,” which appeared in the magazine. David Sedaris (“Why Aren’t You Laughing?,” p. 30) is the author of, most recently, “Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002),” which came out last month. Liana Finck (Comic Strip, p. 40) has been contributing cartoons to the magazine since 2013. Her graphic novel, “A Bintel Brief,” was published in 2014. Andrew Sean Greer (Fiction, p. 54) is the author of six books, including “Less,” due out in July. Paul Rudnick (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 29) will première his play “Big Night” at the Center Theatre Group, in Los Angeles, in September. Barry Blitt (Cover), a cartoonist and illustrator, has contributed more…

When the city of New Orleans took down its last Confederate statue, of General Robert E. Lee, Representative Yvette Clarke, of New York’s Ninth Congressional District, had a local take. She tweeted, “We should do likewise with General Lee Avenue in Brooklyn.” Clarke was referring to a street in Bay Ridge that is also named for the Confederate Army leader. Half a mile long, and two lanes wide, it is the main thoroughfare inside the U.S. Army garrison at Fort Hamilton, the city’s only active military base, which is fenced off from the surrounding neighborhood. All of the base’s streets are named for generals: Pershing Loop, for John Pershing; Marshall Drive, for George Marshall; Washington Drive, for George Washington. Lee served at Fort Hamilton in the Army Corps of Engineers…

The artist James Turrell has never been in a hurry. Now seventy-four, with white hair, a white mustache, and a white Mosaic beard, he has spent the past forty years rearranging a defunct volcano in the Arizona desert. Called Roden Crater, the project is still at least five years from completion. Construction, so far, has involved moving more than a million cubic yards of earth. “I’m much more the tortoise than the hare,” Turrell said the other day. Turrell was visiting the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams, which was about to open a new wing featuring nine of his works. These were nothing on the scale of Roden Crater, but still, as art works go they were large and unusually complicated. Turrell was fine-tuning one, an apartment-size…

The exhibition space on the fourth floor of the New Museum, in New York, is a long room with a high ceiling. You might expect towering video screens in here, or something bulky and threedimensional, requiring circling—entering, even. But on a recent day the room was filled with oils. The show has a melancholy, literary title, “Under- Song For A Cipher,” and consists of seventeen paintings hung low, depicting a set of striking individuals, all slightly larger than human scale, though not imposingly so. Most are on herringbone linen; one is on canvas. It’s impossible to avoid noticing that they are all—every man and each woman— physically beautiful. Mostly they are alone. They sit, stretch, lounge, stand, and are often lost in contemplation, their eyes averted. If they are with…

FIGHTING THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC Margaret Talbot’s article on heroin addiction in West Virginia brings the national opioid epidemic to life for readers, but I question some of the terms she uses to describe her subjects (“The Addicts Next Door,” June 5th & 12th). Studies show that when patients are described as “addicts”— a term that identifies people by their actions—rather than as having a “substance-use disorder,” they receive more blame from their healthcare providers, and less treatment. Addiction is a chronic disease. Until we change the way that we talk about people who suffer from addiction, those struggling with the disease will continue dying in the shadows cast by our stigmatizing language. Shayla Partridge Cambridge, Mass. Talbot’s article describes West Virginians’ efforts to treat drug addiction by different means,…

If you want to see what’s so good about Russian ballerinas, without also having to see what can be so bad about them, buy a ticket to one of Diana Vishneva’s performances with American Ballet Theatre. Don’t wait, though. She is leaving A.B.T. in late June. Vishneva has one of the world’s leading examples of the powerhouse lower back that is the secret of Russian ballet and, in some measure, all good ballet. She can twist, dive, and bend until you think she is going to do herself harm. Even when she’s performing small steps, or no steps, you can still feel, across the auditorium, that astonishing engine, humming along like an Alfa Romeo, at the base of her spine. It doesn’t just produce the movements; it unifies them, makes…

15 Vanderbilt Ave. (212-297-1781) When the Campbell Apartment closed, last year, some worried that another classic New York bar was dead. Once the office of the financier and railroad executive John W. Campbell, the cavernous room hidden in a west ventricle of Grand Central Terminal had multiple uses after his passing, in 1957, but eventually fell into disrepair. In the nineties, Mark Grossich carefully renovated the space, turning it into the Campbell Apartment; its Florentine- style ceiling (repainted by hand), original wooden details, and formal dress code quickly made it a city icon. In 2016, the M.T.A. decided to transfer the lease to the Gerber Group, a hospitality company, which promised to renovate the space and remove the dress code—hence the beloved Campbell Apartment’s closure, and the fear that, when…

“Left arm straight, head down,” Anthony Michael Hall murmured as he took his stance at the Chelsea Piers driving range. His 5-wood carved the air but only grazed the ball, which lolloped gently over the Astro-Turf toward the Hudson River. Hall glared after it. “First of all, plant your fucking feet!” he told himself. “Turn your hips. Be the ball!” When his next shot boinged sideways into the protective netting, he cracked up. “My mother taught me that, to laugh at yourself,” he said. The actor, who goes by Michael, had arrived wearing an outfit that seemed to embody this precept: black suit, white sneakers, tomato-red T-shirt, Ninja Turtle-green backpack. “I’m not afraid of color,” he explained. “It’s my Italian side.” Hall, who in the eighties personified dewy, dorky youth…

One day in 370 C.E., a sixteen-yearold boy and his father went to the public baths together in the provincial city of Thagaste, in what is now Algeria. At some point during their visit, the father may have glimpsed that the boy had an involuntary erection, or simply remarked on his recently sprouted pubic hair. Hardly a world-historical event, but the boy was named Augustine, and he went on to shape Christian theology for both Roman Catholics and Protestants, to explore the hidden recesses of the inner life, and to bequeath to all of us the conviction that there is something fundamentally damaged about the entire human species. There has probably been no more important Western thinker in the past fifteen hundred years. In the “Confessions,” written around 397, Augustine…

When Ada JoAnn Taylor is tense, she thinks she can feel the fabric of a throw pillow in the pads of her fingers. Taylor has suffered from tactile flashbacks for three decades. She imagines herself in a small apartment in Beatrice, Nebraska. She is gripping the edges of a pillow, more tightly than she means to, and suffocating a sixty-eightyear- old widow. “I feel for her,” Taylor told me recently. “She was my grandmother’s age.” Taylor confessed to the woman’s murder in 1989 and for two decades believed that she was guilty. She served more than nineteen years for the crime before she was pardoned. She was one of six people accused of the murder, five of whom took pleas; two had internalized their guilt so deeply that, even after…

Arthur Less recalls intercontinental- travel advice that his old flame Freddy once gave him: “They serve you dinner, you take your sleeping pill, they serve you breakfast, you’re there.” Forearmed, Less boards the aircraft, settles into his window seat, chooses the Tuscan chicken (whose ravishing name, like that of an Internet lover, belies the reality—mere chicken and mashed potatoes), and with his Thumbelina bottle of red wine takes a single white capsule. The drug does its duty: he does not remember finishing the Bavarian cream in its little eggcup, nor the removal of his dinner, nor setting his watch to a new time zone. Instead, Less awakens to a plane of sleeping citizens under blue prison blankets. Dreamily happy, he looks at his watch and panics: only two hours have…

In the mid-sixties, when smart technology was the stuff of sci-fi, the British collective Archigram drew up plans for “Walking City,” a utopian metropolis in which people would live in roaming pods, docking at charging stations as needed. The Croatian artist Dora Budor pays homage to the project in her sculpture “The Forecast (New York Situations),” pictured above, which is part of the High Line’s open-air exhibition “Mutations.” Budor’s piece has a mutant twist of its own: in the rain, the pods change color. ART MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Metropolitan Museum “Irving Penn: Centennial” The American photographer, whose twin talents for dynamic portraiture and spartan still-lifes dovetail beautifully in his fashion work, is perhaps most renowned for his six decades of contributions to Vogue. Penn, who died in 2009, shot…

Summer Solstice Celebration For the twenty-second consecutive year, the Paul Winter Consort stages a sunrise performance to herald the year’s longest day. The group, joined by a thirty-two-voice choir, the Florida Singing Sons, begins the concert in darkness, with the music swelling in intensity as sunlight slowly fills the stained-glass windows of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The musicians will première new music and reimagine classics, incorporating elements of Bulgarian chant and the compositions of Eric Whitacre and Morten Lauridsen to create a singularly immersive and moving harmonic experience. “When I’m awake in the darkness before dawn, as the birds begin to sing, and the earth prepares for the sun,” Winter says, “I feel as if life is beginning again.” (1047 Amsterdam Ave. paulwinter.com. June 17 at…

Michel Houellebecq was at home the other afternoon. He lives in an apartment in a nineteen-seventies high-rise in the Thirteenth Arrondissement of Paris, a neighborhood of efficiency hotels and Asian grocery stores. The welcome mat had an English bulldog on it. Houellebecq answered the door wearing a denim shirt and jeans—hiked up to a seemingly concave chest—and ushered a visitor inside, past a polka-dot shopping cart, some metal shelves stocked with bottled water, and a closet filled with threering binders. One had the feeling that Houellebecq, like a lot of his characters, might not get out much. His most recent novel, “Submission,” published in 2015, was in some ways a prophesy of the political upheavals of this year, but the line that came to mind was more prosaic: “To maintain…

The masters wrote—to yield the best result, harvest after a cold winter the wood condensed by ice and storms in whose gales the highest notes are born. From summits of Balkan maple, red spruce gathered in a valley off the Italian Dolomites, they carved each instrument’s alluvial curves. Then came the varnish—one coat of painter’s oil, another of plain resin. Only the thinnest of layers to obtain that satin chatoyancy, that liminal reflet. It’s said Stradivari, playing to the trees, first noticed the straight pines like strings on a vast, divine violin absorbing Heaven’s vibrations. The truth could be found in the song itself— how it was impossible to tell where the wood ceased and the song began—notes pure as a mathematical equation. Transposing mountain. Valley. Mountain again.…

The grownups sat on their long chair called couch And talked of the weather, the dew of the blossoms’ morning, And what might happen to us, the children. Mom said don’t leave the house, not without Papers. Do I dare speak of the papers hoarded In corners? How many more poems can you write About a face spackled with fear before It holds you? The reader aiming, too. Let us find a charcoaled corner, you and I, Where we will lay these words. Leave children To sleep in windowless rooms. The mother Biting a prayer. The country weaving a tomb.…

Be Like the Fox, by Erica Benner (Norton). Machiavelli’s “The Prince” is famous for its cool espousal of political expediency, but for fifteen years before Machiavelli wrote it, in 1513, he championed popular republicanism, working tirelessly, if ultimately unsuccessfully, to prevent Florence from returning to Medici rule. In this tightly composed narrative of Machiavelli’s life and thought, Benner argues that “The Prince” is a work of secret subversion, using irony and beguilement to advance a staunchly republican message. Anchoring her study in contemporary styles of discourse—Florentines were known for “selfprotective, ambiguous speech”—Benner produces a gripping portrait of a brilliant political thinker, who understood the dangers of authoritarianism and looked for ways to curb them even though independent speech had become impossible. Chaos and Culture, by Victoria Newhouse (Monacelli). In…

In 1992, when the Russian-born choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, now the artist-in-residence at American Ballet Theatre, travelled with his wife, Tatiana, from Kiev to Winnipeg to join the ballet company there, they were dazzled by the aisles and aisles of food in the supermarkets. “At the time, food was scarce in the Ukraine, you could buy nothing, and suddenly there was all this stuff,” he recently told Roslyn Sulcas, of the Times. “Tatiana loves whipped cream and would run to the stores to buy those cans you can squirt.” Soon afterward, on a trip to Japan, Ratmansky came across a CD of a Richard Strauss ballet he’d never heard of, “Schlagobers”—or, in English, “Whipped Cream.” He brought the music back to Winnipeg and, for a choreography workshop, fashioned from it a…