Innholdsfortegnelse for July 3, 2017 i The New Yorker

Jeffrey Toobin ( “Feeding the Beast,” p. 38) is the author of, most recently, “American Heiress.” Masha Gessen (“Forbidden Lives,” p. 22) has written several books on Russia, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” forthcoming in October. Amit Majmudar (Poem, p. 44) is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist and the first poet laureate of Ohio. His translation of the Bhagavad Gita, “Godsong,” comes out next year. Rachel Corbett (The Talk of the Town, p. 20) is the author of “You Must Change Your Life.” Colin Nissan (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 29), a writer and voice actor, is a frequent contributor to McSweeney’s. Kadir Nelson (Cover) is an artist whose work has received much recognition, including a Caldecott Honor and a Sibert Medal. He illustrated “Blue Sky White…

To unveil Donald Trump’s decision to abandon the Paris Agreement on climate change, his Administration held an upbeat ceremony featuring a jazz quartet in the White House Rose Garden. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh—not Paris,” he proclaimed. The White House ceremony, on June 1st, took place in the middle of the night for Beijing, where David H. Rank, the most senior American diplomat in China, would have the responsibility of delivering the news to the Chinese government. Rank, who was running the U.S. Embassy until the arrival of Trump’s Ambassador—the former governor of Iowa Terry Branstad—is fifty-two, and has spent more than half his life in the Foreign Service. Growing up in Park Forest South, Illinois, a working-class suburb of Chicago, Rank gave no thought to…

A few weeks ago, on the day before his new show opened in New York, Anselm Kiefer, the seventy-two-year-old German-born painter and sculptor, walked from a hotel in SoHo to his gallery in Chelsea, talking of ruins, and of the attempt he made, in 2011, to buy the cooling tower of a decommissioned nuclear power station on the Rhine. “You can go in the middle and look up sixtytwo metres, and it’s like the Pantheon!” he said of the tower. He had foreseen dance performances and installations: “You can do Jacob’s Ladder—the angels coming down. It would have been nice.” By that time, Kiefer already owned a two-hundred-acre site in southern France, on which he had built tunnels and teetering concrete towers. He had also bought a four-hundred-thousand-squarefoot former distribution…

“My dentist was recently indicted for murder.” It sounds like a droll line that you’d use at a dinner party, but in my case it’s true. On October 15, 2015, Dr. Gilberto Nunez, whose patient I had been for many years, was indicted for killing his friend Thomas Kolman, of Saugerties, New York, by getting him “to ingest a substance that caused his death.” There were also two forgery counts: allegedly, Nunez had been posing as a C.I.A. agent. He’d apparently told people that he was authorized to implant tracking devices in patients’ teeth. It wasn’t the kind of news you wanted to hear about your family dentist. Kolman’s death occurred before dawn on November 29, 2011, in the parking lot of a Planet Fitness gym in Ulster, fifteen minutes…

FALSE CONVICTIONS After reading Rachel Aviv’s article about the six people in Beatrice, Nebraska, who were pressured by the police to create false memories of a crime that they did not commit, I was in a state of shock (“Memories of a Murder,” June 19th). I grew up in Beatrice, but moved to New York City as soon as I graduated from college. I visited home not long after the murder, and everyone was talking about it. Murders just didn’t happen in Beatrice. By the time the Beatrice Six had been arrested and tried, my parents had died, so I had no reason to keep up with the town’s news. Learning the whole story, I wish I were surprised that so many people still believe that the six are…

64 Cooper Sq. (212-260-2182) “I’m going to support the one that’s most against Trump,” a young man in glasses said on a recent night at Coup, holding a wooden chip and looking around manfully. “They got Planned Parenthood?” At Ravi DeRossi, Max Green, and Sother Teague’s bustling new bar, tucked into an odd corner of Astor Place Tower, all profits support institutions threatened by the Trump Administration. Each drink comes with a chip that you can drop into one of several vases affiliated with a cause: the A.C.L.U., City Harvest, the N.E.A. Many vases are hard to reach, by design— a community-forcing effort, Teague says, that was inspired by the butt funnel, a coziness- producing floor plan, on the show “Bar Rescue.” That night, bright-eyed millennials, each looking earnest and…

Jeff Baena, the writer and director, was wandering around the Cloisters the other weekend with his girlfriend, Aubrey Plaza, the actor. “Excuse me, sir? Where are the Unicorn Tapestries?” he asked a guard. The guard indicated an ornate doorway, which led to another room. Baena was wearing a cream-colored sweater over a plaid shirt, and had a pair of reflective sunglasses pushed into his silvery hair. “I haven’t been here in almost twenty years,” he said. Baena and Plaza live together in Los Angeles, but lately they’ve spent time in Tuscany, shooting “The Little Hours,” which Baena wrote and directed. The film is loosely based on the Decameron, the fourteenth-century Italian text by Giovanni Boccaccio; Plaza plays a foulmouthed nun. She had visited the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s…

I used to study the bigger kids— they’d show-and-tell me how to wiggle my hips, how to razz the boys. Now I’m watching my cohort master the skills at each grade of incapacity and get promoted to the next. To the oldest I’m a novice. “These seventy-five-year-olds, they think they know everything,” says Cousin Leo. He’s ninety. Who thinks, Leo? Who knows? We’re too busy reading “Gratitude” and “Being Mortal,” passing around the revised edition of “Dying for Dummies,” still trying to get it right. And the young study us.…

The eighteenth-century British novel appeals to an apparently dwindling taste. With intrusive narrators, slatternly plots, odd punctuation, and long, ambling digressions, books like “Tristram Shandy” and “Joseph Andrews” try the patience of many contemporary readers, and modern efforts to emulate them—Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon” and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle spring to mind—are frequently greeted with exasperation. Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding couldn’t help writing like that, but what, some people wonder, is Pynchon’s excuse? The appealing qualities of the period’s literature—its humor, its frankness about sex and power, its omnivorous curiosity about humanity and the world—can be squandered, by present-day revivalists, amid defunct slang, semicolon dashes, and promiscuous capitalization. Francis Spufford’s first novel, “Golden Hill,” which is set in New York in 1746, doesn’t make that mistake. It is…

Netflix’s “GLOW,” created by Carly Mensch and Liz Flahive, and executive- produced by Jenji Kohan, of “Orange Is the New Black,” is a carbonated blast, ten episodes of pure Silly String joy. It’s smartly plotted, with characters that deepen in the course of the show. But, refreshingly, in our era of homework TV, it’s also a joyride, all roller skates and mousseclaw bangs, synthesizer jams and leopardprint leotards, home pregnancy tests and cocaine-serving robots. By the final episodes, I was whooping at my computer screen, fists in the air, like a superfan. As those old-school accessories suggest, the series is set in the mid-eighties, in the San Fernando Valley—a dingy landscape of fast food and wishful thinking, on the fringes of Hollywood. We meet Ruth (Alison Brie) when she’s at…

Since 2000, the comedy trio Unitard (Nora Burns, David Ilku, and Mike Albo) has wickedly anatomized the vanities of New York’s lefty bourgeoisie. Tech bros, Facebook over-sharers, proud parents of the gender-fluid: all feature in the group’s new sketch show, “Tard Core—There Are No Safe Words,” at Joe’s Pub on June 28. Albo’s recurring character the Underminer (now living in Berlin—why aren’t you?) makes an appearance, as do squabbling anti-Trump protesters and competitors in the “Narcissism Olympics.” THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Hamlet Oscar Isaac stars in Sam Gold’s production of the tragedy, featuring Keegan-Michael Key as Horatio. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. In previews.) Ice Factory 2017 The festival of new work returns with seven plays over seven weeks, including Steven Haworth’s “Fernando,” a thriller set in the…

As pundits argue over whether or not President Trump is an obstructor of justice, a gaggle of Queens residents are preoccupied with a different question: Is the First Lady, Melania Trump, a Gottscheer? The issue hung in the air at the Miss Gottschee 2017 pageant, which was held, last month, at Plattduetsche Park Biergarten, in Hempstead, Long Island. Christina Gladitsch Popowytsch, a blue-eyed blonde and a recent graduate of Marist College, waved a cupped hand to the dirndl- and lederhosen- clad crowd as she was crowned. Upon receiving her blue-and-white sash—Gottschee colors—she vowed “to fight to preserve the lives and traditions of the past,” a task she considers “vital for those of my generation, with a vibrant Gottscheer heritage like myself.” That has been an increasingly difficult feat, as former…

Steve wears jeans at the party. Darker than his work pair, thinner than his everydays. These are his party jeans. Steve knows that wearing these jeans leaves the door wide open to intercourse. Steve leans against things at the party. He’s already leaned against a wall, a couch arm, and a refrigerator, and he’s just getting started. There are funky rhythms pulsing through Steve’s body at the party. He chooses to contain them for the time being, so that he doesn’t trigger intercourse too far ahead of schedule. Steve walks over to the mantel at the party. He sees photographs of Chloe, the party’s host, smiling on vacation. Steve realizes that he would like to be part of Chloe’s smiling life style. And that her eyes look weirdly similar to…

What was I like, before this beard? More like, what was I not like. Who I was depended. I feared consensus because stupidity lies in numbers. Among believers an atheist, among atheists a skeptic, among skeptics an agnostic, among agnostics all emphatic on the apophatic, I laughed in my beard at market panics, fanaticism, Beyoncé worship. Not that I had a beard back then. Neither did Ahmad Rahami on his driver’s license, my doppelgänger Afghan, mon semblable, I will not say mon frère. When the pictures of him bearded, beardless, bearded showed up on sixty million screens, I was partway through my third mile on an Urban Active treadmill. Well shucks, I thought, and yes that quaint Midwestern word appears in my internal monologues, Well shucks, that bastard looks like…

There was a line at the ski lift. The group of boys who had come on the bus had joined it, one next to the other, skis parallel, and every time it advanced—it was long and, instead of going straight, as in fact it could have, zigzagged randomly, sometimes upward, sometimes down—they stepped up or slid down sideways, depending on where they were, and immediately propped themselves on their poles again, often resting their weight on the neighbor below, or trying to free their poles from under the skis of the neighbor above, stumbling on skis that had got twisted, leaning over to adjust their bindings and bringing the whole line to a halt, pulling off windbreakers or sweaters or putting them back on as the sun appeared or disappeared,…

The Hello Girls, by Elizabeth Cobbs (Harvard). This engaging history crackles with admiration for the women who served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the First World War, becoming the country’s first female soldiers. Operating switchboards in France, they juggled constantly shifting lists of codes and connections, worked fast amid artillery blasts, and mastered the “genteel diplomacy” needed to communicate with officials in French as well as English. Their technical skill was matched by what one woman called the “great, unquenchable, patriotic desire to do my bit.” Cobbs intercuts front-line activities with political battles on the home front: the women returned from victory to an America that did not yet grant them the right to vote. The Souls of China, by Ian Johnson (Pantheon). Chairman Mao banned religious…

In May, on the final day of the Metropolitan Opera season, the gelatovoiced soprano Renée Fleming sang what might have been her farewell performance in a major repertory role. Fleming, who is a youthful fifty-eight, has denied reports that she is retiring from the operatic stage, and she may return in a contemporary piece. Still, her portrayal of the Marschallin, the pensive Austrian aristocrat at the heart of “Der Rosenkavalier,” had a valedictory air. The most striking moment came in Act I, when the Marschallin muses on the passage of time and the advance of age: “How can it happen? . . . It is all a mystery, so deep a mystery, and one is here to endure it. And in the ‘how,’ there lies the whole difference.” To the…