Innholdsfortegnelse for July 24, 2017 i The New Yorker

Kelefa Sanneh (“Hat Trick,” p. 42) has been a staff writer since 2008. Cristina Henríquez (Fiction, p. 52) is the author of three books, including the novels “The World in Half ” and “The Book of Unknown Americans.” Peter Hessler ( “Follow the Leader,” p. 20) is a staff writer living in Ridgway, Colorado. He is currently working on a book about the five years he spent reporting from Egypt. John Skoyles (Poem, p. 48) lives in Truro, Massachusetts. His most recent books are “Suddenly It’s Evening: Selected Poems” and “The Nut File.” Marisa Meltzer (The Talk of the Town, p. 17) is the author of “Girl Power” and a co-author of “How Sassy Changed My Life.” She writes the “Me Time” column for the Times. Hua Hsu (Books,…

“I live in absolute fear of what happens in those tunnels,” Joseph Lhota said last week, at a press conference at Penn Station. Lhota is the new chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the beleaguered state agency that runs the New York City subway system. The occasion for the remark was the beginning of the “summer of hell,” an appellation coined by Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, to prepare commuters for rough times ahead. (Gone, evidently, are the halcyon days of empty assurances.) With three derailings since March, Amtrak has been forced to undertake repairs to the tunnels into and out of Penn Station, which will severely cut capacity at a time when the system is already bursting at the seams. So what does happen in those tunnels?…

A bedsheet with eyeholes makes a lovely, if lazy, costume for Halloween— and a lousy costume for a film. Last summer, two days after the director David Lowery finished the Disney film “Pete’s Dragon,” he secretly began shooting “A Ghost Story.” In the newly released film, made for around a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the devoted couple C and M (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) are sparring over their prospective move out of a ranch house in Irving, Texas, when C dies in a car accident. He returns in a white sheet to haunt the house. C’s ghostly powers are faint—he can smash the odd glass—and mostly he just trails M longingly or studies her as she, for instance, eats an entire chocolate pie (in a single four-minute take),…

The first rule of any expedition is that if someone falls behind, you leave him. As Cub Scout leader, you knew that. A shotgun can go off accidentally, and hit a cuckoo clock, and get reloaded accidentally, and hit the clock again. In the dark, a container labelled “Smallpox” looks like “Snuff Box,” and who wouldn’t want some of that flavorful snuff ? You tried to close it, but it had weird safety latches. Seventeen years and four months was long enough for your friend not to have a big tumbler of Scotch. Pants fall down. That’s a fact of life, whether it’s in the privacy of your own home or in front of people at a bus stop. It’s not your fault. If you need to blame something, blame…

George Strait has discovered that when he isn’t wearing a cowboy hat people often don’t realize that he is George Strait. In San Antonio, where he lives, he can usually visit restaurants unmolested, so long as he doesn’t smile too widely— he is famous for his smile, which is bright and crooked. One time, in Key West, where he records, he was sitting outside the studio, naked from the neck up, when a woman accosted him. She said, “My husband says that George Strait is in there, cutting a record, and I told him that can’t be true. Why would he cut a record in this little place?” Strait’s response was not, strictly speaking, a lie. “Honey,” he said, “I was just in there, and I didn’t see him.” He…

When Bob Marley died, on May 11, 1981, at the age of thirty-six, he did not leave behind a will. He had known that the end was near. Seven months earlier, he had collapsed while jogging in Central Park. Melanoma, which was first diagnosed in 1977 but left largely untreated, had spread throughout his body. According to Danny Sims, Marley’s manager at the time, a doctor at Sloan Kettering said that the singer had “more cancer in him than I’ve seen with a live human being.” As Sims recalled, the doctor estimated that Marley had just a few months to live, and that “he might as well go back out on the road and die there.” Marley played his final show on September 23, 1980, in Pittsburgh. During the sound…

PUTTING AFRICA ON THE GRID Bill McKibben, in his piece on off-thegrid solar power in sub-Saharan Africa, unfortunately lapses into a cliché account of the region (“Power Brokers,” June 26th). Although McKibben quotes Africans, he presents the story of Africa as the story of Westerners in Africa, and makes the task of rural electrification seem to be a series of tech nical problems for Americans to solve. The Westerners in his article are presented as operating in an idealized environment, one devoid of the gritty institutional challenges to development in Africa, such as local politics, government accountability, and legal empowerment. Alloysius Attah, a Ghanaian entrepreneur, notes that “there are a lot of Ivy Leaguers coming to Africa to say, ‘I can solve this problem.’ . . . They’re doing…

Highlands 150 W. 10th St. (212-229-2670) Near the door of Highlands, opposite the bar, there are mirrored shelves up to the ceiling full of lit candles and bottles of whiskey. They cast, on hands and faces, a tremulous amber glow, and this flattering warmth seems ready to forgive the sins of tipsy patrons. Highlands calls itself a “contemporary Scottish gastropub,” a claim buttressed by an abundance of tartan—in lampshades, in the waitresses’ minidresses, in chair coverings—and by a painting of a beady-eyed Scots guard hanging in the rest room. The Scottish influence is most resplendent, however, in the abundance of whiskeys, which an obliging bartender will nimbly clamber up the shelves to fetch, before serving cocktails like the peaty Blackberry Tartan (whiskey, blackberry compote, walnut bitters) and the Krankie (rosemary-infused…

Last week, Beyoncé released the first photograph of her month-old twins on Instagram. She poses with them against a floral backdrop, her hair flowing, one knee slightly bent, like Botticelli’s Venus rising from the sea. It complemented a look she took up at the Grammys, when she performed pregnant, channelling African, Hindu, and Roman deities. Goddesses seem to be in season. In China, fans of Ivanka Trump refer to her as the goddess Yi Wan Ka, citing her perceived power and poise. The TV show “American Gods” features several divine female beings, including the Evening Star, the Morning Star, and a goddess of media. “And there’s the Wonder Woman movie,” Lucie McQuilkan said. A former fashion designer from New Zealand, Mc- Quilkan hosts Mischievous Goddess parties, where young girls can…

Educated at a school in Queens whose slim roster of celebrated alums boasts Don Rickles number one, my mother knew little about art, but she took me to a show where she withdrew into private air on seeing “The Potato Eaters” and “Three Pairs of Shoes” because the shoes resembled my grandmother’s high-topped boots my mother knelt before and laced up every morning after applying salve to those diabetes-ulcerated shins. And the potatoes recalled the fires she and her brothers built against the curb: charred skin, raw at the center, and called “mickeys” in honor of the Irish. My mother pointed out how the poor have only potatoes for dinner, their faces so rough they looked unearthed themselves. And the shoes, ravaged by labor. Unlike Heidegger, who said of “Three…

Stranger in a Strange Land, by George Prochnik (Other). Gershom Scholem, the renowned historian and theologian, was instrumental in the formation of twentieth-century Zionism and played a crucial role in revitalizing Jewish mysticism. He was also a fractious man of “unrepentant multiplicity,” and once fancied himself the Messiah. Entwining memoir with biography, Prochnik skillfully chronicles Scholem’s intellectual and personal life, including his passionate friendship with Walter Benjamin; his 1923 emigration from Berlin to Jerusalem; and his ambivalent attitude toward the evolution of Zionism, which eventually, he believed, “triumphed itself to death.” Prochnik’s account of his own sojourn in Jerusalem illuminates the ongoing struggle to reconcile Zionist ideals with political realities and to envision possibilities for breaking “the spell of hopelessness” in a divided land. I Was Told to Come…

We all know that theatre is an ephemeral art. Looking back on a given production, we dance around in and then sort out what the critic Arlene Croce called “afterimages,” fragments that are either tied together by the director’s style—by the nuances in the way that he or she set the scenes and had the actors move and speak, by the surprises that he or she managed to draw out of the script—or made dull and forgettable by a lack thereof. In the past decade or so, American theatre has been rethought by a number of serious, original, and deeply ambitious playwrights, including Annie Baker, Thomas Bradshaw, Lucas Hnath, Branden Jacobs- Jenkins, Richard Maxwell, Sarah Ruhl, and Young Jean Lee. But their scope and their style have not, unfortunately, been…

The game-changing Austrian-Italian designer Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) was ambivalent about retrospectives. “It’s like having a birthday party where too many relatives show up,” he once said. That family is about to expand. On July 21, the Met Breuer opens a six-decade survey of Sottsass’s impertinent genius, from the lipstick-red typewriter he conceived for Olivetti, in 1969, to his gonzo work with the Milan-based Memphis design group, in the early eighties (including the “Carlton” room divider, pictured above). CLASSICAL MUSIC CONCERTS IN TOWN “Calder: Hypermobility” If any artist deserves the tribute of live-action performance, it is Alexander Calder, whose principal works—mobiles—are constantly in motion. The Whitney Museum is augmenting its current Calder show with a number of events; this week features Christian Marclay, a creator of both sound and art,…

OZY Fest OZY, a digital daily news magazine, was launched in September, 2013, by Carlos Watson, a former MSNBC contributor. He aims for the outlet’s marquee live event, OZY Fest, to be “the new South by Southwest.” For its second year, the festival hosts an array of musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, and athletes, with headlining performances by Jason Derulo, Talib Kweli, and Zara Larsson; talks and panels featuring Samantha Bee, Issa Rae, Malcolm Gladwell, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Katie Couric, and Van Jones; and food from the chef and author Eddie Huang. (Rumsey Playfield, Central Park, mid-Park at 69th St. 800-745-3000. July 22.) Come Out & Play Street games shouldn’t need organizers, beyond the loudest participant choosing who’s it and what nearby surfaces count as base. But the world of adults rarely…

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis once remembered her fellow-participants in the Smith College Junior Year Abroad in Paris as “slight expatriates . . . swaddled in sweaters and woolen stockings, doing homework in graph-paper cahiers.” Today, the eighteen thousand Americans who study abroad in France each year prefer flip-flops and iPhones, but, as in Onassis’s day, they are still mostly white, well off, and enrolled at a four-year college. The French government is hoping to change that, by providing “students traditionally underrepresented in studyabroad programs with an affordable opportunity to attend an educative program in France.” While President Emmanuel Macron tries to recruit American scientists and engineers—“It’s your nation,” he told them, just before Donald Trump decided to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement—the country’s educators are homing in on American communitycollege…

So sorry about the war—we just kind of wanted to learn how to swear in another language, and everyone knows the top method is simply to open fire and listen to what people yell. And now here’s God again with His hand crank, lowering the sky to make more room for Himself. And now here’s the high-rise we build to brace back, this series of holes for bathing and mending and parboiling roots and undecorated fucking in the style of the times: one person half-braying, the other admonishing KEEP IT DOWN—I DON’T WANT THE WAR TO HEAR.…

We, who are in prison, had to answer for our sins and our lives were taken from us. Our bodies became the property of the state of California. We are reduced to numbers and stripped of our identity. To the state of California I am not Michael Alexander Allen but I am K-10033. When they want to know anything about me they do not type my last name in the computer but it is my number that is inputted. My number is my name. . . . Dante was not in hell due to a fatal sin but somewhere in his life he strayed onto the path of error, away from his true self. I, K-10033, strayed away from my true self: Michael Alexander Allen. What sets the course of…

On the first day, there’s a sense of relief. There are other feelings, too, but relief is among them. She has arrived, at least. After three weeks. After a broken sandal strap, sunburn on her cheeks, mud in her ears, bugs in her hair, blisters around her ankles, bruises on her hips, boiled eggs, bottled water, sour berries, pickup trucks and train cars and footsteps through the dirt, sunrises and sunsets, nagging doubt and crackling hope— she has arrived. They tell her to sleep, but that can’t be right. First she has to find her son, who is supposed to be here, too. They were separated along the way, overnight, a few days ago. The man who was leading them here divided the group. Twelve people drew too much attention,…

As a form, the novel can never decide quite how stylish it should be. Is it a mirror or a music, a camera or a painting? Is it best designed for the long haul or for fine circular flights? Is it where we make a fetish of the perfect sentence, or a more relaxed religion of the appropriate form? Nabokov liked to dismiss writers who failed the Nabokovian sentence test, such as Camus, Mann, and Stendhal (who indeed likened the novel to a mirror). But the novelist ideally writes in paragraphs and chapters, not in sentences, as Woolf reminded her readers. Novelistic form, the accretion of many sentences, must find its own deeper, slower rhythm. In this regard, Iris Murdoch once divided the twentieth-century novel into the journalistic and the…