Innholdsfortegnelse for July 31, 2017 i The New Yorker

Emily Nussbaum ( “Guilty Pleasure,” p. 22), the magazine’s television critic, won the Pulitizer Prize for criticism, in 2016. Terrance Hayes (Poem, p. 51) is the author of five poetry collections, including “How to Be Drawn,” a finalist for the National Book Award, in 2015. Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 17), a staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment. She also writes a column for newyorker.com. Louis Menand (A Critic at Large, p. 64) has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001. Last year, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama. Alexandra Schwartz (Books, p. 74) is a staff writer. Javier Mariscal (Cover) has contributed nine covers to the magazine since 1993. He is the author, with…

Last week, the future looked grim for Trump loyalists. Robert Mueller’s investigation picked up steam; Trumpcare stalled in the Senate; and, six months into his term, the President had the highest disapproval ratings since Presidential polling was invented. Yet, if you were a food vender, a rollerblader, or a yogini on the West Side of Manhattan, you might have been comforted, or triggered, by a familiar spectacle: a one-man racing shell, bobbing in the Hudson River, flying a flag that said “Trump 2020.” “I’m out here every weekday,” Dion Cini, the rower, said. “I’ve been doing it since March, and I’ll be out doing it until the 2020 election. The only thing that might change—and I doubt this will happen— but, if they do actually indict Trump and kick him…

My grandmother’s close friend and, I later learned, occasional lover was, in the fullest sense of the phrase, an international man of mystery. He had a lavish apartment in Manhattan, across from Lincoln Center, and another in London, as well as homes in Israel and France, and he travelled from one to another, showing up suddenly and disappearing just as quickly. He told me sometimes about his impoverished childhood, in Lithuania and in New Jersey; it was never clear exactly how he had become wealthy. There was talk of “interests” in various firms, of lucky real-estate investments, of his time running the production company that made the James Bond films. Much later, not long before his death, in 2004, I learned the truth, revealed by documents unearthed after the fall…

The black poet would love to say his century began With Hughes or, God forbid, Wheatley, but actually It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors, Poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset Bridges & windows. In a second I’ll tell you how little Writing rescues. My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not Especially fun company. A drama queen, thinskinned, And skittery, she thought her poems were ordinary. What do you call a visionary who does not recognize Her vision? Orpheus was alone when he invented writing. His manic drawing became a kind of writing when he sent His beloved a sketch of an eye with an X struck through it. He meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant I never want…

The first eight pages of Michael Robbins’s new book, “Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music” (Simon & Schuster), make reference to Annie Dillard, Harold Bloom, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Kenneth Burke, Geoffrey Hill, Kenneth Koch, Adam Phillips, Frank O’Hara, Emerson, Boethius, Nietzsche, Freud, and Miley Cyrus. The book is a collection of mostly previously published pieces, some on poetry, some on pop music, some on both, written, as the names suggest, in a critical style that could be called advanced pop. Advanced-pop criticism would be criticism premised on the belief that you can talk about cultural goods loved uncritically by millions in terms originally developed to talk about cultural goods known mainly to an overeducated few. Advanced pop is Boethius and Springsteen, Artaud and the Ramones,…

SHAKESPEARE AND JEWS Stephen Greenblatt’s essay on his Jewish family, his experiences with anti- Semitism at Yale, and Shakespeare’s character Shylock, in “The Merchant of Venice,” overlooks the way that Shylock’s language limits his participation in Venetian society (“If You Prick Us,” July 10th & 17th). Shylock, unlike nearly every other character in the play, is unable to employ figurative language, and the metaphors he attempts are few and simple. His speech is literal, low, and often unattractive, and although these qualities make him more fully present to modern audiences, they render him more alien to the society that surrounded him. Even Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech— powerful, compelling, and full of humanity and raw emotion—is still completely literal, devoid of figurative language. Shakespeare supplies us with…

Modern music festivals affirm the contemporary. They celebrate a cluster of artists, sounds, and songs that appeal broadly enough and affect deeply enough to gather thousands of people and generate millions of dollars in one weekend. Coachella, the greatest of the great lawns, has grown into a coveted pilgrimage and routinely sells huge numbers of tickets before the bill is even announced. Last year, its organizers eyed the city for a second outpost: Panorama débuted amid small controversy, set to take place on Randall’s Island just a few weeks after the long-standing Governors Ball. “Scheduling two same-genre festivals on top of each other like this makes it difficult for either to provide the maximum benefit to its fans, its neighbors, and taxpayers,” Tom Russell, a Governors Ball co-founder, told Billboard.…

In the early evening of October 29, 2012, a five-foot swell from the Atlantic Ocean inundated the Freak Bar, the carnivalesque epicenter of Coney Island pop culture. Pouring past the boardwalk, the surge of corrosive salt water arrived at Surf Avenue thick with debris. Dick Zigun—the sixty-four-year-old tattooed impresario of the nonprofit that administers the bar and the iconic circus sideshow next door (a live tenact spectacle featuring, among other oddities, a contortionist, a sword swallower, and a snake charmer)—was devastated. “Most of what we had didn’t survive,” he said on a recent Saturday afternoon at the bar, over a Coney Island Mermaid Pilsner. (No liquor here, but on a hot summer day the beer and wine offerings—which also include the home-town brewery’s watermelon ale—are refreshment enough.) Among the casualties…

The new film “Brigsby Bear” is bouncy, promising, and a little clumsy. It’s like a middle schooler. That’s fitting, since twenty years ago the three men who made it were friends, in San Diego, at Thurgood Marshall Middle School. Over lunch recently at Margaux, in Greenwich Village, “Brigsby” ’s brain trust—Kyle Mooney, a co-writer and the star; Kevin Costello, the other co-writer; and Dave McCary, the director—finished one another’s sentences and did a lot of supportive nodding. They had similar beards, though each claimed to have grown his for personal reasons. The shaggy-haired Mooney, who plays exuberantly inept characters on “Saturday Night Live,” declared, “When summer comes, I like to let loose!” McCary, a ruminative man who directs many of Mooney’s pre-taped “S.N.L.” segments, said, “I’m just generally lazy.” Costello…

For months, it felt easier to avoid watching Donald Trump on television. It was like sniffing spoiled milk: you didn’t need a sip to know it was bad. Then, in June, the President held the first meeting of his complete Cabinet. It aired live, as Trump’s early campaign rallies had, in full and without commentary, on CNN. Wearing a striped tie that rhymed with the flag behind him, Trump sat at a massive table, smiling. “Mike?” Trump said, and Vice-President Pence took the cue. “Thank you, Mr. President. It is the greatest privilege of my life to serve as Vice-President to a President who is keeping his word to the American people.” As cameras clicked like cicadas, each appointee offered up an homage; Reince Priebus, the White House chief of…

Fourteen months ago, the election of Sadiq Khan, who is forty-six, to be the first Muslim mayor of a Western metropolis was seen as just another stride in London’s giant, unstopping swagger. The rise of a local boy, the son of a Pakistani bus driver, to govern the seat of a former empire was proof of the same unsentimental indifference toward race and religion, good money and bad, and a past that is gone that has enabled London to more or less detach itself from the reality of its circumstances—the capital of a once great nation in decline—and become a universe unto itself. Seven weeks after Khan took office, however, Britain unexpectedly voted to leave the European Union. The decision revealed a chasm in the country and the way it…

Nevertheless her sisters and friends never stopped their persecution, for after she had returned to a place where they could seize her, they bound her fast with a heavy wooden yoke and fed her like a dog with only a little bread and water.… No one there had compassion for her wretchedness. —Thomas de Cantimpré (1201-72) HOW SHE WAS LED FORTH FROM THE BODY AND HOW SHE LIVED AGAIN The priest holds the host aloft, the linen sleeves of his alb falling around him like wings. He intones the Agnus Dei, and we sing with him. I can scarcely form the words, my throat is so clotted with grief. Beside me, my sister Gertrude tightens her grasp on my hand. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi— Christina lies in her…

Nobody liked to fiddle with Greek myths more than the Greeks did. Take, for example, one of the best-known tales from the vast web of stories that circulated about the Trojan War: Agamemnon, the victorious Greek general, comes home to his kingdom after ten years only to be murdered by his queen, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus— a crime later avenged by the dead king’s children. In Homer’s Odyssey, composed around 750 B.C., the main villain is Aegisthus, a cad who seduces the weak-willed Clytemnestra and then ambushes the recently returned king and his retainers at a feast, slaughtering them in a grotesque parody of a real battle, the bodies lying among the scattered crockery. (Aegis thus may have had his reasons: according to some, his two brothers were murdered…

In 2015, The Dublin Review ran a goodbye-to-all-that essay by Sally Rooney, a young Irish writer, about her brief career as a university debater. A couple of years earlier, as a student at Trinity College, Dublin, Rooney had risen through the ranks of the European circuit to become the No. 1 debater on the Continent, but she wrote about her feats the way a recovering alcoholic might look back on a time of sotted carousing, at once proud of her exploits and appalled by the person she had been while having them. What Rooney loved about debating was entering a state of “flow,” that magical mental hum when disparate facts and ideas effortlessly assembled themselves in her mind and poured from her mouth as argument. Yet she was also disturbed…

MOVIES NOW PLAYING Atomic Blonde This standard-issue, spy-by-the-pound yarn—set during the last days of the Berlin Wall—is both enlivened and deadened by its unusually realistic and numbingly plentiful violence. Charlize Theron stars as Lorraine Broughton, an MI6 agent sent to the still divided city to locate—with the help of a British colleague (James McAvoy)—a wristwatch containing a list of Western spies, and to rescue a Stasi turncoat (Eddie Marsan), who has the list memorized. This action is seen in flashbacks, intercut with scenes of the bloodied, bruised, and embittered Lorraine’s chilly debriefing by her handlers (Toby Jones and John Goodman). The deceptive twists and cynical moods of espionage take place in nostalgically bleak Cold War cityscapes, but the fine points of spy craft are either reduced to mere winks…

Animation Block Party The largest animation festival on the East Coast returns for its fourteenth year. In 2003— pre-YouTube—the event’s founder, Casey Safron, sought to create a space for students, amateurs, and enthusiasts to screen and share work, eventually hosting a small program in East Williamsburg. Soon, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Rooftop Films offered support, and the event grew. This year’s four-day festival, July 27-30, features more than a hundred animated shorts, in styles ranging from C.G.I. to stop-motion. On opening night, catch a preview of “Summer Camp Island,” an upcoming Cartoon Network series by the “Adventure Time” staff writer Julia Pott, and a short by the rappers and longtime animation junkies Kool Keith and MF Doom. (The Courtyards of Industry City, 274 36th St., Brooklyn. animationblock.com.…

Lucas de Groot, a Dutch typeface designer living in Berlin, recently began receiving a flood of calls and e-mails from Pakistan that, he said, “seemed very urgent.” He soon discovered that Calibri, a font he’d designed almost fifteen years earlier, was playing a central role in a corruption scandal engulfing Nawaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan. As part of an investigation launched by the country’s Supreme Court, the Prime Minister’s daughter had released a supposedly exculpatory document signed and dated February 2, 2006. The document however, had been printed in Calibri, which was not widely available until 2007. Investigators deemed the document to have been falsified, and the term “fontgate” began trending on Twitter. Speaking from his office in Berlin, de Groot said that the incident “has definitely generated…

Suddenly, after a hundred and fifty years of “Who the hell cares?,” Canada is hot. O.K., granted, “Come from Away” just copped a Tony—but what about all the Canadian shows that have bombed on Broadway since “Plaid & Flannel,” in 1913? Who remembers “A Mountie and His Sister,” the 1937 no-singing, no-dancing, all-whistling flop? A revival of the 1901 Broadway smash “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines” has remained in previews since 1935, while the director and producers attempt to agree on whether the featured player is a horse in the Marines or a marine playing a horse. That hunky young Canadian Prime Minister makes Trump look like a usedcar salesman, no argument, but didn’t an earlier Canadian P.M. give the visiting H.M. Queen Elizabeth II a hotfoot at a…

On October 3, 2013, a Sicilian prosecutor named Calogero Ferrara was in his office in the Palace of Justice, in Palermo, when he read a disturbing news story. Before dawn, a fishing trawler carrying more than five hundred East African migrants from Libya had stalled a quarter of a mile from Lampedusa, a tiny island halfway to Sicily. The driver had dipped a cloth in leaking fuel and ignited it, hoping to draw help. But the fire quickly spread, and as passengers rushed away the boat capsized, trapping and killing hundreds of people. The Central Mediterranean migration crisis was entering a new phase. Each week, smugglers were cramming hundreds of African migrants into small boats and launching them in the direction of Europe, with little regard for the chances of…

This is the poem that won’t open no matter where you press. This is the poem that cries on street corners and plays at being lost. This is the poem arranged at a tilt so all the words slide off. This is the poem with lacquered roses closing in on themselves after dark. This is the poem that plays itself out in dives in the small hours. This poem likes to fool around in other people’s cars. This poem gives away small coins and winks at strangers’ kids. This is the poem that understands what it is to be a dog. This is the poem with a teensy tattoo you’ll never get to see. This poem has no big plans for you, which is something, as poems go.…

The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Random House). During the Second World War, a million women served in the Soviet Army. This remarkable collection of testimonies, translated into English for the first time, is the earliest, and the most earnest, of the Nobel laureate’s chronicles of Soviet and post-Soviet lives. Sitting at kitchen tables, Alexievich coaxes out of the women stories that describe a reality vastly different from the officially sanctioned version, with its glorifying tidiness. She asks them, “Was there love during the war?,” and what was it like, when death was so near? They speak guardedly but vividly of fleeting encounters, deep relationships, unexpressed feelings. To the women, love was “the only personal event in…

I’m getting braver at saying the name of a sorely under-known Brazilian artist whose retrospective at the Whitney Museum, “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium,” comes as an overdue revelation. Oiticica died in 1980, of a stroke, at the age of forty-two, after early success in Rio de Janeiro, a brush with fame in London, obscurity during seven years in New York, and a return to Rio that, at one opening, occasioned a riot. Along the way, he turned from superb abstract painting to innovative work in sculpture, film, writing, political action, and participatory installation, much of which remains as fresh as this morning. The sand, huts, potted plants, caged parrots, and inscribed poetry of his sprawling “Tropicália” (1968) await your barefoot delectation should you choose to park your shoes in…