Innholdsfortegnelse for August 7-14, 2017 i The New Yorker

Larissa MacFarquhar (“The Separation,” p. 36) is the author of “Strangers Drowning,” which is now out in paperback. Don DeLillo (Fiction, p. 58) is the author of the story collection “The Angel Esmeralda,” among other works of fiction. “Zero K” is his most recent novel. Judith Thurman (“World of Interiors,” p. 48) began writing for the magazine in 1987 and became a staff writer in 2000. She is the author of “Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire,” a collection of her New Yorker essays. Bob Staake (Cover) has created twentyone covers for the magazine. His “Book of Gold” will be published next year. Laura Miller (Books, p. 75), the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia,” is a books-andculture columnist at Slate. Michael Hofmann (Poem, p.…

Jeffrey Tambor, the actor, first moved to New York in 1979, when he was thirty-five. He lived on Dean Street, in Brooklyn, and made television commercials, playing what he recently called “the young, balding-father type.” At the end of most weeks, he’d stop at a bookstore—often the Strand, on Broadway—to buy a paperback, “just to mark the fact that I’d got through the week.” When Tambor returned to the Strand not long ago, on a hot afternoon, during a break between shooting the third season of “Transparent” and the fifth season of “Arrested Development,” he was for a moment puzzled: the ground floor was bright and orderly, and “Für Elise” was playing on the sound system. “Didn’t it used to be a bit seedy?” he asked. Tambor lives in Westchester…

Last spring, a resident of Lexington, Kentucky, named Jessica Abney logged on to her computer and noticed something odd: her monthly cable bill, which had for years been around ninety dollars, had suddenly risen to a hundred and thirty-one dollars. Abney, who is seventy-three, is retired and living alone on disability; she was treated for colon cancer last fall and has regular blood infusions to address two autoimmune diseases. Even a small rise in expenses creates stress on her budget. Abney said that, when she called her cable company, Spectrum, to complain, a customerservice representative told her the bill would go up again soon, by another fifty dollars. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack right there, and I’ve had five heart surgeries,” Abney told me. “I…

In Rachel Cusk’s most recent novels, “Outline” and “Transit,” a British writer named Faye encounters a series of friends and strangers as she goes about her daily life. She is recently divorced, and while her new flat is being renovated her two sons are living with their father. There is something catlike about Faye—an elusiveness that makes people want to detain her, and a curiosity about their pungent secrets. They tell her their histories, and she listens intently. As these soliloquies unspool, a common thread emerges. The speakers suffer from feeling unseen, and in the absence of a reflection they are not real to themselves. Faye shares their dilemma. “It was as if I had lost some special capacity to filter my own perceptions,” she says. But she lends herself…

Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenthcentury fire-and-brimstone theologian, often rode from parish to parish on horseback through the country around Northampton, Massachusetts, composing sermons as he went. Sometimes he wrote them down, but on long rides he used a mnemonic device: to remember each insight he had, he would pin a small piece of paper to an area of his clothing that he associated with the thought. After trips of several days, he returned covered in paper. As Edwards journeyed through the wilderness, his mind moved in its own direction; the two trajectories, one physical, the other mental, were joined in those little pinned scraps covering the preacher’s clothes. It was an entirely practical approach, but, like most adaptations to the work of intense thinking, it read as eccentricity. I first encountered…

FROM TRUMP’S COLORADO Peter Hessler’s recent article on how Donald Trump is transforming rural America offers a picture of Colorado’s Western Slope that is essentially unchanged from the one he painted in his preëlection report for newyorker.com (“Follow the Leader,” July 24th). Both pieces, dominated by interviews with a handful of characters, show the people of a downtrodden desert region following Trump on a path to nowhere. Hessler captures a quirkiness with which any Grand Junction resident will be familiar, but he makes no mention of the tangible transformations taking place in our community, many of which have gathered steam since the election. These include thousands of citizens flooding Main Street for our local Women’s March, exciting and unconventional approaches to diversifying our economy, nonpartisan efforts to increase funding…

Since 2009, soirées for the young and well-heeled have taken place in a hidden lounge known as the Wooly, situated at the base of Woolworth Building, now a hundred and four years old. Last winter, the proprietors, David Tobias and Eric Adolfsen, opened a companion bar next door called the Wooly Public. A bar for the people was refreshing news in inequitable times, particularly after the upper half of the great building, a neo-Gothic landmark built by the founder of the five-and-dime chain, was recently turned into luxury condominiums. While the condo owners may be unlikely to mingle with the masses downstairs over burgers, ’nduja, and devilled eggs, perhaps—if, say, they’re Russian oil tycoons keen to take secret meetings with American kleptocrats—they’ll appreciate the establishment’s shadowy corners and deafening acoustics.…

Julia Wijesinghe has spent all eighteen years of her life on two islands: Staten Island and Sri Lanka. Her parents, both Sri Lanka-born, met on the Staten Island Ferry. They started a Sri Lankan restaurant called Lakruwana (which is also her father’s first name), on Forty-fourth Street, in Manhattan, and moved it to Bay Street, on Staten Island, thirteen years ago. It seats forty, received a good review in the Times, in 2013, and sometimes has a line waiting in front. Julia, an only child, has helped in the restaurant since she was little. At fifteen, she had an idea: start a Sri Lankan museum in the restaurant’s basement. Her parents said she could do that when she was eighteen, and, a few months ago, she did. Hers, she claims,…

Our son’s room is almost ready. From the previous tenant—his sister, who’s two years old—he has inherited a changing pad, a pile of herniated books, and an armchair and ottoman, the color of whose upholstery, now flecked with who knows what, might politely be called gray heather. I wanted him to have something pristine, all his own, so I ordered a personalized baby pillow. With fifteen days to go until my due date, it’s turning into the “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” of soft furnishings. We were going to call him Pierre. Then we were going to call him Louis, but Louis turned out to be the tenth most popular boys’ name in France, and the seventh most popular in Paris, where we live, and, even in this age of nominative nonconformity,…

Bernie Sanders’s Presidential race ended a year ago, but his campaign never did. Since the election, he has staged events in Michigan, Mississippi, Maine, West Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Montana, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, and Illinois. At every one, he speaks about the suffering of smalltown Americans, and his belief that the Democrats can help them. When I caught up with him recently, his shirt was a little untucked, his head hung down, and he carried a printed copy of his remarks. Sanders was catching a late-night flight to Chicago, and was taking a moment to record a message for Snapchat. The central illusion of a Presidential campaign is that a candidate can, through constant motion and boundless energy, meet countless people and, in the end, give voice…

If I were an early personI’d look for the limits of wisdomby going to sacred oak treesor the local blind man with lips on fire.But this is now. This is N.Y.C.I go to Clive.We meet in a dinerand queue for the breakfast special.Clive’s British.He tries to make the large Hispanic short-order cook appreciate “underdone”French toast. “My wife told menot to say soggy,” says Clive.We pay. Currie shows up.We sit and talkof Clive’s upcoming trip to Guantánamo, where,although he’s visited thirty-six times, they’re questioning(this time) his signature.He laughs.His current client, a Moroccan man,has been cleared for releaseand also informedhe will never leave.Clive, a lawyer, questionsthe logic of this.He laughs again, then says, “I shouldn’t laugh,”then tells more stories.“Evidence” at Guantánamo is often supplied by snitches.Recently the same snitch brought evidenceagainst three…

For a movie that tells a true story of violent death, Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit” begins in a very strange way. A series of crude animated images, like paper cutouts, fills the screen with a potted history of African-American migration from South to North, and of the prejudice that has greeted and thwarted the black population. The ensuing unrest is illustrated by cartoon flames. It’s hard to conceive of a more sombre theme, so why are we leafing through a children’s picture book? Soon enough, we see the light of real fires. This is Detroit, in late July, 1967, when riots spread across town. What ignited them, and what gets the movie going, is a police raid on an after-hours illegal drinking club, better known as a “blind pig.” The clientele,…

Tell Me How It Ends, by Valeria Luiselli (Coffee House). Between April, 2014, and August, 2015, more than a hundred thousand unaccompanied Latin-American children crossed the Mexico - U.S. border and faced expedited deportation, as a direct result of decades of U.S. chingaderas, or “nasty-shitty” policies. Luiselli, a Mexican writer who volunteered as an interpreter in New York’s immigration court, focusses on the forty questions she had to ask children before their deportation hearings. They told her about riding on the roof of La Bestia, a dangerous freight train that traverses Mexico, and inhumane treatment in U.S. immigration centers. As in her hallucinatory and inventive fiction, Luiselli proves her skill as a storyteller while grappling with her own questions of nationalism. Cannibalism, by Bill Schutt (Algonquin). In this deeply…

The double feature used to be a staple of New York repertory houses, and Film Forum is bringing it back. The “Summer Double Features” series, from Aug. 11 to Sept. 5, includes twenty-eight pairings, ranging from silents to independents, from European political fantasies to Hollywood extravaganzas. The Aug. 22 program offers two film-noir classics, both from 1949, about lovers on the run—Nicholas Ray’s first feature, “They Live by Night,” and Joseph H. Lewis’s “Gun Crazy,” a key inspiration for “Bonnie and Clyde.” NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie The members of Fleetwood Mac have endured many emotional chapters in their five decades together: breaking up, making up, and everything…

Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival This decorated-boat race and cultural festival returns to Flushing, for its twenty-seventh year. The tradition is said to commemorate the ancient poet Qu Yuan, who spent years in exile and then jumped to his death, in the Miluo River, after learning that his home state had been invaded. (Fishermen sped onto the river but could not save him.) Today, teams in more than thirty dragon boats race along Meadow Lake after two days of food, folk art, and crafts as well as performances from bands and troupes across cultures, including the Chinese Music Ensemble of New York, the CASYM Steel Orchestra, the Echo Music Jam Band, and the Ka fele Bandele Group. (Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, 11101 Corona Ave., Queens. hkdbf-ny.org. Aug. 12-13.) “Bollywood Boulevard:…

Last May, Lucas Chapman graduated from college and got a job with Postmates; he’d applied to do volunteer work abroad and was saving up for a plane ticket. He delivered stuff around Washington, D.C., in his ’98 Mustang. “I couldn’t do Uber because my car was too old,” he said. Finally, in September, he received the encrypted e-mail message he’d been waiting for: a note from the People’s Protection Units, a Kurdish militia in northern Syria, inviting him to war. He flew to northern Iraq. From there, a handler for the Y.P.G. (in translation, an acronym for the People’s Protection Units) escorted him into Syria—at night, on foot. Chapman, who is twenty-one, is fair-skinned and slight. He reported to a Y.P.G. training camp, where he fired guns, learned Kurdish, and…

What do I remember of those strange episodic parts of my life.What they nowadays call outliers. Someone put them in brackets.(Who put them in brackets? I wanted them to go on.)A dwindling Fall, pumpkins, marriage, winter.The Pioneer Valley. The roaring American convection heating.The fluff off our flannel sheets getting everywhere.You wrote something about the number of windows.Was it a lot? You seemed to think it was a lot.Once, an owl huddled there, pecked at by small birds.It was daytime and just beginning to snow. Such a picture of misery.Me in my blue shirt, and James’s tie. A froghopped over my boot. It seemed like luck. Then the threshold.I don’t remember kitchen, entertainment center, bathroom—just those cream flannel sheets rubbed and blown to lint.The hereditary medievalist downstairs proclaiming: I have seniority…

What should you do if childprotective services comes to your house? You will hear a knock on the door, often late at night. You don’t have to open it, but if you don’t the caseworker outside may come back with the police. The caseworker will tell you you’re being investigated for abusing or neglecting your children. She will tell you to wake them up and tell them to take clothes off so she can check their bodies for bruises and marks. She will interview you and your kids separately, so you can’t hear what she’s asking them or what they’re saying. She opens your fridge and your cabinets, checking to see if you have food, and what kind of food. She looks around for unsafe conditions, for dirt, for mess,…

But nobody showed up, so he sat awhile looking at the wall. It was one of those Saturdays that feel like Sunday. He didn’t know how to explain this. It happened intermittently, more often in the warmer months, and it was probably normal, although he’d never discussed it with anyone. After the divorce he felt an odd numbness, mental and physical. He looked in the mirror, studying the face that looked back. At night he kept to his half of the bed with his back to the other half. Over time a life slithered out. He talked to people, took long walks. He bought a pair of shoes but only after testing them rigorously, both shoes, not just one. He walked from one end of the shoe store to the…

An author owns a snappy title, and then the snappy title owns the author. Robert Wright, having titled his new book “Why Buddhism Is True,” has to offer a throat-clearing preface and later an apologetic appendix, in order to explain exactly what he means by “Buddhism” and exactly what he means by “true,” while the totality of his book is an investigation into why we think there are “whys” in the world, and whether or not anything really “is.” Wright sets out to provide an unabashedly American answer to all these questions. He thinks that Buddhism is true in the immediate sense that it is helpful and therapeutic, and, by offering insights into our habitual thoughts and cravings, shows us how to fix them. Being Buddhist— that is, simply practicing…

In his freshman year of college, Brendan, one of a handful of characters at the center of Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “Mrs. Fletcher,” finds out that his image has been incorporated into another student’s art project. Titled “My Call-Out Wall,” the work provides the artist ’s friends with the chance to “call someone out for behavior that damages our community and threatens our safety.” Some of the targets stand accused of classic sins (“LIES RIGHT TO YOUR FACE”), while others have committed more newfangled transgressions (“CULTURAL APPROPRIATOR,” “GASLIGHTER”). Under the painted portrait of Brendan, however, appears a phrase that he considers “a brief summary of my entire life”: “HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT.” Disappointment plagues the characters in Perrotta’s novels, from the disaffected parents in “Little Children” to the divorced sex-education instructor in…