Innholdsfortegnelse for August 28, 2017 i The New Yorker

Patrick Radden Keefe (“Trump’s Favorite Tycoon,” p. 46), a staff writer, is an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and the author of “Chatter” and “The Snakehead.” Lauren Groff (Fiction, p. 68) is the author of, most recently, the novel “Fates and Furies.” Her short-story collection “Florida” will come out next summer. Ian Frazier (“Drive Time,” p. 34) published “Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces” last year and is working on a book about the Bronx. Jen Spyra (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 41), a former senior writer for the Onion, is a staff writer for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” James Wood (Books, p. 83) teaches at Harvard University. “The Nearest Thing to Life” is his latest book. Craig Morgan Teicher (Poem, p. 56) is the author…

Jazz Age Lawn Party Michael Arenella and his Dreamland Orchestra, who perform nineteen-twenties dance music as if the past ninety years had never happened, present a Gatsby-esque affair on Governors Island. It is billed as the world’s largest Prohibition-era-inspired gathering, just without the Prohibition; a menu includes a period-appropriate spread of food and drink. There will also be dance lessons, a Charleston contest, a display of antique gramophones, a “Bathing Beauties and Beaus” promenade, and a pie-baking contest. (jazzagelawnparty.com. Aug. 26-27.) Long Island City Boathouse Paddle Hallet’s Cove is as tucked away as it sounds, nestled at the border between Astoria and Ravenswood. There, on weekends, the Long Island City boathouse hosts regular canoeing and kayaking trips off the shore of Socrates Sculpture Park; these “weekly paddles” provide stunning…

Generally speaking, anyone can say anything online. But, lately, things have started to get complicated. Last week, after neo-Nazis and white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, the neo-Nazi blog the Daily Stormer disappeared from the Internet. GoDaddy, the registrar of the site’s domain, had discontinued its service. The Daily Stormer switched its domain to Google, which promptly shut it down as well. The site is now back up, on the dark Web, with its publisher pleading victimhood on social media. (“I am being unpersoned.”) What happened to the Daily Stormer wasn’t a violation of the First Amendment— private companies are allowed to stifle speech—but it enraged people on the right, many of whom were already deeply skeptical of the puppet masters in Silicon Valley. Before any of this happened, a pro-Trump…

I don’t even know where my father lives. I know his number, and whenever I call he answers and gives the usual update about getting together with the stepkids and their kids, about the latest minor crises with his health, about what he did with Maryanne for their anniversary. He lives somewhere in Connecticut, near where he lived before. It’s been easy not to go there, but I know I should—there won’t always be more time. There will always be less. I don’t even know my father’s address.…

Your clock’s been turned to zero, though there is no zero on a clock. Your skin is petal soft no matter how old the starter kit was— but you will get tired or bored. That’s when the clock starts up. Your parents want you happy, but we also want to set you down, to get back to our old lives. How will you turn against us once you figure this out? You’re about to discover intention. There are four stuffed animals in front of you on strings. They are targets. You won’t understand this for a while. You flail your arms. Sometimes you make one bounce. Are humans the only creatures who must learn to move with purpose? Is that why we harp on motive, why we think of earth…

WHEN TO REMOVE A CHILD Larissa MacFarquhar’s article shines a light on the tragedy of children in the foster-care system by giving a voice to mothers, caseworkers, judges, and attorneys (“The Separation,” August 7th & 14th). But what about the voice of the children? Although preserving families is a noble goal, and reunification should be a top priority for social workers, advocates, and courts, it is not always in the best interest of the child. Parents in the court system, who are often victims of abuse and neglect themselves, may be unable to provide even a minimal level of safety for their children. Children may be abused or neglected. Families may have food insecurity, and no access to adequate health care or to safe and stable housing, and a…

On Monday, people in a seventymile- wide swath of the United States will witness one of nature’s great spectacles: the total solar eclipse. The event will attract swarms of eclipse chasers—or, as some of them prefer to be called, “umbraphiles,” derived from “umbra,” the technical term for the darkest part of the moon’s shadow. New York City will not be a prime destination; here, the moon will obscure only seventy-two per cent of the sun. But the city is distinguished nevertheless: three men currently claiming the record for the most total solar eclipses seen (thirty-three) are all New Yorkers. “I’m not out for record-setting. It’s just something that happens,” Glenn Schneider, one of the triumvirate, said by phone, from Tucson, Arizona, where he is an astronomer at the Steward Observatory.…

One Saturday night last year, Noam Dworman and the comedian Chris Rock sat at the back table in the Olive Tree, a restaurant on MacDougal Street, in Manhattan, that Dworman owns. The table is permanently reserved for comedians who perform at the Comedy Cellar, a club in the Olive Tree’s basement, which is also owned by Dworman. The comedians’ table had recently been moved, to make space for a kitchen extension. Rock was not happy. Dworman recalled their conversation: “Chris said to me, ‘This is not the table where Robin Williams sat, this is not where Ray Romano sat, this is not where Jon Stewart sat.’ He rattled them off, and each one was like a punch in the gut.” “The table” is actually two slate tables pushed together, with…

On the night of November 7, 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes’s wife, Lucy, took to her bed with a headache. The returns from the Presidential election were trickling in, and the Hayeses, who had been spending the evening in their parlor, in Columbus, Ohio, were dismayed. Hayes himself remained up until midnight; then he, too, retired, convinced that his Democratic opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, would become the next President. Hayes had indeed lost the popular vote, by more than two hundred and fifty thousand ballots. And he might have lost the Electoral College as well had it not been for the machinations of journalists working in the shady corners of what’s been called “the Victorian Internet.” Chief among the plotters was an Ohioan named William Henry Smith. Smith ran the western…

Annie Clark, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known as St. Vincent, has an apartment in the East Village. She’s rented it since 2009. But last winter and spring, while she was in town recording a new album, she didn’t stay there. If she wanted something, she sent someone to get it. “I need to not have to worry about the plumbing and the vermin,” she said. “Also, the trinkets and indicators of my actual life.” She was immersed instead in the filtration of that actual life into song. She was in a hermetic phase: celibate, solitary, sober. “My monastic fantastic,” she called it. A stomach bug in March left her unable to stand even the smell of alcohol, and, anyway, there were so many things she wanted to get done that…

Sigmund Freud almost didn’t make it out of Vienna in 1938. He left on June 4th, on the Orient Express, three months after the German Army entered the city. Even though the persecution of Viennese Jews had begun immediately—Edward R. Murrow, in Vienna for CBS radio when the Germans arrived, was an eyewitness to the ransacking of Jewish homes—Freud had resisted pleas from friends that he flee. He changed his mind after his daughter Anna was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. He was able to get some of his family out, but he left four sisters behind. All of them died in the camps, one, of starvation, at Theresienstadt; the others, probably by gas, at Auschwitz and Treblinka. London was Freud’s refuge, and friends set him up in Hampstead,…

Life in Code, by Ellen Ullman (MCD). This “personal history of technology” by a novelist and former computer programmer presents a unique perspective on software, the people who write it, and the world it has created. Ullman recounts struggles to define herself in the boys’-club atmosphere of technology companies and to come to terms with the implications of her work. Her most trenchant critiques concern the social values inherent in the “mesh of code that envelops human life.” Whether considering the atomistic culture of the Internet, the mechanistic philosophy of mind prevalent in the field of A.I., or the “algorithms of the wealthy” that control the movement of capital, she is generally skeptical about technology. She hopes to show “that code has biases, that programs are written by human…

Beautiful natural vistas, drama, and history come together at Boscobel House and Gardens, home of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, about ninety minutes north of the city. Exciting unplanned confluences, such as a convoy of helicopters flying over “Macbeth,” occur regularly. “A Week of Revolution” (Aug. 27-Sept. 4) will include reënactments, picnics, hikes, and a staging of Richard Nelson’s play “The General from America,” about Benedict Arnold, who tried to hand his command of West Point—visible across the river—over to the British. THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS On the Shore of the Wide World This new play by Simon Stephens (“Heisenberg”), directed by Neil Pepe and featuring Blair Brown, follows a family in Stockport, England, over nine eventful months. (Atlantic Theatre Company, 336 W. 20th St. 866-811-4111. In previews.)…

The nastiest bouncers in New York these days are probably those at the Public, Ian Schrager’s new hotel. (“Not on the list? Get the fuck out of line.”) The prize for the nicest has to go to Hugh, a doorman about a block down on Chrystie Street, who greets guests with a handshake and a warm welcome at Et Al., the friendliest trendy bar in town. That’s not to say that walking in isn’t a touch intimidating: low-intensity club beats whose backing vocals seem to have been imprinted on the lips of the attending cognoscenti at birth, décor that is strictly ravebondage- meets-future-Tokyo. All of this is appropriate for a spot that is remembered by devotees, albeit blearily, as the site of the longlost Experimental Cocktail Club. Witness the words…

The first time James Cromwell got arrested was in 1971. “I sort of— he thought I did, I didn’t think I did— assaulted a police officer on a subway train who was hassling a woman,” he recalled recently. He was taken to a station house beneath Times Square, where a sergeant asked what he did for a living. “I said, ‘I’m an actor.’ He went, ‘You working on anything now?’ Like, You’re unemployed, you’re a fucking actor. I said, ‘Yeah, I’m doing a play.’ ‘What’s the play called?’ I said, ‘AC/DC,’ which is a wonderful English play, very abstruse. Of course, he thought it meant bisexuality.” Cromwell was let off with a warning. He was arrested again a few months later, at the May Day protests in Washington, D.C., along…

My two cars have enough miles between them to circle the earth ten times at the equator. I prefer the older one, a 2000 Honda Civic that used to belong to my mother-in-law. It has racked up most of its miles in New Jersey, where I live, and in New York City. Nothing about it stands out—not its tan color, or its shape, or the small yellow-and-white 2004 parking decal from the College of Staten Island on its left rear window. If you asked people to draw a car, my Honda is probably about what they would come up with. It has been through a lot. Last year, while driving absentmindedly, I let it get overheated. I had not paid attention to the greenish stain on the pavement where I…

One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency. Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas-based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe. Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building, in midtown, that are decorated in the oakand- leather fashion of a tycoon’s…

The storm came and erased the quiet. Well, the older sister thought, an island is never really quiet. Even without the storm, there were waves and wind and air-conditioners and generators and animals moving out there in the dark. What the storm had erased was the silence from the other cabin. For hours, there had been no laughing, no bottle caps falling, none of the bickering that the girls had grown used to over the past two days. This was because there were no more adults. They’d been left alone on the island, the two little girls. Four and seven. Pretty little things, strangers called them. What dolls! Their faces were exactly like their mother’s. Hoochies- in-waiting, their mother joked, but she watched them anxiously from the corner of her…

Translation can be a sluggish triumph. It has taken thirteen years for Gunnhild Øyehaug’s collection of stories, “Knots,” which first appeared in Norwegian, to arrive in an English version (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; translated by Kari Dickson); Øyehaug is forty-two, but the book represents her début in this country. Contemporary Norwegian fiction is astonishingly vital and various. If some of that vitality is gradually becoming apparent to non- Norwegians, it’s partly because of the success of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” which may have the effect of shortening the literary struggles of a number of his peers. Anglophone readers can encounter fiction by Per Petterson, Linn Ullmann, Dag Solstad (three of his novels, jewels from a hoard of nearly thirty books, have been translated into English; more are promised), Roy…