Innholdsfortegnelse for September 4, 2017 i The New Yorker

Sam Knight (“Back to the Garden,” p. 24) is a journalist based in London. Karen Russell ( “Object Permanence,” p. 54) has published four books, including the short-story collection “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” and the novel “Swamplandia!” Richard Burbridge (Portfolio, p. 62) is a British photographer who has lived in New York for more than two decades. He shot his first portrait for The New Yorker, of the jazz critic Albert Murray, in 1996. Dana Spiotta (“D.I.Y.,” p. 42) has written four novels, including “Stone Arabia” and “Innocents and Others.” She teaches at the Syracuse University M.F.A. program. Darryl Pinckney (“A Sentimental Education,” p. 58) is the author of, most recently, the novel “Black Deutschland.” Sarah Larson (Portfolio, p. 62) writes about pop culture, including a weekly column…

Adriane Ohanesian first lived in Africa in 2010, shortly after graduating from Colorado College and completing a program at the International Center of Photography, in Manhattan. She worried that she might have to earn money by teaching figure skating, as she had done on and off since high school. But the manager of an ice rink in Nairobi never called her back, and she returned to her original career choice: photojournalist, covering conflicts in the most conflict-prone parts of the world. “Generally, I’m not afraid of things,” she said recently, over a cappuccino at a coffee bar on East Ninth. (She was visiting family in the city.) She has long brown hair, which she had tied back with a scarf, and she was wearing large gold hoop earrings. A few…

You shouldn’t be surprised that the place you always sought, and now have been given, carries with it a certain disappointment. Here you are, finally inside, and not a friend in sight. The only gaiety that exists is the gaiety you’ve brought with you, and how little you had to bring. The bougainvillea outside your front window, like the gardener himself, has the look of something that wants constant praise. And the exposed wooden beams, once a main attraction, now feel pretentious, fit for someone other than you. But it’s yours now and you suspect you’ll be known by the paintings you hang, the books you shelve, and no doubt your need to speak about the wallpaper as if it weren’t your fault. Perhaps that’s why wherever you go these…

Like Steven Tyler, of Aerosmith, Ken Burns has a summer house on Lake Sunapee, in New Hampshire. The property is furnished with Shaker quilts and a motorboat; every July 4th, a fifteen-foot-long American flag hangs over the back deck. He bought the house in the mid-nineties, with money earned from “The Civil War,” his nine-part PBS documentary series, and its spinoffs. When PBS first broadcast that series, in a weeklong binge in the fall of 1990, the network reached its largest- ever audience. The country agreed to gather as if at a table covered with old family photographs, in a room into which someone had invited an indefatigable fiddle player. Johnny Carson praised the series in successive “Tonight Show” monologues; stores in Washington, D.C., reportedly sold out of blank videocassettes.…

In the past decade, a new genre of highly personal TV comedies, starring the people who write the scripts, has flourished. The rise of streaming services and more experimental cable networks, the proliferation of Web series, and the most recent standup boom have all played a part; so did “Louie.” In 2010, Louis C.K.’s genre-melting, insistently idiosyncratic series—and the complete creative control that made it possible—inspired a generation of funny writers to point a camera at themselves. Watching their shows can feel more like reading a novel, or a collection of comic personal essays, than like watching “Cheers.” In 2017, the number of comedies starring writers has grown too high for any mortal, no matter how ambitious or slothlike, to keep up with. The following pages feature portraits of some…

If ever there was a writer in flight from his name, it was Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa is the Portuguese word for “person,” and there is nothing he less wanted to be. Again and again, in both poetry and prose, Pessoa denied that he existed as any kind of distinctive individual. “I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,” he writes in one poem. “I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me. . . . That’s me. Period.” In his magnum opus, “The Book of Disquiet”—a collage of aphorisms and reflections couched in the form of a fictional diary, which he worked on for years but never finished, much less published—Pessoa returns to the same theme: “Through these deliberately unconnected impressions I am…

LCD Soundsystem’s career ended quite magically, in 2011, with a concert at Madison Square Garden. At the end of the night, after an almost decadelong run during which the group changed what both dance music and rock bands could do, balloons fell from the ceiling, strangers hugged one another, and devoted fans cried. The next year, a documentary, “Shut Up and Play the Hits,” captured the concert’s staging and immediate aftermath, and also James Murphy, the group’s sole full-time member, having long, thoughtful conversations about the musical legacy he was leaving behind. In 2014, a lavish boxed set arrived to further commemorate that glorious last hurrah. Murphy, who is now fortyseven, retired to a life of seeming leisure, opening a wine bar, roasting coffee beans, and indulging in one-off, prestige…

HOW WE DEFINE BUDDHISM Adam Gopnik, in his essay on American Buddhism, strikes an elegant balance between respect for Buddhist spirituality and efforts to “secularize” specific practices, but he misses some crucial distinctions (A Critic at Large, August 7th & 14th). As Gopnik explains, many people find meditation acceptable but struggle with the concept of reincarnation, despite Buddhism’s injunctions against overliteral interpretation. Buddhists do not see physical death as the seismic event that many others do, so there can be reincarnations within the frame of a single human life. And what could be more American than reinventing yourself ? Contrary to what Gopnik writes, Buddhism does not teach that there is no self. (Clearly, my “self ” is typing this letter and your “self ” is reading it.) Rather,…

Ian Schrager, the hotelier and former co-owner of Studio 54, lives in a penthouse apartment on Bond Street, in NoHo. His abundant views include, to the north, a blue-green glass tower on Astor Place that nobody likes. It sits on a boxy Chase bank. “I think people come downtown to get away from buildings like that,” Schrager said, on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago, sitting at his kitchen table. “A gateway to downtown— that’s what it should have been.” He could have built the gateway. Seventeen years ago, there was a parking lot on Astor Place, and Schrager tried to build a hotel on it; before that, he’d opened hotels only in renovated buildings. For the design, Schrager persuaded Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect, to collaborate with Jacques…

The factory that makes the paper for U.S. currency smells like a clean barn just supplied with fresh hay. Built in the eighteen-seventies, in Dalton, Massachusetts, it runs today, as it did then, on the power of the adjacent Housatonic River. The scent emanates from the centerpiece of the mill, a giant, elevated iron sphere larger than a house. Tons of raw cotton and linen are poured in at the top, along with water, and the sphere is heated and spun like a washing machine to break up the fibres, which are run through the paper-making machinery at another, slightly younger plant down the road. It’s in that plant that this nineteenthcentury product is outfitted with the latest technology. The hundred-dollar bill, for example, is embedded with a micro-optic security…

He cupped the two halves of my tush and spoke directly to them. “Run away with me, girls,” he whispered. “She doesn’t understand our love.” I lay still, staring out the window, letting them have their time together. If I protested, I’d only make his case stronger: I’m less fun than my own butt. Which is not untrue. In my essence, I am a stone, unmoving for ten thousand years, unless picked up and moved. It’s not just sex; I find this whole experience—life—gratuitously slow and drawn out. See it crawl, second by fucking second. If I’m a workaholic, it’s only because I hate work so much that I’m trying to finish it, all of it, once and for all. So I can just ride out the rest of my…

Korean pop music—characterized by visual outrageousness, factory-made superstars, and sounds and styles that reflect Western pop like a fun-house mirror—became widely known to Americans after the world-conquering success of “Gangnam Style.” Now it hits Off Broadway, in Ars Nova’s “KPOP” (starting previews Sept. 5, at A.R.T./New York), an immersive piece presented with Woodshed Collective and Ma-Yi, with music by Helen Park and Max Vernon, about a new record label on the eve of its launch. THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS As You Like It The Public’s Public Works initiative presents an open-air musical adaptation of the Shakespeare comedy, written by Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery and featuring a two-hundred- person cast of professional actors and community members. (Delacorte, Central Park. Enter at 81st St. at Central Park W. 212-967-7555.…

24 Ninth Ave. (212-255-5588) In “A Moveable Feast,” the consummate day drinker Ernest Hemingway narrates his order in a Paris café: a café au lait, two servings of Martinique rum, and a half carafe of dry white wine. The great buzzed and wired bard of the Jazz Age would have liked Kobrick Coffee, where the baristas are cross-trained as mixologists and the creative synergy between the twin disciplines of craft coffee and craft cocktails rises to the level of art. From early morning until late afternoon, the place churns to the rhythms of aproned barmen grinding beans for espresso and tapping pitchers of steamed milk to break up the bubbles. By 8 p.m., the lights are dimmed, candles and dainty bud vases are set out, and a menu board rolls…

On a recent afternoon in Astoria, Queens, the artist Molly Crabapple was adding color to her paunchy, man-child drawing of Donald Trump, part of a large mural titled “The Bore of Babylon.” Holding a sceptre topped with a red “Make America Great Again” hat (on which Crabapple has scrawled “WHY” in white paint), the scowling President rides a Hydra-like monster with fifteen heads—one for each member of his Cabinet. The creature, rendered in scratchy lines and splotches of black ink, seems a terrifying amalgam of Hieronymus Bosch, Honoré Daumier, and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” Crabapple calls it Trumpbeast. It roams among more than a hundred and fifty works in the Welling Court Mural Project. In 2009, a resident named Jonathan Ellis sought to beautify Welling Court, a neighborhood along the…

Devon Shepard met Jenji Kohan, the creator of “Orange Is the New Black” and “Weeds,” twenty- four years ago, when they were writers for the NBC sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel- Air.” Shepard, a former standup comedian, got into the business serendipitously, after he clowned on a square producer at a black barbershop in Los Angeles. Kohan, who had recently graduated from Columbia, was a rung down from Shepard—a “baby writer,” in Hollywood lingo. But “she was fun, a whole lot of energy, a sponge,” he said. Kohan wanted to learn dominoes—the “loud and outrageous” street version—and they began playing bones in an office they shared, trading stories about growing up black in South Central and Jewish in Beverly Hills. “I made the room cool,” Shepard said. “People were,…

The bird flying up at the windowpane aspired to the blue sky reflected in it but learned the hard truth and flew off again. Was it a finch, a blue tit or a linnet? I couldn’t quite identify the strain. Checking a pocket guide to get it right— “The Birds of Ireland,” illustrated text— I note the precise graphic work and definite descriptions there, and yet I’m still perplexed. I only glimpsed the bird in busy flight: bit like a goldfinch, like the captive one perched on a rail, by Rembrandt’s young disciple, except for the coloring, blue, yellow, and green. A tit so, one of those from the bird table which whirr at hanging nuts and grain. Off he flew. Now there’s a mist out there and a mist…

On the evening of October 30, 1938, a seventy-six-year-old millworker in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, named Bill Dock heard something terrifying on the radio. Aliens had landed just down the road, a newscaster announced, and were rampaging through the countryside. Dock grabbed his double-barrelled shotgun and went out into the night, prepared to face down the invaders. But, after investigating, as a newspaper later reported, he “didn’t see anybody he thought needed shooting.” In fact, he’d been duped by Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of “The War of the Worlds.” Structured as a breaking-news report that detailed the invasion in real time, the broadcast adhered faithfully to the conventions of news radio, complete with elaborate sound effects and impersonations of government officials, with only a few brief warnings through the program…

Where the Line Is Drawn, by Raja Shehadeh (New Press). A Palestinian human-rights lawyer who has written several books about life under the Israeli occupation here focusses on his friendships with Israeli Jews, in particular with the Jung scholar Henry Abramovitch. “I was looking for solace in the midst of the chaos all around, and I found it with Henry,” he writes. Over forty years, their friendship has been nurtured through letters, conversations in the Ramallah hills, and, initially, a studious avoidance of politics. Yet increasingly hopeless national politics, intractable identity narratives, and the quotidian humiliations of the occupation come to affect the assumptions and the expectations of friendship. Shehadeh describes with courage and grace the internal struggle to remain fair. Henry David Thoreau, by Laura Dassow Walls (Chicago).…

The American poet Ange Mlinko’s fifth book is “Distant Mandate” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Her title, borrowing a phrase from the writer László Krasznahorkai, refers to art’s primum mobile, its primordial first domino. The drive to create art is a “mandate” so ancient that it should probably by now have expired, and yet when it arrives, still, it is always in a hurry. Mlinko’s readers can easily spot the wit, the elegance, and the play in her poems, but they might miss the urgency, since it is so slyly channelled. “Distant Mandate” is partly about the binds of middle age, when one’s obligations compete, like a nest of hungry robins, for attention. Mlinko’s poems aren’t simple: they face the complexities of love and loss with a pragmatic erudition. She is…