Innholdsfortegnelse for September 11, 2017 i The New Yorker

Rachel Aviv (“A Muslim Cop’s Trial,” p. 50) won the 2015 Scripps Howard Award for “Your Son Is Deceased,” her story for the magazine on police shootings. Calvin Trillin (“Final Cut,” p. 28) is the author of, most recently, “No Fair! No Fair!: And Other Jolly Poems of Childhood,” with illustrations by Roz Chast. Elizabeth Kolbert (Comment, p. 23) is a staff writer. Her book “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Billy Collins (Poem, p. 45) published his latest poetry collection, “The Rain in Portugal,” in 2016. Amanda Petrusich (Pop Music, p. 80), a contributing writer for newyorker.com, is the author of “Do Not Sell At Any Price.” Chris Ware (Cover), a graphic novelist, has contributed comic strips and twentyfour covers to…

Debra Wray Furrh, the advocacy director of Lone Star Legal Aid, evacuated to Texarkana last week when Hurricane Harvey struck. The Houston headquarters were closed. One colleague fled to Nacogdoches, and another was stuck at home, in Pearland. Lone Star, which offers free legal services to the poor from Waco to Galveston, has a special disaster-recovery unit that’s weathered Katrina, Rita, Ike, and the yearly floods and fires since then. “We just stay real calm,” Furrh said. At nine-thirty on Monday morning, she was working the phones from a room at a Best Western when a colleague texted her with a question: “Is our building on fire?” Furrh: “What’s your source?” The source was a legal intern who lived in an apartment building across the street, in downtown Houston, and…

Last summer, reposted images of a girl-about-town, drawn in Sharpie, began proliferating on Instagram. Invariably, the girl is wide-eyed and frantic— because of an unreturned text, a hankering for vodka, or an imminent bad choice. (“Me debating who I should go home with,” reads the caption of one cartoon, an ex-boyfriend in one thought bubble, a slice of pizza in another.) The drawings appear daily on the Instagram account But Like Maybe, a “Cathy” for our devicedriven times. One imagines its creator, Arianna Margulis, sipping a pink drink on a flamingo floaty—this summer, she posted an image with her character doing just that. Ah, the good life of a young artist, a hundred and forty-five thou sand Instagram followers and counting. Life on dry land is kind of, like, different.…

Aisha got her first call from the terrorists when she was fourteen. It was 2013, and she was at home, in Mogadishu, Somalia, when an unknown number appeared on her phone. She picked up. The man on the other end told her that Islam does not allow women to play sports, or to wear shirts and pants. It was immodest and indecent, he said. His voice was harsh and menacing. He told her that he was going to kill her if she didn’t stop playing basketball. The next day, another man called to say the same thing. Aisha changed her phone number three times, but the calls kept coming, and she became convinced that someone at the mobile-phone company was giving out her contact information. After a while, Aisha began…

Early in 1881, before entering the White House, James Garfield recorded a peculiar dream about the Vice-President-elect, who would end up succeeding him before the summer was over. In “Destiny of the Republic” (2011), a surprise best-seller about Garfield’s assassination, Candice Millard explains that it was a dream in which Chester Arthur drowned. [Garfield] and a close friend, General David Swaim, had escaped a sinking ship, only to watch Arthur, who was lying on a couch, very pale and obviously ill, disappear under the surface of the water. “I started to plunge into the water to save Arthur,” Garfield wrote, “but Swaim held me, and said he cannot be saved.” Most nineteenth-century Vice-Presidents were too insignificant to get on a President’s calendar, let alone into his subconscious, but Garfield’s dream…

ASSANGE AND WIKILEAKS Depending on a reader’s preconceptions, she or he will interpret Raffi Khatchadourian’s article about the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, a ghostly global activist hiding out in a foreign embassy, as a portrait of either a self- involved, two-faced traitor to his own ideals or a crusading hero of the populace (“Man Without a Country,” August 21st). It’s impossible, it seems, to have anything but the strongest reactions to Assange. For the Assange and Edward Snowden types of the world, is it worth it, in the end, to live in exile? And are they driven by righteous missions of exposure or by a desire to get credit for them? Gino Cirignano Playa del Rey, Calif. For all of Assange’s grandiosity, what has he actually done? He created…

1413 Bushwick Ave., Brooklyn (347-365-7257) On a broad and relatively barren swath of Bushwick Avenue, the asphalt rent with months of heat, Salud appears like sudden relief. Its patio—surrounded by strings of white lights, more lights curled in Mason jars, and a riot of flowers in steel boxes— gives it the look of an urban oasis. On offer to the thirsty: a panoply of beers, from chichi (Delirium Tremens, Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout) to old standards (Modelo, P.B.R.). In summer, pitchers of red sangria, heavy, fruity, sticky, and sweet, adorn the tables; in the winter, coquito— Puerto Rican eggnog, made with cream of coconut and condensed milk—is mixed up by the gallon by the patient, deft-handed staff. There’s usually sports on the TV, but the broad array of neighborhood…

After the Charleston church massacre, in 2015, Georgia leaders quietly removed two holidays from the official state calendar—Robert E. Lee’s birthday and Confederate Memorial Day— and commenced a modest redesign of a specialty license plate bearing a Confederate emblem. But the most divisive Confederate monument in the state—and the largest in the world—remains carved into Stone Mountain, a massive, isolated chunk of rock twenty miles east of Atlanta that protrudes from the piedmont’s arboreal green like a sore gray thumb. Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson, astride their horses, occupy nearly two acres of sheer mountainside. One of the largest bas-relief sculptures on earth, the monument took decades to complete, with the help of the K.K.K. and local politicians, and is protected by Georgia law, as “a tribute…

Sometime in the early eighties, when my wife, Alice, and I and our daughters were about to leave New York for Nova Scotia, where we spent our summers, I was asked this question, pointblank: “Is it true that in Nova Scotia you lock people in your barn and make them watch your home movies?” “You’re close,” I replied. But I would submit that there’s more to the story. The term “home movies” conjured up in those days the rough equivalent of today’s cell-phone videos on Facebook or YouTube: the toddler making his unsteady way across the back yard, the new kitten doing something excruciatingly adorable with the old dog. The movies being shown in our barn had plots—not terribly believable plots, I’ll admit, but plots nonetheless. There were costumes—some white…

Over the summer of 2011, the water in Lake Michigan turned crystal clear. Shafts of angled light lit the lake bed, like searchlights from a U.F.O.; later, old sunken ships came into view from above. Pleasure was soon replaced by panic: lakes are not supposed to look like swimming pools. When biologists investigated, they found that the turbid swirls of plankton that typically grow in the lake by the million had nearly vanished—consumed gradually, they could only guess, by some ravenous organism. The likely culprits were mollusks: the zebra mussel and its cousin the quagga mussel. The two species—Dreissena polymorpha and Dreissena bugensis—are thought to have originated in the estuarine basins of Ukraine, notably that of the Dnieper River. In the late nineteeneighties, cargo ships, travelling from the Caspian Sea…

Phoebe found the house almost unchanged. Same furniture, same couch cushions worn out in the same old places, practically the same stack of magazines. Phoebe’s parents, Melanie and Dan, looked just as they had when she left them, and so their new coffeemaker startled her. “Where did that come from?” “Your mother bought it.” “The old one broke,” Melanie said, defending herself. Of course, Phoebe saw that the new machine stood right where the scrap bucket had been. All composting had ceased the minute she went to college. Sweetie, it smelled so bad had been Melanie’s excuse. And yet Phoebe’s parents had planted vegetables with her when she was little. They had hired a handyman to build a chicken coop in the back yard. The coop stood empty now, just…

No matter how you slice it, gay children with straight parents are born to people who are not their type. Growing up in a milieu that doesn’t reflect their desires, queer kids can’t help questioning their difference and what it means, in relation to Mom and Dad’s more socially acceptable union—even if that marriage happens to fail. (“Always that same old story— / Father Time and Mother Earth, / A marriage on the rocks,” James Merrill wrote, in “The Broken Home.”) Standing both inside and outside the parental home, or their fantasies of it, gay and lesbian poets, such as Elizabeth Bishop, Audre Lorde, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Frank Bidart, can become astute sociologists of the ways in which people respond to gay difference and to difference in general. Writers,…

Plenty of bands address the extravagance and the ferocity of youth, but far fewer sing about being grownup. Since 2001, the National, an indie-rock group from Ohio, has given voice to a particular kind of midlife melancholy: what it means to have a good job and a reliable partner, and nevertheless feel choked and despairing. This might seem absurd at first—privilege is privilege, after all—but the emotional depth of the band’s work says something about the size of those disappointments. To have so much and still feel grief is an existential torment all its own. The National is made up of the vocalist Matt Berninger and two sets of brothers: Aaron and Bryce Dessner, and Scott and Bryan Devendorf. Though they all grew up around Cincinnati, the band formed after…

One of rap’s last true enigmas, Del the Funky Homosapien leaves a thumbprint on the few things he touches. After writing for the rapper Ice Cube, his cousin, in 1990, Del sketched his own wacky slacker style as an alternative to big-budget sounds, perfected on the blissed-out verses he lent to the Gorillaz for their 2001 trip-hop hit, “Clint Eastwood.” The Oakland cult hero has since led an unhurried career of cherished offshoot projects and sporadic appearances; he materializes at Brooklyn Bowl on Sept. 12, before floating off again. NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Chris Cohen Listen closely, because he sings softly; Cohen is a bit of a treasure. His comfort shines through…

Coney Island Film Festival With its scrappy amphitheatre, historic bumper-car discos, and boardwalk sticky with margarita mix, Coney Island was in full swing this summer. Keep an eye on Coney Island through the fall, though, as offbeat events continue in cooler weather. Sideshows by the Seashore and the Coney Island Museum host their seventeenth annual film festival this week, offering original shorts, classic campy features, and live shows and serving food and drinks. The program includes a slate of comedies, horror flicks, and documentaries set in Brooklyn and beyond—don’t miss Saturday night’s Sideshow screening of “The Warriors” before your own moonlit subway ride back to home turf. (3006 W. 12th St., Brooklyn. 718-372-5159. Sept. 8-10.) Tribute in Light The attacks of September 11th have settled into history: heightened security…

On September 20, 1973, the former tennis champ Bobby Riggs rode by rickshaw into the Houston Astrodome, wearing a yellow Sugar Daddy jacket. Across the court, Billie Jean King was carried on, Cleopatra style, by a bevy of bare-chested hunks. Riggs was fifty-five; King was twenty-nine. At the net, King handed Riggs a squirming piglet—code for male chauvinist pig. In the stands were more than thirty thousand spectators, the largest crowd ever at an American tennis match. Hyped as the “Battle of the Sexes,” the hundred-thousand-dollar winnertake- all showdown began as a publicity stunt, but it soon became a referendum on women’s lib. Four months earlier, Riggs—past his prime and said to be saddled with gambling debts—had walloped Margaret Court, then the No. 1 women’s-tennis player, after boasting that no…

Dear Harvard, How are you? I hope you are well! My name is Jared Kushner, and I would like to go to you. As an example of how smart I am, here is some money. I heard from my daddy and my friends’ daddies that you are a big house for smart, good boys. I am a good boy! I am nice and my face is very smooth. Would you like a hundred-dollar bill? It has Benjamin Franklin on it! He is silly, because he only has hair on the sides, not on the top. Here are some of him! Here are some facts about me: I am Jared. I am more than six feet tall, which is funny, because feet are on your legs, not how tall you are!…

Every time Gulliver travelsinto another chapter of “Gulliver’s Travels”I marvel at how well travelled he isdespite his incurable gullibility.I don’t enjoy travelling anymorebecause, for instance,I still don’t know the differencebetween a “bloke” and a “chap.”And I’m embarrassedwhenever I have to hold out a palmof loose coins to a cashieras if I were feeding a pigeon in a park.Like Proust, I see only troublein store if I leave my room,which is not lined with cork,only sheets of wallpaperfeaturing orange flowersand little green vines.Of course, anytime I wantI can travel in my imaginationbut only as far as Toronto,where some graduate studentswith goatees and snoodsare translating my poems into Canadian.…

The Wisdom of Finance, by Mihir A. Desai (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). This accessible book attempts to show that economic theories can illuminate other areas of our lives. Probabilistic thinking may help us to deal with life’s risks and randomness, and diversification can improve our relationship portfolios. Some analogies are labored, but Desai, a Harvard economist, is an omnivorous reader, referring to Trollope and Hammett amid explanations of such concepts as leverage and options theory. The book’s final question may be its most important: “If the ideas of finance are so life-affirming, why does everyone hate it?” But Desai, who avoids topics like the 2008 financial crash and rising income inequality, offers no convincing answer. The Stranger in the Woods, by Michael Finkel (Knopf ). Seeking an anonymity so extreme…