Innholdsfortegnelse for September 25, 2017 i The New Yorker

Rebecca Mead (“Transformer,” p. 42) has been a staff writer since 1997. “My Life in Middlemarch” is her latest book. Michael Schulman (Portfolio, p. 78) is the Goings On About Town editor for theatre, and has written for the magazine since 2006. He is the author of “Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep.” Emily Nussbaum (On Television, p. 102) has been The New Yorker’s television critic since 2011. She won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Paul Tran (Poem, p. 71) is a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis and the winner of the 2017 Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam. Sheila Heti (Books, p. 98) has written eight books, including the forthcoming “Motherhood.” Adam Davidson (The Financial Page, p. 41), a staff writer,…

On a recent evening, the singer Judy Collins, who has lived in a classic six on West End Avenue for many years, had a visit from an old flame, Stephen Stills. “Don’t you look sharp!” Collins exclaimed as Stills, who was wearing a dark suit jacket over a black T-shirt, came in and kissed her on both cheeks. They sat at the dining-room table. Stills was grumpy at first about his squealing hearing aids (he is all but deaf in one ear), flinging them down on the table in frustration. Collins asked soothingly if he would like a Coca-Cola. Stills, seventy-two, and Collins, seventy-eight, are touring together, and they have an album, “Everybody Knows”—new songs, some catalogue, a few covers—coming out this week. Their collaboration, fifty years in the making,…

Elam Lapp, Jr., like many Amish people, always wanted to be a farmer, but he knew it was a difficult way to make money. Before the nineteenseventies, most Amish made their living farming; today, fewer than ten per cent do. Lapp has twelve siblings, none of whom went into the business. But Lapp—a friend of mine, and a man with an easy, self-deprecating sense of humor and the short beard of a newly married Amishman—came across a solution: he would farm deer. Deer farming doesn’t require as much acreage as cows or crops, and there’s little need for technology. All you have to do is throw up some fences, get pregnant does, and buy feed (the deer like beans and corn). There are roughly ten thousand deer farms in North…

On Saturday night in Lagos, Nigeria, women are restless with anticipation. On the mainland, where slums built atop landfills run into middle-class housing estates, a young hair stylist is putting on makeup and taming her mane of extensions, getting ready to meet her older boyfriend for drinks. On the island in the city’s center, where wealth and political power are concentrated, a twentysomething ad executive in a clingy dress is going with her friends to a club; if she doesn’t find a man she likes, she’ll text a friend, who is rich and good-looking, though not ready to settle down. The fact that there is church tomorrow is barely in the back of their minds. A decade ago, they would have been expected to attend services regularly, to dress conservatively,…

Years he lives alone on Montezuma Road. Delivers newspapers during dawn’s darkest hours. Marine layer hangs like gunfire over the Gulf of Tonkin. Optical illusion: how cleverly the war begins in his ’93 Mazda MPV. We sail I-15 South as though it’s the Thu Bồn River, flee Hội An’s cinnamon-forest barricade, viscera-flooded streets. American soldiers peeling his house apart, straw by straw. His uncles wearing nothing but nametags around their necks, lying in a ditch of saw-toothed rocks. Flies spewing from a missing eye. We grab doughnuts at a panaderia in North Park. A stereo beneath La Virgen croons “Como la Flor” while I probe a glazed exit wound: wedding ring he never gave my mother. Too poor for love, too ruined for ritual. I dance with him. My feet…

Earlier this summer, my family spent a week in an Italian village near Menton, just over the border that Italy shares with southern France. Dry hills, the azure Mediterranean, scents of rosemary and lavender, a lemon tree in the garden. Well, lucky us. Daily, we crossed the border into France and back again into Italy. We didn’t have to stop, and the listless border guards barely glanced at our respectable little hired car, with its four white occupants. They were a good deal more interested in the African migrants, who gathered with persistent hopelessness on the Italian side of the border, just a few feet from the guard post. We saw the young men everywhere in that Italian hinterland—usually in groups of two or three, walking along the road, climbing…

In a late episode of “The Deuce,” two young men, blissful, curl up after sex. One lover praises the other for his brand-new fame—strangers drove miles to see him. “That’s worth celebrating, baby,” he says. His partner scoffs: “Like it’s normal to watch people fucking on film.” The other man gazes up, as if spotting a new constellation, and says, softly, “Maybe it is.” It’s one of many intimate exchanges in “The Deuce,” a sweet rarity for HBO: a drama full of hardcore sex and violence, but one with an elastic generosity, a willingness to see even the ugliest phenomena through curious eyes. For two decades, sex has been the network’s killer app—it’s what made HBO, doubly, “adult entertainment.” If you watched “The Sopranos,” you got a V.I.P. seat at…

THE KEN BURNS EFFECT Ian Parker’s Profile of Ken Burns offers a rare glimpse into the mind of a man who seems to have rewritten part of our country’s history (“Mr. America,” September 4th). Parker reports that Burns’s new documentary series, about the Vietnam War, begins with the claim that the war “was begun in good faith, by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings.” For anyone, much less a popular chronicler of American history, to make such a claim is incredibly distressing, given that there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The Pentagon Papers, released by Daniel Ellsberg, in 1971, revealed a pattern of deception and subversion by American leaders going back as far as 1945. Those documents clearly demonstrate that the people who initiated American involvement in Vietnam…

Few things are more disappointing to beer drinkers than ordering a pint of their favorite local variety and discovering that it tastes like sweaty gym socks, because it came out of a dirty tap. That will never be the case at this low-key haunt for hops nerds in Clinton Hill, where the walls are totally bare and the beer tastes much fresher than the average draught. The focus here is exclusively on beer and liquor made by New York’s growing community of distilleries and breweries, and the taps are cleaned fastidiously, to accommodate an ever-changing list of eclectic, delicious brews. The fine cocktails, such as the Trust Fund, with strawberry shrub, lime, mint, and rum from the Brooklyn outfit Owney’s, or the Bloody Mary with house-made aquavit, are seasonal. Everything…

Just after sunset, the writer-director Peter Landesman sat on a bench in Battery Park, staring at a sombre sculpture. The American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial, a bronze statue on a breakwater near the butt of Manhattan, commemorates the torpedoing of a merchant- marine vessel in the Second World War: three men are in a sinking boat and another man, already overboard, is desperately reaching up. “When the tide is low, it looks like they’re being saved,” Landesman said, “and when it’s high and it covers the guy in the water it’s, like, They’re all anonymous and they’re all going to die.” Buzzcut, grizzled, and deeply tan, he wore black jeans and a rawhide bracelet. At fifty-two, he now lives in Los Angeles. In his thirties, when he was a painter and…

Several years ago, Iris van Herpen, a Dutch fashion designer, began visiting cern, the center for particle research near Geneva. Van Herpen, who is thirtythree, does not have a background in science; she attended design school in Arnhem, a small city in the Netherlands. Yet she regularly draws inspiration from the natural sciences to create rarefied, strangely gorgeous garments, many of which employ unexpected materials and 3-D printing. On a 2014 trip to cern, she toured the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator, buried in a tunnel, which exerts a magnetic field about a hundred thousand times stronger than that of Earth. Innumerable magnets and electronic devices are linked together with color-coded wiring and brightly painted metal structures. It struck her as the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.…

Hillary Rodham Clinton, who, as she puts it, won “more votes for President than any white man” in American history, is not the first candidate to capture the popular vote but lose the election. She is the fifth. The Founders, for varying reasons, distrusted popular democracy. Southerners were wary of a challenge to slavery; others feared the emergence of a national demagogue. The Electoral College, Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Paper No. 68, would block the rise of a leader with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” An extra layer of electoral deliberation, he thought, would also insulate the American system from a hostile hack from abroad—“the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” Andrew Jackson was the first to suffer…

Notes on a Foreign Country, by Suzy Hansen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Hansen, a reporter, moved to Turkey in 2007 and found that, as she probed her subjects’ anxieties and blind spots, she was compelled to question everything she presumed to know about being American. Anchored in the work of James Baldwin, who spent several emancipatory years in Istanbul, her memoir is a piercingly honest critique of the unexamined white American life. Hansen finds a willful innocence in American assumptions, an obliviousness to history and to the burdens of imperial power. She comes to see the anti-Americanism she encounters as “a defensive crouch,” rooted in “bewilderment that an enormous force controls your life but does not know or love you.” Scale, by Geoffrey West (Penguin). Undergirding this sweeping work…

In 1982, Nike unveiled Bruce Kilgore’s design for the Air Force 1 basketball shoe with the simple slogan “Air in a box.” Hundreds of versions have since been released, but the most iconic is still white on white (pictured above, in a 2007 anniversary edition). A vintage pair will soon grace the sixth floor of moma, in “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” (opening Oct. 1), an exhibition of a hundred and eleven now classic style specimens, from a white T-shirt and a black leather biker jacket to a hijab and a shalwar kameez. THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS As You Like It John Doyle’s production of the Shakespeare comedy features Hannah Cabell, Ellen Burstyn, and André de Shields, with original music by Stephen Schwartz. (Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th…

Photoville The days when shipping containers were used only for shipping are a distant memory. The sizable metal boxes have become cherished elements of the repurposing economy, hosting radio stations, pop-up hotels, tattoo parlors, skateboard shops, and, at this free weeklong festival, photography exhibits. Held in Dumbo’s Brooklyn Bridge Plaza, Photoville, now in its sixth year, is the largest annual photography event in New York. Attendees will find an exhibit of photographs taken at Rutgers University- Newark, regarded as the most ethnically diverse campus in the nation; a study of fashion photography in New York magazine, presented by its director of photography, Jody Quon; and a spread of forgotten still images from cast-aside rolls of film, positioned as a crowdsourced public record from before the digital age. There will…

The first Nazi rally in Los Angeles took place in the summer of 1933, a few months into Adolph Hitler’s chancellorship, at a downtown biergarten nicknamed the Brown House, after the Nazi Party’s offices in Munich. It was here (now an America’s Best Value Inn) that the Jewish spymaster known as L1 sent his first undercover operatives, a husband-and-wife team of Christian German émigrés, with instructions to infiltrate the Fascist underground. “Today people are marching and saying, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ ” Steve Ross, the author of a forthcoming book, “Hitler in Los Angeles,” which documents the rise of anti-Semitic hate groups and a covert Jewish- led resistance, said the other day. “In the thirties, they’re saying, ‘Kill the Jews.’ All it takes is one crazy person. People say,…

There is such a thing as too much beauty. So the stuffed bird on the counter seemed to be saying. It was a Himalayan monal, Lophophorus impejanus, Liberace of land fowl. Its head was emerald, its neck amber and gold, its back a phosphorescent violet that flared to a sunburst at the tail. A pouf of feathers jutted from its head like a tiny bouquet. Named for Lady Mary Impey, the wife of the Chief Justice of Bengal in the late seventeen-hundreds, it had a stout, ungainly body swaddled in bright plumes as if for an audience with the maharaja. It was a turkey that wanted to be a hummingbird. Eric Charles-Donatien held it up to the light. “It’s almost too nice,” he said. “Do you have one that is…

I remember that it was fall. And that it was a weekend. And that I was sitting at home drinking apple juice and half watching a rerun of a debate program. My neighbor across the courtyard had bought a new TV and he was watching the same channel. It felt nice, somehow. That we were sitting on our respective sides of the courtyard and. I don’t know. Sharing something. I hadn’t spoken with Katja in three days. But I wasn’t worried. It was like that between us sometimes. Soon she would call and we’d meet up and everything would be back to normal. We had gone through worse things. Around lunchtime the doorbell rang. I turned off the TV. Across the courtyard, the debate program was still on. The local…

Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy. In her new story collection, “I Am the Brother of XX” (New Directions), she praises her friend Ingeborg Bachmann, one of the most celebrated Austrian writers of the twentieth century, for needing “little encouragement not to speak.” Similarly commendable is a suicidal man, in one of her novels, who lives near a church, and who makes sure that “the striking of the hour coincided with the revolver shot. That way no one heard.” Elsewhere, we meet nymphs who have stepped down from their paintings into a darkened museum; they wish to try out life. But, “having descended to earth, they realized they were ill-disposed to living. . . . They abhor all manner of…