Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2, 2017 i The New Yorker

Hannah Beech (“Fallen Idol,” p. 22), the Southeast Asia bureau chief for the Times, is currently based in Bangkok. Kadir Nelson (Cover) is an artist whose work has received much recognition, including two Caldecott Honors and a Sibert Medal. He is the illustrator of “Blue Sky White Stars,” which came out in June. Jia Tolentino (“A Woman’s Work,” p. 38) is a staff writer. Previously, she was the deputy editor at Jezebel and a contributing editor at the Hairpin. Alex Ross (“Cather People,” p. 32), a staff writer, is the author of “The Rest Is Noise” and “Listen to This.” Didi Jackson (Poem, p. 42) teaches at the University of Vermont. Her first collection of poems, “Killing Jar,” is forthcoming. Minzayar Oo (Photograph, p. 22) is a photojournalist from…

In the sauna, the body asserts itself: essential, unavoidable, a fleshy fact of being. In the Finnish tradition—the original, Finns will argue—you’re naked, sitting near a wood-burning stove in two-hundred-degree heat, in a structure the size of a garden shed, pouring water on hot stones for a scalding hit of löyly, sauna steam, like some heat-seeking junkie. Stay long enough, and the mind may clear, the body may melt; then löyly! Enlightenment. Risto Sivula, a Finn from north of Helsinki who now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, has, for the past eight months, been driving around the country with a portable sauna attached to the back of his pickup truck. “We have about fourteen thousand miles on it so far, and about nine hundred and fifty people have taken a…

Lillian Ross came of age at a time when it was impolite to ask a lady how old she was, and—quaintly, miraculously— that practice, as it pertained to her, was observed well into the era of full disclosure. For those of us who joined the magazine in the later years of her tenure—which is to say, almost all of us—she was a colleague of indeterminate seniority. It was not until Lillian witnessed the way in which Nelson Mandela was fêted upon his ninety-fifth birthday, in 2013, that she realized that to have reached her advanced age, with her accomplishments, was, in a way, an accomplishment of its own. Thereafter, her age became an open point of pride: she turned ninety-nine in June. Lillian joined The New Yorker in 1945, and…

A few years ago, Marisa Woytek, a lance corporal in the Marines, decided to help other women deal with a problem she’d already dealt with several times herself. She was going to get their photographs removed from private Facebook groups like Just the Tip of the Spear. (The name refers both to a ploy to coax a woman into having sex and to a military tactic.) Woytek didn’t consider herself a feminist, but she was sick of military sexism. The Marine Corps is the only branch of the armed services that still segregates basic training by gender; in 2014, nearly eight per cent of female marines reported having been sexually assaulted within the previous year. On Just the Tip of the Spear’s Facebook page, underneath the screenshot of a uniformed…

It was winter, which meant that a pelvic frost had fallen across the land. Or maybe just across Roy and Ida’s apartment. And, in truth, the frost had long since matured into a kind of bodily aloofness, just shy of visible flinching, when they passed each other in the halls, or when they co-slept in the intimacyfree bed they’d splurged on. Why not have the best sleep of your life next to the dried-out sack of daddy you’ve long taken for granted, whose wand no longer glows and quivers for you and for whom you no longer quietly melt? You had to track the erotic cooling back into summer, or the prior spring, and, well, didn’t the seasons and the years just dog-pile one another when you tried to solve…

The Lowells of Massachusetts, by Nina Sankovitch (St. Martin’s Press). In 1639, Percival Lowle emigrated from England to Massachusetts, giving rise to a dynasty of influential Americans, especially poets, including Robert Lowell. First distinguishing themselves in professions key to the nascent colonies— law, politics, the ministry—the family veered toward the arts. In the Romantic era, James Russell wrote of being racked with grief over the death of his wife, who was “half of earth and more than half of heaven.” Amy, who, in 1926, posthumously won a Pulitzer Prize, challenged audiences at her readings by saying, “Clap or hiss, I don’t care which, but do something!” Sankovitch relies too heavily on the imagined thoughts of her subjects, but her skillful blending of context and detail makes the vicissitudes of…

Nearly twenty years ago now, the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks created two works for the stage that remain masterpieces of the form. The first, “In the Blood,” had its première at the Public, in New York, in 1999; “Fucking A” was staged by Parks at a smaller venue, in Houston, in 2000. The plays, which are now in revival under the joint title “The Red Letter Plays” (at the Signature), present different landscapes and story lines, but they have a number of technical similarities— including the use of monologues, projected titles, and songs—and both examine a woman’s dream of motherhood and the challenges of mothering without societal support or faith. The plays’ protagonists, both named Hester, bend low or stand tall in a political climate in which the powerless are given…

LIFE AFTER DEATH I was grateful to read Alice Gregory’s essay about people who have inadvertently killed others (“Accidental Killers,” September 18th). In 1967, on a family vacation in Florida, my father drowned while saving my life. I was fourteen. My mother raised me as best she could, but she never attempted to help me deal with the emotional scars from the incident. I have always felt that I didn’t deserve the good things that have come to me in life; for a long time, I hoped that I would die, like my father, at the age of forty-six, so that I would get no more out of life than he did. Fifty years after the accident, I still feel burdened by tremendous guilt and shame. Years ago, I…

Oscar Wilde, the author of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and infinite witticisms seemingly ready-made for Facebook—“ Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes”—is a revered cultural icon. Perhaps for the first time, though, he’s being revered in NoMad, where a recently opened bar is named after him. The other night, visitors were greeted by Wilde himself—he sits on a bench outside, dressed in a typically lavish bronze cast. Inspired by the aesthete, the bar’s extravagance explodes inside, with a maze of marble objects bearing his quotations, intricate porcelain floor inlays, and an antique piano converted into shelves. A second bronze Wilde leans on the bar, an open hand anticipating a drink and an Instagram post. A server described the intense décor as…

About two and a half years ago, Miriam Sicherman’s fourth graders began fishing for treasure beneath the wood-plank floor of their classroom closet, at the Children’s Workshop School, on East Twelfth Street. First, they worked surgically, using pencils, chopstick style, to tweeze out objects that they spied through gaps in the boards. Then they used coat hangers as hooks. Now teachers have pried up a number of the planks, creating a full-on dig site, with strata dating back to the building’s construction, in 1913. During free periods, the kids can choose between playing dominoes, mucking around in the compost bin, and kneeling beside the opening to sift through the jumble of relics that have fallen out of generations of jacket pockets and backpacks. They’ve unearthed a cultural fossil record spanning…

Sometimes, after the last snow in May, after the red-winged blackbird clutches the spine of the cattail, after he leans forward, droops his wings, and flashes his epaulets, I imagine shouldering the yellow center lines of the road. Near the recently thawed pond, within a long channel of construction, a man holding a sign. One side says slow, the other stop. Joy and sorrow always run like parallel lines. Inside the house, when I leave the lights on, small white moths come like a collection of worship, pulsing their wings up and up the window, as if in a frenzied trancelike dance, some dervishes, others the penitent on shaky knees. The first few years after my husband’s suicide I wanted to be the penitent. I thought I deserved all the…

Privilege is a man taking up two seats on the train. Now four, putting his feet up. It is also my not having to describe his leather loafers for you to fill in the white space of his body straight and able and also my body’s proximity to his, socially and physically, on this train he is taking from the Hamptons and I am taking from the Pines. And how my finding him handsome keeps him handsome, that if he were to look my way, his would be worth more to me than any other gaze. What I’m trying to say is proximity is the problem with White Gays. I’m one of them, so I can say that. Proximity, because it promises the possibility of arriving where all the room…

The American poet Danez Smith’s third book, “Don’t Call Us Dead” (Graywolf ), opens with “summer, somewhere,” a stunning elegy that contains a tense refusal: somewhere, a sun. below, boys brown as rye play the dozens & ball, jump in the air & stay there. boys become new moons, gum-dark on all sides, beg bruise -blue water to fly, at least tide, at least spit back a father or two. i won’t get started. history is what it is. it knows what it did. Starting without having “started,” Smith’s lines suggest the discourses that they suspend. History “is what it is,” since it can’t be changed. Even though “it knows what it did,” it’s like a stubborn child: nobody can coax it into confessing. These phrases cut in all kinds…

Centuries before the Internet began worshipping LOLcats, the ancient Egyptians venerated felines as gods, burying their preserved remains in cat-shaped coffins (like the two pictured here, which may date as far back as 664 B.C.E.). Other cat mummies were simply pets—like their dog, monkey, and gazelle counterparts—joining their owners in the forever home of the afterlife. The Brooklyn Museum highlights these rarely seen treasures in “Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt,” opening Sept. 29. NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Chance the Rapper Four summers ago, when this quirky young Chicago m.c. (né Chancelor Bennett) played a small venue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, his energy was infectious, and, as he robo-danced like the second…

Parade of Boats Since 2000, the Waterfront Alliance, a nonprofit organization, has taken on the noble task of restoring and maintaining New York and New Jersey’s various waterways, and also hosting events along shoreline parks and docks. The Parade of Boats, now in its tenth year, will showcase a fleet of historic ships, yachts, sailboats, and fireboats, in various stages of restoration but all fully functional, that together unfurl New York’s rich port legacy. A dinner following the parade will honor Donald Capoccia, of the development firm BFC Partners, and Peter Madonia, of the Rockefeller Foundation, among others, and a silent auction will help raise funds for the city’s piers and shores. (Pier 61, Chelsea Piers at W. 21st St. waterfrontalliance.org. Oct. 3 at 6.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES The…

Demetri Martin is a comedian whose jokes often take the form of oneliners (“Where my verb at?”) or rudimentary drawings. “Constraints are big for me,” he said recently, over dinner at Bar Pitti, in the West Village. “How simple can I make this and still get a laugh?” He reached into a backpack and took out a spiral-bound notebook— one of two he’d brought on the plane from Los Angeles, where he lives. It was labelled “H-56,” in accordance with an idiosyncratic filing system. “Most of this is just nothing,” he said, flipping through pages. In one drawing, a judge holds up a scorecard while a diver stands on a diving board. Caption: “Psychic judge.” Another drawing showed two beverage coolers—one plain (“Cooler”), the other decorated with lightning bolts (“Cooler…

In Webster County, Nebraska, the prairie rolls in waves, following the contours of a tableland gouged by rivers and creeks. At the southern edge of the county, a few hundred feet north of the Nebraska-Kansas border, is a sixhundred- acre parcel of land called the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie. Cather spent much of her childhood in Red Cloud, six miles up the road, and for many people who love her writing, and perhaps for some who don’t, the Cather Prairie is one of the loveliest places on earth. You park at the top of a hill and follow a path down to a gulch, where a creek widens into a pond. At the bottom, you no longer see traces of modern civilization, though you can hear trucks on Route 281…

Is health care a right? The United States remains the only developed country in the world unable to come to agreement on an answer. Earlier this year, I was visiting Athens, Ohio, the town in the Appalachian foothills where I grew up. The battle over whether to repeal, replace, or repair the Affordable Care Act raged then, as it continues to rage now. So I began asking people whether they thought that health care was a right. The responses were always interesting. A friend had put me in touch with a forty-seven-year-old woman I’ll call Maria Dutton. She lived with her husband, Joe, down a long gravel driveway that snaked into the woods off a rural road. “You may feel like you are in the movie ‘Deliverance,’ ” she said,…

It is one of the more improbably dramatic moments in American letters. Henry Adams, as he reports in his memoirs, was breathlessly waiting in the Capitol Building in 1869 for word of the Cabinet appointments that would be made by the newly elected President Grant. Foreseeing a renaissance of civic virtue after the sufferings of the Civil War, Adams— whose great-grandfather was the second President, and whose father had been Lincoln’s Ambassador to Great Britain—expected his reformist vision and his intellectual cohort to be brought forward to rule, as the Alexander Hamilton–Thomas Jefferson generation had been after the triumph of the Revolution. Instead, he heard, one after another, the names of mere time-servers and hack politicians and unknown cronies of the General. Crushed (at least in memory), he felt that…

The hundredth anniversary of the death of Auguste Rodin prompts “Rodin at the Met,” a show of the Metropolitan Museum’s considerable holdings in works by the artist. But no occasion is really needed. Rodin is always with us, the greatest sculptor of the nearly four centuries since Gian Lorenzo Bernini perfected and exalted the Baroque. Matter made flesh and returned to matter, with clay cast in bronze: Rodin. (There are carvings in the show, too, but made by assistants whom he directed. He couldn’t feel stone.) You know he’s great even when you’re not in a mood for him. Are “The Thinker” and “The Kiss” kind of corny? I’ve felt that. Does the grandiosity of “Monument to Balzac” (for which there is a small study in the show) overbear? Sure.…