Innholdsfortegnelse for October 9, 2017 i The New Yorker

Jon Lee Anderson (“Boundary Issues,” p. 24), a staff writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998. He is the author of several books, including “The Fall of Baghdad.” Rachel Monroe (“Something in the Air,” p. 32) has contributed to the Guardian, New York, and Texas Monthly. Peter Schjeldahl (The Art World, p. 78), the magazine’s art critic, is the author of “Let’s See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker.” Tiana Clark (Poem, p. 42) is the author of the chapbook “Equilibrium” and the forthcoming collection “I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood.” Bruce Eric Kaplan (Cover) has contributed twelve covers and more than eight hundred and fifty cartoons to the magazine since 1991. His latest book is the memoir “I Was a Child.” Jill…

The history of American art is getting a rewrite at the David Zwirner gallery on West Twentieth Street, in a transporting show of sculptures by the little-known Ruth Asawa: diaphanous wonders, crocheted out of wire, that appear to be floating in space. (They hang from the ceiling.) In her use of line as sculptural form, Asawa provides a crucial link between the mobile modernism of Alexander Calder and the gossamer Minimalism of Fred Sandback, whose yarn pieces similarly render distinctions between interior and exterior moot. She hit on her singular process in 1947, at the age of twenty-one, while on a visit to Mexico, where she saw baskets in the process of being made. That domestic association has led to her work being marginalized, as was the case with so…

Thomas Adès’s much talked-about new opera, “The Exterminating Angel,” is based on the 1962 Luis Buñuel film of the same name, which is not a movie for people who like to eat and run. It’s the story of a dinner party that never ends. After dining in a mansion, a group of rich, swankily dressed people discover that, for some mysterious reason, they are unable to leave. Attended by only a faithful butler, since all the other servants have fled, they remain there for days, penned in like sheep, growing nastier and more dishevelled. They relieve themselves in a china cabinet, drink water from a pipe they have bashed in, and roast a lamb over a campfire of smashedup furniture. In the end, one of them has a heart attack…

On a recent afternoon, the Toys R Us big-box store in Coney Island, Brooklyn, was lively. The entrance was crowded with racks of Halloween costumes. There were aisles of Lego sets, bats and balls, Minions and Minecraft, Nerf guns, baby dolls, and fairy wands. Families were dragging their children through the store. The reassuringly typical scene belied the fact that the toy retailer had been in financial distress for months, and that many of its suppliers weren’t shipping their products to the stores, for fear that they wouldn’t be paid. On September 18th, a few days before my visit, Toys R Us, five billion dollars in debt, had filed for bankruptcy protection. Some of the early postmortems in the press blamed the chain’s sorry state on Amazon and other online…

Twenty years ago, Carla Cohen fell mysteriously ill. She couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong; it felt as though some conspiracy between her mind and her body were eroding her capacity to work. Cohen, who was an entertainment executive in Los Angeles, woke up every morning feeling weak and foggy-brained, with a lowgrade fever. Her doctors couldn’t make a diagnosis, and suggested antidepressants. “I said, ‘I’m not depressed!’ They just told me to go home and rest.” Disillusioned by Western medicine, Cohen began exploring other options. She studied with multiple healers and shamans; she read books with titles like “The Body Toxic” and pursued a massage-therapy license. As part of her training, she took a class on a massage technique called “raindrop therapy,” which incorporates essential oils— aromatic…

For years, Rudy North woke up at 9 a.m. and read the Las Vegas Review-Journal while eating a piece of toast. Then he read a novel— he liked James Patterson and Clive Cussler— or, if he was feeling more ambitious, Freud. On scraps of paper and legal notepads, he jotted down thoughts sparked by his reading. “Deep below the rational part of our brain is an underground ocean where strange things swim,” he wrote on one notepad. On another, “Life: the longer it cooks, the better it tastes.” Rennie, his wife of fifty-seven years, was slower to rise. She was recovering from lymphoma and suffered from neuropathy so severe that her legs felt like sausages. Each morning, she spent nearly an hour in the bathroom applying makeup and lotions, the…

Chester B. Himes, by Lawrence P. Jackson (Norton). This biography of Himes—novelist, Ohio Penitentiary inmate, reformed Communist, and privileged child of the black middle class— maps his punishing road to success and the experiences that shaped his distinctive blunt perspectives on race, class, and sex. Jailed at nineteen, after a botched robbery, Himes found fame in 1934, with short stories about prison life. But his career faltered after his release, as publishers rejected his work for its violence, homosexual content, and unvarnished style. Himes was forced to take odd jobs, and was dogged by debt and drink. Not until he settled in Europe, in his forties, did he achieve stability, writing the hardboiled detective novels for which he is chiefly remembered. Saving Charlotte, by Pia de Jong, translated from…

WHAT HAPPEND? I was disappointed that David Rem nick’s article about Hillary Clinton didn’t discuss the role of redistricting and voter suppression in the 2016 election (“Still Here,” September 25th). The impact of the Republican Redmap redistricting plan has been well documented. Since 2010, as Republicans have gained more and more governorships and seats in state legislatures, they have deliberately made it harder for minorities, young people, and women to vote. Suppression measures include strict voter-I.D. laws, new residency requirements, ending early voting, restricting third-party voter-registration drives, and reducing the number of polling places in Democratic strongholds. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court, in 2013, unleashed another wave of efforts to suppress voting. These measures are usually justified by bogus claims of voter fraud.…

Fresh Kills gives an initial impression of austerity: the long, narrow room has walls of rich wood with visible knots and nails, a low swoop of a ceiling, booths with uncushioned seats, and, in the front, low little tables with curiously unmoving leather tablecloths. The name brings to mind the infamous landfill, lately being transformed into a city park, on Staten Island; at the end of the bar, a dour portrait of a man in a tricorne hat glowers at would-be revellers. But the vibrant menu, and the dizzying array of liquors—from Amaro CioCiaro to sweet vermouth— puts to rest any hint of asperity. On a recent Sunday, Williamsburg denizens sipped at citrusy cocktails chilled with fashionably sculpted blocks of ice; two women in draped gray blouses kept up a…

There’s no place like an island, and a barrier island especially, for seasonal migrants. That’s certainly true of Fire Island. The thirty-two-mile-long sandbar off Long Island may be best known for little red wagons, houses on stilts, and gay beach parties, but it is also beloved by lepidopterists. Every September and October, the island’s dunes become a way station for tens of thousands of monarch butterflies, who stop there on their three-thousand-mile journey from Canada to a mountaintop in Michoacán, near Mexico City, where they go to reproduce and die. Ellen Federico, who is known to locals as “the butterfly lady,” grew up across the water, in West Islip. She works as an event planner in Manhattan, but she spends her free time in a clapboard cottage that her father…

A few months ago, at Mexico City’s Auditorio Nacional, workers were cleaning up after a triumphant viewing of “L’Elisir d’Amore,” broadcast live from the Metropolitan Opera House. Outside, in the bright sunshine, Reforma Avenue was closed to traffic for a protest. Angry people gathered on the theatre steps, waving Mexican flags and hoisting effigies of Donald Trump, and then began marching toward El Ángel, a century-old monument to Mexican independence. One protester carried a placard that read “Mexico Deserves Respect.” Another held a poster of Trump with a Hitler mustache and the tagline “Twitler.” A local activist known as Juanito carried a large American flag bearing an unflattering image of Trump and the message “Enough! Gringo Racist, Full of Shit Trump, Son of Satan, You’re a Danger to the World.”…

In Rachel Maddow’s office at the MSNBC studios, there is a rack on which hang about thirty elegant women’s jackets in various shades of black and gray. On almost every week night of the year, at around one minute to nine, Maddow yanks one of these jackets off its hanger, puts it on without looking into a mirror, and races to the studio from which she broadcasts her hour-long TV show, sitting at a sleek desk with a glass top. As soon as the show is over, she sheds the jacket and gets back into the sweater or T-shirt she was wearing before. She does not have to shed the lower half of her costume, the skirt and high heels that we don’t see because of the desk in front…

The dad scrolled through his daughter’s Instagram account, looking for clues. The most recent post was a photograph of an icecream cone, extravagantly large, held up against a white wall by a disembodied hand. Peppermint stick, or strawberry. The mound was starting to melt, a trickle of it inching down the cone and drawing dangerously close to the thumb. His daughter’s. The next photo was a closeup of a shopwindow. Inside the window glowed a pink neon sign spelling out the word “warm” in lowercase letters. The glowing word took up most of the frame: it was impossible to tell what sort of store it was. Another closeup: an eraser-colored rose, its petals halfway unfurled. A panorama: the sky at sunset. A shot of her dog, Bob, curled up like…

This summer, the Times reported that, under President Trump, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice had acquired a new focus. The division, which was founded in 1957, during the fight over school integration, would now be going after colleges for discriminating against white applicants. The article cited an internal memo soliciting staff lawyers for “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.” But the memo did not explicitly mention white students, and a spokesperson for the Justice Department charged that the story was inaccurate. She said that the request for lawyers related specifically to a complaint from 2015, when a number of groups charged that Harvard was discriminating against Asian-American students. In one sense, Asian-Americans were overrepresented at Harvard: in 2013,…

Gay life was lived entirely on the margins back when Harvey Fierstein wrote and starred in “Torch Song Trilogy,” about a drag queen searching for love and his own kind of family. The plays premièred at La Mama in the late seventies, then became a Broadway show and a movie, making Fierstein an unlikely ambassador to mainstream America. All these years later, they’re a period piece. A condensed version, called “Torch Song,” is in previews at Second Stage, starring the irrepressible charmer Michael Urie. NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Best Coast Well before the Times caught on to women in rock (its recent roundup of front women in bands like Speedy Ortiz and…

New York Comic Con This convention has grown from a geek refuge to an all but mandatory celebration of the best in upcoming television, film, books, and comics—well, it’s still a geek refuge, but now there are a lot more geeks. Fans and enthusiasts will enjoy unprecedented access to stars from series such as “Archer” and “Mythbusters”; panels and workshops with the directors, producers, and industry insiders who keep the entertainment machine churning; and appearances by Kevin Conroy, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Mark Hamill, Rosario Dawson, and many others. The annual display of inventive costumes promises to be more outlandish than ever with the return of the N.Y.C.C. Eastern Championships of Cosplay on Oct. 7, where elaborate props and inventive concepts reign and trademarks are an afterthought. (Javits Center, Madison…

Two nights after the Emmy Awards, Keli Lee, the managing director of international content and talent at ABC Studios International, faced a dilemma. She had to choose between accepting an award in Hollywood for helping to cast people of color in major television roles—Sofia Vergara in “Modern Family,” Kerry Washington in “Scandal,” Viola Davis in “How to Get Away with Murder”—and flying to London to make a presentation to executives of the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC. Standing outside the beige ballroom of the Loews Hollywood Hotel, an hour before the Adcolor Awards ceremony, Lee smoothed her hair and said, “The hurricane cancelled the flight I was supposed to take tomorrow morning, so I’m flying out tonight.” She would have to head to LAX just as the ceremony was…

Herewith, some mindfulness exercises for the thirty minutes between the launch of a nuclear ballistic missile and its detonation in your city: Focus on Your Breath No matter how you choose to spend the last thirty minutes of your life, one thing’s for certain—you’re going to be breathing while doing it. Slowly breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, if you are not weeping. You can count your breaths if that helps you to relax, but it may increase tension if you find yourself counting down. Break from Technology It might be tempting to check social media to see how world leaders, celebrities, and comedians are interpreting the coming apocalypse. Or perhaps checking your e-mail has simply become a “break” activity for you. Practice putting down the…

is hot chicken on sopping white bread with green pickle chips—sour to balance prismatic, flame-colored spice for white people. Or, rather, white people now curate hot chicken for $16 and two farm-to-table sides, or maybe they’ve hungered fried heat and grease from black food and milk—but didn’t want to drive to Jefferson Street or don’t know about the history of Jefferson Street or Hell’s Half Acre, north of downtown. Where freed slaves lived on the fringe of Union camps, built their own new country. Where its golden age brought the Silver Streak, a ballroom bringing Basie, Ellington, and Fitzgerald. First-run movies at the Ritz and no one had to climb to the balcony. 1968, they built the interstate. I-40 bisected the black community like a tourniquet of concrete. There were…

In 1969, Cary Raditz, a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina, quit his job in advertising and headed to Europe to bum around with his girlfriend. They ended up in Matala, on the island of Crete, where they found a bunch of hippies living in a network of caves. Raditz soon decamped for Afghanistan in a VW bus; when he returned, his girlfriend had bailed, but there was word that a new girl was headed to Matala. Raditz didn’t know much about Joni Mitchell, but “there was buzz” among the hippies, and, soon enough, he found himself watching the sunset with one of the most extraordinary people alive. Raditz and Mitchell shared a cave for a couple of months, travelled around Greece together, and parted ways. That’s where…

In an early episode of “One Mississippi,” the dark comedy that Tig Notaro co-created with Diablo Cody, Notaro, the show’s star, tugs her shirt off and turns away from a mirror. Then, just before the final credits, she undresses again. This time, she doesn’t turn away. Instead, she lets us look at her as she looks at herself, a wiry butch woman of around forty, wearing jeans, her chest scarred from a double mastectomy, her eyes glittering with something that can’t be reduced to amusement. The moment felt like a thesis statement: it’s better to look directly at the damage. The semi-autobiographical “One Mississippi” mines what Notaro has described as her “worst year ever.” It’s about a cancer survivor, Tig Bavaro, who flies home to Bay St. Lucille, Mississippi, as…