Innholdsfortegnelse for October 16, 2017 i The New Yorker

Alexandra Schwartz ( “Watch Closely,” p. 56), a staff writer, received the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing for 2014. David Plunkert (Cover) is an illustrator and a graphic designer. Tessa Hadley (Fiction, p. 66) has been publishing short stories in the magazine since 2002. Her latest book is “Bad Dreams and Other Stories.” Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 21), a staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment. She also has a column on newyorker.com. Will Stephen (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 33), a writer for “Saturday Night Live,” recently appeared in the film “The Incredible Jessica James.” Claudia Roth Pierpont (Books, p. 87) is a longtime staff writer and the author of “American Rhapsody: Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars, and One Great Building,” which…

On a recent Monday night in the First Arrondissement of Paris, a crowd of cowboys, Native Americans, Uncle Sams, and federal agents packed the terrace of a restaurant. They drank Bloody Marys and draft beers. They ate popcorn and wore buckskin vests— this was a faintly ironic theme party, thrown by the editors of America, a new magazine that, since launching in the spring, has sold nearly a hundred thousand copies in France. The magazine’s tagline is “America like you’ve never read it.” A trimonthly that will be published until the fall of 2020, America was conceived to help French readers make sense of its namesake in the age of Trump. The editorial mix comprises long interviews with American novelists (Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, James Ellroy); essays and excerpts in…

This summer, after a loose coalition of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Confederate apologists announced that they would hold a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, promotional flyers began to circulate on the Internet. The flyers included a list of names: the self-proclaimed thought leaders who planned to speak at the rally, arranged, Coachella-like, in order of prominence. At the top of the list was Richard Spencer, who coined the term “alt-right” almost a decade ago, and who has been so successful at making himself the poster boy of the movement that he was once sucker punched while standing on a sidewalk in Washington, D.C. Farther down the list were Jason Kessler, the Charlottesville resident who organized the rally; Matthew Heimbach, who has been called “the affable, youthful face of hate in America”;…

One afternoon in late September, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called a meeting of the six countries that came together in 2015 to limit Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. They gathered on the main floor of the United Nations headquarters, in Manhattan, in the “consultations room,” a private chamber where diplomats can speak confidentially before stepping onto the floor of the Security Council. Tillerson, who was the head of ExxonMobil before becoming President Trump’s top diplomat, had not previously met Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, who negotiated the agreement with the Obama Administration. Tillerson’s career had been spent making deals for oil, and his views on such topics as Iran’s nuclear weapons were little known. Even more obscure were his skills as a diplomat. Sitting at a U-shaped table, Tillerson let the…

As I’m walking on West Cliff Drive, a man runs toward me pushing one of those jogging strollers with shock absorbers so the baby can keep sleeping, which this baby is. I can just get a glimpse of its almost translucent eyelids. The father is young, a jungle of indigo and carnelian tattooed from knuckle to jaw, leafy vines and blossoms, saints and symbols. Thick wooden plugs pierce his lobes and his sunglasses testify to the radiance haloed around him. I’m so jealous. As I often am. It’s a kind of obsession. I want him to have been my child’s father. I want to have married a man who wanted to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much that he marked it up like a…

Goodbye, Vitamin, by Rachel Khong (Henry Holt). “More and more, I get this feeling I don’t know a thing,” says the narrator of this novel, who, after a terrible breakup, moves in with her parents to help care for her Alzheimer’s-stricken father. Despite the sad premise, the novel unfolds in quirky, diary-like bursts. Khong, a food writer and editor, dots the narrative with beautiful quotidian details, often gustatory: jellyfish lovingly prepared to stave off dementia, secrets told over a shared pomegranate. The novel’s opening sentence—“ Tonight a man found Dad’s pants in a tree lit with Christmas lights”—encapsulates much of its magical, visual approach, which is micro in detail but universal in scope. Out in the Open, by Jesús Carrasco, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (Riverhead).…

The Metropolitan Opera opened the season with its hundred-and-fiftyseventh performance of Bellini’s “Norma.” The New York Philharmonic began with its hundred-and-nineteenth rendition of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. This is the safe course that many performing-arts groups are choosing in precarious times: the eternal return to the world that was. Both works are masterpieces that deserve to be heard repeatedly. Yet the implicit message is reactionary. As the nation contends with its racist and misogynist demons, New York’s leading musical institutions give us canonical pieces by white males, conducted by white males, directed by white males. The Met’s productions this season feature no female composers, no female conductors, and no women directing new stagings. The Philharmonic’s main schedule, at David Geffen Hall, has one female conductor and one female composer. The fact…

TRUMP VS. KIM JONG UN I directed the Iraq Survey Group, which detailed the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and, more important, the internal dynamics of Saddam Hussein’s regime (“On the Brink,” September 18th). Reading Evan Osnos’s report about Kim Jong Un and North Korea, I noticed some striking parallels. Saddam made assumptions about President Bush and Washington that were wildly off the mark; he did not know what motivated Washington, and Washington did not know what motivated him. So it is now with Kim and Donald Trump. Osnos notes that there is no U.S. Embassy in Pyongyang. Similarly, the U.S. closed its Embassy in Iraq in 1990 and reopened it only after the invasion of 2003. This dramatically limited the number of Americans who had…

93 Scott Ave., Brooklyn (401-481-9205) The mead served at this thoughtful Bushwick cocktail bar is dry and floral, more like natural wine than the cloyingly sweet stuff one imagines swilling in a land of dungeons and dragons. This is not to say that you’ll want for magic. The co-owners Raphael Lyon and Arley Marks are devoted herbalists who pick many of their mead ingredients upstate, and there’s something indelibly witchy about drinking rounds of Floralia (made with juniper, lavender, and marjoram) from delicate Nick and Nora glasses at a bar festooned with the spoils of their frequent foraging trips, such as a branch of downy pink sumac berries. A window behind the bar looks onto the facility where Lyon and Marks produce and age their wines, in racks of ponderous…

When Ben Schatz was in his first year at Harvard Law School, in the mid-eighties, he conducted an experiment. He sent his résumé, seeking a summer job, to hundreds of law firms. On half of the résumés, Schatz listed his credentials as a leader in the gayrights movement at Harvard College, and on the other half he omitted his associations with gay causes. He received responses to seventeen per cent of the non-gay-affiliated résumés, and to just three per cent of the ones that had made it clear that he was gay. “That was the kind of thing that I went to law school to do,” Schatz said the other day. “I wanted to be Martin Luther Queen.” After law school, Schatz moved to San Francisco to do legal work…

Slick wood and slick hair. Striped suits, chairs, Fiji bottles. I love cool meetings. My name is Donald Trump, Jr., the son of President Trump. K, bitch? A President’s boy. Maybe one day, President? No. I’m apprentice. “You’re fired,” I told them. They left. My Secret Service. In peace, I collude. Buildings are the best, With elevators, and glass. So cool. So cool. Chyeah. On Election Night, Dad hugged Jared. I was pissed. No hug since ’02. The White House. It’s real. I thought it exploded in “Independence Day.” A crowd cheers for Dad. My eyes close. I pretend it’s For my cute hairdo. My dad is so smart. “Rocket Man.” “Little Marco.” I’m just “Don.” That’s fine. America First. Hell, yes. Badass. So baller. I have five children. “Kim…

You’ve come of age in the age of migrations. The board tilts, and the bodies roll west. Fanaticism’s come back into fashion, come back with a vengeance. In this new country, there’s no gravitas, no grace. The ancient Chevys migrate west and plunge like maddened buffalo into a canyon. Where the oil-slick geese go, no one knows—maybe the Holland Tunnel because they take it for the monstrous turbine promised them in prophecy. I brought you to this world, and I do not regret it. The sky’s still blue, for now. I want to show you an island where the trees are older than redwoods ever since Prospero turned them into books. You’ll meet him when you’re ready. For now, though, study this list of endangered species: it’s incomplete, of course,…

The child was nine years old and couldn’t fasten her own buttons. Valerie knelt in front of her on the carpet in the spare room as Robyn held out first one cuff and then the other without a word, then turned around to present the back of her dress, where a long row of spherical chocolatebrown buttons was unfastened over a grubby white petticoat edged with lace. Her tiny, bony shoulder blades flickered with repressed movement. And although every night since Robyn had arrived, a week ago, Valerie had encouraged her into a bath foamed up with bubbles, she still smelled of something furtive—musty spice from the back of a cupboard. The smell had to be in her dress, which Valerie didn’t dare wash because it looked as though it…

P. T. Barnum’s first exhibit was a blind, crooked, and shrivelled old woman, a hundred and sixty-one years old, and his second was her dissection, conducted in an amphitheatre on Broadway in front of more than a thousand New Yorkers, who paid fifty cents each to see her get cut up. Her name was Joice Heth, and the story she’d told, long before she met Barnum, was that she was born in Madagascar in 1674, kidnapped into slavery in 1689, and transported to Virginia, where she became the property of George Washington’s father. She said she’d been in the room when George Washington was born—“little Georgy,” she called him—and that she’d been the first to swaddle him. “In fact,” she said, “I raised him.” Was she alive or was she…

One of the great gifts the Met Breuer has given New York has been spotlighting modernists beyond art history’s Eurocentric canon. The latest is Raghubir Singh, the Indian photographer—and color pioneer—who died in 1999, at the age of fifty-six. Born in Jaipur, he lived in Hong Kong, Paris, and London, but India remained his inexhaustible muse. On Oct. 11, the museum opens the three-decade survey “Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs,” which includes “Monsoon Rains, Monghyr, Bihar, 1967,” above. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera Bartlett Sher’s production of Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” often feels disjointed in performance. But in the current revival it coalesces around Vittorio Grigolo’s thrilling performance in the title role, with each act emerging as a fever dream of frustrated longing. The bass Laurent Naouri…

Open House New York Historic residential and commercial buildings will be opened to the public during this annual series of architecture tours and talks. Attendees will enjoy access to more than two hundred and seventy-five sites across the city, along with lectures from designers and developers. Highlights include the African Burial Ground National Monument, in Tribeca; the restored Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, in the financial district; the rooftop farms of Brooklyn Grange; a trip to the top of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, in the Bronx; the Met Breuer, on the Upper East Side; and the Kings County Distillery, the city’s oldest operating whiskey distiller. (Various locations. ohny.org. Oct. 14-15.) READINGS AND TALKS Brooklyn Brainery This crowd-sourced classroom offers talks and…

A few years ago, after looking at half a dozen apartments all over Moscow, I visited a rental in a vast building across the river from the Kremlin, known as the House on the Embankment. In 1931, when tenants began to move in, it was the largest residential complex in Europe, a self-contained world the size of several city blocks. The House of Government, as it was initially called, was a mishmash of the blocky geometry of Constructivism and the soaring pomposity of neoclassicism, and had five hundred and five apartments that housed the Soviet Union’s governing élite—commissars and Red Army generals and vaunted Marxist scholars. On the day that I visited, the apartment’s owner, Marina, a cheerful woman in her forties who works for a multinational oil-and-gas company, met…

Writing four novels is no guarantee that you’ll complete a fifth. Readers may love you; critics may praise you; you might win a big prize. None of it helps when you find yourself back at the beginning, confronted with your own unredeemable prose, convinced, as Jennifer Egan was not so long ago, that you’ll never produce a decent chapter again. “The book was bad,” she told me recently. “I did one draft that was absolutely unspeakable. But that’s normal.” Then she wrote a second draft, and despaired. “I thought very, very seriously about abandoning it, because I just thought, Hell—the distance between this and something anybody is ever going to want to read is too great for me to span.” The book was “Manhattan Beach,” Egan’s latest novel—her fifth, if…

In addition to all of your other identities— urban, rural, Christian, atheist, African-American, first-generation, introverted, immunocompromised, cyclist, gun owner, gardener, middle child, whatever panoply of nouns and adjectives and allegiances describes you—you are also this: a gnathostome. A gnathostome is a creature with a jaw, a characteristic you share with all other human beings, plus macaques, zebras, great white sharks, minks, skinks, boa constrictors, and some sixty thousand other species. I learned this fact about myself (and you) from one of the more unlikely books I lately committed to reading: “Teeth: A Very Short Introduction,” by Peter S. Ungar, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. Like its subject, “Teeth” is both a freestanding entity and part of a larger body: the Very Short Introduction series, a project…

In Renaissance Florence, a number of designated boxes placed throughout the city allowed citizens to make anonymous denunciations of various moral crimes—in 1461, for example, the artist-monk Filippo Lippi was accused of fathering a child with a nun. But the crime that the government was really trying to control was sodomy, so notoriously prevalent that contemporary German slang for a homosexual was Florenzer. The common nature of the offense did not erase the threat of serious consequences. In 1476, Leonardo da Vinci, on the verge of his twenty-fourth birthday, was named as one of four men who had practiced “such wickedness” with the seventeenyear- old apprentice of a local goldsmith. There is little doubt that Leonardo was arrested. Although any time he may have spent in jail was brief, and…