Innholdsfortegnelse for October 23, 2017 i The New Yorker

Sheelah Kolhatkar (“Dark Factory,” p. 70), a staff writer, published her first book, “Black Edge,” this year. Jonathan Franzen (“Under Construction,” p. 50), a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, is the author of, most recently, the novel “Purity.” Jiayang Fan (The Talk of the Town, p. 38) became a staff writer in 2016. Her reporting on China, American politics, and culture has appeared in the magazine and on newyorker.com since 2010. Nicholas Lemann (Books, p. 93), a staff writer, is a professor at Columbia Journalism School. Jerome Groopman (Books, p. 88) is the Recanati Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Marsha de la O (Poem, p. 60) most recently published the poetry collection “Antidote for Night.” Ronan…

Diwali on the Hudson In the early aughts, a snaking loop of syncopated handclaps and kick drums from Jamaican dancehall swept into mainstream radio through the back door. Tropical hits like Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” and Rihanna’s “Pon di Replay” were anchored by a drum sample affectionately referred to as the “Diwali riddim,” for its Indian- dancemusic influence. Diwali, the ancient Hindu autumn holiday also known as the festival of lights, is celebrated in India, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, New Zealand, and, now for the fourth year, New York City’s waterfront. Karsh Kale and DJ Suhel will provide the soundtrack for an evening of food, drinks, performance, and fireworks, featuring a pop-up shop in collaboration with the Mumbai designer label Payal Singhal. Proceeds from the event will go to…

The Chinese artist Xu Tan inspected the freshly unpacked pieces of his art work—scrupulously labelled and cordoned off with yellow barrier tape—and, hands on hips, exclaimed, “Well, this sort of looks like a crime scene, doesn’t it?” Xu, who is sixty, wore a “Palm Springs Bridge Winner of the Year” T-shirt (the real winner was his brother-in-law, who lives in Orange County) and clunky brown shoes. He’d arrived in New York two days earlier, from Shenzhen, to take part in the exhibition “Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World,” on view at the Guggenheim until January. Nearly a hundred and fifty works were being set up throughout the museum. Xu was contributing an installation called “Made in China,” which he’d first shown two decades earlier: a recreation of…

My girlfriend, V, and I were finishing college, with a summer to burn before the next thing, and New York beckoned. V went to the city and signed a three-month lease on the apartment of a Columbia student, Bobby Atkins, who may have been the son of the creator of the Atkins Diet, or maybe we just enjoyed imagining that he was. His place, on the southwest corner of 110th Street and Amsterdam, had two small bedrooms and was irremediably filthy. We arrived in June with a fifth of Tanqueray, a carton of Marlboro Lights, and Marcella Hazan’s Italian cookbook. Someone had left behind a spineless black plushtoy panther, manufactured in Korea, which we liberated and made ours. We were living on a margin. In 1981, before full-scale gentrification, before…

When David Stinson finished high school, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1977, the first thing he did was get a job building houses. After a few years, though, the business slowed. Stinson was then twenty-four, with two children to support. He needed something stable. As he explained over lunch recently, that meant finding a job at one of the two companies in the area that offered secure, blue-collar work. “Either I’ll be working at General Motors or I’ll be working at Steelcase by the end of the year,” he vowed in 1984. A few months later, he got a job at Steelcase, the world’s largest manufacturer of office furniture, and he’s been working at its Grand Rapids metal plant ever since. Stinson is now fifty-eight. He has a full, reddish…

When I trained to be a doctor, some four decades ago, everyone neglected sleep. “On call” duty for hospital interns began at 6 A.M. and lasted twenty-four hours; I often kept on working until early evening the next day, after which I would stumble back to my apartment and fall asleep in my clothes. The ethic was not to complain. You were being toughened up—“iron man” was the term we all used—to deal with the demands of doctoring, which did not respect the clock. But that wasn’t the only way in which sleep was disregarded. In medical school, the subject had been covered in only the most cursory way. In a class on the brain, an instructor mentioned a neural pathway, the reticular activating system, that was associated with wakefulness.…

THE MYTH OF ELLIS ISLAND Janet Malcolm’s Profile of the political television commentator Rachel Maddow mentions that her surname was “faked … by a nineteenth-century Ellis Island official who bestowed it on a family of Russian Jewish immigrants named Medvyedov” (“The Storyteller,” October 9th). Genealogists dispute the common family lore that names were changed by immigration inspectors at Ellis Island. They did not create the records but instead worked with passenger lists that had been provided by shipping companies. Any mistakes, misspellings, or fabrications originated with the ticket- buyers and ticket-sellers. Many immigrants also Americanized their names at the urging of family, friends, employers, and immigration- aid workers. Harvey Kabaker Silver Spring, Md. UNDERSTANDING MYANMAR The violence and discrimination against the Rohingya, one of Myanmar’s ethnic minorities, is disturbing beyond…

Jofie Ferrari-Adler looks young enough to be the president of the student council, but he’s actually an executive editor at Simon & Schuster. When he turned forty, he decided that the only birthday present he wanted was an artificial putting green in the back yard of his family’s house, which is across the street from Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. “I’ve wanted one since I was ten,” he said the other day. His yearning was not foreseeable at his birth: his father was a hippie and his mother was an ex-nun, and they had met while counselling draft resisters during the Vietnam War. Their home was a farm in southwestern Pennsylvania; the marriage broke up when Jofie was four, in part because his mother didn’t like the fact that the marijuana…

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 is perhaps the single most frequently mocked act of Congress in history. It sparked a trade war in the early days of the Great Depression, and has become shorthand for self-destructive protectionism. So it’s surprising that, while the law’s tariffs have been largely eliminated, some of its absurd provisions still hold. The other week, the American appliancemaker Whirlpool successfully employed a 1974 amendment to the act to persuade the United States government to impose as yet unidentified protections against its top Korean competitors, LG and Samsung. Whirlpool’s official argument was that these firms have been bolstering their market share by offering fancy appliances at low prices. In other words, Whirlpool is getting beat and wants the government to help it win. This decision is…

On September 14th, the rightwing pundit Ann Coulter, who last year published a book titled “In Trump We Trust,” expressed what a growing number of Americans, including conservatives, have been feeling since the 2016 election. The previous day, President Trump had dined with Democratic leaders at the White House, and had impetuously agreed to a major policy reversal, granting provisional residency to undocumented immigrants who came to America as children. Republican legislators were blindsided. Within hours, Trump disavowed the deal, then reaffirmed it. Coulter tweeted, “At this point, who doesn’t want Trump impeached?” She soon added, “If we’re not getting a wall, I’d prefer President Pence.” Trump’s swerve did the unthinkable— uniting Coulter and liberal commentators. After Trump threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea, Gail Collins, the Times columnist, praised…

These strangers with my name, busy being kidnapped, embezzled, honored and dying at a frightening rate. The cross-dressing exterminator convicted of rape in Kensington, Ohio, sentenced to 72 years without bail, the policeman killed stopping a burglary in Thermopolis, WY—could they have imagined a Florida painter with their name communicating with extraterrestrials through sculptures made out of railroad tracks, or being written about in a poem by another member of our redundant family for a reason none of us can explain? Sometimes I fear I’m imaginary, don’t really exist. Catch myself wondering why I only seem to like myself when, say, I’m wearing a teacher’s face— because I see myself only through others’ eyes? In that case, who am I really? Alone at night, watching a ballgame, I’m always surprised…

Last year, the economist Robert Gordon published a book titled “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” which set out to debunk the notion that we live in a great age of innovation. The celebrated inventions of the past half century, like the personal computer and the Internet, Gordon argues, have increased productivity and transformed people’s lives far less than did the leading inventions of the half century between 1870 and 1920, like household electricity, indoor plumbing, and the automobile. “Most aspects of life in 1870 (except for the rich) were dark, dangerous, and involved backbreaking work,” he wrote in a paper that appeared a few years before the book. People’s homes were dark and poorly heated, and smoky from candles and oil lamps. “But the biggest inconvenience was the…

NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Baauer A pipe dream for many electronic producers who love hip-hop but don’t make it is to, well, make it. Harry Bauer Rodrigues veered somewhere close in 2012. His track “Harlem Shake,” a case study of the meme-as-song, spawned thousands of amateur dance videos showing flash mobs flailing to the monstrous drop of coiling synths, though the dancing bore little resemblance to the decades-old hip-hop shoulder shuffle from which the single pulls its name. Since then, the Philadelphia d.j. and producer has been releasing music that’s at once more ambitious and closer to his heart: “One Touch,” from 2014, pays glowing homage to the shiny hip-hop featured in mid-aughts…

Langston Hughes, wistful, black tie around his neck, stares from a portrait behind the bar at this uptown watering hole and eatery. “I guess I like him like that,” one of the courteous servers mused. “You never get to see him in that way: young.” Crowded with twentysomething Harlemites on the quietest of evenings, the Edge serves wine and sweet punch to a reggae and jazz soundtrack. A hibiscus mimosa is a Hudson River sunset in a glass. On any given night, everyone is invariably deep in conversation, perhaps because there’s no WiFi: a sign tells guests to “connect with each other.” The other night, a young Brit wearing a T-shirt that read “FCUK MOI?” complained to his date about the weather (“It’s like Florida here!”), while, nearby, a professorial…

When the action thriller “Bushwick” premièred, at Sundance, during the same week as Donald Trump’s Inauguration, its plot seemed like a fanciful nightmare, in a “Red Dawn” kind of way: an army of militiamen from Southern states, hoping to secede from the Union, invades the transitional Brooklyn neighborhood, bringing black helicopters and automatic weapons. It’s a Fort Sumter moment for a second American civil war. “We thought it would be a cautionary tale for maybe ten years in the future— not now,” Jon Milott, one of the movie’s directors, said the other day. But just before “Bushwick” opened, in August, Confederate flags were flying in Charlottesville, and a new civil war suddenly seemed a little less hypothetical. “A Brooklyn radio host asked me if I would punch a Nazi in…

Since the establishment of the first studios, a century ago, there have been few movie executives as dominant, or as domineering, as Harvey Weinstein. He co-founded the production-and-distribution companies Miramax and the Weinstein Company, helping to reinvent the model for independent films with movies including “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “The Crying Game,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The English Patient,” “Shakespeare in Love,” and “The King’s Speech.” Beyond Hollywood, he has exercised his influence as a prolific fund-raiser for Democratic Party candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Weinstein combined a keen eye for promising scripts, directors, and actors with a bullying, even threatening, style of doing business, inspiring both fear and gratitude. His movies have earned more than three hundred Oscar nominations, and, at the annual awards ceremonies, he has been thanked…

I still hear the sound of women at night crossing the cobblestones, filmy kerchiefs over their hair, the mic-mac of their clogs— this in a country that doesn’t exist. But don’t tell that to the storks who flap in from Africa and build stick houses on battlements. And consider the swans: laying their warm breasts down on banks that mark no border. The Moors passed through this impossible country once and left behind their longings, and what can anybody do about that? Or the oblique solitude of the river sweeping downstream forever filling the emptiness of its bed with more emptiness … light spills onto its flecked back, coriander light, clove light, sesame, the flower inside my eye opening to receive— those hungry flowers—if a particle is a prison, a…

You hop into a car, race off in no particular direction, and, blam, hit a power pole. Then it’s off to jail. I remember a monstrous tangle of arms and legs and fists, with me at the bottom, gouging at eyes and doing my utmost to mangle throats, but I arrived at the facility without a scratch or a bruise. I must have been easy to subdue. The following Monday, I pled guilty to disturbing the peace and malicious mischief, reduced from felony vehicular theft and resisting arrest because— well, because all this occurs on another planet, the planet of Thanksgiving, 1967. I was eighteen and hadn’t been in too much trouble. I was sentenced to forty-one days. This was a county lockup, with its ground level devoted to the…

And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, by Adrian Shirk (Counterpoint). In this memoir, the author chronicles her relentless quest for religious fulfillment, which leads her from a voodoo shrine in Louisiana to a Presbyterian church in Brooklyn. Along the way, Shirk explores her troubled family history, in which faith crops up as a “perplexing recessive gene.” The book doubles as a catalogue of America’s “divergent prophetesses,” such as Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, the astrologer Linda Goodman, and the silver-tongued evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who faked her own kidnapping to spend five weeks with her lover. These accounts are brief, vivid portraits of women in the “spiritual avant-garde,” and although Shirk struggles to unify these threads, her wide-ranging curiosity delights. The Dream Colony, by Walter Hopps, with Deborah…