Innholdsfortegnelse for October 30, 2017 i The New Yorker

Jiayang Fan (“The Ghost Scam,” p. 20) 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. Broti Gupta (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 27) has written for the Times, the Washington Post online, and newyorker.com. Joseph O’Neill (Fiction, p. 60) will publish the story collection “Good Trouble” in June. Amanda Petrusich (On Television, p. 76), a staff writer, is the author of “Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records.” Carter Goodrich (Cover) is a writer, an illustrator, and a character designer for feature animation. He is at work on his seventh children’s book, “Nobody Hugs a Cactus.” Jia Tolentino (Comment, p. 15) is a staff writer.…

The English choreographer Matthew Bourne is known for ballets that are based on popular tales or movies; that pulsate with crime and passion; that transpire on shifting planes of reality; that incorporate big, crazy dance parties and small, nastily observed manners; and that generally end with the boy’s not getting the girl, or the boy. Now Bourne has done it again, God bless him! His new ballet is “The Red Shoes” (at City Center, Oct. 26-Nov. 5), and the story, basically, is that of the famous 1948 movie by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Once again, we have a beautiful young ballet dancer, Victoria Page, torn between art, represented by her imperious Russian ballet director, Lermontov, and love, in the person of her composer boyfriend, Julian. At the end, unable…

In the weeks since the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predations, stories about the former Miramax chief have placed him in numerous shower stalls, a town car, various hotel suites, and a restaurant kitchen. But no one expected to find him lurking in a children’s cartoon. In 2005, Weinstein made a cameo appearance as himself in an animated feature film, starring Lindsay Lohan, called “My Scene Goes Hollywood.” The movie, part of the Barbie franchise, was distributed by Miramax’s family division and produced by Mattel, which was trying to lure back the tweens who were ditching their Barbies for a line of sexy competitor dolls called Bratz. To keep up, Mattel produced an edgy line of dolls called My Scene. Barbie became a night-clubbing New York high schooler, with a…

Andy Serkis has played two of the most kinetically captivating creatures in recent film: the bounding ape Caesar, in the “Planet of the Apes” series, and the skulking hobbit Gollum, in the “Lord of the Rings” saga. Standing near Times Square the other day, digi tally unenhanced, he resembled any other tourist—an amiable, bearded fifty-threeyear- old Brit with a camera hanging from his neck. But his fans weren’t fooled. As soon as Serkis entered Gulliver’s Gate, a miniature-world exhibit, the requests for selfies began. “The digital masks I wear have not prevented me from being recognizable,” Serkis said. “The Marvel generation have seen the behind-the-scenes footage of performance capture, and they get digital avatars.” He bent to admire the HOscale subway cars running below Grand Central Terminal, then pointed to…

Serious but friendly, a woman who rarely jokes but readily laughs, the Los Angeles artist Laura Owens, forty- seven years old, was pleasantly dishevelled in mom attire: shirt, baggy shorts, sneakers, big glasses. “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes,” she said to the children in each of the five classes she spoke to on Career Day, in June, at her nine-yearold daughter Nova’s public elementary school. She accompanied the advice with a PowerPoint slide of herself after fall ing from a low scaffold and being splattered with blue paint from a pail that had followed her down—a studio mishap, in 2013, that an assistant had paused to snap before helping her up. The next slide showed her paint-smudged face, smiling—no harm. The kids seemed fascinated but perplexed, as well they…

In the midst of our lifelike life I come to this fork in your hand— stainless silver, of appreciable weight— and I fully understand its pronginess, the bent of want, an expressive head and narrow neck spreading like a delta out to three strict parallels. You, the children, me. At some point the waiter brought your sea bass and the fork hovers over its seared arrangement of chain mail, its lips parted in surprise. Against the stiff table linen and sunlight on the fork your skin is caramel and scuffed a little whitely at the knuckles. A few veins give the skin its dark ridges and where each hair plants itself there is a small dent and crinkle in the flesh. If the situation is not stable or sustainable, what…

Enveloping dread, ambient unease, a kind of sensuous foreboding: the music of the thirty-five-year-old American composer Ashley Fure addresses feelings that are all too familiar in earlytwenty- first-century life. Fure’s experimental music-theatre piece “The Force of Things,” which was recently staged at Peak Performances, in Montclair, New Jersey, is in part a study in infrasound, or sounds below the range of human hearing. For most of the work’s duration, twentyfour subwoofers, placed with their cones pointed upward, emit electronic tones that vibrate at a frequency of 10.67 hertz, or around ten oscillations per second. They are arrayed around the auditorium, with the audience seated in the middle. Human ears can’t detect sounds much below twenty hertz, but you register their presence all the same. Urban legend holds that infrasound can…

BEYOND THE BOUNDS I’ve been sad for days since reading Ronan Farrow’s story on Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual abuse and assault (“Abuses of Power,” October 23rd). My eighty-six-year-old mother has always said that every woman is forced to prostitute herself at some time in her life, and hearing that never fails to make me sick. And yet I know of so many women who have had bad experiences with people they work with, including myself and my daughter. I never told anyone what happened to me, but when women like the ones in Farrow’s article tell their stories it helps everyone to speak up, especially those with lower incomes, who can’t risk losing their jobs because of a boss who tries to force sex on them. Connie Sundquist…

894 Broadway, Brooklyn (718-450-3255) Erzulie, the Haitian spirit of love and beauty, holds Thursdays sacred. After reading a longer list of her preferences, it may seem that the vodou goddess had a hand in more than just the name of this new café-cum-cocktail-lounge in Bushwick. Erzulie likes pink and light blue (the color of the floor tiles), sweet-smelling flowers and sparkling wine (provided in the form of the bubbly Kir de Jacmel), and small cakes (sticky buns are sold at the counter). The storefront is also home to Flowers by Leslie, a fifteen-year-old plant shop that was struggling to make rent. Instead of displacing it, the Erzulie owners preserved it as a business, and as a drink. Now patrons can browse the lilies and the basil for sale near the…

You’ve been named chairman of a major-party candidate’s Presidential campaign. And it turns out that you can work for free, because, through a series of dubious transactions and nimble maneuvers, you’re able to keep thirty or sixty million dollars peregrinating through various overseas bank accounts. Cool! Or maybe you’re the leader of one of the hundred and ninety-five countries in the world. Never mind how you landed that gig (free election? rigged election? dynastic inheritance? super-super-high I.Q.?), it comes with a jumbo helping of entitlement. Being human, before long you start to take the perks for granted, until one day up pops this thought: I need more. Conveniently, you’ve discovered a back door to your country’s treasury, or a slick method for frictionless bribery, and . . . moneymoneymoney! There…

Wang Jing was so ashamed of what had happened to her that, for the first hour of our conversation, in June, at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, she made no eye contact, as if doing so would break some spell and prevent her from finishing her story. She spoke haltingly in Mandarin, the only language we shared; she’d have been more comfortable in Cantonese or Taishanese, the dialect of the small city in Guangdong Province on whose rural outskirts she was born. But, more than that, she seemed unused to being listened to in any language. She asked me not to use her real name and had brought along her son, who is in his late twenties. He sat impassive but watchful, accustomed, like many children of immigrants, to making…

He drinks like the faithful,the way they fold their hands In church, like two owls roosting in an elm. Karaoke night at the Don’t Care Bar: A worker staggers, following the lyric To a lit-up song, and outside A stranger chews their ears off About the Green Desert: fields of soy and corn And soy and corn and soy, Devoid of flowers, and the bees going damn drunk with hunger. She leans into him like a stray cat against a fence. A hundred species of insects, the stranger tells them, in a space where there should have been a thousand. A truck leaving backfires. Beneath the only street light, a possum Practices its death. His hand at the small of her back, On the depthless roses painted On her old…

Clang! Clang! Down the corridors of religious history we hear this sound: Martin Luther, an energetic thirty-threeyear- old Augustinian friar, hammering his Ninety-five Theses to the doors of the Castle Church of Wittenberg, in Saxony, and thus, eventually, splitting the thousand-year-old Roman Catholic Church into two churches—one loyal to the Pope in Rome, the other protesting against the Pope’s rule and soon, in fact, calling itself Protestant. This month marks the five-hundredth anniversary of Luther’s famous action. Accordingly, a number of books have come out, reconsidering the man and his influence. They differ on many points, but something that most of them agree on is that the hammering episode, so satisfying sym bolically— loud, metallic, violent—never occurred. Not only were there no eyewitnesses; Luther himself, ordinarily an enthusiastic self- dramatizer,…

The odd pleasure of watching people cook and eat on television seems to transcend generational boundaries. This year, Viceland, a new, millennialfocussed television network under the creative direction of Spike Jonze, has become an unlikely bastion of food-related programming. Some of its shows are expressly edifying. But many of them are renegade variations on the travel-andchow- down theme, in which a tattooed chef (like Eddie Huang, the host of “Huang’s World,” or Frank Pinello, the host of “The Pizza Show”) goes to a farflung locale, and ingests and ruminates for the camera. The majority of these series began on Munchies, a Web site launched by Vice in 2014. The energy is masculine and contrarian—a corrective, perhaps, to the self-seriousness of foodie culture, and to the cozy murmurs of chefs like…

Metropolitan Opera audiences know the British composer Thomas Adès for “The Tempest,” a svelte Shakespeare adaptation that opened here in 2012. But in his acclaimed new opera, “The Exterminating Angel” (which premières on Oct. 26), inspired by the scabrous film by Luis Buñuel, he returns to the territory he marked out in his first opera, “Powder Her Face”: skewering the sexual and political assumptions of the upper class. The baritone David Adam Moore and the soprano Amanda Echalaz, above, are featured in the cast. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera There is a coterie of contemporary composers—including John Adams and Philip Glass—who can say that the Met has performed more than one of their operas; their number now includes Thomas Adès. Five years after the company première of his opera…

Village Halloween Parade Everyone’s invited—and costumes are a must—to march in this wild parade, one of the city’s more exuberant traditions, now in its forty-fourth year. “It’s a time for people in the most modern city in the world to come out and behave in a completely primitive way,” Jeanne Fleming, the event’s longtime director, told The New Yorker in 1989. This year’s theme is “Cabinet of Curiosities: An Imaginary Menagerie,” celebrating the transformative power of the hybrid: the wolfmen, Frankensteins, and Fiji Mermaids that have haunted and bewildered humans for centuries. The parade will feature more than fifty bands, hundreds of giant puppets, and thousands of New Yorkers letting out their inner monsters. (Sixth Ave., heading north from Canal St. to 16th St. halloween-nyc.com. Oct. 31 at 7.)…

On a recent Thursday, in a suite of dressing rooms at “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Bill Murray, the cellist Jan Vogler, the violinist Mira Wang, and the pianist Vanessa Perez were get ting ready to perform songs from an album they’ve just released, called “New Worlds.” On the album and at concerts, Murray reads selections from Hemingway, Thurber, Whitman, Twain, and others; the musicians— all renowned international soloists— play everything from Foster to Gersh win to Shostakovich. Last Monday, at Carnegie Hall, Murray sang, danced, read, announced the score of the Yankees game, and chucked roses into the balconies from the stage. At “Late Night,” things were shaggier: the band had been on the road. As the musicians napped, Murray darted around the dressing rooms, trying on outfits.…

The north wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a vast, airy enclosure featuring a banked wall of glass and the Temple of Dendur, a sandstone monument that was constructed beside the Nile two millennia ago and transported to the Met, brick by brick, as a gift from the Egyptian government. The space, which opened in 1978 and is known as the Sackler Wing, is also itself a monument, to one of America’s great philanthropic dynasties. The Brooklyn-born brothers Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler, all physicians, donated lavishly during their lifetimes to an astounding range of institutions, many of which today bear the family name: the Sackler Gallery, in Washington; the Sackler Museum, at Harvard; the Sackler Center for Arts Education, at the Guggenheim; the Sackler Wing at the…

When I became a parent of young children I also became a purposeful and relentless opportunist of sleep. In fact, sleep functioned as that period’s subtle denominator. I found myself capable of taking a nap just about anywhere, even when standing in a subway car or riding an escalator. I wasn’t the only one. Out and about, I spotted drowsy or dozing people everywhere; and I realized that a kind of mechanized mass somnambulism is an essential component of modern life; and I gained a better understanding of the siesta and the snooze and the death wish. Then the three boys grew big— grew from toddling alarmists into wayward urban doofuses neurologically unequipped to perceive the risks incidental to their teen-age lives. Several nights a week I lie awake in…

Empress of the East, by Leslie Peirce (Basic). This engaging biography reconsiders the legacy of the sixteenth-century Ottoman empress Roxelana. Kidnapped as a child by slavetraders in present-day Ukraine, she was sold into the harem of Süleyman I. As a royal concubine, she was expected to produce just one son with the sultan—to avoid bloody succession struggles between full brothers. But Süleyman freed and married Roxelana, and had five sons with her, a break from tradition that got her branded a witch and a seductress. Peirce persuasively recasts Roxelana as a pragmatist adept at navigating both palace politics and international relations, and as a pioneer who established a more powerful role for Ottoman women. Young Radicals, by Jeremy McCarter (Random House). The work of five young activists anchors this…