Innholdsfortegnelse for November 6, 2017 i The New Yorker

Nicola Twilley (“The Exercise Pill,” p. 30), a frequent contributor to the magazine, is a co-host of the podcast “Gastropod.” She is at work on two books: one about refrigeration and the other about quarantine. John Cuneo (Cover) has been drawing for the magazine since 1994. His collection of illustrations “Not Waving but Drawing” came out this year. Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 17), a staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment. She also has a column on newyorker.com. Kelefa Sanneh (“Against the Tide,” p. 36) has been a staff writer since 2008. Tracy K. Smith (Poem, p. 32) is the United States Poet Laureate. Her latest collection, “Wade in the Water,” is forthcoming in 2018. Yoni Brenner (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 29) writes for film and television,…

505 E. 6th St. (917-265-8006) Gay night life in New York, for those seeking something more hands-on than a civil-rights history tour, greets newcomers as an impenetrable maze. Each turn leads back to the same scene: a club, somewhere on the West Side, where no one has a last name, poppers abound, and, amid the crush of bodies, near-identical bartenders, all muscle and chiselled jaw, serve as caricatures of a hegemonic hypermasculine ideal. Not so at Club Cumming. The tiny space welcomes a far broader spectrum of the queer community and overflows with a sense of inclusive camaraderie. The actor Alan Cumming, a co-owner, named the bar after the parties he began throwing in his Broadway dressing room during the 2014 revival of “Cabaret.” The spontaneity lives on: in the…

Jim Warlick was peering into a dark tractor-trailer parked in an airplane hangar in northeast Georgia. Inside was a four-thousand-pound Oval Office, broken down into pieces—doorways, windows, curved walls —along with its attendant furniture: two sofas, several chairs, the Resolute desk, lamps, china, and a replica of Frederic Remington’s bronze sculpture “The Bronco Buster,” beloved by Ronald Reagan. Also, multiple photomurals re-creating the view outside the real Oval Office’s windows in every season. “The office is to scale, down to the inch,” Warlick said, shining a flashlight on the assemblage, which he owns. “Twenty-nine by thirty-six feet. Takes about six people to handle it.” Warlick, who is sixty-five, owns a company called American Presidential Experience, which traffics in authentic and fake political artifacts. He grew up in North Carolina, halfway…

Consider the yeti. Reputed to live in the mountainous regions of Tibet, Bhutan, and Nepal. Also known by the alias Abominable Snowman. Overgrown, in both senses: eight or ten or twelve feet tall; shaggy. Shy. Possibly a remnant of an otherwise extinct species. More possibly an elaborate hoax, or an inextinguishable hope. Closely related to the Australian Yowie, the Canadian Nuk-luk, the Missouri Momo, the Louisiana Swamp Ape, and Bigfoot. O.K., then: on a scale not of zero to ten but of, say, leprechaun to zombie, how likely do you think it is that the yeti exists? One of the strangest things about the human mind is that it can reason about unreasonable things. It is possible, for example, to calculate the speed at which the sleigh would have to…

He has sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people. He has plundered our— ravaged our— destroyed the lives of our— taking away our— abolishing our most valuable— and altering fundamentally the Forms of our— In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. —taken Captive on the high Seas to bear—…

By that time, she had flown from Dublin to New York, then over to Milan, for a disastrous day followed by a long trot down to Gate D09, where nothing was happening. There were no passengers, just a lone, slightly accusatory woman in uniform, who said that the flight had been cancelled since yesterday and she would have to route through—and here her mind went blank, the way you blank on the name of a person at a party—although some part of her brain must have known, because she turned and walked back the way she had come, past the Segafredo franchise, the Swatch counter, past two Italian men shopping for sunglasses at a little spinning stand, down to the new gate, the number of which was circled on her…

Black excellence is a thing. People— from Beyoncé Knowles to Venus and Serena Williams to folks you haven’t heard of—are into it. It’s less a movement than a standard: believers set the bar high not only for themselves but also for others who share their vision, especially when it pertains to black history, stories, and style. Black excellence harks back to an earlier time, when hardworking, aspirational parents told their kids, “Don’t make us go up to that school,” meaning, Don’t mess up, do better than great, and never let “them” (the goyim, those ofays) see you sweat. Several years ago, Knowles encountered the black excellence of the Underground Museum, in Arlington Heights, a mostly Latino, black, and Asian neighborhood near central Los Angeles. The museum, which is not at…

PENCE AND THE PRESIDENCY Jane Mayer’s piece on Vice-President Mike Pence revealed his terrifying personal convictions and his connections to right-wing evangelical donors (“The President Pence Delusion,” October 23rd). Pence seems to be content to act as President Trump’s puppet, a facet of his personality that I wish Mayer had gone into at greater length. The puppeteer has only to suggest that it’s time for Pence to perform, and he rises to the occasion, no matter how embarrassing or how costly to the country. Take Pence’s recent publicity stunt on Trump’s orders. He flew from Las Vegas to Indianapolis for the Colts–49ers game, but then left almost immediately, after football players peacefully protested in the way they’d declared they would: by taking a knee during the national anthem to…

Winter Village Bryant Park, renovated in 1992 to discourage crime and welcome midtown strollers, is now one of the city’s cherished holiday destinations, hosting various winter activities around its famous seasonal ice rink. College Skate Nights offer two-for-one skate rentals with a school I.D., plus themes including Mardi Gras and Battle of the Boy Bands. Scavenger hunts, pop-up retail experiences, and the requisite tree-lighting extravaganza dot the schedule, along with family-friendly performances. (42nd St. at Sixth Ave. wintervillage.org. Through Jan. 2.) READINGS AND TALKS The Center for Fiction After a difficult bout with postpartum depression, the academic and writer Mimi Khúc sought to change how mental health was discussed in her community. To that end, she has put together “Open in Emergency,” a special issue of the Asian American…

Some people come to Los Angeles with aspirations for the big screen, others for a choice location in Aisle 2. The other day, dozens of purveyors of fancy packaged foods gathered on the third floor of an open-air mall for a casting call of sorts. Eataly, the Italian food empire, which has thirty-eight stores, is opening its first L.A. branch this month and was looking for local products to stock. “It’s kind of a speed-dating situation,” Simona Picco, Eataly’s director of U.S. purchasing, said, sitting down at a folding table. She wore a black leather jacket and held a clipboard with a list of the day’s candidates, which included four brewers of kombucha. Beyond tasty samples, Picco was on the lookout for compelling product narratives, proof that venders “didn’t just…

Is there any point to another Stalin biography? Before the opening of the old Soviet archives, three decades ago, the best historians mastered the limited available sources and proceeded to fill in the gaps through inspired guesswork. In addition to genuine insight, this guesswork sometimes involved cross- Atlantic psychoanalysis, including speculations on how Stalin was swaddled as an infant, and could reach the point of imagining his thoughts and putting them in quotation marks. But the archives—while curbing these excesses, settling old arguments over the precise number of people shot by Stalin’s secret police during the Terror (an astonishing six hundred and eighty-one thousand six hundred and ninety-two), and showing definitively that it was Stalin who signed the execution orders— have not radically altered anyone’s overall conception of what sort…

MOVIES NOW PLAYING BPM (Beats Per Minute) This intermittently affecting but occasionally simplistic drama, about the ACT UP movement in France in the nineteen-nineties, alternates between collective action and intimate life. It’s centered on one couple, Nathan (Arnaud Valois) and Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), who meet in the group. The twenty-six-year-old Sean is H.I.V.-positive, having been infected at the age of sixteen by one of his teachers; Nathan, who’s a little older, is uninfected, having abstained from sex for years. But their discussion of their conjoined medical and erotic histories is more or less the only substance with which the director, Robin Campillo (who wrote the script with Philippe Mangeot), infuses their relationship. (One powerful arc of the drama involves characters’ frequent references to their dwindling T-cell counts.) Scenes…

Claes Oldenburg, the artist, leaned back in a rolling office chair and considered some sculptures made of canvas shopping bags fashioned into mouse ears. He wore a pink shirt and round glasses, and was talking to Arne Glimcher, his dealer, about the first time he’d used mouse ears in his work—on masks, in a performance piece that took place on West Forty-first Street, in 1965. “The people came in, but they were not allowed to sit down. The only ones who were allowed to sit down were the ones who were wearing the mask,” he recalled. “There was one person who disagreed, and that was Marcel Duchamp. He said, ‘I’m getting old, and I have to sit down.’” Oldenburg’s eyes twinkled. Glimcher, tall and neat, had a navy sweater tied…

In 2012, Cate Long was working at the news service Reuters, where she wrote a daily column on the municipalbond market. Municipal bonds are typically a sleepy corner of investing. They are forms of debt issued by states, counties, or cities, usually to fund infrastructure projects, such as airports and highways, and they are generally considered a safe investment, paying relatively low levels of interest. Finding a compelling story about the municipal- bond market is not an easy task, so when Long came across a document related to an eight-hundredmillion- dollar bond sale that Puerto Rico would be undertaking that spring, she decided to look at the numbers more closely. What she found was startling. “I sat down and read it for a couple of hours, and I said, ‘These…

Refuge, by Dina Nayeri (Riverhead). At the age of eight, Niloo, the protagonist of this poignant, agile novel, fled Iran with her mother and brother for the United States; her father stayed behind. Niloo sees him only four times in the next twenty years, each visit more painful than the last, as he remarries and succumbs to opium addiction. After Niloo marries a Frenchman and moves to Amsterdam, she begins to feel increasingly alienated from her husband and from their neighbors, and becomes involved with a community of recent Iranian immigrants “whose accents are still fine and whose memories of home are clear and unwarped.” Nayeri’s prose is sometimes overwrought, but her exploration of the exile’s predicament is tender and urgent. We Shall Not All Sleep, by Estep Nagy…