Innholdsfortegnelse for November 13, 2017 i The New Yorker

Larissa MacFarquhar (“Our Town,” p. 56), a staff writer, is the author of “Strangers Drowning.” Ian Frazier (“Clear Passage,” p. 46) most recently published “Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces” and is working on a book about the Bronx. Rebecca Hazelton (Poem, p. 50) is the author of the poetry collections “Fair Copy” and “Vow” and a co-editor of the anthology “The Manifesto Project.” omas McGuane (Fiction, p. 66) began regularly contributing short fiction to the magazine in 1994. His latest book, “Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories,” comes out in March. Joan Acocella (Dancing, p. 80) became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998. Her latest book is “Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints,” a collection of essays. Jeffrey Toobin (“Trump’s Inheritor,” p. 32) is the author of “American Heiress: The Wild…

Veterans Day Parade This annual procession dates back to the first Armistice Day celebrations, in 1919. This year’s parade, which runs north on Fifth Ave. from 26th St. to 52nd St., commemorates the centennial of the United States’ entry into the First World War, in 1917; Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut who helped man Apollo 11 on its trip to the moon, serves as grand marshal. The opening ceremony, in Madison Square Park, includes a wreath-laying at the Eternal Light Flagstaff at 11 A.M., the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. (Enter the park at Broadway at 23rd St. Nov. 11 at 10 A.M.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES Once again, the auction houses are gearing up for their seasonal battle in the high-stakes arenas of Impressionist, modern,…

Twelve thousand photographers, graphic designers, creative directors, and filmmakers attended a recent conference hosted by Adobe, in Las Vegas. For many, Barack Obama’s official White House photographer, Pete Souza, was the main attraction. Nine hundred people filled a ballroom in the Venetian for a “fireside chat” with Souza, a sixty-twoyear- old former Chicago Tribune photographer and professor of photojournalism at Ohio University, who took nearly two million pictures of Obama during his two terms in office. Three hundred and nineteen of these appear in Souza’s five-pound book, “Obama: An Intimate Portrait,” released this week by Little, Brown. Shortly before the book’s publication, Obama still hadn’t seen a copy. But he’d offered Souza some advice. As the photographer culled millions of Presidential images down to hundreds, Obama told him, “Sometimes you’ve…

Late one spring night in 1984, the doorbell rang at the home of Norman and Mary Jane Stout. The Stouts, married thirty years, with three grown kids, lived in Guernsey County, Ohio, about a hundred yards off Interstate 70. Norman was a heavy-equipment operator; Mary Jane, who once worked as an office manager, was a collector of Holly Hobbie plates and figurines. They were at the kitchen table, paying bills. Norman opened the door to find two men, who looked to be in their mid-twenties. They said that their car had broken down on the highway and asked to use the telephone. Norman invited them in, then watched as one of the men, after finishing the call, took out a handkerchief and wiped off the receiver. The two men—their names…

Philip Roth’s new collection of nonfiction, mostly writing about writing and about other writers, is called, with Rothian bluntness, “Why Write?” (Library of America). It’s the first nonfiction collection Roth has produced in many years, though some pieces in it have appeared in two previous volumes, “Reading Myself and Others” and “Shop Talk.” Where John Updike, his competitive partner in a half-century literary marathon—in which each always had the other alongside, stride by stride, shedding books like perspiration—produced eight doorstop-size volumes of reviews, essays, jeux d’esprit, citations, and general ponderations, Roth ceased writing regularly about writing sometime in the mid-seventies. Since then, there have been the slightly beleaguered interview when a new book came out, the carefully wrought “conversations” in support of writers he admired, particularly embattled Eastern European ones,…

Mark Morris, as a teen-ager, in the seventies, did his longest and most serious dance training as a member of a Balkan folk-dance troupe, the Koleda Balkan Dance Ensemble, a semi-pro group of Seattle hippies and music geeks who got together on weekends, went to the woods, drank slivovitz, and danced till they dropped. When you see the sheer danciness of his work—the twirling, the leaping, the falling, the floor-smacking—Koleda, in large measure, is what you’re seeing. In time, fired up by that experience, and by the ethnic richness of his native city, he absorbed many other traditions. Partly because of Morris, we no longer speak loosely of “folk dance.” We call such dances by the name of the folk in question: Macedonian, Greek, Indonesian, flamenco. Late last month, during…

WHEN THE ROBOTS TAKE OVER Having worked as a manufacturing engineer for forty-five years, and having installed fifteen robotic manufacturing systems, I was impressed by Sheelah Kolhatkar’s comprehensive piece on how robotics and artificial intelligence are replacing human workers (“Dark Factory,” October 23rd). The world of manufacturing is undergoing rapid changes, and the number of highly skilled people who are needed to design, program, test, install, and service the robots and the manufacturing systems does not come close to the number of people who have lost their jobs to these technologies. We should all be concerned about where humans will fit in in the future, not only in the manufacturing sector but also in aviation, finance, medicine, transportation, and construction. Sometime in the next twenty-five to two hundred years,…

After a man drove a rented truck down a bike path along the West Side Highway on Halloween afternoon, murdering eight people and injuring twelve, Annie Thoms, an English teacher at nearby Stuyvesant High School, followed “shelter-in” protocol. The next day, when her students returned, she opened her class with a writing prompt. “I asked them to write about whatever they were thinking and feeling this morning,” she said later that day. She told them, “There’s no wrong reaction, and sometimes reactions take time to occur.” “One girl wrote that this was a moment which made her reflect on her own life’s importance,” Thoms went on. “I had one kid who said, honestly, ‘I feel like I should be feeling more.’” Thoms had been teaching at Stuyvesant for a year…

In the Queens Museum, just past Arthur Ashe Stadium, there’s a large, quiet room containing a 9,365-squarefoot replica of New York City. Made of urethane foam, wood, plastic, and handpainted paper—except for the bridges, which are etched brass—the Panorama of the City of New York has a scale of one inch to a hundred feet. (The Empire State Building stands at fifteen inches tall.) To gaze on it from the walkway along its perimeter is to feel like a great god beholding creation, or, more to the point, like Robert Moses, who conceived the sculpture for the 1964 World’s Fair. “Moses designed the Panorama as a teaching tool,” Louise Weinberg, the museum’s archives manager, said the other day, “and obviously as a paean to himself.” It was a Thursday afternoon,…

I must have been renting a place on H Street in Livingston at the time, so that I could meet clients in town. (My home was several miles south, toward Gardiner.) I was an architect, and I had a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, which I’d built in school, on a library table in the front room. Most of my clients thought it was my design. The H Street house was on an elevated lot, facing the old sewing-machine shop. I never went in there, but I recall that they sold machines with a foreign name that were said to hem, darn, baste, and stitch— back when people did those things, instead of just throwing stuff away. Eventually, the place went out of business. I had only the ground…

Red Famine, by Anne Applebaum (Doubleday). In the early nineteen-thirties, at least five million people died of hunger in the Soviet Union. Some eighty per cent of the deaths occurred in Ukraine, and Applebaum draws on new archival research to show that food scarcity was not simply a tragic consequence of misguided state planning but, rather, a stateorchestrated program “specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.” The Soviet leadership, driven by “paranoia about the counter-revolutionary potential of Ukraine,” ordered the confiscation of food from homes and imposed severe restrictions on travel and trade, while also carrying out a purge of scholars, writers, artists, and others. The Holodomor, as the result came to be known, was a “political famine.” Kierkegaard’s Muse, by Joakim Garff, translated from the Danish by Alastair Hannay…

Which music-theatre works of today will play to sold-out houses in the twenty-fifth century? Such is the challenge issued by Claudio Monteverdi, the former maestro di cappella at the Basilica di San Marco, in Venice, who, four hundred and fifty years after his birth, still has a knack for putting butts in seats. In October, the British conductor John Eliot Gardiner led vital performances of Monteverdi’s three surviving operas—“Orfeo,” “The Return of Ulysses,” and “The Coronation of Poppea”—at Alice Tully Hall. Once again, this ancient music worked its wiles on posterity. We thrilled to the lustrous brass fanfares, swooned at the liquid lyric lines, laughed at the bawdy jokes, and grew tense at moments whose outcome was not in doubt. When Orpheus cast his fatal glance back at Eurydice, there…

1260 Myrtle Ave., Brooklyn (917-818-1738) Wong Kar-wai’s films inspired the feeling of this new bar in Bushwick, where, inside, muted lighting casts magenta shadows across faces, conjuring the dreamy intensity of classics like “In the Mood for Love” or—as a neon-pink sign suggests—“Happy Together.” The dramatic setting turns even the simple gesture of raising an emerald bottle of Tsingtao to one’s lips into something cinematic, but it also makes the cocktail menu awfully hard to read. Diligent squinters are rewarded with creations like the Tony Leung (bourbon, Frangelico, egg white, pistachio). A better move, though, is to bypass the menu entirely and order the monthly rotating cocktail, designed to capture the essence of whichever star sign the sun happens to be passing through. Lately, the specialty drink has been a…

Last Tuesday night, at a Democratic Socialists of America Halloween Party, at Hotel Chantelle, on Ludlow Street, Marc Fliedner was dressed as a yellow No. 2 pencil. Fliedner, a former prosecutor in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, was running a last-minute write-in campaign against the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr. Earlier in the evening, at the Village Halloween Parade, Fliedner, in pencil costume, had walked down Sixth Avenue handing out specially made campaign pens (“Write-in Marc Fliedner for Manhattan DA on Nov. 7”) and talking to potential voters about why he was running and how to go about voting for him. It had been difficult, along the parade route, to engage in substantive discussions. The D.S.A. shindig was a more receptive environment. “Are you Marc Fliedner?” a socialist named…

If you believed the national media, the week of the annual Republican Party fund-raising dinner, in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in late August, was one of the worst of Donald Trump’s Presidency. The President had just responded to the unrest in Charlottesville with statements that appeared sympathetic to neo-Nazi demonstrators, and even some members of his own party were denouncing him. The White House staff was in turmoil, following the departure of Reince Priebus as chief of staff, and the Senate had failed to pass a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. The featured speaker for the evening was the state’s junior senator, Tom Cotton, who seized the chance to address the disquiet in the nation’s capital. At forty years old, Cotton is the youngest member of the Senate, and he…

Who mows the lawn. Who prunes the rangy rose. Who whacks the weeds by the chain link with mafioso panache. Who drinks the beer. Who has no questions. Who knots a tie four-in-hand. Who washes the car. Who drives stick. Who smoked but did not inhale. Who wears the drugstore cologne his kid gave him. Who wakes up beside the same wife. Who has no questions. Who parts his hair. Who has a bald patch. Who plays golf. Who plays Call of Duty. Who plays the stock market, responsibly. Who reads biographies of generals. Who does not dream. Who climbed trees as a boy. Who leaves his towel beside the hamper. Who has never swum nude. Who knows cardinal directions. Who sees the sun set without a sense of unease.…

Near the end of Ty Dolla $ign’s new album, “Beach House 3,” the singer makes a startling declaration: “I think about you all the time.” This would be standard fare for almost any radiofriendly chorus since the dawn of time, but for Ty Dolla $ign it’s a gesture of transformation. A few years ago, the singer—who once referred to women as “horses in a stable,” among other derisive descriptions—would have dismissed a line like this with a low chuckle. The rapid churn of musical appetites rarely affords artists the opportunity to evolve gradually. This is true in terms of sound, certainly, but especially in the emotional realm. The music business is fuelled by fresh blood and hard resets—breakdowns, highdrama apology tours, and drastic makeovers. Fans, accustomed to constant novelty, no…