Innholdsfortegnelse for December 4, 2017 i The New Yorker

Grand Central Holiday Train Show At this annual train show, now in its sixteenth year, the M.T.A’s history is brought to life as scale models of classic red subway cars, double- letter trains, and even commuter-rail cars race past iconic stops and dart through labyrinthine tunnels. Back by popular demand is the Transit Museum’s Holiday Nostalgia Train, featuring restored vintage subway cars in use between 1932 and 1977, which passengers can ride up Second Avenue. The show is open to the public seven days a week through Feb. 4. (New York Transit Museum Gallery, 89 E. 42nd St. grandcentralterminal.com.) Cranksgiving As the holiday season draws near, tradition nudges us to consider all the things for which we’re grateful and to turn our gaze toward the less fortunate. Still, not…

Jason B. Kessler is a food and travel writer and a co-host of “Trip Testers,” a show on the Travel Channel. His tweets, from the handle @JasonBKessler, are mostly self-promotion and innocuous musings. (“I would absolutely patronize a pickle vending machine if such a thing existed.”) On the morning of August 12th, as hundreds of white supremacists massed in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, he tweeted, “For the record, I am not *that* Jason Kessler.” “You think you have it bad...” a data scientist named Jason S. Kessler (@Jason- Kessler) replied. “Jason Kessler sympathy group right here,” Jason N. Kessler, a high-school football player (@JasonKessler22), added. A few more Jason Kesslers—a screenwriter, a Dallas sports fan, a nursing-association employee—weighed in. There was a shortlived hashtag: #JasonKesslers Against- RacistJasonKesslers. The racist…

The road wasn’t as hazardous then,when I’d walk to the steel guardrail,lean my bendy girl body over, and stareat the cold creek water. In a wet spring,the water’d run clear and high, minnowsmouthing the sand and silt, a crawdadshadowed by the shore’s long reeds.I could stare for hours, somethingalways new in each watery wedge—a bottle top, a man’s black boot, a toad.Once, a raccoon’s carcass half underthe overpass, half out, slowly decayedover months. I’d check on him each day,watching until the white bones of his handwere totally skinless and seemed to reachout toward the sun as it hit the water,showing all five of his sweet tensile fingersstill clinging. I don’t think I worshippedhim, his deadness, but I liked the evidenceof him, how it felt like a job to dailytake note…

“They’re off!” the trackside announcer called for the tenth time that day, a Wednesday in August, at the Saratoga Race Course. Starting next to each other on the far outside of the dirt track were Irad and Jose Ortiz, two Puerto Rican jockeys, age twenty-five and twenty-four, whose rides have been electrifying New York’s racetracks in recent years. They burst from the gate together, with Irad, who is eighteen months older, slightly ahead, and Jose on his brother’s flank. Within three strides, the pair led the field. They veered masterfully toward the rail, intimidating the other horses but not quite interfering with them. As the horses hit top speed, about thirty-eight miles an hour, Irad, aboard a four-year-old filly named Fortunate Queen, held a two-length lead. His strategy was to…

The sign on the gate says “Chien méchant,” and the dog is certainly méchant. Every time she passes by he hurls himself against the gate, howling with desire to get at her and tear her to pieces. He is a big dog, a serious dog, some sort of German shepherd or Rottweiler (she knows little about dog breeds). From his yellow eyes she feels hatred of the purest kind shining upon her. Afterward, when the house with the chien méchant is behind her, she ruminates on that hatred. She knows it is not personal: whoever approaches the gate, whoever walks or cycles past, will be at the receiving end of it. But how deeply is the hatred felt? Is it like an electric current, switched on when an object is…

Greater Gotham, by Mike Wallace (Oxford). This gargantuan study of twentytwo formative years in New York history begins with the merging of the five boroughs, in 1898, which created the world’s secondlargest metropolis. Wallace, a Pulitzer Prizewinning historian, details the emergence of the “symbolic capital of a new American empire.” The skyline’s “constellation of megaliths” signalled economic might, and a “seamless river of rails” connected the city’s districts. But not all was booming: chorusline dancers in Times Square, New York’s “densest pleasure ganglion,” were poorly paid; suffragists (to whom Macy’s marketed matching bonnets and hatpins for demonstrations) faced intransigent opposition. Interweaving the actions of plutocrats, anarchists, striking garment workers, and a host of others, Wallace gives a multifaceted account of the city Marcel Duchamp called “a complete work of…

“Antiques Roadshow” premièred, on public television, in 1997. The premise of the program is terrifically simple. Regular folks present a relic—usually excavated from some unswept corner of the home—to a specialist, who then delivers a swift and unsentimental appraisal. By the start of its second season, “Antiques Roadshow” was the most watched prime-time series on PBS. The show has lasted for more than two decades in part because it perpetuates a seductive mythology—that we’re all sitting on gold mines and we simply don’t know it. It also affirms a very American belief in the enduring value of stuff. In the course of a three- or four-minute segment, a benign heirloom is imbued with vast historical and financial worth, and an ordinary person becomes the keeper of an extraordinary artifact. Earlier…

DOES FARMING CO2 WORK? 2 I was surprised that Elizabeth Kolbert, in her article on carbon capture, mentions only one biological approach to reducing carbon dioxide: growing biomass, burning it for fuel, and then capturing the CO2 and burying it underground (“Going Negative,” November 20th). In fact, there are other biological approaches available, such as carbon farming, a collection of practices for growing forests, food, and livestock in ways that have the potential to sequester enormous amounts of carbon in the soil. Carbon farming can reduce the amount of fossil fuel used in fertilizer production and tillage, and can lead to less polluted waterways and a reduced need for herbicides and pesticides. It also improves the water retention of soil, thus lessening the need for irrigation. Finally, since carbon-…

On a recent Monday, Glenn Reinhart, a former salesman of chemicals for the cosmetics industry, and now, in his mid-fifties, a freelance karate instructor with a fair amount of leisure time, took twenty-two rides on Citi Bikes, one after another, and then went out to breakfast in Chelsea. He had arranged to meet Collin Waldoch, who runs Bike Angels, the Citi Bike program that awards points, redeemable for extended membership and other modest benefits (a commemorative pin; a white bike key), to riders who help the company rebalance its network of twelve thousand bikes. Angels earn points for taking bikes from full stations and parking them at empty ones. A ride from one to the other might earn two or three points. When the scheme was launched, this spring, Waldoch…

Young professionals of the nineteen- sixties had three-Martini lunches; today’s have after-work panel discussions sponsored by liquor companies. On a recent evening, eighty-eight women gathered at an auditorium in the Santa Monica headquarters of Hulu, the content-streaming service. Doyenne, a year-old private club for women, had partnered with Hulu’s women’s arm, Hula, to host a panel about the advancement of women in the entertainment industry. It had been planned in August. “Every week, there’s been something to inspire us to go further,” Betsy Rosenberg, one of the club’s founders, said before the event. She wore a drapey cardigan over a green slip dress. “It’s Harvey Weinstein now,” her co-founder, Natacha Hildebrand, who wore a red lace sheath, said. “A month and a half ago, it was that engineer at Google;…

Presented with photos of gay men and straight men, a computer program was able to determine which of the two was gay with 81 percent accuracy, according to Dr. [Michal] Kosinski and co-author Yilun Wang’s paper. —The Times. A recent independent review of this program, which was expanded to include female subjects, has just been made public, with findings that include the following: • There were many false positives. For example, when a photo of Mike and Karen Pence was submitted, the couple was categorized as both “gay” and “human.” • On several occasions, when a photo of an especially attractive subject was scanned, the hardware would disappear from the lab for many hours and then return with a sheen of perspiration and the categorization “YES.” • Because the photos…

One day, I realized, to my surprise, that Björk was a normal person who did everyday things. Few pop musicians have seemed so futuristic and so weird for as long as she has. Since the early nineteen-nineties, the Icelandic artist has charted extremes— of ecstasy and intimacy, creativity and destruction—always attuned to the possibilities emerging from dance music’s experimental communities. Everything she does feels powered by an intense, full-bodied commitment, as though animated by forces greater than anything the rest of us will ever encounter. So it was shocking when, once, I saw her quietly shopping for CDs. We know that stars are just like us. But Björk has always seemed like her own solar system. Part of the reason Björk has stood apart is that she projects complete confidence…

In November of 1963, A. R. Ammons, known to family and friends as Archie, the author of a single, privately printed book of poems and a manager at his father-in-law’s glass factory, picked up a roll of adding-machine tape at a local store and began to “contemplate...some fool use for it.” Back home, Ammons threaded the roll of tape into his Underwood typewriter and, beginning on December 6th, sat down to write a poem that recorded his daily impressions. The poem’s margins were set by the tape’s width, about two inches; it began where the tape started and ended when it ran out, with no chance for revisions as Ammons’s words slalomed down its length. This was during an unusually frigid spell in Millville, New Jersey, the shore town where…

Jocelyn Bioh’s “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play” (an MCC Theatre production, at the Lucille Lortel) has so many fabulous moments drawn from cruelty and vengeance that attempting to separate the humor from the emotional barbarism would be like trying to peel a kernel of corn: you could do it, but it would take too long, and to what purpose? One of Bioh’s aims is to examine how brutishness and the distancing effect of satire can frame comedy in general and, more specifically, her subject: the complicated interactions of teen-age girls. Bioh is less solemn about this than Lillian Hellman was when she wrote about a schoolgirl and betrayal, in “The Children’s Hour,” in 1934, and she’s less cool than Muriel Spark was when she looked in on…

ART MU5EUM5 AND LIBI\AI\IE5 Metropolitan Museum “Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman & Designer” Michelangelo’s sixteenth-century Italian contemporaries very nearly worshipped him for collapsing more than a millennium of distance between classical antiquity and a surge of avowedly Christian but disruptively individual inspiration. You can’t miss the atavistic power in this show’s hundred and thirty-three drawings, which are beautifully installed with a few of his creations in sculpture, painting, and design and with works by related artists. The drawings are stupendous-no surprisethough strikingly limited in iconography and formal repertoire, except those from a few years when Michelangelo exercised a definitively Mannerist panache in gifts to friends and patrons. (In a smoky portrait dated 1531- 1534, the hauntingly ambiguous expression of an adored young friend, Andrea Quaratesi, qualifies the sitter as kissing kin…

266 Irving Ave., Brooklyn (347-715-4255) Tiki bars, with their fair-weather décor and icefilled offerings, first arose in the wake of Prohibition, in parts of California where snow hardly ever falls. These days, though, one can hardly set foot in Brooklyn, a place with seasons, without stumbling upon an eternally churning dispenser of piña colada, or finding a watering hole like this new tiki-inspired Bushwick spot, which provides brain freeze in a variety of flavors. By February, when blizzards coat the oily streets, the world outside will resemble the bar’s Black Manta, a rye drink with black sesame and on-trend charcoal, made unsettlingly frothy with the aid of egg whites. Last month, on a trivia night, frigid rain seemed to have already dampened spirits. Across from a sign that spells “Beach”…

The Château de Plieux, a fortified castle on a hilltop in the Gascony region of southwestern France, overlooks rolling fields speckled with copses and farmhouses. A tricolor flag snaps above the worn beige stone. The northwest tower, which was built in the fourteenth century, offers an ideal position from which to survey invading hordes. Inside the château’s cavernous secondstory study, at a desk heavy with books, the seventy-one-year-old owner of the property, Renaud Camus, sits at an iMac and tweets dire warnings about Europe’s demographic doom. On the sweltering June afternoon that I visited the castle, Camus—no relation to Albert—wore a tan summer suit and a tie. Several painted self-portraits hung in the study, multiplying his blue-eyed gaze. Camus has spent most of his career as a critic, novelist, diarist,…

At about eight o’clock on August 11th, more than six hundred people, many of them liberal activists, gathered in the still air of St. Paul’s Memorial Church, across from the campus of the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. Over the years, parishioners at St. Paul’s have debated everything from the Vietnam War to the ordination of women. Now they were facing something unprecedented and unpredictable: the prospect of a confrontation with the far right. The next day, a coalition of extremist groups, including young men who proudly proclaimed their loyalty to a whitenationalist ideology, planned to hold a rally under the banner of “Unite the Right.” Their ostensible intention was to protest the city’s decision to remove a monument to the Confederate hero Robert E. Lee. Charlottesville was expecting as…

It’s June 15, 2017, a Thursday,fortieth anniversary of the infamous daythe Mets traded Tom Seaver to Cincinnatiand they’re still losingI mean we are7 to 1 to the Washington Nationalsa team that didn’t exist in 1977the summer of a little tour in Francewith Henry Jamesin a yellow Renault douzethe light a lovely graythe rain a violinconcerto (Prokofiev’s No. 2 in D Major)and I had books to readHuxley Woolf Forster and their enemy F. R. LeavisEmpson a little dull for my tastealso Freud on errors, Norman Mailer on orgasms,James Baldwin in ParisDostoyevsky’s “Notes from Underground” Part 1and John Ashbery tells me he is reading “The Possessed”translated as “The Demons” in the newfangled translationwhile Ron and I stay faithful to Constance GarnettI went upstairs stood on the terrace ate some cherriesadmired the outline…

A small plaint, as a starter, against the multivolume biography of the single-volume life. In the nineteenth century, the big sets were usually reserved for the big politicians. Disraeli got seven volumes and Gladstone three, but the lives of the poets or the artists or even the scientists tended to be enfolded within the limits of a single volume. John Forster’s life of Dickens did take its time, and tomes, but Elizabeth Gaskell kept Charlotte Brontë within one set of covers, and Darwin got his life and letters presented in one compact volume, by his son. The modern mania for the multivolume biography of figures who seem in most ways “minor” may have begun with Michael Holroyd’s two volumes devoted to Lytton Strachey, who was wonderful and influential but a…