Innholdsfortegnelse for July 11, 2016 i The New Yorker

George Saunders (“Trump Days,” p. 50) is the author of nine books, among them “The Braindead Megaphone” and “Lincoln in the Bardo,” his first novel, which comes out in February. Mark Singer (Comment, p. 27) is a longtime writer for The New Yorker. His book “Trump and Me” has just been published. Kia Gregory (The Talk of the Town, p. 31) has written for the Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Philadelphia Weekly. John Seabrook (“The Mixologist,” p. 34) has published four books, including, most recently, “The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.” Natalie Shapero (Poem, p. 36) teaches at Tufts University. “No Object” is her first poetry collection. Kadir Nelson (Cover) is an artist whose work is included in “The Picture Book Re-Imagined,” a group exhibit at the Pratt…

Bastille Day A week after the Fourth of July, indulge in a celebration of independence with Parisian flair. French culture, cuisine, and entertainment will be on display at this annual street fair, presented by the French Institute Alliance Française in commemoration of the historic storming of the Bastille Prison in rebellion against King Louis XVI, in 1789. This year, the cast members of the Tony Award-winning musical “An American in Paris” perform selections live onstage, and attendees can enjoy champagne and chocolate tasting before watching the conclusion of the 2016 U.E.F.A. European Soccer Championship at a free screening in Florence Gould Hall. (60th St., from Fifth Ave. to Lexington Ave. bastilledayny.org. July 10 at noon.) READINGS AND TALKS Book Culture Ashton Applewhite explores decades of ageism in “This Chair…

“I don’t want to do this,” Lezley McSpadden said, standing in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown. She was about to start a two-day press tour to promote “Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil,” which interweaves her story with that of her son Michael Brown, who was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Her book editor, her publicist, and the memoir’s co-writer stood typing on their phones. McSpadden’s husband, Louis Head, sat waiting nearby, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. McSpadden had short dyed-red hair, and she wore a black hoodie, goldrimmed sunglasses, a sparkly crucifix, and a bracelet of colorful beads, a token of the organization she founded, called Rainbow of Mothers, which supports women who have buried their children. She hoped that…

My body is an injury the world can’t seem to heal from— you would expect it gone by now, and yet each next day it persists, still implementing its same staunch pain, atrocious, railed against, assumed by the world to be an ingenious comeuppance, a vengeance against it—what did it do what did the world do to warrant my body within it, smarting, to warrant each of our bodies within it, crowding the sites of abuse, assessing ticket prices, asking how much to see the slave house, how much to touch the indented names of the killed, how much to enter the slatted cell and size it, close behind us its wrought door, oh actually that one’s free…

HE APPEARS Trump is wearing the red baseball cap, or not. From this distance, he is strangely handsome, well proportioned, puts you in mind of a sea captain: Alan Hale from “Gilligan’s Island,” say, had Hale been slimmer, richer, more self-confident. We are afforded a side view of a head of silver-yellow hair and a hawklike orange-red face, the cheeks of which, if stared at steadily enough, will seem, through some optical illusion, to glow orange-redder at moments when the crowd is especially pleased. If you’ve ever, watching “The Apprentice,” entertained fantasies of how you might fare in the boardroom (the Donald, recognizing your excellent qualities with his professional businessman’s acumen, does not fire you but, on the contrary, pulls you aside to assign you some important non-TV, real-world mission),…

Fortunately, the family, anxious about its diminishing food supply, encountered a small, possibly hostile pig along the way. The daughter happened upon it first pushing its scuffed snout against something hidden at the base of a thornbush: a blood-covered egg, maybe, or small rubber ball exactly like the sort that snapped from the paddle my mother used to beat me with when I let her down. At the time the father and mother were tangled in some immemorial dispute about cause and effect: who’d harmed whom first, how jealousy did not, in fact, begin as jealousy but as desperation. When the daughter called out to them, they turned to see her lift the pig, it was no heavier than an orphan, from the bushes and then set it down in…

Nearly every moment of the fourth season of “Orange Is the New Black”—which this review discusses in full—feels refracted in a small sequence in the finale, a bubble of joy floating up through tragedy. In a flashback, Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley) is visiting friends in New York, and ends up taking an F train to Dumbo, blissful and exhausted. Sitting next to her, a white guy with dreads plays a steel drum. An Asian mother falls asleep; when her little boy opens her wallet to take some cash, Poussey catches the eye of a middle-aged man in a turban. They smile, sharing the secret. Poussey watches Wall Street suits offering a flask to two girls, then gazes at an older black woman reading Michael Chabon, an interracial couple kissing, a…

BASIC INCOME James Surowiecki’s column on proposals to institute a universal basic income— a stipend from the government for all citizens—presents a number of persuasive arguments in favor of the idea (The Financial Page, June 20th). I would add that there would also be significant benefits for women. Many women, particularly those who are poor and working class, perform a vast amount of labor—caring for children, the sick, the disabled, and the elderly— that goes unpaid and unrecognized. This leaves many of them vulnerable to poverty, exploitative relationships, and violence. (Indeed, many women stay with their abusive partners because they cannot survive economically without them.) Not only would a universal basic income increase workers’ bargaining power, as Surowiecki notes; it would also increase women’s bargaining power within their households.…

In 2013, Dan Hurlin, a performance artist and puppet artist, was working at the American Academy in Rome when he stumbled on evidence that during the First World War Fortunato Depero (1892-1960), one of the Italian Futurists, had written four puppet plays that were never produced. Where were they? Hurlin travelled to Depero’s home town, Rovereto, at the foot of the Italian Alps, to examine the man’s archive. “I sat at this big table, wearing those white cotton gloves they make you wear,” Hurlin remembers. “The librarian brought out a huge box, full of sheets of paper, each covered with tissue paper. And I turned the sheets, and there they were—the plays. I practically wet my pants.” What the box contained was pages and pages of stage directions, and also…

In 2008, the weekly Presidential radio address that Franklin Delano Roosevelt pioneered moved to YouTube. It skipped television entirely, legitimizing an Internet hub that has created an ecosystem of stars and revenue streams to rival Hollywood. Presidential candidates routinely court Hollywood. They may have a new crush. Last Tuesday, ninety YouTube personalities gathered at NeueHouse, a sleek co-working space on Sunset Boulevard, for a “Creator Town Hall” with Hillary Clinton. (“Creator” is Internet-speak for someone who makes content for social media.) The event was organized by the new-media company Beautycon, after its C.E.O., Moj Mahdara, pitched the idea to Clinton’s campaign, which picked up the tab. “I said to them, ‘Look, if you want to get this audience’ ”—most creators at the event were in their twenties—“ ‘you need to…

A few days after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, Nigel Farage, the head of the U.K. Independence Party, made a curious speech to the European Parliament. Farage has spent nearly two decades railing against the E.U., and his speech went viral, thanks to the unbridled scorn he showed toward his listeners. Less commented on was the end of his address, which struck a very different note. He begged the E.U. to make a tariff-free trade deal with the U.K., and promised that the British “will be your best friends in the world.” Farage was articulating the fundamental dilemma of Brexit. In 2015, forty-four per cent of the U.K.’s exports went to E.U. countries, and fiftythree per cent of its imports came from them. Although London is…

Laura Hull and Tom McCoy will be married at the Holy Lutheran Church in Roxbury, New York, on Saturday. The ceremony will be officiated by Robert O’Brien, a longtime friend of the groom, who will stammer through a meandering analogy about how love is like a boat, failing to convince anyone in attendance that love is even remotely like a boat. The bride, thirty, graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth, with a B.A. in education. The groom, thirty-two, graduated magna cum laude from Penn, with a B.A. in economics. This disparity in achievement will be a recurring source of tension for the couple, first rearing its head during their honeymoon, in Belize, when the groom will take a little too long to calculate a tip and the bride will step…

At the Golden Globe Awards, in January, Ennio Morricone won Best Original Score for his contribution to “The Hateful Eight,” the Quentin Tarantino Western. Accepting the award on Morricone’s behalf was Tarantino himself, who brandished the trophy in a gesture of vindication, suggesting that Morricone, despite all the honors he has received, is nevertheless underrated. Tarantino proclaimed Morricone his favorite composer. “And when I say favorite composer,” he added, “I don’t mean movie composer—that ghetto. I’m talking about Mozart. I’m talking about Beethoven. I’m talking about Schubert.” The backlash began a few moments later, when the next presenter, Jamie Foxx, approached the microphone. He smiled, looked around, and shook his head slightly. “Ghetto,” he said. Tarantino’s comment, and Foxx’s one-word response to it, became a big story. In the Washington…

THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Butler Richard Strand’s play, directed by Joseph Discher, tells the true story of General Benjamin Butler’s moral crisis when three escaped slaves arrived at Fort Monroe in 1861 seeking sanctuary. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200. Previews begin July 14.) Cats The return of Trevor Nunn’s long-running production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, based on T. S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” and featuring Leona Lewis as Grizabella. (Neil Simon, 250 W. 52nd St. 877-250-2929. Previews begin July 14.) Engagements In Lucy Teitler’s dark comedy, directed by Kimberly Senior for Second Stage Theatre Uptown, a young woman causes trouble at a series of summer engagement parties. (McGinn/Cazale, 2162 Broadway, at 76th St. 212-246-4422. Previews begin July 18.) Hyperbolic! (The Last…

In the citronella-scented back yard of Rose’s, a man in a stiff Carhartt jacket disparaged a recent meal to his friend, a five-hundred-euro affair that dared to include a classless dish of couscous and a cold egg yolk. Luckily, that evening, the egg yolk served on a particularly juicy burger was hot and runny to perfection. Until the bar was bought out by two of its managers, last April, Rose’s was owned by Francine Stephens and Andrew Feinberg, dons of the tastiest mafia on Flatbush Avenue, which owns the beloved pizza restaurant Franny’s and Bkln Larder, a fancy (and pricey) market down the street. Service is a relaxed, hands-off affair that encourages independence, and a refined eye is necessary to distinguish the plainclothes waitstaff from the customers: a Jesus-beard-and-German-fade combo…

On a winter afternoon, Jim and Jeannie Gaffigan, the married couple behind “The Jim Gaffigan Show,” were working at home, in NoHo, editing a script for Season 2, which recently premièred. Fans of the semiautobiographical sitcom might imagine them, and their five children, sharing a two-bedroom apartment, as they do in the show. They used to, but now they live in a space that comprises three apartments. Their living room/home office has a large projection screen, black walls, a black floor, and black leather furniture. Jim Gaffigan wore black, and he looked fairly trim. In February, he became the latest K.F.C. Colonel Sanders; he is famous for joking about his gluttony and sloth. At home, he sat in an easy chair, eating berries and grapes. An exercise bike stood in…

At eleven-thirty on a Saturday night, in a bland-looking office building on Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, a security guard in the lobby directed me to a locked door. Hearing the magic words “Mike Will,” the man who opened the door smiled, introduced himself as the studio manager at Electric Feel, and pointed down the hall. In the main room, the console sat in a kind of sunken cockpit where two producers could work side by side, surrounded by an open hangout space. A long hall led to an internal courtyard, where you were supposed to go if you wanted to smoke, a rule that no one was bothering to observe. There was also a glassed-in conference room, and that’s where I found Mike Will—Mike WiLL Made-It is his producer…

Signed. Notarized. Everything in order. The royal steward returns the amusement park’s deed to his crocodile-leather attaché case and addresses the king. “Your Majesty,” he says, in his most officious tone, extending a withered hand in the direction of the failing iron gates, “may I present, for your consideration, Liebling’s Sunday Morning Carnival and Midway.” His Royal Highness, the King of Retired Amusements, surveys the carnival grimly. Beside him, his modest cortège: the steward, tall and lengthily wrapped in a livery of black velvet, a powdered wig on his head and lace pursed at his collar and wrists, his spectacles at high perch; the scout, not yet sixteen, pale and freckled in his olive sash and khaki shorts; and the dancing bear, in a comically small fez and a Jacobean…

Homintern, by Gregory Woods (Yale). This wide-ranging history of gay culture spans the so-called “Wilde century”: the era that began in 1895, with the trial of Oscar Wilde, when homosexuality emerged as “a major cultural influence.” Wandering from Sergei Diaghilev’s coterie around the Ballets Russes to Natalie Barney’s interwar Paris salon and Jane and Paul Bowles’s compound in Tangier, in the fifties, Woods shapes his book as a challenge to a defining myth of the period: the idea that homosexuals, newly emboldened, were secretly plotting a takeover of the social order. Marshalling an impressive array of conspiracy theories (as early as 1869, Engels was telling Marx that the “paederasts” would shortly begin organizing), Woods allows his eclectic portraits of gay groups and individuals to provide the exculpatory evidence. The…