Innholdsfortegnelse for July 25, 2016 i The New Yorker

Jane Mayer (“Trump’s Boswell Speaks,” p. 20), a staff writer, is the author of “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.” Rachel Aviv (“Captain of Her Soul,” p. 34) won the 2016 Scripps Howard Award for “Your Son Is Deceased,” her story on police shootings, which appeared in The New Yorker last year. George Black (“Purifying the Goddess,” p. 46) is writing a book on the history and the culture of the Ganges. Reporting for this article was facilitated by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Joy Williams (Fiction, p. 54) has published four novels and five books of stories, including, most recently, “99 Stories of God.” Roz Chast (Sketchbook, p. 44) is a cartoonist and an illustrator,…

Orchard Beach Lagoon Birding On the right late-summer day, canoeing on Orchard Beach Lagoon, in Pelham Bay Park, can feel like a trip up the coast to picturesque New England shores. The lagoon, which hosted the 1964 U.S. Olympic rowing trials and is still a practice ground for the Fordham Prep crew team, also hosts summer birding excursions, where city dwellers can row through Bartow Creek, looking out for the variety of species that call this stretch of the Long Island Sound home. Prior canoe experience is preferred; attendants may register via lottery. (Pelham Bay Park, 1 Orchard Beach Rd., the Bronx. 718-319-0912. July 24 at noon.) The Hills on Governors Island New York has a new view. A ten-acre park on the south end of Governors Island opens…

Last Monday was Antonia Romeo’s first day as Her Majesty’s Consul-General in New York. Romeo rose at six, skipping her morning SoulCycle class, and slipped on a pair of snakeskin Louboutins to welcome Britain’s outgoing Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, who was in town to reassure Wall Street, post-Brexit. Romeo, who is forty-one, is the first woman to hold her position in its two-hundredand-thirty-one-year history. After seeing the Chancellor, Romeo dashed off to perform her first bit of diplomacy, a City Hall meeting with Melissa Mark-Viverito, the speaker of the New York City Council. “I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t feel a little frisson of excitement at being late,” Romeo said. “Which is probably something you should leave behind when you join the Foreign Office.” “You’re the first…

Last June, as dusk fell outside Tony Schwartz’s sprawling house, on a leafy back road in Riverdale, New York, he pulled out his laptop and caught up with the day’s big news: Donald J. Trump had declared his candidacy for President. As Schwartz watched a video of the speech, he began to feel personally implicated. Trump, facing a crowd that had gathered in the lobby of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue, laid out his qualifications, saying, “We need a leader that wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.’ ” If that was so, Schwartz thought, then he, not Trump, should be running. Schwartz dashed off a tweet: “Many thanks Donald Trump for suggesting I run for President, based on the fact that I wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.’ ” Schwartz…

Martha Nussbaum was preparing to give a lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, in April, 1992, when she learned that her mother was dying in a hospital in Philadelphia. She couldn’t get a flight until the next day. That evening, Nussbaum, one of the foremost philosophers in America, gave her scheduled lecture, on the nature of emotions. “I thought, It’s inhuman—I shouldn’t be able to do this,” she said later. Then she thought, Well, of course I should do this. I mean, here I am. Why should I not do it? The audience is there, and they want to have the lecture. When she returned to her room, she opened her laptop and began writing her next lecture, which she would deliver in two weeks, at the law school of the…

It was December, and he was in the windowless consultation room of his doctor’s office. A young man with a stunningly high forehead was informing him that he had lung cancer and would die—the certainty of this being considerable—soon. The doctor was not familiar to Henry. The one he usually saw was at a baptism or a wedding that afternoon, Henry wasn’t sure which, the information having been relayed to him by a receptionist hastily swallowing her lunch. He asked the young man with the intimidating forehead if he would kindly repeat what he had just said. The words were repeated, and Henry’s first thought was that his own doctor had been too embarrassed to tell him. His second thought was that this was unlikely. “I call them work sticks,”…

On the morning of September 4, 1957, a fifteen-year-old girl named Elizabeth Eckford walked toward the entrance of Little Rock Central High School. It was among the first high schools in a major Southern city to admit a class of black students, in partial accommodation of the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision calling for the desegregation of all public classrooms across the country. As a crowd formed around her, Eckford followed her mother’s advice: that the best way to deal with the spiteful people she would encounter that day was to ignore them. The most famous image of this moment was captured by Will Counts, a photographer for the Arkansas Democrat. One figure in the crowd stands out: a teen-age girl, trailing behind and heckling. She later identified herself to reporters…

A small but wondrous Alma Thomas retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem put me in mind of a desert plant that spends all year as an innocent cactus and then, in the middle of the night, blooms. Thomas, who died in 1978, at the age of eighty-six, was a junior-high-school art teacher in Washington, D.C., whose own paintings were modernist and sophisticated but of no special note until she retired from teaching, in 1960, and took up color-intensive abstraction. Her best acrylics and watercolors of loosely gridded, wristy daubs are among the most satisfying feats (and my personal favorites) of the Washington Color School, a group that included Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and others associated with the prescriptive aesthetics of the critic Clement Greenberg: painting shorn of imagery, the…

ACTIVISM AND ACADEMIA Nathan Heller accurately captures the atmosphere at élite liberal-arts colleges in his piece on student activists at O berlin College (“The Big Uneasy,” May 30th). This article could have been written about my school, Colby. It is impossible to reconcile divisions among students within an institution—and across the country— when many of them feel afraid to speak up. Yet the piece casts the activist community in a negative light, and will inevitably become fodd er for conservatives who claim that political correctness kills debate. Speaking as someone who could be considered a textbook example of a white, privileged kid, I have learned a lot from stu d e n ts who have campaigned for trigger warnings and brought up cultural appropriation and the “decolonization of academia.”…

“I wish I had eight pairs of hands, and another body to shoot the specimens,” John James Audubon wrote in 1829. A similar yearning has gripped the population lately, thanks to the worldconquering success of the smartphone game Pokémon Go. In the “augmented reality” app, which has topped fifteen million downloads since its release, on July 6th, players venture into the streets to collect cute Pokémon creatures, which have been digitally overlaid onto real locations. At least the game gets you outside, the thinking goes. But, like any social experiment, it has its dark side. Pokémon hunters have popped up at Auschwitz, and, around the country, robbers have targeted players by staking out Pokéstops. A safety advisory from the N.Y.P.D. last week: “As you battle, train, and capture your Pokémon,…

Michael Crawford was a cartoonist and a painter, a wry and sensitive artist who woke each day with his head full of dreams. Straight from bed he reached for his pencils and pad, the better to get those images and word clusters down on paper. For at least an hour every morning, “Michael was mining his dreams,” his wife, Carolita Johnson, also a cartoonist for this magazine, said. “And when it came to cartoons he just started drawing, without any idea where things might go. Lots of drawings sat around for years without any caption. He was his own one-man cartoon-caption contest in that way. But he was patient.” There was a wild, improvisational streak in Crawford’s work. He loved baseball, and imagined a cockeyed intimacy in the talk between,…

Old scrap-iron foxglovesrusty rods of the broken woodswhat a faded knocked-out stiffnessas if you’d sprung from the horsehairof a whole Victorian sofa buried in the mud down thereor at any rate something dropped from a great heightstraight through flesh and out the other sidehas left your casing pale and loose and finallyjust a heap of shoesthey say the gods being so upliftedcan’t really walk on feet but take tottering stepsand lean like this closer and closer to the groundwhich gods?it is the hours on bird-thin legsthe same old choirs of hoursreturning their summer clothes to the earthwith the night nowas if dropped from a great heightfalling…

A boy’s bicycle inner tubered as inside the body,a well-chosen forked limbsawed from a shrub oak,& then an hour-long measureto get it right. The taut pullis everything. There’s nothingwithout resistance & the dayholds. The hard, slow, steadyhoning flips a beetle on its back,but the boy refuses to squash it.He continues with his work.Summer rambles into a quietquantum of dogwood & gum—a girl he’s too shy to tell his namestands in damp light nearing dark& biting a corner of his liphe whittles the true stock,knowing wrong from right.Though Pythagoras owneda single truth, the boyuntangles a triangle of pullwithin a triangle of release,the slingshot’s tongue a tonguetorn out of an old Army boot& Lord, what a perfect fit.Feet spread apart, the boystraddles an imaginary line,settling quietly into himselfas the balance & pull…

Sweet Lamb of Heaven, by Lydia Millet (Norton). In this novel, which is in part a beach-read thriller and in part a contemplation of questions about God and communication, Anna, a young mother fleeing her estranged, sociopathic husband, grapples with a disembodied voice that only she seems to hear. Holed up in a battered motel in Maine with her daughter, she finds herself among a recovery group of sorts for people with similar problems. Even when the book’s blend of action and philosophy feels forced, Millet’s sense of pacing is acute and her prose is glittering and exact. “True language is the deep magic,” as the voice tells Anna. “As old as time.” Imagine Me Gone, by Adam Haslett (Little, Brown). Haslett’s second novel depicts, with candor and tenderness,…

Of the three European megamusicals that dominated Broadway in the nineteen-eighties, “The Phantom of the Opera” has never left us, and “Les Misérables” keeps coming back for more. But whither “Cats,” which vowed to be with us “now and forever”? Those kitties weren’t joking around. The Andrew Lloyd Webber extravaganza has returned (in previews, at the Neil Simon), and a lot has changed in Times Square since its heyday. Will an Elmo-Mistoffelees turf war bring back the old grit? Watch and purr. ART MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Brooklyn Museum “Disguise: Masks and Global African Art” This welcome, if overdetermined, exhibition mixes contemporary works by two dozen artists from Africa and its diaspora with historical African masks and effigies, including a gloriously fearsome gela mask from Liberia, dripping with raffia and…

This cocktail bar’s lyric name, plucked from a Yeats poem, suggests a breezy harborside cantina. Walking down an industrial stretch of Van Brunt Street, in Red Hook, however, what you encounter appears to be an abandoned storefront. A polite patron would knock, but someone less thoughtful might jerk at the locked door until the bartender, Sandy, swings it open. In the early evening, the space—red leather booths, steel tabletops— feels like a cozy, empty diner, with diffuse light filtering in through wavy glass blocks. Next to each booth is a tap for refilling water glasses, a stack of napkins, and playing cards. “You could basically be self-sufficient,” one patron said on a recent Friday. “The only thing you can’t do is make a drink.” You’ll be glad to leave it…

On a recent Wednesday, at the Met Breuer, the Metropolitan Museum’s new outpost in the old Whitney building, a typical crowd—older, white— milled around the inaugural exhibit, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.” Half-painted Picassos, a Warhol, and a large portrait by Kerry James Marshall, an African-American artist based in Chicago, were on view. The subject of Marshall’s painting is a woman with skin shaded gray to black, holding a palette; behind her, like a shadow, is a colorby-number outline of herself. Kimberly Drew, the Met’s twenty-five-year-old social-media manager and the founder of a popular Tumblr, Black Contemporary Art, admired the work with a friend, the artist Eric Mack. “It’s a portrayal of black femininity that’s not compromised— the direct stare, the skin color,” Drew said. “It’s a position of supreme power.”…

Out of nowhere, a huge fad sweeps the country. It dominates social media and leads to a blizzard of think pieces, which are followed almost immediately by a backlash, as critics warn of the fad’s baleful consequences. Eventually, people get bored and move on to something new. That could well be the story of Pokémon Go, the augmented-reality game that has everyone wandering the streets in search of Pikachus and Squirtles. It’s also the story of the A.L.S. Ice Bucket Challenge, in 2014, in which millions of people filmed themselves dumping buckets of ice-cold water over their heads, in order to fight Lou Gehrig’s disease. Facebook users posted more than seventeen million videos of dousing, and countless celebrities—Bill Gates, Justin Timberlake, Leonardo DiCaprio—got drenched for the cause. For a few…

Not long ago, Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s 2016 Presidential candidate, put a halt to his considerable consumption of marijuana. “The last time I indulged is about two months ago, with some edibles,” Johnson told me in late June, in the lobby of a midtown hotel. Johnson, who was the Republican governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003, also ran for President in 2012, as a Libertarian, and received just under one per cent of the vote, but he believes this year could be different. At the end of May, William F. Weld, the former moderate Republican governor of Massachusetts, became the Libertarian Party’s Vice-Presidential nominee, giving the Party its most mainstream ticket since its founding, in 1971. “It is beyond my wildest dreams that Bill Weld is my…

When the anti-corporate thriller “Mr. Robot” débuted, last year, it felt like a shock to multiple systems, one of them being the network on which it aired. That was USA, a subsidiary of NBCUniversal and Comcast; the home of upbeat, aspirational procedurals, it’s known as the “blue skies” network. “Mr. Robot” was more of a hurricane advisory. Created by a newcomer, Sam Esmail, it was a parable of class rage, with a vigilante anti-hero, welding the paranoid style in American TV drama onto the ideology—and, just as important, the aesthetics—of both the Occupy movement and Anonymous. Esmail’s plot was a Philip K. Dick puzzle box, exposing one false reality after another. By day, the alienated junkie genius Elliott Alderson worked as a corporate cyber-security expert; by night, he was part…

In 1988, the Los Angeles punk band NOFX celebrated its fifth birthday by embarking on a tour of Europe. The first engagement was in Rotterdam, in front of hundreds of people, virtually all of whom were unimpressed. “I thought you guys were a lot better,” the promoter said after the show. Mike Burkett, known as Fat Mike, is the bassist and lead singer of the band, and in a new oral history called “NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories,” he explains that the rest of the tour substantiated the promoter’s judgment. “It finally started to sink in that maybe we were not a good band,” he recalls. Audience members hurled insults, or bottles. Burkett was ready to quit when a friend played him a brilliant new album of “melodic…

A subway train clatters out of sight, into the gullet of a tunnel. Trapped in the last car is an evil spectre, glowing blue with rage, and gazing after it is an M.T.A. worker named Patty (Leslie Jones), who seems unmoved. “I guess he’s going to Queens,” she says. That is one of the quieter—and better— gags in the new “Ghostbusters,” which is directed by Paul Feig, written by Feig and Katie Dippold, and based on Ivan Reitman’s film of 1984. The format is intact, with a number of ghosts plaguing New York, and getting their immaterial asses kicked by a quartet of enterprising mortals. Patty is one of the four, the others being Abby (Melissa McCarthy) and Holtzman (Kate McKinnon), who are nutty scientists, and Erin (Kristen Wiig), once…