Innholdsfortegnelse for January 1, 2018 i The New Yorker

Lawrence Wright (“The Glut Economy,” p. 42), a staff writer since 1992, is an author, screenwriter, and playwright. Jonathan Blitzer (“Trapped,” p. 20) is a staff writer. Julia Rothman (Sketchbook, p. 51) is an author and illustrator. Her work has appeared in the Times, the Washington Post, and New York, and her children’s book “Brick: Who Found Herself in Architecture” will be published this spring. James B. Stewart (“The Virtuoso,” p. 28), a contributor to the magazine since 1993, is on the faculty at Columbia Journalism School. He also writes the “Common Sense” column for the Times. Bridget Lowe (Poem, p. 48) published her début poetry collection, “At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky,” in 2013. Adam Gopnik (Comment, p. 15; Books, p. 66), a staff writer, has been contributing…

2122 Beekman Pl., Brooklyn (916-936-2122) Two men approaching the Prospect-Lefferts Gardens bar Erv’s, on a recent Wednesday night, hesitated when they heard the horn section of a local jazz band screaming through the windows. They walked in anyway, but left without ordering, agreeing to return another time, when the place might have quieter programming. Two days later, there was no band, and a Snazzerac—a take on a Sazerac, spiffed up with the addition of pecan liqueur—could be sipped in relative peace. Mac DeMarco sang salty beach tunes over the stereo, a fitting choice for the first truly frigid night of the season, when head colds and existential dread abounded. “I’m so old,” someone moaned to a friend in a booth. “I’m almost twenty-seven.” Hats and jackets spread into the bar’s…

Juliana grew up with a single memory of her father. He was sitting in the half-light of evening on the porch of their home, in a small town in El Salvador, while her mother cooked dinner in the kitchen. A man in a black mask emerged from the darkness. Juliana heard three gunshots, and saw her father fall off his chair, vomiting blood. She was three years old at the time, and afterward she wondered if the killing had actually happened. The most tangible detail was the man in the mask, who came to seem more present in her life than her father ever was. Juliana used to find her mother by the windows, pulling back a corner of the curtains to be sure that he had not returned. “It…

A year ago, I picked up a book, “Chanson Douce,” that I’ve thought about pretty much every day since. I was initially drawn to it because I’d read that its author, Leïla Slimani, had been inspired by a news item about a New York nanny who killed the two children in her care. The murders happened in 2012, but I remembered them in all their excruciating particulars: that the mother had been at a swimming lesson with a third sibling; that they came home and found the boy and the girl bleeding in the bathtub; that the nanny, who tried to slit her own throat, said she was upset at having been asked to take on cleaning duties; that the couple has since had two more kids. Once in a…

Eileen watched the bus pull into the depot and the passengers debark, stiff and groggy, into the crisp November air, their breath flashing like handkerchiefs in front of their faces. She was in her car, the window rolled all the way down, her arm slung out. She was smoking a cigarette but the cigarette had gone out and her arm had turned numb, not from the cold but from the ligature of its own hanging weight. Eileen liked the sensation, as if her arm were holding its breath. The crowd dispersed, leaving one man lurking under the eave of the shelter. He had a Slazenger sports bag bunched against his ribs, long wrists dangling from his coat cuffs, and a pink, animate nose, twitching like a dog’s. It was Murt’s…

Gorbachev, by William Taubman (Norton). The de-Stalinization of Soviet Russia took place in two stages: first, from 1953 to the early sixties, “The Thaw” of Nikita Khrushchev; then the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, who—from 1985 until Christmas night of 1991, when he ruefully announced the disintegration of the Soviet Union—took on the gargantuan and, ultimately, self-immolating task of democratizing a Communist empire. Amazingly, Taubman, a political scientist at Amherst, has written by far the best biographies of both leaders. (The book on Khrushchev won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004.) He does not answer every riddle of Gorbachev’s personality or of his wildly improvisational reign, but, with evident sympathy, he tells a superbly researched story of a politician of such decency as to seem, in our more pessimistic, darker moment,…

There may be no genre of television easier to parody than true crime. The style is formulaic by design: an atrocity is followed by an investigation, a left turn, a revelation, fin. Think “America’s Most Wanted,” or “Dateline.” Fictionalized variations of the idea, in which a crime is committed, scrutinized, and solved within the hour, are called procedurals for good reason. The accoutrements (plastic evidence bags, grainy security footage, an incriminating fibre tweezed from a corpse) are consistent from episode to episode, and the action unfolds in the same way each time. True crime allows for more uncertainty— sometimes the wrong man is fingered— but the sight of a perpetrator being hustled off in handcuffs remains satisfying, because we knew it was coming, and because it signals the deliverance of…

SONTAG’S LEGACY Tobi Haslett, in his thoughtful article on Susan Sontag, perpetuates a longstanding error about the Vietnam War (A Critic at Large, December 11th). He writes that, in 1968, Sontag “flew to Hanoi and visited the Vietcong,” and that 1978, the year of Sontag’s “I, etcetera,” was “three years after the official Vietcong victory.” North Vietnam, however, was not the Vietcong. The term, an epithet that meant “Vietnamese Communist,” was employed by the Saigon government to designate a guerrilla movement in South Vietnam—the movement was officially called the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, and more commonly known as the N.L.F. Though the exact relationship between North Vietnam and the N.L.F. remains the subject of heated debate among historians, the N.L.F. operated independently, at least in…

Beanie Feldstein moved to New York in 2015, a self-described theatre geek fresh out of Wesleyan. Days after signing a lease in Chelsea, she landed her first film role, as a sorority sister in “Neighbors 2.” True to her initials, Feldstein, who is twenty-four and effusive, quickly found a niche playing the best friend, a character-actress staple she doesn’t seem to mind. “There’s something so beautiful in playing a character that supports another character’s success,” she said recently. In Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” she plays the high-school bestie of the title character. During filming, the producer Scott Rudin saw the dailies and asked her to audition for “Hello, Dolly!,” on Broadway; she was cast as Minnie Fay, the kooky assistant to a milliner. “I’ve never met anyone that I feel…

The following letters were written by Mrs. Mildred Jackson, of Boston, to her son, Edward, in California. AUGUST 1, 1860 Dearest Edward, I hope this letter gets to you! I do not trust this Pony Express!! Be careful not to send any personal information on it!!! Margaret Mooseford’s daughter sent a daguerreotype to her fiancé in California, and someone intercepted it and hung it in a tavern washroom and now everyone in the territory of Utah has seen her dimples. Love, Mother OCTOBER 12, 1860 Dearest Edwart, Please forgive any erors in this letter, as I am still getting used to this quill pen. I do not know why they stopped making my old quill pen. I suspect it is a flimflam to sell more quill pens! This one dosnt…

CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera Eight years after opening the Met’s 2009-10 season to a lusty round of boos, Luc Bondy’s rather seamy staging of “Tosca” is being retired. Equally unsurprising is the person who has been entrusted with replacing it. David McVicar has logged more new productions than any other director of the Peter Gelb era, and he gets an ace cast—Sonya Yoncheva, Vittorio Grigolo, and Željko Lučić—to introduce his version of Puccini’s hair-raising melodrama to New York operagoers, on New Year’s Eve; Emmanuel Villaume conducts (replacing James Levine). Dec. 31 at 6:30. • The velvety-voiced American mezzosr Gelb era, and he gets an ace cast—Sonya Yoncheva, Vittorio Grigolo, and Željko Lučić—to introduce his version of Puccini’s hair-raising melodrama to New York operagoers, on New Year’s Eve motley…

On a recent off day for the New York Knicks, Enes Kanter—the team’s gifted new center, who moved to the United States from Turkey eight years ago—was at the White Plains Ritz-Carlton trying to decide if it was safe for him to go out for halal kebabs. Kanter is six feet eleven, with manicured facial hair that makes him look older than his twenty-five years—until he smiles, which he does often. The Knicks had just practiced at their training facility in Tarrytown, and Kanter had showered and changed into clean sweats. There was a halal joint called Turkish Cuisine down the block, but Kanter was hesitant. “I don’t know if it’s a my Turkish-people Turkish restaurant or a their Turkish-people Turkish restaurant,” he said, sitting in the lobby. “It could…

Sean Tejaratchi knew what he wanted to do with his life, but nobody in Eugene, Oregon, was hiring teen-agers to work as graphic designers. So he made up a fake rock band—Toad Licker—and distributed phony concert flyers around the city, like baited hooks on a trawl line. (Printing them was easy; he worked at Kinko’s.) The publicity manager of a local indie-rock venue was impressed— “You did Toad Licker?”—and paid him to make real flyers. Since then, he has been, among other things, an art director, a graphic designer for two films by Miranda July, an artist for a series of feminist postcards, and a freelance photo retoucher for a producer of pornographic videos and magazines. “That porn company is one of the most relaxing places I’ve ever worked,” Tejaratchi…

Johannes Brahms wrote his first violin sonata for his muse, the pianist Clara Schumann. He presented it to her in 1879, soon after the death of her youngest child, Felix, who was named for the composer Felix Mendelssohn and was the only violinist among Schumann’s eight children. Brahms was his godfather. The sonata, which Brahms completed at the relatively late age of forty-six, takes its theme from his own “Regenlied,” or “Rain Song,” and is a meditation on the loss of childhood innocence. The violinist Anne- Sophie Mutter, who was captivated by the work as a child, has said that it is best played by an adult. “I have a deeper understanding of music and, if you want it or not, life does leave its marks not only in your…

God said—Look at it this way—The poinsettias have to endure themselves—so many pornographic reds in one place—their effect that of the clown—all mouth—it’s too much— And so you must also endure your form— make the best of things—stop moping around— Sometimes I spy you from the top tier of my treehouse in the woods—with my special binoculars—I have to get the leaves out of my eyes first—adjust the black knobs— Then the top of your head, your bangs hanging limply in your eyes—you are always alone, in clothes that seem a size too small—a girl-ox moving through the grass—so dumb— pulling a cart filled with the adult world— its anxieties and lusts stacked like logs, all that liquid grief pooling in the bottom— You think I didn’t see but I…

I both like and dislike “Thérèse Dreaming” (1938), the Balthus painting that thousands of people have petitioned the Metropolitan Museum to remove from view because it brazens the artist’s letch for pubescent girls—which he always haughtily denied, but come on! The man was a creep. The subject sits with head turned, eyes closed, and a knee raised to expose her panties. On the floor, a cat—a personal totem for Balthus—laps milk from a dish. The picture is strongly painted, with a dusky tonality in which colors smolder. There is a sense of time run aground on a day—in the afternoon, you somehow know—without end. Thérèse was the daughter of a restaurant worker, a neighbor of Balthus’s in Paris. At the time, she was twelve or thirteen years old, and Balthus…