Innholdsfortegnelse for January 15, 2018 i The New Yorker

Vinson Cunningham (“Quiet Storm,” p. 22) has been a staff writer since 2016. Sarah Stillman (“No Refuge,” p. 32) was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016. This story was produced in collaboration with the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s Global Migration Project, which she also directs. David Gates (Fiction, p. 52) is the author of several books, including, most recently, the story collection “A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me.” Alexandra Schwartz (A Critic at Large, p. 65) is a staff writer. Mark Ulriksen (Cover) has contributed more than fifty-five covers to the magazine since 1994. Chana Bloch (Poem, p. 55), who died in May, was the author of five poetry collections and a co-translator of “The Song of Songs,” “Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of…

From “The Associated Press Stylebook”: “We do not use obscenities, racial epithets or other offensive slurs in stories unless they are part of direct quotations and there is a compelling reason for them.” From “The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage”: “The Times very rarely publishes obscene words... sometimes at an acknowledged cost in the vividness of an article or two.” From the Daily Stormer style guide: “While racial slurs are allowed/recommended, not every reference to nonwhite[s] should be a slur.... It should not come across as genuine raging vitriol. That is a turnoff to the overwhelming majority of people.” The guide, apparently written by the site’s founder and chief propagandist, Andrew Anglin, lists eighteen racial slurs that are “advisable” and four that are “not allowed,” and reminds…

Three years ago, on a Saturday in spring, I wandered into a humid gallery just south of Canal Street. On display was a group exhibition called “Black Eye,” which included works by an impressive roster of established and emerging artists—Kehinde Wiley, Wangechi Mutu, Steve McQueen, Kerry James Marshall, Deana Lawson, David Hammons, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. The show, curated by Nicola Vassell, felt like a confirmation of my growing, and perhaps belated, realization that work by black artists had come to occupy an elevated position of regard in the art world. A few months before the show, McQueen had won the Academy Award for Best Picture, for “Twelve Years a Slave.” A year later, Wiley’s first career retrospective, “A New Republic,” opened at the Brooklyn Museum to widespread acclaim. In October, 2016,…

On June 9, 2009, just after 2 a.m., Laura S. left the restaurant where she waitressed, in Pharr, Texas, and drove off in her white Chevy. She was in an unusually hopeful mood. Her twenty-third birthday was nine days away, and she and her nineteen-year-old cousin, Elizabeth, had been discussing party plans at the restaurant. They’d decided to have coolers of beer, a professional d.j., and dancing after Laura put her three sons to bed. Now they were heading home, and giving two of Laura’s friends a ride, with a quick detour for hamburgers. Elizabeth said that, as they neared the highway, a cop flashed his lights at them. The officer, Nazario Solis III, claimed that Laura had been driving between lanes and asked to see her license and proof…

After the children had left home and his wife had made her escape to Italy, Garver kept most of the house closed off, even when summer came and he no longer had to save on heat. Better the blank doors than the empty rooms—not to get sentimental at this late date. He still went to his studio every day, although the work was no good anymore, and “anymore” was putting it kindly. His married daughter, Emma, the only one of the kids who kept in touch, had flown up for his birthday and told him that this was no way to live. Look at the garden: sumacs ten feet high. He should sell this stupid farm and move back down to the city, she said. Or someplace where he could…

God, by Reza Aslan (Random House). Aslan’s first publication since his short-lived television series “Believer” is a brief survey of human conceptions of God, from the man-beast divinities found in prehistoric cave paintings to the one God of Islam. Drawing on evolutionary theory, Aslan argues that people have an “unconscious urge” to project their image onto God, since “we are the lens through which we understand the universe.” This urge has often led away from the idea of an embodied God to one in which God is a creative force underlying existence. Aslan is a believer in the latter. “I am, in my essential reality, God made manifest,” he writes. This conclusion has been reached before by many worthy thinkers; here, however, it arrives abruptly, in a book that…

WHEN WE START WITH DEATH Lauren Collins, in her article on the writer Leïla Slimani, picks up on the power of the beginning of Slimani’s novel “Chanson Douce”: “Le bébé est mort” (“The baby is dead”) (“The Home Front,” January 1st). The book’s opening sentence, which frames all that follows, recalls, in structure, story placement, and organizing narrative function, as well as psychological effect, the start of Slimani’s fellow French- North African writer Albert Camus’s book “L’Étranger”: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte” (1942). Though Slimani is not a neo-existentialist, by interrogating motherhood’s role in society she calls into question our (supposedly) most natural relations and responses to tragedy, just as Camus did. When children and mothers perish in a story’s first line, it’s safe to say that life and meaning…

Fear not, Duolingo delinquents! This cozy Nolita wine bar’s intimidating mouthful of a nom belies its unpretentiousness and approachability. Though La Compagnie, opened by the team behind Experimental Cocktail Club, boasts a head-spinning list of around six hundred bottles, an infectious lightness pervades the elegant setting, where the staff wears brightly patterned tracksuits on Tuesdays and aloha shirts on Fridays, to honor the Hawaiian heritage of the head bartender. “I want the Muscadet drinker to be as comfortable as the Montrachet drinker,” the managing partner Caleb Ganzer said, on a recent Thursday evening, as chic thirty-somethings with nice highlights lounged on plush velvet chairs. It was well past happy hour, which stretches blessedly from the time the bar opens, at five, until seven o’clock, and knocks five dollars off glasses…

Once you’ve made a reservation at Paris’s first nudist restaurant, you find yourself neurotically broadcasting this bit of news to anyone who will listen. While vacationing in France’s capital recently, a visitor from New York City approached the front desk of his hotel and told the thoughtful-looking employee seated there, “Tonight, we will be eating at the naturist restaurant, O’Naturel. In addition to our clothing, we will also be surrendering our phones, so between eight-forty-five and eleven o’clock we will be unreachable.” The desk clerk nodded gravely. O’Naturel is situated on a residential street in the Twelfth Arrondissement, a stone’s throw from a nursery school. The restaurant’s co-proprietor, smiling and fully dressed, buzzed the visitor and a friend into a tiny, curtained- off lobby. “New York City!” the co- proprietor…

Why is it boring when your friend Don tells you about his wife leaving him but you laugh when you find out that she left him for another man named Don? Why is a funny cowboy dance hysterical but a funny sailor dance confusing? If a busload of circus clowns is travelling through Mexico, is there any chance they will survive? When you see someone sinking in quicksand, is it funnier if you know the person? Did the Vikings have jokes, and, if so, were they surprisingly gentle? Is pointing and laughing something we do naturally, or do we have to learn it? Likewise, can someone without a sense of humor be taught to have one, or must it be beaten into him? How long should you laugh at your…

I have been fooled before, and just becauseThis summer seems so long, it might not beMy last. Winter could come again, and pauseThe sky like a taped tactical descentOf pocket paratroopers. Things to seeCould happen yet, and life prove not quite spentBut still abundant, still the main event. The trick, I’m learning, is to stay in doubt,Season to season, of what time might bring,And patiently await how things turn out.Eventually time tells you everything.If it takes time to do so, no surpriseIn that. You fold your arms, you scan the skies,And tell yourself that life has made you wise, If only by the way it ebbs away.But still it takes an age, and after all,Though nearly gone, life didn’t end today,And you might be here when the first leaves fallOr…

(1940-2017) I made a big wish on the evening star,Venus, or was it Mars,but it was a low-flying planeheaded east. I saw the little foxes on the hillsidewith their pointy red ears;up close, a fallen branch of autumn. When the guide clapped his hands,the brilliant apples on the tree got frightenedand flew away. The marriage I called Gibraltarwent down like a shipscraping the rocky strait. I thought the war would bring peace.The road signs all saidThis Way to the Future, so we ran outwith flag and shovel, elated, planting—…

How literal must a literary translation be? Nabokov, who was fluent in three languages and wrote in two of them, believed that “the clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.” Borges, on the other hand, maintained that a translator should seek not to copy a text but to transform and enrich it. “Translation is a more advanced stage of civilization,” Borges insisted—or, depending on the translation you come across, “a more advanced stage of writing.” (He wrote the line in French, one of several languages he knew.) In 2016, “The Vegetarian” became the first Korean-language novel to win the Man Booker International Prize, which was awarded to both its author, Han Kang, and its translator, Deborah Smith. In the English-speaking world, Smith, at the…

NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Body & SOUL More than twenty years ago, the d.j.s and nightlife veterans Danny Krivit, François Kevor kian, and Joaquin (Joe) Claussell began hosting a Sunday-afternoon party called Body & SOUL. For many revellers, the event became a place of sin and salvation; some likened it to church. The spot where Body & SOUL was born, the downtown Manhattan warehouse Club Vinyl, has since been shuttered. Yet the series lives on, touring around the world with stops in dozens of other refurbished spaces. The crew decamps to Elsewhere for the holiday weekend; each year, the three friends celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., with…

Zlatne Uste Golden Festival Eastern European and Middle Eastern music, dance, and cuisine are the subjects of this annual festival, held in New York City for more than thirty years. The organizers explore Balkan traditions and customs across two nights and four stages, where attendees can shop for folk arts and sample a wide array of dishes native to the region, which spans roughly from Romania to Greece and from Croatia to Turkey. The main draw is a marathon of performances, including a traditional Egyptian dance troupe, the Yale Women’s Slavic chorus, a Balkan brass band, and ROSA, a women’s choral group that specializes in non-tempered Serbian singing. Profits from ticket sales will be donated to charitable and educational organizations aiding Balkan communities. (The Grand Prospect Hall, 263 Prospect…

Barren Island has been likened to “a scrotum hanging from the bottom of Brooklyn.” In the eighteen-fifties, the city began sending horse carcasses, slaughterhouse offal, and other troublesome refuse there for salvage or disposal, and in 1879 a court ruled that a Brooklyn railroad company could legally turn away passengers who worked in the rendering plants because their clothes smelled so terrible. In the late nineteen-twenties, after automobiles had begun to make horse recycling obsolete, the city used landfill to enlarge the island and merge it with the mainland, then built Floyd Bennett Field, New York’s first municipal airport. In the mid-thirties, Robert Moses evicted the remaining residents to make way for Marine Park. In 1972, Barren Island—whose name apparently comes not from its long association with desolation but from…

In 2016, the highest-paid employee of the State of California was Jim Mora, the head coach of U.C.L.A.’s football team. (He has since been fired.) That year, Mora pulled in $3.58 million. Coming in second, with a salary of $2.93 million, was Cuonzo Martin, at the time the head coach of the men’s basketball team at the University of California, Berkeley. Victor Khalil, the chief dentist at the Department of State Hospitals, made six hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars; Anne Neville, the director of the California Research Bureau, earned a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars; and John Smith, a seasonal clerk at the Franchise Tax Board, earned twelve thousand nine hundred dollars. I learned all this from a database maintained by the Sacramento Bee. The database, which is open to…

One morning last February, not long after Donald Trump had been inaugurated as President, but long before many people had reconciled themselves to that fact, students at Howard University awoke to find a bold message written on a walkway of the campus’s central plaza, known as the Yard. Spray-painted in blue block letters, it read “Welcome to the Trump Plantation, Overseer: Wayne A. I. Frederick.” The message was aimed at the heart, the character, and the conscience of Howard’s president, a reserved, deliberative oncologist and surgeon whom the board of trustees had unanimously elected to the position in 2014. Frederick is pure Howard: he earned his undergraduate and medical degrees and a master’s in business administration there. At forty-six, he has held a number of titles, but “overseer”—a derisive term…

Happy New Year, you! Now that the champagne has gone flat and the Christmas tree is off to be mulched, it’s time to turn your thoughts to the months ahead. 2017 was a pustule of a year, politically and personally; the general anxiety around the degradation of American democracy made it hard to get much done. That’s O.K., though, because you’ve made new resolutions for 2018, and the first one is not to make resolutions. Instead, you’re going to “set goals,” in the terminology of the productivity guru Tim Ferriss—preferably ones that are measurable and have timelines, so you can keep track of your success. Apps like Lifetick or Joe’s Goals will help by keeping you organized and allowing you to share your progress on social media; a little gloating…