Innholdsfortegnelse for January 22, 2018 i The New Yorker

Not long ago, Eva Schloss, a survivor of the Holocaust and a childhood friend of Anne Frank’s, left her home in London and flew to Los Angeles, where she spent a week inside a camera-filled dome, answering painful questions about her past. “It was exhausting—the lamps and the cameras and the big globe,” she recalled. In a soft accent, she explained, “We are really worried. We won’t be here very much longer to answer questions.” In 1938, Schloss’s family left Vienna for Amsterdam, where she met Anne Frank, and later went into hiding. When she was fifteen, her family was taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and she spent nine months in the camp. Her father and her brother were killed in a death march. In 1953, her mother married Otto Frank, Anne’s…

Valentine Seaman was born in Queens County in 1770 and studied medicine in Philadelphia under Benjamin Rush. He defied early-nineteenth-century anti-vaxxers by introducing Edward Jenner’s “kine-pock” inoculation to New York City, initially by administering it to one of his own children. In 1851, his son John Ferris Seaman bought twenty- six acres near the northern tip of Manhattan, in what’s now called Inwood but was then known as Tubby Hook. He built an ornate, multi-cupolaed, statue embellished mansion on the crest of a hill, using marble that had been quarried approximately where Columbia University’s football stadium stands today. “If you were coming south into the city on the railroad in the late eighteen-hundreds, the mansion was the first thing you saw,” Cole Thompson, a real-estate salesperson and amateur local historian,…

FINDING THE FICTION A few sentences into Sadia Shepard’s story “Foreign-Returned,” I began to get the eerie feeling that I knew exactly what was coming next (Fiction, January 8th). And, in fact, I did, because almost everything that happens in Shepard’s story happens in Mavis Gallant’s story “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” published, in The New Yorker, in 1963. Scene by scene, plot turn by plot turn, gesture by gesture, the Shepard story follows the Gallant— the main difference being that the characters are Pakistanis in Connecticut rather than Canadians in Geneva. Some phrases and sentences are mirrored with only a few words changed. Shepard, in an interview with the fiction editor Deborah Treisman, acknowledges a “great debt” to the Gallant story, but the correspondences far exceed…

Julius Eastman is the kind of American genius not enough people know about. I first heard of him from the composer Nico Muhly; for years, Eastman had been a known-ish quantity in music circles, but even there he was something of a mystery, owing in part to the fact that he died under unhappy circumstances. Born in New York City in 1940, and raised in Ithaca, he had a younger brother, Gerry, who ended up playing guitar for Count Basie. As a student, Eastman earned his degree in piano and composition at the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia. But Eastman’s gifts were not limited to paper. He had a remarkable voice—deep, soulful, nuanced—that attracted attention. Eventually, the conductor Lukas Foss found himself drawn to Eastman’s way of singing…

Across from a glass-goods warehouse on an unassuming, windswept Bushwick block, the Narrows has glossy rewards for the determined seeker of a good drink. Outside, the bar is unmarked; open the door, and a vast dark-copper counter punctuated with candles stretches almost the length of the room. Round a corner, and another slender space greets you, this one replete with plush booths. The black-and-white décor is severe but modish, and the ceiling is a stark high swoop; black wood tables seem to drink in the dim yellow glow from Art Deco light fixtures. On a recent Sunday, refugees from frigid temperatures lined the bar, wearing knit beanies that made them distinguishable from behind only by hair length. From the front, a bristling array of full beards and pointed mustaches suggested…

Discussions of public morality often have a teleological bent. People used to behave better, we hear. They never would have got away with this kind of behavior back in the day. But declines, like vasectomies and windbreakers, can occasionally be reversed. Can you put incivility back into the bottle once it’s out? So to the Cock, a London pub that recently banned swearing, to try to answer a question of the moment. The Cock is part of the Samuel Smith chain of pubs. There are more than two hundred of them, and they are owned by a Yorkshireman named Humphrey Smith, whose old-school tastes manifest themselves in cheap prices, a lack of music or televisions, and “uncompromisingly Victorian” décor. Smith is known to make some sudden moves. He is said…

In Calabria, Lea Garofalo’s disappearance required no explanation. The local Mafia, known as the ’Ndrangheta, had a term for people who simply vanished: lupara bianca, or “white shotgun,” a killing that left no corpse. Residents of Pagliarelle, the mountain village where Garofalo’s family lived, added her name to a list of victims who were never to be mentioned again. In three decades, thirtyfive local men and women had been murdered in Mafia vendettas, including Garofalo’s father, her uncle, and her brother. Garofalo, born into the ’Ndrangheta, had eloped with a cocaine smuggler named Carlo Cosco when she was sixteen. The next year, they had a daughter, Denise, and Garofalo implored Cosco to leave the Mob. Instead, a few years later, she witnessed her husband and his brother kill a man…

In the nineteenth century,I’d have found a medium,a knocking table, a crystal ball,but to conjure him in 2016I go online and Google,scroll page after page untilhis name disappearsin a list of random links,but still there’s his handle on Skype,still the picture of him crossing the finish lineof the Portland marathon,still the smiling-in-the-wind-on-the-beach photo, stillthat e-mail that arrived at 3 a.m.back in February, those words of suchlove and affirmation out of the blue that I knew were strange but didn’t query,thought maybe he’d been up drinking,was feeling sentimental, andthat must have beenthe night of the first attemptwe found written in his journal,how he’d thrown himself off a bridgeinto the cold dirty Willamettebut survived,and how disappointedhe must have felt then,the body involuntarily counteringwith a surge of adrenaline,his body feeling at itsutmost alive.…

It seemed as good a time as any to buyA cemetery plot. The price is boundTo spike, the local real estate beingWhat it isFor both the living and the dead, and seeingHow few opportunities to make a soundDecision are left as our debilities multiply,I signed up for a double bed, the gruffSix inches above an adamant rockledge hereThat doesn’t allow for anything but ashes—Yours and mine,I trust. Why molder while the family rehashesAs ghosts the grievances that went in one ear...?Weren’t the wars one survived aboveground enough?While waving the check to dry its bottom line,I asked the gravedigger who is it ownsThe space next to ours, now a crabgrass aisle.He scratched his chin,Then named a woman whose flaking shingle styleIs eight down from mine, a woman I’ve known,Good God, for…

Ghosts of the Tsunami, by Richard Lloyd Parry (MCD). Among the thousands who perished in the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 were seventy-four children from a single elementary school, the focus of this examination of the tragedy’s aftermath. When, after months of digging for remains, municipal workers gave up, one mother, intent on continuing, acquired a license to operate heavy machinery. When officials sheltered behind bureaucratese with the “metallic tang of lawyerly advice,” the parents took them to court—a confrontational course that, Parry notes, was unusual within the quietist norms of Japanese democracy. With exemplary sympathy and detachment, he also writes of exorcism rituals, the many reports of ghosts reflecting the persistence of attachments between the living and the newly dead. What You Did Not Tell, by Mark…

THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Balls One Year Lease mounts this physical-theatre rendition of the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, also the subject of the film “Battle of the Sexes.” (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200. In previews.) A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds At Next Door at NYTW, Elena Araoz directs her adaptation of two short stories by Mac Wellman, dealing with asteroids, aliens, amnesia, and estranged neighbors. (Fourth Street Theatre, 83 E. 4th St. 212-460-5475. Opens Jan. 17.) Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill In Steph Del Rosso’s play, directed by Marina McClure and featuring the Bats, a woman recovering from a breakup begins to feel holes throughout her body. (Flea, 20 Thomas St. 212-226-0051. Previews begin Jan.…

The New York City Naturalist Club: Eagle Watch Inwood Hill Park caps the neighborhood of Dyckman, on the northern edge of Manhattan. In the summer, the park is one of the liveliest spots in New York, rich with the music, food, and night life of the neighborhood’s Dominican residents. In the quieter winter months, Inwood Hill Park also happens to be one of the best locations in the city for eagle watching. Bald eagles have been common in the Manhattan area since the nineteenth century, and restorative efforts along the Hudson River have helped to maintain the population of birds who call the park and the surrounding land home. The New York City Naturalist Club hosts a birding expedition, during which guests of all skill levels can watch for…

On his first day as Secretary of the Interior, last March, Ryan Zinke rode through downtown Washington, D.C., on a roan named Tonto. When the Secretary is working at the department’s main office, on C Street, a staff member climbs up to the roof of the building and hoists a special flag, which comes down when Zinke goes home for the day. To provide entertainment for his employees, the Secretary had an arcade game called Big Buck Hunter installed in the cafeteria. The game comes with plastic rifles, which players aim at animated deer. The point of the installation, Zinke has said, is to highlight sportsmen’s contribution to conservation. “Get excited for #hunting season!” he tweeted, along with a photo of himself standing next to the game, which looks like…

Tahseen Chowdhury, a seventeen-year-old student at Stuyvesant High School, isn’t into skateboards or video games. He spends his weekends running for New York state senator, in the September Democratic primary, against the incumbent, Jose Peralta. “It’s not that difficult,” Chowdhury said one day at the school, referring to his grassroots campaign. “All you need are competent people.” His team consists of about twenty advisers, most of whom have curfews. His treasurer, Tymur Kholodnyak, is seventeen. “He just read a bunch of books and figured out how to track our campaign donations and expenses,” Chowdhury said. Chowdhury was preparing for a student- union meeting at school. He was dressed in chinos, a button-down checked shirt, and leather lace-ups. “I dress like this mostly because of the campaign,” he said. Then, after…

The following are recently discovered quotes from interviews that William Shakespeare conducted while promoting various plays, in which he speaks candidly about writing, life, love, and even battling the common cold. • “Writing is everything to me. I love writing in that weird, flowery language. It takes much longer than writing regular, but, in the end, I think it’s worth it. I hope so, at least. Sometimes I worry that people won’t know what the hell I’m saying, but that’s a risk worth taking if you want it to sound all flowery and weird.” • “Juliet [Capulet] was based on my former downstairs neighbor Carla. And, before you ask, Carla did not commit suicide. (Laughs) But she had this annoying thing where whenever she saw someone sleeping she assumed that…

One day last July, the five writers of “The Other News,” Nigeria’s first prime-time politicalsatire show, sat in an office in Lagos, trying to figure out how to make fun of a king. The Ooni of Ife, the traditional ruler of the Yoruba people, had recently made headlines for an incident that occurred on a flight to Ontario. As the Ooni’s entourage boarded, one of his aides, dressed in a flowing white robe, blessed the plane by rattling a couple of shakers above his head. A passenger caught the rite on his phone and posted a video to YouTube, where it quickly went viral. The writers were working on the pilot episode of the show and hoped to begin with a few jokes about recent news items; the clip, some…

I hear from my former students occasionally. A few have gone on to accomplish remarkable work. Hear equally from the ordinary and, remarkable. Requests for recommendations, announcements of new jobs, marriages, children, a photo, copy of a book or film script, story in a magazine or anthology, perhaps inscribed personally to me or sent directly from the publisher. The gift of a snapshot, book, or story meant to break silence that settles in after they leave the university, the silence that being here, a student for a semester in my fiction-writing class, doesn’t break, silence of living ordinary lives we all endure whether our writing is deemed remarkable by others or not. A current student, Teresa McConnell, wants to help other people. The story she submits to my fiction-writing class,…

Bratz dolls have swollen heads, pouty lips, spindly limbs, and chunky heeled shoes. Their waists are barely wider than their necks. Their eyes and heads are so big and their noses so small that if it weren’t for their Penthouse makeup (icy eyeshadow, cat-eye liner, glistening lip gloss, and eyelashes as long as their fingers) and their come-hither clothes (crop tops, hot pants, microminis, and kinky boots), they’d look like emaciated babies, Kewpie dolls in a time of famine. Carter Bryant was thirty-one and working at Mattel in August of 2000, designing clothes for Barbie, when he created Bratz, though he later said— and his legal defense turned on this claim—that he’d got the idea for the dolls while on a seven-month break from Mattel, two years earlier. He drew…

The poems of Joan Murray, who died in 1942, at the age of twenty-four, have been lost and recovered many times over. First, Murray’s manuscript was pried, from her mother, by W. H. Auden, who wanted to publish it as his inaugural pick as judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, in 1947. The resulting book, “Poems,” received a few respectful notices but was soon forgotten. In 2003, John Ashbery, a cheerful prospector in overlooked minor poetries, published a short appreciation of Murray, “one of the poets of the forties whom I most enjoy,” whose “abrupt transitions and changes of scene” bring readers to “the brink of a momentous discovery.” The poems were discoveries in and of themselves. In 2006, the poet and editor Shanna Compton uploaded a PDF…

The new season of “High Maintenance” opens with a modern moment of dread. In an episode called “Globo,” a Brooklyn pot dealer—a character we know only as the Guy—wakes up with his girlfriend. The two are cozy and slovenly, joking about the ethics of sharing dreams. Then they check their phones. Something awful has happened: a terrorist event, the details left vague. “I think I’m going to go to work early,” the Guy says, staring at his screen. “Yeah,” she says. “That makes sense.” “Globo” lasts just twenty-six minutes. And yet, somehow, in its spiky, elliptical, warmly observant way, as the camera floats without judgment from one thread to another, from bistro to crash pad to brownstone stoop—sometimes following the Guy as he delivers weed to customers, but just as…