Innholdsfortegnelse for January 29, 2018 i The New Yorker

Kathryn Schulz (“Remainders,” p. 26), a staff writer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Nick Paumgarten (“Getting a Shot,” p. 32) has been writing for The New Yorker since 2000. Lindsay Gellman (The Talk of the Town, p. 17), a reporter, has been published in the Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. Calvin Trillin (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25) has been a regular contributor to the magazine since 1963. His latest book is “No Fair! No Fair!: And Other Jolly Poems of Childhood,” with illustrations by Roz Chast. Roz Chast (Cover), a New Yorker cartoonist since 1978, is the author of, most recently, “Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York.” Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 15), a staff writer, is a regular contributor…

Thanks to the locavore movement, we’re used to food with origin stories: that venison tartare once ran free in a forest in Katonah. But what about the farmers? They started out somewhere, too. On a recent Saturday morning, eighteen fledgling farmers gathered in the East Village, armed with PowerPoint presentations and big dreams. They were the latest graduates of the Farm Beginnings class run by GrowNYC, which also oversees more than fifty farmers’ markets in New York City, including the huge one in Union Square. GrowNYC has been around since 1970—it blossomed out of the first Earth Day—but the training program started in 2000. “The average age of the American farmer was getting higher and higher—it’s about fifty-eight, fifty-nine across the country right now,” Christopher Wayne, the program’s director, explained.…

One afternoon at the Explorers Club, in Manhattan, Geoffrey Gray was in the fifth-floor gallery looking at a painting of a man with a beard. Sixty-odd years ago, the bearded man was a correspondent for a publication called True, which billed itself as “The Man’s Magazine.” Two years ago, Gray rebooted True as True.Ink, an online “experience- based” publication. “They called him the Vagrant Viking,” Gray said of the man in the painting. The Vagrant’s legal name was Peter Freuchen. Born in 1886, he speared walruses, hiked the Arctic, and stood six feet seven in a polar-bear-fur coat. Gray described how Freuchen, suffering from frostbite, once had to cut off his own leg. “I think he ate the leg? Gonna have to check the facts on that,” said Gray, who…

There were arrows, so we followed them. This was one afternoon last summer; my partner and I had spent the day at our local public library, working steadily through breakfast and lunch and what the British would call teatime, until suddenly hunger clobbered us both and we packed up and headed out to the car. Home was maybe four miles away. In my mind, I was already constructing enormous sandwiches. The arrows appeared two miles in, lining the side of the road where, that morning, there had been nothing but marsh grass. They were shin-high, wordless, red on a white background, pointing away from the sandwiches. My partner, who is usually more hungry than I am but always more curious, swung the car into the other lane and began to…

At 1 A.M. the dairy sink in your yard was a deer-glyphed megalith caught in my headlights. I found not only sermons in stones but Tamerlane of Samarkand in the Timberland mukluks tossed on your bedroom floor. Now I’d rather shop for staples (bread, milk, Clorox), at the twenty-four-hour Supermart than lag behind the laggard dawn about to steal from haystack to haystack, no less bent on taking us to the brink of destruction than was Clement V on dissolving the Knights Templar. He was determined to disband that herd of ten-point bucks by showing them the door courtesy of a papal bull he dubbed “Vox in excelso.” For I’m averse, sweetheart, to ever again seeing a stag take the head staggers, ever again seeing dawn kneel as if it…

The first crisis that erupts in “The Final Year” involves Samantha Power, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. The film is a documentary about the last quarter of Barack Obama’s second term, and the subjects covered include the Iran nuclear deal, the Presidential visit to Hiroshima, and the intractable plight of Syria. These are issues of immense weight, but none are as pressing as Power’s discovery that one of her children is heading to school minus the statutory bagel. It must be traced. World peace will have to wait. The focus of Greg Barker’s film is on diplomacy—a mere slice of the duties undertaken by the outgoing Administration, but more than enough to fill an hour and a half. We are swiftly introduced to the leading players: Power;…

The Growth Delusion, by David Pilling (Tim Duggan Books). According to the author of this critique of gross domestic product as a metric and as a policy tool, “Only in economics is endless expansion seen as a virtue. In biology it is called cancer.” The originator of G.D.P., the economist Simon Kuznets, never intended it to serve as a proxy for societal well-being. Pilling explores alternative models, including Maryland’s Genuine Progress Indicator, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness concept, and the U.N.’s Human Development Index. He suggests other metrics—levels of inequality, carbon emissions, life satisfaction— that could enhance our view of where we are and where we’re headed. As Kuznets wrote, “What are we growing? And why?” The Only Girl in the World, by Maude Julien with Ursula Gauthier, translated from…

CAN HOLLYWOOD CHANGE? The most telling quote in Dana Goodyear’s article on Hollywood’s reckoning with its culture of sexual abuse comes from a television executive: “Nobody knows how to act now. The rules have been so changed” (“Exposure,” January 8th). Well, yes, duh! Many men don’t know how to act now because they weren’t acting like adults in the past. The “rules” put in place and enforced by male-dominated institutions—government, academia, industry, science, religion—have indeed been exposed as predatory and oppressive. The participants— not just the perpetrators but those witnesses who colluded through their silence—have also been exposed. Judy Funston Norwood, N.Y. People are asking whether we can finally have gender equality and “more equitable and accountable workplaces.” This can’t happen until we address the real issues behind oppression.…

This bar is situated on the spot where, in 1762, the West Indian freeman and innkeeper Samuel Fraunces began pouring beer and wine for the thirsty merchants of lower Manhattan; where the Sons of Liberty plotted the lesser-known New York Tea Party; where a cannonball from a British ship, sent to put down the rebellion, crashed through the roof; and where, in June of 1776, insurrectionists gathered for the New York Provincial Congress and drained bottles of Madeira as one of them blew his fife and another played drumsticks. (They broke sixteen glasses and a pudding dish.) It’s also where General Washington announced his resignation, toasted his officers, and, crying, shook all their hands. One evening, years later, Washington sent back a three-dollar shad, offered to him on the house,…

There’s a warehouse in Long Island City that houses a quarter of a million pieces of Tiffany glass, sorted by color, in rough wooden cubbies. Understandably, people who hear about it want to come take a look. Pilgrims regularly show up at the door and ring an unmarked buzzer for the Neustadt Collection. Lindsy Parrott, the collection’s executive director and curator, turns them away. “My heart kind of breaks,” she said. The Neustadt Collection is a nonprofit decorative-arts archive comprising hundreds of Tiffany lamps and windows, and the world’s largest trove of glass fragments from Tiffany Studios. The outfit lends objects to travelling exhibitions and has a dedicated gallery in the Queens Museum, but the warehouse isn’t open to the public. On a recent Saturday, though, the Neustadt welcomed visitors…

In early 2017, shortly after Jared Kushner moved into his new office in the West Wing of the White House, he began receiving guests. One visitor who came more than once was Cui Tiankai, the Chinese Ambassador to the United States, a veteran diplomat with a postgraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University. When, during previous Administrations, Cui had visited the White House, his hosts received him with a retinue of China specialists and note-takers. Kushner, President Trump’s thirtyseven- year-old son-in-law and one of his senior advisers, preferred smaller gatherings. Three months earlier, Cui had been in near-despair. Like many observers, he had incorrectly predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election; his botched forecast, he told a friend, was precisely the kind of error that dooms the careers of…

I asked my son which part of his body he loved most.He said his skeleton. I always used to think I lovedmy toes, a quarter of my bones splayed into fans,the nerves so bright and easy to please. A friend’s daughtershowed me the bones she’d filed in an old card catalogue.I handed each one back, the dull heat of rot tradedfor the glare-white of a bare rib, fleshless cradle of hip,heft of femur on a mantel. She and I shared our loveof lemons, and she taught me “witch” in her made-up languageso I could call myself by the proper word. The invented one.I held myself against the hard belly of those vowels,that black glyph of a name. The pulse I once feltwhen my son turned inside me thrummed against my…

Danh Vo had just started to gain recognition as a rising young artist when he decided, in 2010, to make a full-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty. He had been offered a one-man show at the Fridericianum, a huge exhibition space in Kassel, Germany. “The curator said he had seen shows of mine, and that I could deal with big spaces without putting too much into them,” Vo told me. “I’m very childish. When people want to put me in boxes, I go the other way, so I was thinking, How can I stuff that space? And my simple mind came up with the Statue of Liberty.” The whole hundred-and-fifty- foot monolith, he meant, cast in many separate elements, which would remain separate and unassembled. Vo, who was born…

If you are tired of puns, are you tired of life? Puns are easy to disdain. They are essentially found, not made; discovered after the fact rather than intended before it. Puns are accidental echoes, random likenesses thrown out by our lexical cosmos. They lurk, pallidly hibernating, inside fortune cookies and Christmas crackers; the groan is the pun’s appropriate unit of appreciation. On the other hand, everyone secretly loves a pun, and, wonderfully, the worst are often as funny as the best, as the great punster Nabokov knew, because the genre is so democratically debased. Puns are part of the careless abundance of creation, the delicious surplus of life, and, therefore, fundamentally joyful. Being accidental, they are like free money—nature’s charity. There’s a reason that the most abundant writer in…

In 1953, when Joseph Cornell saw a collage by the Spanish painter Juan Gris, titled “The Man at the Café,” it inspired the most extensive series of the American sculptor’s career. “Birds of a Feather: Joseph Cornell’s Homage to Juan Gris,” at the Met, unites the Cubist masterpiece from 1914 with twelve of the shadow boxes that Cornell made in response to it, including “Untitled (Le Soir),” circa 1953-54. (It’s pictured behind the scenes at the museum, above.) The exhibition is on view through April 15. MOVIES NOW PLAYING The Chair This 1962 documentary, produced by Robert Drew and filmed by Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker, offers high drama, complex characters, and vivid performances that match those of any fictional film. It focusses on a Chicago attorney, Donald…

New York Boat Show Some say that the two happiest days in a boat owner’s life are the day the craft is bought and the day it’s sold. This annual gathering at the Javits Center gives would-be buyers a chance to extend that initial pleasure, displaying hundreds of fibreglass wonders, from motor yachts to sailboats. A number of activities are planned, including the Touch-a-Boat tour, where kids can climb aboard a working F.D.N.Y. fireboat; a boating career day for students; and a presentation of the WaterCar, which goes from land to water with a transition time of fifteen seconds. Expect interactive boating simulators, hands-on workshops about engine repair, rope-tying tutorials, fishing seminars, and presentations about financing and insurance. (655 W. 34th St. nyboatshow.com. Jan. 24-28.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES The…

The first time that Michael Grandage, the distinguished British theatre director, saw “Frozen,” the wildly lucrative animated Disney movie, was upon its release, in 2013. (It was at the bidding of his partner, Christopher Oram, a theatre designer with a fascination for animation.) At the time, Grandage made the passing observation that its plot resonated with themes in the pastoral comedies of Shakespeare that he had directed. Then he moved on, as one does when one has more pressing concerns, like bringing Daniel Radcliffe to Broadway in “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” for which Grandage received a Tony nomination. The second time Grandage watched the movie was in the summer of 2016, after being asked by his agent whether he wanted to be considered to direct a stage-musical version of the…

Every Saturday, a new family comes to stay. Some arrive early in the morning, from afar, ready to begin their vacation. Others don’t turn up until sunset, in bad moods, maybe having lost their way. It’s easy to get lost in these hills; the roads are poorly signposted. Today, after they introduce themselves, I show them around. My mother used to do the welcoming. But she’s spending the summer in a nearby town, helping out an elderly gentleman who’s also on vacation, so I have to do it. As usual, there are four of them: mother, father, two daughters. They follow me, their eyes wide, happy to stretch their legs. We stop for a moment on the shaded patio that looks out over the lawn, under a thatched roof that…

We know we’ve come to a crossroads when German childhood is being held up as an idealized model for Americans. It was, after all, Teutonic styles of child rearing that were once viewed with disgust—as in “The Sound of Music,” for a long time the most popular of all American movies, with all those over-regimented Trapp kids rescued by wearing the bedroom drapes and singing scales. But Sara Zaske’s “Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children” (Picador) is perhaps an inevitable follow-up to “Bringing Up Bébé,” that bestselling book about parenting the way the French supposedly do it—basically, as though the kids were little grownups, presumably ready for adultery and erotic appetites. So why not move eastward through Europe, until we get the book…