Innholdsfortegnelse for February 12-19, 2018 i The New Yorker

Jill Lepore (Life and Letters, p. 86), a professor of history at Harvard University, will publish “These Truths: A History of the United States” in September. Peter Schjeldahl (The Art World, p. 102), the magazine’s art critic, is the author of “Let’s See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker.” Rachel Kushner (Fiction, p. 76) has written the novels “Telex from Cuba,” “The Flamethrowers,” and “The Mars Room,” which will come out in May. Joshua Rothman (“Jambusters,” p. 42) is the magazine’s archive editor and a frequent contributor to newyorker.com. Meena Alexander (Poem, p. 44) is the author of the poetry collection “Atmospheric Embroidery” and the editor of the anthology “Name Me a Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing,” both coming out in June. Jelani Cobb (Comment, p. 27)…

Lunar New Year Sara D. Roosevelt Park is a treasure of the Lower East Side, a bright stretch of green tucked into the shadow of Pace University High School. Residents of nearby Chinatown frequent the park for refuge from downtown’s grit, and it will burst with even more life than usual during the annual Lunar New Year festival. On Feb. 16, more than five hundred thousand fireworks will float above elaborate choreographed performances and venders serving a bevy of traditional dishes. The parade takes place on Feb. 25, at 1; beginning at Mott and Canal Sts., it will snake through Little Italy and Chinatown, past the Manhattan Bridge, and back up toward the park, to ring in the Year of the Dog. (Canal St. at Chrystie St. Feb. 16-25.)…

Donald Sutherland, Officer of the Order of Canada, and Helen Mirren, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, were in town to talk about their movie “The Leisure Seeker” (it opens next month), in which they play a married couple who drive an R.V. from Massachusetts to the Florida Keys. In New York, they were subjected to a different sort of road trip: the morning-show blitz. It began at 7 a.m., when they were picked up at the St. Regis in separate cars. Sutherland’s smelled of gas fumes, and, by the time he got to the “Today” show, he felt nauseated. “You should have demanded to drive yourself, like you did in the movie,” Mirren told him, in the dressing rooms in the bowels of Rockefeller Center. Sutherland,…

I. MORTAL DANGER The man felt like a speck in the frozen nothingness. Every direction he turned, he could see ice stretching to the edge of the Earth: white ice and blue ice, glacial-ice tongues and ice wedges. There were no living creatures in sight. Not a bear or even a bird. Nothing but him. It was hard to breathe, and each time he exhaled the moisture froze on his face: a chandelier of crystals hung from his beard; his eyebrows were encased like preserved specimens; his eyelashes cracked when he blinked. Get wet and you die, he often reminded himself. The temperature was nearly minus forty degrees Fahrenheit, and it felt far colder because of the wind, which sometimes whipped icy particles into a blinding cloud, making him so…

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley began writing “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus” when she was eighteen years old, two years after she’d become pregnant with her first child, a baby she did not name. “Nurse the baby, read,” she had written in her diary, day after day, until the eleventh day: “I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it,” and then, in the morning, “Find my baby dead.” With grief at that loss came a fear of “a fever from the milk.” Her breasts were swollen, inflamed, unsucked; her sleep, too, grew fevered. “Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and…

“Blood” is one word that comes up. Blood as poison, blood as might. Other words—“help” and “cry”—are among the verbs most likely to be spoken by the eighty-six-year-old playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s characters. These bitter, lovesick words—sharp bleats of distress—rise and cling to the curtains and the walls in the ghastly showrooms of her characters’ troubled, hope-filled, and hopeless minds. Taken together, Kennedy’s twenty-odd plays form a long and startling fugue, composed of language that is impactful and impacted but ever-moving, ever-shifting, as her protagonists, usually women of color, stand on the precipice of disaster, madness, or loss. For the course of the performance, at least, those women overcome their passivity and their willfulness—a jarring combination— in order to tell us what life can feel like on that cliff of color…

BIG PHARMA’S DAUGHTER Surely I am not the only reader who was unsettled by Nick Paumgarten’s article on Madeleine Sackler’s upcoming movie “O.G.,” which was filmed inside a maximum-security prison in Indiana (“Getting a Shot,” January 29th). Sackler is the granddaughter of Raymond Sackler, whose descendants, as Paumgarten writes, have derived their massive fortune from Purdue Pharma and its painkiller OxyContin, an opioid that has unleashed a national epidemic of drug abuse and incarceration. (Patrick Radden Keefe wrote last year about the devastation that OxyContin has caused.) The inmates in Sackler’s film have, in many cases, been adversely affected by Indiana’s Draconian drug laws, yet she thinks it’s baloney to connect her background with her project. It’s not: shortly before filmmaking began, one inmate at the prison died from…

Terrence McNally’s “Fire and Air,” directed by John Doyle (at Classic Stage Company, through Feb. 25), is a sort of account of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, but very sort-of. Compressing the twenty-year fortunes of this company, the most glamorous and influential ballet troupe of the twentieth century, into less than two hours, it’s like what might have passed through Diaghilev’s mind if he had had to undergo general anesthesia. The play has only one set—two giltedged mirrors, a scattering of gilt chairs—and only six characters. First come Diaghilev (Douglas Hodge, not quite seigneurial enough) and his two most famous dancer-lovers, Vaslav Nijinsky (James Cusati-Moyer, much handsomer than the real Nijinsky) and Léonide Massine (Jay Armstrong Johnson). Then there’s Dunya (Marsha Mason), Diaghilev’s childhood nurse, an anachronistic presence (Diaghilev didn’t take…

When Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” opened on Broadway, in 1993, the part of the Angel was played by an athletic Ellen McLaughlin, who, suspended from a pair of twin guy wires, flew twenty feet above the stage. At the same time, she maneuvered a tremendous pair of wings: a steel frame glued all over with feathers—real and fake— attached to a sturdy corset. In the Broadway revival of the play, which begins previews later this month, the wings have metastasized. They have their own supporting cast: a team of six performers, known in the production as Shadows. Four of them lift the Angel off the earth, and two of them manipulate one eight-foot wing each, holding them aloft with the use of a handle and a pole. “The wings…

A concerned citizen searching for her place in the resistance but at a loss for words might head over to Gibney Dance Center, across from City Hall, in lower Manhattan, for a class called “Body Politic, Somatic Selves.” Somatics studies the body as it’s perceived from within—something like a goldfish that, wishing to know the feel of the ocean, rejects the construct of the bowl. Performance is not the point. “Physical experience can empower us like nothing else,” Jill Sigman, the teacher, said the other day. “Dance can inspire compassion in ways that words can’t.” As a child, Sigman trained with the Joffrey Ballet, and later she received a doctorate in analytic philosophy at Princeton; now she describes herself as “a choreographer, interdisciplinary artist, and agent of change.” Her credits…

People pray to a vengefulgod because they seek revenge.They chose a god who hateswhat they hatebut also made the seaand the sequoia.I’m walking my infantson through a stand of rhododendrontrees. It feels like we are walkingthrough a cloud of jellyfishmade of pink and purple paperpetals fallingto the ground.These jellyfish are the fish of spring.He is making soundslike a mouse, small but all outof his body. Inside,his organs are so newthat they are both organs and the beginning of organs.When he cries for his motherto nurse himhe sounds like a rooster.He is notjust hungrybut hunger itself.He is the thinghe cries for. Sunlight is turningthe rhododendronsinto balls of pink light if lightwere liquidand something else,splashing,that’s what the pink is doing,splashing all over us,lucky without god,animals under the bright pinkidea of earth.…

Big events go by unseen while we sweat the smaller stuff; things happen underground while we watch the boulevard parades. Truly underground, sometimes: in 1858, the pundits and politicians in Britain were obsessing over the British government’s takeover of India from the East India Company and the intentions of Napoleon III, yet the really big thing was the construction, with the supervisory genius of the great engineer Joseph Bazalgette, of a sewer system to protect London from its own waste, and so arrest the smelly miasma” that had come to crisis conditions that year. This underground system, along with its visible embankments, would, both directly and by example, save countless lives in the developed world during the next century— making cholera epidemics, for instance, a thing of the distant past.…

The Frick Collection has a surprise for us: a room-filling loan show of “Jacob and His Twelve Sons” (circa 1640-45), thirteen full-length, life-size imagined portraits, all but unknown in the United States until now, by the Spanish master Francisco de Zurbarán. Twelve are from the dining room of Auckland Castle, in the small northeastern English town of Bishop Auckland, and one, reuniting the suite, is from another English collection. They constitute a terrific feat of Baroque storytelling: movies of their day. All the characters—each a distinct personality uniquely posed, costumed, and accessorized, and towering against a bright, clouded sky and a low swath of sylvan scenery— appear to be approximately as old as they are in the forty-ninth chapter of Genesis. There the dying Jacob prophesies, in gorgeous verse, the…

CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera Rossini’s deft and propulsive musical style is so synonymous with his comedies that his serious operas don’t get taken all that seriously. Occasionally, however, the Met will dust one of them off as a vehicle for a remarkable talent, and in this season’s revival of “Semiramide” that singer is the soprano Angela Meade. Taking the titular role of the warrior queen, she leads a first-rate bel-canto cast that includes Elizabeth DeShong, Javier Camarena, Ildar Abdrazakov, and Ryan Speedo Green; Maurizio Benini conducts. Feb. 19 at 7:30. • Also playing: Bartlett Sher’s picturesque rendition of Donizetti’s feather-light comedy “L’Elisir d’Amore” returns with a cast of full-bodied lyric voices, including Matthew Polenzani, Ildebrando D’Arcangelo, and Pretty Yende; Domingo Hindoyan. (These are the final performances.) Feb. 7…

Down a quiet street on the Lower East Side, warm amber light spills onto the sidewalk, and the smell of chocolate drifts into the cold air. Inside at Cocoa Bar, shelved wines reach to the ceiling, burgundy reds and mellow whites and a few rosés. Behind a broad blond-wood counter, an obliging staff mixes full-bodied cocktails that intertwine cocoa and liquor; the French hot chocolate, made with port wine, is as potent as a tyrant and as dark as three o’clock in the morning. The chairs wouldn’t be out of place in a cafeteria and the décor is modest, but the couples aligned in this cozy room look as if they wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Almost everyone is part of a pair: casually but fashionably dressed, and arranged…

When Ashley Johnson, an artist from Chicago, heard about Taglit- Birthright—the program offering trips to Israel for young Americans of Jewish descent—she wondered why a similar program didn’t exist for people of the African diaspora. She Googled “birthright” and “Africa,” and was pleased to learn that one did—at least in theory. In 2005, Walla Elsheikh, a former Goldman Sachs associate whose father had been a Sudanese diplomat, heard a friend rave about a Taglit trip. She registered a Web site with the name Birthright AFRICA. She let the idea marinate, and nothing much happened, until she got a Facebook message from Johnson. The two began a correspondence and eventually decided to launch the program together. In October, 2016, Johnson, who is thirty-three, and Elsheikh, who is thirty-eight, travelled to Ghana,…

The tin roof of the hospital has claw marks—Bruised indigoThe kind you left on your thighThat awful night when no one could come near you.On the road from the hospitalYou pass me the prescription—Same?I peer then nod, shortsighted already.You crane your neck, point out rain cloudsNoke—the sky has pink streaks shiny as a shell.You always saw those things so wellYou were the artistic one, keen and lovely.I was your shadow self, strolling into waterLying in wait for boysSo they could burn away the hurt in meMy hair black and angularCut into wedge shapes, flapping like sails.At six you hid in the attic Scrawling half-inch creaturesScarlet word balloons jostling their lips,Radiant ciphers no one could tellYour imaginary friends, Susie Kali with corkscrew curls,Mad Thoma axe in hand.Sometimes you gathered stray cats,…

If his students could learn to think well, to enjoy reading books, some part of them would be uncaged. That was what Gordon Hauser told himself, and what he told them, too. But there were days, like when a woman walked into the prison classroom and flung boiling sugar water into the face of another woman, when he did not believe it. There were days when it seemed as though the real purpose of the work he was doing was to destroy his own life by trying to teach people who wanted to burn each other’s faces off. The guards made everything more difficult, with their contempt for the women and their hostility toward free-world staff like Gordon. The guards had been forced to undergo sensitivity training and were furious…

Goddess of Anarchy, by Jacqueline Jones (Basic). Lucy Parsons, a Chicago anarchist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and the wife of Albert Parsons, one of the men hanged after the Haymarket Square bombing of 1886—emerges in this biography as a rich, sometimes contradictory figure. A black former slave who often tried to pass as Mexican or Native American, she criticized fellow-anarchists who championed complete sexual freedom for men and women, but she also kept several lovers. Her dedication to the pursuit of equality for the masses was adamantine, however. “Within a public arena of competing ideas and legislative initiatives,” Jones writes, “she occupied a prominent niche—a revolutionary cadre of one.” Maestros and Their Music, by John Mauceri (Knopf). By the mid-nineteenth century, orchestral music had grown so…