Innholdsfortegnelse for February 26, 2018 i The New Yorker

Ian Parker (“Stairmaster,” p. 42) contributed his first piece to the magazine in 1994 and became a staff writer in 2000. Joyce Carol Oates (Books, p. 70), the 2017 recipient of the International Festival of Literature and Art with Humor Award, most recently published the story collection “Beautiful Days.” Evan Osnos (Comment, p. 15) is the author of “Age of Ambition,” which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2014. Carrie Battan (The Talk of the Town, p. 17; Pop Music, p. 74) is a contributing writer for newyorker.com and a regular contributor to the magazine. Jeffrey Toobin (“The Miss Universe Connection,” p. 34) is the author of, most recently, “American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst.” Emily Nussbaum (On Television,…

Some artists are so iconic, they’re known by only one name: Brancusi, Léger, Tarsila. Wait, who? The painter Tarsila do Amaral is so famous in her native Brazil that forty-three years after her death she helped close out the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, when a projected pattern of red-orange-yellow arcs graced the stadium floor, an homage to her 1929 painting “Setting Sun.” That chimerical landscape—stylized sunset above tubular cacti and a herd of capybaras that shape-shift into boulders—hangs now at MOMA, in the artist’s first-ever museum exhibition in the U.S., “Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil.” (It’s on view until June 3.) New Yorkers have had a crash course in Brazilian art in recent months, between Lygia Pape’s subversive geometries, at the Met Breuer, and the sand-in-your-toes…

After Grigory Rodchenkov left his position as the director of a Russian anti-doping lab, in November of 2015, some burly guards showed up in his front yard. Ostensibly, they were sent to protect Rodchenkov from prying reporters. But he knew enough about Vladimir Putin’s Russia to fear the worst. “One day, he is security,” Rodchenkov said last week. “Next day, he is killer.” Rodchenkov promptly fled. He is an asthmatic, and he told his wife, Veronika, that he couldn’t handle another Moscow winter, so he planned to wait it out in sunny Los Angeles. He packed light, to avoid arousing suspicion. He recalled, of bidding Veronika goodbye, “It was not long kiss. I don’t want make her scared.” Bryan Fogel, a competitive cyclist and a filmmaker, was waiting for him…

By day, the floral designer Lewis Miller creates arrangements of abundance and originality for understated events at such venues as the Maidstone Club, the Stone Barns Center, and the New York Public Library. By night, his Banksy side kicks in. Every month or so, under cover of predawn darkness, he and his team take a van to a different location in the city and swiftly unload treasure: buckets and buckets of flowers. Then, as quickly as they can, they shove the blooms into corner trash cans, or tuck them into the nooks and crannies of construction sites, or drape their garlanded stems around statuary. Miller calls these guerrilla installations Flower Flashes: he puts them together in less than twenty minutes; they vanish within a matter of hours. Instagram saves them…

One weekend last June, in an auditorium in the German city of Karlsruhe, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk celebrated his seventieth birthday by listening to twenty lectures about himself. A cluster of Europe’s leading intellectuals, academics, and artists, along with a smattering of billionaires, were paying tribute to Germany’s most controversial thinker, in the town where he was born and where he recently concluded a two-decade tenure as the rector of the State Academy for Design. There were lectures on Sloterdijk’s thoughts on Europe, democracy, religion, love, war, anger, the family, and space. There were lectures on his commentaries on Shakespeare and Clausewitz, and on his witty diaries, and slides of buildings inspired by his insights. Between sessions, Sloterdijk, who has long, straw-colored hair and a straggly mustache, prowled among luminaries…

For almost thirty years, by means financial, military, and diplomatic, the United States tried to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist state. Millions died in that struggle. By the time active American military engagement ended, the United States had dropped more than three times as many tons of bombs on Vietnam, a country the size of New Mexico, as the Allies dropped in all of the Second World War. At the height of the bombing, it was costing us ten dollars for every dollar of damage we inflicted. We got nothing for it. We got nothing for pretty much everything we tried in Vietnam, and it’s hard to pick out a moment in those thirty years when anti-Communist forces were on a sustainable track to prevailing. Political and military leaders…

When, on a recent snowy day in Paris, members of the earlymusic ensemble Les Talens Lyriques arrived for a rehearsal at the Collège- Lycée Jacques-Decour, a secondary school near the Gare du Nord, they had to make their way around a revolutionary barricade. That morning, students at the school had gone on strike, joining a nationwide protest against proposed changes to the baccalauréat, the French college-entry exam. The main entrance was blocked with garbage bins; a sign decried “libéralisme scolaire” and “sélection bourgeoise.” As I walked toward a side door, I was nearly hit by a snowball, for which the perpetrators were apologetic. The protest prompted me to think about the political significance of the music being played inside. Les Talens Lyriques specialize in composers from the time of the…

ALL JAMMED UP Joshua Rothman’s article on paper jams resurrected my memories of three decades of altercations with printers in computer shops all over Baltimore (“Jambusters,” February 12th & 19th). I was a business-forms designer and salesman in the era of continuous, pin-fed paper forms. (Remember paper with holes down each side?) My day would often begin trying to coax interleaved and fanfolded sets of crimped-and-perforated carbon through an I.B.M. 1403 printer at twelve hundred lines a minute, which is like trying to shove a quilt through a mail slot very quickly. If that worked, it was on to the decollator, a Coupe de Ville-length machine that transformed the sets into a neat stack of forms and multiple rolls of carbon paper. Next was the burster, a vicious paper-eating…

“I screwed up my back yesterday, so if I’m grimacing that’s why,” the playwright Bruce Norris said recently. Norris has a reputation as a grimacer, at least in the way he expresses his acidic world view onstage. Best known for his Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning “Clybourne Park” (2010), a disenchanted gloss on “A Raisin in the Sun,” he is often said to make his liberal audiences squirm. His 2006 comedy, “The Pain and the Itch,” so effectively satirized an NPR-loving, Bush-hating bourgeois family that friends of friends started calling him “that Republican playwright.” In fact, he said, “I’m a big economic lefty,” which should become clear from his new play, “The Low Road,” in previews at the Public Theatre. Commissioned by London’s Royal Court Theatre, where it ran in 2013,…

The city can be tough on extroverts who have made it into February with their healthful resolutions more or less intact: if you’re still attempting to cut back on booze, going out with friends is risky—one drink inevitably leads to another. Luckily, Stefen Ramirez, an owner of Tea Dealers, a longtime purveyor of high-end teas, is intent on cultivating, at this elegant new Alphabet City establishment, what he calls “an air of sobriety.” “Now more than ever, people need that,” he said, on a recent Saturday, as patrons chatted quietly over pots of tea and glasses of wine, in an airy ceramic-lined space flooded with pristine afternoon light. The drinks are inventive and tasty (try one of the Korean-tea-infused sojus or the Moon Over Hadong, with yuzu and pepper). But…

A few days before Fashion Week began, the avant-garde label Eckhaus Latta held a casting call in a Chinatown basement for its runway show. Women with pink hair, men with fullback tattoos, plus-size and transgender models, and not terribly tall civilians— all were fair game in the eyes of Rachel Chandler, the casting director who’d summoned them. Chandler was reviewing the day’s snapshots as a few stragglers showed up. A lanky woman with a short Afro and an unplaceable accent sauntered in and handed over her modelling card. “Where are you from?” Chandler, who is thirty years old and petite, with blond hair, asked. She is a new mother, and she wore a hoodie and baggy jeans. “Panama,” the woman said. “Cool,” Chandler said. “I’ve never had a model from…

The first-round results of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant seem to have come as a surprise to some of the competition’s judges, who thought that they would declare the finalists. The seven judges of the pageant’s preliminary round were charged with winnowing eighty-six contestants to fifteen finalists. Divided into two groups, they had brief conversations with each of the contestants, who then paraded onstage, first in bathing suits, then in evening gowns. The judges—including public- relations professionals, a modelling entrepreneur, and a fashion reporter— rated each woman on such qualities as “appearance” and “personality,” after which the ballots were whisked away. “They told us not to share how we voted with each other, but we did anyway,” one of the preliminary judges told me. When the finalists were announced, he…

On the short walk from the churchyard to her car, Mrs. Crasthorpe was aware of a profound humiliation. A lone mourner at her husband’s funeral, she had sensed it first in the modest country church he had insisted upon for what he had called his obsequies. A woman cleric unknown to Mrs. Crasthorpe had conducted a bleak service, had said the necessary words in an accent that appalled Mrs. Crasthorpe, and then had scuttled off without so much as a glance in Mrs. Crasthorpe’s direction. Two men were waiting, leaning on their shovels in the nearby graveyard, and within minutes had returned the clay to where they had dug it from, making a little mound, the coffin gone forever and with it Arthur, all of it a mockery. She was…

When Montezuma Met Cortés, by Matthew Restall (Ecco). In 1519, the emperor Montezuma received the conquistador Hernán Cortés and some of his men as guests in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. Within two years, Montezuma was dead, the Aztecs routed, and the city destroyed. This revisionist history contests received views of Cortés as either swashbuckling hero or bloviating villain, of the Aztecs as cannibals, and of Montezuma as a meek, mystical king who voluntarily capitulated. Restall skillfully describes a subtler story of relationships both loving and coercive. He offers a particularly bold interpretation of Montezuma’s devotion to his palace zoo, arguing that he saw Cortés and his men as exotic creatures and hoped to learn by studying them. First Time Ever, by Peggy Seeger (Faber & Faber). This whirling memoir…

Last summer, the emo-pop band Dashboard Confessional made an unexpected choice at the end of a live show in Central Park. All evening, it had performed its blockbuster singles, most of which are known for their pareddown, acoustic intimacy and the epic, agonized wail of the front man, Chris Carrabba. But Carrabba closed the set with an emotionally labored rendition of Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself,” from 2015, a master class in acoustic pop. The cover version illuminated how much Carrabba shares with the world of mainstream pop. But it also demonstrated what separates the band from its peers— in pop, emo, indie rock, and punk alike. Like Bieber, Carrabba has a knack for vocal melody, but the tone and the intensity of his version made the song anew. Bieber’s bratty…

In the first episode of “Here and Now,” on HBO, a liberal Portland mother, played by Holly Hunter, defends her choice of party supplies to her daughter. “Bamboo is sustainable!” she says. “The world is bigger than us.” Her daughter scoffs. “Sweetie, remember,” Hunter coos back. “Thoughts create reality.” If only that were true. “Here and Now” crashes to the shore on a glittering wave of high hopes, with an A-list cast that includes Hunter and Tim Robbins; it’s made by the beloved show-runner Alan Ball, the creator of the much missed “Six Feet Under” (and also the less missed but still fun and filthy “True Blood”). Sadly, the first four episodes are—despite a very HBO combination of worldly themes and superhorny sex scenes—more of an irritant than an intoxicant.…

Tyler, the Creator, a rapper-songwriter, clothing designer, and director, who plays Madison Square Garden on Feb. 23-24, has grown from a foulmouthed seedling into something more refined. In 2011, he emerged as the central member of Odd Future, a rap collective whose charged music videos and edgy interviews reshaped artist image-making for a new decade. His latest album, “Flower Boy,” traces a mind in transition and a body in constant motion, with confessional stories and baroque production that draw from the best of aughts-era outsider pop. NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. ALA.NI If you’ve sat out the past five decades or so of popular music, and believe that the singing tradition began and…

Entrepreneurs Festival For the seventh year running, New York University invites business-owning alumni to share advice and anecdotes at the largest student-run entrepreneurial event in the country. The conference includes panels and discussions exploring the nuances and unforeseen challenges of starting and managing a company, and culminates with the Pitch, where attendees present their ideas to an audience of experts. This year’s participants include Di-Ann Eisnor, the director of growth for the popular navigation app Waze; Dr. Nedal Shami, the co-founder and chief strategy officer of CityMD Urgent Care; and Tony Shure, a co-founder of the salad chain Chopt. (N.Y.U. Tisch Hall, 40 W. 4th St. nyuef.org. Feb. 23-24.) New York International Children’s Film Festival This annual festival, founded in 1997, hosts shorts, features, Q. & A.s with directors,…

Last month, just before “Saturday Night Live” parodied Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot as wine-swilling reactionaries, Marlène Schiappa, a Frenchwoman with significantly greater authority on gender issues, made a quick visit to New York. Schiappa is the gender-equality minister in President Emmanuel Macron’s government. A former blogger (her Web site, Maman Travaille, was among the country’s first online resources for working mothers) and author (she edited an anthology called “Letters to My Uterus”), she is, according to a recent poll, the fourth most popular member of the Macron cabinet, and among the most outspoken. Since her appointment, last May, she has campaigned against les violences obstétricales—painful or traumatizing procedures that women undergo during childbirth, including unnecessary episiotomies. The day after the publication of the Deneuve letter, which Schiappa deemed “dangerous,”…

Midnight–8 A.M.: Vividly hallucinate while paralyzed atop a cushion-topped box of metal springs. 8-8:05 A.M.: A small plastic box generates fast-moving vibrations strong enough for my eardrums to register them and communicate to my brain that it is time to switch from a hallucinating state to a state of gathering food and information. I smack the box. 8:05-8:15 A.M.: Spin a dial to release water that has travelled from the top of a mountain through a maze of lead pipes onto my outermost epidermal layer in order to rinse away the salty liquid that my body secreted through thousands of holes while I was hallucinating. 8:15-8:17 A.M.: Agitate a brush created by children halfway around the world to remove minuscule invisible creatures from the bones in my mouth that I…

1My father is playing the B-Flat Sonata.Hidden under the rented baby grandI press one pedal or another,“damper,” “sustain”— Mozart grows pompous, prissy,or strangely tongue-tied. You can watch the shadows come—the elm in the French windowimpenetrable as a score.Rain is a diminished chord. I press those huge slippersthat smell of fart and wax,gently, and my fatheradjusts his timing delicately. It’s late. Mozart bloated with sepsis says:Fetch me my quill. I have an ideathat will make me famous. Now the room is entirely dark.My father is playing by heart.That stupid grief—he memorized it. Our love is like nightfallor a trill: you can see through itbut not it. 2Then time shall be no more.…

If you start in the center of Africa and head southeast, you arrive at Wakanda. According to one map, it lies somewhere near Uganda—below South Sudan, above Rwanda, and abutting the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Unlike those nations, however, which have been scalded by strife, Wakanda is a model of serenity. It is a kingdom, wisely ruled, and rich in a precious natural resource, vibranium, which is used for hyper-technology. Foreign marauders have never pillaged that wealth, because they know nothing about it. In short, Wakanda is blessed among nations, and there’s only one thing wrong with the place. It doesn’t exist. The map appears in “Black Panther,” most of which is set in present-day Wakanda, at a pivotal point. The old king is dead; long live the new…

An archetype, as Mark Twain might have observed, is nothing but a stereotype with a college education. Where modernists and postmodernists boldly plunder the collective treasuries of myth, legend, fairy tales, and art for their own idiosyncratic purposes, commercially minded writers replicate formulaic situations, characters, and plots in order to appeal to a wide audience. The challenge is to invest the generic formula with just enough distinction—what dust-jacket blurbs might praise as “originality”— without leaving formula behind; to fuse the familiar and the unfamiliar while assuring the reader that the ending will be clear, decisive, and consoling in a way that “literary fiction” usually is not. “The Woman in the Window” (Morrow), a highly successful début novel by the pseudonymous A. J. Finn (thirty-eight-year-old Daniel Mallory, a former editor at…

Just as playwrights’ artistic development can be charted through their work, critics tell us who they are—and how they grow, or don’t grow—when they’re fortunate enough to be able to focus on a particular dramatist over a period of time. An engaged critic jumps at the chance to dance with an artist’s vision; it teaches him so much about himself and, by extension, his job, which is and isn’t subjective. Brooks Atkinson, the Times’ lead theatre reviewer for decades, wrote many pieces about Tennessee Williams’s triumphs and fascinating failures; taken together, those reviews read like a long letter from a fair and unsentimental uncle, offering encouragement and tough love in equal measure. Kenneth Tynan’s pieces about Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan, and John Osborne are not only intimate dialogues with the…