Innholdsfortegnelse for March 5, 2018 i The New Yorker

Mike Spies (“The Arms Dealer,” p. 24) is a staff writer at the Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. This story was published in partnership with the Trace. Chris Ware (Cover), a graphic novelist, has contributed comic strips and covers to The New Yorker since 1999. His most recent book, “Monograph,” came out in October. Idea Vilariño (Poem, p. 46), who died in 2009, was an Uruguayan poet and essayist whose best-known books include “Nocturnos” and “Poemas de Amor.” Jon Lee Anderson (“The Afterlife of Pablo Escobar,” p. 50), a staff writer, began contributing to the magazine in 1998. He is the author of several books, including “The Fall of Baghdad.” Emily Stokes (The Talk of the Town, p. 21) is the features editor for newyorker.com.…

New York International Children’s Film Festival This annual festival, founded in 1997, hosts family-friendly shorts, features, Q. & A.s with directors, and national premières. (The winning films are eligible for Academy Award consideration.) Among the highlights this year are a preview of Season 2 of the Netflix adaptation of Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events” and the New York première of the Japanese musical anime “Lu Over the Wall,” about an aspiring musician who joins a band in search of the perfect lead singer—who turns out to be a mermaid. (Various locations. nyicff.org. Feb. 23-March 18.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES The “Contemporary Curated” sale at Sotheby’s (March 2) offers a wide selection of postwar and contemporary works at a variety of prices, from a photographic print by Nan Goldin…

Abraham Lincoln, as every school kid used to know, back when his birthday was hived off as a holiday of its own, passed through New York seven times, but only three of those visits were truly memorable. There was the most famous one, in 1860, when he delivered the address at Cooper Union that made him a plausible Presidential candidate. Then, there was April, 1865, when his body was brought through on the funeral train taking him home. Less seemingly momentous was a middle visit, in February of 1861, when the President-elect made a slow train trip east, on his way from Springfield to Washington, and stopped in New York for two days. Walt Whitman saw him then, outside the Astor House, on Broadway, and noted “his perfect composure and…

Fifty-five years ago, I built a house (that is, paid for the building of it) in the northwest corner of Princeton Township, in New Jersey. It was on an unpaved road, running through woods and past an abandoned cornfield that had become a small meadow. My house looks out through trees and down that meadow. Improbably, I developed a yearning, almost from the get-go, to see a bear someday in the meadow. While I flossed in the morning, looking north through an upstairs bathroom window, I hoped to see a bear come out of the trees. If this seems quixotic, it was. This was four miles from the campus of Princeton University, around which on all sides was what New Yorkers were calling a bedroom community. Deer were present in…

Open the hand and give me the sweet sweet crumb as if a god as if the wind as if the burning dew as if never hear open the hand and give me the sweet dirty crumb or give me perhaps the tender heart that sustains you. Not the skin or the disordered hair or the breath or the saliva or everything that slips unconnected past the skin. No if it is possible if you hear if you are here if I am someone if it is not an illusion a crazy lens a grim mockery open the hand and give me the dirty dirty crumb as if a god as if the wind as if the hand that opens that distracts destiny were granting us a day.…

Listen to the after-work shovels and snow brusheson my quiet winter street. Nasal congestion. Loose boots.The whole country is outraged and outspoken and you should be toobecause if you’re not, then you’re not doing your part.People are having a hard time. At work, patients cryalmost every day. I make sure they have tissues;I get them a glass of water. I say, That’s terrible or That’s hard.It is hard to be at the hospital, to live in a room that’s not yoursand have people coming to check your blood pressure all the time.You get bad news, you have medical bills, no sleep. Your painexists on a scale from 0 to 10. When I saw the sac on the ultrasoundscreen,I whispered, There’s nothing in there. A tiny hollow space. I have a…

Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi (Grove). This ambitious novel is narrated mostly by spirits—a “godly parasite with many heads”—inhabiting the mind of the protagonist, Ada, a Nigerian who comes to America for college. After she is sexually assaulted, one of the spirits propels her through drug abuse, bad relationships, and suicide attempts. Later, when a more masculine spirit takes over, Ada starts wearing men’s clothes and undergoes surgery to achieve a “fine balance” of gender. Ada is torn between wanting to quell the spirits and feeling a certain security in submitting to them, until a historian explains the Igbo meaning of the name Ada and its links to the spirit world. The novel cunningly uses African traditions in order to show that they include ideas about gender, sexual orientation, and…

I bought the first U.S. Girls seven-inch, “Kankakee Memories,” in 2009, for reasons that no music-discovery algorithm would likely predict. I didn’t know what U.S. Girls sounded like, or if it was indeed a band of American women. But the single’s title reminded me of my mother, who likes to reminisce about a summer in the early nineteen-seventies that she spent working at a diner in the small town of Kankakee, Illinois, just after she arrived in the United States. I eventually found out that U.S. Girls was one person, Meghan Remy, who grew up in Chicago but now lives in Toronto. Her songs were short and hazy, full of bright melodies washed out with abrasive noise. Listening to them was like listening to oldies while tilling gravel. In the…

DEATH AND THE MIND Rachel Aviv beautifully illuminates the story of Jahi McMath, a child who was declared brain-dead four years ago, in Oakland, and the family members who disagree with her diagnosis (“The Death Debate,” February 5th). They deserve Aviv’s advocacy. However, Aviv also seems to create villains in her telling. Her writing subtly but powerfully forms a picture of an uncaring hospital and incompetent, indifferent, and possibly racist health-care providers. I know the hospital and the people whom Aviv describes; I completed some of my medical training there about a decade ago, though I have never reviewed any medical records associated with the McMath case, nor have I directly spoken about the case with any of the providers involved. For more than a hundred years, the Children’s…

Last week, Heidi Beirich gave a visitor a tour of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s office, in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. The following day, the nonprofit would unveil its annual Hate Map of America, a main feature of the spring issue of its biannual Intelligence Report, which focusses on the radical right. A wall was plastered with past covers. One read “Rebels with a Cause.” It was illustrated with a very un-James-Dean-ish image of neo-Confederates. She pointed to a cover from 2014. “This line I came up with,” she said. “ ‘White Homicide Worldwide.’ Beirich, who has a Ph.D. in political science, began working at the S.P.L.C. as an intern, in 1999, and is now the director of its Intelligence Project. She became interested in hate groups in high school, in…

Much has been made of the announcement by Daniel Day-Lewis, last summer, that “Phantom Thread,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s psychological/ sartorial drama, set in nineteen-fifties London, marks his retirement from acting. Less has been made—indeed, it would be fair to say that almost nothing has been made—of the fact that “Phantom Thread” also marks the cinematic début of George Glasgow, a bespoke shoemaker and nascent character actor. Viewers of the film who have managed to tear their eyes away from Day-Lewis—he has won three Academy Awards for Best Actor, and is nominated again, for his performance as Reynolds Woodcock, a fastidious couturier—may have noticed Glasgow, who appears in two scenes in his role as Nigel Cheddar-Goode. In the first, he is seated in a brasserie, bow-tied and mustachioed, dining with Day-Lewis…

June 25, 1942. The day I went off to war. My sweetheart, Alice, whom I started dating my junior year of high school, drove me to the station to see me off. We were in love, and the thought of being apart was overwhelming for both of us. Alice parked the car, and we held hands as we walked silently through the station and out onto the platform. Our hearts bursting, we gazed at each other for a few moments before she spoke. I remember the conversation almost verbatim. “Promise you’ll come back to me.” “I promise.” “And promise you’ll write to me.” “Of course I’ll write to you.” “Every day.” “Every day? Hmm. Well, I’ll certainly try. I mean, I’ll be in a war. I’ll be fighting. But, sure,…

When Roberto Escobar was the head accountant for the Medellín cartel, in the nineteen-eighties, he handled billions of dollars a year—so much cash that he sometimes resorted to stuffing it in plastic bags and burying it in the countryside. Known as El Osito, or Little Bear, he was the older brother of the narcotrafficker Pablo Escobar, who was then among the richest men in the world, responsible for a drug-smuggling empire that extended from Colombia to a dozen other countries. Although Roberto was never as extravagant as his brother, he was accustomed to flying on private jets, and sent his children to a Swiss boarding school. Once, during an extended hike through the forest to elude capture, he threw a briefcase containing a hundred thousand dollars into a river, because…

Uzodinma Iweala’s first novel, “Beasts of No Nation,” published in 2005, gave its readers imagined access to the experience of child soldiers in West Africa. As a way to get Westerners to enlarge their sympathy for people often perceived as distant, pitiable victims, the book succeeded completely, and was made into a film in 2015. Depending on what you think a novel should do, this accomplishment might seem more than sufficient. Like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “Beasts of No Nation” is a work that uses sentiment—horror, compassion, the protective feelings children inspire—to instruct its readers morally and prod them to action. You never have any doubt what you ought to feel about the long nightmare that the book’s narrator, Agu, endures. Agu himself is not so much a character as an…

THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Admissions In this new play by Joshua Harmon (“Significant Other”), Jessica Hecht is an admissions director at a private academy who is diversifying the student body while her own son applies to Ivy League colleges. Daniel Aukin directs. (Mitzi E. Newhouse, 150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200. In previews.) Amy and the Orphans In Lindsey Ferrentino’s play, produced by the Roundabout, two siblings take their sister (Jamie Brewer), who has Down syndrome, on a road trip after their father’s death. (Laura Pels, 111 W. 46th St. 212-719-1300. In previews. Opens March 1.) Angels in America Andrew Garfield, Nathan Lane, and Lee Pace star in the National Theatre’s revival of Tony Kushner’s epic two-part drama about New Yorkers living through the nineteen-eighties AIDS epidemic. Directed by…

“Don’t blink,” the British sci-fi television series “Doctor Who” instructed its fans, or alien psychopaths will steal you away from everything you love. At the Way Station, a “Doctor Who”-themed bar home to nothing more threatening than a rollicking liquor pour, that advice is still best heeded. Here, blink and you could miss the bar’s bathroom, which masquerades as the show’s time-travelling spaceship, the Tardis (the toilet experience is not as transportive as it sounds). Or, on burlesque night, miss at your peril a woman costumed as a lamp undressing to a leopard-print thong and switching her light off. Are the burlesque performers Whovians? “We’re pan-nerds,” said the erstwhile lamp. Asked to identify the subject of the Oscar-nominated film “Phantom Thread,” she guessed “a Jedi sweatshop.” (Incorrect. The movie is…

Last week, the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien was in town to receive the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. O’Brien, who has “broken down social and sexual barriers for women,” as the organization’s press release put it, received the prize from the Irish novelist Colum McCann. O’Brien and McCann have been friends since 1994, when they met at his London publishing house on the day that McCann’s first story collection appeared, and O’Brien invited him to read with her that evening. Later, when she was in New York, they liked to go to Ulysses’, on Pearl Street, with the Irish writer Frank McCourt. The day before the ceremony, O’Brien and McCann met for tea in the Tennyson Room of the Lotos Club, and O’Brien reminisced about staying at the…

Jared Moskowitz, a Democratic member of the Florida House of Representatives, was debating tax policy on the chamber floor, in Tallahassee, two weeks ago, when he received a call from his wife, Leah. He was surprised to hear her crying. She was trying to pick up their four-year-old son, Sam, who attends a preschool in Moskowitz’s district, which encompasses two affluent communities about an hour north of Miami—Parkland and Coral Springs. Leah had seen a number of police officers outside the building. Moskowitz called the local sheriff’s office and learned that the preschool was on lockdown, because there was an active shooter at the nearby Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Moskowitz, who graduated from Douglas in 1999, called Leah back, then walked over to Richard Corcoran, the speaker of the…

Donald Glover sat behind the wheel of the Nissan Sentra, his door ajar, and lit a joint. In the scene he’d just finished, for the show “Atlanta,” he’d jammed on the brakes to avoid a wild boar in the road, an apparition that made him wonder just how high he was. On this crisp October morning, the car was parked beside Gun Club Road in northwest Atlanta, a woodsy region where a few shacks and a cemetery were all that gestured toward urban life. “This isn’t real,” Glover said—his joint was a prop, filled with clover and marshmallow leaves. “But it actually makes me feel kind of high. Smoking in the car like high school.” He passed the joint to his co-star Zazie Beetz, who inhaled companionably as Glover nodded…

I’d been in the company for more than a year by then. It had been my dream to dance for the choreographer since I first saw his work, and for a decade all my desire had been focussed on getting there. I’d sacrificed whatever was necessary during the years of rigorous training. When at last I auditioned and he invited me to join his company, I dropped everything and flew to Tel Aviv. We rehearsed from noon to five, and I devoted myself to the choreographer’s process and vision without reserve, applied myself without reserve. Sometimes tears came spontaneously, from something that had rushed upward and burst. When I met people in bars and cafés, I spoke excitedly about the experience of working with the choreographer and told them that…

In February, 2000, The American Journal of Psychiatry published a concise review of a not-at-all-concise book. The book, “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief,” was nearly six hundred pages long, and, although it was published by the academic press Routledge, it fit neatly within no scholarly discipline. The reviewer, a sympathetic professor of psychiatry, bravely attempted to explain such forbidding phrases as “the grammatical structure of transformational mythology.” Then he admitted defeat. “Doing justice to this tome in a two-paragraph synopsis is impossible,” he concluded. “This is not a book to be abstracted and summarized.” But he expressed the hope that curious souls would nevertheless discover this curious book, and savor it “at leisure.” Eighteen years later, the author of “Maps of Meaning,” Jordan B. Peterson, has produced a…