Innholdsfortegnelse for March 12, 2018 i The New Yorker

Kathryn Schulz (“Home Invasion,” p. 32), a staff writer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Joseph O’Neill (Fiction, p. 66) is the author of the story collection “Good Trouble,” which comes out in June. Jenny Kroik (Cover) will exhibit a collection of paintings of bookstores at Word Up Community Bookshop in Manhattan in June. This is her second cover for The New Yorker. Rick Barot (Poem, p. 68) is the author of three poetry collections, most recently “Chord.” He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington. Emily Nussbaum (On Television, p. 82), the magazine’s television critic, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Adam Gopnik (Books, p. 72), a staff writer, has been contributing to the magazine since 1986. His most recent book is “At the…

The urge to give human bodies sculptural form has been around at least as long as the Venus of Willendorf— which is to say, for about twenty-five thousand years. The Met Breuer starts its story of figurative sculpture a little bit later, in the fourteenth century, with the exhibition “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300-Now).” The show zeros in on another ancient impulse: to ramp up realism with the application of paint or the addition of fabric. (The Greeks and the Romans did it, and so did Degas, adding a cotton skirt and a satin ribbon to his bronze dancer.) Interspersed with some hundred and twenty sculptures—by artists from Donatello and Rodin to Louise Bourgeois and Isa Genzken— will be wax effigies, mannequins, and anatomical models. (Opens March…

Spring Revolution Festival Each year, National Sawdust hosts a two-week series of events and exhibits in recognition of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” from 1913. This year, the festival overlaps with International Women’s Day, and has scheduled a dense program featuring women curators, artists, and composers. Highlights include Gamelan Dharma Swara, a twenty-five-person ensemble that performs traditional Balinese music, and OK Miss, a chamber group and rock band led by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun. (National Sawdust, 80 N. 6th St., Brooklyn. 646-779-8455. March 1-11.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES During a slow week at the big auction houses, two fairs pick up the slack. The Armory Show, a sprawling contemporary-art fair, returns to Piers 92 and 94 on Manhattan’s West Side (March 8-11). This year’s edition focusses on…

Jay McInerney, the novelist, who lives in a penthouse just off lower Fifth Avenue, recently took a car to Wonton Foods, in Bushwick, to discuss the experience of writing fortune cookies. He was wearing a beige turtleneck sweater, a long gray coat, and loafers. Looking out the car window, he said, “When my wife sees graffiti, as a former Upper East Side girl, she just thinks of urban blight.” (His wife is Anne Hearst, a granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst.) “But I associate it with a period of great urban creativity.” He added, “Basquiat once came to my apartment at one-thirty in the morning to sell me a painting, and, unfortunately, I didn’t have what he considered enough.” In recent months, McInerney worked on a television adaptation of a trilogy…

TV1 (above the treadmills), “The News” (NEWS): Get your heart rate up with some of the most horrifying developments from around the world. Feel like running as fast as you can yet? No? Well, the anchors are about to sit down with another “dapper” member of the alt-right to discuss fidget spinners, memes, and, if there’s time, race relations. Go! TV2 (above the recumbent bikes), “Singing Competition” (MUSIC): Amateurs from all over the country compete to become America’s next big recording artist by singing, presumably. It’s kind of hard to tell with the sound off. And, honestly, the closed captioning just makes things more confusing. TV3, TV5, TV6, TV8, TV9, TV10, TV13, TV15, TV18, TV19, TV20 (simulcast), “Just a Black Screen” (MYSTERY): Are these TVs broken or are they just turned…

Five years ago, we sold the Phoenix house and bought land in Flagstaff and built a house there— our final abode, I called it. Jayne objected to this designation, but I defended myself with what I termed “an argument from reality”—which was also objected to by Jayne, who said I was using “an argument from being really annoying.” “Are you saying this isn’t going to be our final abode?” I said. “And don’t talk to me about hospices or nuthouses. You know what I mean. This is the last place you and I will call home. This is our final abode.” I looked up “abode.” It refers to a habitual residence, of course, but it derives from an Old English verb meaning “to wait.” The expression “abide with me” can…

Rise and Kill First, by Ronen Bergman (Random House). This remarkable account of Israel’s targeted-killing programs is the product of nearly eight years of research into what is arguably the most secretive and impenetrable intelligence community in the world. Bergman, an investigative reporter and military analyst, interviewed hundreds of insiders, including assassins, and obtained thousands of classified documents. The genesis of what he calls “the most robust, streamlined assassination machine in history” spans more than a century, beginning in Ottoman Palestine, where Eastern European Zionist guerrillas covertly arranged for the slaying of a Bedouin policeman. Questions of ethics, legality, and geopolitics pervade the work. As Bergman writes, “It is very hard to predict how history will proceed after someone is shot in the head.” 1947, by Elisabeth Åsbrink, translated…

A few weeks ago, the CW aired a perfect episode of “Jane the Virgin,” directed by its star Gina Rodriguez. It had five plots, ranging from poignant to zany. Each scene was tinted in pastels, like a plate of macarons. There were two gorgeous dresses and three hot consummations, plus a cliffhanger, several heart-to-hearts, and Brooke Shields getting attacked by a wolf on live TV. As usual, the world took all this perfection for granted. “Jane the Virgin,” which débuted in 2014, is an extremely loose adaptation of a Venezuelan telenovela in which a poor teen-ager has the ultimate “whoops” pregnancy: she’s accidentally impregnated via artificial insemination, then falls for the wealthy bio dad. For the American version, the creator, Jennie Snyder Urman, added a fabulous framing device—a Latin-lover narrator…

CROSSING THE ANTARCTIC I read with pleasure David Grann’s account of Henry Worsley’s solo trek across the Antarctic continent (“The White Darkness,” February 12th & 19th). I share his great appreciation for Ernest Shackleton, whose hut at Cape Royds I visited, after sledding across the sea ice from Scott Base, more than fifty years ago. Because Shackleton had wintered there, it has since been carefully preserved. I spent the night in the hut, then crossed through a penguin colony on my way back to Scott Base, and then travelled to the Victory Mountains. Recently, in Heathrow Airport, I saw some crates of “Shackleton” whiskey for sale. Curious, I did some research, and I’ve since learned that three crates of Mackinlay’s had been buried beneath the floorboards of Shackleton’s hut,…

For his second animated feature, “Isle of Dogs” (opening March 23), Wes Anderson employs the same stop-motion techniques, featuring elaborately crafted puppets and diorama-like sets, that he used for “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” This time, he deploys a vast array of characters, both human and canine, to dramatize grand-scale dystopian politics with comedic verve. The film is set in a futuristic Japan, where Megasaki City’s tyrannical Mayor Kobayashi (voiced by Kunichi Nomura) orders that all dogs be deported to a wasteland called Trash Island. The mayor’s twelve-year-old ward, Atari (Koyu Rankin), sneaks off to the compound to rescue his own dog, Spots (Liev Schreiber), and a well-organized uprising results. Voice performers include Greta Gerwig, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Scarlett Johansson, and Courtney B. Vance. Chloé Zhao’s drama “The Rider” (April 13)…

Trixie Madell, nine, of Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, has been a David Bowie fan since she was three. Her parents, Dawn and Josh Madell, are rock enthusiasts— she’s a music supervisor, he co-owned the record store Other Music—if not particular Bowie devotees. For Trixie’s third birthday, Dawn made her a CD with Bowie’s 1967 song “The Laughing Gnome” on it. (“Ha ha ha, hee hee hee, I’m the laughing gnome and you can’t catch me.”) Trixie became obsessed. “I thought ‘The Laughing Gnome’ was his only song,” she said last Wednesday. It wasn’t. Dawn played her “Let’s Dance,” which didn’t quite take, and some seventies Bowie, which did. At four, Trixie dressed as Bowie for Halloween; at seven, she met D. A. Pennebaker at an outdoor screening of a favorite film,…

“I am in awe—after his daily toil, he still finds the energy to train for a marathon.” Every four years, patrons of the city’s sports bars try to deduce the rules of curling—a sport that’s been called “chess on ice”—by studying Olympic matches on wall-mounted TVs that they can’t hear. Last month, the members of the Ardsley Curling Club, one of three dedicated facilities within an hour or so of the city, held a series of open houses for people who wanted to try to play. The club promoted the sessions, in part, with a video that appeared on pumps at area gas stations. More than six hundred people showed up—and that was before the U.S. men’s team had bankrupted Canadian and Swedish bookies by winning the gold. “The club…

The city of Yinchuan, in northwestern China, is the capital of Ningxia, a tiny lozenge of land that accounts for just half a per cent of China’s population and a similarly tiny proportion of its landmass. Yinchuan’s name means “silver river,” and, according to local legend, the city owes its existence to a phoenix, known as the Bird of Happiness. A flock of these birds lived in southeastern China, bringing fertility to the land. One day, they heard about a wasteland, near the deserts of the Mongolian Plateau, whose people struggled to work the arid soil. Full of pity, one phoenix flew north to help, and soon flowers bloomed, crops thrived, and a city came into being. But the good times did not last. The city was besieged by an…

The galleons want to go to the opera because they want to hear emotions as big as their emotions. When the spurned lover sings his booming aria, they think of the oceans that cover the world almost completely. When the young maid sings her way to being the queen of a kingdom, they think of the months-long journeys that will pick off their crews one by one, in terrifying weather followed by boredom. And then the galleons want to shop in the mall in the suburbs. Everything they see there is like the secrets they once carried in their holds. Racks of blouses like sacks of gold, tiers of blenders like crates of silver. The food courts remind them of their full bellies before the trips home, the weight in…

On the evidence of two productions that played at the Metropolitan Opera in mid-February, an opera lover from another planet might have concluded that two different companies were sharing the same space. The first offered an austerely hypnotic staging of “Parsifal,” in which singers not only did justice to Wagner’s monumental, cryptic score but brought it to shuddering life. The second unloaded a monstrously tacky version of Rossini’s “Semiramide,” one whose sets and costumes seemed to have been raided from a museum of theatrical kitsch, not excluding souvenirs of Liberace-era Las Vegas. Met No. 1 was cohesive and purposeful; Met No. 2 felt chaotic and hapless. Such a juxtaposition is typical of the modern-day Met, which keeps lurching between a cumbersome past and glimpses of a more adventurous future. The…

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Some grandmothers may have a tough time drinking in Brooklyn these days. Newfangled cocktails, served in glasses smoked with rosemary and selling for fifteen dollars a pop, could seem ridiculous to a generation raised on dry Martinis and whiskey-on-the-rocks—simple drinks that one relies on like morning orange juice. Fortunately, there’s Montero, which opened as a longshoremen’s bar in Brooklyn Heights in 1939. On a recent Tuesday, the bartender (theatre major, kohl-rimmed eyes) pointed to the rows of liquor bottles behind her, some dusty, some new. “I’ve got a hundred and eighty bottles back here that haven’t been cleaned out,” she said. She cracked open a beer called Estrella Galicia, noting that the bar’s owner hails from Galicia, Spain. “Pepe,” she said, pointing to his photo on the wall. He inherited…

Last week, in Parkland, Florida, after classes had resumed and news trucks had left, two sixteen-year-old juniors at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School sat at a dining-room table, in a gated community, trying to launch a movement. Adam Buchwald, stroking a precocious five-o’clock shadow, pitched a visitor. “We want parents to sign a contract,” he said, “promising their kids that they’ll vote for leaders who put kids’ safety over guns.” The contract concept had occurred to Adam and his friend Zach Hibshman—who each knew two of the fourteen students killed at their school—in the Buchwalds’ den, where they’d been hunkering down since the shooting. “Last Friday, we were just, like, ‘Let’s change the world,’” Zach, who was wearing gym clothes, said. “Our classmates marched in Tallahassee, which we think is…

One October night a few years back, Pam Stone was downstairs watching television with her partner, Paul Zimmerman, when it struck her that their house was unusually cold. Stone and Zimmerman live just outside Landrum, South Carolina, in an Aframe cabin; upstairs in their bedroom, French doors lead out to a raised deck. That week, autumn had finally descended on the Carolinas, killing off the mosquitoes and sending nighttime temperatures plummeting, and the previous evening the couple had opened those doors a crack to take advantage of the cool air. Now, sitting in front of the TV, Stone suddenly realized that she’d left them open and went up to close them. Zimmerman was still downstairs when he heard her scream. He sprinted up to join her, and the two of…

In January, after a long day at his London office, Christopher Steele, the former spy turned private investigator, was stepping off a commuter train in Farnham, where he lives, when one of his two phones rang. He’d been looking forward to dinner at home with his wife, and perhaps a glass of wine. It had been their dream to live in Farnham, a town in Surrey with a beautiful Georgian high street, where they could afford a house big enough to accommodate their four children, on nearly an acre of land. Steele, who is fifty-three, looked much like the other businessmen heading home, except for the fact that he kept his phones in a Faraday bag—a pouch, of military-tested double-grade fabric, designed to block signal detection. A friend in Washington,…

American lovers of musical theatre who blame Andrew Lloyd Webber for pretty much everything that went wrong on its stages, starting in the early seventies, will be chagrined to discover that he has written an autobiography that has all the virtues his music always seemed to lack: wit, surprise, contemporaneity, audacity, and an appealingly shrewd sense of the occasion. There is nothing pompous or pallid about his prose, which makes it all the odder that so much of the music that he wrote seems to have no other qualities. Given his reputation as the guy who dragged the Broadway musical from its vitality and idiomatic urgency back to its melodramatic roots in European operetta—while also degrading rock music to a mere rhythm track—is it possible that, as his memoir indicates,…

Had Grant Wood not made the painting “American Gothic” (1930), there would not be a Grant Wood retrospective now at the Whitney Museum. This would be a pity, because the show fascinates as a plunge into certain deliriums of the United States in the nineteen-thirties, notably a culture war between cosmopolitan and nativist sensibilities. But any notion that the Iowan—who died in 1942, of pancreatic cancer, on the day before his fifty-first birthday—is an underrated artist fizzles. “American Gothic” is, by a very wide margin, his most effective picture—though not his best, for which I nominate “Dinner for Threshers” (1934), a long, low, cutaway view of a farmhouse at harvesttime that brought to disciplined perfection Wood’s strong suit, imaginative design. He was a strange man who made occasionally impressive, predominantly…