Innholdsfortegnelse for March 19, 2018 i The New Yorker

Maira Kalman (Cover), a writer and illustrator, is the author of, most recently, “Cake.” She has also reissued her series of children’s books about Max Stravinsky, a poet dog hero. Anthony Lane (The Current Cinema, p. 92), a film critic for the magazine since 1993, published his writings for The New Yorker in the 2003 collection “Nobody’s Perfect.” Alexandra Schwartz (Books, p. 84) is a staff writer. Ian Frazier (The Talk of the Town, p. 34) most recently published “Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces” and is working on a book about the Bronx. Catherine Barnett (Poem, p. 52) will publish her third poetry collection, “Human Hours,” in September. Patricia Marx (The Talk of the Town, p. 32) is a staff writer and the author of, most recently, “Let’s Be…

One Wednesday night this winter, Jo Ann Veneziano saw “Sweeney Todd” at the Barrow Street Theatre for the hundred and sixth time. (The count now stands at a hundred and thirty-seven.) You would not be wrong to describe her as an extreme theatregoer. She is partial to musicals, often taking in nine performances a week, if you include cabaret acts. Between 2001 and 2004, she attended two hundred productions of “Urinetown”; in 2006, it was “The Wedding Singer” (a hundred and seventy). “Right after that closed, in 2006, was when I jumped to ‘Spring Awakening,’” Veneziano said, over a pre-theatre salad and a hard-boiled egg. “I saw that five hundred and thirty-three times, plus three when it was on tour later, which I usually don’t count.” Even so, she may…

On a recent cold Monday morning, a line of determined-looking women snaked around the corner of Park Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street. Seven of them wore fur coats; one, in a wheelchair, was accompanied by a nurse. Their destination: spring, or the springlike profusion of floral sheets, pillowcases, and cocktail napkins at the D. Porthault store, which was holding its biannual sale. Judy Sanger, a poet, stood near the front of the line, wearing a fur hat. She explained that her mother had bought Porthault sheets, as had her grandmother. “In my mother’s day, if the bias edging frayed you could bring the sheets to the shop and have them sent to Paris for hand repair,” she recalled. She favors the Coeurs print, based on the Duchess of Windsor’s heart doodles,…

Four weeks before the Emmy Awards, Barry Jossen, the executive vice-president of A&E Studios, stood on a wooden platform at a Beverly Hills tailor shop, wearing a two-year-old Armani tuxedo that he thought fit just fine. Andrew Weitz, an intense, wiry man whom Jossen had hired to update his look, squinted at Jossen’s trousers. He turned to Mario Gonzales, the tailor. “Do the pant,” Weitz ordered. “See that?” He pulled the material tighter against Jossen’s shin. “If you keep it this way—” He let go of the fabric. “Eh, you’re older. This”—Weitz pinched the fabric again—“hooks you up.” “Taper the pant,” Gonzales said, and bent down to ease a line of pins through the back of Jossen’s right trouser leg. Weitz wore a teal Isaia blazer with a pocket square…

Which Web sites get the most traffic? According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United States, as of this writing, are Google, You-Tube, and Facebook. (Porn, somewhat hearteningly, doesn’t crack the top ten.) The rankings don’t reflect everything—the dark Web, the nouveau-riche recluses harvesting bitcoin—but, for the most part, people online go where you’d expect them to go. The only truly surprising entry, in fourth place, is Reddit, whose astronomical popularity seems at odds with the fact that many Americans have only vaguely heard of the site and have no real understanding of what it is. A link aggregator? A microblogging platform? A social network? To its devotees, Reddit feels proudly untamed, one of the last Internet giants to resist homogeneity. Most Reddit pages have…

It’s so narrow here. And kind of falsely Shining with the return of spring. Walking in the garden for an hour Is not a solution. Saving each edition Of the day as it lengthens and warms Isn’t progress. It’s very narrow here, Pages and pages of orders in a sheaf. There seems to be a problem below Because that’s where they dug it. If the state had a single neck I’d Already slowly have drawn a bow And stayed to watch the tenor pour out. We finally see what we already know. There are prisons both sides of the walls. Statements that happen at the same time In different places, at different times In the same place, at different times In different places form a single score. No one can…

100 Amazing Facts About the Negro , by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Pantheon). This compendium takes its title from a 1957 book by the Jamaican-born American journalist and historian Joel A. Rogers, which was marketed as a black version of Robert Ripley’s “Believe It or Not!” Gates observes that Rogers occasionally embellished facts to live up to that comparison, but he also celebrates Rogers’s achievement in challenging the notions that black life was not worthy of study and that black people had made no significant contributions to history. Gates has reimagined Rogers’s book for a twenty-first-century audience. In one chapter, he describes advances in DNA technology that have determined how much African ancestry the average African-American has (73.2 per cent), and have shown that a remarkable thirty-five per cent of…

THE ALT-RIGHT AGENDA The exchange between the controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson and an interviewer, reported in Kelefa Sanneh’s article on Peterson’s book, “12 Rules for Life,” reflects a common misunderstanding about human rights (Books, March 5th). When the interviewer asked Peterson what gave him the right to offend transgender people about their self-referential pronoun choices, Peterson asked what right she (and, we can infer, transgender people) had to offend him. This retort apparently stumped the interviewer, prompting Peterson to exclaim, “Ha! Gotcha.” The answer to Peterson’s question is straightforward. Human rights represent claims that the less powerful make against those who have power. Transgender people have traditionally been at the mercy of privileged people like Peterson. While pronoun choices may not be an explicitly recognized human right, they represent…

In 1992, when Ludwika Haraburda Mickevicius was offered this bar—a low-ceilinged dive on the edge of Tompkins Square Park, where she had worked since immigrating from Poland, a decade earlier—she was packing to move to Florida. The owner, who was also Polish, had heard the escape plan and decided that she, too, wanted out. She asked Ludwika—known to regulars as Lucy—to take over the liquor license so that she could retire. “Long time you’ll be happy,” Lucy recalls the woman saying, and so she agreed. Twenty-six years later, not much has changed: the interior looks like an archived “Twin Peaks” set (wood veneer, linoleum flooring, fluorescent red lighting), and, aside from biannual trips to Poland, when she shuts the place down for several weeks, Lucy still works from open to…

The architects Louise Harpman and Scott Specht began collecting takeout-coffee lids when they were in college, in the nineteen-eighties, and continued the practice as graduate students at Yale. Separately, and unbeknownst to each other, they had amassed, in their dorm rooms, a trove of everyday objects that they found aesthetically pleasing. Specht had glass radio tubes, medicine bottles, and airline-safety cards; Harpman had Ferrara Pan candy boxes, flypaper packaging from the forties, and hot-water bottles. They both had coffee lids. Once they learned of their shared interest, they began comparing notes, like trading-card fanatics. “There was the Wawa convenience-store lid, the 7-Eleven, the Dunkin’ Donuts,” Harpman recalled. “It was, like, ‘Oh, I found this one, do you have that one?’” After they merged their collections and married, they ran an…

In November, the St. Regis Shanghai Jingan hosted a “midnight supper” for the fashion designer Jason Wu. The event, which, according to a press release, was inspired by the late-night soirées of the Gilded Age, necessitated a one-night-only renovation of the hotel’s upstairs bar. The tufted banquettes that line the room were reupholstered in a rosy velvet. Leather wing chairs were traded out for mitt-shaped seats that looked as though they had been made from ladyfingers. In place of a traditional landscape mural, a set of black-and-white art works in wooden frames ran the length of the room. Behind them, the walls had been covered in pastel paper, making the St. Regis Bar, if not the pinkest room in the world, then probably the pinkest room in Shanghai—a room as…

Abby Stewart sometimes thought that she was born to be a teacher. At the small college in Colorado where she was an instructor in the biology department, she enjoyed preparing lectures for business or history majors who were simply fulfilling a requirement by taking her course in anatomy and physiology. She worked hard to prove to these students that they should still care about biology, and one way she captured their attention was by describing natural phenomena that, at first glance, might seem peculiar. She revealed that clown fish—like Nemo, in the Pixar movie—are hermaphrodites, starting out as male but sometimes becoming female as they mature. And she talked about how fungi send out subterranean tentacles, which fuse with those of other fungi. When you eat a mushroom, Abby told…

Bless the soul who, under the sobriquet @Lollinghurst, maintains Lines of Beauty, a Twitter account devoted to irregularly publishing sentences from Alan Hollinghurst’s great novel “The Line of Beauty.” When they are least expected, the gorgeous, wry phrases slip into the fountain of my feed, glinting like gold coins tossed among the pennies and the pigeon shit. Even the simplest have something to say, and to teach. “The nights sped by in unrememberable brilliance,” for instance, is made by that “unrememberable,” a term that implies not unmemorable dullness but a glut of indulgences. (Chief among them, as readers of the novel will know, is cocaine; another is sex, which is figured, in a different @Lollinghurst selection, as a blur of “unattributable organs and orifices at work in a spectrum of…

Three decades ago, a crew of hair stylists, led by David Humphries, began flaunting their most fantastic designs at night clubs around Detroit. “Hair Wars”—equal parts performance art and promotion—is still going strong; it arrives at moma PS1 on March 18. Among the participants is Joanne Petit-Frère (modelling her own creation, above). Her portrait was taken by Kwame Brathwaite, whose Afrocentric vision helped to pioneer the “Black Is Beautiful” movement, in the nineteen-sixties. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera Patrice Chéreau’s production of Strauss’s “Elektra” has the spirit of an ancient Greek tragedy but the look of a modern one: it turns the house of Agamemnon into a dysfunctional family, à la Eugene O’Neill, which endures its own long day’s journey into night in the course of the hundred-minute opera.…

The Orchid Show This edition of the New York Botanical Garden’s annual Orchid Show, now in its sixteenth year, features the work of the Belgian garden architect Daniel Ost, a widely celebrated floral artist who studied ikebana, a Japanese style of flower arrangement. For this year’s presentation, Ost has designed towering plant sculptures and gathered the widest array of orchid species ever assembled for the exhibit. The garden hosts tours, Q. & A. sessions, weekly live-music performances, and classes; the program closes with an extensive Earth Day celebration. (2900 Southern Blvd., the Bronx. 718-817-8700. Through April 22.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES Sotheby’s launches its Asian-art sales on March 19, with a session devoted to paintings by modern and contemporary artists from India and the subcontinent. Alongside abstract and semi-abstract works…

When it comes to town, the UniverSoul Circus, a one-ring show that plays in cities on both coasts, often pitches its orange tents streaked with yellow lightning-bolt designs in an empty lot in Newark. Suburban commuters in trains passing on the elevated tracks to Newark Broad Street Station looked at the tents for a second, then back at their phones. Probably they did not know the extreme scariness of what was going on inside. Guys were limboing under flaming limbo bars. A woman was hanging only by her teeth high in the air and spinning like a top. A man in cargo shorts, whom the ringmaster had pulled from the audience, was dancing in front of everybody—mortifying! Why did he ever agree to do that? Another audience member’s heart was…

John Locke says children don’t understand elapsed time,and when I was a girl it was trueand it remains true— It’s been three hundred years and still my feelings for Lockemust pass unrequited.I keep his book in my satchel with other pleasures—lipstick, Ricola, matches, binder clips, and a tiny bar of soapstolen from the Renaissance Inn where I sometimes cheat on Locke with another man.At least objects endure—see how my old sofa holds up! Locke would look pretty good lying herewith his long face, his furrowed brow and center part,he who too quickly flourished and outraced this crowded place.La duration, I said, trying to roll my “r”when some new French friends asked what I’d been thinking about.John Locke et la duration.They thought I said l’adoration, which is also true.Turns out duration…

Since my mother-in-law came to visit America she is quite busy. First, she has to eat many blueberries. Because in China they are expensive! While here they are comparatively cheap. Then she has to breathe the clean air. My husband, Wuji, and I have lived here for five years, so we are used to the air. But my mother-in-law has to take many fast walks. Breathing, breathing. Trying to clean out her lungs, she says, trying to get all the healthy oxygen inside her. She also has to look at the sky. “So blue!” she says during the daytime. “I have not seen such a blue since I was a child.” At nighttime, she says, “Look at the stars. Look! Look!” She has to post pictures of the stars on…

The American poet Li-Young Lee’s new book, his first in ten years, is titled “The Undressing,” suggesting a public performance of privacy, staged to prolong pent-up expectations. Lee’s work is often about the ways in which personal life can be understood as ceremony: his poems are nearly Eucharistic in their stately mingling of body and belief, blood and words. But the book’s title also suggests that Lee’s style, which tends toward solemnity, is itself “undressed”—stripped of its occasional didacticism and mushiness by rogue hecklers and anti-muses, stationed at important crossroads in his poems, whose brutal scripts Lee himself supplied: “Who hasn’t heard that! / You call yourself a poet? / You tame high-finisher of paltry blots!” Lee’s is a self-divided art. His poems often volley between speakers and states of…