Innholdsfortegnelse for March 26, 2018 i The New Yorker

Connie Bruck (“California v. Trump,” p. 36) has been a staff writer since 1989. She has published three books, among them “The Predators’ Ball.” Michael Schulman (“The Ascension,” p. 22), the theatre editor of Goings On About Town, is the author of “Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep.” Lucie Brock-Broido (Poem, p. 44), who died earlier this month, was the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, “Stay, Illusion.” Sharif Hamza (Portfolio, p. 48), a photographer living in New York City, has contributed to Vogue, V Magazine, and Dazed. His work focusses on youth culture in fashion, music, and cinema. Dana Goodyear (Portfolio, p. 48), a staff writer, is the author of three books, including “Anything That Moves.” Adam Kirsch (Books, p. 73), a poet and critic, published “The…

Tim Brown, a World Cup soccer player from Wellington, New Zealand, and Joey Zwillinger, the head of an ecofriendly algae-chemical company, met through their wives a while back, and, observing a trend toward workplace informality, went into business with a loose idea: knitted woolen sneakers. “This was the very first shoe we made,” Brown said the other day, in San Francisco, gesturing toward a photograph of footwear that bulged and puckered like a tea cozy. “It looks like something you might wear if you have some sort of medical problem.” That was then. Since releasing its first non-hideous model, in 2016, their company, Allbirds, has sold more than a million pairs of sustainably sourced woolly sneakers. “Wool is this miracle fibre that regulates temperature and wicks away moisture,” Brown said.…

The #MeToo movement has prompted countless gatherings of women. What about men? On a recent brisk morning, Fatherly, a Web site for dads, convened twenty-eight academics and professionals at a Tribeca café to dis cuss how to raise boys to be better men and how existent men might conduct themselves better. They made sure to invite some women. “People sometimes confuse us with a men’s-rights organization,” Andrew Burmon, Fatherly’s editor-in-chief, said, sipping coffee. He had a thick beard and was wearing a blazer. “We say, ‘We’re having a breakfast to talk about men,’ and they’re, like, ‘Oh, you must hate women.’ We’re, like, ‘No, no, no!’ At nine o’clock, the group took seats at long tables set with mismatched china. Michael Rothman, Fatherly’s chief executive officer, kicked things off: “Looking…

A few years ago, Kris Wu decided that he wanted to be known as a rapper. Wu, who is twenty-six, grew up in Canada and in China, where he is famous as an actor, singer, and model. In middle school, he had become a devotee of N.B.A. basketball and, subsequently, of hip-hop. After a stint in the Korean pop group EXO, he became a judge on “Rap of China,” a hugely successful reality show about aspiring rappers. (His catchphrase, delivered in Mandarin, was “Do you even freestyle?”) Like many Asian superstars, who are mobbed at home yet walk around Manhattan in relative anonymity, he wanted to measure himself against American artists. In February, 2016, Wu played in the celebrity game at the N.B.A.’s All-Star Weekend, in Toronto. There, he met…

In another life, he was Caesar’s pet, perhaps a gift from CleopatraWhen she returned to RomeHer hair salty and sapphiredFrom bathing, the winged kohl around her eyes smudgedFrom heat. In another life, he was from SomaliaWhere he spent hours watching cloudsIn shapes of feral acrobats tipping along their tightropesSpun of camels’ hair and jute. His eyes were liquid, kind. His lashes each as long as a hummingbird’s tongue. His fetlocks puffed from galloping, his tail curled upwardFrom the joy of feeling fleet across the tinted grasslandsAnd the gold savannahs there. Do you find me colorful as well?Once, in another life in the Serengeti, he stretched his neckTo feed on the acacia twigs, mimosa, wild apricot. He was gentle and his heart was as longAs a human’s arm. At night, the…

The house, on an island in Maine, perches on a rock at the edge of the sea like the aerie of an eagle. Below the white-railed back porch, the sea-slick rock slopes down to a lumpy low tideland of eelgrass and bladder wrack, as slippery as a knot of snakes. Periwinkles cling to rocks; mussels pinch themselves together like purses. A gull lands on a shaggy-weeded rock, fluffs itself, and settles into a crouch, bracing against a fierce wind rushing across the water, while, up on the cliff, lichen-covered trees—spruce and fir and birch—sigh and creak like old men on a damp morning. “The shore is an ancient world,” Rachel Carson wrote from a desk in that house, a pine-topped table wedged into a corner of a room where the…

STRANGE GUESTS I have zero interest in brown marmorated stinkbugs; in fact, I’d rather be entirely ignorant of them (“Home Invasion,” March 12th). But, on reading the first few sentences of Kathryn Schulz’s article about them, understanding what I was in for and wishing to avoid it at all costs… well, I simply could not tear myself away. That she was able to lure me in and keep me reading to the very end is proof of her spell-weaving ability. Ken Horowitz Stamford, Conn. Each year, the number of stinkbugs invading my home grows. In the fall, there were thousands of them crawling on the back of my building, trying to get inside. The best way to deal with them is to drop them into soapy water. The addition…

On a recent evening in Alphabet City, a heavy snow was melting into an icy soup, served cold on the sidewalk. Some might have taken this as a sign to stay in and snuggle up, but others found themselves trudging through it to visit Loverboy, a bar opened last June by the owners of Mother’s Ruin, in Nolita. Its large windows are ideal for people-stepping-in-snow-puddles-watching, and they open up for a pleasant breeze in the summer. Two people surveyed the list of cocktails (twelve dollars each) above the bar, considering their options. “I don’t know about the slushy drink—I already had enough of that outside,” one said, in reference to the Dr Angel Face. Instead, they chose the excellent No Pants Dance, a combination of tequila, agave, lime, and pineapple…

As Twitter insults go, the one by Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, a journalist in Washington, was pretty mild. On June 6th, after President Trump tweeted some criticism of the news media, Buckwalter-Poza replied, “To be fair you didn’t win the WH: Russia won it for you.” What happened next, though, was unusual. President Trump, from his @realDonaldTrump Twitter handle, blocked Buckwalter-Poza, meaning that he wouldn’t see any more of her responses and Buckwalter-Poza would no longer see any of the President’s tweets. That made her one of at least a hundred people Trump has blocked, and it led, ultimately, to a hearing in federal district court in Manhattan the other day. Buckwalter-Poza was one of seven Twitter users—including a surgeon in Tennessee and a police officer in Texas—who joined a lawsuit against…

Onstage at the Neil Simon Theatre one recent afternoon, Andrew Garfield was wrestling with an angel. The thirty-four-year-old movie star was in white pajamas; the Angel, played by the British actress Amanda Lawrence, wore a Phyllis Diller wig, a skirt fashioned from a frayed American flag, and eight-foot-long wings made of crinoline and linen, as grimy and tattered as a New York City pigeon’s. “Mortal Kombat”-style music blared as the Angel dragged Garfield across the stage by his leg, slammed his head on the ground, and then floated above his motionless body. Then: a fakeout! Garfield grabbed her by the arm and rammed his head into her torso. The Angel shot up twenty feet in the air, lifting Garfield with her, and shrieked: I I I I Am the CONTINENTAL…

There are days I think beauty has been exhaustedbut then I read about the New York subway cars that, dumped into the ocean, have become synthetic reefs.Coral gilds the stanchions, feathered with dim Atlantic light. Fish glisten, darting from a window into the sea grassthat bends around them like green flames— this is human-enabled grace. So maybe there’s roomin the margin of error for us to save ourselves from the trends of self-destruction.Or maybe such beauty is just another distraction, stuffing our hearts with its currency, paraded for applause.Here, in the South, you can hear applause coming from the ground: even the buried are divided.At the bottom of the Gulf, dark with Mississippi silt, rests the broken derrick of an oil rig—and isn’t oilalso beautiful? Ancient and opaque, like an…

All but one were born in the decade after Columbine; like the student gun-control advocates activated by the recent massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, most are in their teens. But the children depicted here—hunters, target shooters, competitors in trap and skeet—occupy a parallel realm, where guns signify not danger, alienation, and the threat of death but safety, discipline, and trust. Several years ago, while on a road trip, Sharif Hamza, a British-born photographer who lives with his wife and two daughters in Brooklyn, met a gradeschool kid with a shotgun in the Arizona desert. Watching the boy’s father patiently instruct him in safety procedures, Hamza was struck by how different the interaction was from the culture he grew up in, where soccer was the game…

“Can there be a history of a slave?” When Isaak Markus Jost asked this question, in the introduction to his “General History of the Israelite People,” published in 1832, it was by no means clear that Jewish history was a viable scholarly discipline. To many people, Jost knew, it might seem that the important part of the Jewish story had ended with the Bible, leaving only a long sequel of passive suffering. “It is commonly held that where independent activity has ceased, there too history has ceased,” he noted. And where was the independent activity in Jewish history? Ever since Judea was crushed by the Roman Empire, the Jews had possessed none of the things that made for the usual history of a nation: territory, sovereignty, power, armies, kings. Instead,…

In the fourteen years since “Mean Girls” came out—introducing the world to such bons mots as “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen”—the lives of teen-age girls have become only more fraught, with Snapchat chronicling every after-school power play. A musical adaptation, with songs by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin and an updated script by Tina Fey, who wrote the enduringly witty 2004 screenplay, is in previews at the August Wilson, directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw. Will “fetch” finally happen? MOVIES NOW PLAYING Annihilation In this numbingly ludicrous science-fiction drama, written and directed by Alex Garland, a talented cast of actors play undeveloped characters delivering leaden dialogue in a haphazard story that’s filmed with a bland slickness. Natalie Portman stars as Lena, a medical-school professor and former Army officer…

Macy’s Flower Show The annual two-week exhibition—featuring ornate, aromatic displays of flora from around the country, at the Herald Square flagship store—is a welcome sign of spring’s arrival. This year’s theme is “Once Upon a Springtime,” which draws on the mythical, soft-focus forestry of wonderlands and fairy-tale kingdoms. On March 25, the Flower Show hosts the floral designer Rachel Cho, who will teach attendees how to make flower crowns, the traditional Slavic headwear originally designated for young unmarried women that has become a ubiquitous accessory for Coachella-bound, carefree twenty somethings. One highlight is a special floral demonstration by Martha Stewart on April 5, as the mogul celebrates her ninetieth book, “Martha’s Flowers.” (151 W. 34th St. 212-695-4400. March 25-April 8.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES Asia Week continues with a flurry…

“At eighty-three years old, Sheila Hicks, born in the summer of 1934, in Hastings, Nebraska, is the artist that everyone is fighting over,” the French newspaper Le Figaro wrote recently, listing Hicks as one of twenty cultural figures who would “make Paris in 2018.” Hicks has been on a streak. Her monumental works have recently appeared on the High Line (fibre-wrapped tubes like giant pool noodles) and in the gardens of Versailles (where she cocooned a statue of Proserpine in blue, purple, and orange ribbons). “Life Lines,” an exhibition devoted to her seven decades of work, opened last month at the Pompidou, in Paris. The tempting storyline is that of a long-neglected genius finally having her moment. But Hicks has been a star all along. She was just out of…

From an exhibition on display in the British Museum’s Permanent and Non-Returnable Collection of American Antiquities and Near-Antiquities: OBJECT 1-A: Rawlings baseball glove, circa 1959. While on a collecting trip in search of artifacts in a remote part of the American interior known as Ohio, William Fitzmorris, fifth Earl of Litchfield, discovered this mintcondition example of a “ball mitt” lying in plain sight just inside the back door of a single-family home. Shipped with a crate of similar acquisitions, the item was catalogued and entered irretrievably into the museum’s holdings in 1960. OBJECT 1-B: Schwinn “Roadmaster” boy’s bicycle, bright blue with white detailing, circa 1962. This museum-quality velocipede of American manufacture was stumbled upon by Sir Chauncey Peakes, K.B.E., as he was studying small-village bicycle racks in search of clues…

Before you were born, you were a head and a tail in a milky pool—a swimmer. You were a race, a dying off, a breaking through, an arrival. Before you were born, you were an egg in your mom, who was an egg in her mom. Before you were born, you were a nested Russian doll of possibility in your mom’s ovaries. You were two halves of a million different possibilities, a billion heads or tails, flip-shine on spun coin. Before you were born, you were the idea to make it to California for gold or bust. You were white, you were brown, you were red, you were dust. You were hiding, you were seeking. Before you were born, you were chased, beaten, broken, trapped in Oklahoma. Before you were…

An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones (Algonquin). This powerful novel follows a young, upwardly mobile African-American couple in Atlanta as their marriage is falling apart. It’s a disaster not of their own making: Roy is accused of, then imprisoned for, a crime he didn’t commit. But the injustice of their circumstance doesn’t ease the burden. “A marriage is more than your heart, it’s your life,” his wife, Celestial, writes to him at one point. “And we are not sharing ours.” The story, narrated variously by Roy, Celestial, and a friend of Celestial’s, is both sweeping and intimate—at once an unsparing exploration of what it means to be black in America and a remarkably lifelike portrait of a marriage. No one is to blame, yet everyone is at fault. The…