Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2, 2018 i The New Yorker

Margaret Talbot (“Dirty Politics,” p. 38) has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2004. Joshua Rothman (“As Real as It Gets,” p. 30) is the magazine’s archive editor and a frequent contributor to newyorker.com. Jane Shore (Poem, p. 70) published her latest book, “That Said: New and Selected Poems,” in 2012. Jeffrey Toobin (The Talk of the Town, p. 28) most recently published “American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst.” Laura Miller (Books, p. 90), the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia,” is a books and culture columnist at Slate. Jack Handey (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 37) has contributed to The New Yorker since 1987. He has written several humor books, including, most recently, “Please…

Most people, when they think of puppets, are put in mind of the sock puppet that their third-grade teacher brought into class to tell them to brush their teeth. Much harder to learn is a marionette, such as Howdy Doody, which is operated, on strings, from high above the puppet’s head. But until recently there was probably no such thing as an abstract puppet. “Or, if there was,” the forty-eight-year-old master puppeteer Basil Twist says, “there weren’t that many. That’s kind of why I did it.” One day, twenty years ago, Twist was walking down his block, and he saw a ten-gallon fish tank that someone had put out for the garbage collectors. It had a crack in it. “‘Hmm,’ I said, and I lugged it home, and I covered…

Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival Held annually in New York City, this Easter gathering has long symbolized the holiday’s blend of theology, pageantry, and whimsy. In the mid-nineteenth century, St. Patrick’s Cathedral began displaying floral arrangements at its Easter services, and high-society female parishioners followed suit, brightening their church apparel accordingly; soon, the stroll from the cathedral down Fifth Avenue became a flamboyant showcase of bonnets, ribbons, and floral prints. This Easter morning, participants will march in headwear featuring elaborate models of the skyline, live animals, and countless other outlandish ornaments, in keeping with the parade’s spirit of one-upmanship. As the poet Rosyrie Schulman declared in this magazine, in 1946, “This year I’m being different / (My heart is set upon it) / I’m going to wear a ribbon…

When it comes to the phenomenon of Donald Trump, you have to give him this: sanctimony is not foremost among his sins. He provokes no moral disappointment, because he creates no moral expectations. Just as his business career was characterized by Mob-connected cronies, racial bias, aggrieved contractors, dubious partners, byzantine lawsuits, and tabloid sensation, his Presidency dispenses with ethical pretense. Human rights in foreign affairs, compassion for the disadvantaged in domestic affairs, and truth in public statements are objects only of disdain. Recent days have been typical. The President spoke on the telephone with Vladimir Putin about his reëlection last Tuesday, and, despite the counsel of his national-security advisers (“DO NOT CONGRATULATE,” they wrote, noting the current tension in relations), he conveyed his kudos anyway. No mention was made of…

Even the weather was starting to turn Russian in Washington last week, as the creators and cast of “The Americans” rolled into town to celebrate the launch of the show’s final season on FX. When the series, a period piece about a family of spies from the Soviet Union living under deep cover as ordinary suburbanites, premièred, five years ago, it had the cheery glow of the eighties—the cars were boxy, the computers clunky, and it was always morning in America. “The computers are so old that we can’t get any of them to work anymore,” Matthew Rhys, who stars as the husband, Philip Jennings, said during a reception at the Newseum. “Anything you see on the screens is put on during post-production.” The real surprise from “The Americans” has…

Where does the mind end and the world begin? Is the mind locked inside its skull, sealed in with skin, or does it expand outward, merging with things and places and other minds that it thinks with? What if there are objects outside—a pen and paper, a phone—that serve the same function as parts of the brain, enabling it to calculate or remember? You might say that those are obviously not part of the mind, because they aren’t in the head, but that would be to beg the question. So are they or aren’t they? Consider a woman named Inga, who wants to go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She consults her memory, recalls that the museum is on Fifty-third Street, and off she goes.…

Jack London started drinking at age five, plunging his face into a bucket of beer he was carrying to his father and lapping it up; he spent the afternoon lying sick under a tree. As a teen-ager, he drank prodigiously, got into fights, and suffered epic hangovers. At least once, he combined all three activities, downing whiskey “like so much medicine” somewhere south of Oakland (“I think the place was Haywards. It may have been San Leandro or Niles”), brawling on the train back to the city, and ending up … well, it’s not entirely clear, but he came to, the next night, in a strange boarding house, after seventeen hours in a “comatose condition.” By the time London wrote down these recollections, in “John Barleycorn,” published in 1913, he…

READING THE DOSSIER Jane Mayer is alarmed about Russian meddling in the 2016 Presidential election, yet she seems unconcerned that Christopher Steele, a British citizen, was able to meet privately with officials in the United States government in an attempt to stop a candidate from being elected (“The Man Behind the Dossier,” March 12th). Why is Russian interference shocking but anti-Trump skulduggery by a well-connected, retired British intelligence officer acceptable? If the Russians are scheming foreigners, then Steele must be one, too. Hope Leman Corvallis, Ore. In pinochle, holding trump cards late in the game often leads to a win. James Comey, as the F.B.I. director in October, 2016, had a trump card for each candidate, but chose to play only one of them. Mayer’s summary of the Steele…

In a week in which Stormy Daniels could plausibly be called the most famous actress in America, and with the nation awaiting revelations about the private predilections of the serial sexual harasser in the White House, it seemed grimly appropriate that, on a recent evening, a group of theatre professionals in New York would gather to discuss ways that their own industry might combat more routine manifestations of sexual transgression. Julia Jordan, the treasurer of the Dramatists Guild and the executive director of the Lilly Awards, welcomed a full house at the A.R.T./New York Theatres, on West Fifty-third Street, by heralding “a tool to remove serial predators from our workplaces.” The assembled performers, writers, and other creative types were there to learn about Callisto, an online nonprofit startup that seeks…

The names of the newest cryptocurrencies betray the increasing desperation pooling in this sector of the economy: Jesus Coin, Bananacoin, TrumpCoin, PutinCoin, titcoin, potcoin, and, yes, Ponzicoin. The new exercise app Sweatcoin is not exactly a cryptocurrency; it tallies the footfalls you make outdoors and rewards you with one sweatcoin for every thousand and fifty steps. It then allows you to use this digital currency to purchase items on the app’s Web site. Hoping to convert his daily constitutional into cash, a correspondent recently amassed more than a hundred sweatcoins by walking around New York, and then investigated what he could reap from his labors. At the Gap, when a clerk ringing up the correspondent’s purchase asked, “Do you have a Gap card?,” the correspondent said, “No, but I have…

Who knows One. I know One.One is God for God is One—The only One in Heaven and on earth. Who knows two. I know two.Two are the first two: Adam and Eve.One is God for God is One—It takes one to know one. Who knows three. I know three.Bad things always come in threes.Two trees grew in the Garden of Eden.One is God for God is One—One rotten apple spoils the barrel. Who knows four. I know four.What were you doing on all fours?Three’s the hearts in a ménage à trois.Two’s the jump ropes in double Dutch.One is God for God is One—One good turn deserves another. Who knows five. I know five.Five is the five in “Slaughterhouse-Five.”Four is Egypt’s plague of flies.Three the Stooges on TV.Two the two-faced lie…

Anatomy of a Genocide, by Omer Bartov (Simon & Schuster). Between 1941 and 1944, Polish and Ukrainian inhabitants of the small town of Buczacz helped German occupying forces kill more than ten thousand Jews. The communities had lived side by side for centuries, but Bartov, a noted Holocaust historian whose mother grew up in the town, shows that this shared history, which involved competing narratives of victimhood, often provoked neighbors to turn on one another without remorse. His remarkable archival work produces an account that is finely detailed. Some people provided shelter to strangers; some of the Jewish élite saved their own kin by betraying other Jews. Haunting photographs punctuate the text: a row of exhumed bodies, German officers playing cards and drinking schnapps, survivors erecting a memorial. Time…

THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Between the World and Me A multimedia theatrical reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book about living as a black man in America, conceived by Kamilah Forbes and featuring music by Jason Moran. (Apollo Theatre, 253 W. 125th St. 800-745-3000. April 2-3.) Bobbie Clearly In Alex Lubischer’s comedy, directed by Will Davis for Roundabout Underground, the residents of a Nebraska town tell the story of a murder in a cornfield two years earlier. (Black Box, Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, 111 W. 46th St. 212-719-1300. In previews. Opens April 3.) Carousel Jack O’Brien directs a revival of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, starring Joshua Henry, Jessie Mueller, and Renée Fleming. (Imperial, 249 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. In previews.) Children of a Lesser God…

Every weekend from the first whispers of warmth in spring to the last mild day in fall, the patio of this Bed-Stuy cocktail spot, named after a romantic subgenre of reggae, is a sprawl of naked limbs. Inside, crowded bodies about as diverse as the neighborhood itself squeeze past one another in the little dance space between the back door and the bar, half of them angling for someone new to match their rhythm, the other half trying not to spill their glasses of rum or mezcal on their way to fresh air. The mood is decidedly more subdued in late winter, but, a few weeks ago, a man wearing a black turban and a necklace of wooden beads went in search of a light and found a tall blond…

Last week, the New York première of the new Wes Anderson movie, “Isle of Dogs,” a stop-motion love story between man and beast set on a fantastical garbage-covered island in the Japanese archipelago, brought several of its stars to town. On a blizzardy Wednesday, the movie’s boy hero, Atari Kobayashi (Koyu Rankin, age eleven), and his beloved bodyguard dog, Spots Kobayashi (Liev Schreiber, age fifty)—met in a midtown hotel suite, along with the head of the film’s puppet department, Andy Gent, of London, who has worked with Anderson since “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Atop two pedestals stood a tidy series of manmade alpha dogs, with tags reading “CHIEF,” “REX,” “BOSS,” and so on. Each was the size of a young Chihuahua. The puppets, by design, look noble and haggard; life on…

Thomas Metzinger had his first out-of-body experience when he was nineteen. He was on a ten-week meditation retreat in the Westerwald, a mountainous area near his home, in Frankfurt. After a long day of yoga and meditation, he had a slice of cake and fell asleep. Then he awoke, feeling an itch on his back. He tried to scratch it, but couldn’t—his arm seemed paralyzed. He tried to force the arm to move, and, somehow, this shifted him up and out of his body, so that he seemed to be floating above himself. Gazing out into the room, he was both amazed and afraid. He heard someone else breathing and, in a panic, looked around for an intruder. Only much later did he realize that the breathing had been his.…

Hannah Upp had been missing for nearly two weeks when she was seen at the Apple Store in midtown Manhattan. Her friends, most of them her former classmates from Bryn Mawr, had posted a thousand flyers about her disappearance on signposts and at subway stations and bus stops. It was September, 2008, and Hannah, a middle-school teacher at Thurgood Marshall Academy, a public school in Harlem, hadn’t shown up for the first day of school. Her roommate had found her wallet, passport, MetroCard, and cell phone in her purse, on the floor of her bedroom. The News reported, “Teacher, 23, Disappears Into Thin Air.” A detective asked Hannah’s mother, Barbara Bellus, to come to the Thirtieth Precinct, in Harlem, to view the Apple Store surveillance footage. Barbara watched a woman…

When Kiril arrived at Room 2C for the first time that Wednesday evening, he was surprised to hear a piano ringing out from behind the classroom wall. It was early summer, and the community center was almost empty; the children’s camp had been dismissed hours earlier, and in the silence the clustered chords seemed dense and significant, like church bells. He was already late, but he paused for a moment, listening. All day he’d debated backing out at the last minute, though the course was prepaid. Even now, his hand on the doorknob, he felt a slight urge to run. But the music was too intriguing. It drew him through the door. He was disappointed, upon entering, to find that there was no piano: just a whiteboard, a long table,…

The pleasure of reading novels comes in assorted flavors, and one of them, certainly, is nostalgia. This is the craving satisfied by Christine Mangan’s début, “Tangerine” (Ecco), the story of two women, former college roommates, who are reunited in Tangier in 1956. Alice Shipley, psychologically fragile since the deaths of her parents in a house fire when she was an adolescent, is married to John, who does something vaguely secretive for “the government.” Lucy Mason, a scholarship girl who bonded with Alice as a fellow-orphan during their freshman year at Bennington College, has ditched her job typing manuscripts for a publisher in New York and appeared without advance notice on Alice’s Moroccan doorstep. Also unannounced is Lucy’s plan to pry Alice out of her marriage and carry her off for…