Innholdsfortegnelse for April 23, 2018 i The New Yorker

Nick Paumgarten (The Talk of the Town, p. 26; “Water and the Wall,” p. 44) has been writing for the magazine since 2000. Ann Beattie (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 39), a contributor to The New Yorker since 1974, is the recipient of a PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction. “The Accomplished Guest” is her latest story collection. David Hockney (Cover), a painter based in England and California, recently had a career retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exhibitions of his work are currently on view in New York City, Los Angeles, and Venice, California. Carrie Battan (Pop Music, p. 74) began contributing to the magazine in 2015, and became a staff writer in 2018. George Packer (Comment, p. 25), a staff writer, is the author of “The…

St. Jordi Festival In Barcelona, St. Valentine’s seat is occupied by Jordi, a knight who, according to medieval legend, slew a dragon and saved a village, including the daughter of a king; the dragon’s blood produced a rosebush where it dripped. Catalans celebrate St. Jordi each April by exchanging roses and books with their loved ones. Two organizations, the Farragut Fund for Catalan Culture in the U.S. and the Catalan Institute of America, aim to broaden the tradition’s global recognition with a week of events, including a bookstore crawl and a reading by the Catalan writer Alícia Kopf, at this year’s PEN World Voices Festival. (Various locations. ciofa.org. April 21-23.) Sakura Matsuri Cherry Blossom Festival In the classic Japanese horror film “Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees,” from 1975, villagers…

For the past six years, the designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have staged biannual presentations of their haute-couture, or Alta Moda, collections. The extravagant events, in which the designers show custom-made, one-of-a-kind pieces for both women and men, have until now taken place largely in Italian resort towns. But on a recent Friday hundreds of Dolce & Gabbana clients descended on New York for the first-ever Alta Moda event in the United States—four days that kicked off at the main branch of the New York Public Library with an exhibit of the company’s high-jewelry, or Alta Gioielleria, line. The library’s entrance hall—usually frequented by frazzled-looking graduate students, puffy-coated tourists, and homeless people seeking shelter—had been transformed. Enormous sprays of blossoming plum branches loomed everywhere; in a tribute to the…

1. The mouthfeel of the Stormy Daniels “60 Minutes” interview is complex, gradually revealing itself in a mellow bitterness that still has so much more to tell. With hints of self-knowledge paired with humor, graced by silvery pink Underside of the Ash Tree lipstick, the 2018 Stormy holds delicious allure, offering undertones of raspberries, as its mystery resolves on the tongue with crumbling sweetness and a sparkle of brilliance not often seen in so humble a grape. 2. The terroir was propitious for this year’s Banished Secretary 2018, whose taste lies primarily beneath the surface, its low notes shivering with incautious power, owing to the convergence of double allegations whose force pairs them in an assertive way. Though some find it too strong, others will take pleasure in the sour-grape…

The best meal of my life, or at least the most memorable, came from a can. I was thirteen at the time and living in France, so that may have had something to do with it. But I credit the beans. My older sisters and I were at a hippie camp in the Alps that summer, not far from the Italian border. My parents had stashed us there while they went home to Oklahoma to check on our house, which they’d rented to some graduate students while my father was on sabbatical. The camp was the cheapest one they could find, and they seemed to have done next to no research before signing us up. My mother just loved the name: Jeunesse du Soleil Levant, Youth of the Rising Sun.…

from where my students ask mewhy Sylvia Plath wanted to eat men,two men overdose. This is rural Ohio,and the new drugs from Columbusare cut with elephant tranquillizers.The police are nurses now.They don’t dream. My students tryto understand why the voicein the poem brags about death butnever dies. Not a mile from here,two men regain consciousnessin their living room full of litter boxesand Optimos. They are not particularly scaredby the police or their I.V.s. They have bothdied before, and been revived with Narcan.It’s November 6th, and the skyhas been blank for so long its emptinesshas turned supple. The men refusefurther medical treatment. One dumpsa baggie of crickets into a lizard tank.My students are sincerely tryingto analyze death: its cadence and anaphora,its German origins. The policedo not know how to speakto my…

In the third episode of “Roseanne,” on ABC, Roseanne Conner and her husband, Dan, wake up on their iconic sofa, in Lanford, Illinois. “It’s eleven o’clock,” Roseanne says. “We slept from ‘Wheel’ to ‘Kimmel.’” Dan replies, “We missed all the shows about black and Asian families.” Roseanne squawks, “They’re just like us!” Then, sardonically, “There, now you’re all caught up.” It would be so nice to be able to hunker down on my own sofa with “Roseanne,” the blockbuster sitcom from my twenties, a feminist show that was tough about class, with pioneering gay characters and a memorably complex teen girl. It would feel good to critique the new version with a tolerant smile—to say simply that you shouldn’t judge any sitcom too harshly, early on. In a review of…

GUNS IN THE HANDS OF KIDS There was a strange dissonance between Sharif Hamza’s photographs of teen-agers with guns and Dana Goodyear’s accompanying article (Portfolio, March 26th). Goodyear mentions gun-related deaths and injuries, but mostly focusses on a “parallel realm, where guns signify… safety, discipline, and trust.” Hamza’s pictures, by contrast, were outright frightening. We can talk about target shooting or trap and skeet, but guns have only one purpose, which is to kill. These armed children, regardless of the occasional smile, look menacing. There is simply no way to take benign photos of armed people. Looking at the picture of Cheyenne Dalton, a sixteen-year-old from Missouri, whose mother is concerned about self-defense, I could not help thinking of a New Yorker cartoon by Matthew Diffee, from 2011, in…

The playwright Tom Stoppard was in town recently, to see previews of his 1974 play, “Travesties.” The drama is set in Zurich in 1917, and, amid Stoppard’s layered, brilliant verbal erudition, it defends the purpose of art as an activity that can grant a sliver of immortality. Central to the action are James Joyce, the poet and Dada founder Tristan Tzara, and Vladimir Lenin—all of whom landed in Zurich during the First World War—and a production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.” The revival, directed by Patrick Marber, originated in London in 2016; it opens on Broadway, at the American Airlines Theatre, on April 24. Stoppard, who looks younger than his eighty years and carries with him what Marber calls “his kingly bonhomie,” was dressed in an Oxford…

Josh Max is a name that turns up in your e-mail in-box, sometimes with a video attached. The video might be a business proposition, in the form of him performing, on a portable keyboard, a few verses he’s written to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” In place of the opening line, “Don’t go changing,’’ he sings your name. He’s sitting next to an old stove. He has messy peroxide-blond hair, a tight red T-shirt, and a wild look in his eyes. So you’d think, when other e-mails arrive saying he’s going to be in the city and would like to pick you up near your apartment in a fancy car and drive you to a graveyard, that you might come up with an excuse not…

When her phone rang that day, Leah Nanako Winkler was broke. She’d come to New York on a bus, a decade earlier, with forty-five hundred dollars that she’d earned by selling her eggs to a fertility clinic, and now she was thinking about taking a part-time job as a dog groomer because she couldn’t afford to both pay her rent and do the only work she wanted to do: write plays. “I saw that an unknown number was calling my phone, and I automatically assumed it was a telemarketer,” she said recently. “So I answered the phone by saying, ‘I don’t have any money.’” But the caller was Tim Sanford, the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, and he told Winkler that she’d been chosen as the first recipient of the…

Fifty years ago this spring, Stanley Kubrick’s confounding sci-fi masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” had its premières across the country. In the annals of audience restlessness, these evenings rival the opening night of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” in 1913, when Parisians in osprey and tails reportedly brandished their canes and pelted the dancers with objects. A sixth of the New York première’s audience walked right out, including several executives from M-G-M. Many who stayed jeered throughout. Kubrick nervously shuttled between his seat in the front row and the projection booth, where he tweaked the sound and the focus. Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick’s collaborator, was in tears at intermission. The after-party at the Plaza was “a room full of drinks and men and tension,” according to Kubrick’s wife, Christiane. Kubrick, a…

Whitetails flicker like light in the winter woods,where my dog and I crack openthe early morning, the ground a frozen patchworkof leaves, the brittle ice of dirt. So muchof walking is description. Late in the yearthe sun stops us cold. Or, walking is comparison,these woods in New Jersey seem(a passing thought) Ohioan,then I recall that late thaw one March in New Hampshire. Or,I’m ten again wondering whereI last saw the deer carcass. Maybeby the creek, maybe loose ribs, a skulltucked into snow.As childrenwe set old logs against a middling elm,thatched branchesinto a sort of rooftop, called our dwellingAntelope. My friend and I, we ignored the skycutting into our shelter and made wallsof found particleboard,fragmentary, damp, worthless as kindling.Her mother worshipped Zoroaster. Her fatherhad an Irish-American mistress. Stub of birch, first…

If you need more proof that reality television and social media are this era’s greatest cultural incubators, look no further than Cardi B (born Belcalis Almanzar), the twenty-five-year-old Bronx native who has taken an unprecedented but well-documented path to pop-world domination. In 2014, while working as a stripper, she launched a grassroots campaign for her personality on Instagram and Vine, posting bawdy, unflinching videos in which she monologued about whatever was on her mind—unfaithful boyfriends, the indignity of backhanded compliments, the relative merits of IHOP and Philippe Chow—in a thick New York Spanish accent. She sometimes wore nothing but a shower cap. “I ain’t gon’ lie to y’all, these terrorist attacks got my mental a li’l finicky. That’s why I been in the Bronx,” she said in one video, from…

“Carousel,” the 1945 musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein (in revival at the Imperial, under the direction of Jack O’Brien), is a kind of intimate extravaganza, packed with so many ideas about the body, gender roles, premarital coupling, and fear of closeness that at times its force and clumsiness weigh on you like another body, one that’s not necessarily harmful, just a little woozy and didactic, demanding that you get how it “feels.” The twoact spectacle, which runs just under three hours, is about the fantasy of love, and how it gets even hotter when it’s interrupted or shattered by lawlessness or death. When the New York-born Billy Bigelow (Joshua Henry) arrives in a small town on the New England coast, he brings with him chaos and sex appeal. He’s a…

Johannes Schenk’s twelve viol sonatas, by turns sprightly and solemn, and collectively called “Le Nymphe di Rheno,” were a swan song, in 1702, for the now archaic ancestors of the modern violin. Shirley Hunt, Wen Yang, and Sarah Cunningham, of New York Baroque Incorporated (above), bring the instruments back to life with one of the Schenk sonatas. They also perform works by Bach and Couperin, and a fifteenth-century paean to smoking, on April 24 at the Morgan Library, perhaps Manhattan’s closest approximation to the nymphs’ Rhineland court. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera The title role of Puccini’s “Tosca” is an alluring, larger-than-life diva who delivers one of the most beloved arias in the Italian repertoire, so it was especially flummoxing when Anna Netrebko, one of opera’s undeniable superstars, dismissed…

On a recent melancholy evening, two young women—one in want of a job, the other disappointed in a man—took an elevator to the twenty-sixth floor of the Beekman Tower. Both sought levity and, perhaps, a celebrity: the rooftop bar, about two months old, advertised that Frank Sinatra had loyally visited a previous iteration, for drinks and, maybe, a heartbreaking song. Instead, the women encountered several quiet customers, most in sweaters, drinking to light techno. Yet they also found, on an enclosed patio, a velvety red banquette good for consoling, undisturbed and unjostled. A beatific hostess appeared in the candlelight. Did the women want drinks? Oh, but they did, and they were grateful to her for not wincing at one woman’s decision to pronounce “Pain Killa” with an “a,” as written…

Arthur Mondella is mourned. Up until the moment of his death, on February 24, 2015, he ran his family’s company, Dell’s Maraschino Cherries, in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. His daughters Dana Mondella Bentz and Dominique Mondella, who run the company now, miss him every day. They remember him in their prayers and wish he could see how they’ve done with the business. Their great-grandfather Arthur Mondella, senior, and their grandfather Ralph founded it in 1948. Dell’s Maraschino Cherries processes and sells nothing but cherries—about fourteen million pounds a year—from its single Red Hook factory. Dana, the president and C.E.O., is thirty, and Dominique, the vice-president, is thirty-two. One might not expect that Mondella’s death also would have saddened many of New York City’s beekeepers, but it did. People…

A few times a year, around major Chinese holidays, Min received an e-mail from a man whom she had met twice in her life. Every November—after the celebration of another birthday, on November 3rd, he never failed to remind her—he also attached a picture of himself, and begged for a picture of her. In the past twelve years, the number of his grandchildren had quadrupled. His oldest grandson had graduated from college and taken a good job in New York City. The next two grandchildren were in college. There were a few more, mostly on the West Coast. The youngest, a boy born with a noble look, the man had nicknamed J.C., for Julius Caesar. In 2012, his wife had died, but he was healthy in general, minus some common…

Educated, by Tara Westover (Random House). In this harrowing memoir, Westover, the daughter of survivalist Christian fundamentalists in the Idaho mountains, defies her father and ends up at Cambridge University. Unschooled in childhood, she and her siblings are repeatedly imperilled by their parents’ blistering paranoia about civilization and modern medicine. After she leaves home, revelations include stumbling upon John Stuart Mill’s opinion that, of women’s natures, “nothing final can be known”: “Never had I found such comfort in a void,” she writes. “It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman.” Westover is a keen and honest guide to the difficulties of filial love, and to the enchantment of embracing a life of the mind. The Wife’s Tale, by Aida Edemariam (Harper). Ethiopia during the reign of Haile…