Innholdsfortegnelse for April 30, 2018 i The New Yorker

Elif Batuman (“A Theory of Relativity,” p. 50) is the author of, most recently, the novel “The Idiot.” Alex Dimitrov (Poem, p. 64) has published the poetry collections “Together and By Ourselves” and “Begging for It.” He lives in New York City. Ashley Powers (“Lone Stars,” p. 30), a contributing writer for The California Sunday Magazine, lives in Brooklyn. Reporting for this piece was supported by a grant from the Reporting Award at N.Y.U.’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Robert Coover (Fiction, p. 62) most recently published the story collection “Going for a Beer.” Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 17), a staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment. She also writes a column for newyorker.com. Julie Belcove (The Talk of the Town, p. 20) has contributed art and…

You may not be familiar with the Nahuatl language, a lingua franca of Mesoamerica, but you already know a few words. “Ocelot,” “chili,” and “avocado” all made their way into English courtesy of the Nahua people, via sixteenth-century Spanish invaders. More than a million and a half people still speak it today. One of them is Fernando Palma Rodríguez, a sixty-year-old indigenous Mexican artist, engineer, and activist, making his impressive museum début in the United States, at MOMA PS1, with a compact two-decade survey of robotic sculptures, titled “In Ixtli in Yollotl, We the People.” (The show also marks the auspicious début of the museum’s incisive new curator, Ruba Katrib.) Another word from Nahuatl is “coyote,” the wily trickster that crops up across American culture, from native lore to Looney…

Dick Leitsch, an early gay-rights activist, who is now in his eighties, arranged to donate his old working files to the archives of the New York Public Library. The decision was prompted by a diagnosis of terminal cancer. “Because I’m dying, everybody thinks I’m interesting,” he said the other day, in his Upper West Side apartment. “Had I known how much fun this would be, I’d have done it a lot sooner.” In 1959, when Leitsch was twenty-four, he left his family home, in Kentucky, for New York City, where he found work as a painter, a bartender, a decorator, a journalist, and as the unpaid president of the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay-rights organizations. He led campaigns to end police entrapment and discrimination by local bars, culminating…

On a recent damp evening in San Francisco, on one of the few remaining blocks of blight between the headquarters of Twitter and Salesforce, two hundred and eighty people gathered in a former printing warehouse. A paper sign on a table inside read “Welcome to Drunk User Testing! We’re so glad you’re here!” The sold-out crowd comprised mostly male tech workers in their twenties who had paid about six dollars a head to drink unlimited beer and wine and to try out apps. At a registration table, guests were asked to fill out nametags with their first name and their reason for attending. Three suggested reasons were helpfully posted: “Looking!”; “I’m hiring!”; and “Just drinking” (with a smiley emoticon). Haley Richards, a Dartmouth student from Berkeley, wore a tag that…

DARK SPIRIT They are on a film lot, walking through a pre-shoot reading of a script that calls for a brave traveller—“That’s you, kid,” the director says, leading her forward with an arm around her shoulders—to be lured to the edge of a deep, mysterious forest, known portentously as the Forest of Time. The forest is fake, deep as a painted scrim, but the director has told them that a real forest from Transylvania will be pasted in later, and they have all been asked to bat at the air around their faces, as if to brush away foliage, bugs, bats, clinging cobwebs. “Out, out, damned spot, I say!” an actor screams in falsetto, batting wildly, and everyone laughs. The actor, who has a bit part in the film, as…

The Epic City, by Kushanava Choudhury (Bloomsbury). This searching memoir charts the American-born author’s relationship with Calcutta, the city from which his parents emigrated and to which he periodically returns—including a stint as a journalist—eventually choosing to settle there. Choudhury sees the city, once known as the cultural center of India, as “an impossible place” characterized by political conflict, artistic achievement, and the “unmistakable bouquet” of urine. Flitting between history and travelogue, the book is most memorable for its portraits of people: family elders in New Jersey who “derailed each other’s sentences in locomotive Bengali”; American students for whom “Calcutta would only be the city of poverty and Teresa, suffering and its redeemer.” Renaissance Woman, by Ramie Targoff (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this richly realized biography, Targoff explores…

SOCIAL ANIMALS It was a pleasure to read Larissa Mac-Farquhar’s article on Andy Clark’s theories about embodied intelligence and its relationship with A.I. and neuroscience (“Mind Expander,” April 2nd). Clark’s theories underemphasize the importance of other people as the primary embodiment of external representation, rather than our own bodies, machines, or objects in the world. The story of Clark’s collaborations—with his wife, Chalmers, Friston, and others—is a perfect example of the fact that humans are fundamentally social animals. This insures our survival: organisms working together can do so much more than organisms working apart or in parallel. The greatest challenge for A.I. is not the slow progress in top-down intelligence but the lack of attention to teaming intelligence that would allow the pairing of humans’ remarkable predictive powers with…

Behind the blond-wood bar at Anyway Café, the bartender is whittling a horseradish root, slicing off long pale strips with a little knife. They are bound for one of the large jars of vodka behind her, which are infusing, slowly, with ingredients including black currants, beets, honey, and ginger. These fierce spirits are mixed into the bar’s signature Martinis: Katherine the Great (pomegranate vodka, black-pepper vodka, rosewater), Madam Padam (blueberry vodka, champagne). Best and strangest of all is the borscht Martini—beet vodka and dill vodka, sprinkled with Himalayan pink salt and crushed herbs, a pungent, tangy punch in a frosty glass. It’s easy to down one after another, licking the salt from the rim. In this cavernous subterranean space, the chairs are filled with East Village denizens out for an…

Two dozen gleaners—not to be confused with foragers or dumpster divers—showed up for the second annual International Gleaners Symposium, held recently at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta. They were there to discuss the finer points of gathering neglected foodstuffs from roadsides, back yards, and other nonpublic places, and then donating them to the hungry. The gleaners sat in a classroom, drinking coffee and eating store-bought grapes. They were awaiting remarks from Ashley Pruitt, a local lawyer specializing in civil litigation, who had volunteered to explain the surprising number of ways that one can run afoul of the law while picking unharvested fruits and nuts for homeless shelters and food banks, as more than four hundred volunteer groups in the United States now do. “A few weeks ago, I…

Several years ago, the novelist Rachel Kushner followed an inmate at New Folsom Prison, in Sacramento, into his cell. A former Los Angeles police officer, he was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for working as a contract killer. Kushner, seeking to learn about the prison system, had come with a criminology professor and his students, but, as the group continued down the hall, she stayed behind, and the prisoner told her about his crimes—the ones he was in for and those which had never been found out. His complexion was ghoulishly youthful, undamaged by the sun: dirty cops don’t dare go on the yard. On the cell walls Kushner glimpsed pictures of Harley-Davidsons, relics of a former life. In the five minutes she was alone with…

When Donald Trump had a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin on the morning of March 20th, the two were at an excruciatingly delicate juncture. American intelligence officials had concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 Presidential election, with the goal of helping Trump win, and Trump had become the subject of an investigation, by the special counsel Robert Mueller, into allegations of collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. On March 4th, a former Russian spy and his daughter had been poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in the English city of Salisbury. Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, announced that the Russian state appeared to be responsible and expelled twenty-three Russian diplomats from the U.K. Before a phone call to a foreign leader, American Presidents are normally…

There will never be more of summerthan there is now. Walking alonethrough Union Square I am carrying flowersand the first rosé to a party where I’m expected.It’s Sunday and the trains run on timebut today death feels so far, it’s impossibleto go underground. I would like to saysomething to everyone I see (an entirecity) but I’m unsure what it is yet.Each time I leave my apartmentthere’s at least one person crying,reading, or shouting after a strangeranywhere along my commute.It’s possible to be happy alone,I say out loud and to no oneso it’s obvious, and now herein the middle of this poem.Rarely have I felt more charmedthan on Ninth Street, watching a womanstop in the middle of the sidewalkto pull up her hair like it’san emergency—and it is.People do know they’re…

A decade ago, in the spring of 2008, Coldplay released an album with a grand title and a grander purpose. The title was “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends.” The purpose was to transform Coldplay, which was just about the most popular band in the world—and just about the most reviled, too. To facilitate this transformation, the members had recruited Brian Eno, the legendary producer and electronic composer. Chris Martin, the singer, told MTV that he was intent on “breaking down” the band’s musical identity and “trying to build something different, and hopefully better.” But if the album was a revolution it was a mild one. “Viva la Vida” began with a collection of chiming, flickering sounds, unobtrusive at first but slowly growing louder, as a hummable…

At thirty-one, the actress Condola Rashad has become a force on Broadway. In roles like Juliet (opposite Orlando Bloom’s Romeo) and the smiling yet iron-willed daughter in “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” she’s shown a mixture of poise and fortitude echoing that of her mother, Phylicia Rashad. This combination will surely come in handy for her latest character: the warrior, martyr, saint, and troublemaker Joan of Arc, in George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan,” opening this week at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. MOVIES NOW PLAYING Borg vs. McEnroe The icy Swedish tennis champion Björn Borg (played convincingly by Sverrir Gudnason) is the focus of the Danish director Janus Metz’s entertaining sports film, a sharply edited drama centered on Borg’s historic 1980 Wimbledon match against the American bad boy John…

Brisket King Beef brisket is known among barbecue enthusiasts as one of the most difficult cuts of meat to prepare; it can demand as many as eighteen hours of attention, and there is a narrow window between undercooking and overcooking. More than twenty chefs put their methods to the test at this annual competition, now in its seventh year, where celebrity judges—including Dana Cowin, the former editor of Food and Wine, the cookbook author Peter Kaminsky, and the onetime “Top Chef” contestant Grayson Schmitz—will crown the city’s best brisket. Attendees can purchase tickets that are good for unlimited tastings and drinks, and can cast a vote for the People’s Choice Award. (110 Kent Ave., Williamsburg. brisketkingnyc.com. April 25 at 6.) Street Games Since 2007, neighbors of Thomas Jefferson Park…

The mother-and-son artists Deborah Willis and Hank Willis Thomas stopped by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, the other day. Thomas carried his mother’s tote bag for her as they walked through an exhibit titled “Black Power!” An F.B.I. most-wanted poster caught Thomas’s eye. The hunted man, identified as Hubert Gerold Brown, had a prominent Afro and wore dark glasses. Thomas, who makes politically charged conceptual art, said, “Strange to see sunglasses in a mug shot.” Then he noticed the same figure wearing the same shades in a photo of civil-rights leaders. “I’ve never heard of him before,” Thomas said. Willis, who is seventy and first visited the Schomburg Center as a photography student, before returning as a curator, peered at the image. “That’s H. Rap…

Two years ago, Kazushige Nishida, a Tokyo salaryman in his sixties, started renting a part-time wife and daughter. His real wife had recently died. Six months before that, their daughter, who was twenty-two, had left home after an argument and never returned. “I thought I was a strong person,” Nishida told me, when we met one night in February, at a restaurant near a train station in the suburbs. “But when you end up alone you feel very lonely.” Tall and slightly stooped, Nishida was wearing a suit and a gray tie. He had a deep voice and a gentle, self-deprecating demeanor. Of course, he said, he still went to work every day, in the sales division of a manufacturing company, and he had friends with whom he could go…

“History teaches, but has no pupils,” the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. That line comes to mind when I browse in the history section of a bookstore. An adage in publishing is that you can never go wrong with books about Lincoln, Hitler, and dogs; an alternative version names golfing, Nazis, and cats. In Germany, it’s said that the only surefire magazine covers are ones that feature Hitler or sex. Whatever the formula, Hitler and Nazism prop up the publishing business: hundreds of titles appear each year, and the total number runs well into the tens of thousands. On store shelves, they stare out at you by the dozens, their spines steeped in the black-white-and-red of the Nazi flag, their titles barking in Gothic type, their covers studded with swastikas.…

“The Street Where I Live,” the playwright and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner’s amusing 1978 memoir, is full of anecdotes about the process by which Lerner and his professional partner, the composer Frederick Loewe, created eight blockbuster musicals together, including the 1956 hit “My Fair Lady” (in revival at Lincoln Center Theatre’s Vivian Beaumont, directed by Bartlett Sher). The year was 1952, and Lerner, then thirty-three, was in Hollywood, working on a screen adaptation of “Brigadoon,” his and Loewe’s very successful 1947 musical. One day, he received a call from a producer named Gabriel Pascal, who had acquired the rights to George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play “Pygmalion” and thought that Lerner and Loewe could turn the comedy about class and sexism into a musical. He wasn’t wrong. In their collaborations, Lerner…