Innholdsfortegnelse for May 7, 2018 i The New Yorker

Zadie Smith (“Through the Portal,” p. 50) most recently published the essay collection “Feel Free.” This piece is from “Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph,” which comes out in September. Nicholas Schmidle (“Digital Vigilantes,” p. 30), a staff writer, was a 2017 Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Elizabeth Metzger (Poem, p. 36) is the author of the poetry collection “The Spirit Papers” and the poetry editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal. She teaches at Columbia University. Nicholas Lemann (Comment, p. 17), a staff writer, is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. J. J. Sempé (Cover) is a longtime contributor of covers and art works to the magazine. “C’est la Vie” is one of his many books. Alexandra Schwartz (Books, p. 64)…

François Hollande climbed into a minivan, knocking newspapers and a box of tissues onto the floor. The van drove away from a tech incubator called Station F, where he had had a meeting. It was a sublime spring afternoon in Paris, even behind smoked glass. Hollande, the seventh President of the Fifth Republic, brought up Emmanuel Macron, his successor. He sort of had to. Macron had just landed in Washington, D.C., for a handsy, headline-dominating state visit. Hollande seemed less than impressed that Macron had given an interview to Fox News, in English, no less. “No chance,” Macron had said, when Chris Wallace asked if he would back down in the standoff with groups including les cheminots, France’s railway workers, thousands of whom have been striking since April. “What are…

One rainy afternoon, Philip Ashforth Coppola got on the No. 4 train heading toward Nevins Street, in Brooklyn. Taking a seat, he pulled a massive paperback labelled “Silver Connections: Volume III” from a tote bag, and began flipping through it. “Nevins Street is in here,” he said. “I mean, I really went to town on this station.” The train’s recorded announcement boomed: “This is…Wall Street.” Coppola started sketching the subway in 1978, when the stations were grungier and the cars were covered in graffiti. Passing through the Cortlandt Street station one day, he picked up a chunk of an old mosaic wall tile that had fallen onto the platform. “I realized, to my horror, that we’re losing part of our subway to renovations,” he recalled. “I thought, I’d better get…

One day in the summer of 2003, Shawn Carpenter, a security analyst in New Mexico, went to Florida on a secret mission. Carpenter, then thirty-five, worked at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, on a cybersecurity team. At the time, Sandia was managed by the defense contractor Lockheed Martin. When hundreds of computers at Lockheed Martin’s office in Orlando suddenly started crashing, Carpenter and his team got on the next flight. The team discovered that Lockheed Martin had been hacked, most likely by actors affiliated with the Chinese government. For several years, operatives tied to China’s military and intelligence agencies had been conducting aggressive cyberespionage against American companies. The problem hasn’t gone away: in 2014, the Justice Department indicted five hackers from the People’s Liberation Army for stealing blueprints from electrical,…

In the old dayshair was magical.If hair was cutyou had to make sure it didn’t end upin the wrong hands. Bad people could mix itwith, say, the spit of a frog.Or with the urine of a rat!And certain wordsmight be spoken.Then horrible thingsmight happen to you. A woman with a husbandin the Navycould not comb her hair after dark.His ship might go down. But good thingscould happen, too.My grandmotherthrew a lock of her hairinto the fireplace.It burned brightly.That is why she livedto be a hundred and one. My uncle had red hair.One day it started falling out.A few days laterhis infant son died. Some women let their hair grow long.If it fell below the kneesthat meantthey would never find a husband. Braiding hair into cornrowswas a safety measure.It would keep…

If I were asked to describe the stage of life that I occupy now, at the age of thirty, it would not occur to me to say that I am a thus far childless woman of childbearing age. Yet that’s doubtless how I will think of this time if I become a mother: as a finite, departed “before” that gave way to an ever after, just as childhood molted into adolescence, and adolescence ceded to adulthood. Each of those new phases yielded more degrees of autonomy, but motherhood works the opposite way. In “A Life’s Work,” a 2001 memoir of becoming a mother, Rachel Cusk writes that after her daughter’s birth her “appetite for the world was insatiable, omnivorous, an expression of longing for some lost, pre-maternal self, and for…

The title of Jenny Xie’s début poetry collection, “Eye Level” (Gray-wolf), is a pair of palindromes. You realize this only after you’ve gone a little nuts staring at the book’s cover, and of course the effect cannot be reproduced in speech. Two common words in a familiar English idiom wouldn’t normally attract this sort of pattern analysis: it’s not how we tend to read. But the phrase “eye level,” encountered at eye level, detains you in pleasant consideration of its intriguing, perhaps meaningless, symmetries. This is a book about the necessity of toggling between the enchantments of the page and the allure of the horizon: Xie’s “appetite for elsewhere” competes with a longing for the “infinite places within language to hide.” The poems dazzle in their local details, even as…

LOST IN SPACE Dan Chiasson, in his article on “2001: A Space Odyssey,” seems to doubt that young people will be interested in carrying on the decades-long debate about the film’s meanings after watching it “on a palm-size device” (“Anybody There?,” April 23rd). A few years ago, I went with a group of my fellow-millennials to a screening of “2001” at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where the film was projected onto the side of a massive mausoleum. The crowd was young, and the mood was festive: people had dressed up, and had space-themed picnics and generally nerded out. We discussed the film long after the Uber trip home. Our generation may be known for our memes, as Chiasson suggests, but we’re also thirsty for analysis and criticism. After an…

The d.j. set that Robert Hood performed as Floorplan in June, 2015, at the Weather Festival, a three-day event in Paris, seemed to sum up his trajectory from angry young techno renegade to gospel-powered global club-land paterfamilias. A Detroit native living in Alabama and an ordained minister since 2009, Hood opened with the stately piano-and-vocal introduction to a remix of the R. & B.-gospel choir Sounds of Blackness’s “The Pressure, Pt. 1,” but his selections soon plunged into a series of dark, heavy techno grooves—many of them his own recordings—with unabashed praise to the Lord surfacing in sampled vocals with increasing regularity; some of those transitions hit like a tidal wave. The set has received more than three hundred and seventy-five thousand views on YouTube. In a witty bit of…

The pamphleteer Thomas Paine, chief propagandist of both the American and the French revolutions, found himself maligned, in his later years, as an infidel. An unrepentant Deist, he spent his final days penniless, in a ramshackle house in Greenwich Village, shouting away the clergymen who stopped by to save his soul. The building was destroyed in 1839, and the new one that arose in its place now holds, in its basement, a divey piano bar, where N.Y.U. musical-theatre students, heavy-lidded office workers, and Jimmy Fallon go to warble out show tunes. Steps from the piano is a three-panelled mirror lined with dusty liquor bottles and etched with the words “Rights of Man,” Paine’s defense of popular revolt. In 1801, Paine opined that merchant ships crossing the embattled Atlantic should fly…

President Trump seems awfully worried about the financial state of the United States Postal Service. He thinks the culprit is Amazon. “This Post Office scam must stop,” he tweeted. “I am right about Amazon costing the United States Post Office massive amounts of money for being their Delivery Boy!” Maybe no one has told Trump about what is arguably the Postal Service’s most pressing crisis. “It’s called mailbox fishing,” Phil Bartlett, the inspector in charge at the New York division of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, said recently at the agency’s headquarters, on West Thirtieth Street. On a table in front of him was a small bottle of Tropicana cranberry juice. It was coated in a viscous white goo, and a black shoelace had been knotted around its neck. “This…

Natasha was the first of our daughters to get bitten by a rodent. It probably happened while she was sleeping, but she was too small to communicate anything. As with Ariel, her identical-twin sister, Natasha’s early vocabulary was mostly English, but the girls used Egyptian Arabic for certain things—colors, animals, basic sustenance. Aish for bread, maya for water. If I twirled one of them around, she would laugh and shriek, “Tani!”: “Again!” And then her sister would pick up the refrain, because anything that was done to one twin had to be repeated with the other. Tani, tani, tani. They weren’t yet two years old. I noticed the mark while changing Natasha. To the right of her navel, there were two pairs of ugly red puncture holes: incisors. Perhaps the…

There was a boat on the pondbut no water. The water had sacrificed itself for your brutal thirst. Goodbye,cowboys. Goodbye, not knowing to speak. The boat is ready for me, baby.Enough with the reeds and the motherless. One singular hornwill turn your face purple. A leaf blower may take your breath away. But the boat here is alwaysand human. It floats on nothing. All the surfaces for floatingand reflecting are gone. What good is what passes through us but clouds? There is a branch overheadas if there were birds. And I would rather show you than go.…

We speak of great athletes in mythic terms, as heroes or even gods, but the truly Olympian figures in modern professional sports are probably the team owners. They move in realms we can’t understand and to which we have no access. They cause mortals to enact arbitrary contests (the Patriots versus the Dolphins—what does that even mean?) for their own glory and diversion, offering, in return for those mortals’ health and safety, sometimes handsome rewards and sometimes nothing. They watch from skyboxes. Their powers breed in them more impulsiveness than sagacity; they can be hotheaded, lusty, intemperate, and rivalrous, qualities for which their subjects usually pay the price. Worthington Gill is the name of the elderly owner of the Dallas Cowboys in the alternate universe of Sergio de la Pava’s…

In Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” a heroic woman risks all to save her husband from wrongful incarceration. Heartbeat Opera’s new production, which opens at Baruch Performing Arts Center on May 3, updates the story: Florestan, the captive, is now a Black Lives Matter activist named Stan; the indomitable Leonora becomes a prison guard, Lee; and the famous “Prisoners’ Chorus” has been recorded by six Midwestern prison choirs. The American soprano Kelly Griffin and the Angolan tenor Nelson Ebo play the faithful couple. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera Opera audiences and directors can be jaded when it comes to embellished plots. Often, Puccini’s “Tosca”—a psychosexual thriller that ends with the grisly deaths of a famous opera singer, her paramour, and the police chief who tries to blackmail her—barely raises an…

“A Prelude to the Shed” The city is a year away from the opening of the Shed, a multipurpose arts-and-entertainment space currently under construction where the High Line and Hudson Yards meet. As a preview of the wide-ranging types of programming being proposed for the new structure (the design is a collaboration between Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Rockwell Group), a pop-up venue in the shadow of the rising building will host a twelve-day, free event that features panel discussions, music, and dance performances. On May 2, Laurie Anderson and fellow-panelists will explore the challenges of connecting older modes of cultural production to the tech sphere (“Beyond the Body/Mind Division: Neuroscience, Technology, Spirituality”). On May 8, the cultural critics Barbara Browning and Nelson George and others will contemplate…

Ricky Williams, the Miami Dolphins running back, retired from the N.F.L. in 2012. “I wanted to go on a spiritual quest,” he said the other day, “to find out who I was and what I’m really here to do.” So far, he has become a certified yogi, learned how to perform craniosacral therapy, and studied evolutionary astrology. For three hundred dollars he will interpret the orientation of the stars at your birth. Last month, he launched Real Wellness by Ricky Williams, a cannabis-based line of tonics, salves, and vape cartridges—an offshoot of his long and sometimes complicated relationship with herbs. (Repeated violations of the N.F.L.’s drug policy had something to do with Williams’s early retirement, although he was also bored and battered by football.) A toothache recently led Williams to…

The Trump Administration has moved in recent months to promote abstinence-only sex education in the nation’s schools. Valerie Huber, the Department of Health and Human Services official who is overseeing this effort, explains, “As public health experts and policymakers, we must normalize sexual delay.” Surely the adult-film industry can do its part, too. SCENE 1: Alexis St. John, an attractive lady in a revealing outfit, is lounging on a white leather couch in her North Hollywood condo. The doorbell rings. Alexis gets up and opens the door. Jeff Ryder, a handsome delivery guy, is holding a pizza box. Jeff: You ordered a pizza? Alexis: I did. Come on in while I find my purse, so I can tip you. (Jeff closes the door behind him and puts the pizza on the…

Shortly after an evening nap, Patrick Skinner drove to the police station in the Third Precinct in Savannah, Georgia, wearing ill-fitting body armor. It was late December, and bitterly cold, and he figured that the weather would bring fewer shootings than usual but more cases of domestic abuse. “Summertime is the murder time,” he said. He had come to work early to tape together his body camera, because the clasp was broken. The shift supervisor—a tall corporal with a slight paunch—stood at a lectern. “Good mornin’, mornin’, mornin’,” he said. It was 10:31 P.M. Speaking through a wad of tobacco, he delivered a briefing on criminal activities from earlier in the day, then listed vehicles that had been reported stolen. “Look out for a cooter-colored truck,” he said. The walls…

Outside, there was the rumbling of a truck that wouldn’t start. It rattled and gasped as if its metal soul were about to expire. Children were playing baseball and screaming wildly. The air coming through the open window smelled of gasoline, scallions, and the beginning of summer. Around the ceiling light, a swarm of flies eddied, droning monotonously. Through the window, hung with Dutch curtains, a butterfly flew in and landed on the table. It stood motionless, its wings together, waiting with the fatalistic calm of a creature that lives for only a short time. Reb Berish Zhichliner, in prayer shawl and phylacteries, had already finished his proper prayers, but he kept on reciting additional supplications, which are repeated only by the very pious and by those who have a…

Neapolitan Chronicles, by Anna Maria Ortese, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee (New Vessel). Elena Ferrante has cited Ortese (1914-98) as one of her greatest influences, and the connections are obvious in this collection of short stories and essays, which infuse a grimy, chaotic Naples with unsentimental menace rather than romantic mystique. Ortese gathers concrete details about the realities of poverty, and, like Ferrante, delineates moments of status tension with blunt accuracy. The narrator of “The Silence of Reason” encounters an old literary friend and describes his presence in the room as “an abyss, a chasm full of hands clapping, which created a desolate sound, an endless sigh.” The story’s skewering of Neapolitan intellectuals caused such an outrage that Ortese had to leave the city.…