Innholdsfortegnelse for May 14, 2018 i The New Yorker

Emily Nussbaum (“Mr. Big,” p. 52) is the magazine’s television critic and the recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Hua Hsu (Pop Music, p. 98), a staff writer, is the author of “A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific.” Casey N. Cep (Books, p. 84) is the author of the forthcoming book “Furious Hours: Harper Lee and an Unfinished Story of Race, Religion, and Murder in the Deep South.” Joost Swarte (Cover) recently published “New York Book,” a collection of more than four hundred and fifty documents, illustrations, and sketches he has contributed to the magazine since 1995. Lauren Collins (The Talk of the Town, p. 34), a staff writer, is the author of “When in French: Love in a Second Language.” Caleb Crain (Books,…

International Migratory Bird Day This spring highlight for bird-lovers includes festivities on Rockaway Beach and at the Audubon Center in Prospect Park. This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, but it also happens to be a moment when some of the statute’s protections are under attack. Last November, Representative Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, proposed legislation—H.R. 4239, an amendment to the American Energy Act—that could make avian stopovers throughout the U.S. more dangerous by reducing the accountability of corporations if wildlife is killed as a result of hazards like transmission lines, oil-waste pits, or gas flares. On a day set aside to contemplate the vast array of winged species that pass through the city, it’s also worth remembering that, in the current political…

On a recent afternoon, Beatrice Fihn, the Swedish antinuclear activist, walked into a Tribeca café to address her next audience: sixty new mothers and about forty of their children, most under three years old. “It’s not so different than the U.N., you know,” she told the group. “Lots of crybabies.” The thirty-five-year-old Fihn is the executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Owing to its efforts, last July the United Nations adopted a treaty to ban nuclear weapons, by a vote of a hundred and twenty-two to one. (Sixty-nine nations did not vote.) In order for the treaty to take effect, fifty countries must ratify it. So far, seven have. The day before the Tribeca talk, the French President, Emmanuel…

In the morning, when I’m pouring the hot milkinto the coffee, I put the side of myface near the convex pitcher to watchthe last, round drop from the spout,and it feels like being cheek to cheekwith a baby. Sometimes the orb pops back up,a ball of cream balanced on a whale’swatery exhale. Then I gather my tools,the cherry sounding-board tray that will rest on mylap, the phone, the bird book to look upthe purple martin. I repeat them as I seek them,so as not to forget—tray, cell phone,purple martin; tray, phone,martin, Trayvon Martin, song wasinvented for you, art was madefor you, painting, writing, was yours,our youngest, our most precious, to remind usto shield you—all was yours, all that isleft on earth, with your body, was for you.…

Every morning without thinking I openmy notebook and see if somethingmight have grown in me during the night.Usually, no. But sometimes a tendriltries a crack in my consciousnessand if I remain only indirectly aware of itand tether my attention to the imminentand perhaps ultimately unseeablesun, sometimes it will grow. Inevitablya sense of insignificance intrudes: I thinkof all the lives in all the placeswaiting in their waysfor something to grow out of them,into them. Is it the same God? I have a cousin whose political opinionsvile up out of him on the Internetin the most imaginative ways.He sports a cartoon mustache like Rollie Fingersthat was a lodestone of enduring awein my childhood, along with his giftfor scissoring bricks with one blow.With his spanking karategi and cowboy kiai,his weasel-sleek of hair and…

In London, in the nineteen-thirties, the émigré Hungarian intellectual Karl Polanyi was known among his friends as “the apocalyptic chap.” His gloom was understandable. Nearly fifty, he’d had to leave his wife, daughter, and mother behind in Vienna shortly after Austria lurched toward fascism, in 1933. Although he had long edited and contributed to the prestigious Viennese weekly The Austrian Economist, which published such celebrated figures as Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter, he had come to discount his career as a thing of “theoretical and practical barrenness,” and blamed himself for failing to diagnose his era’s crucial political conflict. As so often for refugees, money was tight. Despite letters of reference from eminent historians, Polanyi failed to land a professorship or a fellowship, though he did manage to earn thirty-seven…

WHEN YOU CAN BUY LOVE Elif Batuman wrote a fascinating article on the Japanese industry of rental relatives and family members (“A Theory of Relativity,” April 30th). It would be easy to find this concept amusing or sad, but we in the West should be asking how we can build on it. For example, an innovative program for seniors in Florida, called Papa, offers “grandkids on demand.” It recognizes that good paid caregivers often act as surrogate grandchildren when no one else can or will. Michael Zablocki Torrance, Calif. Batuman’s piece left me deeply unsettled. She suggests that transactional relationships can represent unconditional love because of their unambiguous nature—but all rent-a-person experiences are predicated on one person having the financial resources to hire another. Further, the phenomenon of transference…

For reasons of professional decorum, the Times does not attend the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association. So, two Saturdays ago, on the day of the dinner, editors and reporters from the paper’s Washington bureau were available to travel to New York for a gala screening of “The Fourth Estate,” a Showtime documentary series about themselves. The event involved a red carpet, praise from Robert De Niro, and strawberries dipped in chocolate at an open-bar after-party. Before the screening, Dean Baquet, the paper’s executive editor, met a few colleagues and their partners for supper at Locanda Verde, in Tribeca. They were joined by Liz Garbus, who, for the first year of the Trump Presidency, shot “The Fourth Estate” in the Times’ New York and D.C. offices. The first…

Diana Henry estimates that she’s hosted two hundred meals in the nine years she’s lived in her house, in North London. Experience hasn’t dispelled the romance, or the anxiety, that comes along with the desire to make every occasion special. Once, Henry was roasting a sea bass when a guest came into the kitchen and confided that her husband was having an affair. “I did want to sympathize but, really, I was more worried about overcooking the fish,” Henry writes, in “How to Eat a Peach,” her eleventh and most recent cookbook. Henry will get out a trestle table for a crab feast. She will start infusing prunes with Monbazillac wine a month early in order to serve, at a supper inspired by her memories of travelling in southwestern France,…

Precisely how and when will our curiosity kill us? I bet you’re curious. A number of scientists and engineers fear that, once we build an artificial intelligence smarter than we are, a form of A.I. known as artificial general intelligence, doomsday may follow. Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, recognize the promise of an A.G.I., a wish-granting genie rubbed up from our dreams, yet each has voiced grave concerns. Elon Musk warns against “summoning the demon,” envisaging “an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.” Stephen Hawking declared that an A.G.I. “could spell the end of the human race.” Such advisories aren’t new. In 1951, the year of the first rudimentary chess program and neural network, the A.I. pioneer Alan Turing predicted that…

At first glance, the crowds of people congregating on a block of Mulberry Street, a stretch of squat brick buildings near downtown Memphis, on the morning of April 4th, might have been there for a variety of reasons. The street venders selling T-shirts and posters and the jumbotron set up near a parking lot suggested the start of a music festival; delegations of men and women dressed in their union best pointed to a labor rally. But the plaintive notes of gospel music drifting from speakers and the black bunting draped over a balcony of the building at the center of the activities indicated a more sombre occasion. The space behind the bunting had begun as an overlook, became a crime scene, and is now a historic site. The hundreds…

Captain William Foster left Mobile in secret and returned the same way. On July 8, 1860, he dropped anchor in the waters off the coast of Mississippi, hid his cargo below deck, slipped ashore, and travelled overland to fetch a tugboat from Alabama. By then, Foster and his ship had survived a hurricane, a mutiny, an ambush, and a transatlantic journey, but late that Sunday night, after the tug carried him up the Mobile River to Twelve Mile Island, the Captain emptied his hold, dismissed his crew, and set fire to his ship. The Clotilda, Foster would forever after complain, was worth more than his share of what it had smuggled. Although the international slave trade had been outlawed in America more than half a century earlier, Foster and three…

“Flesh,” the title of a small, potent, and timely Chaim Soutine retrospective, elegantly curated by Stephen Brown, at the Jewish Museum, is genteel. “Meat” would better fit the show’s focus on the ferocious paintings of plucked fowl and bloody animal carcasses that the great and, I believe, underrated Russian-French artist made in the mid-nineteen-twenties, in Paris. Other uses of “meat,” for an argument’s main point or for any solid content, apply as well. The center-piece of the show, “Carcass of Beef” (circa 1925), on loan from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in Buffalo, activates all those meanings. Painted in reds and blues as luminous as those of Gothic stained glass, it communes with Rembrandt’s seventeenth-century masterpiece “The Slaughtered Ox,” which Soutine contemplated often and intensely in the Louvre, and it crackles…

Pope Francis may favor basic black footwear and plain white cotton garb, but for centuries the Vatican has been synonymous with jewel-encrusted, ermine-trimmed opulence. On May 10, the Met’s Costume Institute opens the exhibition “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” in which modern designs share top billing with papal robes and accessories on loan from the Sistine Chapel sacristy, including an embroidered chasuble (above) made for Pius IX in the mid-nineteenth century. NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Bombino Omara Moctar acquired his Italianate stage name when he was a precocious student of the guitar in Agadez, the largest city in central Niger and the home of just over a hundred thousand of…

Eight Brooklynites, assembled at a bar counter, had a choice: succumb to what seemed to be the truth of a cold Tuesday in the city, or, dreamily, agree that the venue, as its name suggests, was a log cabin. Kindly, none of them touched the skis or the kayak propped against the walls, lest they test, and ruin, the ruse that an outdoor sporting adventure was possible. Instead, in a dirge of a campfire song, the aspirant vacationers tapped smartphones and, occasionally, spoke. “What kind of camp is this?” a woman asked the bartender. The wallpaper, a spectral forest, gleamed under green spotlights. “Nowhere specifically,” he told her. Ministering to the sudden ontological crisis he had inspired, the bartender prepared a tray of s’mores fixings for her and her friend,…

Seth Rogen was in town from L.A. recently, and dropped in on the airy studio of the furniture-design firm Bower, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Rogen, who is best known for playing lovably goofy stoners, is also a director, screenwriter, and producer. But his meeting at Bower was dedicated to another type of business. The organizers of Sight Unseen Offsite, an annual design fair, had invited professional designers to pair up with well-known amateurs to create one-ofa-kind objects that would be displayed and then sold to benefit a charity of the collaborators’ choice. Rogen joined the Bower partners, who, with his help, dreamed up a large round mirror made of curved segments, to resemble a flattened reflective beach ball. The proceeds will go to Hilarity for Charity, a foundation created by…

If I get addicted to vaping, I thought, in March, I will always remember this Texas strip mall. I was walking out of a store called Smoke-N-Chill Novelties, in Southwest Austin, holding a receipt for $62.95 and two crisp, white shrink-wrapped boxes. I got into the driver’s seat of a rental car and began to open them. From one I extracted a Juul: a slim black vaporizer about half the width and weight of a Bic lighter, with rounded edges and a gently burnished finish. (It looks like a flash drive, everyone always points out. You can recharge it by plugging it into your computer.) From the other I extracted a thumbnail-size cartridge called a pod, filled with juice containing a cigarette pack’s worth of nicotine. The juice in my…

It took Arnold six and a half seconds to fall five hundred feet. During that time, an image of his son, Paris, flashed before his eyes: Paris, dressed in his red school-uniform shirt and khakis the day of his kindergarten graduation. That morning, Paris’s mother, Darline, had skipped around the apartment changing dresses, as if she were the one graduating. Closing his eyes tightly as the hot wind he was plunging through battered his face, Arnold saw Paris at the classroom ceremony. He saw himself, too, standing next to Darline, who had finally chosen a billowing sapphire-colored satin dress. He was in the one black suit he wore to everything, to weddings and to funerals. One reason not to own too many things was their crammed two-bedroom apartment, but the…

African Dominion, by Michael A. Gomez (Princeton). This ground-breaking study of early and medieval West Africa focusses on the rise and fall of the Kingdom of Ghana and the empires of Mali and Songhay. Reports by Arab and European travellers often contradict one another, so Gomez ingeniously synthesizes them with archeological evidence, manuscripts in Timbuktu libraries, and local tradition, to give a granular view of life in the region. The most fascinating figure is Mali’s fourteenth-century ruler Mansā Mūsā, whose fame reached Europe; a Catalan illuminated map depicts him holding a massive gold nugget. Making the hajj to Mecca, he gave away such huge quantities of gold along the way that he inadvertently depressed its value for a considerable time. Operation Chaos, by Matthew Sweet (Holt). A little-known chapter…

As the story goes, Post Malone uploaded the song “White Iverson” to his SoundCloud page on the night of February 4, 2015. When he went to sleep, he was anonymous and broke. Within a day, the song had changed his life. Like many viral hits, “White Iverson” succeeded in part because it was divisive, inspiring awe and annoyance, bewilderment and mild scorn. The cavernous, slightly melancholy beat conjured both R. & B. and New Age meditation music. Post, who was born Austin Post, sang with a conviction that seemed strange and unearned, even a bit ridiculous: he was a white teen-ager invoking the legendarily tough basketball player Allen Iverson to describe his own triumphs over adversity. It was the sound of a profoundly unlikely victory lap, “swaggin’” and “ballin’” against…