Innholdsfortegnelse for May 21, 2018 i The New Yorker

Pop-Up Magazine Spring Issue Tour The stories in “Pop-Up Magazine” are far from ephemeral, but there’s an element of the hit-and-run in their presentation. Each issue is staged live before an audience, the tales performed aloud and fleshed out with photographs, illustrations, films, or animations. They’re even scored with live original music by the Magik*Magik Orchestra. The storytellers have consisted of Oscar winners, bestselling authors, radio personalities, and journalists; the producers reveal the participants in advance, though an air of secrecy surrounds the exact scope of the pieces until they’re performed. Among the contributors to the Spring 2018 installment are the filmmakers Lauren Greenfield and Veena Rao, the photographer Andres Gonzalez, the actors Joy Bryant and Franchesca Ramsey, and the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan. Helen Rosner, a contributor to…

The Germans had meetings in Manhattan. The last one was at the Hofbräu Bierhaus, a very intentional beer hall in midtown. It hadn’t been their idea, but there they were, sitting at a picnic table in the middle of the afternoon facing down meaty steins of lager, talking about techno with Austin Kramer, Spotify’s global head of dance­ music curation. “He’s doing all the large playlists,” one of them said. “He’s the kingmaker.” The principal German was Paul Kalkbrenner, the techno artist from Berlin, who was in town to perform for two nights in Brooklyn. The others were his manager, Marcus Ruschmeyer, and his friend Olaf Heine, a photographer. Kalkbrenner, his head shaved but stubbled, had on black drop­crotch sweatpants, flower­patterned hightops, a black hoodie, and an olive­green bomber jacket.…

Many students have been driven to drink by the effort of understanding Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time.” Only one, perhaps, has been driven to wine, exclusively and for life, and that is the inimitable California vintner, punster, screw-top evangelist, and all-around Don Quixote of the vineyards, Randall Grahm. In the nineteen-seventies, when he was a philosophy major at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and struggling with an honors thesis on the concept of Dasein, the most obscure idea in Heidegger’s obscure classic, he happened to wander into a wine store in Beverly Hills called the Wine Merchant. It was a time when the great crus of France were relatively cheap, and the owner, Dennis Overstreet, soon to be his employer, was generous. “There was a kind of Bordeaux…

THE HISTORY OF HITLER Alex Ross, in his survey of recent literature on Adolf Hitler, conducts a detailed examination of American influences on Nazi ideology (A Critic at Large, April 30th). My only note is that he might have placed greater emphasis on the American eugenics movement, and specifically on Granville Stanley Hall, the first president of the American Psychological Association and the founding editor of the journal Eugenics. In the early twentieth century, Hall wrote extensively about how a society might develop a healthy citizenry, and he vocally supported forced sterilization of the poor, the sick, and the developmentally disabled. His work arrived in Germany at the height of the völkisch movement, which romanticized German ethno-cultural heritage and hailed his writings as scientific rationales for racial cleansing. After…

In 1955, the Guggenheim held the first-ever museum exhibition of the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, installed in a temporary location while its Frank Lloyd Wright building was under construction. Nineteen years later, it mounted a posthumous, full-dress retrospective of the painter and sculptor, by then recognized as a titan of modernism, both for his early, brutal Surrealist works and, especially, for his later attenuated figures in plaster and bronze, works of such bare-bones intensity that his friend Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that “to sculpt, for him, is to take the fat off space.” This summer, a hundred and seventy-five sculptures, paintings, and drawings by Giacometti will once again grace the museum’s rotunda. (Opens June 8.) A smaller, but still vital, exhibition at MOMA spotlights the great Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi,…

The summer’s visionary speculations run the gamut from the fanciful to the bleak. The science-fiction romantic comedy “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” (May 25), about teen-age boys who find themselves flirting with aliens, is based on a short story by Neil Gaiman; it stars Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, and Matt Lucas, and is directed by John Cameron Mitchell. Tessa Thompson and Lakeith Stanfield star in “Sorry to Bother You” (July 6), a metaphysical comedy, directed by Boots Riley, about telemarketers endowed with supernatural powers; Armie Hammer, Terry Crews, and Danny Glover co-star. The director Peyton Reed, whose comedic touch enlivened “Ant-Man,” returns with (July 6), in which Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) team up to ward off evil. Amandla Stenberg (“The Hunger Games”)…

The National Rifle Association held its annual conference earlier this month, at a Dallas convention center. Thousands of people milled around hundreds of exhibitors, including Armageddon Gear (beer bivy sacks), WMD Guns (not nuclear weapons), and RCBS Precisioneered Reloading supplies (“leaving varmints mystified since 1943”). A long line snaked around the booth of a firearms company called Brownells. At about 9 A.M., a staffer looked at his watch. “He usually gets a pretty good line,” he said, referring to Lou Ferrigno, the former Mr. Universe and star of “The Incredible Hulk” TV series (which aired on CBS from 1978 to 1982), who would soon arrive to sign autographs. Nearby, at another table, attendees filled out paper slips for the “Gun-A-Day Giveaway.” James and Natalie Cannariato were waiting for Ferrigno. A…

A few years ago, Carol Burnett was doing a live Q. & A. in Texas, and a nine-year-old boy in the audience raised his hand. “You know who I am?” Burnett asked, incredulous. He answered, “Surprisingly, yes!” “The audience went crazy,” Burnett, who is eighty-five, said the other day. “I wanted to take him on the road. He didn’t censor himself.” Now that the kids who grew up on “The Carol Burnett Show” are well into middle age, Burnett has been courting a new generation of fans. Her new Netflix series, “A Little Help with Carol Burnett,” convenes a panel of brutally honest children, ages five to nine, to solve grown-up dilemmas for celebrity guests. (When Lisa Kudrow asks about double-booking friends for lunch, one boy advises, “Don’t have a…

“This is not theatre,” Judge Richard Matsch announced on the first day of the trial of twenty-nine-year-old Timothy McVeigh in the daffodil spring of 1997. “This is a trial.” McVeigh, charged with bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in Oklahoma City, two years earlier, stood accused of taking the lives of a hundred and sixty-eight people and injuring some seven hundred more in the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history. The blast demolished nearly half of the nine-story building, shattering its glass front and shearing off its north face. Rescue workers who raced to the scene could hear people moaning and crying, pinned beneath concrete slabs, impaled with steel girders, suffocating from dust. Jerry Flowers, an Oklahoma policeman, dug through rubble at what became known as the…

BROTHERS Finn said an awkward goodbye to his parents and watched them drive off in the new Buick they had bought in case he changed his mind. They were pleased, of course, at Finn’s decision to study for the priesthood, but they were wary, too. It was 1954, and priests were still thought to be holy, and Finn … well … Finn knew that he wasn’t holy, but during a retreat in college he had succumbed to a fit of piety and, dizzied by the idea of sacrifice, applied to join the Jesuits. They had put him through a series of interviews, and let him know that he seemed altogether too caught up in theatre, but in the end they had accepted him. So now here he was, almost a…

The thing about royal weddings is that there aren’t that many of them. Practically anyone who marries into the House of Windsor represents a first in one sense or another. Philip Mountbatten was the first Greek prince (and the bride’s third cousin). Diana Spencer was the first to drop the word “obey” from her vows. Sarah Ferguson was a redhead. Sophie Rhys-Jones was a commoner with a serious career. Kate Middleton was a commoner without one. Camilla Parker Bowles, now a grandmother, was without precedent in having referred to herself, in a love letter, as “your devoted old bag.” It’s not so surprising, then, that Prince Harry is marrying Meghan Markle—a divorced biracial American actress, as she is forever being referred to in articles and books, written, for the most…

A lain Locke led a life of scrupulous refinement and slashing contradiction. Photographs flatter him: there he is, with his bright, taut prettiness, delicately clenching the muscles of his face. Philosophy and history, poetry and art, loneliness and longing—the face holds all of these in a melancholy balance. The eyes glimmer and the lips purse. It was this face that appeared, one summer morning in 1924, at the Paris flat of a destitute Langston Hughes, who put the scene in his memoir “The Big Sea.” “Qui est-il?” Hughes had asked through the closed door. He was stunned by the reply: A mild and gentle voice answered: “Alain Locke.” And sure enough, there was Dr. Alain Locke of Washington, a little, brown man with spats and a cultured accent, and a…

The Australian musician Courtney Barnett often sings about anxiety and depression. One track on “Tell Me How You Really Feel,” her new album, is titled “Crippling Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence.” But those conditions rarely manifest themselves in predictable ways. Dread can yield frantic, needling work: deranged guitar, a yelping vocal. Yet Barnett’s most defining characteristic is her nonchalance. She sounds gloriously, enviably unbothered, even as the circumstances around her openly deteriorate. In 2013, Barnett released a twelve-track compilation, “The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas.” “Avant Gardener,” a single from the collection, became a minor hit. It’s a wordy and ambling jam about navigating a domestic drama—specifically, going into anaphylactic shock while weeding a flower bed—in which Barnett drolly assesses the inanities and the ecstasies of…

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There is a gritty purism about Jimmy’s Corner, where the walls are covered in boxing memorabilia and an old jukebox permeates the atmosphere with the velvety tones of Sam Cooke and Sinatra. The proprietor, Jimmy Glenn, is a former prizefighter and cornerman for Floyd Patterson. He opened Jimmy’s in 1971. From a distance of half a century, the bar’s survival, in the heart of Times Square, has the feel of an underdog story. The decades-long makeover of the neighborhood, from a convivial Gomorrah to an outpost of Disneyland, couldn’t dislodge the place. Even the price of booze—draft beers for three dollars, mixed drinks from the rail for fifty cents more—remains stubbornly out of step with inflation. Glenn, now in his eighty-eighth spring, still drops in nearly every night. On a…

When much of your professional life has been spent as half of a duo, a creative uncoupling can take on the tenor of a breakup. It’s not hard to imagine Garfunkel having a good cry while cutting Simon out of snapshots. How, then, to broach going solo when your erstwhile partner is your sibling? One recent morning, Jay Duplass, one half of the filmmaking Duplass brothers, stood by a trailhead in Altadena, stretching his hamstrings and describing how he’d been hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (of “Wild” fame) in sections. “People do it all in one hike—it takes them six months—but they’re all, like, twenty-two,” Jay, who is forty-five, explained. Mark, who is four years his junior, strolled up. “Hey, Dupiss,” Mark said, handing over his car keys. “Jay always…

Two months after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, the White House took a sudden interest in a civil servant named Sahar Nowrouzzadeh. At thirty-four, she was largely unknown outside a small community of national-security specialists. Nowrouzzadeh, born in Trumbull, Connecticut, grew up with no connection to Washington. Her parents had emigrated from Iran, so that her father could finish his training in obstetrics, and they hoped that she would become a doctor or, failing that, an engineer or a lawyer. But on September 11, 2001, Nowrouzzadeh was a freshman at George Washington University, which is close enough to the Pentagon that students could see plumes of smoke climb into the sky. She became interested in global affairs and did internships at the State Department and the National Iranian American Council, a Washington…

Twenty, on a Paris backstreet I took in a bearbrought out to entertain our gathering crowd. I shit you not, I say in my language of that time,this really, really, happened. Snouted, declawed, castrated probably, he dancedon hind feet to the musics of a short whip. Twenty, a student whose bad French was his worst painsince he had a childhood he couldn’t remember and he told everyone that he was happy. That was before three friends overdosed, four more were suicides, beforewe lost a child and in twelve months I lost my mother, father, sister,before analysis brought my childhood back— abused by my sister until I had that painliquidated, in the words of the kind witch doctor. “I had to puke,” I said to the girl I was with that…

The Overstory, by Richard Powers (Norton). The preservation of primeval trees and dwindling forests unites nine characters in this capacious novel. Two protesters spend ten months living in the canopy of a redwood wider than a house. A psychologist travels to study the activist group they belong to, wanting to understand their immunity to the bystander effect (the assumption that someone else will fix a problem). After a violent action against the logging industry, the characters are forced to scatter. Powers edges their experiences toward the supernatural, while pressing an ethical imperative, voiced by one character: “When you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.” Theory of Bastards, by Audrey Schulman (Europa). The protagonist of this genre-blurring…

If you know Bach’s Goldberg Variations only through the eternally bestselling recordings by Glenn Gould, you have not really heard the work. Gould was a brilliant but idiosyncratic player whose approach to Bach might be compared to Laurence Olivier’s renditions of Shakespeare: the art can obscure the matter. Furthermore, the the piano. The equal-tempered tuning of the modern piano is markedly different from tuning systems of the early eighteenth century, and the instrument’s opulent sonorities cast a Romantic blur over Bach’s harmony and counterpoint. To avoid muddying the texture, pianists rely on a clean, detached style, and as a result the music too often sounds subdued, fastidious, even soporific. This is not to say that presenting Bach on the piano is any sort of categorical mistake. The composer took an…