Innholdsfortegnelse for May 28, 2018 i The New Yorker

Jon Lee Anderson (“Behind the Wall,” p. 24), a staff writer, began contributing to the magazine in 1998. He is the author of several books, including “The Fall of Baghdad.” Jennifer Gonnerman (“Framed,” p. 46) became a staff writer in 2015. She is the author of “Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett.” Stephen Metcalf (Books, p. 71) hosts Slate’s “Culture Gabfest” podcast and is currently at work on a book about the nineteen-eighties. Gayle Kabaker (Cover), an illustrator, contributed her first cover to the magazine in 2012. Peter Balakian (Poem, p. 51) is the author of “Ozone Journal,” which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He teaches at Colgate University. Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 17), a staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment.…

Alien Resurrection Huma Bhabha’s cinematic bronze sculptures land on the roof of the Met. In a classic episode of “The Twilight Zone,” a woman has surgery to correct her appearance. The twist is that she’s a Hitchcock blonde in a world where the norm is a face so contorted that it looks Cubist. In Huma Bhabha’s spare, striking installation on the roof of the Met—a pair of monumental figures, one prostrate, either in prayer or in fear, and the other a battle-scarred, five-faced warrior-golem—she similarly flips the script on conventions of beauty, while injecting figurative traditions (Eastern and Western, ancient and modern) with a dose of pulp science fiction. The title of Bhabha’s exhibition is “We Come in Peace,” a line adapted from the cult-classic movie “The Day the Earth…

The day before the White House announced that Rudolph Giuliani would be joining President Trump’s legal team, news broke of another controversial New York figure’s comeback. After a tumultuous stay in the United States, a stint in Tasmania, and three years in the art collection of Steven A. Cohen, the hedge-fund billionaire—whose company, in 2013, paid a fine of $1.8 billion after pleading guilty to charges of insider trading—“The Holy Virgin Mary,” the British artist Chris Ofili’s painting of a black Madonna, adorned with elephant dung, is soon to be installed in the Museum of Modern Art. “The Holy Virgin Mary,” like many newcomers to the city, lived in Brooklyn before she made it to Manhattan. The painting had its American début in 1999, at the Brooklyn Museum, as part…

On a recent Tuesday, Sabin Howard, the figurative sculptor, was preparing for one of the first public viewings of a planned national memorial to the First World War. He had driven from his studio, in the Bronx, to the New York Academy of Art, his alma mater, in Tribeca. At the curb, he opened the doors of his van to reveal a ten-foot scale model of a fifty-seven-foot bronze tableau: a narrative meditation on the Great War, to be installed in a few years near the White House, not far from the tributes to the Second World War and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. He carried the model inside in three heavy pieces. “Sorry it’s not bigger,” he said. In 2016, Howard and his collaborator, Joe Weishaar, were named…

One night many years ago, a French family was driving through the North Region of Cameroon when they ran out of gas. As they scrambled to refill the tank, the car was surrounded by a pride of lions. To protect their young daughter, the parents locked her in a metal trunk. The animals circled the vehicle continuously, and to distract herself from danger the girl repeated her own name. Over the years, the story of the little blond French girl besieged by lions became something of a legend in the area. It was said by some that she had survived for fifteen days under the hot African sun. Decades after the story first the little girl returned to Cameroon from Paris, where she had come of age. She was still…

I loved the white moon circlesand the purple halos, on a plate as the salt sweat them. The oil in the pan smoked like baddays in the Syrian desert— when a moon stayed all day— when morning was a purpleelegy for the last friend seen— when the fog of the riverbankrose like a holy ghost. My mother made those white moons sizzlein some egg wash and salt— some parsley appearedfrom the garden and summer eveningscame with no memory but the table with white dishes. Shining aubergine—black-skinnedbeauty, bitter apple. We used our hands.…

First Person, by Richard Flanagan (Knopf). The narrator of this novel is an angsty aspiring novelist who is summoned from Tasmania to Melbourne for a ghostwriting assignment. His subject, an infamous con man called Ziggy, is infuriatingly evasive. “I have been missing since I was born,” he offers by way of an origin story. As the ghostwriter contends with underworld escapades, farcical publishing-industry posturing, and his gnomic subject, he becomes obsessed with the boundary between fiction and reality. Flanagan cannot quite make Ziggy’s magnetism or sinister influence plausible, but the novel, with its switchbacking recollections and cyclical dialogue, its penetrating scenes of birth and, eventually, death, is enigmatic and mesmerizing. Woman at 1,000 Degrees, by Hallgrímur Helgason, translated from the Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon (Algonquin). Near the opening of this…

On June 20th, Simon Rattle will end a sixteen-year tenure as the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic—a post of quasi-papal authority in the classical-music world. How Rattle should be judged against predecessors on the order of Hans von Bülow, Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, and Claudio Abbado is for the musical sages of Berlin to decide. From a distance, Rattle appears to have left a distinctive stamp on the institution. He has promoted contemporary music with unprecedented vigor; he has given new prominence to French, British, and American fare; he has presided over such staggering spectacles as Stockhausen’s “Gruppen,” presented at Tempelhof Airport, and the Bach Passions, as staged by Peter Sellars. If any question mark hovers over his legacy, it has to do with his handling…

THE A.I. YOU KNOW Tad Friend’s giddy roundup of the farthest-out possibilities in artificial intelligence is a testament to the heated enthusiasms and fears of our time (“Superior Intelligence,” May 14th). It’s telling that most of Friend’s examples of threatening, triumphant, or all-seeing A.I. come from aesthetic sources—movies, books, TV—where anything is possible. In actuality, self-conscious and self-directed A.I. is very far away, and may well not be possible at all. For A.I. to “extend meaning in the universe that gave life to us,” A.I. itself must understand and experience meaning, and there is no real evidence of how it might develop this capability. On the other hand, we have already constructed an omniscient, omnipotent, deathless A.I. that holds all of our fates in its power: God. It took…

On a recent Sunday afternoon, a young man in a yellow-striped tracksuit was ambling toward Third Avenue, in East Harlem, when a storefront tucked between a heating-and-plumbing-supply shop and a Mexican restaurant caught his attention. Maybe it was the music—fast-paced norteño rhythms followed by Argentinean ska filtered through the open doorway. Perhaps it was the décor—framed black-and-white pictures, cheeky signs urging patrons to drink more, a leopard mask fixed in a rictus grin. Or maybe it was simply the promise of tequila, mezcal, and even sotol, a smooth spirit from Chihuahua that is distilled from the juice of a spiny plant called the desert spoon and is rather difficult to find in New York. Inside the warmly lit bar, a clutch of couples were meeting to ring out the weekend.…

Last week, Stacey Abrams headed north from Atlanta, in a big white bus, to persuade rural Georgians to vote for her in the state’s gubernatorial primary. On Tuesday, she faces Stacey Evans, the other Democrat who’s running for governor, and who is known as White Stacey. They’re both young, progressive former state representatives who grew up poor and are willing to denounce Donald Trump. Abrams is the state’s former House minority leader, a graduate of Yale Law School, and an eight-time published romance novelist (sample titles: “Hidden Sins,” “Power of Persuasion”), and she would become the first African-American woman to govern a state. She has been endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Rashida Jones; Evans, on the other hand, has the backing of the Georgia Federation of Teachers and many state…

John Feeley, the Ambassador to Panama and a former Marine helicopter pilot, is not averse to strong language, but he was nevertheless startled by his first encounter with President Donald Trump. Summoned to deliver a briefing in June, 2017, he was outside the Oval Office when he overheard Trump concluding a heated conversation, “Fuck him! Tell him to sue the government.” Feeley was escorted in, and saw that Mike Pence, John Kelly, and several other officials were in the room. As he took a seat, Trump asked, “So tell me—what do we get from Panama? What’s in it for us?” Feeley presented a litany of benefits: help with counter-narcotics work and migration control, commercial efforts linked to the Panama Canal, a close relationship with the current President, Juan Carlos Varela.…

Al Green cuts a distinctive figure around the Capitol. He is, for starters, the only male member of the House of Representatives with a ponytail. He expresses himself with a kind of baroque humility; to the question “How are you?” he invariably responds, “Better than I deserve.” (Elaborating, if asked, he says that he is a “recovering sinner.”) He is unusual, too, because, while most politicians call attention to their triumphs and hide their failures, Green reserves a place of honor in his congressional office for two reminders of crushing, if perhaps temporary, legislative defeats. Last year, Green—who, since 2005, has represented a district centered on Houston—sponsored the first vote in the House of Representatives on the impeachment of President Donald Trump. On December 6th, the House rejected Green’s initiative…

James is home early and he says we goddammit really seriously need to pack. Hup hup, time to go. It’s the weather again, and it bores me so. We live where the water loves to visit. Just a little rain off the coast, that’s all, and it’ll rise into our home. It loves to soak our rug and climb up the walls and, once, it seeped into our electronics, inside the TV cabinet, and destroyed our precious entertainment center, which keeps us—or me, anyway—from raiding the medicine cabinet at night for other pleasures. Otherwise, well, we have brilliant sunsets and the kind of grass that is absurdly tall, taller than you or me. I don’t know how it doesn’t just fall over. You’d think it had a long slender bone…

Late in the fall of 2014, an entity calling itself Guardians of Peace began leaking e-mails and other private material belonging to Sony Pictures. Sensational headlines quickly followed. The hack was reportedly the work of the North Korean government, possibly in retaliation for the portrayal of Kim Jong Un in the as yet unreleased Sony comedy “The Interview.” (North Korea denied this.) Among other things, the e-mails revealed that Jennifer Lawrence was paid significantly less than men whose stardom didn’t equal hers and that, before attending a Democratic fundraiser featuring Barack Obama, Amy Pascal, the co-chair of Sony Pictures, had joked with the producer Scott Rudin about which recent movies starring black people the President might have liked. On the heels of these and other reports came opinion pieces arguing…

NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Laurent Garnier and François K This sharp bill features two Paris-bred dance-music mixers who paved the way for contemporary outfits like Daft Punk. Garnier, whose first residency was at the Manchester, England, club Haçienda in the late eighties, helped spearhead the early-nineties Parisian raves that set the tone for the city’s house-music eruption. His long, rangy d.j. sets, which flit effortlessly between lavish vocals and brusque minimalism, are some of dance music’s most storied; a 2013 set for Boiler Room, recorded at Amsterdam’s famed Dekmantel Festival, has received nearly four million YouTube views. François K (for Kevorkian), who co-founded the afternoon party Body & Soul (still a going…

New York City Ballet The comic ballet “Coppélia” was originally inspired by a pair of eerie stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann, about a gullible young man who is tricked into falling in love with the title character, an automaton. The choreographer George Balanchine danced a version of the piece by Petipa when he was a student in St. Petersburg. In an uncharacteristic moment of nostalgia, he adapted it for New York City Ballet in 1974, in partnership with the Russian ballerina Alexandra Danilova. (She had triumphed in the role of Swanilda—the human girl who saves the young man from falling for Coppélia—with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.) The pair imbued the dance with high spirits and warmth, and the music, by Léo Délibes, is incredibly catchy. •…

Wearing his trademark silk head scarf, an exotic blend of Barbary pirate and Russian babushka, Steven Van Zandt was relaxing backstage at the PlayStation Theatre, in Times Square, recently, before a gig with his fourteen-piece band, the re-formed Disciples of Soul. Van Zandt, who is sixty-seven and is widely known as Little Steven (he goes by that name on his Sirius XM radio show), was limning his undistinguished career as a high-school student. “I was only interested in rock and roll and getting laid, probably in that order,” he said. Because neither was part of the curriculum at Middletown High School, in Middletown, New Jersey, he went on, “I had no interest in school whatsoever.” He learned everything he needed to know from rock and roll, he said. His timing…

Clarissa Glenn’s troubles with the law began on Mother’s Day, 2004, when she was on her way to the Pancake House with her three sons—Ben, Jr., Gerard, and Deon. They left their apartment in the Ida B. Wells Homes, a housing project on the South Side of Chicago, to meet her partner, Ben Baker, outside the building. They found him talking with a police sergeant named Ronald Watts, a notorious figure in the project. Watts oversaw a team of police officers who were supposed to be rooting out the project’s drug trade, but he was in fact running his own “criminal enterprise,” as another officer later put it. Watts extorted money from drug dealers and other residents, and when they didn’t pay him he fabricated drug charges against them. That…

Photography, at its mid-nineteenth-century beginning, muscled in on painting one precinct at a time. Portraiture, of a solemn, straight-on sort, suggested itself immediately. Its hold-still composition, simple and traditional, met a mechanical necessity of the new art: early studio photographers, at the mercy of long-duration exposure, often steadied the backs of their subjects’ heads with clamps unseen by camera or viewer. Landscapes held still on their own if the wind didn’t blow, so Gustave Le Gray could become an automated Poussin, while Mathew Brady strained to click his way past Gilbert Stuart. History painting—crowded, violent, declamatory—had to postpone its photographic update until smaller cameras made picture-taking portable and fleet. But genre painting, with its casual assemblages of ordinary life, stood ready early on to be appropriated by the new medium.…

In the late nineteen-seventies, the sociologist didn’t know who these writers were, or whether their transgressive spirit ever manifested itself in violent crimes, but of uncontrollable predators.” In the Glazer’s essay would help inspire the concept of “broken windows” policing—a theory that preserving the appearance of calm, orderly neighborhoods can foster peace and civility. Graffiti has always had this kind of metaphorical power. It is somehow more than art or destruction (even though it is both), and it prompts awe or dread, depending on your tolerance for disorder. For every Glazer, there were romantics like Norman Mailer, who had written the text for a book of photographs elevating graffiti to the status of “faith.” From his perspective, graffiti forced the upper crust to reckon with the names and the fugitive…