Innholdsfortegnelse for June 4, 2018 i The New Yorker

Rivka Galchen (“The Teaching Moment,” p. 38; “Mum’s the Word,” p. 74) is the author of, most recently, “Little Labors.” Mohsin Hamid (“What Is Possible,” p. 71) lives in Lahore, Pakistan. His latest book is “Exit West.” Lidija Haas (Books, p. 93), a books columnist for Harper’s, has also written for the London Review of Books, the Guardian, and Bookforum, where she is a contributing editor. Chang-rae Lee (“My Father’s Face,” p. 59) teaches creative writing at Stanford. His most recent novel is “On Such a Full Sea.” Loveis Wise (Cover), an illustrator living in Philadelphia, has contributed to the Times and Cartoon Network. This is her first cover for the magazine. Gabrielle Bates (Poem, p. 57) works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, in Seattle. Her poems and…

Museum Mile Festival This marks the fortieth year that the museums lining upper Fifth Avenue are throwing a block party. Live entertainment and various outdoor activities will be set up to encourage a leisurely walk from the Metropolitan Museum of Art up to El Museo del Barrio. Admission to the participating institutions in between—among them the Guggenheim, the Cooper Hewitt, the Jewish Museum, and Neue Galerie New York—is free. (Fifth Ave. between E. 82nd and E. 105th Sts. museummilefestival.org. June 12 from 6 to 9.) Freshkills Park Staten Islanders like to point out that the borough’s sprawling public green space dwarfs Manhattan’s Central Park in size. It’s no small wonder that it was fashioned on what was once the world’s largest landfill. Slated for completion in 2036, the twenty-two-hundred-acre…

The British photographer Tom Murray isn’t crazy about Alexi Lubomirski’s official engagement and wedding portraits of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. In one shot, the couple are sitting on stone steps at Frogmore House and leaning in to each other. “Harry is too round-shouldered,” Murray said the other day, during a visit to New York. “He’s squishing her, and he’s so hunched over that she can’t get close enough. And she should have both hands on top of his right hand, instead of one hand down here, where you can’t see it.” There is, in fact, something disturbing about Markle’s right arm, which seems to end at her elbow. “And, when you put your hand on the bloke’s hand, you don’t press,” he continued. “It’s the same with leg models.…

The meaning of life is that it stops. Especially in his later years, Philip Roth often quoted this remark attributed to Kafka, and it was hard not to think of it when the news came that his heart had given out. He lived to be eighty-five, but he had little expectation of making it much past seventy. Over the years, there had been stretches of depression, surgeries on his back and spine, a quintuple bypass, and sixteen cardiac stents, which must be some kind of American League record. By the time Roth was in his seventies, he would open his eyes in the morning and experience a moment of ecstatic surprise: he had pulled it off again, stolen another taste of being alive, a self, conscious of the beautiful and…

“We have to go further back, to 2005. I’m in Warri, in Delta State, I’m working as a doctor, and my mom and I are having a fight. She’s saying, You’re stagnating, you read medicine and you haven’t gone further, you could do better! I was happy, I was in this quiet place becoming a provincial doctor, but in Nigeria that is a lack of ambition, so my mom was angry. She showed me a photograph in a magazine of a young woman with beads in her hair, and she said, Look at this small girl, she has written a book of horticulture, about flowers—you could do something like that. She didn’t care what I did, really, she just wanted me to do more. So she told me, Write books!…

A BNORMAL RESULT. HIGH RISK. CLINICAL OUTCOME UNKNOWN. At night, Rae pulls a pillow between her legs and lets the pain scissor at her. She feels like a gut-shot animal lying in the road. Rae was not raised with religion, so when she sees the blood in the toilet she invents her own prayers. After the results from the third set of tests come back, she starts begging anything that might be listening to save her baby. And then, lo, something does answer. I can help you. It spoke without speaking, glowing low on the horizon. She had made it over the ledge of 4 A.M. to 5 A.M., what she’d once believed to be a safe hour. The out-of-the-woods hour. What are you? The voice tipped out of the…

The insurance check came in the mail. From Geico. With its big-eyed lizard mascot. A Cockney gecko. As though disaster should appeal to ironic children. There are no geckos in Portland, Oregon—or in East London, for that matter. Not their natural habitat. But there are geckos in South Carolina. Andrew remembered them. In the winter they would sneak indoors and hide near curtains, frozen like novelty rubber until roused, and then such speed. Of course the goal was to catch one, to hold it in your palms, a brief warm home, until boredom set in, after which you’d release it onto the porch. The crueller boys did worse. With tennis racquets. With windups into trees followed by whoops. Geckos lose their tails if captured endwise, probably their most famous trait.…

A long with the uncanny determinism of her surname, Helen DeWitt has several assets, inherited or acquired, useful to the comic writer: she is a trained classicist, whose teasing instincts have been schooled in ancient Greek and Roman satire; her style is brilliantly heartless, and cork-dry; original herself, she is a witty examiner of human and cultural eccentricity. She is, above all, playful—rigorously so. Though she’s famous for her big first novel, “The Last Samurai” (2000), her comedy, committed to serial absurdities, doesn’t always flourish best in long forms. It blooms into riffs and fugitive ideas, rebellious asides and quick conceptual tryouts. She is a master of the paragraph-length flareup. Here, in “The Last Samurai,” the narrator tells us about the single sexual encounter she had with a British travel…

Bodys Isek Kingelez was, by his own description, a “designer, an architect, a sculptor, engineer, artist.” Though a boastful man, he neglected “genius” in the list of his identities, so I’ll tack that on. Kingelez, who died three years ago of cancer, at the age of sixty-six, in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is the subject of a phenomenal exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Sarah Suzuki and wonderfully installed with help from the German artist Carsten Höller, the show presents scores of the “extreme maquettes,” as Kingelez termed them, that he began making in the late seventies. These depict imaginary buildings and whole cities in a perfectly integral mélange of modern, postmodern, and entirely invented styles, mostly in cut and painted…

THE RIGHTS OF VICTIMS I read Jill Lepore’s warning about the dangers of the victims’-rights movement with some concern that I might have contributed to the problem (“Sirens in the Night,” May 21st). In 1982, I published a book of profiles featuring families of murder victims. I was happy to learn that victims’ support groups were using the book, but I wonder now if it played a part in the spread of the deleterious aspects of the victims’-rights movement, which depends, to a degree, on seeing survivors as a monolithic group. I tried to make it clear in my book that people experience crimes committed against their family members in many different ways. We need to remember that not all the families of the Oklahoma City bombing victims wanted…

Late on a rainy afternoon last week, Cameron Kasky and Zion Kelly, gun-reform activists, were in the lobby of the Hotel Beacon, on the Upper West Side, wearing tuxedos. Kasky is a survivor of the mass shooting, in February, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. He was memorably self-assured when, on CNN, he pressed Senator Marco Rubio about accepting N.R.A. funding; he went on to help organize the March for Our Lives. At that protest, Kelly, a high-school senior from Northeast Washington, D.C., spoke about the death of Zaire, his twin brother, who was shot and killed during an attempted robbery. Kasky and Kelly were waiting for Samantha Fuentes, another Parkland student, to join them; they would then drive to the American Museum of Natural History, each…

In 1991, the same year as the Crown Heights riots, the New York City Police Department decided that it was time to make music again. The N.Y.P.D. Police Band had existed from 1901 to 1955, and, to revive it, the department turned to Lieutenant Tony Giorgio, from the Ceremonial Unit, which handles everything from Columbus Day marches to pallbearers for police funerals. Through the department’s internal computer system, called the Finest, Giorgio put out a call for musicians. “I was looking for clarinets, woodwinds, brass, sousaphones,” he said the other day. “I got a gazillion guitar players and drummers.” The band grew to eighty strong, and Giorgio, a fiftyish man with a Brooklyn accent and tidy salt-and-pepper hair, remains its conductor and musical director. He began playing the clarinet in…

I very lived with my deaf granny from a young age and was sent to be with my mother and my father only on feast days and for memorials. Behind Granny’s house was a deep well pond, and it was in that well pond that I first saw the silver tiger. Much of what I’m going to tell you is inextricably bound up with that silver tiger. In physical form, the silver tiger’s paws flexed and sprang as it stepped nimbly through the thickets of my childhood memory, an awe-inspiring presence. I have to begin this with the well ponds. Well ponds are an ancient form of water storage, still in use in the countryside around Rongtang Town. As the name implies, they are shaped like pools, but are well-like…

A car’s tires thu-thunk over the rubbery black trip wire at the oil change,triggering a fat bell,and a group of girls in silver leotards are reflectedlike spatters of sap in its windows— liquidine, firm, gleaming.It’s a Game Day; they are the girlschosen to split in tempo to the brass band,heel of a front foot sliding over Astro-Turf,top of a back foot grinding over lit green,cervix slapping the fifty-yard linelike a fried egg flipped down on a griddle to burn.Behind the bleachers, a boy takes off the shirt of another boy,paints a letter there in red paint (R, and then another boy I-O-T …).When the sun goes down over the ridgeall the painted boys will make PATRIOTS.For now the sun rises, sanctioning the street:Jiffy Lube, pet store, the Sam’s Super Sandwichesteens…

Is Lyme disease a feminist issue? It may sound ludicrous to ask this of a tick-borne infection that can usually be dispatched with a course of antibiotics. Yet its name commemorates the two women living in the town of Lyme, Connecticut, who, in the mid-seventies, fought the medical establishment to have the disease acknowledged and treated. “You know,” a doctor informed one of them after failing to find the source of her symptoms, “sometimes people subconsciously want to be sick.” It’s tempting to think of this reflexive, paternalistic skepticism directed at female patients as a remnant of a bygone era. And yet there’s a class of illnesses—multi-symptomatic, chronic, hard to diagnose—that remain associated with suffering women and disbelieving experts. Lyme disease, symptoms of which can afflict patients years after the…

A some few weeks ago, on “The Good Fight,” Chicago litigators found the pee tape. Initially, they suspected that it was a hoax—entrapment by Project Veritas, perhaps, designed to embarrass the D.N.C. Their firm investigated, and in the process they discovered an entire genre of pee-tape fakes. The F.B.I. weighed in. There was a granular comparison of bathrobe screen grabs. (“Enhance!”) Finally, they had confirmation: it was the real thing. And then they buried it—all of them, conspiring together, with varying motives. Releasing a video of Russian prostitutes peeing on a bed that the Obamas slept in, the group understood, would lead to nothing but another shockeroo news cycle. There would be outrage, then distraction, and on to the next round. To survive in an era of numb unreality, they…

NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Ambient Church with Suzanne Ciani Three years ago, during a wave of venue closures in north Brooklyn’s D.I.Y. scene, Brian Sweeny (a founder of the notorious, now defunct Bushwick community hub Body Actualized Center) started this roaming live series, tapping into New York’s rich supply of gorgeous, historic churches, where landlords have no sway. The concept is disarmingly simple: expertly curated programs of “meditative, devotional, and minimal” avant-garde electronic music paired with stunning 3-D-mapped projections, covering the churches’ interiors with gently undulating New Age visuals. This week, the electronic pioneer Ciani settles in for an evening of soothing music written for the Buchla 200e modular synthesizer, presented in…

Sameness can be refreshing, particularly in a borough where change is often costliest to those who desire it least. This, however, has not been true of the Gowanus Canal, which, poorly drained for much of the past two centuries, ripened into an un-water-like hue as it received the sins of the growing, changing Brooklyn at its banks. Yet, on a recent week night, a woman at this canal-adjacent bar, named for the channel’s ironic epithet, settled in for what would pass beautifully as a lakeside evening—an illusion that was certainly helped by the fact that from nowhere in the bar was the Gowanus, a Superfund site, actually visible. On a fenced-in back deck, a charming simulacrum of a back yard, friends in their twenties communed at picnic tables and ordered…

One recent evening, Alicia Glen, the New York City deputy mayor for housing and economic development, was sitting in a black S.U.V. that had pulled over near Washington Square Park. She was on her way to celebrate the launch of a new initiative focussed on women, and she had come directly from her office, in City Hall. An aide appeared at the vehicle’s tinted rear window, which Glen rolled down to receive what she’d been waiting for: a black T-shirt that said “Women.nyc.” She threw it on under her dark blazer. “Norma Kamali, an icon of feminism, made these T-shirts for us,” she said. Women.nyc is both a Web site and the name of an ad campaign meant to provide a boost to New York’s female residents. The site offers…

Gray and white, as if with age, or some preservingof the past, as in Beowulf, our hoary ancestor,hoary as in a bat or a willow, or the venerablehoary dove that flew straight into my picturewindow today and then lay dead on the front porch.We buried it—in some distorted version of its normal self— folded in a white cloth napkin in the back yard.Still soft enough to be cut into like a cabbage, I thought,I’m glad I’m not dead. Listen to them now,higher up in the trees, biting and scratching,with their unmistakable twitch of life. Don’t fearnothing, their twittering voices cry. The true spiritof living isn’t eating greedily, or reflection, oreven love, but dissidence, like an axe of stone.…

Men and Apparitions, by Lynne Tillman (Soft Skull). The narrator of this ruminative and amusing novel is a cultural anthropologist whose area of specialty is the family photograph. In his late thirties, he is reckoning with some familial issues of his own: his wife has left him and his sister has died. His account of his life is interspersed with essay-like digressions on the history of photography and the image saturation of digital culture. Dozens of photographs accompany the text, and wordplay abounds. The novel concludes with a pseudo-academic study on the “ethnography of the new man.” At times aphoristic and at times just plain corny, the book succeeds as a gentle satire of generational self-absorption and emotional disengagement. The Red Word, by Sarah Henstra (Black Cat). Set at…