Innholdsfortegnelse for June 18, 2018 i The New Yorker

Rebecca Mead (“Meal Ticket,” p. 46) has been a staff writer since 1997. “My Life in Middlemarch” is her latest book. Adam Entous (“The Enemy of My Enemy,” p. 30) recently joined the magazine as a staff writer. Previously, he was a reporter for the Washington Post. Evan Osnos (Comment, p. 13) writes about politics and foreign affairs for the magazine. His book “Age of Ambition” won the 2014 National Book Award for nonfiction. Sarah Larson (The Talk of the Town, p. 16) is a staff writer. Her column, Podcast Dept., appears weekly on newyorker.com. Nick Flynn (Poem, p. 52) will publish his next poetry collection, “I Will Destroy You,” in 2019. Christoph Niemann (Cover) is the author of “Conversations,” with Nicholas Blechman, and “Souvenir.” Louis Menand (“Nowhere to…

Mark Kelly and Samantha Bee 92nd Street Y Kelly, a retired astronaut and U.S. Navy captain, is the husband of Gabrielle Giffords, the former U.S. representative who was shot during a campaign stop in Arizona in 2011. Kelly sits down with Bee, the comedian and host of TBS’s “Full Frontal,” for a discussion of the current political climate and the reanimated gun-control debate that has followed the recent spate of school shootings. Giffords will offer opening remarks.—K. Leander Williams (June 14 at 8.) Edwidge Danticat Brooklyn Public Library Individuals moving between worlds inhabit many stories by the Haitian-American writer Danticat. Immigration concerns will likely be at the forefront when she gives this season’s “Message from the Library,” a biannual address in which noted figures reflect on issues important to…

On a recent briny Tuesday afternoon near the Red Hook waterfront, Nick Offerman, the actor, woodworker, author, comedian, and enthusiastic husband of Megan Mullally, sat in a curved red banquette at Sunny’s, a local bar once frequented by longshoremen and dock-workers. He wore a mint-green linen shirt and his graying beard was full but tidy—a style that the diagram of facial-hair configurations in his book “Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man’s Fundamentals for Delicious Living” might categorize as the Tracker. He drank a rye whiskey, neat. Near him, amid ancient nautical doodads and figurines of the Marx Brothers, was a framed photograph of cast and crew from the movie “Hearts Beat Loud,” out last week, in which Offerman stars. He plays a struggling record-store owner (beard style: Mr. Natural) who…

We know. We messed up. We had your trust, your loyalty, your Social Security numbers … and now we’ve lost all that. Somehow, we forgot what really matters. Is it enough to say we’re sorry? We don’t think so. Because we want to make things right. And that starts with admitting to what we did—owning it—even when it wasn’t entirely our fault, because nothing really happened. So, yes, accounts were created that perhaps should not have been, in the names of customers who perhaps were unaware of them, or of us. Incorrect fees were charged. Credit ratings were improperly annihilated. People got sick, pets died in transit, and the entire population of Green Valley, Wisconsin, was evicted from their homes. Why? Maybe because we cared too much. Maybe because our…

The Faroe Islands, an austere, mountainous archipelago marooned in the North Atlantic two hundred miles north of Scotland, has a landmass of only five hundred and forty square miles, and is sparsely populated with fifty thousand people and seventy thousand sheep. But, looked at another way, the country, an autonomous outpost of the Kingdom of Denmark, is much larger: its territorial waters extend for more than a hundred thousand square miles around nearly seven hundred miles of coastline. Only one village, Vatnsoyrar, isn’t on the coast, and wherever you are on any of the Faroes’ eighteen islands you’re never more than three miles from the crashing, frigid ocean. Like the human body, the Faroes are mostly water. The inhabitants of the islands, which were settled by Vikings in the ninth…

Because the gurney is unattendedin the hallway outside my father’s room,because nobody is guarding its bright metal railsor its silver tongue shrouded with a woollen blanket,because the blanket is a faded shadeof red currant—now bitter, now sweet—because the hallway is emptyof everything but soothing lemon wallpaperand the eucalypt sting of disinfectant,I am almost beside it before I seethe unmistakable topography of a body—troughs and peaks, a rough silhouetteas though earth is piled up there, underneath.The hairs on my arms rise stiffylike the prickling pelt of a nettle leaf,and as if I have suddenly held copperwire to current I am seizedwith an uncontrollable shuddersummoned from some primordial placebehind the daylight mind. Mortal voice, speak.Don’t move, I want to say, I’ll get somebody—but I do not know to whom I am speaking,I…

There might not seem to be much left to say about Alberto Giacometti, the subject of a majestic, exhausting retrospective—pace yourself, when you go—at the Guggenheim. Critics, scholars, philosophers, poets, journalists, and chatty amateurs have all had a go at the Swiss master of the skinny sublime. I wrote about him in these pages seventeen years ago, on the occasion of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. A standard story of Giacometti, as a Surrealist who became a paragon of existentialism for his ravaged response to the Second World War, was well established by 1966, when he died, at the age of sixty-four. He hasn’t changed. The world has, though, and with it the significance of a man who termed himself a failure and chose to live in…

DISMISSING DISEASE Lidija Haas, in her review of Porochista Khakpour’s book “Sick,” about a woman suffering from so-called chronic Lyme disease, equates a series of anecdotes with rigorous scientific research, and seems to completely discount the possibility of psychosomatic disease (Books, June 4th & 11th). But there are innumerable examples of people whose mental conditions cause bodily pain, such as the immigrants in Rachel Aviv’s article “The Apathetic.” Haas implies that people who exhibit a constellation of vague symptoms and have never received a diagnosis should get “creative treatment.” In the case of chronic Lyme disease, that would likely mean taking antibiotics for months or years, which can have very serious, and even life-threatening, effects. Haas also makes the larger point that women—especially women of color—are often disbelieved and…

A few hours before game three of the N.B.A. finals, last week, when the Golden State Warriors took a three-to-zero series lead over the Cleveland Cavaliers, Ann Kerr gave the final talk of the semester for a U.C.L.A. seminar called Perceptions of the U.S. Abroad: Discussions with Fulbright Scholars. Kerr is the director of Southern California’s Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program, the author of “Come with Me from Lebanon: An American Family Odyssey,” and the mother of, as she likes to say, “two Ph.D.s, an M.B.A., and an N.B.A.,” the latter being the Golden State Warriors head coach, Steve Kerr. Ann studied in Lebanon in the fifties, and later married Malcolm Kerr—a Middle East scholar at U.C.L.A. and the president of an American university in Lebanon—who was assassinated in 1984, outside…

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that, at a time when so many public figures seem to be having trouble staying within the lines, coloring books have made a comeback. They are entering a baroque phase. The other day, thirty-odd Manhattan children attended a tea party in the penthouse suite at the Mark Hotel, on East Seventy-seventh Street, to road test the hotel’s new coloring book, “The Colorful Mark.” It was created by the fashion illustrator Jean-Philippe Delhomme, and includes elaborate line drawings of what a marketing employee for the hotel called “all the normal Mark activities”—a blowout at Frédéric Fekkai, a pedicab ride to Bergdorf’s to find a dress for the Met Gala. “I like coloring when I’m bored, and I like it more than math at school,” Gray Neville,…

The reason you’ve been receiving a steady stream of privacy-policy updates from online services, some of which you may have forgotten you ever subscribed to, is that the European Union just enacted the General Data Protection Regulation, which gives users greater control over the information that online companies collect about them. Since the Internet is a global medium, many companies now need to adhere to the E.U. regulation. How many of us are going to take the time to scroll through the new policies and change our data settings, though? We sign up to get the service, but we don’t give much thought to who might be storing our clicks or what they’re doing with our personal information. It is weird, at first, when our devices seem to “know” where…

My first night without youmy wings fold back in on themselves— all those birds inside orreleased by your hands—now I trace my fingers along my collarbone trying to find where they live. I keeptouching my scar—it feels like swallowing night, like flyers for a lost boy—what if it’s true our bodies are not our own, but only become manifest (like thispoem) when activated by another’s touch what if the thing activated is outlined—roughly—by the word body … This morning my daughter stood before menaked & said her body was not her own—she’s been sick for two days—smiling, she seemed to like it, the feeling, that floating above … I worry it’s a set-up, amanifestation of the addict I’ve passed on through the blood, my talentfor slipping into the bigger thing…

Collaboration is a murky trade, and it covers quite a range. Whether you’re siding with the enemy in Nazi-occupied France or laying out the lyrics to “Edelweiss” so that Richard Rodgers can devise a tune to match, you’re a collaborator. But no joining of forces is more difficult to fathom than the partnership between two writers. Writing, like dying, is one of those things that should be done alone or not at all. In each case, loved ones may hover around and tender their support, but, in the end, it’s up to you. So, when two writers decide to merge, what do they actually do? Well, I’ve heard rumors of novelist couples who produce alternate chapters: one for you, one for me. A tidy scheme for twin souls but otherwise,…

ART “Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams” Museum of Modern Art The Congolese sculptor, who died in 2015, is the subject of a phenomenal exhibition, curated by Sarah Suzuki and wonderfully installed with help from the German artist Carsten Höller. It presents scores of imaginary buildings and cities made mostly of cut and painted paper, card stock, and plastics, with occasional urban detritus (used packaging, bottle caps, soda cans). In shape, these “extreme maquettes,” as Kingelez termed them, are variously tiered, towering, serpentine, pinnate, finned, and scalloped. Colonnades and grand staircases abound, as do decorative grids of circles, stripes, diamonds, stars, and floral motifs. Kingelez was a great and subtle colorist, with a palette anchored by the red, yellow, and green of the national flag of Zaire—he once said, “A…

Vol de Nuit West Village At the start of summer in New York, the spendthrift Europhile, unable to afford a transatlantic voyage, can reach, on foot, several airy patios with echoes of Provence. One, dripping in verdure, is that of the cocktail and oyster lounge Maison Premiere, in Williamsburg. Another is this Belgian beer bar off Washington Square Park, where thirsty travellers cradle goblets of Chimay and Delirium Tremens drawn straight from the tap. Its name, borrowed from a novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry set at the dawn of commercial aviation, translates to Night Flight, suggesting, along with the Trappist ales on offer, a red-eye into a land of pastoral retreat and deep history. A few weeks ago, two men seeking a Continental illusion hopped around the bar like backpackers…

“I’m used to sitting where I can fiddle with the climate controls,” Stephin Merritt, the fifty-three-year-old songwriter and composer, said the other day from the back seat of a Subaru Forester belonging to Claudia Gonson, his Magnetic Fields bandmate and longtime manager. She was chauffeuring Merritt, who had taught her to drive almost thirty-five years ago, and who is best known for the 1999 album “69 Love Songs.” They were headed to a theatrical-prop house in Rahway, New Jersey, to unpack materials for a staged production of “50 Song Memoir,” Merritt’s most recent work, coming to the Apollo Theatre, in Harlem, on June 15th. Merritt blew on his tea. They have had the same caffeine routine since the mid-nineties: Merritt, who generally sleeps till the late morning, will have green…

The first installment of the teen drama “SKAM Austin” popped up on Facebook almost without warning, on April 24th, at 3:40 P.M. Central Standard Time. No advertising preceded it. No interviews with the actors or the director accompanied its début, and the clip had no production credits. It was as if the footage were just another update in your Facebook feed. The show—an American version of the Norwegian phenomenon “SKAM,” whose title means “shame”—did not take the form of conventional episodes. Viewers were instead offered an array of scenes, of varying lengths, shot in and around a high school in Texas’s capital. One clip was two minutes long; another was eight. These fragments began sporadically “dropping” on Facebook Watch, the social network’s entertainment portal, in accordance with the action of…

On the afternoon of December 14, 2016, Ron Dermer, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, rode from his Embassy to the White House to attend a Hanukkah party. The Obama Administration was in its final days, and among the guests were some of the President’s most ardent Jewish supporters, who were there to bid him farewell. But Dermer, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, did not share their sense of loss. For the Israeli leadership, the Trump Presidency could not come soon enough. Netanyahu believed that Barack Obama had “no special feeling” for the Jewish state, as one of his aides once put it, and he resented Obama’s argument that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians was a violation of basic human rights and an obstacle to security, not least for Israel…

The couple decided that tonight they would go out for sushi. Two years ago, they’d met online. Three months ago, they’d moved in together. Previously, she’d lived in Boston, but now she lived in New York with him. The woman was a research analyst at a bank downtown. The man was a ceramic-pottery instructor at a studio uptown. Both were in their late thirties, and neither of them wanted kids. Both enjoyed Asian cuisine, specifically sushi, specifically omakase. It was the element of surprise that they liked. And it suited them in different ways. She got nervous looking at a list of options and would second-guess herself. He enjoyed going with the flow. What is the best choice? she’d ask him when flipping through menus with many pages and many…

Kudos, by Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In the final novel of a mordant trilogy, the narrator, Faye, a British writer, attends a literary festival in Europe. Her exchanges with complacent publishers, tedious journalists, and egotistical writers allow Cusk to eviscerate the characters for their ignorance—of themselves, of one another, and of the changing European political landscape post-Brexit. Literary-world foibles may be a tired subject, but the narrative brilliantly explores that very sense of fatigue, as illustrated in a speech delivered by Faye: “I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting.” Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf). This…