Innholdsfortegnelse for June 25, 2018 i The New Yorker

Jon Lee Anderson (“Mexico First,” p. 40), a staff writer, began contributing to the magazine in 1998. He is the author of several books, including “The Fall of Baghdad.” Liana Finck (Sketchbook, p. 35) has been contributing cartoons to The New Yorker since 2013. This work is from her graphic memoir “Passing for Human,” which will be published in September. Vinson Cunningham (“Figure of Speech,” p. 18) has been a staff writer since 2016. Leo Robson (Books, p. 66), a writer living in London, is a judge for the 2018 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Catherine Barnett (Poem, p. 58) will publish her third collection of poems, “Human Hours,” in September. Gary Shteyngart (Fiction, p. 50) is the author of “Super Sad True Love Story” and “Little Failure,” among…

Nell Irvin Painter Greenlight Bookstore Retirement has been breezy, relatively speaking, for Painter, a noted historian. In contrast to her 2010 race study, “The History of White People,” Painter’s new memoir, “Old in Art School,” chronicles the former Princeton professor’s late-life pursuit of first a B.F.A., then an M.F.A. Painter talks with the Times editor Clay Risen about the transition from academia to creative life.—K. Leander Williams (June 25 at 7:30.) Salman Rushdie Strand Book Store Rushdie’s latest novel, “The Golden House,” gets under way on the day of the Obama Inauguration, but it’s not nostalgic for a time of hope. Nero Golden, the ominously named central character, is a billionaire from India who moves to Greenwich Village with his adult sons in tow—a family with the requisite share…

The actress Ann Dowd descended from her apartment, in Chelsea, carrying a Buddha and a potted fern. Dowd, who has lived in the same housing development since 1989, keeps a plot in the community garden: a mulchy oasis amid brick behemoths. On her way out of the elevator, a woman eyed her and said, “Are you throwing that out?” “No, I’m bringing it to the garden,” Dowd told her brightly. A moment later, she grumbled, “There’s a lot of rules in the garden. You have to plant by a certain time or you’ll lose your plot, and she’s one of those sort of police.” Garden cop: it sounded like a role for Dowd, who tends to get cast as battle-axes. On the HBO drama “The Leftovers,” she was a domineering…

“Sorry to bother,” Jed murmured. “But I think I maybe made an other mixup.” Thomas Edison squinted at the boy. He’d known for some time that Jed was unintelligent. But lately he’d begun to suspect that the boy was an actual medical idiot. “What is it now?” Edison muttered. “Did you say to mix in five centilitres?” “No,” Edison said. “Five millilitres.” A nearby beaker exploded, showering them both with shards of glass. “Sorry,” Jed said. Edison rubbed his throbbing temples. He’d hired the local boy to help with basic lab work, but even the simplest tasks were beyond his capabilities. The boy’s best hope for contributing to science would be to let doctors dissect his head to study the brain of a moron. There was just no other use…

Dignity, I said to myselfas he carried his last things into the dorm.It was not a long goodbye, nothing sad in it,all I had to do was turnand head up the hill. All I had to do was balanceon two feet that seemed to belongto a marionette who had no idea what came next or who governed the strings.There’s no emergency, I told her,just get back to your car, that’s it, that’s all that’s required.I didn’t mind accompanying her,I myself had nowhere to go. She drove east then farther eastunder a river through a tunneluntil she found herself back at home, with a purpose.And the purpose was?To recognize the green awning. To find a key in a pocket.To fit that key in the lock,take off her shoes, drop them on…

It is always startling to hear the dead breathe again, speak again. Reza Abdoh, one of the more profound and original theatre artists of the twentieth century, died, of AIDS, in the spring of 1995; he was thirty-two. And yet it’s his voice—political, inconsolable—that we have the privilege of hearing once again in “Reza Abdoh” (at MOMA PS1), the first large-scale retrospective devoted to this Iranian-born spinner of epic, omnivorous tales about queerness, AIDS, American TV and violence, the cult of celebrity, and the gay child’s relationship to the patriarchy. Co-curated by the museum’s director, Klaus Biesenbach, and Negar Azimi, Tiffany Malakooti, and Babak Radboy, of Bidoun, the show is a marvel of archival research and curatorial empathy, paying the kind of attention that Abdoh craved for most of his…

DEFINING OUR WORLDS I was in bed listening to my nine-month-­old son stir when I read Mohsin Hamid’s essay (“What Is Possible,” June 4th & 11th). When Hamid was a young man, his father let him believe that whatever he imagined was possible. “I watched cartoons on our small black­and­white TV, a TV in which I always saw colors,” he writes. A parent’s decisions are often dictated by the daily grind: feeding, bathing, finding socks and shoes, slathering on sunscreen, doing laundry. It’s easy to mistake these obligations for being a parent. My daughter, who is four, exists mostly in her own world. She loves to paint and collect bugs and examine every dandelion. It’s magical and infuriating, especially when we’re running late for swimming lessons. Hamid reminds us…

On an evening in the week after the 2016 election, the N.Y.P.D. blocked off Fifty-second Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and Donald Trump pulled up outside the 21 Club with members of his family. The restaurant is a longtime favorite of Trump’s; it has a dress code, and it foregrounds its celebrity associations, like a monument overshadowed by its own gift shop, or a midtown Mar-a-Lago. In 1984, Trump made a half-hearted attempt to buy the restaurant; two years earlier, Roy Cohn, his lawyer, threw Roger Stone a thirtieth-birthday party there. Visiting as President-elect, Trump received a standing ovation. He ate a thirty-six-dollar burger and made a promise to fellow-diners, saying, “We’ll get your taxes down. Don’t worry about it.” (In the same restaurant a few weeks later, Michael…

Last Thursday, four members of the horn-driven seventies-and-eighties hitmakers Kool & the Gang were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, at a ceremony in Manhattan, honoring an œuvre that includes “Ladies’ Night,” “Get Down on It,” “Jungle Boogie,” and the ecstatic wedding-and-bar-mitzvah anthem “Celebration.” Last Tuesday, three of those inductees, the founding members Ronald (Khalis) Bell, his brother Robert (Kool) Bell, and their childhood friend George Brown, met up at the venerable Greenwich Village club Café Wha? and greeted one another with boisterous hugs. “So where are the Jazz Birds?” Brown said. Brown, the drummer, wore a Bob Marley T-shirt. Kool, the bassist, wore a patterned shirt in shades of flamingo. Khalis wore black. They all wore chain necklaces. As Jersey City teens calling themselves the Jazz Birds, the…

In 1984, Prince recorded a song called “Paisley Park,” for his seventh record, “Around the World in a Day.” Its lyrics imagine a kind of utopia: There is a park that is knownFor the face it attractsColorful people whose hairOn one side is swept backThe smile on their facesIt speaks of profound inner peaceAsk where they’re goingThey’ll tell you nowhereThey’ve taken a lifetime leaseOn Paisley Park Prince wrote often and eagerly about the idea of sanctuary—places where his spiritual anxieties were assuaged. Back then, Paisley Park was merely an imagined paradise. “Paisley Park is in your heart,” he sings on the chorus. Three years later, it was real: in 1987, Prince built a sixty­five­thousand square­foot, ten­million­dollar recording complex in Chanhassen, Minnesota, and called it Paisley Park. It was intended to…

My friends don’t get buriedin cemeteries anymore, their wivescan’t stand the sadnessof funerals, the spectacleof wreaths and prayers, tear-soakedspeeches delivered from the altar,all those lies and encomiums,the suffocating smell of flowersfilling everything.No more undertakers in black suitsclutching handkerchiefs,old buddies weeping in corners,telling off-color stories, nipping shots,no more covered mirrors,black dresses, skullcaps and crucifixes.Sometimes it takes me a year or twoto get out to the back yard in Sheffieldor Fresno, those tall ashes scatteredunder a tree somewhere in a parksomewhere in New Jersey.I am a delinquent mournerstepping on pinecones, forgetting to pray.But the mourning goes on anywaybecause my friends keep dyingwithout a schedule,without even a funeral,while the silencedrums us from the other side,the suffocating smell of flowersfills everything, always,the darkness grows warmer, then colder,I just have to lie down on the…

THE THEATRE Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf Abrons Arts Center Elevator Repair Service’s latest caper with a classic work of literature is an anarchic parody of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (with a couple of detours into “A Streetcar Named Desire”). Kate Scelsa’s wacky script, directed by John Collins, blends gleefully artificial absurdist camp in the Charles Ludlam mode with wry feminist dramaturgy. Solid familiarity with Edward Albee’s play is an absolute prerequisite for making sense of this show. Along with everything else—a robot, a vampire, a disquisition on slash fiction—the piece includes trenchant critiques of the way that Albee (and Tennessee Williams) wrote female characters, but recognizing them requires fighting through relentless torrents of archness. It helps that the actors jump in head first, especially Vin Knight, as…

Loopy Doopy Rooftop Bar Battery Park City The popsicle was an American eleven-year-old’s idea. By 1923, that child was an adult with kids who called him Pop, and, behold, the popsicle, summer’s wholesome pleasure, was born. Not wholesome as in nutritional, but as in conjuring, for adults, an era in which their bodies were pure instruments of chasing after ice-cream trucks—having not yet grown up to be convinced, by svelte promotional material on social media, that nil-calorie frozen dessert successfully duplicates the original. The promise of Loopy Doopy, atop the Conrad Hotel, is childhood’s reprisal. Here, select a fruity (liquored) popsicle to be plopped into a giant glass of rosécco. Pay twenty-four dollars, plus tip, for this. Ponder the potential inefficiencies of a whiskey popsicle as an alcohol-delivery system. Inquire…

In the shadow of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, a stream of people snaked toward Randall’s Island Park, heading to the Governors Ball music festival. The attendees—mostly white, mostly middle class, mostly in their teens and early twenties—were in their summer best. The guys wore tennis shoes, shorts, and T-shirts. The girls’ getups were more elaborate: sneakers (Vans or Adidas), denim short shorts, a colorful halter or strapless top, and a mini-backpack or fanny pack (typically glittery). Those who dared accessorized with two buns atop their heads—the kind popularized by Björk in the nineties, a seeming lifetime ago. On the festival grounds, a stone’s throw from the LaCroix Fizz Lounge, City Winery’s Rosé Hideaway, and the Kleenex Cabana, Aaron Ghitelman stood near the booth of the voter-registration organization HeadCount, working…

“I’m watching ‘60 Minutes’ last night, with the whole Stormy Daniels thing, and the President and all that,” Stephen A. Smith said, early on a Monday near the end of March. He was sitting behind the desk in his small, sparsely furnished office at the Bristol, Connecticut, headquarters of ESPN, eating breakfast—oatmeal with brown sugar and milk, and a green smoothie. The live taping of “First Take,” the morning-time sports-debate show that he co-hosts and that has made him one of the network’s best-paid stars, would begin in a couple of hours. The night before, Daniels, a well-known performer in pornographic films, had sat across from Anderson Cooper and outlined in queasy detail the particulars of her tryst with Donald Trump, and of the hush money she subsequently received from…

On January 14, 2016, four publicists from Bell Pottinger, one of L ondon’s leading public-relations firms, flew to Johannesburg and met with a potential client: Oakbay Investments, a company controlled by Atul, Ajay, and Tony Gupta, three of South Africa’s most powerful businessmen. The Guptas, brothers who had holdings in everything from uranium mining to newspapers, maintained close ties with Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, and were notorious for having leveraged this connection for profit and influence. Three members of Zuma’s family had worked in Gupta-owned businesses. In 2015, South Africans staged large protests against Zuma’s Administration, calling it inept and corrupt. They also accused the Guptas, who were born in India, of running a “shadow government” that swung procurement decisions their way and appointed government ministers aligned…

Barry was trying to focus, but on what? Shapes began to materialize. Circles. Triangles. Three panels in outrageously bright colors. It was that squiggly AIDS painter guy from the nineteen-eighties. A figure fell into his head. Something he had once discussed with Seema at a gallery—1.8 million. O.K. He was on a bed. He was hungry, but at the same time beyond hunger. He turned his head. There were magazines displayed on a nightstand: a Bentley mag and a Patek Philippe mag and a Nat Geo. He scanned the room quickly. The Rollaboard with his watches and Shiva’s rabbit toy and his passport was neatly placed at the foot of the bed. There was also a glass coffee table topped with a bottle of Fiji water, a jar of salted…

In soccer terms, I am what is known as a “neutral,” someone who loves the sport but doesn’t follow any particular club or team. This comes with certain drawbacks—requiring me, for instance, to devote energy and interest to all twenty participants in the English Premier League, the most competitive and popular in the world, as well as to the élite clubs from the other European soccer countries. Now and again, some turn of events—a wonder goal, or horror tackle, or unexpected trade—will force me to dig a little into the Superliga Argentina or the Bra sileirão, where many of the best players start out but never stay. And when I’m feeling curious or apprehensive about the future of the game, and about the sheer range of soccer I might one…

Half Gods, by Akil Kumarasamy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Thick with suburban magic realism, this novel-in-stories tracks three generations of Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka, living in Jersey City. A teen-ager named Arjun feels guilty about asking his brother to pray for domestic stability while the family’s country burns. His grandfather, whose wife and children were killed in Sri Lanka, recites Tamil poetry at the television. “Only myth had any real pleasure left for him,” Arjun observes. In episodes spanning a century or so, family dramas mingle with tales of murder in colonial Ceylon, of an Angolan butcher who names his daughter for a sea nymph, of a man who defiantly sticks out his tongue as he is burned alive. The recurrent theme is one of human life thrown…

“No bad horses, only bad riders,” Mrs. G, the riding coach of a thirteen-year-old girl, says. She’s gentle, coaxing. It seems like good advice—her charge needs to get back on after being thrown. It’s also a kind of hypnosis: whatever happens now, it will be the girl’s responsibility. No bad lives, only bad people. HBO’s “The Tale,” a harrowing and wise two-hour drama about childhood sexual abuse, was directed by Jennifer Fox, based on an autobiographical story that Fox has been trying to tell, in many forms, for nearly four decades. (It permeates her globe-trotting documentary series from 2007, “Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman.”) When we first meet the adult Fox, played by Laura Dern, she’s a workaholic iconoclast who lives in a gorgeous loft with her loving fiancé,…