Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2, 2018 i The New Yorker

Brooke Jarvis (“Paper Tiger,” p. 44), the recipient of a 2017 Livingston Award, is a contributing writer for the Times Magazine. Reporting for this piece was facilitated by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Andrew Marantz (“Fighting Words,” p. 34) has contributed to The New Yorker since 2011 and is working on a book about politics and new media. Joseph O’Neill (Fiction, p. 52) is the author of the story collection “Good Trouble,” which came out in June. Safiya Sinclair (Poem, p. 38) is a poet and a memoirist. Her début collection, “Cannibal,” won a 2016 Whiting Award. Edward Steed (Sketchbook, p. 41) has been contributing cartoons to the magazine since 2013. Yascha Mounk (A Critic at Large, p. 59) is a lecturer on government at…

Thomas Frank Book Culture, on Columbus Ave. The essayist Frank has been examining the fading culture of liberalism since he first diagnosed the rightward shift in regional American politics in his 2004 book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” His new collection, “Rendezvous with Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society,” paints a suitably anxious picture of what has happened to what was once called the American Dream. Frank reads from the work and takes questions.—K. Leander Williams (June 27 at 7.) Amber Tamblyn Greenlight Bookstore Through clear-eyed observation, Tamblyn, a poet, essayist, and sometime actress, has sought to uncover often overlooked truths about the lives of women. Though lyrical in form, her new novel, “Any Man,” is a thriller that follows the movements of a serial rapist whose victims, who…

Robert Mercer, the New York hedge-fund magnate whose huge donations to pro-Trump groups in 2016 have been credited with putting Donald Trump in the White House, has kept a low profile since the election. But his daughter Rebekah, who runs the family’s foundation, now has a way to relive the thrill of the campaign with friends around her dinner table. In March, on a ski vacation at a rented house near Vail, Colorado, she brought a batch of copies of the “Rules of Play” for an elaborate parlor game called the Machine Learning President. Essentially, it is a race to the Oval Office in three fifteen-minute rounds. It’s a role-playing game, more like Assassin than like Monopoly, although players of this game do start out with an allotment of “cash”…

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Golden Beaks, the awards show that dares to ask, Who is the most beloved back-yard chicken in Silicon Valley? We grant you, the love affair between chickens and tech workers is an unlikely one: they’re the world’s two demographics that are least likely to engage in eye contact. Recently, however, the Washington Post reported that having a fully automated chicken coop bursting with heritage breeds is, to the Silicon Valley resident, an “eco-conscious humblebrag on par with driving a Tesla.” To a certain portion of the Bay Area’s professional class, chickens have accrued a significance far beyond being the Pet Who Makes Breakfast. A poultry correspondent recently e-mailed sixty-three Bay Area owners of back-yard chickens, almost all of them participants in Tour de Coop,…

When Bo Burnham was in eighth grade, he starred in a middle-school production of “Footloose,” in the Kevin Bacon role. Offstage, he was hardly a dance rebel. Lanky and blond, he was late to puberty; at pool parties, he would keep his hands under his armpits to hide his lack of body hair. He was a budding theatre geek, but also did basketball, math league, and the student council. He liked “Austin Powers” and Rubik’s Cubes and Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5.” He had discovered George Carlin and told a classmate that he wanted to be a comedian, but he was also considering becoming a pastor. He had a girlfriend, Cassie, who was also in “Footloose”—she sang “Let’s Hear It for the Boy.” He asked her out over AOL Instant…

crowd of supporters and protesters gathered outside the barricades, waiting to be let in. Yiannopoulos was not allowed onto the Sproul Hall steps. Instead, he stood on a concrete landing nearby, facing about thirty people. “I am here, in the name of Mario Savio, to make you stop!” one protester shouted. Yiannopoulos addressed his audience. “I invite you to join me for a moment, on your knees, to pray,” he said. “Pray for each other, for the fortitude and strength to carry on, to fight for free speech in the face of overwhelming odds.” He knelt and clasped his hands. Few joined him. Geller tried to lead the crowd in a rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” but, beyond those three words, nobody could remember the rest of the song. After…

My marriage came to an end, with consequences that were almost all beyond my powers of anticipation. One such consequence was that a series of men confided in me about their marriages past or present. These weren’t my old buddies—my old buddies suddenly viewed me with a kind of fear. These were guys with whom I’d had friendly but arm’slength dealings: a father at my kids’ school; the contractor who was painting my new place; or, to take an astounding case, my dermatologist. Previously his opinions had been restricted to the perils of moles; now he opened up, unprompted, on the pros and cons of monogamy as he’d experienced them. Either these men had heard about my new situation or something about me, some post-apocalyptic air, had led them to…

Enemies in Love, by Alexis Clark (New Press). When Elinor Powell and Frederick Albert fell in love, in 1944, it was under less than ordinary circumstances. She was an African-American nurse, working at a segregated U.S. Army base in Arizona; he was a German P.O.W. whose only encounter with black America was through jazz recordings. Frederick saw the statuesque Elinor in the dining hall and said, “I’m the man who is going to marry you.” Working from official records and family reminiscences, Clark recounts this improbable romance and the hurdles the couple overcame within a larger, more sobering story of sexism and racism in postwar America and Germany. Intensely guarded, the couple prohibited any discussion of racial identity at home; Clark describes the effect of this erasure on their…

Drury takes on the notion of theatrical style and the questions it raises. In 1978, the author Janet Malcolm published in this magazine a long and thought-provoking piece about family therapy. Titled “The One-Way Mirror,” Malcolm’s report described how a therapeutic session evolved over a period of time, shedding light on a particular psychosocial dynamic: how families respond to and resist the idea of outside “help.” Malcolm watched the proceedings through a one-way mirror, a device that allows the viewer to see in but keeps the players, so to speak, from seeing out. Theatre works in the same way. Audience members sit behind the invisible fourth wall, eavesdropping on dramas about what humans are capable, or incapable, of. The characters in “Fairview,” Jackie Sibblies Drury’s outstanding, frustrating, hilarious, and suigeneris…

THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY Louis Menand’s piece on privacy concerns ignores ethical questions about the private sector’s surveillance and tracking of people, whom it tends to treat as consumers, not as citizens (“Nowhere to Hide,” June 18th). When corporations track human beings through their clicks and purchases, they turn them into data points, purchase histories, and algorithm targets. Perhaps Menand should have considered the 1905 case of Lochner v. New York, in which, as Jeffrey Toobin explained in his overview of the Citizens United judgment, the Supreme Court’s decision “turned the Fourteenth Amendment, which was enacted to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, into a mechanism to advance the interest of business owners.” In 1886, as Toobin noted, Chief Justice Waite had declared on the Court’s behalf that…

It’s not hard to explain New Yorkers’ thing for speakeasies. The bigger the sweaty, elbowing crowd in a given location, the stronger the craving for exclusivity. The principle has generally been applied to the night-life realm—not to home goods. But that may be changing. Grace Edwards, a writer for the Netflix show “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” recently found herself in need of a mattress. She wanted better customer service than could be found at a chain like Sleepy’s (now Mattress Firm), so she consulted Yelp. She was surprised to discover that the best-reviewed mattress store in town was not a cool, venture-backed startup like Casper but an outfit called Craig’s Beds, in midtown. Edwards went to the address, which, she said, turned out to be “a shitty office building near Penn…

On a foggy February morning in Oxford, England, I arrived at the John Radcliffe Hospital, a shiplike nineteen-seventies complex moored on a hill east of the city center, for the express purpose of being hurt. I had an appointment with a scientist named Irene Tracey, a brisk woman in her early fifties who directs Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences and has become known as the Queen of Pain. “We might have a problem with you being a ginger,” she warned when we met. Redheads typically perceive pain differently from those with other hair colors; many also flinch at the use of the G-word. “I’m sorry, a lovely auburn,” she quickly said, while a doctoral student used a ruler and apurple Sharpie to draw the outline of a one-inch…

The day after the 2016 Presidential election, Terrance Hayes wrote the first of the seventy sonnets collected in his new book, “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.” Time had been altered in some baleful and uncertain way; the sonnet offered an alternative unit of measurement, at once ancient, its basic features unchanged for centuries, and urgent, its fourteen lines passing at a brutal clip. These crisis conditions suit Hayes. A former college basketball star, he treats poetry like a timed game, a theatre for dramatic last-minute outcomes. He freelances inside a form he calls “part music box, part meat grinder,” fashioning a diary of survival during a period when black men are in constant danger. Hayes, who is forty-six, won the 2010 National Book Award and is a…

NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Ravi Coltrane Birdland At age fifty-two, the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane has had time to deal with any issues of personal and artistic identity arising from his illustrious family background. It’s been a few years since he’s released an album of his own, but Coltrane’s lyrical work on “In Movement,” with Jack DeJohnette and Matthew Garrison, gained him a well-deserved Grammy nomination in 2017.—Steve Futterman (June 26-30.) William Parker The Stone at the New School Still only in his mid-sixties, William Parker is a bona-fide patriarch of new jazz: a bassist, composer, and bandleader who first gained attention with Cecil Taylor in the eighties and has since collaborated with a galaxy of…

Ry Cooder—the guitar wizard, songwriter, film-score composer, itinerant scholar and interpreter of soulful sounds from around the world and his own back yard—always disliked beingthe main dude onstage. “Being the front guy is a hard job,” he said the other day. “I’m still not sure about it. I’d rather be sharing the stage with other people.” And yet here he was in a midtown hotel lobby, the morning after a gig at Town Hall—a week into his first front-guy tour in six years. “Never thought I’d do this again,” he said. “Touring? Out of the question. Just not feasible. We had to start from scratch. I had nothing in place. No machine, like the big acts have, the country guys especially. Me and Joachim already got rid of all the…

ONCE, WHEN St. Don was in the fullness of his years, the people brought before him a woman caught in adultery and asked should they stone her. St. Don grew quiet, attempting to know the hearts of the people. Did the people want to stone her? Would they like him more if he urged them to stone her or if he urged them not to stone her? He sensed that they were actually dying to stone her. For all were holding rocks and a few even had rocks in both hands. And St. Don spoketh as follows: “What she did? Whatever it was? Was bad. So bad. Am I saying you should stone her? Well, I hear that some people have been saying she definitely should be stoned.” And the…

I want to be the blade strikingknotted brown, to kiss the nape of any hunger;American beautyberry or rutted cane, warm branchof man pinning me here in mute study. To be an achein the breast of a burst jelly is what I wanted, vine-slickand torrid in summer’s greed, pressing my fears againstthe light of the lonely. Nameless, I haunt for god and lovein extinct places, curve myself inside desire’s eye and drink.All peeled vermillion, all caught promise. Again all-seeing, and finally.To be seen. Is what I wanted. To trawl the sleep of his body.To make a burning room of this mouth. Skinned eagerwith spiderbite and holy. Split-pink, drunken. Choked quiet,as life unfolds its sticky wings in me. Snuffing me sweetly.Isn’t this love? To walk hand in hand toward the humid dark,enter…

When I was a little kid in ChicagoJimmy Yancey, the great bluesand boogie-woogie piano player,worked as a groundskeeperat Comiskey Park, where the White Sox played—Years later, I listened to his recordsand did the best I could to imitate his left hand, not knowing he’d playedbaseball for the Chicago All-Americansin the Negro Leagues, throwing downhis best curves and sliders on boththe black and white keys, rememberinghow he’d appeared as a tap dancerand pianist in Europe and at Carnegie Hall,then kept his day job working at Comiskeyfor twenty-five years, until he diedin 1951, sweeping the infield…

The wildfires that consumed large tracts of Southern California last December came close to ravaging the rustic-bohemian town of Ojai, which has long been the seat of the Ojai Music Festival, America’s most vibrant new-music gathering. Advancing from the north, the east, and the south, the fires got within a few miles of the town before a determined firefighting effort and a lucky shift in the wind held them back. Today, if you survey the Ojai Valley from an overlook you will see charred mountainsides looming over an island of green. Not surprisingly, the 2018 festival, which took place over four days in early June, felt different from past editions, which have unleashed wild sounds in idyllic surroundings. The idyll remained, but it seemed more fragile this time. The sounds…