Innholdsfortegnelse for July 9-16, 2018 i The New Yorker

Ariel Levy (“Not from Around Here,” p. 50), a staff writer since 2008, is the author of the memoir “The Rules Do Not Apply.” David Sedaris (“Active Shooter,” p. 32) has contributed to The New Yorker since 1995. His latest book, “Calypso,” came out in May. Adrian Chen (“No More Secrets,” p. 24) began contributing to the magazine in 2015. He is currently at work on a book about video-game culture. Joy Harjo (Poem, p. 40) is a winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize. Her play “Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light” will be published in 2019. Nathan Heller (A Critic at Large, p. 65), a staff writer, has contributed to the magazine since 2011. Benjamin Moser (Books, p. 70) is the author of “Why…

In a week when borders dominated the news, David Goren was drawing up a different kind of map. On a recent Saturday afternoon, he was on the hunt for pirate radio stations. With one hand, he tuned an FM dial connected to a directional antenna. With the other, he jotted frequencies onto a notepad advertising Ortho Tri-Cyclen. (“That’s my wife’s,” he said. “She’s a nurse-practitioner.”) Jazz, from a legal station, started playing. “Sometimes there’s a Haitian station near here,” Goren said. He swivelled the antenna, and the music turned into a burst of Creole. “This is Fièrte Haitienne”—Haitian Pride. “Of the thirty-plus stations I hear at my home, in Flatbush, Brooklyn, about a third of them are Haitian,” Goren said. Goren, who has lively eyes and a graying beard, works…

One day in February, Francis Inserra, of Rockville, Maryland, sat down at his computer and found a message alerting him that a French count was trying to get in touch. “My original thought was, Is this a game? Am I being played? Where’s the Nigerian prince?,” Inserra, a federal attorney, recalled the other day. In the message, an old friend described a Facebook post that he’d seen, by Aymeric de Rougé, the proprietor of Baronville—a twenty-four-hundred-acre estate, an hour southwest of Paris, that de Rougé’s ancestor the Marquis d’Aligre had acquired in 1783. “Let’s test the power of Facebook,” de Rougé had written. He explained that he was searching for descendants of an American soldier who bivouacked with his unit at the family’s château in the summer of 1944. “They…

It came up through the ground in the night. The worst things never wait for sunrise. She had soothed the bad dream from her little son until he breathed smoothly in the dark and then crossed the floors to the bed and climbed in without brushing the sand from her feet. The house sat alone in the marsh. They couldn’t afford the beach a mile away, and so their consolation was the birds. The great herons, the cormorants, the lit candles of ibis. As she drifted off, she thought of the birds sleeping out in their nests, although by then they were no longer there; they’d already fled. She was almost asleep when she felt a great tongue licking the edges of her body, and she opened her eyes to…

LOCAVORE VERSUS ECOLOGY Rebecca Mead, in her account of wealthy foodies flocking to the Faroe Islands, describes traditional ways of cooking local seabirds like northern fulmars and razorbills (“Meal Ticket,” June 18th). She may be unaware of the disastrous future facing seabirds, which are one of the most seriously jeopardized categories of wildlife. As Mead points out, razorbills are eaten in the Faroes because the population of Atlantic puffins, formerly the region’s delicacy of choice, is now dwindling drastically throughout the North Atlantic. But multiple international agencies have designated razorbills as worthy of conservation concern as well. The fact that they survive in reasonable numbers in the Faroes belies their poor health as a species. It is a crime against nature to kill these endangered creatures to satisfy adventurous…

At the northernmost end of Manhattan Island, in the shadow of one of the city’s oldest forests, is the last Irish pub in a neighborhood once dotted with nearly a hundred of them. The story of the Liffy II begins in the early nineteen-sixties, when an Irishman called Sean Cassidy took over a ground-floor room from an Italian whose name has been lost to history. Cassidy opened a small tavern and called it Innisfree, after a W. B. Yeats poem about an uninhabited island, which is inscribed in the Irish passport. In 1968, Cassidy passed the reins to Andy Carney, a thirty-three-year-old former bus driver from Ballaghaderreen (current population 1,808); Carney sold the business a few years later, but stayed on as a bartender. He is there to this day,…

Hydroponics are a slippery slope. You might find yourself, one Sunday morning, at a Santa Monica farmers’ market, loitering among the apples, say. You come across a bunch of papalo, a leafy herb native to central Mexico, and toss it in your mouth (your tastes are expansive; a papalo leaf is nothing to you) and wham!: a brand-new flavor. Suddenly, you’re up at all hours, watching vertical-farming videos on YouTube, ordering seed packets from eBay, buying rhizomes—rhizomes!—and worrying about spider mites. You get some fennel crowns and a pouch of parasitic wasps, and you’re on your way. On Worth Street, in Tribeca, deep underground beneath the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary and the Michelinstarred restaurant Atera, lies Farm.One, Manhattan’s largest hydroponic farm. That’s distinct from aquaponics (farming with fish)…

On a cold Tuesday morning in March, Andy Byford, the president of the New York City Transit Authority, was working the subway turnstiles—the gates, as he calls them—at the Chambers Street station, in Tribeca. Byford was seven weeks into the job, which had come with a seemingly impossible mission: to rebuild the city’s beleaguered publictransit system, after years of chaotic decline and stark dysfunction. He had vowed to visit every one of New York’s subway stations—there are four hundred and seventy-two—and to ride every bus route, in an effort that was part good-will tour, part reconnaissance mission. “How was your trip?” he asked a commuter. No reply. Waves of passengers rumbled past. He reminded himself to look for people who weren’t wearing earphones. Making eye contact was key. “How was…

There was an unearthly quality to the atmosphere inside the Frieze New York art fair, like the air in a plane—still but pressurized, with an unsettling hum—when the fiction writer Ottessa Moshfegh visited to speak about her work one afternoon in May. “I hate this fair already,” she said when she walked in, handing her ticket to a very tall, very pale man dressed entirely in black lace. Almost immediately, she was lost in the labyrinth of works for sale: Takashi Murakami’s lurid blond plastic milkmaids with long legs and erect nipples; the words “any messages?” spelled out in neon tubing. It was like an enactment of the world inhabited by the protagonist of Moshfegh’s forthcoming novel, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” who works at a gallery in Chelsea,…

In the mid-seventies, George Clinton and his band Funkadelic were working on a new song, “Get Off Your Ass and Jam,” at a studio in Los Angeles. At the time, Funkadelic was basically a psychedelic-rock band that took apart soul ballads, and its heavy, sprawling jams felt like an endurance test. If you made it through them, then you tasted true freedom. The musicians were taking a break when, according to Clinton, a white kid wandered into the session—probably “a smack addict,” as he recalled in his memoir, from 2014, “Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?” The kid asked if they would give him twenty-five dollars for a guitar solo. Clinton was sufficiently bemused to agree. He played “like he was possessed,” Clinton wrote.…

Most countries have a writer like him: the bearded eminence whose face adorns postage stamps, and whose name dignifies avenues, and whose Complete Works sit, undisturbed, on grandparents’ bookshelves. Since no one can graduate from high school without feigning knowledge of his work, many people read him far too young, and come to view him as a child might regard an improving vegetable. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Knight of the Imperial Order of the Rose, founder of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, has long been Brazil’s ambassador to the international society of official writers. He seemed to be preparing for the role for most of his adult life, which was so colorless and conventional it might have been taunting future biographers. An outstanding employee of the Ministry of Agriculture,…

Anika Noni Rose is not a humble performer. She views the audience’s attention as a kind of birthright. When I first saw her, in 2003, in George C. Wolfe’s production of Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s indelible musical, “Caroline, or Change,” I was struck not only by her self-possession in the role but by her curtain call. “Yes,” she seemed to say without saying it, as she bowed, not too deeply, “isn’t it wonderful that we’re here together to celebrate how great I was?” Divas ranging from Leontyne Price to Aretha Franklin to FKA Twigs have a similar hauteur, and why shouldn’t entitlement be part of their act? Certainly, in order to get their art out there, they’ve had to endure a level of crap that would have crushed more…

The composer Stephen Trask helped yank the musical into the indie-rock age with “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” in 1998. His first new musical since then, “This Ain’t No Disco” (he wrote the score with Peter Yanowitz, of the Wallflowers), travels back to the dirty old New York of 1979, with characters including the Studio 54 impresario Steve Rubell. The Atlantic Theatre Company’s production, now in previews, features (from left) Samantha Marie Ware, Peter LaPrade, Theo Stockman, and Chilina Kennedy. THE THEATRE Cyprus Avenue Public There is no faulting the performance of the great character actor Stephen Rea, as a terminally bigoted Belfast Unionist who somehow becomes convinced that his infant granddaughter is the former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, whom he loathes. The rest of the cast of…

Some people look to the stock market to read the national mood. Eugene Thacker, a philosopher at the New School, can look to the enrollment numbers in his course on pessimism, which have increased over the past few semesters. “There’s a sense people are having that the world is big, that there are a lot of dark forces,” he said recently. Students come seeking answers. “The conventional models, like protest, get lost.” Thacker is in his forties, with spiky black hair. The other day, he had on a black T-shirt, a black scarf, and black pants, accessorized with a black tote bag. He began studying pessimism, he explained, because “philosophy begins with disappointment.” A few years ago, he wrote “In the Dust of This Planet,” a book of “horror philosophy”…

Nikolai jumped down from his sleigh, ran to Natasha, and helped her dismount from her horse. “Natasha,” Nikolai whispered in French. “I’ve made up my mind about the Internet Research Agency.” “Have you?” Natasha asked, beaming. “Yes, sister, yes,” Nikolai said. “Maman has bought me a camera, SIM cards, and disposable cell phones. In the spring, I leave for Greeley, Colorado.” Natasha clapped her hands and turned her rapturous face up to his. “You’ve done a wonderful thing.” Prince Andrei, having spent his whole life in society, felt he had encountered everything in society, and nothing in society could interest him. Except the Così in northern Illinois, with its sandwich boxes, signature flatbreads, and woodlike surfaces. He held up his camera, spinning around the room. The restaurant employees took no…

It’s closing time. Violence is my boyfriendWith a cross to bearHoisted on by the church.He wears it everywhere.There are no female deities in the Trinity.I don’t know how I’m going to get out of here,Said the flying fish to the tree.Last call.We’ve had it with history, we who look for vision hereIn the Indian and poetry bar, somewhereTo the left of Hell.Now I have to find my way, when there’s a river to cross and noBoat to get me there, when there appears to be no home at all.My father gone, chasedBy the stepfather’s gun. Get out of here.I’ve found my father at the bar, his ghost at least, some pieceOf him in this sorry place. The boyfriend’s convincing to a crowd.Right now, he’s the spell of attraction. What tales…

It was only after waking for the first time in yearsbeside a stranger, in that gray valleywhere morning hasn’t yet taken responsibility,that I thought I understood at last why the man from the bar who never spokebut drank quietly every day at the same seatfor the same hours, and whom I was oncepaid to follow home, would sit in his smallliving room and call the pound on speakerphoneand ask about a dog that didn’t existso that when the receptionistwent walking through the kennelsholding the cordless receiverlooking for the dog-that-wasn’tyou could hear all hell rattling in the cages,thrashing the chains, could almost sense,even from where I was standingoutside his window looking through a breakin the curtains, the drool shining on the teethbared in the black, dank holes, howenough abandoned things screamingcould…

In 1795, a group of magistrates gathered in the English village of Speenhamland to try to solve a social crisis brought on by the rising price of grain. The challenge was an increase in poverty, even among the employed. The social system at the time, which came to be known as Elizabethan Poor Law, divided indigent adults into three groups: those who could work, those who could not, and those—the “idle poor”—who seemed not to want to. The able and disabled received work or aid through local parishes. The idle poor were forced into labor or rounded up and beaten for being bums. As grain prices increased, the parishes became overwhelmed with supplicants. Terrorizing idle people turned into a vast, unmanageable task. The magistrates at Speenhamland devised a way of…

Harvey Milk, by Lillian Faderman (Yale). After his election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, in 1977, Milk became “the most prominent homosexual in America.” This biography traces the path from his Long Island school days to his murder, less than a year after he took office. Along the way, it describes his sexual awakening at the Metropolitan Opera, a political flirtation with Barry Goldwater, and the hippiedom that eventually led him out West. Milk’s significance as a symbol of gay liberation has eclipsed the reality of the man—a political latecomer and rhetorical savant, whose compassion for the dispossessed vied with an avarice for publicity that sometimes drew him toward populism. Milk’s achievements as an organizer and a campaigner are all the more apparent for being presented along…