Innholdsfortegnelse for July 23, 2018 i The New Yorker

Edmund White Books Are Magic In “The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading,” his latest memoir, White recalls how his existence has been, to a large degree, an open book. “I’ve always associated reading and writing with sex,” he offers, just before recounting the role of libraries in his sexual awakening and considering how visits to bookstores taught him about gay identity. He’s making the rounds on behalf of the new work, which could also be classified as literary criticism. He will also appear at the W. 112th St. location of Book Culture, on July 19, at 7. —K. Leander Williams (July 18 at 7:30.) 33 ⅓: Writers on Music Strand Book Store Since 2003, when its first volume, devoted to Dusty Springfield’s classic recording “Dusty in Memphis,” was…

California banned cannabis in 1913, under an amendment to the Poison Act which made it illegal to possess “loco-weed” and its derivatives. That contentious period, and the travails of a fictional farmer named William (Bull) Lowell, who goes to jail for his insistence on growing, form the backstory of Lowell Herb Co., which produces the top-selling pre-roll in the state. The company was founded in 2017, shortly after Proposition 64 reversed California’s marijuana prohibition and created a process for people convicted of weed-related crimes to have their sentences reduced or overturned and their records expunged. (There were some half a million marijuana arrests between 2006 and 2015.) This spring, the company, seeking to expand, placed a billboard outside Men’s Central Jail, in Los Angeles, inviting those pardoned for cannabis infractions…

All day long I feel my pilgrimworry. Crude and unforgivingas the buckle on my boots. I markthe boundaries of the townand then I build a fence. I builda pillory and scaffold. I bringmy gun into the forests.And my axe. Inside me. I hurlmy brittle body at the pines.I have a plan for them. A wayto make them useful, whichis God’s compact with the world.Whatever does not welcomeme I tear asunder. Whateverwelcomes me was mine tosack and bring to my knees.I give the gift of my hungerto everyone. And thenI build a fence. The doeis certainly a sorceress.The sparrow was the womansmiling into the mirrorof the well. What will I makeof this country? Inside me.My pilgrim huddles in the cornerof my heart. Which I hatefor its hopeful sounding.Its unwillingness to knowthe…

There is an urge to be good. To be seen to be good. To be seen. Also to be. Badness, invisibility, things as they are in reality as opposed to things as they seem, death itself—these are out of fashion. This is basically what I told Mary. I said, Mary, all these things I just mentioned are not really done anymore, and also, while we’re on the subject, that name of yours is not going to fly, nobody’s called Mary these days, it’s painful for me even to say your name—actually, could you get the hell out of here? Mary left. Scout came by—a great improvement. Scout is so involved and active. She is on all platforms, and rarely becomes aware of anything much later than, say, the three-hundredth…

The Language of Kindness, by Christie Watson (Tim Duggan Books). With grit and wisdom, this memoir of life as a nurse encompasses birth, death, and the unpredictable workings of minds and bodies in between. The book roams through the NICU and the psychiatric ward, capturing both the dedication of the staff members and their mistakes. Watson, who worked in British hospitals for twenty years before becoming a novelist, recounts the crises, triumphs, and uncertainties inherent in nursing others—which, she writes, “means doing for them what they would normally do, when they have no will to do it, until they have will to do it.” In the book’s final pages, she turns to elder care, and considers the inevitable transformation that occurs when a caregiver becomes a mourner. Kingdoms of…

N.Y.C. TRANSIT TRUTHS I didn’t give a damn about New York’s troubled subway system until I read William Finnegan’s article about the complex challenges facing Andy Byford, the new president of the New York City Transit Authority (“Tunnel Vision,” July 9th & 16th). The man could write ten thousand words on the history of the ironing board or the evolution of the toothbrush, and I’d settle in for what would surely be a deeply satisfying read. Nancy Debevoise Lander, Wyo. Of Byford’s time as the head of transit in Toronto, Finnegan writes that, “by nearly all accounts, he turned around a troubled transit system with spectacular results.” Not in my experience. Much of our public transit is overcrowded and our city is generally underserved—the connecting system of subways, buses,…

Three days after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, Jim Obergefell—the lead plaintiff in Obergefell v. Hodges, the civil-rights case that granted marriage to same-sex couples, with a majority opinion authored by Kennedy—took a Lyft to the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C., to officiate at a wedding. It was his ninth. Obergefell has married eight same-sex couples and one straight couple. “I just went online one day and clicked the ‘Ordain Me’ button,” he explained before the ceremony. “It was easy.” Roughly three years earlier, Obergefell had been sitting across town, at the Supreme Court, waiting to find out if he could legally call himself a widower. In 2013, Obergefell had married his partner, John Arthur, in Maryland, because their home state of Ohio had banned…

One Saturday early this summer, five members of the c ast of the sketch-comedy show “SCTV,” Canada’s answer to “Saturday Night Live,” which aired between 1976 and 1984, assembled at the London Hotel, in midtown. They were there to meet Martin Scorsese, who is making a documentary about “SCTV” for Netflix. The plan was for an on-camera conversation, to be conducted in the hotel’s penthouse suite, but when the cast arrived, at 7 p.m., Scorsese hadn’t yet shown up. They were escorted to a small sitting room, where they lounged on hotel-style furniture, drank wine, and picked at a spread of M&M’s and charcuterie. “What are you thinkin’, honey?” Andrea Martin called over to Martin Short, who was stretched out on a sofa. “Me?” Short said. “I can’t wait.” He…

Branko Milanović grew up in Yugoslavia, during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. He became an economist at the World Bank and then a professor at CUNY; on his blog, Globalinequality, he discusses economics and reminisces about the past. Recently, he published a post about his youth. He had been reading histories of the postwar decades, by Svetlana Alexievich, Tony Judt, and others. Faced with these grim accounts, Milanović felt protective of his past. “However hard I tried,” he wrote, “I just could not see anything in my memories that had to deal with collectivization, killings, political trials, endless bread lines, imprisoned free thinkers,” and so on. Instead, he had mainly good memories—of “long dinners discussing politics,” the “excitement of new books,” “languid sunsets, whole-night concerts, epic soccer games, girls in miniskirts.”…

What are you doing? I don’t mean what are you doing with your life, or in general, but what are you doing right now? The answer, in one respect, is simple enough: you’re reading this magazine. Obviously. From a certain economic perspective, however, you’re doing something else, something you don’t realize, something with a sneaky motive that you aren’t admitting to yourself: you are signalling. You are sending signals about the kind of person you are, or want to be. What’s that you say—you’re reading this in the bath, or on your phone in bed, or otherwise in private? Well, the same argument applies. You are acquiring the tools for a “fitness display.” This, the economist Robin Hanson and the writer-programmer Kevin Simler argue in their new book, “The Elephant…

The elms of Central Park were young in 1905, when a musical businessman founded the Naumburg Orchestral Concerts. In this summer’s series, on the evening of July 17, the chamber collective the Knights pairs Brahms’s rollicking “Hungarian Dances” with Anna Clyne’s elegy for her mother, the calmly devastating “Within Her Arms.” On July 31, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the soprano Sherezade Panthaki collaborate on an all-Vivaldi program. Like the Park, the concerts are free—a gift to the city’s people. ART “Canova’s George Washington” Frick Collection “I wasn’t aware that was something a person could do,” trills King George III, in “Hamilton,” on learning that George Washington will give up the helm of the United States. In 1816, North Carolina commissioned Europe’s leading sculptor, Antonio Canova, to memorialize…

You might end up as lost as the crew of the S.S. Minnow on your way to this Soho Grand cocktail lounge, which, in keeping with its desert-island theme, floats just off to the side of the hotel, at the mercy of the open sky. From mid-spring through the end of summer, once you find the entry gate, you can walk over a sand-brick path lined with fan palms and maidenhair ferns and emerge into a maze of patio umbrellas and Adirondack chairs that, much like the huts on “Gilligan’s Island,” expands to an unexpected size. On a recent afternoon, the nautical-jungle atmosphere was buoyed by a waitress in a blue-and-white Breton shirt, who issued a muted Tarzan yell as she strode by with a bottle of brut. Many patrons,…

Just forty-eight hours before Justin Bieber proposed to his on-again, off-again girlfriend, the model Hailey Baldwin, a twenty-three-year-old paparazzo named Miles Diggs was scanning through photos of the pop star on Instagram. He was searching for clues. Diggs and his business partner—a thirty-nine-year-old Dominican father of two and veteran paparazzo named Cesar Peña—had already snapped pictures of the newly engaged Katharine McPhee and David Foster, and they were mapping out their day. They could either take Peña’s white Suburban down to the West Side Heliport, where suntanned luminaries would be returning from the Hamptons, or they could go straight to Bieber. They decided on the latter option. Parked outside Bieber’s midtown hotel, they speculated about his next move. “Hailey’s still in the Hamptons, as far as I can tell from…

The travelled first weeks of July, 2017, were especially intense for Carrie Gracie, the BBC’s China editor. She seven thousand miles to record more than a dozen television and radio pieces. The dissident Liu Xiaobo died, and Gracie scrambled to explain to the British public why the Chinese authorities had found him so dangerous. “For a jealous ruling party, an outsider with conviction is an affront,” she wrote, “and those who cannot be bought or intimidated are mortal enemies.” On July 14th, Gracie left for a vacation. She flew to London from Beijing—where, for two hundred days a year, she lived alone, in a rental apartment—and caught a train to the Scottish coast. She planned to unplug from the news cycle and spend time with her children, Rachel, twenty, and…

Writer, blighter, fighter—what do you want?I want to repeat myself. The fumbling heart,Thud-thud. The microbe clangor in every cell. I want to publish a book with on every pageThe one same poem. Not by me. But mine.The Lamentation of the Fiery Furnace, Or of the Passage. The Chorus of the Many,The Celebration of Ancestors Not By Blood,Thud-thud. The Few. On every page the same, And a mixed chorus on every page that strugglesTo repeat again the birthright I cannot claimWithout repeating my inheritance. Again The Chorus of the Money. The ExecrationOf Fire. The Woman Who Deceived the Nazis.Mixed chorus on the cover and every page. The prophecy says you turn your back on the oceanAnd lug your battered oar far inland, untilYou find a people who don’t know what the…

As a child, I was obsessed with Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl.” Like Anne, I wanted to grow up to be a writer; like her, I kept a diary (though less faithfully), which for a time I addressed, following her model, as Kitty; like her, I agonized over how little my mother understood me and longed to swoon in a boy’s arms. My obsession peaked at the age of eight with a visit to the Secret Annexe, in Amsterdam—the warren of rooms where the Frank family hid from the Nazis. I had imagined it countless times and had the floor plan memorized, but seeing it was a shock: it was so much smaller than I had pictured. That may have been the moment I began to understand…