Innholdsfortegnelse for July 30, 2018 i The New Yorker

Sam Knight (“The Impossible Choice,” p. 30), a journalist based in London, became a staff writer earlier this year. Patricia Spears Jones (Poem, p. 28), the recipient of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize, is a poet, a playwright, and an activist. Her latest book is “A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems.” Elisabeth Zerofsky (“Memory Politics,” p. 18) has contributed to newyorker.com since 2012. She lives in Paris. T. Coraghessan Boyle (Fiction, p. 50) has published sixteen novels and eleven short-story collections. His new novel, “Outside Looking In,” will be released in the spring. Sophia Hollander (The Talk of the Town, p. 15) is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Times. Laura Miller (Books, p. 65), the author of “The…

New York City Poetry Festival Governors Island A weekend’s worth of versifiers will read at this event, which takes over the green space on Governors Island for the eighth straight year. Dozens of presses, journals, and poetry societies (The Adroit Journal, Anomaly, Belladonna, Brooklyn Poets, Indolent Books) are represented across its five stages, allowing audiences to get acquainted with a wide range of voices. Terrance Hayes, one of the marquee names on hand, ranks among the most accomplished poets working today. He reads on July 29 at 3 P.M. on the White Horse Stage.—K. Leander Williams (July 28-29 from 11 A.M. to 6.) Ottessa Moshfegh Strand Book Store The unnamed young woman who narrates “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” Moshfegh’s new novel, suffers from a form of pre-millennial…

For the past decade, an uptown mortgage broker named George Pakenham has been predicting that the scourge of engine exhaust caused by needless automobile idling will soon become as socially unacceptable as secondhand smoke. After years of rapping on the windows of passenger cars and delivery vans, reminding drivers that the law prohibits idling for longer than three minutes within the city limits, and only occasionally being rebuffed with remarks like “Go move to China” and “You are not human,” he felt like he had reason to be optimistic. He has produced a children’s book devoted to the subject, “Big Nose, Big City,” and also a documentary, “Idle Threat,” which has screened in Nevada City, California, and at Westfield High School, in New Jersey, where he was, as he recalls,…

The British Prime Minister, Theresa May, often strikes people as cautious, but her political career has been defined by acts of boldness, often on behalf of unfashionable causes, or in the face of seemingly impossible circumstances. The misconception arises in part because she is an awkward person. May, who is sixty-one, is tall and stooped, serious and shy. Since she was elected to Parliament, in the late nineteen-nineties, she has dressed in sharp, eye-catching clothes, as if to offset the fact that she is not personally vivacious, but the effect is often to accentuate what is not there. May doesn’t say much, by anyone’s standard, let alone that of a politician. On a recent sunny afternoon, in the garden of the Prime Minister’s residence, at 10 Downing Street, I watched…

Michael Robertson’s “The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy” (Princeton) is instructive and touching, if sometimes inadvertently funny. The instructive parts rise from Robertson’s evocation and analysis of a series of authors who aren’t likely to be well known to American readers, even those of a radical turn of mind. All four wrote books and imagined ideal societies with far more of an effect on their time than we now remember. The touching parts flow from the quixotic and earnest imaginations of his heroes and heroine: the pundit Edward Bellamy, the designer William Morris, the pioneering gay writer Edward Carpenter, and the feminist social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. His utopians showed enormous courage in imagining and, to one degree or another, trying to create new worlds against…

REMAKING THE ECONOMY There is one aspect of universal basic income that Nathan Heller didn’t touch on in his article (A Critic at Large, July 9th & 16th). Because people would no longer need to live where the jobs are, a U.B.I. would represent a redistribution not simply from the wealthy few to the masses but also from geographical areas of concentrated wealth to, really, anywhere else. I think this would be good. Some people are perfectly content to live in a cabin far off the beaten track, if they can afford their canned beans. Others, who have seen their towns wither, could experience a renewal of hope. Meanwhile, the fevered rise in cost of living in places like New York City or Austin, Texas, would likely ease up,…

Most every Tuesday, a crew of cartoonists face the harrowing task of presenting their weekly batches of gags to this magazine for judgment. Afterward, they’re ready for comfort food, preferably at the French stalwart Pergola des Artistes, on West Forty-sixth Street, which they’ve patronized for fifteen years or so. On a recent afternoon, they had a crasher: the film director Gus Van Sant. Van Sant’s latest movie, “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot,” is an adaptation of a darkly funny memoir by the late cartoonist John Callahan—played in the movie by Joaquin Phoenix—who, in a drunk-driving accident at the age of twenty-one, became a quadriplegic. In his memoir, published in 1989, Callahan refers to Sam Gross—a founding member of the Pergola gang—as the “grandaddy of the sick cartoon.”…

Livia Cetti belongs to a long tradition of paper-flower artists, dating to around 100 B.C., when paper was invented, in China. Among them: the eighteenth-century English artist Mary Delany, who began making her famed botanical collages at the age of seventy-two, after she noticed a geranium petal falling onto a dark table. For Cetti—who creates three-dimensional blossoms from hand-dyed crêpe paper and tissue paper—inspiration struck earlier. The daughter of hippie parents, she grew up on a farm outside Santa Barbara, down the road from Ronald Reagan. (“Queen Elizabeth came up the mountain and stuff.”) Starting at age six, she began her days by putting on a blue leotard and heading outside. “My parents would lock me out of the house, and I’d go out collecting flowers,” she recalled. “I thought…

Not quite two months after the Presidential Inauguration, a Henry Taylor painting appeared on the cover of Art in America: “Cicely and Miles Visit the Obamas” (2017). In this portrait, the Obamas are invisible, represented only by the house they’d just left, while the actress Cicely Tyson and her lover Miles Davis have been transported from a long-ago black-and-white society photograph onto the green impasto glory of the White House front lawn. Transported? Transmogrified. The original paparazzi snap is from the 1968 première of “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” a film in which Tyson had a supporting role—in 1968, a black actress could rarely expect more—and she is playing a supporting role here, too. The nature of this support is interesting. Her hand is on Davis’s sleeve, a gesture…

On the afternoon of February 9, 2011, in a suite at the City Hotel in Bucharest, two men, hoping to sell a stash of Russian military-grade weapons on the black market, met with an ebullient businessman in his sixties named Yianni. A short man with a neatly trimmed beard and a bulging midriff, Yianni was, the men had learned, a financier entrusted by the Taliban to buy armaments. As is advisable when broaching the sale of millions of dollars’ worth of illicit goods, the men—a thirty-something Iranian-American who once worked as a translator for the U.S. Army and a Chicago-based Israeli-American in his mid-fifties—began their negotiations with caution. But after several meetings they were reassured by Yianni’s confident manner and social ease. The men had put together a list of…

“You look at a dark immigrant in that long line at JFK,” Kailash, the protagonist of Amitava Kumar’s new nonfiction novel, “Immigrant, Montana” (Knopf), says of his fellow New Yorkers. “You look at him and think that he wants your job and not that he just wants to get laid.” In 1990, Kailash arrives in New York City from the eastern-Indian city of Ara to study literature; sex for him has gone only as far as a fleeting topless shot at the movies before the censor’s cut. John Donne, in “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” imagined his lover’s body as his America, awaiting discovery; Kailash is hopeful that America the beautiful can be explored through its women’s bodies. Getting laid has always been a way that outsiders have attempted…

Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove). Keiko, who narrates this science-fiction-tinged novel in a calm, hyperlogical voice, is thirty-six and has worked at a Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years. Other people’s emotions and motivations are foreign to her. Her sole desire is to be “a faithful disciple to the store,” with its clearly defined transactions and tasks. She eats only food from the store, and copies her coworkers’ speech and attire in order to resemble “a normal person.” But her placid existence troubles those around her, and she is faced with a choice: conform to social expectations about career and marriage, or maintain her unorthodox path to fulfillment, at the risk of total alienation. Slave Old Man, by Patrick…

THE THEATRE Antigone Marcus Garvey Park As those who endured Shakespeare in the Park’s clunkily Trumpian “Julius Caesar” last summer can attest, it’s easy to go awry when trying to inject contemporary relevance into a time-honored text. Happily, the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s tight, punchy “Antigone” is energized, rather than dragged down, by its modern references. The director, Carl Cofield, sets the Sophocles tragedy in the world of Black Lives Matter; when the ruler Creon (a commanding Ty Jones) attempts to prevent Antigone (Alexandria King) from burying her slain brother, open rebellion feels like the only answer. Not everything lands, and the acting can be uneven—a little of Anthony Vaughn Merchant’s comic antics as a guard goes a long way. But, through music, dance (the choreography is by Tiffany…

Clinton Hill A man walks into a bar, declines a drink because he’s “waiting for a friend,” and, when the “friend” arrives, goes in for a hug—torsos arranged at a pious distance. Thus, a bartender at Hot Bird explained, goes the punch-lineless joke of a first Tinder date. “I don’t know if there’s some sort of manual that everyone reads,” he said. Hot Bird, eight years old, is named after an obsolete local barbecue business whose yellow signs, which sent customers “left at light” for chicken, inadvertently punished the hungry for decades after it closed. These days, beneath a wall where one such sign flaunted meat sits a fine venue for modern mating, a ritual that often begins with a test of accuracy in self-advertising. (Does, for example, a date…

Mothers may know best. But what happens when they disagree? On a recent evening, six women and one baby gathered at Beacon Bar, on the Upper West Side, to discuss the morally fraught business of parenthood. The event was convened by Sarah Chesters, an Australian ethics professor turned interior designer and mother (to Hugo, four, and Heidi, fourteen months), who had found herself riveted by the heated debates in online parenting forums. Part of the attraction, she confessed, came from guilty pleasure. “It’s like watching ‘The Real Housewives,’ ” she said. “When someone’s just selling baby furniture, I’m, like, ‘Eh.’ ” In a post on UWS Mommas, a Facebook group for Upper West Side parents, Chesters proposed a series of in-person ethics salons “where you get to hash things out…

On a rainy afternoon in March, Andrzej Nowak’s lanky frame loomed in the cramped, faux-Renaissance entryway of the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, in Warsaw’s Old Town Market Square. For the past twenty-five years, Nowak, a decorated historian of Poland and Russia, has been conducting regular interviews with Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of Law and Justice, the conservative political party that came to power in Poland in 2015. Since then, liberal leaders and intellectuals in Western Europe have begun to fear that the country, after two decades as the model student of European liberalism, is retreating from democracy. Critics point to the loyalists at the heads of public media, the increasing harassment of opposition politicians and judges, the country’s refusal to accept its European Union-mandated quota of refugees, and, especially,…

Once a beauty, full figured, belovedAnd then a fever, sweats, water vomitedUntil the body gave out. And then, Wings and lyres and legion of otherAngels. Singing, dancing, flying about, But once a beauty remembersPhysical love and then its loss Eternal life seems mundaneNo conflict or need or desire. Thus, this seraphim held melancholyGentle as a lull in a long conversation But heaven allows only jubilance.Possibly the angel needed to return Human: with feelings, tears and laughterOr find a way to shape the sadness intoA moment of beauty when the angel’s wings Spread and flight moves to breathingFull of vision. There the angel’s tears bondwith the visitor’s fear, awe. It could be a filmmaker’s perambulating Berlin,in search of a reason to considerthe spirit, those angels seton top of monumentsacross the handsome…

VALENTINE’S DAY This past Valentine’s Day, I was in Kingman, Arizona, with my wife, Nola, staying in the Motel 6 there, just off the I-40. You might not think of Kingman as a prime location for a romantic getaway (who would?), but Nola and I have been married for fifteen years now, and romance is just part of the continuum—sometimes it blows hot, sometimes cold, and we certainly don’t need a special day or place for it. We’re not sentimentalists. We don’t exchange heart-shaped boxes of chocolates or glossy cards with manufactured endearments inside, and we don’t go around kissing in public or saying “I love you” twenty times a day. (To my mind, couples like that are always suspect—really, who are they trying to fool?) Besides which, we were…

“People with no experience of God tend to think that leaving the faith would be a liberation, a flight from guilt, rules,” observes Will Kendall, one of the three central characters in “The Incendiaries,” R. O. Kwon’s début novel. In fiction, there’s a corollary: to the nonbelieving reader, a character’s religious fervor can be a hindrance. Reading a novel requires, if not outright belief, the willing suspension of its opposite. The characters in fiction may be invented, but the concerns and the passions that propel them—love, ambition, anger, fear, curiosity, desire, loneliness—are ones that everyone shares. When an imaginary character cares most deeply about a god who seems equally imaginary, the spell can weaken; a reader may impatiently wonder when the character will wise up and throw off these phantasmal…