Innholdsfortegnelse for August 6-13, 2018 i The New Yorker

Patrick Radden Keefe (“Crime Family,” p. 32) is a staff writer. His new book, “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” will be out in February. A. E. Stallings (Poem, p. 62) recently published a verse translation of Hesiod’s “Works and Days.” Her latest poetry collection, “Like,” is forthcoming in September. Nathan Heller (“Tribes,” p. 26) has been a staff writer since 2013. Rozina Ali (The Talk of the Town, p. 16) is on the magazine’s editorial staff. She writes about the Middle East, the war on terror, and Islamophobia. Richard Ford (Fiction, p. 56) is the author of, most recently, the memoir “Between Them.” He has contributed to The New Yorker since 1987. Tom Gauld (Cover) has written and illustrated several books, including…

Celebrating Li Shangyin Greenlight Bookstore China’s Tang Empire (618-907) coincided with what is often thought of as a golden age of art and literature, and the poet Li Shangyin’s imagistic verse is considered among the era’s most powerful. In China, his name resonates far beyond literary circles. The New York Review of Books has just published a volume of new translations of his work by the scholars Chloe Garcia Roberts and Lucas Klein, both of whom will be on hand for this fête.—K. Leander Williams (Aug. 1 at 7:30.) R. O. Kwon Books Are Magic The characters in “The Incendiaries,” Kwon’s début novel, undergo crises of faith, something that the author, a lapsed Catholic who was born in Seoul but raised in Los Angeles, has said she knows about…

Back when Donald Trump was a Presidential candidate, he said, “I think Islam hates us,” and called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” The realities of office reined him in somewhat, and in January of 2017 he signed an order to block the entry of people from only select Muslim-majority countries. (The Supreme Court upheld the policy last month.) What bothers Katherine Merriman, a Ph.D. candidate in Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is that Trump misses the fact that Islam is already part of America’s history. For the past four years, Merriman has been giving Muslim-history tours of Trump’s home town, focussing on Harlem. “There are roughly three hundred mosques in New York City,” she said the other…

I like to park a few blocks from the house of my hostsAnd walk with my bottle of wine the tree-lined streets,Anticipating the dinner with friends that awaits me.A bottle of wine showing not only that I’m gratefulTo be included but that I’m eager to do my part,To offer a gift that won’t survive the evening,That says I’ve set aside the need for transcendenceAnd made my peace at last with living in time.Soon we’ll welcome the evening with a toast.Soon we’ll be toasting it in farewellAs it starts on its journey into the near pastAnd then the far. Do the houses I’m passingRegard me as a creature about to vanishInto the realm of shadow while they have resolvedTo hold their ground? But the bottle I’m carryingShows how the past can…

Every year the swallows comeAnd put their homestead in repair,And raise another brood, and skimAnd boomerang through summer air,And reap mosquitoes from the humOf holidays. A handsome pair,One on the nest, one on the wire,Cheat-cheat‐cheat, the two conspire To murder half the insect race,And feed them squirming to their chicks.They work and fret at such a pace,And natter in between, with clicksAnd churrs, they lift the raftered place(Seaside taverna) with their tricksOf cursive loops and Morse-code call,Both analog and digital. They seem to us so coupled, married,So flustered with their needful young,So busy housekeeping, so harried,It’s hard to picture them amongThe origins of myth—a buriedSecret, rape, a cut-out tongue,Two sisters wronged, where there’s no right,Till transformation fledges flight. But Ovid swapped them in the tale,So that the sister who was…

An American Quilt, by Rachel May (Pegasus). In this far-reaching history, the discovery of an unfinished antebellum quilt becomes an investigation of the fragile scraps of documents used to make its backing. The fragments lead May to a white couple in South Carolina, who incorporated fabric left over from their slaves’ “gowns” into the quilt, as well as to some of the thirteen-plus people whom the family owned. May acknowledges the naïveté of her early research—“I was surprised and suddenly disgusted by the quilt that I’d fallen in love with,” she writes—but the book evolves into a meticulous and insightful account of slavery’s role in early mercantile America. Unbound, by Arlene Stein (Pantheon). This sociological study follows four people—three transgender men and one butch lesbian—who surgically masculinize their chests.…

HOW ARE WE DOING? In Joshua Rothman’s article on whether the world is getting better or worse, he explores two metrics, quality of life and subjective well-being, but he doesn’t address the most important metric, “meaning” (“The Big Question,” July 23rd). In “The Good War,” Studs Terkel’s oral history of the Second World War, people who lived through the war consistently cited that period as the most meaningful of their lives. Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived internment in Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps, subsequently wrote “Man’s Search for Meaning,” which, in a survey by the Library of Congress, in 1991, was considered to be one of the ten most influential books in America. Quality of life and subjective well-being cannot be evaluated without discussing what is…

House Republicans have called for the impeachment of Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, who is overseeing the Russia investigation, but his defenders are speaking out. Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, has called Rosenstein “highly capable,” while Sally Yates, the former acting Attorney General, said that the impeachment effort would “undoubtedly fail.” Perhaps the most impassioned testimonial came from the actor Jim Carrey, who drew a picture of Rosenstein as a saint with a halo, invoking early Christian art. Carrey tweeted a photo of the drawing to his nearly eighteen million followers, with an earnest plea: “I hope there are other Republicans like you who will defend us against this thuggish lot.” Since 2016, Carrey has created more than a hundred cartoons protesting the Trump Administration, a pastime that borders…

Parker Posey, the indie-film actress and bohemian bon vivant, recently moved to the top floor of a West Village town house, owned by a friend’s mother, Marcia, who lives downstairs. At around six o’clock one evening, Posey was holding court on the building’s stoop with her dog, a fourteen-year-old bichon frise-poodle-Maltese mix named Gracie. Chatting with a next-door neighbor, Posey was dressed like a silent-movie star living out her retirement in Palm Beach: cream-colored linen dress, floral-print silk head scarf, oversized Tootsie sunglasses. A visitor had just arrived, for a cocktail and a chat about Posey’s new memoir, “You’re on an Airplane,” which covers, in nonlinear fashion, her childhood in the Deep South (where her father ran a car dealership), her roles in comedies such as “Dazed and Confused” and…

For more than twenty years, Leslie Moonves has been one of the most powerful media executives in America. As the chairman and C.E.O. of CBS Corporation, he oversees shows ranging from “60 Minutes” to “The Big Bang Theory.” His portfolio includes the premium cable channel Showtime, the publishing house Simon & Schuster, and a streaming service, CBS All Access. Moonves, who is sixty-eight, has a reputation for canny hiring and project selection. The Wall Street Journal recently called him a “TV programming wizard”; the Hollywood Reporter dubbed him a “Wall Street Hero.” In the tumultuous field of network television, he has enjoyed rare longevity as a leader. Last year, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, he earned nearly seventy million dollars, making him one of the highest-paid…

Before screening Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Who Is America?,” Showtime flacks handed me a nondisclosure agreement. They locked up my phone. Guards roamed the aisles with night-vision goggles. The implication was clear: this show, heralded by panicky press releases from politicians, was incendiary stuff. Then, three days later, the network tiptoed backward like Trump after Helsinki. “At its core WHO IS AMERICA? is a comedy show,” a pre-airing e-mail insisted. “This is not a statement on the state of the country, but Baron Cohen experimenting in the playground of 2018 America.” Please. Better for Showtime to own what it’s doling out: an ugly response to an ugly age. Baron Cohen is a skilled troll, whose work is fuelled by contempt—though he’d probably prefer to be described as a bouffon, the rule-breaking…

"Straight White Men” (a Second Stage “S production, at the Helen Hayes) is such a great title for a show that it momentarily blinds you to the fact that there’s no real script to support it. It’s difficult to comment on the literary merit of the forty-four-year-old playwright Young Jean Lee’s first foray on Broadway—she’s also the first Asian-American woman to have a piece produced on the Great White Way—because she hasn’t so much written a play as handed over, to the director, Anna D. Shapiro, and the four fine cis male actors, notes in the shape of a play. That those notes are flat and boring, with no organic force or comedic interest whatsoever, is only part of the problem. What one walks away with after this nearly two-hour,…

ART “David Wojnarowicz” Whitney Museum There should be a word other than “artist” for Wojnarowicz, whose sensational retrospective is subtitled “History Keeps Me Awake at Night.” “Phenomenon” works. So might “sphinx,” for a young man who managed his fierce emotions with striking sangfroid. An abused child and then a teen-age street hustler, the New Jersey native didn’t so much join as happen to the East Village art, music, and graffiti scene during its peak, in the recessionary early nineteen-eighties. He was preposterously talented, notably as a spellbinding writer in the vein of his hero, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and as a designer of posters and flyers, including some for his rock band 3 Teens Kill 4. Wojnarowicz was mentored by the masterly photographer Peter Hujar, and it shows…

Lower East Side On a recent Saturday night, a Russian financier and two associates peered into the glass-walled “ice cage” at Mehanata, a Bulgarian discothèque on the Lower East Side. Once they entered, they’d have two minutes to consume up to six shots of vodka each. A Georgian bartender, who happened to be a descendant of the fifteenth-century noble house of Abashidze, distributed vintage Eastern Bloc military overcoats, ushanka fur hats embellished with the hammer and sickle, and shot glasses made of ice. “Don’t drink out of the bottle,” he instructed. “And if you need to throw up, God forbid, come outside.” The newly minted Soviet partisans stepped into the room, which was set to five degrees Fahrenheit and lined with shelves of assorted vodkas. They clinked and toasted (“Nazdarovya—un,…

On a recent Tuesday morning, Rod Coligado, a co-founder and sometime barista of the bakeshop and espresso bar Butler, in Williamsburg, informed a regular patron that her cortado’s milk options were limited. “We’ve got almond, soy, coconut, or macadamia,” he said. “But the oat is gone.” Coligado, who has broad shoulders and wore a cap stamped with the phrase “DEUS EX MACHINA”—referring not to Aristotle but to a Sydney-based “motorcycle lifestyle concept store”—was talking about oat milk, a neutral-tasting milk substitute made from raw oats. Oat milk arrived in New York City in 2016, when a sales rep began making the rounds of local coffee shops. Coligado was attracted to his pitch. “It was environmentally sustainable, less water, no added sugar,” he recalled. “And it had already become the No.…

The filmmaker Nicole Holofcener has a cat named Peggy, with one back leg that doesn’t touch the ground when she moves: the limb twists sideways, so that it shoots into the air as the cat hop-steps through life. “I found her a couple blocks from here, on the street,” Holofcener said, sitting in the back yard of her house, in Venice, California, petting Peggy in the bland sunlight. “I didn’t steal the cat. But the cat was behind a fence. There were paper plates of old cat food all over the front yard, and she was covered in scabs.” Peggy purred and leaned into Holofcener. “She was pretty vicious,” Holofcener said, jerking her hand away from Peggy’s head to avoid getting bitten. “And now she’s a little princess.” This is…

Astrid Holleeder has arresting eyes—they are swimming-pool blue—but that’s all I can reveal about her appearance, because she is in hiding, an exile in her own city, which is Amsterdam. For the past two years, she has lived in a series of furnished safe houses. She prefers buildings with basement parking, in order to minimize her exposure during the brief transit to a bulletproof car. She bought the car used, for fifteen thousand euros. She also owns two bulletproof vests. She thinks a lot about how she might be assassinated, gaming out fatal scenarios. Whenever she stops at a red light and an unfamiliar vehicle sharks up alongside her, she clutches the wheel, her heart hammering. Then the light changes, and she exhales and keeps moving. Amsterdam, a city of…

When your father dies and you are only sixteen, many things change. School life changes. You are now the boy whose father is missing. People feel sorry for you, but they also devalue you, even resent you—for what, you’re not sure. The air around you becomes different. Once, the air contained you fully. But now an opening’s been cut, which feels frightening, yet not so frightening. And there is your mother and her loss to fill—at least, to step into—while you manage all your own sensations, and others. Fear. Opportunity. And always there is the fact of your father, whom you loved but whose life has become only about its end—much of the rest quickly fading. So. You are alone in a way that is so many-sided. There is not…

The Argentine writer Jorge Barón Biza once said that his parents didn’t have a marriage so much as a “passionate, infinite divorce.” His father, Raúl Barón Biza, once chased his mother, Rosa Clotilde Sabattini, with a gun and thirty-two bullets; later, Raúl ran, still armed, into his in-laws’ house. (He told police that he had wished only to commit suicide.) Raúl was born in 1899, the scion of wealthy landowners in Argentina. After spending his twenties partying, he began publishing novels. He also got involved in politics, which is how he met Clotilde. She was the daughter of Amadeo Sabattini, a famous politician whose party, the Radical Civic Union (U.C.R.), controlled Argentina’s government throughout the twenties; it was removed from power, in 1930, in a military coup. By 1936, Raúl…