Innholdsfortegnelse for August 20, 2018 i The New Yorker

Nicholas Schmidle (“Rocket Man,” p. 36), a staff writer since 2012, was a 2017 Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Jane Huffman (Poem, p. 41) received an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa. She is the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Guesthouse. Steve Coll (Comment, p. 13), a staff writer, is the dean of Columbia University’s School of Journalism. His latest book is “Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Patricia Marx (The Talk of the Town, p. 16), a staff writer, most recently published “Let’s Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties.” R. Kikuo Johnson (Cover) teaches cartooning at the Rhode Island School of Design. Carrie Battan (Pop Music, p. 70) began contributing to the magazine in…

KentPresents The Kent School OUT OF TOWN Given the number of Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur Fellows, diplomats, and decorated scientists who speak annually at this “festival of ideas,” hosted by a prep school in Kent, Conn., it’s somewhat astonishing that KentPresents has managed to fly under the radar for much of its short existence. Its fourth year promises just as much spirited discussion of global affairs, law and politics, health and food, science and tech, and humanities and the performing arts. Among the scheduled speakers are the journalists Lesley Stahl, Soledad O’Brien, and Charles M. Blow; the former government officials Jeh Johnson, Henry Kissinger, and Mitch Landrieu; the law practitioners Lisa Bloom and Preet Bharara; and the activists Faye Wattleton and Michael Pollan.—K. Leander Williams (Aug. 16-18.)…

“It’s a beautiful day for plogging.” Neither James Joyce nor Lewis Carroll said that. Alex Bournery did, in a thick French accent, on a recent Sunday morning at the entrance to Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, where he was addressing his fellow-ploggers. Invented, or at least named, by Erik Ahlström, in Stockholm, in 2016, plogging is an exercise trend that has reached countries as far-flung as Thailand, Ecuador, and Canada. The word is a blend of “jog ging” and plocka uppa, the Swedish term for “picking up.” What is being picked up is litter. “It’s a little like hunting for chocolate Easter eggs,” Bournery explained. Except that the treasure is cigarette butts and baggies full of dog doo. Bournery, an entrepreneur and parttime French teacher at Columbia, is the founder of…

Andrea taught me to ride sidesaddle. I rodein small and dizzying circles around her.I rode around her in small and dizzyingcircles. Past the mirror and past the mirrorwhere, one summer, she was reared offby a stallion attacking his own flaringreflection. One summer, she was rearedoff, or almost. I rode into the acresof our sunflowers. In the acres, the fields,I overindulged in beauty. In the fields,I rode. Andrea leaned on a rail, her bodya rail. Andrea leaned on the shadowof a rail. My shadow rode around her,the small bells of my intuition. She rangthe small bells of the saddle. I wassmall and dizzying. I was dizzy. I rodein small and dizzying circles. Andreataught me to ride, no stirrups. Nothingsuspending my body but intuition, the smalland dizzying circles of my body.My intuition…

Charles de Gaulle, Julian Jackson insists in the preface of his new biography, “De Gaulle” (Harvard), is “every where” in modern France, its undisputed hero. This claim, like some other confident statements in the book, may strike a reader as both narrowly true and what a French thinker might call metaphysically false. His name is certainly everywhere—on the great airport outside Paris; on the Place Charles de Gaulle, once called the Étoile, where traffic streams perpetually around the Arc de Triomphe—but his example seems remote. He is more a ceremonial than a controversial figure, his work now done. In forty years of passing in and out of France, I have almost never heard him pointed to as an exemplar useful in any way for today’s crises. His name having been…

Until 1976, the Bayreuth Festival, Germany’s Wagner shrine, was exclusively the province of German and Austrian stage directors—usually, members of the Wagner family. But that year, which marked the festival’s hundredth anniversary, the late French director Patrice Chéreau presented his legendary, quasi-Marxist production of the “Ring,” and since then nothing has been the same. Radical rethinkings of Wagner operas by theatre artists of various European nationalities have become routine. In the past two years, the pool of talent has opened up further. Last year, Barrie Kosky, an Australian native, became the festival’s first Jewish director, and this year Yuval Sharon, a Los Angeleno of Israeli parentage, became its first American. The hiring of Kosky and Sharon is a welcome corrective to an oppressive past: Wagner was a vicious anti-Semite, Hitler…

THE OTHER SAN FRANCISCO I enjoyed reading Nathan Heller’s article on San Francisco’s trajectory from a liberal cosmopolitan city in the post-war decades to the wealthy, techfinanced enclave it is today, but he overlooks the racism that shaped the city’s built environment, even in its so-called progressive years (“Tribes,” August 6th & 13th). In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the Western Addition neighborhood, which includes the Fillmore District, was the center of black cultural and political life and became known as the Harlem of the West. The neighborhood was razed in the nineteen-seventies, in the name of urban renewal. As James Baldwin noted, “Urban renewal … means Negro removal.” At the same time, Hunters Point, another predominantly black neighborhood in San Francisco, was abandoned because of toxic pollution. In 1962,…

Mayor Bill de Blasio has had a rough summer. On the left, he’s been raked over the coals about the city’s public-housing system, which is embroiled in a lead-paint scandal, among other crises. (Cynthia Nixon attacked him for having a “pissing contest” with Governor Cuomo instead of taking action.) On the right, he’s got a rat problem. According to city data, rat sightings increased by more than fifty per cent during the Mayor’s first term. Researchers blame climate change—mild winters and sweltering summers are ideal for rat babies. But conservatives blame de Blasio. “DemocRATS running the city have caused an increase in rat infestations,” a Trump supporter named Noah Talansky tweeted. “I see rats all the time in local parks etc. thanks to Bill de Blasio’s poor leadership.” Last month,…

Helena Howard, the twenty-year-old star of the experimental film “Madeline’s Madeline,” and Josephine Decker, its writer and director, were sweating it out at the Storm King Art Center, an outdoor museum in Cornwall, New York, recently, trying not to touch the art. Among the large-scale sculptures parked along the grassy hills, one multi-pronged stainless-steel work caught Howard’s eye. She reached out her arm. “You can’t touch that!” a guard yelled from across the field. Howard flinched. “O.K., I’m sorry!” she said, and added, quietly, “It shouldn’t be outside, then.” She was wearing a loose black dress and black patent-leather Doc Martens that matched her purse, and she carried a pack of Newports in her free hand. Decker created “Madeline’s Madeline” by working with Howard and a group of improv actors…

In the afternoon, I cross-country ski up a logging road not far out of town. We haven’t had any new snow for a week, and the trail is a hardened icy crust, spackled frequently with brown streaks of runny, frozen dog shit. A local dogsledding operation frequents this trail. Tourists staying at the hot-springs resort down the valley get decked out in mukluks and parkas and tool around under the watchful eye of the head musher. I don’t know this man personally, but I’ve heard that he competed in the Iditarod several times, and finished quite well. I can only imagine the cognitive dissonance that results from running dogs under the northern lights on the frozen Yukon and then returning here to haul overweight Texans up and down logging roads…

Aroused, by Randi Hutter Epstein (Norton). In 1905, the physiologist Ernest Starling presented a new theory: chemical messengers, which he termed “hormones,” are crucial actors in the body’s self-regulation. From there, the field of endocrinology, as this compelling history shows, has manifested extremes of ingenuity and hubristic error. Researchers such as Harvey Cushing and Rosalyn Yalow, who won a Nobel for her hormone-measuring technique, made lasting advances. But market-driven physicians also touted vasectomies as a means of rejuvenation; peddled estrogen pills that were subsequently linked to uterine cancer; and, by administering injections of contaminated growth hormone, infected hundreds of children with fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Epstein movingly relays the stories of intersex and transgender children, whose well-being has been at the mercy of fluctuating medical approaches. Two Sisters, by Åsne…

ART “African-American Portraits” Metropolitan Museum This small show is defined by a double anonymity: most of the hundred and fifty portraits of unknown sitters were taken by unknown commercial photographers in the mid-twentieth century. (Many of the subjects would likely be in their eighties or nineties by now.) There are no signs of the ravages of the Great Depression, or Jim Crow, or the Great Migration. Instead, these men and women pose before backdrops of nature or domestic exteriors, outfitting themselves in the trappings of middle-class contentment. A crowd of five young men in boxy double-breasted suits are framed by two pillars; a giggling baby and its mother appear against a background of country bliss; a pair of newlyweds stand before a reproduction of a front porch. But there…

Red Hook On a recent Thursday, four young people walked into the Sunken Harbor Club, a weekly tiki pop-up at the Red Hook restaurant Fort Defiance, very much intact. They did not leave thus. At a table covered in a bright floral print, the group, composed of a middle-school science teacher on summer break and three friends still pretending that the arts might make a viable career path, noted that one of the menu’s cocktails had a “two drink maximum.” Taking a sip of the Tradewind (rum, apricot liqueur, coconut), the science teacher said, “I feel like I was just tossed into the arms of a competent but not overly masculine lifeguard.” Eschewing the science teacher’s poetics, one of the more frustrated artists ordered a beer. (“That’s not tiki, but…

On a recent drizzly morning, Nora Lum, the rapper, actress, and TV personality better known as Awkwafina, walked into Brooklyn Standard, the vegetarian deli in Greenpoint where she once worked, and hollered, “What up, dudes?” Until three years ago, Lum manned the cash register. When her self-produced single “NYC Bitche$” went viral (hook: “New York City, bitch, that’s where I come from/Not where I moved to on mom and dad’s trust fund”), she was selling vegan muffins to hipster Brooklynites. “Who’s that? Is that really her?” one of the cooks, who was chopping ingredients for the Holy Guacamole, joked. He asked for a photo for his twelve-year-old nephew, who’d seen Lum in “Ocean’s Eight,” the gender-inverted caper that came out in June, in which Lum plays a pickpocket who, she…

I have been thinking lately about a letter that I received from President Barack Obama in the fall of 2011. In it, he offered me his congratulations and praised my determination, in terms that were deeply gratifying, if a little over the top—he told me that I “represent the promise of the American Dream.” Of course, it wasn’t a personal letter; the signature at the bottom was a facsimile. It was addressed to me with a salutation that I hadn’t received before: “Dear Fellow American.” That year, I was one of roughly six hundred and ninety thousand people to get this letter, along with Certificates of Naturalization from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service confirming that, as the President put it, “this great Nation is now your Nation.” Knowing that…

I’m noticing once again the singular thingsI noticed as a boy: the hidden springs,the sound of silence, nap of tablecloths,sea taste of iodine, the scents of clothes,raw grain of wood, a scrambling interfaceof ebbing tide and incoming tide race. Light, hot on the “fanatical existence”of furniture and the brightwork of kitchens,on country garage, hen run and mown hay,shines everything, even on the rainiest day,with the reflected or intrinsic glowof an intentional world we think we know— the inert, potential force of things material.Our knowledge instrumental, our facts unrealbecause unlived, unfelt, what can we usefor wisdom but these fierce realities?We don’t need telescopes to appreciatethe silent music of the sky at night; nor do we need computers to contemplatethat morphic resonance where swifts migratein close formation from a river mouthknowing by…

To be a hip-hop fan in 2018 is to be overwhelmed by change, particularly when it comes to its restless young talent. Just when you think you have a grasp on an artist like A-Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, a Queens native reshaping New York hip-hop, he suddenly pivots to a global-dance-pop style. Acclimate yourself to the barking antagonism of Tekashi 6ix9ine, a rainbow-haired instigator, and he suddenly embraces R. & B. Classify someone like Tyler, the Creator, as a relic of the petulant shock-rap era that his group, Odd Future, defined, and he unexpectedly matures into a clear-eyed and subtle stylist. Even the listening format is erratic: the genre now comes in epic twenty-five-song mixtapes, or in albums that barely break the twenty-minute mark. It is difficult to name another…