Innholdsfortegnelse for August 27, 2018 i The New Yorker

Calvin Tomkins (“Painterly Virtues,” p. 56) covers art and culture for The New Yorker. “The Bride and the Bachelors” is one of his many books. Elizabeth Kolbert (“Shaking the Foundations,” p. 30) has been a staff writer since 1999. Her book “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Zach Helfand (The Talk of the Town, p. 26), a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff, was previously a sports reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Sana Krasikov (Fiction, p. 66) has published the novel “The Patriots” and the story collection “One More Year.” In 2017, she was named to Granta’s “Best of Young American Novelists.” Jim Moore (Poem, p. 48) is the author of, most recently, “Underground: New and Selected Poems.” Joan Acocella…

Among the season’s notable films based on true stories is “The Old Man and the Gun” (Sept. 28), directed by David Lowery and adapted from an article in The New Yorker by David Grann. It stars Robert Redford (who has said that it will be his last film), in the role of Forrest Tucker, a man of seventy-nine who, in 1999, capped off an impressive lifetime of crime with one last bank robbery. Ryan Gosling plays the astronaut Neil Armstrong in “First Man” (Oct. 12), a drama about the 1969 mission to the moon, directed by Damien Chazelle; Claire Foy co-stars, as Armstrong’s wife, Janet. “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” (Oct. 19), directed by Marielle Heller, features Melissa McCarthy in an adaptation of a memoir by Lee Israel, a literary…

Kate Walbert Greenlight Bookstore The power relationships at work in “His Favorites,” Walbert’s new novel, are only intensified by the age differences of the central characters. The narrator, Jo Hadley, reflects upon her troubled teen years, in which a tragic accident sent her to a boarding school in Massachusetts and into the uncomfortable orbit of one of her teachers. Hadley no longer conceals her rage at the school administrator who failed to consider her youthful confusion and vulnerability and all but dismissed her requests for help thwarting the predator. Walbert discusses the new work with the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Joan Silber.—K. Leander Williams (Aug. 23 at 7:30.) A People’s History Rumsey Playfield, Central Park Part reading, part music event, and one-hundred-per-cent call for social justice, this…

At 8 a.m. one scorching summer Friday, Joe Minihane sat by the pool at the William Vale hotel, in Williamsburg. A slim thirty-six-year-old from Essex, England, Minihane is an aficionado of finding a nice place to swim. In 2010, he was unhappily freelancing as a tech journalist in London when he discovered the nature writer Roger Deakin’s book “Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain,” in which Deakin took a “frog’s-eye view” of his homeland via its rivers, lochs, lidos, fens, moats, dykes, aqueducts, and canals. Deakin died in 2006, but “Waterlog” helped launch a wild-swimming craze in Britain; last month, the Local Government Association issued a warning after a spike in drownings. Like Julie Powell cooking her way through Julia Child, Minihane decided to reswim Deakin’s course. Also like Powell,…

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cases of tick-borne diseases in the United States have doubled in recent years. Frequent and thorough tick checks, however, can significantly reduce your chances of enjoying summer. As a matter of fact, checking yourself for ticks after going outside may be the only way to see what your body looks like covered in ticks. Ticks wait in the grass and the leaves with their legs outstretched, ready to attach to a passing host, burrow into the host’s skin, and feed on the host’s blood while transmitting disease through their saliva, often within a few hours of contact, so it’s crucial to recognize how fucking gross that is. Kids are particularly vulnerable to ticks because of their exposure to the outdoors, so…

Whatever else, the little smile on the face of the womanlistening to a music the rest of us can’t hear and a sky at dawnwith a moon all its own. Whatever else, the construction cranehigh above us waiting to be told how to do our bidding, we who bid and bid and bid. Whatever else, the way cook #1looks with such longing at cook #2. Let’s not be too sadabout how sad we are. I know about the disappearanceof the river dolphins, the sea turtles with tumors.I know about the way the deaddon’t return no matter how long they take to diein the back of the police car. I know about the thousand ways our worldbetrays itself. Whatever else, my friend, spreading wide his arms, looks out at the river…

We go on talking and digging a pit in the earthto spit-roast kid, since anyone working in a lively rhythm is not attachedto the story.In saving her, he saves himself.It’s getting late.The story of the boy is thatby drinking water from a hoof he’s turned into a goat.If we separate magic from life, we get art. His sister, long story short, gets thrown into a river with a stone around her neck.His weeping stirs the neighbors with a silken netto scoop her out. He turns three somersaultsof joy and lands on two feet as a boy again.How, in heaven’s name, will dinner be served, and when? Separate art from life, we get nothing.We go on talking and digging.I’ve got a million and ten things to do.Of the multitude of things,…

When the hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music, in April, reactions in the classical-music world ranged from panic to glee. Composers in the classical tradition have effectively monopolized the prize since its inception, in 1943. Not until 1997 did a nominal outsider—the jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis—receive a nod. Lamar’s victory, for his moodily propulsive album “damn.,” elicited some reactionary fuming—one irate commenter said that his tracks were “neurologically divergent from music”—as well as enthusiastic assent from younger generations. The thirty-one-year-old composer Michael Gilbertson, who was a finalist this year, told Slate, “I never thought my string quartet and an album by Kendrick Lamar would be in the same category. This is no longer a narrow honor.” Lamar’s win made me think about the…

NOT MY BROTHER’S KEEPER Patrick Radden Keefe, in his otherwise excellent article on Astrid Holleeder’s choice to expose her criminal brother, Wim, claims that Sophocles’ Antigone chooses loyalty to family over fidelity to Theban laws (“Crime Family,” August 6th & 13th). But is this really true? The standard for dead bodies in Thebes, according to Sophocles, was the same as in the rest of Greece: that they should, except in rare circumstances, be buried. Antigone acts in keeping with that standard when she attempts to bury her brother Polyneices. It is the ruler, Creon, who acts like a criminal by issuing the erratic injunction that Polyneices be left to rot on the surface of the earth, picked apart by dogs and birds. This command—impulsive, impious, and soon retracted—is contrary…

With Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings approaching, Senate staffers are poring over the judge’s journal articles and legal decisions, looking for clues to how he might rule on critical issues, such as challenges to Roe v. Wade and the limits of executive privilege. One instructive text might be his address in 2015 to law-school students at the Catholic University of America. The title: “The Judge as Umpire.” Kavanaugh urged his listeners to study the career not of Earl Warren but of Ed Hochuli, an N.F.L. referee. “He’s a model for concise judicial decision-making,” Kavanaugh said. He went on to make the case for the precise drafting of laws by citing a 2014 game between the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys. “The Dez Bryant catch this year in…

Several weeks ago, a New York fitness startup, Aaptiv, installed a new, high-tech water cooler in its downtown offices. The five-foot-tall, Internet-connected contraption dispenses still or sparkling water, and still or sparkling flavored water, with hints of fruits and vegetables. In other words, it’s LaCroix on tap. Before the machine arrived, Aaptiv had been swept up in the same post-cola craze that turned the sparkling-with-a-hint-of-pamplemousse beverage, beloved by Midwestern moms, into a pop-culture icon, referenced in Halloween costumes and T-shirts demanding that girls choose “LaCroixs Over Boys.” “We were going through so many cans of LaCroix every day it was ridiculous,” Aaptiv’s employee-experience manager, Kate Blain, recalled. She discovered Bevi, the company that makes the new water coolers, at a networking event, and campaigned to have her office acquire one.…

Rick Smith, who made a fortune selling conducted-energy weapons—stun guns—likes to say that he is a “techno-optimist.” Human beings create problems, technology solves them, and a few bold thinkers get phenomenally rich in the process. Forty-eight years old, with a coplike, jacked physique, Smith is a co-founder and the C.E.O. of Taser International, which supplies police departments with weapons that are less lethal than firearms. “A hundred years ago in New York, they had a major problem,” he said. “Horse manure was spreading disease. You can imagine if you’d gone around New York and told people who love their horses, ‘We’re going to take your horses away.’ There’s the same dynamic with Americans and guns. What happened a hundred years ago was that we had a technology shift.” He paused,…

Insane, by Alisa Roth (Basic). America’s mass-incarceration crisis is by now well known, but the overrepresentation of the mentally ill among the prison population is less studied. This essential exposé, which includes tragic case histories, tells of legions of prisoners put in solitary confinement or subdued with medication. In some jails, the mentally ill wear uniforms of a different color from those of other inmates and talk to therapists through tray slots in cell doors. In others, they are subjected to dehumanizing abuse. At the heart of the problem, Roth notes, is the changing landscape of mental-health care; she is wary, though, of the common assumption that the closure of large psychiatric hospitals is to blame for the current situation. The Secret Life of Cows, by Rosamund Young (Penguin).…

MOVIES BlacKkKlansman Believe it or not, the story told by Spike Lee’s latest film is true. The setting is the late nineteen-seventies, but it’s the present day and its lingering injustices that lie within the movie’s sights. John David Washington plays Ron Stallworth, the first black policeman in Colorado Springs, who hatches a scheme to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan by making friendly contact with Klansmen—including their Grand Wizard, David Duke (Topher Grace)—over the phone. For face-to-face meetings, Ron is impersonated by a fellow-cop, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver). Lee, as nimble as he’s ever been, remains alert to the absurdist comedy of this setup as well as its nastiness and risk. The result is a switchback ride that by the end veers into documentary outrage, but that wildness feels…

When Jack Whitten died, in January, at the age of seventy-eight, he was a renowned, category-defying abstract painter. But the sculptures he made in his studios in New York and Crete were more or less secret. Fashioned by the Alabama-born artist from wood, marble, fishing line, nails, glass, and other materials, the totemic works will be seen at the Met Breuer in the company of his paintings and a selection of relics from Africa, ancient Greece, and the American South which informed his aesthetic. “Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017” opens Sept. 6. At the Brooklyn Museum, Whitten’s 1970 painting “Homage to Malcolm” is among the hundred and fifty works by sixty artists in “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” arriving Sept. 14. People cavil about…

In June, the American models Gigi Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski visited Mykonos, the Greek island, and confirmed via Instagram that money and beauty do beget happiness—or, at least, a pouty stare passing as happy. A month later, two women in possession of somewhat less square footage, in both the real-estate and leg departments, visited Mykonos, the bar. Could an evening of fifteen-dollar cocktails at a Chelsea hotel’s rooftop offer, if not all-around good fortune, then its believable illusion? The women hailed an elevator and deboarded at the roof. The Maroon 5 on the sound system was loud, but not as loud as the vacation-volume howl of bronzed women in their forties, draped on white couches; not as loud, either, as the fifty something man courting his date, while drooping into…

In November, the Whitney Museum of American Art will feature the first U.S. retrospective of Andy Warhol’s art in some three decades, in an exhibition that will occupy a great deal of the institution’s eight-story, High Line-adjacent building. On a recent Thursday, around what would have been Warhol’s ninetieth birthday, the Whitney hosted a Warhol party attended by more than three thousand people. Many were dressed in themed festive wear: banana, Pop art, flowers, Basquiat. Early on, the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again” played and the setting sun filled the first floor with dazzling golden light. Some guests posed for photographs, superstar style, in front of a step-and-repeat wall adorned with silver and white spheres; others watched live screen printing, à la the Master, of feisty Warhol quotations onto…

In the spring of 1889, Andrew Carnegie published an essay on money. If possession confers knowledge, then there was no greater expert on the subject: Carnegie was possibly the richest American who ever lived. The essay, which was printed first in the North American Review, then in Britain’s Pall Mall Gazette, and later reissued in a pamphlet, became known as “The Gospel of Wealth.” The “Gospel” opened with a discussion of inequity. This was the Gilded Age, and, even as most Americans were struggling to get by, the one-per-centers were putting up “cottages” in Newport. The disparity was, in Carnegie’s view, unavoidable. It was the price of progress, and progress, ultimately, benefitted everyone. “The ‘good old times’ were not good old times,” he observed. “Neither master nor servant was as…

On May 18, 2017, Jonathan Bush was standing at the stern of his luxury catamaran, the Zenyatta, named for a champion Thoroughbred racehorse, when he received a text message from a colleague warning him not to answer calls from phone numbers he didn’t recognize. Bush, the cofounder and C.E.O. of the health-care technology company Athenahealth, had just finished a three-day race with his company’s sailing team, going from the Bahamas to Bermuda. Bush is the nephew of one former President, George H. W., and the cousin of another, George W., and his professional and personal lives were intertwined. He socialized with members of Athena’s staff as if they were college friends. (“We have a drinking team that has a sailing problem,” he said, half-jokingly, of the Bermuda group.) On social…

The first time Hal read Oliver’s apology was when it came down through the company server to the in-boxes of every employee at the public-radio station where they both worked—she for a decade and Ollie for three. His words were the usual ones, conveying sorrow at the thought of treading on anyone’s sense of dignity or self-assurance. The remorse toward his staff and others he may have injured through “an excess of blindness.” It torments me to know I’ve caused pain to people who held me in esteem. In recent days I’ve come to recognize that my position in itself created a power dynamic that led many around me to feel silenced, invalidated, or reduced in spirit. The apology struck Hal as both defensive and pandering, suffering, as all acts…

The title of Forrest Gander’s latest book of poems, “Be With” (New Directions), is a blurted command welling up from yearnings not quite expressible in language. Gander’s partner of more than thirty years, the poet C. D. Wright, died unexpectedly in her sleep in 2016. Later that year, a new volume by Wright, “ShallCross,” was published posthumously, with a dedication to Gander: “for Forrest/line, lank and long,/be with.” Gander borrows his title from that dedication, which reads like a message from beyond the grave. This collection of elegies for Wright confirms receipt of the message and returns it. Poetry often creates a supernatural-seeming rapport with the dead, but rarely has the communication between worlds felt so eerily reciprocal. Gander, who teaches at Brown, is the author of eleven books of…