Innholdsfortegnelse for September 10, 2018 i The New Yorker

Anna Russell (“Hemmed In,” p. 52), a member of the magazine’s editorial staff, previously wrote about arts and culture for the Wall Street Journal. Awol Erizku (Portfolio, p. 66), a conceptual artist, has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Jill Lepore (A Critic at Large, p. 86) is a professor of history at Harvard. Her new book, “These Truths: A History of the United States,” is out this month. Joe Henry (Poem, p. 59) is a singer-songwriter and a three-time Grammy-winning producer. He is also the coauthor of “Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him.” Elizabeth Kolbert (Comment, p. 35), a staff writer, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.” Nathan Heller…

Rescued: Ahmed Bouanani McNally Jackson Books Known primarily as a filmmaker in his native Morocco, Bouanani (1938-2011) was also a prolific writer of fiction and poetry, though much of his work has not seen the light of day. His literary reputation rests on a hallucinatory novel from 1990 (“The Hospital”) which was recently reissued in French and English, to much acclaim. Scholars are beginning to evaluate the many boxes of unpublished journals, manuscripts, and translations that were nearly destroyed by a fire in Bouanani’s Casablanca apartment, after his death. His legacy is assessed at this event by the writers Omar Berrada, Anna Della Subin, and Emma Ramadan.—K. Leander Williams (Sept. 5 at 7.) John Kerry 92nd Street Y The difference between memoir and autobiography can be fuzzy, but “Every…

It’s hard to get permission to climb skyscrapers without ropes. Recently, Alex Honnold got lucky. “It’s cooler here than I thought,” he said. He’d flown in from Seattle, and was sitting in a Jersey City diner wearing a hooded sweatshirt. Beside him was a worn backpack containing what he called “my light setup”—including a fifty-five-metre length of rope—and a copy of “Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism.” Honnold, who is thirty-three, with a boyish face and huge hands, specializes in “free soloing,” climbing without any ropes or safety gear. That’s how he ascended El Capitan, the three-thousand-foot granite face in Yosemite National Park, last summer—an event that the Times called “one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever.” A National Geographic documentary about the climb, “Free Solo,”…

The bells in chaos rake out from Christchurch, clipped and sudden and on the quarter-hour, as if ringing out the death of sound itself. People fill the streets this Friday eveningand walk in procession; crowd into Lord Coward’s andstand three deep at the bar: a grim wake. I find my voice will no longer carry: it has set down its bagsbeneath an iron bench at an easement into the parkand laid down on it, flat and cracked as peasant bread. From here forward, our eyes and ears willneed to do more: receive the cries from those without harborand flicker out alarm, ship to shore; will have to sing out silent song in gesture—bear witness while God’s own truthspeaks for itself. This, until again we are worthy of our hearts’true devotion:…

Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people.If they’re close enough, they can see something is different with me, something unnerving, as if I have no features, I am embryonic, pre-eyebrows, pre-eyelids, pre-mouth, I am like a water-bear talking to them, or an amniotic traveller, a vitreous floater on their own eyeball, human ectoplasm risen on its hind legs to discourse with them.And such a white white girl, such a sickly toadstool, so pale, a visage of fog, a phiz ofmist above a graveyard, no magenta roses, no floral tribute, no goddess, no grownupwoman, no acknowledgmentof the drama of secondary sexual characteristics, just thegray matter of spirit talking, the thin features of a gray girl in a gray graveyard—granite, ash, chalk, dust.I tried the paint, but…

GIVE AND TAKE Elizabeth Kolbert, in her critique of private philanthropy in the United States, argues that the super-rich are reinventing our society through charitable foundations (“Shaking the Foundations,” August 27th). Her examination is damning but incomplete. I spent twenty years in senior positions at charitable organizations, and another twenty advising the boards of directors at dozens of family foundations. I can attest that government oversight is more rigorous than Kolbert suggests. The Tax Reform Act of 1969 created regulations that keep 501(c)(3) organizations accountable. Among other things, a foundation is required to pay out a certain percentage of its endowment each year, so that its money doesn’t just sit in investment accounts. The law also prohibits “self-dealing” on the part of those responsible for making decisions on grants.…

Last month, in the second round of the U.S. Open, Fernando Verdasco, a Spaniard, broke new ground when, while smacking a serve, he unleashed a grunt that sounded uncannily like “Au revoir!” This put him in the company of other notable grunters, including a sixteen-year-old Russian phenom who claimed that her grunts would change with her mood, and a Dutch player who was once docked a point for “counter-grunting”—sarcastically mocking his opponent’s wails. Studies of tennis players’ grunts have revealed their impact on performance: Can grunting distract an opponent? Yes. Can it help a player hit harder? Significantly. Last year, three mammal-vocalization researchers at the University of Sussex, in England, published a paper in Animal Behaviour titled “Tennis Grunts Communicate Acoustic Cues to Sex and Contest Outcome.” The researchers demonstrated…

Set loose in San Jose, California, recently, with some time to kill before the evening’s standup sets, the comedian Norm Macdonald made plans to see the Winchester Mystery House—a mansion of notoriously strange design—and to find lunch, though maybe not precisely in that order. It was past noon, but he hadn’t eaten. He was wearing a baggy tangerine-colored polo shirt, billowing sweatpants, and red shoes. “Do you know anywhere that is a diner with a booth?” he inquired of the concierge in his hotel’s lobby. “I don’t mind a greasy spoon.” Since stepping back from the daily grind of TV, more than a decade ago, Macdonald, most widely known as the mid-nineties host of “Weekend Update,” on “Saturday Night Live,” and the star of an eponymous sitcom, has been burrowing…

In February of 2016, Batsheva Hay, a former lawyer with two young children, decided to have a favorite vintage dress remade. Designed by Laura Ashley, the dress, like most of the British icon’s clothing, blended a folksy craft aesthetic with the dreamy romanticism of the Pre-Raphaelites. Calf-length with long sleeves and a slightly tapered waist, it was made of a dense corduroy printed with green leaves and purple roses. But the fabric at the armpits had frayed, and then torn beyond repair. Hay, a willowy redhead with a quietly assertive manner, grew up in a secular Jewish family in Kew Gardens, Queens. Her mother, Gail Rosenberg, met her father, an Israeli research engineer, while she was working on a kibbutz. When choosing a name for her daughter, Rosenberg was drawn…

Before sunrise on a morning just after Labor Day, 1977, Humberto and Jackeline Alvarez, Felix Hernandez, Rosario and Jose Robles, and Lidia and Jose Lopez huddled together in the basement of the United States Courthouse in Tyler, Texas, the Rose City, to decide just how much they were willing to risk for the sake of their children, for the sake of other people’s children, and for the sake, really, of everyone. Among them, the Alvarezes, Hernandez, the Robleses, and the Lopezes had sixteen children who, the week before, had been barred from entering Tyler’s public schools by order of James Plyler, Tyler’s school super-intendent. On the first day of school, Rosario Robles had walked her five children to Bonner Elementary, where she was met by the principal, who asked her…

IN THE MUSEUMS The title “Obsession,” for a show at the Met Breuer of fifty-two works, mostly drawings of female nudes, by Pablo Picasso, Gustave Klimt, and Egon Schiele (made between 1902 and 1923), bequeathed to the museum, in 1982, by the storied aesthete Scoffield Thayer, promises titillation. Some is delivered, but fitfully. Despite scorching-hot pictures by Schiele, who turned out hundreds for an avid market, and sensual delectations by Klimt, a pasha of his studio, the operative obsession here is that of the collector. A rich heir from Massachusetts, described by a friend as “ice on the surface and molten lava underneath,” Thayer edited the little magazine The Dial in its glory years, in the twenties, was psychoanalyzed by Freud in Vienna, and then fell victim to crippling…

West Village The name of this extravagantly inventive new cocktail bar may call to mind medical insurance or metaphysics, but here it refers to architectural constraints created by former tenants—including the particularly ill-christened Affair on Eighth, whose name remains scrawled behind the bar. On a recent evening, the proprietors, Dave Arnold and Don Lee, were investigating a mysterious spill from one of their many patented centrifuges. A jovial couple from Long Island received a custom creation, honoring the man’s wish for “something on fire”: acid-adjusted orange juice, pressurized and condensed coconut milk, two types of rum, and an extra shot, aflame, floating placidly in the inverted skin of a lime. “I told them where I want to end up,” he explained—with the Waffe Turkey 101, made with waffe-infused bourbon—“and they’re…

Teachers get time off, but mentorship knows no bounds. The other day, Wyclef Jean settled into an armchair in a Los Angeles studio and logged on to Skype. He was wearing red vinyl high-tops and oversized aviator sunglasses. To do: video-chat with fledgling musicians. The session had been organized by Fiverr, an online marketplace for freelancers; for a fee of a hundred dollars, an artist could get twenty minutes of one-on-one mentorship from the former member of the Fugees. Jean, who is forty-eight, is best known as part of the nineteen-nineties hip-hop trio, and for producing music by artists from Santana to Beyoncé. In the past few years, following a failed attempt to run for President of Haiti, in 2010 (he didn’t meet the residency requirements), he’s settled into a…

Although it has been almost a generation since Rudolph Giuliani was the mayor of New York, there is one place in the city where he still presides: the Grand Havana Room, a tatty cigar club that occupies the top floor of 666 Fifth Avenue. Giuliani is on the Grand Havana’s board of directors and is a regular presence at the club. The room is filled with overstuffed armchairs, oversized ash trays, and the persistent haze of smoke. Thick velvet drapes, many the worse for wear, block out the view of the city, and ventilation machines wheeze from the ceiling. One afternoon this summer, Giuliani sank into a chair, pulled the knot of his tie down to his chest, and removed a Padrón fiftieth-anniversary cigar (retail price: forty dollars) from a…

In a corner of Panorama Bar, the upstairs venue of the Berlin night club Berghain, there is a large, unlit photograph of the back of a throat—one of three photos by the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans that hang on the walls. Berghain is a techno club known as much for its code of etiquette as for its sound system. Photography is forbidden. Cellphone-camera lenses are covered with stickers when patrons enter. Doormen are strict about whom they let in, with apparent biases against conspicuous displays of wealth. The party starts at 11:59 on Saturday night and continues until Monday morning; it’s common to stay for twelve hours, or twenty. There is no V.I.P. area. The bathrooms are ungendered, the atmosphere is sexually open, and the ethos is queer. Ravers make…

The first time I smoked crack cocaine was the spring I worked construction for my father on his new subdivision in Moonlight Heights. My original plan had been to go to college, specifically for the arts, specifically for acting, where I’d envisioned strolling shoeless around campus with a notepad, jotting down details about the people I observed so that I would later be able to replicate the human condition onscreen with nuance and veracity. Instead, I was unmatriculated and nineteen, working six days a week, making eight dollars an hour, no more or less than what the other general laborers were being paid, and which is what passed, at least for my self-made father, as fairness. Occasionally, I would be cast in a community-theatre production of Neil Simon or “The…

A Future in Ruins, by Lynn Meskell (Oxford). When UNESCO was created, in 1945, its mission was to restore and protect a world ravaged by war. Its concern for cultural sites and monuments was informed by the principles of archeology: excavations were undertaken primarily for research, to understand “the total context of the human past.” But, as this trenchant and often depressing investigation shows, the organization’s original ideals have been eroded. Governments, discovering that a coveted “World Heritage” designation could boost tourism, began razing surrounding areas and displacing local populations, in order to accommodate bigger crowds. Making an argument for urgently needed reform, Meskell presents numerous case studies and an analysis of UNESCO’s legal framework, which is vulnerable to manipulation by corrupt actors. Modernists & Mavericks, by Martin Gayford…

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who think there are two kinds of people in the world and people who don’t. Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers were the first kind, and the test they invented based on that belief, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, is the most popular personality test in the world. More than two million people take it every year. It is used in twenty-six countries to assess employees, students, soldiers, and potential marriage partners. It is used by Fortune 500 companies and universities, in self-improvement seminars and wellness retreats. There are more than two thousand personality tests on the market, many of them blatant knock-offs of the MBTI, but Myers-Briggs is No. 1. Merve Emre’s “The Personality Brokers” (Doubleday) is the story…