Innholdsfortegnelse for September 17, 2018 i The New Yorker

Evan Osnos (“Ghost in the Machine,” p. 32) writes about politics and foreign affairs for the magazine. His book, “Age of Ambition,” won the 2014 National Book Award for nonfiction. Rebecca Mead (“Inner Voice,” p. 18) has been a staff writer since 1997. “My Life in Middlemarch” is her latest book. Thomas Mallon (Books, p. 59) is a novelist, an essayist, and a critic. His tenth novel, “Landfall,” will be published in February. Jen Spyra (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25), a former senior writer for the Onion, is a staff writer for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Ishion Hutchinson (Poem, p. 37) is the author of two poetry collections, “Far District” and “House of Lords and Commons.” Tessa Hadley (Fiction, p. 48) has been publishing short stories in…

Walter Mosley Greenlight Bookstore Crime novelists are generally most comfortable with depictions of wrongdoing, but the murder that functions as the pivotal plot point in “John Woman,” Mosley’s new novel, is secondary to the book’s sweeping meditation on shifting identities and narratives. The sleuthing in Mosley’s popular Easy Rawlins novels is replaced with a hall of mirrors. The author discusses the book with W. Paul Coates, the founder and director of the Black Classic Press.—K. Leander Williams (Sept. 13 at 7:30.) Jennifer Egan Brooklyn Public Library In the early forties, the period covered in Egan’s latest novel, “Manhattan Beach,” the Brooklyn Navy Yard was a bustling site of wartime innovation, industry, and activity. Re-creating this world for the expansive historical novel took years of intense investigation, which Egan discusses…

On a recent Thursday, Matt Haimovitz, the forty-seven-year-old virtuoso cellist, packed an empty instrument case into the back of his car and drove from his home, in Montreal, to a friend’s apartment on the Upper West Side, where he’d be crashing. The case was for Haimovitz’s rare, multimillion-dollar cello, which he calls Matteo—after Matteo Goffriller, the seventeenth-century Venetian luthier who built it. He had played it for thirty years, until, fifteen months earlier, while giving a lesson to a promising Canadian student, he dropped it, and the cello’s neck snapped. Since then, the instrument had been undergoing extensive repairs by a team of five luthiers at Reed Yeboah Fine Violins, near Columbus Circle. Now the shop had called to say that Matteo was ready for release. The relationship between cellist…

Evening blooms in heat a braying of bellsfrom August Town; my mind fizzlesover “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” its sporadic arcwelding and breaking the question, how toalign poetry with truth. A stalled elevation,returning in my old professor’s blightmarginalia, his book, offered abruptly,taken, stowed away, now posthumously examined:fragile pencil webbings of flickered exclamations,impatient the way he paced the blackboard,erased a word (“meteors”), hurled glancessomewhere far off, beyond me, himself a boy-comet, weeping to his duty.Once I strayed to the tubular steel chairchained in a corner, glistening sweaton one leg, our eyes wounded appraisalmet there and he cracked the air, chargedme pick up Browning’s chorus. I couldn’t.He died. His pupil flowered later intothe voltage of self-alienating poetry,away from that moribund grammarian’sblind reluctance. Still, as moving ironwill fuse and repel, by his book, I amthe…

September 15th marks the tenth anniversary of the demise of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, which presaged the biggest financial crisis and deepest economic recession since the nineteen-thirties. After Lehman filed for bankruptcy, and great swaths of the markets froze, it looked as if many other major financial institutions would also collapse. On September 18, 2008, Hank Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, went to Capitol Hill and told congressional leaders that if they didn’t authorize a seven-hundred-billion-dollar bank bailout the financial system would implode. Some Republicans reluctantly set aside their reservations. The bailout bill passed. The panic on Wall Street abated. And then what? The standard narrative is that the rescue operation succeeded in stabilizing the financial system. The U.S.…

Worldwide celebrations of the hundredth birthday of Leonard Bernstein, which fell on August 25th, have touted the man as a kind of musical superhero, who conquered every medium he touched: conducting, composing, Broadway shows, education, television, the intricate game of American celebrity. In classical music, he is venerated, almost desperately, as the Great Communicator, who thrust the symphonic repertory into the national conversation. After the Kennedys were assassinated, Bernstein offered Mahler as a memorial; when the Berlin Wall fell, he led a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. At a time when classical music was retreating to the edges of the cultural landscape, Bernstein appeared to reverse the process almost single-handedly, through force of will. His charisma was indeed potent, but as Bernstein recedes into history he seems more a product of…

BANNON AND THE FESTIVAL While I understand the desire to bring our country together through dialogue, I was shocked by David Remnick’s choice to interview Steve Bannon, an alt-right white supremacist, as part of the New Yorker Festival, even though his appearance has since been cancelled. There must be another conservative Remnick could have a discussion with who carries some of Bannon’s political views but isn’t a leader of white nationalists. Someone who won’t use the invitation as an opportunity to galvanize support for his platform. If Remnick is going to interview someone like Bannon, why not do it in a private setting and include what he says as part of an article? This is the kind of journalism of fascination that got Trump elected. Cynthia Yoder West Windsor,…

The frantic talk, last week, of the President’s mental condition brought back memories of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the test he took earlier this year to reassure the public. Its challenges include identifying pictures of a lion, a camel, and a rhinoceros, and repeating the phrase “I only know that John is the one to help today.” Trump aced it, prompting his physician to pronounce him “very sharp,” and his son Donald, Jr., to tweet, “More #winning.” One wonders how he would fare on the Specialized High School Admissions Test, or S.H.S.A.T., which more than twenty thousand New York City eighth and ninth graders will take next month. The test is the sole admissions requirement for eight of the city’s specialized public high schools, considered the “Ivies” of the system.…

A tip for people who frequent fine dining establishments, or want to A seem like they do: such restaurants often stock black napkins, for guests who spill on themselves while wearing dark clothing. The custom dates at least as far back as 1985, when Danny Meyer opened the Union Square Café. In those days, the restaurateur recalled recently, “we had three choices with napkins. One, give people a white cotton one that would invariably lint. You’d have people walking out of the restaurant looking like a Dalmatian. Two, white polyester, which did not lint but was awful. Or, three, one-hundred-per-cent-cotton ones that did not lint but were so expensive they would’ve put us out of business. That’s what led to the black napkin.” By the late nineties, black napkins were…

Cecilia awakened from her childhood while she was on holiday in Italy, the summer she turned fifteen. It was not a sexual awakening, or not exactly—rather, an intellectual or imaginative one. Until that summer, the odd child she was had seemed to fit in perfectly with the oddity of her rather elderly parents. Her father, Ken, worked at a university library, and her mother, Angela, wrote historical novels, and when they came late to marriage—and then to childbearing and child rearing—they saw no reason to change the entrenched pattern of their lives, or to become more like ordinary people. No one who knew them could quite imagine afterward how they had managed nappies and dummies and spooning in baby food; they themselves couldn’t really remember how they had managed it.…

On May 3, 2016, when Donald Trump appeared to clinch the Republican nomination by winning the Indiana primary, an elderly remnant of Hoosiers could remember the unlikely ascent of another businessman who, in 1940, came out of nowhere, convincing the G.O.P. that he, rather than someone from an array of familiar officeholders, should be the Party’s Presidential candidate. Wendell Willkie had so recently been a Democrat that he slipped up and called the convention delegates who nominated him “you Republicans.” His abrupt rise prompted an immortal complaint from one Party stalwart: “I don’t mind the church converting a whore, but I don’t like her to lead the choir the first night.” Willkie did not become President, but during the next few years he did become a superior political specimen, an…

ART “Giacometti” Guggenheim Museum The Swiss master of the skinny sublime is the subject of a majestic, exhausting retrospective—pace yourself when you go. The standard story of Giacometti, as a Surrealist who became a paragon of existentialism for his ravaged response to the Second World War, was well established by 1966, when he died, at the age of sixty-four. He hasn’t changed. The world has, though. What is he to 2018 and 2018 to him? Since 2010, three bronze figures by Giacometti have become the first, second, and third most expensive sculptures ever sold. Auction antics hardly amount to historical verdicts, but, these days, trying to ignore the market when discussing artistic values is like trying to communicate by whisper at a Trump rally. Giacometti’s work surely deserves its…

Thirteen of the photographer David LaChapelle’s most iconic celebrity portraits are currently on view at the Rose Bar, the ritzy cocktail lounge in the Gramercy Park Hotel. Here’s Tupac Shakur luxuriating in a bubble bath; there’s Paris Hilton in amorous engagement with a Popsicle. “I shoot fantasy,” LaChapelle has said. “If you want reality, ride the bus.” On a recent Thursday evening, a woman in a rainbow trapeze dress arrived by subway. “Do my eyelashes look big?” she asked her beau, as they alighted on a velvety settee near the fireplace. “I put on three coats of mascara.” When the hotel closed for renovations, in 2004, the artist Julian Schnabel was brought in to head up the interior design. He chose a Renaissance color palette, with vermillion upholstery and Douglas-fir…

New Yorkers swarm for many reasons: flash mobs, Occupy Wall Street, the cronut line. Two weeks ago, a group of thirty thousand Manhattanites, give or take, caused a ruckus when they exercised their freedom of assembly in Times Square. The trouble was, they were bees. The runaway swarm settled on the umbrella of a hot-dog cart at Forty-third Street and Broadway. Within an hour, an officer from the New York City Police Department was in a beekeeping veil, sucking the swarm up with a special vacuum. The Times Square bees became instant celebrities: Reuters live-streamed the whole thing, while the official Twitter account of the N.Y.P.D. beekeepers fielded questions. Q: “How does this happen???” A: “Just like us, they’re only looking for a place to cool down.” All this raised…

When George Benjamin, the British composer, was a small child, he discovered that he had an unusual physiological gift: with a voluntary muscular movement, he was able to block his ears. This created a strange sense of internal amplification and enclosure, similar to what other people might experience by plugging their ears with their fingers. With this trick, he could dampen the outside world while increasing the resonance of the inner one. Often when he was alone, or walking, he would shut himself up inside his head and mentally replay music. Benjamin became obsessed with classical music at a very early age, after being taken by his parents to a screening of Walt Disney’s “Fantasia.” “I was very reluctant to go,” he told me recently. “Tantrum on the way. Bliss…

Atten o’clock on a weekday morning in August, Mark Zuckerberg, the chairman and C.E.O. of Facebook, opened the front door of his house in Palo Alto, California, wearing the tight smile of obligation. He does not enjoy interviews, especially after two years of ceaseless controversy. Having got his start as a programmer with a nocturnal bent, he is also not a morning person. Walking toward the kitchen, which has a long farmhouse table and cabinets painted forest green, he said, “I haven’t eaten breakfast yet. Have you?” Since 2011, Zuckerberg has lived in a century-old white clapboard Craftsman in the Crescent Park neighborhood, an enclave of giant oaks and historic homes not far from Stanford University. The house, which cost seven million dollars, affords him a sense of sanctuary. It’s…

Any wonder he tossed back Sazeracs & sidecars,the one who always woke sullenas the long blue light between buildings,who slept with his back curledlike an accusation, who rockedhis weight onto his heels like an amateuractor overdoing Stanley in “Streetcar”when he hailed his cab in the morning.Any wonder there were apologies& bodega flowers wreathed with baby’s breath,any wonder there was another womanI never met & then the wedding invitation,no warning. He knew he was handsome—his worst gift. In restaurants he orderedwithout asking—steak tartare, dollop of yolkglistening in raw meat. To love a narcissistyou have to believe, & reader, I did—for a time, I loved him, I believedin his cruelty & beauty—buds in silverbirch, sparrows scuffingin the gravel by the basketball courtwhere I watched him play Sunday pickup—his brute musculature twistingbeneath his…

The Design of Childhood, by Alexandra Lange (Bloomsbury). This encyclopedic study of children’s toys and environments also charts how the idea of childhood has developed. Lange, an architecture critic, shows that the desire to foster children’s creativity is not always served by the increased sophistication of playthings. The plain wooden blocks introduced in 1838 by Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the kindergarten, facilitated open-ended engagement, whereas Legos come with instructions suggesting the “one best way to build a set.” Lange details the transformation of homes, schools, and cities to include space for play. Some innovations seem extreme, such as “junk” playgrounds filled with “scraps of wood, bricks, mud, and basic tools,” but risk, she counters, “is an essential part of psychological development.” Call Me American, by Abdi Nor Iftin…