Innholdsfortegnelse for September 24, 2018 i The New Yorker

Paige Williams (“The Mouthpiece,” p. 42) became a staff writer in 2015. Her book “The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth’s Ultimate Trophy” is out this month. Kelefa Sanneh (“True Believers,” p. 36; Portfolio, p. 66) is a staff writer. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (Fiction, p. 74) lives in Moscow. Her many works include the memoir “The Girl from the Metropol Hotel,” which was translated into English last year. Jonathan Dee (Books, p. 82) is the author of seven novels, including “The Privileges” and, most recently, “The Locals.” He teaches at Syracuse University. Sarah Larson (The Talk of the Town, p. 25) is a staff writer. Her column, Podcast Dept., appears on newyorker.com. Leonard Cohen (Poem, p. 48), a poet, singer-songwriter, and novelist, died in 2016. His final…

The New Salon Greenberg Lounge Contemporary verse is the focal point of this New York University event, as the creative writing professor Deborah Landau engages two celebrated poets in conversation. The writers are the U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith and Catherine Barnett, whose new collection, “Human Hours,” is her first since her award-winning 2012 work, “The Game of Boxes.”—K. Leander Williams (Sept. 20 at 7.) Best Début Short Stories 2018 Housing Works Bookstore Café The PEN America Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers recognizes the work of a dozen newly published authors of fiction. To be eligible for the prize and inclusion in the subsequent PEN anthology, each author must have débuted in a literary magazine in the past year. Jodi Angel, Lesley Nneka Arimah,…

At four o’clock on a recent Wednesday, the artist and illustrator Jason Polan was sitting at a table at the Taco Bell on Fourteenth Street, just west of Union Square, his black roller-ball pen poised above a small drawing pad. At thirty-six, Polan still resembles a high schooler. He was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, glasses, and an orange baseball cap. Originally from suburban Michigan, he has been in New York since 2004, pursuing commercial work for brands like Uniqlo (a pocket tee printed with contented-seeming giraffes, a tote bag adorned with a pretzel pattern), alongside grander projects. He has resolved to draw every person in New York City, and maintains a blog where he posts quick, nimble sketches of civilians and celebrities tooling around. (“When the project is completed we…

i drank a lot. i lost my job.i lived like nothing mattered.then you stopped, and came acrossmy little bridge of fallen answers. i don’t recall what happened next.i kept you at a distance.but tangled in the knot of sexmy punishment was lifted. and lifted on a single breath—no coming and no going—o G-d, you are the only friendi never thought of knowing. your remedies beneath my handyour fingers in my hairthe kisses on our lips beganthat ended everywhere. and now our sins are all confessedour strategies forgivenit’s written that the law must restbefore the law is written. and not because of what i’d lostand not for what i’d masteredyou stopped for me, and came acrossthe bridge of fallen answers. tho’ mercy has no point of viewand no one’s here to…

The wretched mother could easily have lost her sanity watching her husband love their daughter—the way he stroked the child when she was falling asleep or waking up, his blissful expression when they touched, the fact that he bathed her himself, believing it to be his right and his responsibility. His happy laughter when he recounted to his guests how, in the tub, Manya always tried to cover her privates with her hands (leaving the rest exposed, the guests surmised). That was how matters proceeded until the girl turned eight and insisted on bathing alone, and the mother grew even more worried, wondering what might have gone on between the two. The mother, Irina, kept their home spotless; she had hands of gold—they actually did feel like gold or another…

Any new British novel at this particular moment must emerge, it seems, in the shadow of Rachel Cusk, whose just completed trilogy of austerely philosophical autofiction reflects her repudiation of the novel’s traditional building blocks—character, plot, description, etc.—as “fake and embarrassing,” as she told an interviewer. “Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous…. I’m certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts.” One could do worse, then, than to think of Kate Atkinson as a sort of anti-Cusk. In the twenty-odd years since her prize-winning début, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum,” Atkinson has predicated her enormously successful career upon giving readers intelligent and artful iterations of what they already know they…

During the first episode of “Maniac,” on Netflix, a Russian tour guide steers some red-baseball-capped tourists past a monument in New York Harbor: a flashy gold “Statue of Extra Liberty,” her wings spread wide, wielding a sword. It’s a throwaway visual gag, never revisited, but it made me snort, suggesting as it did something brain-twisty and satirical. It’s easy to get hopped up, at first, on the look and feel of “Maniac,” an archly dystopic series about two unhappy people, Owen and Annie, who volunteer for an experimental-drug trial. The show has its own vibe of Extra Liberty, of dreamy aesthetic excess, with popcorn popping on New York sidewalks and scientists moodily chain-smoking in labs. Written by the novelist Patrick Somerville, inspired by a Norwegian series, and directed by Cary…

WHAT’S YOUR TYPE? I read Louis Menand’s article on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator with particular interest, because I contributed research material to “The Personality Brokers,” the book, by Merve Emre, that Menand uses as his primary source (Books, September 1éth). For thirty years, as an authorized certifier and as a consultant, I taught practitioners how to administer the MBTI questionnaire, which involved explaining what it does and does not do. Menand exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding of how the MBTI is supposed to operate. The results and the scores are not determinate, as he suggests; rather, they are subject to feedback and discussion. That is why it’s an indicator and not a test, and what sets it apart from personality tests. A more informed and relevant critique of the MBTI…

The novelist Rumaan Alam and his husband, the photographer David Land, like collecting stuff. Vintage jigsaw puzzles, chinoiserie, Bangladeshi rickshaw art: these are a few of their favorite things. “We’re like stylish hoarders,” Alam said. Hoarders do not generally divest themselves of their stash, so it came as a surprise when Alam recently tweeted that he and Land were seeking a buyer for one of their more prized collections: twenty-two amateur renditions of Gilbert Stuart’s Athenaeum portrait of George Washington—the one used as the model for the image of the President on the dollar bill. Stuart painted the portrait in 1796, on commission from Martha Washington, but left it unfinished so that he could use it as a reference for future works. It was acquired by the Boston Athenaeum after…

W eWork, the co-working giant, aspires to be more than a place to bill hours. Its mission statement, in part: “Make a life, not just a living.” Accordingly, the company’s new in-house convenience stores, called WeMRKTs, aspire to do more than sell Tic Tacs and hand sanitizer. The stores carry products made by WeWork’s members, and, as Julie Rice, a partner, explained last month, they endeavor to better the world while increasing productivity. She said, “Every time our members have to leave the building, it’s another thirty minutes out of their day.” Rice, who is forty-eight, was on the patio of a WeWork in Century City, Los Angeles. In 2006, she co-founded the exercise chain SoulCycle and oversaw its retail division. “People purchased things because they were so connected to…

In 1957, less than a year after the end of the Montgomery bus boycott, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., took a part-time job as an advice columnist. His employer was Ebony, and his ambit was broad: race relations, marital problems, professional concerns. In the April, 1958, issue, King was asked to address one of the most polarizing issues of the day: rock music. His correspondent was a churchgoing seventeen-year-old with a musical split personality. “I play gospel music and I play rock ’n’ roll,” the letter read. Its author wanted to know whether this habit was objectionable. King’s advice was characteristically firm. Rock and gospel were “totally incompatible,” he explained: “The profound sacred and spiritual meaning of the great music of the church must never be mixed with the…

The British director Sam Mendes doesn’t like to act, but he frequently finds himself in front of an audience, taking a bow. For the forty-eight stage productions and seven feature films he has directed, he has collected thirty-four awards. In 2013, at the Empire Awards, where he received No. 28—for “Skyfall” (2012), which grossed more than $1.1 billion, making it the highest-earning of the twenty-five James Bond films to date—Mendes spoke to the assembled: I want to thank Stanley Kubrick for the war room in “Dr. Strangelove,” Billy Wilder for C. C. Baxter in “The Apartment,” Kurosawa for the death of the king at the end of “Throne of Blood,” Martin Scorsese for panning a camera down an empty corridor in “Taxi Driver,” Joel and Ethan Coen for the last…

Orange, gold, crunch, crisp. Apples cut in clean crescents, burntmarshmallow, smoke caught in the folds of our jackets, in our hair.Luminaria pumpkins like ambassadors of the season, a mustachedrawn with scorched cork, then a pilgrim’s hat of black and white.Cranberries bright as blood, a cold drift from beneath the door.Crackle of ice. Spring, finally: silly to think all this could end,when everything is bursting! Buds furled tight along the branch,wet and new, a girl’s soft hair, hard-soled shoes, rain against thepane and the smell of cut grass, loam and soil and sod, blossomson the sidewalk, petals on our shoulders and days to spend, daysto waste, hours sifted through our fingers like spilled sugar fromthe bowl. Then summer’s small fruits, hard and sour, hot sidewalk,hot forehead, hot breath of August at…

Into the Hands of the Soldiers, by David D. Kirkpatrick (Viking). This street-level account of the Egyptian revolution and its aftermath combines memoir, reportage, and analysis. Kirkpatrick and his family arrived in Cairo in 2010, less than a year before protests erupted across the country, triggering the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood’s electoral triumph, and a military coup restoring authoritarian rule. Kirkpatrick’s most valuable insights come from interviews given, years later, by Obama Administration officials. As tensions mounted, he learns, rival factions in Egypt received disastrously conflicting signals from Washington. This may not have determined how events unfolded, but it could not have helped. One Life at a Time, by Daniel Baxter (Skyhorse). In this affecting memoir, an American physician reflects on his eight years treating H.I.V.…

THE THEATRE Agnes 59E59 Four roommates and a house guest—all in their early thirties, all occupying varying planes of professional and emotional disrepair—seek love and connection in New York City. The setup calls to mind a nineties sitcom, except that the main character, Charlie (John Edgar Barker), has autism-spectrum disorder. Both the cast and the crew include A.S.D. artists, and the show’s best moments are at once funny and revealingly earnest, as when Charlie tells his neurotypical crush that his greatest sexual fantasy is to actually have it. The Lesser America production, directed by Jenna Worsham, with a script by Catya McMullen, crescendos as two simultaneous shouting matches come to a head over a soundscape of stormy weather, in a simulation of what some individuals with A.S.D. experience when…

In ancient Greece, physicians who took the Hippocratic oath vowed to “give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked,” but the bartenders at this apothecary-themed watering hole will gladly blend gentler toxicants with ingredients ranging from cucumber and lemongrass to roasted seaweed and duck fat. The cocktail menu, dubbed a “prescription list,” explains the medicinal properties of each boozy potion. Three vodka drinks (Pillow Talk, Dr. Ruth, Deal Closer), laden with fruits like honeydew and strawberries, promise aphrodisiac effects, while three gin libations (Tainted Love, Siren’s Call, Stolen from Eden) are meant to relieve stress, although their names sound less than relaxing. On a recent night, a woman wearing a sheer polyester top over a gray dress stood as close as she could to the bar. The loping bass line…

The other day, the musician Ben Dickey, originally of Little Rock, now of Louisiana, paid a visit to Chelsea Guitars, in the Chelsea Hotel building. Dickey, who is six feet four, bearded, and solidly built, wore black clothing, a neckerchief, and a fisherman’s cap. The store’s owner, Dan Courtenay, was outside, sweeping the sidewalk around a statue of Marilyn Monroe playing a ukulele. Dickey greeted him warmly. “I’ve met you before,” he said. “My buddy used to live in the hotel.” “Who’s your buddy?” Courtenay said. “Ethan Hawke.” “Oh, Ethan!” Courtenay said. “Yeah, right, right.” They proceeded inside, talking about Hawke’s “outrageous” Gibson L-00 from the nineteen-thirties. “It’s a cannon!” Courtenay said. Dickey agreed. Dickey is the star of Hawke’s new movie “Blaze,” about the late Texas outlaw-country artist Blaze…

When Carrie Coon was five years old, she would lie awake at night contemplating the apocalypse. “I was so ready for the end of the world,” she said recently. “We weren’t evangelicals or anything, but I knew about the Book of Revelation, and I knew that Jesus was supposed to come back.” Coon was raised Catholic, in Copley, Ohio, and her father had gone to seminary before returning to run the family auto-parts store. “My parents would be watching ‘Johnny Carson’ or whatever, and I’d come out of my bedroom and say, ‘O.K., when is the world ending?’” she recalled. When they assured her that it wouldn’t be during her lifetime, she would say, “But you don’t know that. We don’t know when it’s happening.” Decades later, Coon landed a…

Nearly two decades ago, in 2000, a CD called “Body & Soul: The Beginning” showed up in the markets of Lagos, Nigeria—an album that quickly became a regional hit, and, more gradually, helped spark a musical movement that has changed the sound of global pop. It was the work of Plantashun Boiz, a young trio that might accurately have been described as a boy band. The members—known as Tuface, BlackFace, and Faze—sometimes performed in matching outfits and often sang in matching voices, delivering plaintive, briskly syncopated love songs that bore traces of R. Kelly and Destiny’s Child. Careful listeners heard something else, too: a declaration of local pride. “Ememma,” one of the most popular tracks, captured the emergence of a hybrid new form of R. & B., propelled by a…