Innholdsfortegnelse for October 1, 2018 i The New Yorker

Rachel Aviv (“The Forgotten Ones,” p. 34) is a staff writer and a national fellow at New America. James Wood (Books, p. 66) teaches at Harvard University. “Upstate,” his latest novel, was published in June. LaToya Ruby Frazier (Photographs, pp. 35, 38) is an artist working in photography, video, and performance, and a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of “The Notion of Family.” Nick Flynn (Poem, p. 52) will publish his next book of poems, “I Will Destroy You,” in 2019. Jane Mayer (“Russia Won,” p. 18), the magazine’s chief Washington correspondent, is the author of “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.” David Kortava (The Talk of the Town, p. 15)…

A round two hundred and fifty people graduated from New Hanover High School, in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1998. Some of us moved away, but many stayed in the city and its surrounding areas. A twenty-year class reunion was planned for the weekend of October 5th. There was to be a football game, a family bowling day, and a Saturday-night party, with door prizes and music by DJ Miliano, “playing everything from the 90s and a little bit from today.” The Wilmington Convention Center, where the festivities were meant to take place, sits on the northeast bank of the Cape Fear River, which crested at sixty-two feet after Hurricane Florence. Xiquena De Vega, one of the organizers, said last week that she had no idea if the reunion would still…

Over an iced chamomile tea at the midtown Radiance Tea House & Books, whose ambient noise level (sixty decibels) is not much louder than a coffee percolator’s, Gregory Scott Farber described the app he created, Sound-Print, as “Yelp for noise.” The free program allows users to search for and grade restaurants and bars according to their sound level. “Places are getting louder,” Farber, who is forty-two, said. “People tell me, thirty or forty years ago you could go somewhere to eat and expect to have a conversation.” A non-practicing lawyer who works as a research analyst, Farber suffers from permanent hearing loss, brought on by meningitis, which he contracted when he was a baby. Like so many great inventions, Farber’s arose from a desire to find love—or, at least, a…

He wandersamong us, village to village, hauling his sackof rats. Nightfall he stands, at the edge now of ours & inthe dark releases them. They gnaw our sills & eat ourgrain, they fill our wells & find our cribs& lurk among our apples. Morningcomes, his shingle hung— the solution is his song.Some offer gold, some offer milk, what elseto do, we’re over- run, we each must make a promise. Thosewithout, what can we offer— a child will do, just give a name, he’ll fold it up, he’lltake our word, his smile a blackenedsickle. He plays his song, past barn, pastgate, the rats now wake, they goto him, the song he plays, they tumble out& back into his sack. When he returns, his fee nowowed, some sense a trick, some sense…

“Flights,” by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead), is exciting in the way that unclassifiable things are exciting—that is to say, at times confoundingly so. It is intermittently a work of fiction, but it is also an exercise in theory, cultural anthropology, and memoir. The narrator, an unnamed Polish writer with a hungry eye and an unappeasable need to travel, presents an omnium-gatherum, a big book full of many peculiar parts: there are mini-essays on airports, hotel lobbies, the psychology of travel, guidebooks, the atavistic pleasures of a single Polish word, the aphorisms of E. M. Cioran. Some of these riffs, which themselves tend toward the aphoristic, are as short as a couple of sentences. They are interspersed with longer fictional tales, set all over the world and in different…

THE PRESIDENT’S MAN I was the chief counsel to the New Jersey governor Jon Corzine from 2006 to 2008, so I was particularly interested to read Jeffrey Toobin’s article about Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and his relationship with Donald Trump (“Beating the Drum,” September 10th). Toobin fails to convey how far Giuliani’s behavior as Trump’s personal lawyer deviates from traditional legal norms and from the canons of legal ethics. It may be that, as Toobin notes, Giuliani concluded that the core aim of his advocacy for the President should be to undermine public support for the special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. On that count, he has succeeded to some degree. However, what makes Giuliani different…

A window at the back of this sleek bar frames a contraption that looks like one of the onion domes atop St. Basil’s Cathedral, in Moscow, but fashioned out of copper. The device is not, as a patron recently suggested, the latest in Russian espionage technology but, rather, a pot still, where a corn-based alcoholic mash is heated before the liquid is siphoned off and cooled. The resulting product is Our Vodka, a slightly fruity, remarkably clean-tasting version of the spirit. “It’s the first legal distillery in Manhattan since Prohibition,” an employee explained as she showed a clutch of bar crawlers around the facility. Our has a handful of distilleries in other cities, including Berlin, London, and Detroit, each of which sources its own local ingredients. “Manhattan was definitely the…

One recent morning, B. H. Barry, the Tony Award-winning fight director, rode an electric scooter down West End Avenue to Lincoln Center, where he was choreographing stage combat for Giacomo Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West,” which opens next week at the Metropolitan Opera. In a basement studio, which was set up like a Wild West saloon, he took a seat near a wooden table strewn with playing cards, fake pistols, and prop whiskey bottles. An Italian tenor, a Serbian baritone, an American basso cantante, and some twenty extras milled around, preparing for the big Act I brawl. “It’s a comic fight,” Barry explained. “It’s like an Irish bar, and every Friday night these people beat the crap out of each other.” He added, in an exaggerated brogue, “‘Aye, ye broke…

Seth Murrell, a four-year-old boy with dreadlocks to his chin, moved with his family to Atlanta in the fall of 2015. On his first day at his new preschool, he cried the whole morning. He wouldn’t sit still in his chair. He’d pop up and snatch the glasses off a classmate’s face, or spit at the teacher. When he was tired, he waved his arms in the air, begging his teacher to hold him. On the rare occasions that his teacher complimented him, he shouted “Yay!” too loudly. His mother, Latoya Martin, a hair stylist, had moved with her husband and three children from Donalsonville, a rural town in Seminole County, in the southwest corner of Georgia, to be closer to psychiatrists and neurologists who would understand why her son…

The funeral director would be right with them, a woman’s voice said through the intercom when they rang the bell. After standing on the porch for a minute and then another minute, Jiayu and Chris sat down on two wicker chairs, a small round table with a potted yellow chrysanthemum between them. It was a cloudless day, the sky intensely blue. A pair of squirrels were chasing each other on the lawn, and some unseen birds in the trees, which had yet to change colors, made loud noises, a game of hue and cry in the quiet neighborhood. Perhaps the real setting of every Shakespeare play, Jiayu thought, is a wall-less waiting room like this: life as an antechamber to death. That thought, four months later, struck Jiayu as unnecessarily…

Empress, by Ruby Lal (Norton). In 1614, at the Mughal court, Nur Jahan, a widow who was a late addition to the emperor Jahangir’s retinue of wives, was made co-sovereign. She was dismissed by contemporaries as a gold-digger, but, as this thoroughly researched biography shows, she emerged as a wise ruler who helped reinvigorate Mughal culture. Instrumental in significant policy and military decisions—she once rode an elephant into battle to rescue her husband—she was also a talented amateur architect, designing a marble tomb that inspired the Taj Mahal. Although no later Mughal woman attained Nur’s standing, Lal shows that her reign had a lasting effect on female empowerment, enabling royal wives to issue an array of orders beyond the harem. Walls, by David Frye (Scribner). This lively history argues…

The New York Film Festival, at Lincoln Center Sept. 28-Oct. 14, showcases the year’s artistically ambitious movies. It also offers major revivals and rediscoveries, including J. L. Anderson’s rare independent film “Spring Night, Summer Night” (1967); Djibril Diop Mambéty’s “Hyenas” (1992); and Orson Welles’s newly completed “The Other Side of the Wind,” shot between 1970 and 1976, a kaleidoscopic reconstruction (bookending “Citizen Kane”) of the last day in the life of an acclaimed director, played by John Huston. NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Chick Corea Trio Blue Note Corea has worn so many stylistic hats and delved into so many musical byways over the six decades of his acclaimed career that it’s always a pleasure to…

Meme/noun; Internet slang/: a humorous image or text that is copied and shared widely. For example, a snapshot of a man on a motorcycle with a barrel of cheeseballs strapped to the passenger seat, or a ferret wearing a bathrobe, with the caption “It’s called being rich. Look it up, sweetie.” These two items recently appeared on the Instagram accounts FuckJerry and Beige-Cardigan, respectively, which are to memes what the “Tonight Show” is to standup comedians. They mine the Internet for comic gems and broadcast them to their seventeen million followers. Together, the two accounts bring in millions of dollars from corporate sponsors like MTV and Burger King, and they’ve spawned an army of associated companies, including an ad agency, a production house, and a card game called What Do…

*This book is unaffiliated with Oxford University or the Oxford University Press, but its editor drove a Morris Oxford for years. footnote is meant to supplement A textual information, usually on the same page as the subject matter being treated.* * The first use of a footnote has been traced to the year 1347,** in an indecipherable Nordic handbook of cute sayings.*** **Scholars disagree on the exact date; however, as the eminent radio-tune detective Dr. Sigmund Spaeth once said, “Scholars disagree on everything.” *** Lexicographers argue that “cute” is a crude mistranslation of the even cruder Nordic phrase “Ged rootentoota vow hibm oply gook!” (“I want to take your pants down”), translated from the Danish by Professor Arnoldo Ploy,* of Upandownsala University. * Professor Ploy was arrested in 1985 for…

“I only got one body,” a black woman says, deadly earnest, on a recent episode of “Random Acts of Flyness,” the HBO series about race. She pauses before adding, “And I got plans for it.” It can be startling to hear a woman of color describe and claim her own body: despite advances in our culture, some eyes still roll when a black woman says “I” or puts herself forward; in this political climate, it can be perceived as an aggressive act or as hysteria or—the worst—as special pleading. This has been an on-again, off-again problem in American letters since the nineteen-seventies, when authors ranging from Toni Morrison to Lucille Clifton, Gayle Jones, and Ntozake Shange began to write from inside black women’s lives, from a landscape that was dominated…