Innholdsfortegnelse for October 8, 2018 i The New Yorker

Jill Lepore (“Misjudged,” p. 34) is a professor of history at Harvard. Her new book, “These Truths: A History of the United States,” came out last month. John L’Heureux (Fiction, p. 56) has published eleven novels and three story collections. Claudia Roth Pierpont (“The Canvas Ceiling,” p. 20) is a staff writer. Her books include “Roth Unbound” and “American Rhapsody: Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars, and One Great Building.” Ben McGrath (The Talk of the Town, p. 18) has been writing for the magazine since 2001. Ana Juan (Cover) is the illustrator of the children’s-book series “Fairyland.” This is her twenty-fifth cover for The New Yorker. Danez Smith (Poem, p. 38) is the author of “Don’t Call Us Dead,” which received the 2018 Forward Prize for best poetry collection, and…

Last Wednesday afternoon, Jacinda Ardern, the thirty-eight-year-old Prime Minister of New Zealand, sat on a couch in her suite at the Plaza Hotel recounting her day to a small circle of advisers. She wore a patterned silk dress and a black suit jacket, and had tucked her long, dark hair behind her ears. There had been a trilateral meeting with the President of Chile and the Prime Minister of Canada on trade, at the Bloomberg Business Forum, and a climate-change meeting hosted by the U.N. Secretary-General. Now her most demanding constituent needed to be placated. Ardern lifted her three-month-old daughter, Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford, into the air and settled on the couch to nurse. The press is “very interested in Iran at the moment,” Ardern continued, as Neve started…

On a recent Tuesday morning, Charles Ross, the principal of Edison High School in Edison, New Jersey, ushered five hundred members of the senior class into the school’s auditorium for an asssembly. The pop star Matangi Arulpragasam, known by her stage name, M.I.A., would be arriving soon, for the screening of a documentary about her life, but it was still an assembly, and Ross reminded the group that headphones were not allowed. A dozen or so students reached for their earbuds. “And don’t try to bootleg the movie,” Ross warned. “This is serious content.” The documentary, “MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A.,” which premièred last week, was directed by Steve Loveridge, M.I.A.’s former art-school classmate at London’s Central Saint Martins. It incorporates footage that Arulpragasam shot on a return trip to Sri Lanka, where she…

This past summer, as Austrian glaciers melted and Swedish forests burned, the Swiss Air Force, which exists to protect a nation that hasn’t fought a war in five hundred years, was tasked with supplying tens of thousands of gallons of water to herds of parched cows stranded in Alpine pastures. Meanwhile, in Glion, a tiny village roosting high above the city of Montreux and accessible by funicular, it was already above seventy degrees Fahrenheit by 8:30 A.M., which is when classes begin at the Institut Villa Pierrefeu. To Viviane Neri, the school’s head-mistress, the heat wave engulfing Europe came as a pleasant surprise. “We haven’t had a summer like this in a hundred years,” she told me. “It’s quite lucky.” She smiled and gestured graciously toward Lake Geneva, which, like…

The large central room of the memory-care unit was designed to look like an old-fashioned American town square. There was a small fountain, surrounded by plants and a low stone wall; there were a couple of lamp-posts, and benches, tables, and chairs set about. The carpet was mottled with darker and lighter shades of green, to resemble grass growing and bending in different directions. Along the walls were the façades of what looked like clapboard houses, with wooden shutters and shingled pitched roofs and porches that extended into the room. Two long hallways, which led off from opposite sides of the central room, looked like streets in the same town, with more clapboard façades and porches on either side. These façades were not altogether fake: each front door opened onto…

Chan Marshall was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1972 and raised in North Carolina and Tennessee. She came of age as a musician in New York, where, in the early nineteen-nineties, she began recording under the name Cat Power. Her first releases, made with the drummer Steve Shelley, of Sonic Youth, reflect the city’s antagonism and discord. Sometimes, when you are young and far from home, it feels good to camp out in the corner of a dim, sticky dive, strum a single chord on a two-string guitar, and mumble the word “no” for fifteen minutes. Marshall is now forty-six. In the decades since her début, she has provided a rare and important template for generations of indie-rock singers, and particularly for young women trying to come up in an…

Lifetime’s “You” starts on a queasy note, with a cliff dive straight into the head of a stalker. Peering through the aisles of the bookstore he manages, Joe Goldberg ogles a pretty customer, taking in, via voice-over, her jingling bracelets (“You like a little attention,” he says) and her classy book choice (“Desperate Characters,” by Paula Fox). They flirt. When she leaves, he harvests her name from her credit card, dissects her Instagram, Google Maps her address—and, eventually, like a sleazy paparazzo, peeks through her windows. To be fair, Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), the poetry student who’s the object of Joe’s obsession, has no curtains on those windows—and she walks around in a towel, a lot. She has no password on her computer, either. “It’s like you’ve never seen a…

THE KINGDOM OF ZUCKERBERG Evan Osnos’s Profile of Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Facebook, draws a sharp contrast between Zuckerberg’s world view and the corporate ethos that he has created (“Ghost in the Machine,” September 17th). If individual privacy is over and the endgame of the Internet-enabled world is, as Zuckerberg claims, “connectivity,” why is the Facebook headquarters an insular mini-city? If Facebook has a social mission to serve the greater good, why is it so slow and ineffective in responding to the unethical, amoral, and violent uses of its technology? The truth is obvious: Facebook is a psychologically predatory, commercially unscrupulous advertising platform masquerading as a virtuous social-media network. Its only value comes from selling the personal data of a third of the global population. Yes, we volunteer…

A few weeks ago, a group of devotees huddled around a bright light, staring into its source with religious concentration. At Banter Bar, the illuminating savior comes in the form of a dramatically lit foosball table, which attracts adherents from across the city. Most days, the bar is dedicated to football of the larger, English variety—its walls are draped in scarves of the clubs whose games are shown on its TVs. Foosball tables in New York are only a little more common than an apparition of the Virgin Mary, and, sadly, most are the quality of Madonnas who appear on burned toast. At Banter, however, the foosball players who gather on Thursday nights regularly replace broken parts and oil joints, insuring an immaculate shrine. “I’ve been playing every week for…

On a recent Sunday, the modern-dance choreographer Kyle Abraham arrived at the David H. Koch Theatre, in Lincoln Center, to finish making a ballet. His client was the New York City Ballet, his deadline was Thursday, and the ballet—well, it’s his first. “I’m playing a lot of inspirational music before I walk in the door,” Abraham, who is forty-one and has a sincere, open face, said. He wore black sweatpants and a black sweatshirt. Holding up his phone, he shared what he calls his “Don’t eff with me” playlist: Robyn, Prince, and “some hip-hop anthems that tell me, like, ‘You can do it!’” (Drake’s “Over”; Kanye’s “Bring Me Down”). The N.Y.C.B. has been shaken by scandal this year, including a lawsuit by a former student and the retirement of its…

Ruth Bader Ginsburg blinked behind giant, round eyeglasses. It was the first day of her confirmation hearings, in July of 1993, the year after the Year of the Woman, and Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was very pleased to see her. Keen to do penance for the debacle of the Clarence Thomas hearings, just two years before—the year before the Year of the Woman—when an all-male committee, chaired by Biden, failed to credit what Anita Hill had to say about George H. W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, he could hardly have been friendlier to Bill Clinton’s nominee, a much respected and widely admired sixty-year-old appellate judge. She sat with the stillness of a watchful bird. “Judge Ginsburg, welcome,” Biden said, heartily. “And, believe me, you are…

A SIGN Annie Clark is a modern woman. It’s 1950, smack in the middle of the century, and she knows that the Second Great War is over and women were the real winners. Everywhere, women are taking charge of their lives. But Annie is Catholic, so she has to go slow. Today, for instance, she is being extra patient with this young waitress—Patsy P.—who is stout and clumsy and may be new to the job. Annie is waiting for dessert, apple pie with cheese, and she figures they must be baking the pie fresh, because it’s taking forever. Finally, the girl brings the pie and shoves it in front of Annie and heads off without a word. Annie looks at the speck of cheese on her plate and immediately says,…

Old Gods, New Enigmas, by Mike Davis (Verso). In this collection of essays, Davis searches Karl Marx’s œuvre for a revolutionary paradigm capable of addressing present-day economic inequality and climate change. The book moves from debates about nationalism to lively episodes in nineteenth-century science. The title essay concerns the central question facing Marxism today: Who will lead the revolution, now that most of the world’s poor exist in informal economies, outside the reach of working-class organizing structures? Davis argues that the history of worker-led uprisings in the late-modern period remains relevant to understanding how today’s “informal proletariat” might gain class consciousness and political agency. While the esoteric case studies and historical summaries will appeal primarily to readers already familiar with Marx, the book also offers the simple pleasure of…

A decade or so ago, I spent a fair amount of time with three friends who shared a loft in the East Village. Because all three were performers, I nicknamed the loft and its inhabitants the Footlights Club, in honor of Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s 1936 play, “Stage Door,” about aspiring actresses boarding together. And, because my friends sang or acted or wrote or directed for the stage, they had opening-night and closing-night parties at the Footlights Club that were more fun than anything, full of post-performance energy and camaraderie. On those nights, you might see the actor, singer, writer, and director Taylor Mac, his head shaved, with a slash of lipstick above his lip line, like Lucille Ball in “I Love Lucy.” Or you could run into…

THE THEATRE Because I Could Not Stop Pershing Square Signature Center Emily Dickinson was, in her youth, an avid pianist, abandoning music for poetry only when she became convinced she’d never master it. The Ensemble for the Romantic Century has made the inspired choice of pairing a staging of Dickinson’s poems and letters, read by Angelica Page, with a chamber-music performance—with violins, viola, cello, piano, and the soprano Kristina Bachrach—of compositions by her fellow New Englander Amy Beach, whose life overlapped with Dickinson’s. Directed by Donald T. Sanders, the production includes some unnecessary elements that often undermine the urgency of the music and the verse, particularly a series of projections that insert artless factoids about Dickinson’s life and times (“1870s: Industry Surpasses Agriculture as America’s Biggest Business”). But Page…

More days than not, Laurence Leavy attends a professional sporting event of some kind: baseball, primarily, but also basketball, football, hockey, and horse racing. (He owns more than a hundred thoroughbreds.) He buys the most expensive tickets. He always wears the same outfit: black pants, an orange visor, and an orange Miami Marlins jersey, with his nickname, Marlins Man, sewn on the back. His is a “sports-gasmic Groundhog Day of an existence,” as the Florida Sun-Sentinel has put it. He calls his law office, in Fort Lauderdale, a “shrine to the Marlins,” and yet, after a recent falling out with the team’s management, Leavy, who is sixty-one, now seldom attends Marlins games, preferring to roam the country while filing briefs and appeals, involving workers’-compensation cases, from hotels. Most superfans, like…

Were you swimming, and is another shoe also lost? Do you have a dog? Do you ever secretly gnaw on the sole of your shoe? If so, might you have eaten the entire shoe? Might it have disappeared down the same drain from which the bit of dental floss protruded? Are you not aware that drains vary in size? If, as John Lennon suggested, you can imagine there being no heaven, can you imagine that you never had the shoe? Has your husband recently “cleaned” the house? Can you close your eyes and envision your route from the bar to your home after an evening of doing tequila shots? Might your ex-lover be really, really mad at you for breaking things off, and, if so, might he have pulled a…

soundless, it crosses a line, quiets into a seed& then whatever makes a seed. almost like gonebut not gone. the air kept its shape. not antimatterbut the memory of matter. or of it mattering. it doesn’tcross my mind now that it whispers so soft it’s almostsilence. but it’s not. someone dragged the screaming boyso deep into the woods he sounds like the trees now.gone enough. almost never here. daily, swallowedwithin a certain window, a pale-green trail on the tonguethe pale-green pill makes before it’s divvied amongthe ghettos of blood, dissolves & absolvesmy scarlet brand. ritual & proof. surely science & witchcraft have the same face. my motherpraises god for this & surely it is his face too.regimen, you are my miracle. this swallowingmy muscular cult. i am not faithful to…

Even I, pure in my loneliness, in linefor the good soft pretzels, sprint backto my seat. Sentinelfor the bare-shouldered, the cutoff-clad and sugarsmudged, for tall boys trampledand the greased-up mustard pumps,for men threshing againsta particularly elusive curveball (brutal,the Bay’s sure fog). For seabirdsdiving the dumpsters, the chantedsnatches of old cheers.The burnished, Pre-Raphaelite glow.It trawls the crowd, patronscast for tonight’s brief drama.Here is the reluctant husband,holding out until the final secondfor an automatic peck. The façadeof searching, blur of faces, fireworksbursting up, then the graying couplereally going at it, tongue and all.Applause almost crushing the crowdback into itself. Finally—each eager coupleleans forward—the young parentsscore the finale. So intenton righting a bag of popcornthey nearly miss it, blush at the audience’s cheering and pull each otherclose. They will, I think, remember thisalways,…

A round 2012, I began to hear from friends about a remarkable young poet, still an undergraduate at Yale. I never met Max Ritvo, but in the years that followed I felt that I came to know him: his friendly curiosity, his wit and preternatural lyric gifts, and, terribly, his illness. Given a diagnosis of Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, when he was sixteen, Ritvo died in 2016, at the age of twenty-five. His emergence as a writer was, in fact, a record of his imminent disappearance. He was making himself unforgettable, one vivid trace at a time. In 2013, Ritvo began an M.F.A. program at Columbia University. Clips of his readings turned up on YouTube, and spread: friends described to me with animated precision poems that I…

Bill Traylor, the subject of a stunning retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in Washington, D.C., “Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor,” was about twelve years a slave, from his birth, in Dallas County, Alabama, in 1853 or so, until Union cavalry swept through the cotton plantation where he was owned, in 1865. Sixty-four years later, in 1939, homeless on the streets of Montgomery, he became an extraordinary artist, making magnetically beautiful, dramatic, and utterly original drawings on found scraps of cardboard. He pencilled, and later began to paint, crisp silhouette figures of people and animals—feral-seeming dogs, ominous snakes, elegant birds, top-hatted men, fancily dressed women, ecstatic drinkers—either singly or in scenes of sometimes violent interaction. There were also hieratic abstractions of simple forms—such as a purple balloon…