Innholdsfortegnelse for October 15, 2018 i The New Yorker

Hua Hsu (“School Colors,” p. 48), a staff writer, is the author of “A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific.” He teaches at Vassar. Jiayang Fan (“The Great Awakening,” p. 30) became a staff writer in 2016. Her reporting has appeared in The New Yorker since 2010. J. J. Sempé (Cover) is a longtime contributor of art work to the magazine. His many books include “C’est la Vie.” Deborah Landau (Poem, p. 53) directs the Creative Writing Program at New York University. Her fourth collection of poems, “Soft Targets,” will be published in the spring. Kevin Barry (Fiction, p. 70) has contributed to the magazine since 2010. His third novel, “Night Boat to Tangier,” will be out next summer. Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 25), a staff…

Last Wednesday night, less than forty-eight hours before the Senate voted to advance the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, three women who belong to an art-activist collective called the Illuminator parked their battered white van near Union Square and unloaded crates of heavy equipment onto a hand truck. The van was unmarked, and its interior was plastered with stickers: “Oppression Makes Us Sick”; “Revolución Empieza en Casa.” In the back was a homemade platform that could hold a powerful projector and be periscoped through the roof. The Illuminator—made up of a small group of New Yorkers whose day jobs range from archivist to adjunct professor—casts progressive messages onto the sides of buildings. (The group’s tagline is “Shining a light on the urgent issues of our time.”) Its communiqués are…

The other afternoon, Nick Kroll and Andrew Goldberg, two of the creators of the animated Netflix comedy “Big Mouth,” arrived at Solomon Schechter, a Jewish day school in the bucolic suburb of White Plains, New York, where they attended middle school. The men, both forty, have the easy rapport of friends who’ve been cracking each other up since they were six. The show, now in its second season, is based on their painfully awkward early-teen years as best friends in Westchester County. Its protagonists, Nick and Andrew, are forced to navigate the rough seas of puberty while besieged by biological urges represented by convivial, and chatty, creatures called “hormone monsters.” Now the real Nick and Andrew were back at the scene of the crime. Kroll was bearded and natty in…

In June, 2016, after news broke that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, a group of prominent computer scientists went on alert. Reports said that the infiltrators were probably Russian, which suggested to most members of the group that one of the country’s intelligence agencies had been involved. They speculated that if the Russians were hacking the Democrats they must be hacking the Republicans, too. “We thought there was no way in the world the Russians would just attack the Democrats,” one of the computer scientists, who asked to be identified only as Max, told me. The group was small—a handful of scientists, scattered across the country—and politically diverse. (Max described himself as “a John McCain Republican.”) Its members sometimes worked with law enforcement or for private clients, but…

Behind a softly lit control panel, hushed and expectant, the director Luca Guadagnino sat with editors and listened for breath noises at the start of his new film. The studio was dark. The screen, too large for those assembled, glowed. Outside, a hard late-winter rain fell on Rome, joining with the patter of an onscreen storm, as if the line between the real world and the imagined one were weakening, bleeding, beginning to leak. “Ho perso molti respiri,” Guadagnino murmured. Then, calling to the mixer at the controls, “We missed a breath.” Onscreen, an old man and a young woman were speaking in a state of high alarm. The editors were adding into the mix passing noises of human exchange: footfalls, paper rustlings, a little gasp, a sigh. “After he…

Frederick Douglass, who has been called the greatest American of the nineteenth century, grew up as a slave named Frederick Bailey, and the story of how he named himself in freedom shows how complicated his life, and his world, always was. Frederick’s father, as David W. Blight shows in his extraordinary new biography, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” (Simon & Schuster), was almost certainly white, as Douglass knew early on, and there is something almost cruelly parodic in the grand name the child slave was given: Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. Escaping to freedom in 1838, at the age of twenty, and needing a new name—in part as a declaration of a reinvented self, in part for the practical necessity of eluding the slave-catchers—he chose to become Frederick Douglass, in honor…

ACTS OF FAITH Paige Williams, in her article on Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, quotes Sanders as saying, “I’m not going to my office expecting it to be my church” (“The Mouthpiece,” September 24th). It would be nice if Sanders; her father, Mike Huckabee; and other leading voices in the evangelical movement would respect the right of many of us who feel the same way: when we’re at a hospital, a pharmacy, a bakery, or a marriage-license bureau, our experience shouldn’t be dictated by anyone’s religion. Evangelicals should stop trying to make public schools subsidiaries of their churches by forcing our children to listen to religious propaganda. Sanders may not realize it, but, with her quote, she is admitting that the United States is a secular…

On the first evening of fall, members of the boomer-era Ridgewood diaspora, fresh from Florida and Long Island, gathered at Gottscheer Hall to reminisce about adolescence. “We used to rip the antennas off cars and go fight each other,” a woman said, as a bearded man listed bygone rival gangs—the Halsey Bops, the Bleeker Boys—that had prowled the old neighborhood, then an insular enclave of German-speaking immigrants. “But now we’re all friends,” she added. In the faux-Tudor barroom, a man studied a map of Gottschee, part of modern-day Slovenia, near Melania Trump’s birthplace. The garrulous bon vivant of the clan—“the only Sanders voter here”—offered a pink vape, a stein of Spaten, and stories from his life (jail time for armed robbery, service in Vietnam, a turn as a playwright) to…

Fact: the actor Daniel Radcliffe is currently starring in the Broadway show “The Lifespan of a Fact,” as a magazine fact checker with an aviation inspector’s zeal for accuracy. The play is drawn from a real-life skirmish: in 2005, Jim Fingal, an intern at The Believer, was tasked with fact-checking an essay by John D’Agata (played by Bobby Cannavale), about a teen suicide in Las Vegas. D’Agata had more of a watercolorist’s approach to the truth. When Fingal tried to correct his claim that Las Vegas had thirty-four licensed strip clubs—a source indicated that it was thirty-one—D’Agata said that he liked the “rhythm” of thirty-four. Their epistolary tussle was expanded into a book in 2012. Not long ago, Radcliffe arrived at the offices of this magazine, wearing a maroon cap…

In 2012, Michael Wang, a senior at James Logan High School, in the Bay Area, was confident that he had done enough to get into one of his dream schools: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. He had the kind of G.P.A.—4.67—that looks like a typo to anyone older than thirty-five. He had aced the ACT and placed in the ninety-ninth percentile on the SAT. But Wang didn’t want to be seen merely as a bookworm—he was an accomplished member of the speech-and-debate team, and he had cofounded his school’s math club. He played the piano and performed in a choir that sang with the San Francisco Opera, and at Barack Obama’s first Inauguration. The following spring, Wang was rejected from all the Ivy League universities he had applied to, except…

Living alone in his dead uncle’s cottage, and with the burden lately of wandering thoughts in the night, Seamus Ferris had fallen hard for a Polish girl who worked at a café down in Carrick. He had himself almost convinced that the situation had the dimensions of a love affair, though in fact he’d exchanged no more than a few dozen words with her, whenever she named the price for his flat white and scone, and he shyly paid it, offering a line or two himself on the busyness of the town or the fineness of the weather. “It’s like France,” he said to her one sunny morning in June. And it was true that the fields of the mountain had all the week idled in what seemed a Continental…

The hatchet came later. Rocks were rare in the Red Hills of Kansas, where Carry Nation lived, so, when God commanded her to destroy establishments where alcohol was served, she gathered pieces of brick from her yard and wrapped them in brown paper to look like packages. On the morning of June 7, 1900, she walked into a saloon in Kiowa, told the proprietor to take cover, and began throwing her “smashers,” as she called them, at the mirror above his bar and all the bottles on it. Later that day, Nation did the same thing at two other bars in town, though when her brick failed to break the mirror at one of them she hurled a billiard ball from a nearby pool table to finish the job. She…

In several respects, John Wray’s “Godsend” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) appears to be a conventional specimen: a compact, tautly written novel of travel and growth, about a troubled eighteen-year-old California woman who leaves home and sets out on an arduous, sometimes terrifying journey. Formally, everything fits into place: lean dialogue, attentive description, nicely paced interiority, deft characterization—all the right contemporary rations. Wray’s publisher calls it “a coming-of-age novel like no other,” and the reader prepares for a decent chunk of Californian Bildung. But Wray’s story is in fact indecently unconventional. Our heroine leaves not for, say, New York but for a madrassa in Pakistan, and then joins the Taliban, across the border in Afghanistan. She “grows,” she comes of age, but the journey will strike most readers as a distinctly…

Bob Dylan’s songs play a bit of a trick. They loft you along, their verses engaging the brain much the way that plot does in prose: as a long, supple spine making sense of a fleshy body of emotion. And, as happens so often when we speak with almost anyone, we get the impression of being told a story about the outer world while actually learning mostly about the speaker himself. The real Dylan (to my mind, the best Dylan) is the one who presents himself as a national bard, a keeper of myth, but whose music, closely observed, is the extension of a tightly controlled persona. Listen to “Hurricane,” one of my favorites. The song tells the mostly true story of the black boxer Rubin Carter, who was imprisoned…

Defiantly charismatic, the Zimbabwean-born choreographer Nora Chipaumire has long been a kind of rock star of dance. She calls her three-part work “#PUNK 100% POP*NIGGA” a “live performance album,” and it’s as much a punk-style concert as it is a dance show. At the Kitchen, Oct. 11-13, as part of the Crossing the Line Festival, she works the crowd with a microphone, channelling a different musical hero in each fifty-minute section: Patti Smith, Grace Jones, and the Congolese barrier breaker Rit Nzele. ART “The Progressive Revolution” Asia Society In 1947, in the wake of the Partition, six men in Bombay (now Mumbai), most of them painters, formed the Progressive Art Group. Their work would represent the new India, rejecting the namby-pamby, Raj-influenced Bengal School in favor of a bold…

Last Monday night, about fifty New Yorkers of diverse ages and nondiverse politics showed up at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library for the first in a series of “Midterm Explainers”—informal talks ahead of the November elections, followed by cheese and screw-top wine. The evening’s topic, according to a flyer, was “The invisible hand of the super PAC.” The explainer was Zephyr Teachout, who was identified as an anti-corruption activist and a “veteran candidate”—a polite way of saying that she ran for governor of New York, in 2014; for Congress, in 2016; and for state attorney general, this year, all without enduring the potentially corrupting effects of winning. Teachout, a law professor at Fordham, is an expert on antitrust issues and on the Constitution’s emoluments clause. She sat…

Instagram Effective immediately, users of Instagram must be at least one of the following at all times: • In Greece.• Getting married.• Eating an expensive-looking meal that—surprise!—is actually homemade.• Visibly pregnant.• Smiling the carefree smile of the young and beautiful.• A sunset or a cat.• Doing one of those mud races that people seemed to love a few years back. Are those still a thing?• Showing off a new tattoo—but now it has to be a good tattoo.• In an immersive Yayoi Kusama art installation.• A baby. (Note to babies: try the Gingham filter!)• Looking away from the camera the way models do, you know?• A sponsored advertisement for an organic protein bar that retails for $5.99. Twitter All Twitter users must now check a box indicating whether they’re a…

The deepest redress is a thick and fulsome snow.Peaceful prevail of afternoon,looking out at this bluish marvel the air. The snow realizes you a body, puts on you a hat,tombs you in its second nature, with consequenceof sepia, a leaking dusky blue. The snow fumbles at your borders,wants a way in. In the snow we are angelicand it’s not discouraging in fact it is marvellouswhen the snow has its arms around usand we walk the streets as if safe. You’re a child, even in midlife.The snow clouds us in its peppery breathand the air comes fresh. It comes and goes and comes againit doesn’t aim for durabilityit accumulates for the sake of it& doesn’t want to last. The snow, I envy it,it will vanishbut it doesn’t care, it’s its own…

Swelling out of the ocean like a bad feeling,heard before seen slouching toward Miramarover Venice Beach, it’s the Bell Boeing V-22,not sleek but versatile, able to launchfrom Al Asad, fly to Mudaysis, perform pickup,then return, all within the golden hour,fast enough to outrun a difficult past,the budgetary hurdles and crashes in R. & D.,the $72-million price tag, flyaway,its many modes, and we think moods;you remember its namesake in another state, fled from some outer dark, gliding abovethe diamond, from left field to center,where it made its home up in the stadium lights,a crown of wooden swords for its nest,hovering in the swampy air like forethoughtas the crack of a bat sent a tiny mooninto orbit, a wave rippling throughthe crowd, the lights on their tall stemspowered on, day powered down,and…

The Real Lolita, by Sarah Weinman (HarperCollins). This true-crime account of Sally Horner, one of the inspirations for Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” aims to resurrect a victim whose anguish was transformed into sleek prose. Horner was kidnapped by a serial child abuser named Frank La Salle, in 1948, in New Jersey, and during nearly two years in captivity she drove with him across the country. Nabokov alluded to the pair by name in his novel, but Weinman argues that Nabokov minimized Horner’s influence on the book. Weinman’s intensive research uncovers a bright girl—she maintained excellent grades before, during, and after her ordeal—who survived the kidnapping only to be killed two years later in a car crash. Through careful storytelling, Weinman retrieves Horner from her role as grist in the mill…

On a stormy night in 1987, an American herpetologist named Marty Crump was getting ready for bed when she heard a tapping at her door. This was in the mountains of northwest Costa Rica, where evening callers were rare. The visitor had braved the downpour to give Crump what counted, in field-biology circles, as a hot tip: the golden toads had emerged. Golden toads had been formally described only two decades earlier, by another American herpetologist, named Jay Savage. In the paper Savage had written assigning the species its Latin name—Bufo periglenes—he noted that the toads exhibited “the most startling coloration.” “I must confess that my initial response when I saw them was one of disbelief,” he wrote in an otherwise staid scientific tract. He wondered briefly whether someone had…