Innholdsfortegnelse for October 22, 2018 i The New Yorker

Nick Paumgarten (“The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of,” p. 62) has been writing for the magazine since 2000. Sheelah Kolhatkar (“Breaking the News,” p. 30), a staff writer, is the author of “Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street.” Pankaj Mishra (Books, p. 82) has written several books, including, most recently, “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.” Sarah Larson (The Theatre, p. 79), a staff writer, is contributing theatre reviews to the magazine while Hilton Als is on book leave. Her column, Podcast Dept., appears on newyorker.com. Geffrey Davis (Poem, p. 78) is the author of the collections “Night Angler,” which won the 2018 James Laughlin Award, and “Revising the Storm,” the winner of the…

Last week, as female activists swarmed Capitol Hill to denounce the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, another group of women gathered at a law library in Chelsea to push back against a more local threat: the imminent closure of the Mount Sinai West Birthing Center, one of the last remaining natural-birth strongholds in the city which also offers full access to a hospital. The center, which opened in 1996, provides women in labor with a paisley-patterned space where they can walk around and eat, soak in Jacuzzi tubs, avoid continuous fetal monitoring, and be visited by unlimited guests. It’s being closed at the end of the year to make way for an expanded neonatal unit and fifteen additional postpartum beds. A hospital spokesperson said, “The opportunity to…

On a recent morning, the actor Bill Irwin took a Metro-North train to Irvington, New York, on ghostly business. His destination was Sunnyside, the former home of Washington Irving, the nineteenth-century trickster, satirist, and author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” who once described the Hudson Valley as “under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie.” Residents were prone to trances, he wrote, and “the whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions.” Irwin is the star of a new silent film, “The Unsilent Picture,” loosely based on a collection of Irving’s gothic stories, which is being screened in an outdoor tent in the nearby…

Q: I am pursuing due diligence regarding the accepted best practices having to do with theft. When I’m stealing parts from my neighbor’s car, how do I remain fully compliant and not go outside the bounds of the law? A: Let me answer your question with a question: Have you been caught? If not, for all practical purposes you are in compliance. Q: While dumping toxic substances into the reservoir, I suddenly wondered whether there might be some old laws on the books that I should comply with. Are there? A: No, not to my immediate knowledge—or yours. Q: I am interested in making millions of Americans addicted to the drugs that my company sells. This is O.K. from a compliance standpoint, right? A: Absolutely! I would not be a…

Not long ago, I was in Montreal for a cryptocurrency conference. My hotel, on the top floor of a big building downtown, had a roof garden with a koi pond. One morning, as I had coffee and a bagel in this garden, I watched a pair of ducks feeding on a mound of pellets that someone had left for them at the pond’s edge. Every few seconds, they dipped their beaks to drink, and, in the process, spilled undigested pellets into the water. A few koi idled there, poking at the surface for the scraps. The longer I watched, the more I wondered if the ducks were deliberately feeding the fish. Was such a thing possible? I asked the breakfast attendant, a ruddy Quebecer. He smiled and said, “No, but…

One gray morning in Oslo, a class at Fagerborg High School is making its usual hash of Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck.” The atmosphere is a Monday mixture of lassitude, cockiness, and routine. Elias Rukla has been teaching this play, in this school, for twenty-five years. Dignified, resigned, he subsists on the medicine of his own cynicism: he tells himself that it is not his job to excite the kids, merely to lay the foundations of their cultural heritage. He thinks of himself as a cog in the Norwegian pedagogical machine, an “officially appointed educator.” But as he reads a scene to the class Elias Rukla is snagged, perhaps for the first time in a quarter century, by a detail. It is a moment in Act IV, when Mrs. Sørbye…

PICK YOUR BATTLES Jill Lepore, in her piece on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, discusses Ginsburg’s role in developing the jurisprudence of women’s rights and refers to Struck v. Secretary of Defense, a case I was intimately involved in (“Misjudged,” October 8th). In 1970, I was a newly minted lawyer working as staff counsel for the A.C.L.U. of Washington State. Captain Susan Struck was a career nurse in the U.S. Air Force who was stationed in Vietnam. When she became pregnant, she was sent to Mc-Chord Air Force Base, in Tacoma, Washington, to have an abortion—the Air Force’s requirement for service-women to keep their jobs. (There were no rules against men having children.) She refused, and the U.S.A.F. initiated proceedings to discharge her. Captain Struck, who wanted to have her…

On a recent Saturday afternoon, a Brooklynite acclimating two Californian guests to her neighborhood shepherded them to the nearest thing to their San Francisco address, a West Coast-themed bar. She ordered them ciders, gold as the Golden State, that turned out to be from upstate. Then the Brooklynite ordered chips and salsa from an unspecified Zip Code (but one to which she would like to relocate, if only for better access to this salsa), from a bartender from New Jersey, under a TV playing a tennis match in Queens. The Californians, sure, were California cool about any slips in verisimilitude. It was the New Yorker who was predictably uptight: she would give her guests their California, even if they, frankly, did not want it. (What the Californians actually wanted was…

Damien Chazelle stood face to face with a chunk of the moon. It was after hours at the Hayden Planetarium, at the American Museum of Natural History, and the triangular moon rock was held in a vise, under glass: chicken-nugget-size and light gray, with glimmering specks of crystal. “That’s really cool,” Chazelle said, leaning in. The thirty-three-year-old director, who won an Oscar for “La La Land” (he was the youngest person ever to win the Best Director award), was in town to talk about his new film, “First Man,” about Neil Armstrong’s voyage to the moon. Disco wafted up from the Hall of the Universe, below; a crew was setting up for a taping of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s National Geographic show, “StarTalk.” “I think it scores the moon rock quite…

At the back of my narrow New York City closet, squished between a thick sweater that has gone ignored since last winter and a long-retired pair of floral-print jeans, is a dress that I have never worn. I bought it at Zara last April, in a flush of springtime optimism. The dress is a hundred per cent cotton, midi length, and belted at the waist. It is also bright yellow, somewhere between ripe banana and free-range egg yolk. In the dressing room, I thought that it made me look cheerful, like a modest yet sexy daffodil. At home, my unsparing mirror told the truth: I was Big Bird with pockets. The return window closed long ago; that’s seventy-nine dollars added to my open tab of sartorial bets made and lost,…

Objects would suddenly fall or fall apart, cars go off course, dogs drop to their knees. The Army was doing sound experiments at a nearby desert in those days. I was nervous all the rest of my life, she wrote. She was a novelist and enjoyed some success. But always she had the fantasy of a different kind of novel, and although gradually realizing that all novelists share this fantasy, she persisted in it, without knowing what the novel would be except true and obvious while it was happening. Now I’m writing, she would be able to say. She broke off. Where would you put a third arm? is a question asked in creativity-assessment tests, or so I have heard. Will this different kind of novel be like that, like…

In 2015, in South Africa, where Mohandas Gandhi lived from 1893 to 1914, a statue of him was defaced by protesters. The following year, the University of Ghana agreed to remove Gandhi’s statue from its campus, after an online campaign with the (misspelled) hashtag #Ghandimustfall charged the Indian leader with racism against black Africans. Compared with other recent targets of political iconoclasts—stalwarts of the Confederacy and Cecil Rhodes—Gandhi seems an unlikely symbol of racial arrogance. Nelson Mandela claimed that Gandhi’s tactics offered “the best hope for future race relations”; Martin Luther King, Jr., held Gandhi up as a model; decades before that, black activists such as Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., and Benjamin Mays were enthralled by the phenomenon of an Indian leading people of color in the campaign against British…

One work amid the hundreds in a flabbergasting retrospective, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” at the Guggenheim Museum, is so good that it knocked my sense of the show momentarily askew. Af Klint was a Swedish artist and mystic—a mystic primarily, though a dab hand at painting—who died in 1944, at the age of eighty-two. She left instructions that none of her work be shown until twenty years after her death, including her magnum opus—a hundred and ninety-three paintings, most of them made between 1906 and 1908, and intended for display in a temple only sketchily conceived, much less built. Seventy-six of those are at the Guggenheim. (Not until the late nineteen-eighties did European and American museums begin showing any works by af Klint; her first solo show,…

Romanoffs,” on Amazon, is “T Matthew Weiner’s first show since “Mad Men,” and its début feels as freighted as a Fabergé egg. There’s the natural pressure of following up on his much loved retro-Freudian period drama. There’s the fact that, at an estimated fifty million dollars, “The Romanoffs” is among television’s most expensive shows. And there’s the timing: it’s Weiner’s first series since he was accused of sexual harassment by Kater Gordon, a writer for “Mad Men.” Weiner has denied the accusation, but the issue has pervaded his publicity tour like L.A. smog. These metatextual factors may or may not strike you as relevant to a reading of “The Romanoffs.” But there’s a certain O. Henry irony to the situation, insofar as the show, like its predecessor, is a meditation…

Winston Graham’s novel “Marnie” is already a major motion picture (Hitchcock did the honors, in 1964). Now it’s an opera, too. In Nico Muhly and Nicholas Wright’s version, the eponymous fraudster maintains an array of dazzling alter egos, clothed by the costume designer Arianne Philips and voiced by her own personal chorus, her Shadows. Isabel Leonard, a mezzo-soprano who can veer from exuberance to exasperation in the blink of an eye, stars in the Metropolitan Opera’s production, opening on Oct. 19. ART “Delacroix” Metropolitan Museum Eugène Delacroix, the subject of this grand retrospective, was a boffo performer in paint, bent on annual dominance at Paris’s Beaux-Arts Salon from his first sensational entry there, “The Barque of Dante,” in 1822, until 1863, with “Ovid Among the Scythians” (which he’d painted…

Last month, forty years after the Southern District court of New York ordered the Yankees to open their clubhouse to female reporters, the baseball writer Jane Leavy climbed into a black S.U.V. and headed toward Yankee Stadium to throw out the first pitch. Leavy, who is sixty-six, with a blond bob, wore red lipstick, gray sneakers, and a Yankees jacket. “We’re going to pretend for just a few minutes that I’m not a Yankee fan, and I haven’t been dreaming of this my whole life,” she said. “When I was a little girl—this is no shit—I would practice walking in from the bullpen with my jacket dangled over my shoulder just so.” To prepare, she’d called up Sandy Koufax, the subject of her 2002 book, subtitled “A Lefty’s Legacy,” and…

I did not find the body.It was wintertime where I was; women gathered in bars. Their bodies like bare trees,naked arms giving fruit to hands in gestures. Ice was everywhere.I could still feel the command of your hands around a woman’s waistwhen two-stepping—it was the only time you wore joy. Your anger muscularin your small tired body that always hurt. I had seen your childhood once—therewas a hole in the wall of the living room. It led somewhere.Outside, the land was dry, grassless. We had come to rescue the dog,whom we found wrestling her chain in the dirt. There was a lake somewhere nearby,but no sign of it except boats behind cars. Later, I learned your father was a sculptor,your mother what we now call a hoarder. The road home…

In the spring of 2011, a small group of engineers working on a secretive project at Google received an e-mail from a colleague. It’s finally happening, the note read. Anthony is going to get fired. Several of the recipients gathered in one of the self-serve espresso bars that dot the company’s headquarters, and traded rumors suggesting that Anthony Levandowski—one of the company’s most talented and best-known employees—had finally gone too far. Levandowski was a gifted engineer who frequently spoke to newspapers and magazines, including this one, about the future of robotics. On the Google campus, he was easy to pick out: he was six feet seven and wore the same drab clothes every day—jeans and a gray T-shirt—which, in Silicon Valley, signalled that he preferred to conserve his cognitive energies…

I. Thousands of miles from home, you wakein a cheap hotel with thirst so urgent you haveno choice but to find the bathroom faucetwith your mouth, drink deep, and understandthe daily sigh made by bodies everywherein this small town. Your new cushy job gives you bottled artesian water, which you consideras you taste the tap. Used to be there wasno good distance between this rivery tangand your fluid desires. Used to be you’d shoveaside a sweaty friend or jab a siblingfor the first shot at placing lips to the only neighborhood source. Used to be no futurein yearning. Feel how far you’ve come? II. Today a flood, and you see the riskin proximity, in life stretched by loving both a river and the rain:—to watch what feeds yourun dangerous, the…

She Would Be King, by Wayétu Moore (Graywolf). This bold début novel uses magic realism to reimagine the founding of Liberia, during the early nineteenth century, through the lives of three supernaturally gifted people. Norman Aragon, born in Jamaica to a slave and her master, has inherited from his mother the ability to disappear. June Dey, raised on an American plantation, has extraordinary strength and impenetrable skin. Gbessa, born in Africa, called a witch because of her long red hair and inauspicious birth, can die but is always resurrected. “Kindred souls will always collide,” and the three eventually unite to defend Liberia against early challenges to its sovereignty. The force and the symbolism of myth pervade Moore’s engrossing tale. The Distance Home, by Paula Saunders (Random House). At the…

The vanishing of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s once inescapable grand opera “Les Huguenots” is a mystery of musical history—almost a crime in need of solving. A panoramic tragedy of religious violence, “Huguenots” had its première at the Opéra de Paris, in 1836, and received well over a thousand performances there in the century that followed. Berlioz, Verdi, and Liszt hailed the opera as a masterpiece. Heinrich Heine, not given to fulsome praise, compared it to a “Gothic cathedral, whose slender columns and colossal dome seem to have been raised by the bold hand of a giant.” By the middle of the twentieth century, though, “Huguenots” had all but disappeared. The same fate befell the remainder of Meyerbeer’s output and dozens of other works in the grand-opera genre. Most of them are destined…