Innholdsfortegnelse for November 5, 2018 i The New Yorker

Ian Frazier (“The Day the Great Plains Burned,” p. 34) most recently published “Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces.” He is at work on a book about the Bronx. Tad Friend (“Golden Boy 2.0,” p. 18), a staff writer since 1998, is the author of the memoir “Cheerful Money” and the essay collection “Lost in Mongolia.” Claire Friedman (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 27) is a comedy writer whose work for “Saturday Night Live” won a Peabody Award. Tony Earley (Fiction, p. 54) has written five books, including the story collection “Mr. Tall.” He is the Fleming Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Naomi Fry (The Talk of the Town, p. 15) became a staff writer this year. She writes about popular culture for newyorker.com. Tony Hoagland (Poem, p. 49), who…

Last week, as the Georgia governor’s race neared an end, Royce Reeves, Sr., drove around Cordele, Georgia, in a white Cadillac limousine on loan from a local funeral home. The town, in the southwestern part of the state, is known for its watermelons. Reeves grew up in its projects. “I hate watermelons,” he said. Now a barber and a city commissioner—people call him “the west-side mayor”—Reeves was, he said, “hauling people to the polls.” Most of Cordele’s residents are black. Many don’t own a vehicle, and some can’t afford to get there using other means. Reeves, who is middle-aged and bearded, leaned out of the limo’s driver’s-side window, cajoling and coercing passersby. “Hey!” Reeves shouted to a young man standing outside a small woodframe house. “I need you today, man.”…

Pay no attention to the booth in the back right corner of the mezzanine in the Broadway Theatre, where the musical “King Kong” opens next week. The people inside have absolutely nothing to do with the humongous ape stalking the stage. Better to sit back and gape. If you want to know how it all works, though, they’ll tell you. They call themselves the voodoo operators, and the custom-built booth, about the size of a walk-in closet, functions as King Kong’s brain. Its inhabitants call it the Voodoo Lounge. “Sounds like a cocktail bar,” one of them said the other day. It was midday, during previews, and the cast and crew had gathered for a brushup rehearsal. The animatronic Kong puppet, which is twenty feet tall and weighs two thousand…

(1953-2018) The wind comes down from the northwest, cold in September,and flips over the neighbor’s trash receptacles. The Halifax newspaper says that mansions are falling into the sea.Storms are rising in the dark Pacific. Pollution has infiltrated the food chain down to the jellyfish level.The book I am reading is called “The End of the Ascent of Man.” It says the time of human dominion is done,but I am hoping it will be a peaceful transition. It is one thing to think of buffalo on Divisadero Street,of the Golden Gate Bridge overgrown in a tangle of vine. It is another to open the door of your own house to the waves.I am hoping the humans will be calm in their diminishing. That the forests grow back with patience, not rage;I…

Between February 18, 1960, and February 4, 1963, a week before Sylvia Plath committed suicide, at the age of thirty, she sent a series of candid letters to her close friend and former psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher. What has happened to these documents in the intervening years is a case study in Plath’s legacy. In the nineteen-seventies, fourteen letters, which cover in detail Plath’s estrangement from her husband, the English poet Ted Hughes, were passed from Beuscher to Harriet Rosenstein, a feminist scholar who was working on a biography of Plath. Stymied by the Plath estate, Rosenstein never published the book, and the letters, unknown to the public, remained in her files. In 2017, they were put up for sale by an American book dealer. Images of the letters, with passages…

“Didone,” “Norma,” “Tosca,” “Salome,” “Elektra,” “Lulu”: the operatic repertory overflows with works that take their title from a doomed female character, one who is made to undergo a kind of ritual sacrifice. It is a pattern that goes far back: the genre began with Daphne turning into a laurel tree and with Eurydice being dragged back to Hades. Even so, opera’s dependence on the female voice had the effect of empowering singers, who attained unusual cultural authority during eras when women were generally consigned to the social periphery. Nico Muhly’s new opera, “Marnie,” which was first seen at the English National Opera last year and is now at the Met, extends and revises that troubling history. The work is drawn from two eponymous sources: Winston Graham’s novel, from 1961, and…

THE FURIES After reading Casey Cep’s thoughtful examination of women’s response to insult, exploitation, and cruelty, I found myself searching for one particular word (Books, October 15th). Rage, anger, fury: these are the terms used, by Cep and others, to characterize the emotion of today’s feminists. This lexicon is vulnerable to mockery and misrepresentation. Rage is blinding; anger often requires management; fury is for violent, incomprehensible gods. The word I’m really looking for is “outrage.” Virtuous but also rational. Vehement but also focussed. Outrage is the necessary and just way to respond to the treatment of women worldwide. D. G. ComptonBowdoinham, Maine Citing Martha Nussbaum, Cep highlights a tragically ironic story from Greek drama. In “The Eumenides,” Athena interrupts an intergenerational cycle of murder by instituting a new form…

The White Horse Tavern has been around since 1880, but the era with which it is most closely associated is the Beatnik fifties, when a bevy of oddball writers swept through Greenwich Village and lent the sleepy taproom a mystique that lingers to this day. On a recent Sunday afternoon, a small crowd made a pilgrimage to the site as part of a “literary pub crawl.” Supplied with prosecco and mugs of Hoegaarden or Redhook I.P.A., they convened around their guide, an erstwhile English major with purple-streaked hair and dangling skull earrings. “We don’t just use Wikipedia,” she said, reassuringly. “We have also Googled other random sources.” She then rattled off a list of probable former patrons that included Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and Anaïs Nin. A young Hunter S.…

A little more than a decade ago, the A brothers Nat and Alex Wolff appeared in this magazine for the first time. They were then twelve and nine, and enjoying their first flush of fame, as members of the Naked Brothers Band—a tween-rock group in which Nat was the singer-songwriter and Alex was the drummer—which was the centerpiece of a Nickelodeon mockumentary series of the same name, created by their mother, the actress and director Polly Draper. The series ended after three seasons, and the brothers continued to pursue music and acting: collaborating on recordings as Nat & Alex Wolff, and taking dramatic, thinking-girl’s-heartthrob turns in movies such as the psychological-horror flick “He reditary” (Alex) and the teen-romance caper “Paper Towns” (Nat). On a fall day not long ago, the…

Slapout, Oklahoma, at the intersection of a county road and a much used east-west state highway, has a population of five. The town’s name used to be Nye, but in the nineteen-fifties its residents, who were then more numerous, changed it. Locals explain that there was a store in Nye where, if you asked the owner for a particular item, he often went to look for it and came back and said, “We’re slap out of it!” How this inspired a name change no one knows. Now the store is gone, and the town consists of a single building that’s a combination gas station, truck stop, convenience mart, café, and improvised community center. In the dark of early morning, it’s jumping with truckers, oil-field workers, guys who drive the county…

John told the salesman at a Home Depot in Durham that the chain was for a porch swing, the concrete block for a step to the utility building in his back yard. The backpack and sleeping bag he purchased without explanation at an R.E.I. in Raleigh, the inflatable plastic raft, foot pump, and two-piece paddle at Walmart. He made up the name Jimmy Ray Gallup and, at a Goodwill in Mebane, picked out a hoodie, a navy T-shirt, work pants, and boots that Jimmy Ray Gallup would wear. He bought the toolbox and three padlocks from an Ace Hardware in Pittsboro. He paid cash for everything and threw the receipts away in trash cans outside the stores. He bought nothing in Chapel Hill. The gun, an H&R .38, had been…

The Witch Elm, by Tana French (Viking). This absorbing mystery is also arguably a scathing depiction of the fragile male ego. Toby, a charming Dublin art publicist, has lived a life free of the vicissitudes that build character and empathy. (Toby calls it luck; his family and friends don’t think it’s quite so innocent.) After an assault leaves him with lasting damage to his body and his brain, he moves to his family’s ancestral home with his dying uncle to recuperate. Then the mischief begins: a skull is found in an elm on the estate. Like most of French’s novels, this one revolves around the tensions between civilians and the police, who, on all sides, seem to obfuscate the truth as often as they reveal it. Eleanor, or, The…

A family is a finicky machine: when one part starts to falter, the whole thing slows to a halt. There’s nothing like one member’s slide toward death to send the others spiralling backward and inward—inspecting old arrangements and restarting lapsed arguments, wondering just what it was, besides blood, that ever held them together. And, when the eldest member of a clan nears the end, the rest start to comb through the expiring life like a text: What, if anything, did it all mean? Kenneth Lonergan’s wistful play “The Waverly Gallery,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama, in 2001, and has now been revived on Broadway (at the Golden), takes one such disintegration and uses it to clarify the past in its repeated particulars, even as it…

Soon after it was published, in 1818, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” became a sensation—by 1826, sixteen plays based on the book had landed onstage. The Morgan Library & Museum celebrates the legacy of Shelley and her monster in the exhibition “It’s Alive!” (co-organized with the New York Public Library, on view through Jan. 27). Pages of the original manuscript appear with memorabilia including a restoration of the iconic silver-streaked wig worn by Elsa Lanchester in the 1936 movie “The Bride of Frankenstein” (above). NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Jon Batiste and Friends Village Vanguard Batiste, the musical director of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” has travelled far from his home town of New Orleans, but even…

Back in May, the recording artist Jim James slipped into town for one of those semi-secret small-venue industry gigs, at Rough Trade, in Williamsburg. Showtime was 10:45 P.M. In the midafternoon, post-sound check, he walked around the corner to a coffee shop and ordered an iced latte. “I haven’t had a drink in four months,” he said. He had just turned forty and now found himself in a period of midlife not-quitecrisis-more-like-reëvaluation. He was taking a break from his band My Morning Jacket, after nineteen years and seven albums, and had recently gone on a seven-day silent retreat at a place called Spirit Rock, north of San Francisco. “After a day and a half, I was losing my mind,” he said. “I felt like I was in some kind of…

1. Buy hardcover copy of “Infinite Jest” at brick-and-mortar bookstore. Touch paper and feel connected to hundreds of years of printed language. Flash cashier knowing, learned smile. Commend self for protecting bookstores from onslaught of crass digital commercialism. 2. Walk home and experience heft of text as bag handles dig into palm. Embrace heaviness as evidence of import. Thumb nose at pedestrians who aren’t carrying impressive, heavy books. Feel smug. 3. List book on Goodreads as “current read,” along with “Team of Rivals” and “War and Peace.” Accept accolades for being superior to rest of TV-watching generation. Refer to reading as “yoga for the mind.” 4. Go out for drinks with friends. Talk endlessly about book. Reiterate “yoga for the mind” thing. Accept new role as group sophisticate. Warn friends…

They can put a girl on the moon right now, I suppose.The details wouldn’t be too hard to crack.Dangers here. Perils there. It’ll go how it goes. Earth faces venoms, disease, foes, and woes.Free of that jeopardy, she won’t rocket back.If you put the right girl on the moon, I suppose. Some might worry alone she’ll face lunar lows.Does a girl who lacks parties turn blue in pitch black?Dangers here. Perils there. It’ll go how it goes. Like Buzz, Neil, and other above-average Joes,she’ll travel in space boots and wield a screw jack,if we put our best girl on the moon, I suppose. We’ll blast her above every bloom of dog rose.Let her farewell our bright spots along with our wrack.Dangers here. Perils there. Who will own how this goes?…