Innholdsfortegnelse for November 19, 2018 i The New Yorker

Rebecca Mead (“Binge Listening,” p. 48) has been a staff writer since 1997. Her latest book is “My Life in Middlemarch.” Adam Entous (“Havana Syndrome,” p. 34) joined the magazine as a staff writer this year. Previously, he was a reporter for the Washington Post, where his team was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Anthony Lane (“Technicolor Vincent,” p. 30; The Current Cinema, p. 78), a film critic for the magazine, published his New Yorker writings in the collection “Nobody’s Perfect.” Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 17), a staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment. She also writes a column for newyorker.com. James Richardson (Poem, p. 52) teaches at Princeton. His latest collection of poetry and aphorisms is “During.” Katie Nguyen (Shouts & Murmurs, p.…

Several years ago, Michael Cera, the gently comedic actor, now thirty years old, pitched a show to TV execs featuring two of his artistic heroes. “I wrote a cartoon that I really wanted Elaine to be a voice in—her and Kenny,” Cera said on a recent Wednesday at the Golden, the Broadway theatre in midtown. For the cartoon, Elaine and Kenny—the writer-performer-director Elaine May, now eighty-six, whose hit show “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May” premièred at the Golden in 1960, and the writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, fifty-six—agreed to play mother and son. “My friend and I wrote it and tried to sell it, but nobody wanted it,” Cera went on. “I was, like, Are you kidding? A cartoon starring these two would be, like, my favorite thing.” Another…

On Election Night last week, Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, went out to dinner with his wife, Diane, near their apartment, in Boston’s Back Bay. They propped up their iPads on the table, trying to synchronize their schedules after a hectic couple of months. On weekdays, Patrick had been on the road for his job, as a managing director at Bain Capital, the venture-capital firm founded by his predecessor as governor, Mitt Romney. On weekends, he had travelled to a dozen states, to campaign for Democratic candidates in the midterms, and, in the process, to generate the kind of good will and name recognition that could help him if he chooses to run for President in 2020. Diane, meanwhile, had been winding down her law practice, as a…

In the winter of 2017, the American Embassy in Havana was in a precarious state. The Embassy, a six-story tower that sits next to the seawall known as the Malecón, was built in 1953, and during the five decades in which diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States were suspended it had suffered from neglect. Salt and humidity from the ocean ate away at the pins holding up the marble façade. Work crews erected a fence around the most vulnerable area, to insure that no one was impaled by shards of marble tumbling from the walls. Audrey Lee, a career Foreign Service officer in her late forties, worked in a snug office on the ground floor. (The name is a pseudonym, which she requested in order to protect her…

At this juncture, in this environment, only an ogre could defend Mike Maltby, and Isaac was not quite the ogre type. Maybe more on the order of a jerk, according to Nina. As a human being, a woman, and his life partner, she added, she felt it was crucial that she make this distinction. All men, yes. But not all men in all ways. Environment, climate—this was code people used for how you really ought to watch your mouth, not to mention your ass. This wasn’t passing weather. These were the new conditions, like dribbling ice caps, or jagged rips in the atmosphere. There was no quick fix, and no going back. Ask Isaac, it was definitely for the best. History’s ceaseless cavalcade of dickheads was undeniable. A shame, maybe,…

In the House in the Dark of the Woods, by Laird Hunt (Little, Brown). In this engrossing scramble of fairy tales, a woman goes berry picking in the forest and becomes lost in a tangle of dark archetypes. Searching for home, she meets a series of witchlike figures who pull her into macabre adventures—avoiding enormous insect swarms or flying in a ship of bone. Hunt’s novel draws on sources such as the Brothers Grimm and Early American imagery, producing a sense of a rabbit hole that only gets deeper and wider, or a game abundant in mysteries but scant in resolutions. The book’s greatest strength is striking, sensual prose: the air “seemed made of black butter” and a heart is “a shout in a fiery room.” The Golden State,…

You might remember a photograph, now ten years old, taken by Annie Leibovitz, which appeared on a hotly discussed cover of Vogue. LeBron James—who hadn’t yet won a single N.B.A. championship but was already a cultural phenomenon far beyond the confines of his sport—looks straight into Leibovitz’s lens, brows furrowed and mouth open in an expression of mock rage. He’s wearing black gym gear, and with his right hand he’s dribbling a ball. In his left hand, pulled tight to his torso, is the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen, in a silky emerald dress, smiling with coy delight. Immediately, the cover was denounced as racist: this was a clear reference to King Kong, the classic movie monster, who has been used as a vehicle for fear, speculation, and, sometimes, sly commentary…

UNDERSTANDING THE FIRES It’s telling that the word “ecology” is nowhere to be found in Ian Frazier’s heart-wrenching account of the extensive prairie fires last year (“The Day the Great Plains Burned,” November 5th). Journalists tend to see wildfires as evidence of the harm caused to humans by climate change. How, given this widespread blindness, are people to learn about and work with nature’s logic? The article hints at ecological realities, but doesn’t connect the dots. Fire plays a role in any healthy ecosystem. On the prairie, wildfires convert the previous year’s dead grass into fertilizer, which explains why, as Frazier writes, “the grass came back better than before.” Native Americans “used fire as an environmental tool” because the nourishing regrowth attracted game. The native prairie grasses funded by…

It is a happy paradox that the human soul thrives on both the familiar and the unknown. Five years ago, when new ownership reconceived this tiny parlor, once home to the legendary Village Chess Shop, as a thrumming snack hall with an emphasis on novel and esoteric board games, they made sure to hold on to the classics. Nowadays, patrons can play any of about a thousand games, for a fee. On a recent night, a group of friends bought a few ten-dollar cups of frosé and a mini-bottle of champagne. They carried a battered box containing Ticket to Ride, a game that was created this century but looks like it came from the last, to a room decorated with Magic: The Gathering banners and a framed poster that charted…

What we know about the world seems to come increasingly from social media. But it can be hard to separate the news from the geyser of other stuff: hoaxes, non sequiturs, memes about mandarin ducks, doctored footage of CNN reporters, and Kanye West’s latest opinions. Storyful, which was founded, in Dublin, in 2010, calls itself the world’s “first social-media newswire.” Just as Reuters stringers report on stories from around the globe, Storyful analysts cover the wilds of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Gab, and Discord, keeping an eye out for noteworthy posts. These become dispatches in a rolling digest that is available to subscribers, which include newspapers, TV-news bureaus, soda companies—anyone who needs to keep track of what Storyful calls “the conversations and movements shaping the world” but who can’t open enough…

SZECHUAN KITCHEN, 2003 You were going through a breakup and just wanted to eat alone in peace. But when your server Jay’s girlfriend stopped by the restaurant to drop off Jay’s cell phone, which he’d forgotten at home, you were forced to remember how you, too, used to be loved. When it came time to pay, you were so bitter and resentful that you wrote on the tip line, “Why don’t you just get your girlfriend to tip you, you smug bastard.” That night, Jay asked his girlfriend to lay off the P.D.A. She got offended, and for a whole year refused to do that weird thing Jay liked in bed. PLAZA BAR, 2005 When you drank yourself sloppy, vomited in the corner of your booth, and left seven business…

In 1936, Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher and cultural critic, published an essay titled “The Storyteller.” Ostensibly about the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, Benjamin used the piece to analyze the meaning and function of storytelling. Long ago, Benjamin suggested, stories offered listeners practical or moral counsel, much as fairy tales now did for children. They transmitted common wisdom, framed by the personal experience of the storyteller, which was delivered in such a way that listeners could incorporate it into their lives. This kind of storytelling was falling victim to the forces of modernity, Benjamin argued. Soldiers returning from the battlefields of the Great War, for example, were less likely than earlier combatants to speak of what they’d gone through, finding ordinary language incommensurate with the horrors of mechanical warfare. But…

The days I don’t want to kill myselfare extraordinary. Deep bass. All the peoplein the streets waiting for their high fivesand leaping, I mean leaping,when they see me. I am the sun-filledgod of love. Or at least an optimisticunder-secretary. There should be a word for it.The days you wake up and do not wantto slit your throat. Money in the bank.Enough for an iced green tea every weekdayand Saturday and Sunday! It’s like beingin the armpit of a Hammond B3 organ.Just reeks of gratitude and funk.The funk of ages. I am not going to ruinmy love’s life today. It’s like the time I said yesto gray sneakers but then the salesman saidWait. And there, out of the back room,like the bakery’s first biscuits: bright-blue kicks.Iridescent. Like a scarab! Oh, who…

The composer Du Yun’s relentless originality and unflinching social conscience, distilled in her opera “An gel’s Bone,” won her a Pulitzer Prize last year. On Nov. 15, at Miller Theatre, Du joins the International Contemporary Ensemble—she was a founding member—to present “LEGO,” a selection of instrumental works from the past two decades, now reconfigured as an interlocking whole. An exploration of Du’s evolving style, it’s full of electronic squalls and subterranean industry, with glimpses of melody beyond. DANCE Bill Shannon New York Live Arts Years ago, Shannon made a name for himself by developing a supple, inventive way of dancing with crutches—like a b-boy with extra limbs. Part of the idea behind his new “Touch Update” is to adapt that movement vocabulary to dancers without crutches. But the piece…

On the Thursday before the midterm elections, Ilyse Hogue, the president of the pro-choice lobbying group NARAL, arrived at the wrong Drybar to get her hair done. Her appointment was on the Lower East Side; this was West Sixteenth Street. Could they accommodate her? She didn’t have much time, and they squeezed her in. That night, she was scheduled to speak at a Swing Left rally at Cooper Union, before flying to her home state of Texas, to stump for Lizzie Fletcher, in Dallas, and Beto O’Rourke, in Houston. Then she’d do a weekend sprint through Midwestern battleground states—Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota—before flying to Washington, D.C., where she lives, to cast her own ballot on Tuesday. “I should have gotten my shit together to early vote,” she said, settling into a…

A man walks into a field. The day is young. He starts to run, then stops and lies down on his back. He gathers handfuls of soil and sprinkles it over his face. Earth falls onto his eyes. Some goes into his mouth. Anyone passing by would think he was trying to bury himself. But he sits up, wipes his face, laughs, licks his dirty lips, and gets to work. The scene comes from “At Eternity’s Gate,” a new film directed by Julian Schnabel, and the man is Vincent van Gogh, played by Willem Dafoe. That toothy grin is unmistakable, as is the deep, confiding tone with which Dafoe recites the words of van Gogh, in voice-over. The actor is sixty-three, whereas the painter was thirty-seven when he died—of a…

They were unutterably lovely, the aliens,when finally we knew them, when at last we understoodthey had lived and moved among us from the beginning in bodies the image of ours, though smoother, eyes wider,as if the world were a little darker for them, or more wondrous,and we loved them as wildly and deeply and helplessly as our first loves, our dreams, our lost ones, all at once,though we knew they were wilder and deeper than we were, and freer,and loving them only deepened our loneliness. When they gathered on evening corners, faintly luminous,and their murmuring rose in urgency, calling on stars,we feared they would leave us for worlds far, far beyond us, though we dared not ask, in their language so eerily ours,Will you carry us with you?—lest they look…

“It has to be said, there are no points to be won from liking Hesse nowadays.” This rueful assessment of the novelist Hermann Hesse, quoted in the opening pages of Gunnar Decker’s new biography, “Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow” (Harvard), appeared in an obituary in 1962; but it could just as well have been pronounced yesterday, or a hundred years ago. Ever since he published his first novel, in 1904, Hesse has been one of those odd writers who manage to be at the same time canonical—in 1946, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature—and almost perpetually unfashionable among critics. The great German modernists who were his contemporaries mostly disdained him: “A little man,” according to the poet Gottfried Benn; “He displays the foibles of a greater writer than…

One night, when Jeff Majors was fifteen, he dreamed that he was being pursued by evil spirits. All he had to defend himself with was a harp, an instrument that he had never seen in real life. But, as he played it, the notes turned into arrows, and his tormentors, convinced that he was an angel, left him alone. Majors, who was living in Washington, D.C., shared his dream with a local cabinetmaker who ran a small music shop. The man seemed puzzled and told Majors not to come back until he called him. A couple of months later, the man presented Majors with a miniature harp he had built. He said, “Whatever you wanna do with it, do with it what needs to be done, and enjoy yourself.” In…