Innholdsfortegnelse for December 10, 2018 i The New Yorker

Joan Acocella (“Funny Peculiar,” p. 52) has written for The New Yorker since 1992 and became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998. She is at work on a biography of Mikhail Baryshnikov. Zoë Heller (“Perchance to Dream,” p. 24) contributes to The New York Review of Books and has published three novels, including “Notes on a Scandal” and “The Believers.” Louis Menand (A Critic at Large, p. 68) has been a staff writer since 2001. He teaches at Harvard. Emma Allen (The Talk of the Town, p. 21) is the magazine’s cartoon editor and edits humor for newyorker.com. Joy Williams (Fiction, p. 58) has published four novels and five books of stories, including “99 Stories of God” and “The Visiting Privilege.” Laura Miller (Books, p. 74), the author of…

On a recent Wednesday evening, in the lobby bar of the Empire Hotel, near Lincoln Center (leopard-print pillows, velvet curtains, prefab harem chic), Babette Bombshell, a genderqueer actor with a penchant for “extreme monster drag,” attempted to order a drink. “Do you have anything like a Moscato? Or a Piesporter would be fine,” the self-proclaimed “plus-size goddess of gore” asked an incredulous waiter. Bombshell’s ensembles often evoke an X-rated Ursula (the Disney villain), featuring bouffant, fish-net, and leather. In the Empire, she wore a pink three-piece suit, pink crocheted cap, pink belly-dancer top, and enormous rose-tinted glasses. Bombshell is known for such roles as Areola the Twilight Temptress (in “Atom the Amazing Zombie Killer”) and Cock-Hammer Demon (in “CockHammer”). In Lloyd Kaufman’s cult-camp “Return to Nuke ’Em High” movies, she…

Contemporary sleep evangelizers worry a good deal about our social attitudes toward sleep. They worry about many things, of course—incandescent light, L.E.D. light, nicotine, caffeine, central heating, alcohol, the addictive folderol of personal technology—but social attitudes seem to exercise them the most. Deep down, they say, we simply do not respect the human need for repose. We remain convinced, in contradiction of all the available evidence, that stinting on sleep makes us heroic and industrious, rather than stupid and fat. “If we don’t continue to chip away at our collective delusion that burnout is the price we must pay for success, we’ll never be able to restore sleep to its rightful place in our lives,” Arianna Huffington wrote a couple of years ago, in her best-selling how-to guide “The Sleep…

(1898-1956) Oh back in my day when I was a youngsterSpring was lovelier than it is todayAnd that the lovely girls back then were lovelierIs the only thing that cheers us old men on their way. Ask your mother: she thinks the same as I doNobody knows what’s what before they’re old.The old have seen a lot and I can tell youYours is the age of iron and ours was gold. It must be true that corn and meadow nowAre not so green and gold as they were thenFor if it isn’t true and if they are, howWould I be able still to visit them? But that the sun today is ever colderThan were the splendid suns of yesteryearIs not a good thing for as you get olderEach year you…

The building was called the Dove. Or Dove. She’s out there at Dove, people might say if they wanted to bother. It was eleven stories with a multitude of single rooms, very much like a dovecote, or, as everyone eventually suggested, a columbarium. It was in a windy desert basin with a wonderful view of distant mountains. If you felt that the Dove was the place for you, you gave them all your money and you would be cared for there until the day you died. Should you choose to leave before then, they still kept all your money. Leaving was a poor option and hardly anyone did it. When the boys died and after she had buried the one who was hers, she moved to Dove. Many days passed—she…

If a book is good, if it’s artful, entertaining, and informative, should it matter who the author is? Once upon a time, many readers would have said no. It was a long-standing protocol of book appreciation to consider things like the gender, sexuality, ethnicity, personal vices, personal virtues (if any), and prior reputation of the author irrelevant to a book’s merits. You could disapprove of a writer’s politics and prejudices if they showed up in the text; otherwise, they were customarily bracketed off. When people had an issue with the author, it was because they felt that he or she had violated what is known in narratology as the “autobiographical pact.” This is the tacit understanding that the person whose name is on the cover is identical to the narrator,…

In one of the loveliest sequences in Elena Ferrante’s novel “My Brilliant Friend,” two girls read “Little Women.” But Elena and Lila don’t merely read the book together. They recite it, they memorize it. They fantasize about emulating Jo March, who escaped poverty by writing. They wreck it with their love: “We read it for months, so many times that the book became tattered and sweat-stained, it lost its spine, came unthreaded, sections fell apart.” This sequence is a delight in the TV adaptation, too, which is currently airing on HBO. On a bench in their grungy, violent Naples neighborhood, Elena and Lila lounge, bodies entwined, wearing shabby dresses, reading in unison, in Italian. (The show has English subtitles.) Excitedly, Lila recites a passage in which Jo herself reads out…

SONIC BOOM In discussing the health problems that have afflicted U.S. officials in Cuba, Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson explain the theory that “the cause was a device that emitted radio frequencies or electromagnetic pulses” to create cavitation, or bubbling, in the inner ear (“Havana Syndrome,” November 19th). I am a neuroscientist specializing in technology, and I have been following this case with a distinguished group of biological scientists from around the world. In our opinion, it’s implausible that electromagnetic pulses were the cause, since focussing such pulses on a victim’s brain would require very sophisticated technology with multiple antennae arranged around the target. I greatly respect Douglas Smith’s research group, and I have no reason to doubt the veracity of its publication in the Journal of the…

Josie Rourke, the artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, in London, recently went to a formal dinner at a London institution—the kind of event that she, as one of the first women to run an important West End theatre, is frequently called upon to attend. Seated next to her was a man in his sixties, twenty-odd years her senior. Rourke politely went to introduce herself, she recalled recently: “Completely out of the blue, he said, ‘I know who you are, and I know what you’re doing, but can I ask you not to go too far?’” Actually, no. In her seven-year tenure at the Donmar, Rourke, who is forty-two, has frequently overstepped the boundaries of canonical propriety. Shortly after being appointed, she commissioned Phyllida Lloyd to direct an all-female production…

• If you like writing e-mails that have more than nine exclamation points, you might also like going to a gym where you smash furniture with a hammer. • If you like comparing the Trump-Putin friendship to the Archie-Betty friendship on the TV show “Riverdale,” you might also like pointing out that ideologues are often terrible spellers. • If you like Susan Sontag’s definition of camp as “failed seriousness,” you might also like party invitations that come in envelopes that hemorrhage glitter. You’re fun. • If you like imagining the dull roar of tectonic plates mashing against one another, you might also like the way that many male rock-and-roll singers sound like they’re trying to open a jar. I mean, that seems like something you’d be into, no? I can…

When the American cockroach landson its back trying toflick the gloriouswasp off that moves like the hybrid of green tinand blue glass, gemtragic cerulean task, finite and fathomable asa photoshopped sea, theplan is alreadyin full swing: into the neurotransmitterprimeval thatdrives the bidding of the now upended resolute legs ofcockroach American—six times the size ofthe wasp, and the color of a bottle ofBudweiser—thruststhe neurosurgical stinger, the accuracy of whichis neither hate nor lovebut the beginningof the brief paralysis in which she needsto suspend theroach so, unimpeded, she can target a second cockroachground zero in its roachancient cockroach head.Do not fear mystery over precision.That’s the mistakeof children in bed whose abstract suspicions are dismissed. Therewas a jewel. Its nameis wasp. She flies offnow to construct a specific nest. Do youthink the roach…

Invisible, by Stephen L. Carter (Henry Holt). In this engaging biography, a noted legal scholar and novelist chronicles the career of his grandmother Eunice Hunton Carter. In 1935, as the only woman and the only African-American on the legal team pursuing the Mob boss Lucky Luciano, she had the idea of prosecuting him for his ties to prostitution. Her strategy led to his conviction, but she wasn’t allowed to present the case at trial, and her contribution was never fully recognized. The drama of the trial is framed by a finely detailed portrait of Eunice’s life and times. A fixture of Harlem “sassiety” who became an international spokesperson for women’s rights, she was sometimes scorned for her ambition. Here, her lifelong “determination to rise” makes for a moving paean…

Liv Ullmann burst into prominence with Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” from 1966, in which she plays an actress fallen mute; her performance, with its extremes of vulnerability and ferocity, is central to the film and to the time. Ullmann made nine more movies with Bergman, acted in forty-eight other films, and directed five features. She appears at BAM on Dec. 6 for her eightieth-birthday celebration, which includes a discussion with her and a screening of Jan Troell’s historical drama “The Emigrants,” from 1971, for which she received the first of her two Oscar nominations. NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Pharoah Sanders Birdland In a collaboration with John Coltrane, circa 1965-66, Pharoah Sanders drew unearthly tones from his…

In 1641, a Dutchman in what was then New Netherland discovered that his hogs had been slain. A militia was roused to pursue the suspected killers: the Lenape, resident Native Americans. The story was perhaps our country’s original fake news—the pig slayers were probably colonists—but the fallout for the Lenape was real. Colonists massacred the Lenape encamped on what is now the Lower East Side and Jersey City. Over time, violence and disease forced many survivors to move west, and the Lenape lost the island of Mannahatta and its surroundings. On a recent Sunday in November, the Lenape elder George Stonefish was at the Park Avenue Armory, to host a powwow. He’d invited all members of the contemporary Lenape nation, who are spread out on reservations from Oklahoma to Ontario.…

“I tall kinda started a long, long time ago,” Cyndi Lauper said the other day, discussing her commitment to end homelessness, especially among L.G.B.T. youth. Lauper was looking out on the Hudson River from Jane Street, the day after the season’s first snow. A long time ago was 2007, when Lauper was doing a photo shoot for Interview on the West Side piers. “There were a lot of young people—Hispanic, African-American, one East Indian transgender male—and they were homeless, because they had been thrown out,” she recalled. “I’m a mom. It’s not easy. Kids don’t come with a receipt so you can bring them back if it’s not working out, you know?” Shivering, she went into the Jane Hotel and, in her unmistakable Queens drawl, ordered a hoawt toawddy. She…

One day in March of 2000, six of Google’s best engineers gathered in a makeshift war room. The company was in the midst of an unprecedented emergency. In October, its core systems, which crawled the Web to build an “index” of it, had stopped working. Although users could still type in queries at google.com, the results they received were five months out of date. More was at stake than the engineers realized. Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were negotiating a deal to power a search engine for Yahoo, and they’d promised to deliver an index ten times bigger than the one they had at the time—one capable of keeping up with the World Wide Web, which had doubled in size the previous year. If they failed, google.com would…

The book artist Edward Gorey, when asked about his tastes in literature, would sometimes mention his mixed feelings about Thomas Mann: “I dutifully read ‘The Magic Mountain’ and felt as if I had t.b. for a year afterward.” As for Henry James: “Those endless sentences. I always pick up Henry James and I think, Oooh! This is wonderful! And then I will hear a little sound. And it’s the plug being pulled…. And the whole thing is going down the drain like the bathwater.” Why? Because, Gorey said, James (like Mann) explained too much: “I’m beginning to feel that if you create something, you’re killing a lot of other things. And the way I write, since I do leave out most of the connections, and very little is pinned down,…

A longside video games, popular music is at the top of the list of America’s most reliable sources of moral panic. Half a century after Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips stoked mass hysteria, Odd Future, a blustering group of young California rappers and skaters, stirred concern and excitement in equal measure. On their early singles, which became hits about a decade ago, the members rapped nimbly and ferociously about subjects meant to shock and offend: gross-out body horror, casual homophobia and misogyny, and violent sexual acts, to name a few. Their rallying cry was all mischief, and probably not sincere: “Kill people! Burn shit! Fuck school!” By 2010, the leader of Odd Future was a nineteen-year-old named Tyler, the Creator, but the most captivating member was a sixteen-year-old who called himself…

The best friend of the unnamed narrator of Anna Burns’s third novel, “Milkman” (Graywolf), the winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize, sits her down in a night club to address some behavior. The narrator has alienated their neighbors in an equally unnamed, obviously Northern Irish city sometime in the late nineteen-seventies, with the Troubles in full fury. “It’s disturbing,” the friend explains. “It’s deviant. It’s optical illusional. Not public-spirited. Not self-preservation. Calls attention to itself and why—with enemies at the door, with the community under siege, with all of us having to pull together—would anyone want to call attention to themselves here?” She must stop it, and she must stop it now. The deplorable conduct in question consists of reading books while walking down the street. “Milkman”—told in an…

Something witty happens between the first two scenes of the new staging of “The Hard Problem,” Tom Stoppard’s 2015 play, directed by Jack O’Brien, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse. Two young people, a woman and a man—she’s a psychology student prepping for a big job interview at a well-funded institute for brain science, and he’s her tutor—have been arguing about love, and trust, and instinct, and the existence of unsullied human goodness, offered not out of shrouded self-interest but for its own sake. Heady fare, sure, but relatively light stuff for Stoppard. The student, Hilary Matthews (Adelaide Clemens), in whose bedroom the scene is set, is allergic to the naked selfishness implied by the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma, which pits two criminals against each other in a guessing game about who…