Innholdsfortegnelse for January 7, 2019 i The New Yorker

Patrick Radden Keefe (“Winning,” p. 30) is a staff writer. His new book, “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” will be published in the U.S. in February. Lauren Collins (“Post and Riposte,” p. 24) has been a staff writer since 2008. She is the author of “When in French: Love in a Second Language.” Taymour Soomro (Fiction, p. 56) is a doctoral candidate in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. This is his first fiction publication. Paige Williams (The Talk of the Town, p. 17), a staff writer since 2015, is the author of “The Dinosaur Artist.” Matt Whitaker (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 23) is a comedy writer for Netflix’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” Heather Christle (Poem, p. 52) is the author…

One recent morning, as tourists and office workers streamed into and out of the Empire State Building lobby, the arrival of a freshly minted movie star went unnoticed. Yalitza Aparicio plays the lead role in “Roma,” Alfonso Cuarón’s lauded Netflix film, about a live-in housekeeper for a middle-class family in Mexico City; the character, Cleo, is based on Cuarón’s childhood nanny, Libo, to whom the movie is dedicated. When Aparicio got the part, just after completing her degree in preschool education, she had never acted before and had never been outside Mexico. Now she has walked red carpets around the world, appears on the cover of Mexican Vogue, and is an unlikely awards-season contender in a field that includes Glenn Close, Melissa Mc-Carthy, and Lady Gaga. But she had never…

“Expedition: Robinson,” a Swedish reality-television program, premièred in the summer of 1997, with a tantalizing premise: sixteen strangers are deposited on a small island off the coast of Malaysia and forced to fend for themselves. To survive, they must coöperate, but they are also competing: each week, a member of the ensemble is voted off the island, and the final contestant wins a grand prize. The show’s title alluded to both “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Swiss Family Robinson,” but a more apt literary reference might have been “Lord of the Flies.” The first contestant who was kicked off was a young man named Sinisa Savija. Upon returning to Sweden, he was morose, complaining to his wife that the show’s editors would “cut away the good things I did and make…

It’s hopeless, the stars, the booksabout stars, they can’t help themselvesand how could you not love them for ithere in the new week with animalsburying food and everything outlinedin cold and even friends, it’s hopeless,this mess, this season, all thatis lost and tickets and strangers,what can I say, only sitting hereon this dark bench waiting for whatI don’t know, I want this worldto remain with me, this holy tumult,which does not know it loves meand you, friends, spectacular driveways,an orange, the vanishing year.…

This Mournable Body, by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Graywolf). The author’s first novel, the post-colonial classic “Nervous Conditions” (1988), followed Tambu, a woman in nineteen-sixties Rhodesia who is striving for an education in order to transcend a village upbringing. Here, in the third novel of a trilogy, Tambu faces breakdowns and the realization that her hard-won achievements do not guarantee upward mobility in a Zimbabwe beset by poverty, autocracy, and white privilege. Desperate for money, having quit a job where she received “miserly wages for copy white men put their names to,” she works for a tour company that offers wealthy European tourists an authentic African experience. Soon she is guiding them around her old village. The novel brilliantly dramatizes the tragic ironies of life in a country where keeping yourself…

ATTICUS TRUMP? Casey Cep’s piece on “To Kill a Mockingbird” discusses the recent revisionist view of Atticus Finch as a flawed, less-than-heroic figure (A Critic at Large, December 17th). The new Broadway adaptation of the novel, written by Aaron Sorkin, appears to give credence to this reading, with a reimagined Atticus who suggests that there are good people on both sides of a lynch mob. As Cep notes, Sorkin has implied that Atticus’s empathy is somehow analogous to President Trump’s comments after the violent confrontation in Charlottesville. In reality, they couldn’t be more different. Trump seemed to be signalling that white supremacists are morally fine just the way they are; Atticus believes that, through civility and an effort to understand the perspective of others, he might be able to…

Out on Madison Avenue, a woman parked an S.U.V. and then hurried half a block east, into the doorway of a Jacobean mansion. In the foyer, a few people were struggling to get an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair up a ramp. The woman assessed the geometrics and helped ease him up and into an old elevator. The man was Jim Fowler, the zoologist and the former host of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” the pioneering nature procedural; the woman was his daughter, Carrie. They’d arrived here, at the headquarters of the Explorers Club, for a party celebrating the half-century-long friendship between Fowler and John Atwater Bradley, a retired management consultant, Shawangunk squire, adventurer, raconteur, and exuberant dropper of names. Bradley, who is eighty-seven, was already upstairs, in the club’s…

Water crept into our furnished home,the one in the flood zone but zonedanyway, and anyway our home, though we spent so little time there.And now that we’ve moved on,I think of the outlets sparking out and my guitar rising against the walluntil it fell and became a boatthat drifted from room to room, knocking into legs of tables and chairs.I think of the books the water tookfrom the shelves and opened at its leisure as it snaked and rose,the rain still rapping at the roofand at the swollen windows. And of all the items of our life—our braided rugs, the dog’s bedand bowls, the sofa with its pillows, the lamps, the photos, the figurines—all of them out of their element and into another,which held them and rocked them gently.…

Between Irum’s Beauty Spot and Primetime Bakery, below a tall palm, a makeshift stall has appeared. It’s constructed from coarsely woven white plastic sheeting with “Save the Children” and a jumping jack printed on it in red. A boy, perhaps in his late teens, is sitting on an upturned crate in front of it, with a shoe, heel up, in his lap. “It’s a dying art,” Amer says to him, slamming and then reslamming the door of his battered Civic behind him. “It’s the glue,” the boy says. He wipes the excess from the welt of the shoe with a grubby, balled-up cloth. “With the right one, you’re set. None of this UHU superglue. The one like paste. Like flour and water.” The midday sun catches his eyelashes and the…

Like all dystopian narratives, the feminist variety uses stories about how bad the world might become to point out how bad it already is. Not surprisingly, feminist dystopian narratives are now enjoying a boom, from Hulu’s television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale”—Atwood recently announced that she is writing a sequel—to several books by both new and established novelists, including Louise Erdrich’s “Future Home of the Living God,” Christina Dalcher’s “Vox,” and Leni Zumas’s “Red Clocks.” These writers depict a range of inventively punitive societies: in one, women are punished for speaking more than a hundred words per day; in another, the government takes pregnant women into custody to manage a fertility crisis. The novels extrapolate from a very real prospect of curtailed rights, especially reproductive rights,…

The Illustrious Blacks (above) describe their origins in galactic terms: Manchildblack and Monstah Black were kings of separate planets, until an “inexplicable ultramagnetic pull” brought them together. Here on Earth, they perform disco-infused Afrofuturist funk while channelling the androgynous glamour of Prince, David Bowie, and Grace Jones. (They’re also a married couple.) Their show “Hyperbolic!” is part of “Under the Radar” (Jan. 3-13), the Public’s annual emporium of the avant-garde and the out of this world. NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Fred Hersch Trio Village Vanguard Fred Hersch’s pianistic gifts are legendary, but his uncanny ability to assemble perfectly calibrated trios should not be taken for granted. Over the past decade, he’s had a winning combination…

Craig Avedisian, a litigator and situational genius, lives on an Upper East Side residential block with its share of wildlife. At some point, virtually every New York City building not recently constructed and exactingly sealed has—within the walls, or burrowing in the basement—mice. The co-op apartment that Avedisian occupies with his wife, Carla van de Walle, and their two children, in a six-story prewar building, is meticulously tidy. Still, mice. Last March, Avedisian sent the first in a series of e-mails to fellow-members of the co-op’s board, itemizing sightings (or droppings)—under the refrigerator, inside cupboards, in a knife drawer, sleeping it off in a garbage can, running free in daylight, drunk on the fragrance of sizzling bacon. The month had begun on a more propitious note, when Avedisian was announced…

Mike and Alexandra Chau got married in 2012, when they were twenty-eight years old. Mike works in tech, Alex in finance. As they thought about expanding their family, they moved from Manhattan to Mike’s childhood neighborhood of Forest Hills, Queens. An enthusiastic eater, Mike considered himself “one of those people who posted too many pictures of food” on Instagram. One night in 2013, he took a picture of a newborn baby, red and scowling, alongside an open takeout container of chicken and brown rice: the Chaus’ son, Matty, was sixty-seven hours old. A meatball shot followed. Then red velvet cake. Then, as the days passed, sushi and pad Thai. Matty was not yet consuming solid food, but his newborn expressions—lolling tongue, grimace—seemed to convey a gastronomic opinion. When paired with…

In the warm kitchen of a bungalow just off a two-lane road in far-western Ireland, the novelist Sally Rooney, her mother, her sister, and her mother’s friend were contesting the issues of the day over a supper of pork loin, roasted potatoes, green beans, red peppers, and applesauce. The pace of the conversation was brisk, the threshold for entry high. You had to be careful with the prosecco. “A Star Is Born” came up. The film’s lone advocate was quickly crushed with an analysis of its gender politics and time-line issues. The discussion turned to Brexit. We were in Castlebar, County Mayo, at the home of Rooney’s mother, Marie Farrell. Everyone was worried about what would happen to the Irish border if the United Kingdom left the European Union without…

American stories trace the sweep of history, but their details are definingly particular. In the summer of 1979, Elizabeth Anderson, then a rising junior at Swarthmore College, got a job as a bookkeeper at a bank in Harvard Square. Every morning, she and the other bookkeepers would process a large stack of bounced checks. Businesses usually had two accounts, one for payroll and the other for costs and supplies. When companies were short of funds, Anderson noticed, they would always bounce their payroll checks. It made a cynical kind of sense: a worker who was owed money wouldn’t go anywhere, or could be replaced, while an unpaid supplier would stop supplying. Still, Anderson found it disturbing that businesses would write employees phony checks, burdening them with bounce fees. It appeared…

At the beginning of 1962, a tall, thinlipped thirty-three-year-old named James Ivory and a charming, cleft-chinned twenty-five-year-old named Ismail Merchant turned up on the doorstep of a bungalow on Delhi’s Alipur Road. Ivory was a budding film director, Merchant a budding film producer. Together, they were hoping to adapt a novel called “The Householder,” a social satire of contemporary Delhi, and had decided to approach the author to ask if she would help them turn it into a film. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, diminutive and dark-haired, did not imagine herself to be a budding screenwriter. When they first telephoned her, she pretended to be her mother-in-law to put them off. “I told them I’ve never done anything like this before,” she later recalled. “But they said, ‘It doesn’t matter. We haven’t,…

The first room of “Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera,” a wishfully canon-expanding show of painting and sculpture from the past eight decades, at the Metropolitan Museum, affects like a mighty organ chord. It contains the museum’s two best paintings by Jackson Pollock: “Pasiphaë” (1943), a quaking compaction of mythological elements named for the accursed mother of the Minotaur, and “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” (1950), a singing orchestration of drips in black, white, brown, and teal enamel—bluntly material and, inextricably, sublime. There are six Pollock drawings, too, and “Number 7” (1952), one of his late, return-to-figuration paintings in mostly black on white, of an indistinct but hieratic head. The adjective “epic” does little enough to honor Pollock’s mid-century glory, which anchors the standard arthistorical saga of Abstract Expressionism—“The Triumph of American…