Innholdsfortegnelse for January 21, 2019 i The New Yorker

Dana Goodyear (“Blurred Lines,” p. 32), a staff writer, is the author of “Honey and Junk,” “The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard,” and “Anything That Moves.” Joshua Rothman (“Choose Wisely,” p. 26) is the magazine’s archive editor and a frequent contributor to newyorker.com. Salvatore Scibona (Fiction, p. 52) directs the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, at the New York Public Library. His second novel, “The Volunteer,” will be out in March. Hannah Goldfield (Tables for Two, p. 11) is the magazine’s food critic. She has contributed to The New Yorker since 2010. Pascal Campion (Cover), an illustrator, is an art director for animation studios in Southern California. Toi Derricotte (Poem, p. 48) co-founded the Cave Canem Foundation, with Cornelius Eady, in 1996. Her latest book, “‘I’: New and Selected…

The first biannual Cannabis Media Summit took place a few weeks ago, hosted by Duane Morris, a law firm with a cannabis practice. Tickets cost a hundred and forty-nine dollars; the proceedings started at 9 A.M. in the firm’s midtown offices, which smelled not faintly of the subject. More than a hundred paying attendees turned out to hear journalists from outlets including DOPE (“Defending Our Plant Every-where”), Mary (“the mature voice of cannabis culture”), High Times, and the Boston Globe speak on panels with titles like “Getting the Scoop” and “The Rise of Marijuana Podcasting.” New York could become the eleventh state to legalize recreational marijuana, and attendees were optimistic. On a panel called “Financial Reporting on Publicly Traded Cannabis Stocks,” Bill Alpert, a writer for Barron’s, told the crowd,…

This past September, at the Brooklyn Book Festival, the graphic novelist Nick Drnaso signed books at the kiosk of his publisher, Drawn & Quarterly. The kiosk’s vertical supports, its horizontal banner, and the table where he was sitting formed a squat rectangular panel, with his upper body at its center. Drnaso (pronounced “dur-nass-oh”) has small dark eyes, a wan complexion, and a narrow black mustache that seems to have been sketched in by a fine-nibbed pen. He was wearing a black shirt. His hair, which is thinning, was hidden beneath a black baseball cap. Drnaso, who is twenty-nine, was promoting “Sabrina,” his graphic novel about a young man in Chicago who is devastated by his girlfriend’s sudden disappearance. Did Sabrina just leave him, or was she kidnapped or murdered? He…

“Dear Mr. Richter,” the letter “Dear began. “I have been working on the idea for a feature film, about which I would like to talk to you, if you can make that possible. Could you give me an hour of your time?” The author, the German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, had been trying to get in touch with Gerhard Richter for quite some time. Mutual acquaintances had refused to make an introduction; no one wanted to jeopardize a relationship with the man widely considered to be the greatest painter alive. So Donnersmarck, who is full of what Ulrich Mühe, the lead actor in Donnersmarck’s first film, “The Lives of Others,” called “implacable friendliness,” resorted to mailing a handwritten letter to an address listed on Richter’s official Web site. A…

I lost so muchof the world’s beauty, as if I were watching every shining gifton its branch with one eye. Because I was hungry. Because I was waiting to eat, a self crawling about theworld in search of small things. I remember a small thing, my mother’s hat, a teahat or cocktail hat that sat on top of herperfect face—petals, perhaps peonies, flaming out, likethe pink feathers of some exotic bird. Her motherhad been a cook in the South. She grew up in the home ofwealthy white people. Hesitant toward her ownbeauty, unable to protect mine, there were thingsshe never talked about. She said silence was a balm. It saton top of her head, something of exaltation and wonder explodingfrom the inside like a woman in orgasm. One artificial flower…

Mortal Republic, by Edward J. Watts (Basic). Rome’s imperial expansion starting in the mid-second century B.C. brought great wealth but also, as this incisive history shows, undermined a political system based on consensus and collaboration, ultimately tipping the Roman Republic into tyranny. Watts describes how the rise of an economic élite and increasing in-equality brought about populist sentiment that was easily exploited by nefarious politicians. The parallels to the present day are striking: as the rich accumulated power, old standards of morality and decency gave way. After a century of increasing corruption and violence, Romans hungry for stability welcomed the autocracy of Augustus. Watts says that this outcome wasn’t inevitable. Had Romans refused to tolerate minor threats to the rule of law, “the Republic could have been saved.” The…

Early in the pilot for “Good Trouble,” a spinoff of the family drama “The Fosters,” the show’s heroines, sisters Mariana and Callie Adams Foster, visit their new home, in Los Angeles. They’ve signed on at the Coterie, a bargain-rent “intentional community,” and the decision looks like a bad call. Their room has mice. The bathroom is communal and coed. Their housemates seem like millennial cartoons, the type most shows would turn into satirical mincemeat: improv comics, a “body-positive Instagram influencer,” a prickly Black Lives Matter activist. “What’s a Sad Girl Party?” Callie asks, nervously eying the bulletin board. But, right away, those cartoons get shading. The activist, Malika (Zuri Adele, the standout among the new-comers), came up through the foster system, as Callie and Mariana did, unlike them, she was…

REEFER MADNESS? In Malcolm Gladwell’s article about the consequences of marijuana legalization and promotion, he omits a vital detail: the Drug Enforcement Administration categorizes marijuana, like heroin, as a Schedule 1 drug—a substance with no medical value and a high potential for abuse (“Unwatched Pot,” January 14th). This makes it nearly impossible for scientists to conduct clinical trials on its use. Gladwell laments the absence of such research without identifying the primary roadblock—the federal government. In summarizing the case against pot, Gladwell airs the views of Alex Berenson, whose alarmist book about marijuana use and violence relies on a questionable patchwork of incomplete research and anecdotal observations. Whether or not marijuana can cause or aggravate mental illness is an important question, deserving of the kind of study that is…

The other day, in Times Square, the artist Yuji Agematsu took a notebook and a pen from his pants pocket. He logged the time, 12:34 p.m., and the precise location, the south side of Forty-second Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, and drew a rough map. Then something caught his eye. “That spot,” he said, pointing to the ground beside a trash can several feet away. He crossed the sidewalk and picked up a tiny whitish object, which resembled a used eraser. “Gum,” he declared approvingly. He dropped the wad into a cellophane sleeve he’d removed from a pack of American Spirit cigarettes, then carefully slid the sleeve into the empty cigarette box, and returned the package to his shirt pocket for safekeeping. Shortly after Agematsu, who is sixty-two, moved…

• A rising tide floods all houses. • A bird in the hand is worth more than it used to be because they’re going extinct. • She vanished into oddly thick air! • Stop and smell the flower. • One man’s trash is everybody’s trash because it all goes in the same enormous landfill. • It happens only once in a blue moon, and that’s pretty frequently because now the moon is all sorts of weird colors. • She’s a real force of almost entirely decimated rain forest. • A rose by any other name would wilt and die without water, which we’re running out of. • She’s so hot and cold, like the month of January. • When it rains, it acid-rains. • Can we please address the elephant…

The forces out to kill us with their benevolenceare more crazed now than they were when you were alive.And more focussed, too. Our ingratitude excites them.They’re bubbling with remedies.Their providential impulses are a nimbus of knives.Their need to tell us they love us, love us,with all their love in vain … You said before you died that this would happen.Thanks for the warning. You didn’t let me know, though,that even our phantom selves would come after us,crawling out of the poems we made.They don’t care about the transparent skin we wrapped them inso they could watch their organs pulsing within.All they know is that we made their eyes too bright.They see more than they can stand,more than we ever could or would. They see the unending savagerythat we could never…

Okinawa was a fever dream of mosquitoes and Falstaff beer. A Marine Corps rule said they couldn’t put Vollie on the plane to deploy if he was too drunk to walk unassisted across the tarmac and up the stairs into the bird. Why did command make a rule like that if they were going to give you liberty to see the town the night before you flew out? A buddy he’d met Stateside in survival training, a ranch hand from New Mexico, was teaching Vollie to drink himself sick. “The belly got to get swole up,” his companion said. “Loose that belt. Let the bubbles in down deep. You’re a beer camel now. They’ll put me on that plane in ten pieces is the only way. Tie me together in…

Sally Wen Mao’s new book of poems, “Oculus,” borrows its slightly men-acing title from the Latin word for “eye,” which also refers to, among other things, a virtual-reality company and the eye-shaped skylight at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. There are eyes everywhere in “Oculus,” but not all of them are blessed with sight. Some are all-seeing, panoptic; others are yearning and blinkered, un able to return the gaze they attract. These poems are haunted by images of human faces staring out from all kinds of screens, faces that are themselves screens upon which the world projects its fantasies and anxieties. “The stories about our lives do not have faces,” Mao writes. Her strange and morally succinct book is, in part, a sustained defense of writing. Mao’s poems…

Set in a Christian halfway house, Abby Rosebrock’s “Blue Ridge” (at the Atlantic Theatre Company) is a recovery story that dispenses with the dramatic trope of relapse. Nobody falls off the wagon or gets rushed away in an ambulance as onlookers sob. Rosebrock, a thirty-two-year-old Brooklyn-based playwright and actress who grew up in South Carolina, keeps her characters committed to their newfound sobriety, which isn’t to say that they are blessed with untroubled minds. Her subject is healing, the queasy, fragile calm that follows the storm of addiction and abuse; she’s interested in the ways in which damaged people try—or don’t—to fix themselves by untangling the harm that they’ve done from the harm that has been done to them. Who is really at fault for our failures? Should we blame…

Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1981 musical, “Merrily We Roll Along,” closed after just sixteen performances on Broadway, but its afterlife has been long. The story, about three friends who drift apart as they navigate show business, is told in reverse, starting with disillusioned middle age and winding back to idealistic youth. Fiasco Theatre, the Roundabout’s scrappy company-in-residence, is staging a six-person revival at the Laura Pels (in previews), where it previously presented a D.I.Y. version of Sondheim’s “Into the Woods.” NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Eddie Palmieri Blue Note Eddie Palmieri’s new album, “Mi Luz Mayor,” is dedicated to his late wife, Iraida, and includes songs they would dance to; judging from the propulsive performances…

Earlier this month, Governor Andrew Cuomo stunned North Brooklyn residents by cancelling a long-planned fifteen-month shutdown of the L train, which connects the area to Manhattan. In a call with reporters, he attributed the reversal to an engineering breakthrough, and to the intervention of an unnamed Brooklynite who, the Governor claimed, grabbed him by the lapels during a campaign stop and demanded that Cuomo look him in the eye and tell him that the shutdown was the best plan. “I’m not an engineer, I don’t really know,” Cuomo recalled telling the man. “He said, ‘But they told you that you couldn’t build a new bridge at the Tappan Zee, didn’t they?’ I said yes. He said, ‘But you did it, didn’t you?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Well, did you…

Not long ago, Amy Cunningham, a funeral director for Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, convened about twenty strangers in a third-floor room at the Sixty-seventh Street library in Manhattan, for a workshop on writing condolence letters. (The event was part of a festival called “Reimagine End of Life.”) “I have a confession to make at the outset,” Cunningham told the crowd, a group of women of diverse ages and scarf preferences. “Though I have studied condolence letters and thought a lot about this, I struggle to sit down and write a letter myself.” For many of us, she said, the problem is ambition. “I think we want it to be too good and too all-encompassing.” As a result, some people fail to write anything at all. Or they procrastinate. “I even find…

On a spring morning at a concert hall in Toronto, Denise Ho, a queen of the Hong Kong genre known as Cantopop, prepared to appease the gods. Posters on either side of the stage door advertised her tour through Canada, where she spent her formative years, and California. An entourage of assistants and stagehands scurried around unloading speakers, costume bags, and equipment cases. Ho, a lean, athletic-looking woman of forty-one, wore a green bomber jacket and hiking boots. Her face was set in a steely expression of self-possession and purposefulness, which gave her the appearance of a cross between a soldier and a minor Buddhist deity. Ho walked to a table, just outside the door, that was covered with a bright-red cloth. She ignited a few sticks of incense and…

When I was a kid of ten or eleven years old, newly returned to New York after a few years living in Chicago, I started accompanying my mother to a church in Harlem, in a shallow, sunlit upper room just south of 125th Street. Every Sunday, service began with a procession. The Hammond organ would start up, and the ministers, carrying their Bibles, trailed by the pastor, would file in in a loose line, singing a song. It went: This is the Lord’s church, and Jesus is Lord!This is the church that’s been established on his Word.This is the church that love is building; the gates of Hell shall not prevail!This is the Lord’s church, and Jesus is Lord! It was meant to be a happy song—you could tell by…