Innholdsfortegnelse for December 18-25, 2017 i The New Yorker

Ariel Levy (“The Poetry of Systems,” p. 60), a staff writer, is the author of the memoir “The Rules Do Not Apply,” which came out in March. Kelefa Sanneh (“Street Sense,” p. 44) joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2008. Lauren Collins (The Talk of the Town, p. 40) is the author of “When in French: Love in a Second Language,” which was published last year. Barry Blitt (Cover) is a cartoonist and illustrator. His latest book, “Blitt,” is a collection of his illustrations for The New Yorker, the Times, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. Rebecca Mead (The Talk of the Town, p. 36) has been a staff writer since 1997. “My Life in Middlemarch” is her latest book. Ian Frazier (Poem, p. 77) recently published “Hogs Wild:…

The piano man is, rightfully, one of the most revered figures in pop music. Outsized musicians like Elton John, Billy Joel, and Randy Newman have contributed standards to the canon comprising little more than a few Steinway chords and a male voice that’s capable of calm confidence and gutting vulnerability within the same phrase. For diehard fans of the rapper Cam’ron, “He Tried to Play Me” shares the same shelf space. Released in 2006, the song came as little surprise from a rapper who’d sampled Journey and Cyndi Lauper with eager ease. Over full-palmed piano melodies, Cam’ron ambles through detailed scenes with characters from his childhood in Harlem—college students fallen from grace, thugs in wheelchairs, addict grandmothers—with a love of internal rhyme and whimsy that lightens their weight. “It’s real…

Latke Festival This annual tasting event, now in its ninth year, returns to Brooklyn on its quest to crown the city’s premier potato pancake. More than twenty restaurants, including Veselka, Kulushkat, and Shelsky’s, put their best food forward, reimagining the Hanukkah staple in sweet and savory variations—eggplant, mushrooms, braised short rib, duck, and something called a Pumpkin Spice Latke have all been fair game at past competitions. Celebrity chefs and critics will choose a winner, and guests can vote for a People’s Choice; ticket proceeds benefit the Sylvia Center, a nonprofit that offers youthoriented cooking and agricultural programs to promote health awareness and combat childhood obesity. (Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn.latkefestival.com. Dec. 18 at 6.) Make Music Winter Hundreds of revellers fill the streets for carols by headlamp…

“I don’t know a single peer of mine who has sold as few records as I have and still continues to do what they want to do,” Joe Henry, the singer- songwriter and producer, said recently. What does Joe Henry want to do? Make records of his own. How does he get to do it? By producing rec ords for others. (There are other things he likes to do. For example, a few years ago he co-wrote, with his brother, a book about Richard Pryor. But that has nothing to do with making records.) Henry was taking a turn through midtown the other day, a victory lap of a kind, to mark the recent release of his album “Thrum,” his fourteenth, and the completion, two days earlier, in Nashville, of…

All that beauty never got me much; strangers laying claim to whatthey think they recognize, every smile a promise, and most the kindyou hope they won’t keep. Beauty’s an old dog that’s too faithful,that sticks with you despite the curses and the kicks. They say it’sa mask, but it’s the opposite in fact; it reveals what’s inside, andeverybody wants that sweet cream at the center of a chocolateéclair. What am I now but an old broad with glitter at her temples,scattered in her hair, yet I can’t stretch on the bus without stakinga claim. All that beauty never got me much but trouble, and a tastefor trouble, a folded note, a couple of drinks at the bar.…

Another Yuletide at the door:The wreath left on it since beforeThe Christmas of two-oh-fifteen—A goodly while ago, I mean—Is up to date now once again.And I can yet remember whenI hung it, in a better timeWell antecedent to this rhyme.So come on in! The light is lit,The dark still can’t encompass it;A vast supply of grateful gladness,Above the current badness/madness,Prompts us to spread good will promiscuousAnd warmest greetings all Christmas-cuous!So, dearest critics, wince awayAs I shout-out, this holiday,The Khizr Khans, that Gold Star clan,And kind Pope Francis, holy man,And Meryl Streep and S. E. Cupp—May all find joy that fills them up!For Mayor Rahm EmanuelAnd Judge Gonzalo Curiel,May this unskillful doggerelRenew for them the annualSeason’s felicitations!And to our neighbor nations:O Canada, I hope you knowThe gem you have in your…

The new film by Steven Spielberg, “The Post,” begins in the jungle, shifts to Washington, and defies us to tell the difference. Courtrooms, boardrooms, nicely decorated drawing rooms, and newsrooms furnished with little more than telephones and smoke: they all feel cocked and combat-ready, and every deadline looms like an ambush. With Spielberg in command, almost nothing is allowed to soothe the tension. If a great white shark swam by, it would be told to move on. “Who’s the longhair?” So one soldier says to another, as they prepare to head into a dark Vietnamese forest, in 1966. The guy with the frizz is Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys), who is employed by the Rand Corporation and embedded with U.S. troops. On the plane back to America, he is summoned by…

JOCKEYS AND THEIR HORSES John Seabrook’s article on the jockeys Irad and Jose Ortiz ignores an important aspect of horse racing—the horse (“Top Jocks,” December 4th). Jockeys may “accept the hazards of racing as part of the job that both the animal and the rider were born to do.” However, this assumes that humans get to decide the purpose of another creature’s life—in this case, entertainment. Racehorses are routinely drugged and whipped, and often suffer, as Seabrook writes, “catastrophic breakdowns.” When the entertainment value is gone, a horse no longer matters, as when the horse Jose rides, Submit, breaks her leg and is euthanized on the racetrack. This anthropocentric attitude results in actions like President Trump’s attempt to overturn the ban on big-game trophies. And it’s the kind of…

“Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia,” which will be presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Dec. 15-16, is a show in remembrance of the people—approximately one quarter of Cambodia’s population— who were murdered by the Khmer Rouge, a Communist insurgency, in the nineteen- seventies. Given the magnitude of the slaughter, the show is modest. As its composer, Him Sophy, has explained, “Bangsokol is a traditional ceremony in Buddhist religion. ... People offer food, fruit, and other needs, and pray to their ancestors and wish for people who’ve already passed away to rest in peace and calm. Meanwhile, the ritual of Bangsokol also prays for living people to be healthy, happy, and have good lives.” In the seventies, the Cambodians did not have good lives. The country’s king, Sihanouk, was ousted,…

Iestyn Davies, the British countertenor, is spending a season as a New Yorker. Throughout the fall, he appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, in “The Exterminating Angel,” a thrilling adaptation by Thomas Adès of the film by Luis Buñuel, about an élite dinner party that becomes an inescapable nightmare. This month, he makes his Broadway début in “Farinelli and the King,” a play by Claire van Kampen, about the relationship, in the eighteenth century, between King Philip V of Spain and Carlo Broschi, the most famous castrato of his day, known as Farinelli. Davies plays the part of Farinelli’s singing voice, and hovers onstage behind Sam Crane, the actor who plays the rest of him. “I don’t know what it’s like for the audience,” Davies said the other day. “At first,…

Fans of the pick-a-thing genre of nonfiction know that the narrower the noun the better the book. This season, joining treatises on cod, coal, and kitchen utensils, there is a new work that one British critic called “the definitive cultural history of an indefinable subject”: “The Ghost,” by Susan Owens. It examines ghoulish art and literature, from a fifteenthcentury rood screen depicting a pair of fashionably dressed skeletons to the Christmas Eve cameo of Marley’s ghost to the “everyday apparitions” of Muriel Spark. Its cover is black, with some white swirly things that might just be the wind. On Amazon recently, it was the No. 1 best-seller in “Ghosts & Poltergeists.” On a “suitably misty and spooky” evening—her publishers had sent out an e-mail rejoicing at the weather— Owens was…

HoneyCC likes to say that she scarcely remembers the last time someone called her by her given name, Lin Chuchu. She took her online name from a 2003 movie starring Jessica Alba, about an aspiring hip-hop dancer and choreographer named Honey who catches her break after a music-video director sees a clip of her performing. Something similar happened for HoneyCC, who also trained in hip-hop dance, as well as in jazz and Chinese folk styles, and was equally determined to be discovered. After an injury cut short her dancing career, a few years ago, she and some friends set up an advertising business. Many of her clients were social-media companies, and her work for them led to an observation about the sector’s development: first there was the text-based service Weibo,…

A few years ago, a Royal Air Force wing commander visited the British aeronautics engineer Nigel Gifford, to discuss the idea of dropping aid from the sky to besieged civilians in Syria. Airdrops are extremely rare in urban environments; beyond the political obstacles, there are the logistical difficulties of landing giant pallets in small areas of a city. Even successful drops can endanger civilians. “While unpacking one and a half metric tons of food, you make yourself a very nice sniper target,” Gifford, a seventy-one-year-old former soldier, told me. “So I said to the commander, ‘I wouldn’t do it like that. I would build the aircraft out of food.’ Now he has done so. The Pouncer, a hundred-and-forty-five-pound edible glider, with a ten-foot wingspan, is designed to be released from…

Up the Estonian coast, a fivelane highway bends with the path of the sea, then breaks inland, leaving cars to follow a thin road toward the houses at the water’s edge. There is a gated community here, but it is not the usual kind. The gate is low—a picket fence—as if to prevent the dunes from riding up into the street. The entrance is blocked by a railroad-crossing arm, not so much to keep out strangers as to make sure they come with intent. Beyond the gate, there is a schoolhouse, and a few homes line a narrow drive. From Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, you arrive dazed: trees trace the highway, and the cars go fast, as if to get in front of something that no one can see. Within this…

Not long ago, scientists discovered that swans, the beloved symbols of romantic and sexual fidelity, have some chronic philanderers among their number. (How swans had kept this from us for so long is a mystery.) Other species regarded as paragons of sexual constancy—prairie voles and shingleback skinks—have also proved, on closer inspection, to be inconstant lovers. For the makers of anniversary greeting cards, and for anyone else seeking a precedent in nature for the great human experiment in monogamy, only a handful of mascots remain: black vultures, owl monkeys, California mice. We know that humans are bad at being faithful, but exactly how bad is hard to tell. Estimates of the number of people who fool around on their partners range, unhelpfully, from less than twenty per cent to more…

Lenin, by Victor Sebestyen (Pantheon). The Soviet Union’s first head of state appears, in this enthralling biography, as “a thoroughly modern political phenomenon—the kind of demagogue familiar to us in Western democracies.” Sebestyen’s Lenin is not a coolly rational mastermind but a whimsical opportunist, who promised his followers everything (“bread, peace and land”), bypassed his own dogmas as it suited him, and flew into “petulant rages over minor matters.” He scapegoated the vulnerable and evinced a particular animosity toward journalists, whom he lambasted for “sowing confusion by means of obviously defamatory distortion of the facts.” His speech was peppered with obscenities, and, ideology notwithstanding, he “enjoyed the pleasures of a country squire’s life.” He even had small, ugly hands. The Second Coming of the KKK, by Linda Gordon (Liveright).…

NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Lydia Ainsworth It’s not uncommon for musicians to take cues from visual art, but for this Canadian beatmaker, cellist, and vocalist the connection runs particularly deep. Her mother was a set designer on the bygone Muppets program “Fraggle Rock,” and her grandmother was a painter by trade. Ainsworth, who studied film composition, has brought an appreciation for the abstract into the musical realm, where she crafts mighty compositions that fuse electronic pop with string arrangements and darker, more ambient tones, especially on her Juno Award-nominated 2014 début, “Right from Real.” On her second album, “Darling of the Afterglow,” Ainsworth reflects on the expansiveness of the mind, particularly on…

21A Clinton St. (212-228-2100) Down a flight of black-painted stairs in an unremarkable building on the Lower East Side, Caveat is a bar-cum-edutainment space that aims to cater to the discerning nerd. The cavernous basement, decorated with ribbed dark wood and wallpaper printed with esoteric, vaguely scientific symbols, has an array of circular tables, gathered in clusters, as if at a cabaret. But what takes place on the broad stage is a nightly enticement of the intellect. A “Pregame Your Brain” happy hour offers the chance to learn about subjects like famous female scientists; the more musically inclined can take in an “improvised ‘hip-hopera’” in the style of “Hamilton,” by the group North Coast, which seeks to “quench the people’s thirst for historical raps.” For those more conventionally thirsty, a…

As New Yorkers stumble, marionettelike, through the middle passage of life, many keep a lookout for indications of their own increasing crankiness. They shudder at warning signs of the unfathomable new. To wit: in the past month, the number of UNTUCKit stores in Manhattan has gone from one to four. Eager to understand the cultural significance of a shirt whose shortened, curved shirttails are meant to be worn untucked, a visitor stopped in at the UNTUCKit store on Prince Street. He told a young salesman that a friend had recommended the brand’s shirts, and added, “I wasn’t sure what the appropriate emotional response was. I mean, is that like saying ‘You look good in blue,’ or more like ‘You should wear dress shields’?” The salesman trilled, “Absolutely!,” which did not…

Seven hundred turkeys, two rappers, and an intermediate number of onlookers had assembled in the parking lot of a Kroger supermarket on Cleveland Avenue, on the scrappy south side of Atlanta. The rappers were Quavo and Takeoff, two of the three members of Migos, the dominant hip-hop group of the moment— known for exuberant, offkilter tracks, like “Bad and Boujee,” that seem to consist of nothing but interjections. It was the Friday before Thanksgiving, and the two were standing in the back of a U-Haul truck, facing a growing crowd of people who wanted turkeys or pictures or both. Takeoff grabbed a carton and opened it. “We shipping them boxes out,” he barked—Migos can turn just about any handful of words into a memorable refrain. The turkey supply had already…

In many ways, life in Great Missenden was idyllic, bucolic, sweet. The author Roald Dahl and the movie star Patricia Neal called their cottage there, in the rolling English countryside of Buckinghamshire, Gipsy House, because they’d parked a bright-blue caravan in the garden for their four children to play in, and because there was a freewheeling spirit to the place. A dozen people might show up for dinner on any given night; Neal would frequently be on her way to the United States to shoot a film; Dahl wrote his famous children’s books in a little hut— his “nest”—at the edge of the garden, surrounded by the roses and rhododendrons he liked to tend. “It was a very unmanufactured garden—very cobbled together, not unlike the house,” Ophelia Dahl, the second-youngest…

A visit to a scientific-research center usually begins at a star professor’s laboratory that is abuzz with a dozen postdocs collaborating on various experiments. But when I recently toured the Flatiron Institute, which formally opened in September, in lower Manhattan, I was taken straight to a computer room. The only sound came from a susurrating climate- control system. I was surrounded by rows of black metal cages outfitted, from floor to ceiling, with black metal shelves filled with black server nodes: boxes with small, twinkling lights and protruding multicolored wires. Tags dangled from some of the wires, notes that the tech staff had written to themselves. I realized that I’d seen a facility like this only in movies. Nick Carriero, one of the directors of what the institute calls its…

We’re submerged, all of us. You, me, the children, our friends, their children, everybody else. Sometimes we get out: for lunch, to read or to tan, never for very long. Then we all climb back into the metaphor. The Lazy River is a circle, it is wet, it has an artificial current. Even if you don’t move you will get somewhere and then return to wherever you started, and if we may speak of the depth of a metaphor, well, then, it is about three feet deep, excepting a brief stretch at which point it rises to six feet four. Here children scream—clinging to the walls or the nearest adult—until it is three feet deep once more. Round and round we go. All life is in here, flowing. Flowing! Responses…

In March, 2011, when civil protests broke out in cities and towns across Syria, the country’s most famous poet, Adonis—who is in his eighties and has lived in exile since the mid-nineteenfifties— hesitated to support the demonstrators. Although he had welcomed earlier uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, he flinched when Syria’s turn came. In an editorial published in al-Hayat, a leading Arabic newspaper, in May, 2011, by which time more than a thousand protesters were dead and government tanks had shelled several towns, Adonis wrote, “I will never agree to participate in a demonstration that comes out of a mosque.” He portrayed the opposition as young naïfs, easily coöpted by canny Islamists who dreamed of establishing a religious authoritarianism that would be even worse than the Baathist regime of Bashar…

Sex, a cup of coffee the morning after, a quality bag of weed: as the thirtytwo- year-old Los Angeles R. & B. singer Miguel puts it, in a single from 2014, it is the “simplethings” that make life worthwhile. Miguel has made a career out of finding creative ways to render small pleasures in sound. But, unlike many of his colleagues in the sex-anthem industry, there’s a quality to his freakiness that feels bounded, almost safe. There are limits to yearning for its own sake. He sings with a teasing and flirty confidence, yet there’s always a sense of calm and self-control. Where others treat sex as conquest, he plays the part of the dutiful full-service lover. Indeed, he somehow managed to make a song called “The Pussy Is Mine,”…