Innholdsfortegnelse for August 1, 2016 i The New Yorker

Connie Bruck (“The Guantánamo Failure,” p. 34) has been a staff writer since 1989. She is the author of three books, among them “The Predators’ Ball.” Héctor Tobar (“Can Latinos Swing Arizona?,” p. 20) is a professor of journalism at the University of Oregon. He has published four books, including “Deep Down Dark,” about the trapped Chilean miners, and the novel “The Barbarian Nurseries.” Alice Gregory (“Body of Work,” p. 26) writes for the Times Book Review and is a contributing editor for T, the newspaper’s style magazine. Jonathan Alter (The Talk of the Town, p. 19), who has written two books about President Obama and one about Franklin D. Roosevelt, is at work on a biography of Jimmy Carter. Frank Viva (Cover) is an illustrator and a graphic…

As the sole reporter dispatched to Cleveland from Caixin Media, a Chinese news organization, Zhang Yuanan arrived with a mission. Caixin rarely sends correspondents to American political conventions, but in this campaign Donald Trump has devoted unusual attention to China—blaming the country for “killing” America on trade and “beating us in everything.” Zhang was assigned to investigate. She is twenty-eight. Her parents, who are civil servants in the city of Yangzhou, were worried. “They heard about all the shootings recently,” she said, and, over FaceTime, they advised her to “just stay away from the crowds.” Tall and rangy, with a broad smile, Zhang attended college in Beijing and perfected her English in Melbourne; Caixin posted her to Washington, D.C., in 2014. A few hours before the Party was scheduled to…

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were making coffee in their suite at the Westin in Annapolis while, downstairs, a few hundred donors, friends, and Carter Administration veterans (Walter Mondale, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jerry Rafshoon) had gathered for the annual Carter Center Weekend. The night before, the Carters had danced to “Georgia on My Mind” at a party celebrating their forthcoming seventieth wedding anniversary and Jimmy’s graduation from the Naval Academy, also seventy years ago. Their third son, Jeff, toasted them for “saving more lives than possibly any couple in the history of the world.” When Carter was told that only one tenth of one per cent of American couples have been married for seventy years (George and Barbara Bush clock in at seventy-one), he smiled. “I hope we make it,” he said.…

JAILHOUSE SCHOOL OF LAW In 2011, I was sentenced to life without parole in New York State and am currently mounting a legal case to prove wrongful conviction. So I was heartened by Jennifer Gonnerman’s article on Derrick Hamilton, a jailhouse lawyer who succeeded in getting his own conviction overturned after more than twenty years of effort (“Home Free,” June 20th). It was my good fortune that Hamilton was the law clerk at the Auburn prison when I arrived. He taught me how to use the law library, how to obtain my legal certificate, and much more. Although I was not a member of his Actual Innocence Team, a group of prisoners who worked together to prove their innocence, I had many legal conversations with men who were. When…

Seeing an unfamiliar painting by Rembrandt is a life event: fresh data on what it’s like to be human. A remarkable case in point is “Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver” (1629), now on rare loan from a private collection in England to the Morgan Library, where it headlines the show “Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece,” augmented with drawings and prints. The artist completed it when he was twenty-three, still living in his native Leiden and sharing a studio with his friend Jan Lievens. When Constantijn Huygens, the secretary to the Prince of Orange, visited the studio, he declared Rembrandt’s picture equal to “all the beauty that has been produced throughout the ages.” In the smallish canvas, Judas kneels, writhing in anguish, amid a circle of elders in a busy temple.…

Quick word-association exercise: I say “Australia,” you say … “Uggs”? “Marmite”? “Brothers Hemsworth”? Hazard a dingo joke at your own risk. “If there’s one thing Australians will not stand for, it is being ridiculed by America,” the Australian recently blustered. Northern Territory, a spacious “Australian” drinking establishment on the southern edge of Greenpoint, is owned by the native Aussie Jamie Toll and named for the continent’s rather wild north-central block (the local NT News’s “Only in the Territory” section has covered an “intense romantic relationship” between a kangaroo and a pig). At the bar, fair dinkum (a.k.a. genuine) stuff from down under is sparse. There are some regional wines; burgers are garnished with the conventional slice of beetroot; and bottles of Coopers pale ale are ceremoniously rolled, to settle their…

Rachel Chavkin, the thirty-sixyear-old director of “Hadestown,” the folk-opera reinvention of Orpheus and Eurydice at New York Theatre Workshop, says she “came up playing sports.” Before special performances, she leads the cast in a hands-in cheer, like a coach psyching up the team. On her left forearm, below a biceps tattoo of an armadillo, she has a lyre, for “Hadestown”; on her right forearm she has a tattoo for “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” which she directed Off Broadway and will direct on Broadway this fall; she has no tattoo, currently, for “Small Mouth Sounds,” now at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Outside the “Hadestown” stage door, a few minutes before curtain on a recent evening, Chavkin bumped into Anaïs Mitchell, the show’s thirty-fiveyear-old writer and composer,…

Jose Barboza was up early on March 22nd, the day of the Presidential primary in Arizona. Barboza, a twenty-four-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was volunteering for Promise Arizona, a local group dedicated to turning out Latino voters. That morning, he canvassed in the barrios of Phoenix, at the foot of the dry slopes of South Mountain, making sure that the people he had registered showed up to vote. When I interviewed him in April, in the offices of Promise Arizona, he recalled the extraordinary excitement of the primary voters. In the end, a record six hundred thousand people cast ballots in the city and the rest of Maricopa County, twice the number in 2012. Barboza is animated and solidly built, with close-cropped hair and black, rectangular-framed glasses. He was born…

At the Guantánamo military prison—a desolate place near the eastern tip of Cuba—detainees began a chant that grew louder as it spread: “Obama! Obama! Obama!” It was Election Night in November of 2008, and the returns had made it clear that Barack Obama had soundly defeated John McCain. The chant echoed from blocky concrete buildings arranged into camps, where “compliant” detainees watched television and took classes, and “non-compliant” ones passed their time in twelve-by-eight-foot cells. The sound of the chant stopped short of the top-secret Camp 7, where the C.I.A. held “high value” detainees, including five men charged with participating in the attacks of September 11, 2001. But at Camp Justice, which housed visiting defense lawyers and military prosecutors in facing rows of tin sheds, the lawyers formed a chain…

When he returned to the bagel place, there was the usual line, but his hope dwindled with every face that wasn’t hers. He went around the block for the dozenth time. After that, he came untethered and wandered south. Heedless at the corners, he was nearly hit by a cab. He turned right for no reason, and on that block, as he walked, some invisible industrial fan seemed to whir violently, sending up trash. Suddenly, before his eyes, there was an aircraft carrier. There was motion and transition everywhere, the urgent, churning city, the cry of a siren fading around the block. At the Empire State Building, they tried to get him to take a tour. He and his wife had married in Cuba (by way of Nicaragua) four years…

Barely half an hour has passed in “Star Trek Beyond,” and the USS Enterprise is already getting a haircut. First of all, its main thrusters are sheared off, which must—though I’m no expert— spell trouble for the warp drive, and then the tubular body drops away, leaving only the central saucer. In short, everybody’s favorite spacecraft has just turned into one big galactic Frisbee. There’s a wonderful shot of Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), safe in his ejection pod, gazing through the windshield at the flaming corpse of his beloved ship, which plunges down toward the crags of an unwelcoming planet. Even agnostics, unmoved by the remorseless reboots of the “Star Trek” franchise, may find themselves mourning the loss. On the other hand, it does give Kirk a dose…

“I love the poorly educated,” Donald Trump said during a victory speech in February, and he has repeatedly taken aim at America’s élites and their “false song of globalism.” Voters in Britain, heeding Brexit campaigners’ calls to “take back control” of a country ostensibly threatened by uncontrolled immigration, “unelected élites,” and “experts,” have reversed fifty years of European integration. Other countries across Western Europe, as well as Israel, Russia, Poland, and Hungary, seethe with demagogic assertions of ethnic, religious, and national identity. In India, Hindu supremacists have adopted Rush Limbaugh’s favorite epithet “libtard” to channel righteous fury against liberal and secular élites. The great eighteenth-century venture of a universal civilization harmonized by rational self-interest, commerce, luxury, arts, and science— the Enlightenment forged by Voltaire, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and others— seems…

Theatre—the best of it—is primarily a literary art; even a script that doesn’t have much dialogue is still bound by some kind of narrative. While directors and choreographers such as Judith Malina, Pina Bausch, Elizabeth Le-Compte, and Robert Wilson put a lot of thought and energy into destabilizing texts—making verbiage just one sound in a landscape of visual and aural experimentation— storytelling, or, more specifically, the question of how to tell a story, is still a driving force in their work. Are words meaningful in and of themselves, these artists seem to ask, or are they valuable to an audience only when attached to plot? A number of productions around town right now raise similar questions, if unwittingly, since they’re helmed not by visionaries but by directors whose job it…

Disco’s revenge plot may be nearly complete (Justin Timberlake’s unctuous “Can’t Stop the Feeling” aside). The honeyed vocalists, street flautists, and psych guitarists of 79.5, who play Bowery Ballroom on July 30, roused the sound with a 2012 release, “Boogie”/“OOO,” which has been making the rounds ever since. The septet rocks and glints like New York Harbor’s Clipper City schooner—they’ve spent the summer performing from the boat’s deck, on sold-out night cruises from Battery Park to Red Hook. A throbbing new 45, “Terrorize My Heart,” lands on Sept. 16. NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. The Bells: A Daylong Celebration of Lou Reed Lou Reed died nearly three years ago, of liver cancer. Afterward,…

Animation Block Party The largest animation festival on the East Coast returns for its thirteenth year. In 2003—pre-YouTube— the event’s founder, Casey Safron, sought to create a space for students, amateurs, and enthusiasts to screen and share work, eventually hosting a small but official program near a friend’s East Williamsburg coffee shop. Soon, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Rooftop Films offered support, and the event grew—it now averages around five thousand attendees. This year’s four-day festival features more than a hundred animated shorts, with styles ranging from C.G.I. to stop-motion. Past highlights have included pudgy farm animals nervously crossing a wooden bridge and rusty military jets dogfighting to the last shell; kid-friendly blocks are scheduled, but the form’s boundless possibilities are part of its appeal. (BAM Cinématek, 30…

Airport style used to mean khakis and money belts, rolling luggage and T-shirts commemorating mission trips. Then came the rise of US Weekly and its “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” pages, featuring celebrities at security checkpoints and baggage carrousels, and, somewhere along the way, IND and MAN became as full of cashmere sweatsuits as LAX, because what we really want to believe is “Us—We’re Just Like Stars!” Moving sidewalks are now catwalks. Boarding lounges are places to be discovered. For interiors, with no weather, there are a lot of dark glasses and widebrimmed hats. Recently, Paris Aéroport—the authority that manages the city’s airports— decided to pay tribute to the fashion sense of the sixty-six million people who transit through Charles de Gaulle each year. They hired a streetstyle photographer and turned…

That last summer when everything was almost always terrible we waded into the bay one late afternoon as the tide had almost finished pulling all the way out and sat down in the waist-deep water, I floating on his lap facing him, my legs floating around him, and we quietly coupled, and stayed, loosely joined like that, not moving, but being moved by the softly sucking and lapping water, as the pulling out reached its limit and the tide began to flow slowly back again. Some children ran after each other, squealing in the shallows, near but not too near. I rested my chin on his shoulder looking toward the shore. As he must have been looking over my shoulder, to where the water deepened and the small boats tugged…

Won’t do that thing we do and assume the fox is grinning. Watch him break from a last snack and saunter into limelight. My thought’s as flat as his, for anytime he sets off for his needs in the night city I and people like me stop and think the same: you didn’t use to act so frigging brazen. Is it something we’re doing wrong or nothing touching us at all? You walk a curb your kindred came to grief on, not a toss gets given, were you not shit-scared of light one time? Did you not need a zigzag ingenuity to make the chickens walk your walk? We’ve literature that says you once did shy, did plausible, sweet, biddable, polite, but look at you by floodlight— nothing you have…

Say that you have two children, or maybe three, and that they fight for what’s theirs. The contested objects are many: cake, Lego sets, the right to various household electronics or to name the family dog. And the children aren’t pleasant about it: they torment each other, and engage in guerrilla tactics distinguishable from those of ruthless insurgents only by their disregard for stealth, which might at least allow you, the parent, a little peace and quiet. Each of them has a story about fairness and what he deserves. But how much do they really want to win? What would they give up to get dominion over the remote control? It is hard to know anything about these small belligerents other than what they are willing to pay, Paul Raeburn…

Not Pretty Enough, by Gerri Hirshey (Sarah Crichton Books). This engrossing biography of Helen Gurley Brown, the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan, who shook up the sixties with her book “Sex and the Single Girl,” is written in a style worthy of its subject: intimate, charming, and slightly unhinged. “Pussycats, she’d been there,” Hirshey writes, explaining her subject’s appeal to the millions of women who sought her advice on careers, fashion, and sex. Been there she had: from an impoverished upbringing during the Depression through an early career as a secretary—she was often expected to sleep with her bosses, and sometimes did—and landing the top job at Cosmo, Brown knew all the dilemmas facing the new American working woman. Not all of her ideas have weathered the decades intact, but…