Innholdsfortegnelse for August 22, 2016 i The New Yorker

Every four years, the Smithsonian dispatches a small expedition to the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, to collect artifacts for the National Museum of American History. Their finds—a mixture of objects both homemade and mass-produced, profane and devotional—are sent to Washington, where the best join a trove of a hundred and thirty thousand political relics, including, for example, Abraham Lincoln’s top hat. One afternoon, less than two weeks after the Conventions had ended, the museum permitted a visitor to enter the archives of the Division of Political History— a windowless industrial space, with pipes overhead—on the condition that its precise location within the facility remain unpublished, to avoid tempting thieves. The new artifacts were still being bagged in acid-free plastic and tagged with field notes. They were temporarily arrayed—Democratic material…

There’s no shortage of cinematic tropes when it comes to the teenage boy, be he the geek with a master plan, the evil prepster, the hapless stoner, the alpha jock, or the singing, snapping gang member. “Little Men,” a new film, by Ira Sachs, about best friends torn apart by parents feuding over Brooklyn real estate, would like to add another type to the canon: sensitive, wise, emotionally mature, and fiercely loyal. You know, as teen boys are. The other day, Sachs’s two young stars, Michael Barbieri (fourteen) and Theo Taplitz (thirteen), met up at the Brooklyn Museum, where the movie’s final scenes, involving school field trips, had been shot a year earlier. Taplitz, who has the pallor and vibe of a Victorian-novel protagonist, had just come from Cape Cod.…

On a Saturday morning in April of 2014, Nenad Macesic, a thirtyone- year-old doctor-in-training, received an urgent phone call from the emergency room of Austin Hospital, just outside Melbourne, Australia. Lean and taut, with a swirl of dark hair, Macesic resembles an aspiring urban d.j. In fact, by night he spun electronica in clubs around Melbourne; by day he was a fellow in infectious diseases. The call concerned a woman in her late forties who had come to the hospital complaining of a fever, headaches, and an unusual rash. Travel-related illnesses may be an Australian obsession: foreign contagions brought into the country can spread like, well, rabbits. The woman in the E.R. had just returned from the Cook Islands, an isolated spray of atolls in the South Pacific, where she…

ERROL HEALY SHOULD have retired by now from his marine-insurance business, but it was such a going concern it was hard to shut it down, and he worried about what he’d do in retirement. He was widowed and his only child, Angela, had gone up to Gainesville, graduated, and moved to Washington with her husband, Mike, a marketing consultant at the Seattle Art Museum. Every year, Errol travelled to Seattle to see Angela and Mike and, of late, his granddaughter, Siobhan. But Key West was always and intensely home, and Angela was amused to see his rush to get back. She missed Key West not at all, despite the fact that she had been elected Miss Conch in eleventh grade at Key West High. She’d been a conventional sorority girl…

There is a theological parable devised by the impeccably named English philosopher John Wisdom but often adapted and updated by others. The version I first heard, years ago, went something like this: Two travellers return to a once neglected garden and find it miraculously restored to life. One of the travellers suggests that this is proof that a gardener has been tending the patch. The other disagrees, and they decide to set up watch. No one appears, which prompts the believer to suggest that an invisible gardener must be doing the work. Various monitors— bloodhounds, motion detectors, night-vision cameras—are put in place, but none register the appearance of the ghostly gardener. Finally, the skeptic asks the believer what meaningful difference there can be between a gardener who cannot be detected…

THE BRITISH COMPOSER Thomas Adès is as compelling as any contemporary practitioner of his art because he is, first and foremost, a virtuoso of extremes. He is a refined technician, with a skilled performer’s reverence for tradition, yet he has no fear of unleashing brutal sounds on the edge of chaos. Although he makes liberal use of tonal harmony—including opulent, late- Romantic gestures, for which mainstream audiences profess to be starved—he subjects that material to shattering pressure. He conjures both the vanished past and the ephemeral present: waltzes in a crumbling ballroom, pounding beats in a pop arena. Like Alban Berg, the twentieth-century master whom he most resembles, he pushes ambiguity to the point of explosive crisis. Adès, who is now forty-five, has, not surprisingly, proved to be a potent…

SYRIA’S ASSAULT ON MEDICS Ben Taub’s article vividly depicts the unconscionable violence that the Syrian regime is inflicting on those who provide medical services in conflict areas (“The Shadow Doctors,” June 27th). Indeed, since his article appeared, the regime has stepped up violent assaults on hospitals in Aleppo and elsewhere, including, recently, a pediatric hospital. I learned about these experiences through interviews with more than two dozen doctors supported by the Syrian American Medical Society. They spoke about the terror of having to perform surgery during a bombing, the need to conceal their work if detained by security forces, for fear of execution, and the appalling risks that the sick and the injured face when seeking aid. The doctors could understand the regime’s twisted motives for targeting them. What…

Why waste away in Margaritaville when you can explore the delightful terrain of Margarita Island? This beachy cantina, tucked along Coney Island’s neon midway, comprises a tiki-thatched archipelago of snack stands in the magnificent shadow of the Wonder Wheel. Start by ordering a whole watermelon from the Original Coconut Kookoo—its insides blitzed to pink cream—then carry the sloshing globe a few paces to one of the Island’s two bars to have it spiked with rum. You might grab some nachos and stop to catch a zombie flick at the 5-D cinema, where you’ll be doused with water when blood sprays onscreen. Like a true sea-locked landmass, Margarita Island operates by its own mysterious economy. Thursday evenings progress in loose bills: draft beers are a buck at six, and increase by…

On a recent weekend, Nzingha Prescod was practicing at the Fencers Club, in Manhattan, on West Twenty-eighth Street. She moved lightly, jabbing her foil in the direction of her coach, Buckie Leach. “When she’s patient, she’s amazing,” Leach said. Prescod was headed to the Olympics the following week. The first American woman to earn a gold medal in foil at the Grand Prix, in 2013, and the first African-American woman to win an individual medal at the Senior World Championships, in 2015, she was hoping to repeat her success in Rio. “Nice and easy,” Leach said as they tapped foils. “I think I tend to go too fast most of the time,” Prescod said. Prescod is petite and compact, and has a curly bob with blond tips. She grew up…

The modern Presidential campaign may be the world’s most sophisticated pop-up operation, a billion-dollar multilayered organization that, if it hopes to succeed, must be as technologically sophisticated and responsive as any Silicon Valley unicorn. A campaign includes armies of social-media worker bees, data crunchers, messaging experts, policy advisers, media surrogates, fund-raising chiefs, opporesearch teams, volunteers, and, above all, coolheaded managers, who can formulate a coherent position on Chinese trade policy and a plan for how to get out the vote in Hillsborough County in a lightning storm. Then, there is the Presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, which has followed this formula about as closely as the candidate follows the South Beach Diet. The Republican Party establishment has, if reluctantly, helped sketch the outlines of an organization. The campaign raised…

IN 1989, a twenty-nine-year-old African-American civil-rights lawyer named Bryan Stevenson moved to Montgomery, Alabama, and founded an organization that became the Equal Justice Initiative. It guarantees legal representation to every inmate on the state’s death row. Over the decades, it has handled hundreds of capital cases, and has spared a hundred and twenty-five offenders from execution. In recent years, Stevenson has also argued the appeals of prisoners around the country who were convicted of various crimes as juveniles and given long sentences or life in prison. One was Joe Sullivan, who was thirteen when he was charged in a sexual battery in Pensacola, Florida. Sullivan’s original trial, in 1989, established that he and two older boys had burglarized the home of a woman named Lena Bruner on a morning when…

1 I am lying in a hammock in Sweden,blue sky beyond a canopy of cherry.I am resting in a socialistic Eden,beside long meadows, tall oaks for a king,sand paths that wander to sweet water, a ringof road that goes back to the ferry.This haze and heat might have me half asleep.The cherry globes bob slightly in the breeze.The shapes or shades of deer sprint round and leapthrough ancient lichened branches; toward the eveningthey loudly bell, a sound like awful grievingabout the island’s groves and leas. 2 I am lying in a hammock in Sweden,I might have had a beer or two—beer madejust down the road from here, and brewed to sweetensuch summer days and free this people fromtheir goodness, their incorruptible aplomb,for a few hours dreamily swayed.The label says one…

Bobby Kennedy, by Larry Tye (Random House). Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, during a Presidential campaign premised on ending the war in Vietnam and stepping up the War on Poverty. Yet, as this provocative biography reveals, he was not always a champion of peace and social justice. The son of one of America’s last robber barons, he launched his political career as a protégé of the ultraconservative senator Joseph McCarthy; he went on to clash with the Teamsters, plot the sabotage of farmland in Cuba, and authorize a wiretap on Martin Luther King, Jr. Tye, drawing on fifty-eight boxes of private papers that the Kennedy family had kept under lock for four decades, expertly traces the arc of his subject’s metamorphosis “from cold warrior to liberal icon.” We Are…

The final weeks of summer are packed with worthy options for outdoor moviegoing. Socrates Sculpture Park, in Queens, will show “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (Aug. 17), Werner Herzog’s fierce tale of a quest for El Dorado. Rooftop Films, in Brooklyn, presents Kris Avedisian’s independent drama “Donald Cried” (Aug. 19), and St. Mary’s Park, in the Bronx, features Vincente Minnelli’s 1943 musical “Cabin in the Sky” (Aug. 20). Coney Island Flicks on the Beach concludes its season on Aug. 22 with Ryan Coogler’s “Creed.” CLASSICAL MUSIC CONCERTS IN TOWN Mostly Mozart Aug. 16-17 at 7:30: Joshua Bell, an effortlessly stylish purveyor of standard repertory, returns to the festival, playing Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4 in D Major on a program with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra which also features…

Never Sleep Alone The travelling performance troupe Spiegelworld hosts this interactive show, which is part theatre, standup comedy, and group therapy session. Dr. Alex Schiller, an author and sexual evangelist, brings her “Never Sleep Alone” presentation to New York after closing out a threenight stand at Caesars Palace, in Las Vegas, this February, a rich site for her offbeat yet on-thenose discussions of modern courtship: “I found it interesting that people who have no fear of dancing topless, juggling chainsaws, or dealing with hundreds of a-holes a day were afraid to hold hands with a stranger,” she said recently. Schiller’s show calls upon attendees to loosen their inhibitions, with the audience divided into Voyeurs and Singles—only the Singles are asked to make out with a neighboring patron, though everyone…

A man sat in a chair in the café on the first floor of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center, for almost seven hours and listened to sixteen dancers and former dancers read “Blood Memory,” the autobiography of Martha Graham, one reader after the other, all the way through from beginning to end. Graham wrote that a dancer is “an athlete of God” and quoted Lincoln Kirstein’s remark that dance is “glorified human behavior.” Sitting with a glorified seatedness that came from deep within himself, the man, who can’t dance a lick, felt grateful just to be in the bleachers. “There is a fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep.” Though Graham wrote that early in her book, the man…

A PREDATOR WAS stalking London. He would board a crowded bus at rush hour, carrying a Metro newspaper, and sit next to a young woman. Opening the newspaper to form a curtain, he would reach over and grope her. The man first struck one summer afternoon in 2014, on the No. 253 bus in North London, grabbing the crotch of a fifteen-year-old girl. She fled the bus and called the police, but by that time he had disappeared. A few months later, in October, he assaulted a twenty-one-yearold woman on the upper level of a double-decker as it approached the White Hart Lane stadium. She escaped to the lower level, but he followed her, and he continued to pursue her even after she got off the bus. She flagged down…

The crate arrived, via overland express, one spring evening in 1849. Three feet long, two feet wide, and two and a half feet deep, it had been packed the previous morning in Richmond, Virginia, then carried by horse cart to the local office of the Adams Express Company. From there, it was taken to the railroad depot, loaded onto a train, and, on reaching the Potomac, transferred to a steamer, where, despite its label—THIS SIDE UP WITH CARE—it was placed upside down until a tired passenger tipped it over and used it as a seat. After arriving in the nation’s capital, it was loaded onto a wagon, dumped out at the train station, loaded onto a luggage car, sent on to Philadelphia, unloaded onto another wagon, and, finally, delivered to…