Innholdsfortegnelse for February 4, 2019 i The New Yorker

Sheelah Kolhatkar (“The Whistle-Blowers,” p. 30), a staff writer, is the author of “Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street.” Louis Menand (“In the Eye of the Law,” p. 18) has been a staff writer since 2001. He teaches at Harvard. Emma Cline (Fiction, p. 50) is the author of “The Girls.” She received the Plimpton Prize, from The Paris Review, in 2014. Tom Gauld (Cover) has written and illustrated several books, including “The Snooty Bookshop: Fifty Literary Postcards,” a collection of cartoons. Lindsay Gellman (The Talk of the Town, p. 15) is a reporter who has been published in the Times, the Wall Street Jour nal, and The Atlantic. Peter Schjeldahl (The Art World, p. 64),…

In this era of “hyper-gentrification,” New Yorkers have a fraught relationship with Starbucks. In Brooklyn, Williamsburg residents greeted the company’s arrival, in 2014, with sneers. (“It’s only a chain store with bad coffee,” the performance artist Reverend Billy said.) Two years ago, East Villagers held a rally protesting the company’s new location on St. Mark’s Place. Signs read “Not another Starbucks!” Recently, a different sort of petition has been circulating online. Titled “Keep Our Very Special Starbucks Open,” the petition, which has garnered more than four hundred and fifty signatures, implores the company not to abandon a struggling store at the corner of Seventysixth Street and Columbus Avenue. Starbucks has fourteen other Upper West Side locations, but the petition argues that this one is different. It challenges the company’s C.E.O.,…

On the morning of September 17, 2009, Darren Sewell left his office at Freedom Health, the Tampa health-insurance company where he was a vice-president, and climbed into his Chevy Tahoe. He drove to Sonny’s BBQ, a restaurant nearby, where he picked up barbecue sauce for the sandwich he had brought for lunch. Then he continued on until he reached a drab stretch of road lined with gas stations and scraggly palm trees, where he pulled into a parking lot and waited, as discreetly as possible, to meet his F.B.I. handler. Sewell, a physician, was thirty-four years old, six feet four inches tall, and broad-shouldered, with an earnest smile and barely perceptible dimples. He was born with one eye slightly crossed, and it still drifted when he was tired or feeling…

Linda was inside, on her phone—to who, this early? From the h o t tub, John watched her pace in her robe and an old swimsuit in a faded tropical print that probably belonged to one of the girls. It was nice to drift a little in the water, to glide to the other side of the tub, holding his coffee above the waterline, the jets churning away. The fig tree was bare, had been for a month now, but the persimmon trees were full. The kids should bake cookies when they get here, he thought, persimmon cookies. Wasn’t that what Linda used to make, when the kids were little? Or what else—jam, maybe? All this fruit going to waste, it was disgusting. He’d get the yard guy to pick…

Mouthful of Birds, by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Riverhead). Set in a dystopian near future, these surreal short stories address contemporary concerns—hunger, fertility, financial and sexual independence. In the title story, a young girl adopts a diet of live birds, and her dumbstruck parents struggle to reconcile their disgust with their roles as providers. Men are often the perpetrators of harm, through ambivalence or willful violence, and yo u n g, primarily female characters the victims. Varying in impact, the stories cumulatively summon a world in which the civilized is constantly receding and to be a human is to live in a state of desperation. Love in the New Millennium, by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (Yale). In this…

“Russian Doll,” on Netflix, opens with a fun party and a tragic death. Nadia Volvokov (a spectacular Natasha Lyonne, wearing so much kohl eyeliner that it’s almost a special effect) is washing her hands in the bathroom at her thirty-sixth-birthday party. It’s a dirtycool bohemian bash thrown by her friends Maxine and Lizzy, whose loft, in Alphabet City, used to be a yeshiva. In t h e kitchen, Maxine offers Nadia a joint: “It’s laced with cocaine, like the Israelis do it!” For the hell of it, Nadia picks up a stranger and stops by a bodega—and then, as she’s rescuing her lost cat on the street, she gets hit by a cab. She dies there, sprawled on the pavement. Then Nadia’s back in the bathroom, washing her hands. Again…

NEWSWORTHY Jill Lepore, in her insightful piece on journalism in the age of social media and fake news, writes, “Speculation is that Buzz-Feed is trying to dump” BuzzFeed Ne ws (“Hard News,” January 28th). This speculation is incorrect. Whatever challenges we face in this difficult environment for digital media, BuzzFeed News remains a key part of the future of BuzzFeed. Its investigative reporting has freed men from prison, changed the way sexual assault is handled in Congress, given the public incredible insight into the Mueller investigation, and detailed Donald Trump’s business dealings in Russia during the 2016 campaign. I’m excited to see what our journalists do in the years to come. Jonah PerettiFounder and C.E.O., BuzzFeedNew York City Lepore gets a lot right about the many challenges, and a…

According to lore, modern American graffiti began in the late nineteensixties, when a Philadelphia teen-ager named Darryl McCray started spraypainting his nickname, Cornbread, around the city, hoping to catch the attention of his crush. In New York, bands of urchinartisans took up Cornbread’s style—stick letters, tags—and made it an art form. Graffiti now adorns the walls of museums from Brooklyn to Berlin, and sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auctions. What became of the kids? On a recent, drizzly Sunday, about half a dozen of the old masters gathered in the lobby of the former P.S. 62 building, on Grand Street, a hulking brick structure now called the Seward Park Campus. The men, who are in their forties, fifties, and sixties, looked like hip dads, which many of…

My six-year-old said “I don’t know time.” She already knows it’s unknowable. Let it be always a stranger she walks wide around. I fantasize about outer space as if I have some relation to it besides being an animal in its zoo. No visitors. No matter how far I travel on earth I wind up sitting in rooms. Wind up running all over towns and streets the same. Then get hungry as anywhere, again. Going anyplace, I think: I never want to go home and I can’t wait to be home. All travelling’s a way to imagine having a home to leave or return to. The shame of never leaving home. The anguish of no home. Changing house keys on the unchanged ring. The ring is the home, the thing…

One more butterfly in the butterfly housewill count as overcrowding. Sun all morningand the heaviness of piped heatdraws hundreds to the surface. They spend their daysbeing exquisite in a history without wars. We are able,briefly, to forget the scaly intent,the cold-skinned slither a hundred yards awayin the tropical ravine. Hold up your armand with luck you will emerge into the garden,badged and sleeved with butterflies,a thousand bright sails opening around you.…

Saturn’s return, the astrological paradigm shift said to usher in one’s thirties, was the inspiration for NAO’s latest album. The English R. & B. artist—a vibrant spark within the celebrated legacy of British soul music—depicts her psychic transformation in vulnerable confessionals and jubilant tales of romance. Her cosmic voice glides across songs that traverse a spectrum of simmering slow jams and danceable electro-grooves. She performs at Terminal 5 on Feb. 2, with support from another golden-voiced singer, Xavier Omär. ART Richard Deacon Marian Goodman UPTOWN The British sculptor, who won the Turner Prize in 1987, fabricates disconcerting objects of variable size (from small to monumental) and unpredictable design (airily looping, glumly massy) from materials that have included wood, steel, iron, ceramic, plastic, linoleum, and leather. Now he adds digital…

As the government shutdown entered its fourth week, passengers at John F. Kennedy International Airport took note of hip-hop music playing on the sound system in Terminal 5: Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode” (“Cut the lights/paid the price”), Kanye West’s “Lift Yourself” (“Po o p, poop/Scoop-diddy-whoop”). Could i t be an act of protest by airport security agents, who were working unpaid? “TSA has officially stopped giving a fuck,” one passenger tweeted. “It wasn’t us,” a T.S.A. officer named Thomas Schoregge said last week. (The culprit turned out to be a music service called Rockbot, which lets passengers select the beats.) It was a damp afternoon, and Schoregge was bagging groceries in the back of a U-Haul truck, near the airport employees’ parking lot. Schoregge is a local leader with the…

So, like, a really long time ago (1983), this movie “Valley Girl” came out, and people, like, everywhere got the idea that girls from the Valley (the San Fernando Valley, a two-hundred-and-sixty-square-mile swath of Los Angeles County that is home to 1.75 million people) turn every sentence into a question? And only wear pink? And totally, like, live at the mall? As if! The other day, nine f e m a l e denizens of the Valley met for brunch at Myke’s Cafe, a Mexican diner in Pacoima. They’d been brought together by “Valley Girl Redefined,” an a r t exhibition currently showing at the Brand Library & Art Center, in Glendale. Works on display include a photograph of a Rubenesque woman in repose by a brick wall, titled “Together…

Three days after Christmas, in a part of northeast Nashville that many locals describe as “dicey,” a Ford Explorer crashed through the front of a discount-tobacco shop at one end of a strip mall. Police later called the incident an attempted burglary. The vehicle, which had been reported stolen, was propelled by a brick weighting the accelerator. The store was empty—it was four-thirty in the morning. The authorities arrived to find the Ford abandoned and the shop on fire. Two doors down, just past Jennifer Nails, Tyreese Lawless had come to work early, as usual, to clean the fryers at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack. After hearing a boom, he got out of there, in c ase the flames reached the restaurant. Lawless began calling colleagues—to them, and to generations of…

In May, 2017, a twenty-two-year-old Dutch entrepreneur named Boyan Slat unveiled a contraption that he believed would rid the oceans of plastic. In a former factory in Utrecht, a crowd of twelve hundred people stood before a raised stage. The setting was futuristic and hip. A round screen set in the stage floor displayed 3-D images of Earth; behind Slat, another screen charted the rapid accumulation of plastic in the Pacific Ocean since the nineteen-fifties. Slat is pale and slight, and has long brown hair that resembles Patti Smith’s in the “Horses” era. He was dressed in a gray blazer, a black button-down, black slacks, and skateboarding sneakers, which he wears every day, although he doesn’t skateboard. Onstage, he presented plastic artifacts that he had collected from the Pacific during…

In the summer of 2014, the writer Valeria Luiselli, born in Mexico but resident in New York and awaiting the arrival of her green card, went on a road trip. A privileged immigrant, on the lintel of legality, she set out with her husband and their two children for Cochise County, Arizona, near the border with Mexico. While driving through Oklahoma, the family began to hear news of a crisis: unaccompanied children, most fleeing violence and intimidation in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, were turning up at the border in sizable numbers—eighty thousand between October, 2013, and June, 2014. The majority of them had made unspeakably dangerous journeys, riding on a freight train known as La Bestia. Desperate to reach relatives in the United States, they would first have to…

The Broadway première of Sam Shepard’s acclaimed 1980 play, “True West,” in 2000, was astonishing for several reasons. For one, by 2000, Shepard—who had brought his cowboy swagger, muscular language, and rockand-roll rhythms to New York’s downtown theatre scene in the sixties and seventies—was a prolific, Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright and a prolific, Oscarnominated film actor. Yet the anguished, funny “True West,” which the actor Ethan Hawke recently called Shepard’s “cardcarrying audience-pleaser,” had n e v e r been staged on Broadway. Then, there were the production’s virtuosic performances. Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternated in the roles of Austin, a screenwriter, and Lee, his ne’erdo-well brother—a device that could have felt like a gimmick but, instead, enriched the play’s exploration of duality. (A 1982 revival, at the Steppenwolf,…