Innholdsfortegnelse for February 18-25, 2019 i The New Yorker

Adam Entous (“Deception, Inc.,” p. 44) is a staff writer. Previously, he was a reporter for the Washington Post, where his team won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Donald Antrim (“Everywhere and Nowhere,” p. 68) has written several books. Most recently, he published “The Emerald Light in the Air,” a collection of stories. Patricia Marx (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 37; Sketchbook, p. 56) is a staff writer. Her new book,“Why Don’t You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It?: A Mother’s Suggestions,” illustrated by Roz Chast, will be published in April. Michael Schulman (“A Living Document,” p. 38) has contributed to the magazine since 2006. He is the author of “Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep.” Joan Acocella (Dancing, p. 82) became the magazine’s dance critic…

Barca 44 Navy Pier Ct., Staten Island It’s tempting to underestimate Staten Island, a borough whose main attractions include a public park built on a landfill called Fresh Kills. The other night at Barca, a new Italian seafood restaurant in Stapleton, a neighborhood on the island’s northeastern coast, a server couldn’t resist delivering a self-deprecating, faux-pretentious riff on the local water: “Do you want frizzante, or Staten Island tap? Staten Island tap, it’s a little volcanic!” The water may not have been volcanic, but the wine was. On another evening, I asked for a recommendation—a crisp, mineraly red that would pair well with fish. One of Barca’s owners, Vic Rallo, wearing a camo-print trucker hat, launched into a detailed explanation of the 2017 Tenuta delle Terre Nere Etna Rosso, which…

SPACE ROCK On a recent Friday, the musician Sean Lennon, who is forty-three, sat on a striped couch at a studio in downtown Manhattan, in a building where he rehearses, and where his parents, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, once lived and worked. Lennon has a dark beard, long hair, and glasses, and he wore a British military-style hat with a spigotlike protrusion.“I think it’s some kind of dowsing device,” he said, looking pleased. “When I’m doing something Delirium-oriented, I tend to put on a captain’s hat, or Navy attire.” In the past couple of decades, Lennon, a versatile performer and skilled guitarist, has released two solo albums, scored films, started a record label, acted, and appeared on albums by, among others, Marianne Faithfull and Lady Gaga. His prog-rock duo,…

O ne evening in 2016, a twenty-five-year-old community-college student named Alex Gutiérrez was waiting tables at La Piazza Ristorante Italiano, an upscale restaurant in Tulare, in California’s San Joaquin Valley.Gutiérrez spotted Yorai Benzeevi, a physician who ran the local hospital, sitting at a table with Parmod Kumar, a member of the hospital board. They seemed to be in a celebratory mood, drinking expensive bottles of wine and laughing. This irritated Gutiérrez. The kingpins, he thought with disgust. Gutiérrez had recently joined a Tulare organization called Citizens for Hospital Accountability. The group had accused Benzeevi of enriching himself at the expense of the cash-strapped hospital, which subsequently declared bankruptcy. (Benzeevi’s lawyers said that all his actions were authorized by his company’s contract with the facility.) According to court documents, the contract…

Rachael Van Horn, fifty-six years old, lives by herself in a two-bedroom house at the southeast corner of Rosston, Oklahoma. Although the town is on a two-lane highway that runs east and west across the Panhandle, it offers no services to travellers. Prairie surrounds it. Rachael’s fenced-in yard adjoins twenty acres of pasture she owns, in which she keeps four cattle: Raffi, a black-and-white steer with only one horn, and three Black Angus two-year-olds. Phoenix is the Angus bull, and Freya and Cow Polly are the cows. The steer and the three Angus may be the happiest livestock in Oklahoma. When Rachael comes to the fence, they run across the pasture and contend jealously to be next to her. At the time of the fires that burned thousands of square…

I can’t tell you my name. Or the name of the rural village where this story took place. My father is a feared and respected man there, and I do not want to bring shame upon him. He was born on those fertile plains but he made his career in the city, where he became an important man who wears suits and drives a big car. In my sixteenth summer, he sent me to “that hole” to learn the hard life of the countryside, to strengthen my soul and my muscles. “I don’t want you to be like those idle boys who wander our streets,” he told me. “There you will learn how to live.” My memories of that summer are hazy. All the days blurred into one, and I…

Maid, by Stephanie Land (Hachette). The author recalls a life lived on the brink, where a petty mishap can mean destitution. As a domestic cleaner “paid near minimum wage to hand-scrub shit,” she assesses empty homes with a detective’s eye: one “always seemed to be set up for a dinner party,” but dusty furniture suggests that “nights with guests and fancy meals rarely happened.” Sharing a studio apartment (and, in the winter, a bed) with her young daughter, she maintains a life of “careful imbalance” through ceaseless labor and an array of government assistance programs. The particulars of Land’s struggle are sobering, but it’s the impression of precariousness that is most memorable: “I knew that at any moment, a breeze could come and blow me away.” All the Lives…

SEPARATE BUT EQUAL Louis Menand, in his piece on the history of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of segregation laws, reminds us that “segregation began in the North, where it was the product not of the practice of slavery but of Negrophobia” (“In the Eye of the Law,” February 4th). It’s important to note that racial separation (i.e., segregation) was embedded and practiced in states above the Mason-Dixon Line long before the Plessy decision. As early as the eighteen-forties, black and white abolitionists in Boston had waged successful campaigns against anti-miscegenation laws and racial separation in public schools. They were met with considerable resistance. In Roberts v. the City of Boston, in 1850, Judge Lemuel Shaw upheld separation in schools, arguing that the…

SEEKING HEAT Among the least shocking Trump-family revelations of the past year: the New York City Council launched an investigation into Kushner Companies, the firm once run by the President’s son-in-law, for what one council member described as “the weaponization of construction.”Step 1: Buy a building full of rent-stabilized tenants who are paying below market rate. Step 2: Bang and drill until they leave. “The Kushners are just one of many, many predatory landlords,”Noelle Francois said recently. It was the Monday after a cold snap, and Francois, who is thirty-one and lives in Bushwick, was in a brick apartment building in East Flatbush, protecting people against another weapon of bad landlords: turning down the heat. City law requires apartments to be at least sixty-eight degrees during the day and sixty-two…

No one likes to be lectured about how to watch their entertainment, but if you’ll please allow me to do just that: Roma is best experienced on the big screen. —Kyle McGovern, Mic.com. I rarely get evangelical about viewing modalities, but if there’s any way to do so where you live, please get yourself to a real theater to see this. —Dana Stevens, Slate. If you haven’t seen “Aröma”in a movie theatre yet, you must.Trust me.Have I ever steered you wrong? O.K., that one time. But then didn’t I find you a good divorce lawyer? Yes, I am aware that you can stream it on CineSteal, but, believe me, you want—need—to experience this movie on the big screen. Bigger than that. Louder. Whatever you do, I insist that you go…

Most of the rooms muted by cold, and the furniture there with its human chill under vast drapes of plastic for the season— Because eventually we are an austerity, walking room to room enamored and saddened, all the crazy variations of bed and table, clocks, books on a shelf, foreign harbors etched some yesterday, framed for a wall. And the effrontery of windows assuming how lovely out, a certainty of lawn and woods, distance on a road, voices that in summer drift up and move away. Desire. That continues and continuing is the part loved just as there is emptiness with an occasion in it, clothes to remove before you ease into a bath. Branches and branches scraping is winter. And after midnight, near morning when I stepped out, the…

Inhabitant of earth for fortysomething yearsI once found myself in a peaceful country. I watch neighbors opentheir phones to watcha cop demanding a man’s driver’s license. When the man reaches for his wallet, the copshoots. Into the car window. Shoots.It is a peaceful country.We pocket our phones and go.To the dentist,to pick up the kids from school,to buy shampooand basil.Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavementfor hours.We see in his open mouththe nakednessof the whole nation.We watch. Watchothers watch.The body of a boy lies on the pavement exactly like the body of a boy—It is a peaceful country.And it clips our citizens’ bodieseffortlessly, the way the President’s wife trims her toenails.All of usstill have to do the hard work of dentist appointments,of…

Probably the most cherished old tale about George Balanchine is the one in which the mother of a girl who had auditioned for him comes up to him later and asks whether her daughter will become a professional dancer.“La danse, Madame,” Balanchine replied, “c’est une question morale.” You could say that he dodged the question, but many of his admirers would say that he answered it directly and accurately. Dance, by virtue of its energy and its precision—and, often, its mounting intensity—brings us close to what many people in the world once looked for, and many still do, in religion. Music operates in the same way, of course, but most dance includes music, and it has something else as well: the body. On the dance stage, human beings place themselves…

All hip-hop swagger and personified funk, Anderson. Paak makes music that radiates with farsighted imagination, unfettered humor, and an astute appreciation for craft. His voice, a gravelly, soul-filled rasp, allows him to transform from quick-witted rapper into smooth-talking Lothario with ease. California cool permeates his albums, but when he and his band, the Free Nationals—.Paak is the lead vocalist and the drummer—take the stage at Hammerstein Ballroom, on Feb. 22, expect a kinetic, one-of-a-kind jam session. THE THEATRE The American Tradition 13th Street Repertory The title of Ray Yamanouchi’s new play could refer to its subject, slavery, or to this country’s skill at wrestling entertainment out of unlikely topics—in this case, the tale of two nineteenth-century runaways trying to make their way north. The light-skinned Eleanor (Sydney Cole Alexander)…

CODE RED Several years ago, when Helen Yenser was a senior at Oakwood School, a private K-12 school in North Hollywood, she stood up in front of her class and talked about menstruating. “After I gave my presentation, there was this pause,”she said.“The coolest guy in my grade was, like,‘Did she just talk about her period? That’s the coolest thing.’” The other week, Yenser was back on campus to attend the weekly meeting of the Pad Project, a school club she launched after learning, on a field trip to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, about the struggles of girls and women in countries with deep taboos around menstruation. In 2016, the club raised money to send a low-tech pad-making machine—comprising a grinder, a block, a press,…

HELLO, GORGEOUS The first time the actor Richard E. Grant met Barbra Streisand, they spoke for twenty-two minutes. He recently recalled the encounter, which took place at a house party somewhere “above Sunset Boulevard,”in 1991.She was wearing a black lace dress and a floppy hat. He had arrived in a “cheap rental car.” In order to reach Streisand, Grant had to shove past Winona Ryder, then a young starlet who was busy “blowing smoke up my fundament,”he said. Grant asked Streisand for permission to shake her hand. (“I did touch flesh!”) Streisand asked if he was stoned. He was not stoned. Grant—who is now sixty-one, with a tuft of silver hair and a chiselled, craggy face that he admits can look “sepulchral”—doesn’t drink or use drugs. (His father was an…

When Heidi Schreck was fourteen, her mother cajoled her into entering the American Legion Oratorical Contest, in which high-school students give speeches on the U.S. Constitution for prize money. This was 1986, in Wenatchee, Washington, a conservative-leaning town dotted with orchards, which calls itself the Apple Capital of the World. Schreck was, as she put it recently, an outgoing nerd—into ballet, self-tanning, Duran Duran, and boys. Her father, Larry, who voted Republican, was a beloved history teacher at her school. Her mother, Sherry, who voted Democratic, was a debate coach and drama teacher at a different school and ran a children’s-theatre group called the Short Shakespeareans, of which Heidi was the leading lady. “Between the ages of six and twelve, I played most of the great Shakespearean comedic heroines,” she…

The early-music movement has changed not only how musicians play—tuning, timbre, technique, style—but also what they play. A couple of generations ago, programs of Baroque music were dominated by such starry names as Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Handel, and Bach. It became clear, though, that an auteur theory of the Baroque, one that limits the repertory to a few masters, suppressed vast quantities of excellent music. One sign of this emerging view was the suggestion, from musicologists, that “Pur ti miro,” one of Monteverdi’s most beloved arias, might actually have been written by Francesco Sacrati or by Benedetto Ferrari. The obvious next question was which other works of theirs are worth hearing. In recent years, the Baroque repertory has undergone a dizzying democratization, as two midwinter concerts in New York made plain.…