Innholdsfortegnelse for March 18, 2019 i The New Yorker

The fashion designer Dalia MacPhee has a slogan for her line of red-carpet-ready dresses: “Changing the world one garment at a time.” Actresses such as Scarlett Johansson and Sandra Bullock have done their part by wearing her creations. But lately Mac-Phee has been working with a different type of client. After the recent devastating California wildfires, which displaced thousands of horses, Mac-Phee, a lifelong equestrian, created the Equisafe blanket, a bright-orange fire-retardant equine garment with a G.P.S. tracker, for when there’s no time to evacuate, and horses must be let loose to seek safety. (MacPhee said that a local fire department had previously counselled owners to douse their horses with water, so that they would burn more slowly.) That’s not to say that MacPhee has given up outfitting humans. The…

The hashtag #doingthings has been used about a hundred and twenty-five thousand times on Instagram. That’s a little less than #kalesalad, but more than, say, #labradorpuppies. Most of the posts are connected to the clothing brand Outdoor Voices, which was founded by a graduate of the Parsons School of Design named Tyler Haney, in 2014, when she was twenty-five years old. OV makes crop tops and shorts and leggings and fleeces that are soft but well structured and come in colors like lagoon and rose quartz—the company’s advertising helped pioneer a now ubiquitous consumer aesthetic of tasteful minimalist saturation that you might call Sensual Organic Algorithm. Women’s apparel makes up eighty per cent of the company’s sales. The trademark OV look is a racerback crop top and a matching pair…

At the Tuileries gardens, in Paris, one recent evening, three cameramen trailed Virgil Abloh, the artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, as he surveyed the runway for his Fall/Winter show. He stood in a hangar-like structure that had been painted safran impérial, the official color of Louis Vuitton packaging. For the set, Abloh had commissioned a cityscape that resembled the Manhattan of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” music video—a downtown with carefully dirtied storefronts, dinged trash cans, and fake sewers that emitted plumes of steam. “What do you think of that?” Abloh asked Benjamin Cercio, the Director of Press, Influencers, and Entertainment at Louis Vuitton, pointing toward a pristine sign that read “RAUL’S BARBERSHOP.” Abloh contemplated the sign. “I think we should remove it,” he said. “It doesn’t look real.”…

In June, 2015, Roberto Carlos Lange, who records as Helado Negro, released a single titled “Young, Latin and Proud.” Despite the bold title, the song sounded more like a flicker than like a flame. It was tranquil and soothing, with Lange singing gently, almost timidly, over a swaying synth line. His lyrics were addressed to a younger version of himself—someone searching for the language to make sense of his own story: “And you can only view you / With what you got/You don’t have to pretend/That you got to know more / ’Cause you are young, Latin, and proud.” That “Young, Latin and Proud” was released within days of Donald Trump’s announcement of his Presidential candidacy made it seem like a timely anthem for immigrant America. But Lange’s song was…

WHAT AILS JAILS? Steve Coll’s article on addiction and mental illness in jails makes it clear that the serious health risks faced by incarcerated people are systemic, not exceptional (“The Jail Health-Care Crisis,” March 4th). But, in New York City, there are two unique structures that are designed to mitigate these systemic risks. First, health care in New York City jails is delivered by health-care providers who are driven by a human-rights approach and who are independent of the security apparatus. Second, the Board of Correction serves as the permanent, independent oversight agency for the city’s jails. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, the board passed local regulations requiring community standards for quality health care and mental-health care. Since 2016, the board has required the jails’ health-care agency to produce…

One night last week, father (Paul) and son (Alex) Gemignani dropped in on Stephen Sondheim at his town house in Turtle Bay. He bought the building in 1960. “I call it the house that ‘Gypsy’ built,” Sondheim said. The musical Gemignanis go back almost that far with the composer. Paul began as a drummer on “Follies” in 1970, and has conducted nine Sondheim shows, including the original “Merrily We Roll Along,” in 1981. Alex grew up to sing John Hinckley in “Assassins,” at the Roundabout, in 2004—“Dad conducted”—and orchestrated and arranged the current version of “Merrily,” which opened at the Laura Pels Theatre last month. Time goes by. Paul is now eighty-one; Alex is thirty-nine. And everything keeps shrinking. Paul had twenty-one musicians in his orchestra; Alex has eight. Paul…

Ace Frehley’s Loud ’n’ Food ROCKstaurant If you’re looking to exhaustedly chew a veggie omelette while Loverboy’s “Turn Me Loose” blares at 4:50 A.M., this is the retro fifties-and-eighties-themed diner for you! The spirit of rock lives on near gate D57 (and the surrounding fifteen gates, which can all hear Billy Squier’s “The Stroke” blasting), in the only dining establishment that abides by Ace Frehley’s trademark lawyer’s heavy-metal principles: sex, drugs, and a bewildering number of menu sections. Bill O’Reilly’s Killinbooks Need a beach book? Help yourself to the latest from Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing” series, including “Killing Reagan,” “Killing Van Buren,” “Killing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff,” “Killing Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne,” and J. K. Rowling’s “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them—Just Kidding, the ‘K’ in J. K. Stands for ‘Killing.’”…

The first time he sees her she’s getting into his brother’s car. He’s sitting in the back seat and she gets into the front, closing the passenger door behind her. Then she notices him. She cranes around, eyebrows raised, and then turns back to Declan and says, Who’s this? That’s Aidan, Declan says. My brother. I didn’t know you had a brother, she says mildly. She turns around again, as if accepting the inevitability of having to speak to him. Older or younger? she asks. Me? Aidan says. Younger. The interior of the car is dark, and she narrows her eyes before concluding, You look it. He’s only a year younger, Declan says. The woman has turned away now to roll down her window. She has to wind it down…

In 1973, the judges of the National Book Award for fiction, finding themselves deadlocked, resolved to split the prize. Media coverage presented the verdict as reflective of a broader schism in American writing between the experimental and the traditional. John Barth, awarded for “Chimera”—a trilogy of novellas that zanily recast ancient narratives—was the leading exponent of postmodern fiction. Two of his allies in this cause, Leslie Fiedler—the first critic to use the word “postmodernism” in a literary connection—and William Gass, had served on that year’s jury. By contrast, John Williams, the other winner, was an academic literary scholar—a professor at the University of Denver and the editor of an anthology of Renaissance poems—with a slender, little-noticed literary output. His winning novel, “Augustus,” a carefully crafted account of the Roman emperor,…

May I make a confession? I love it when a black playwright makes a white actor say “nigger.” I get a sick thrill. No matter how good the play or the actor may be, that moment of rupture—accompanied, invariably, by a gasp from the audience—always makes me laugh. For a second or two, my mind shuttles backward in time: I think of when the actor first saw the word in the script and gulped, the first few tepid attempts to voice it in rehearsal, the preëmptive apologies to friends coming to the opening. The writer knows full well how much embarrassing racial angst the choice will cause; it’s impossible to view it as anything other than an act of slight sadism or capricious control—suddenly, the playwright’s right there onstage,…

The London-based trio The Comet Is Coming—made up of the saxophonist King Shabaka, the percussionist Betamax, and the keyboardist Danalogue—thrusts empyrean jazz into an apocalyptic future, where raucous psych rock and danceable electro-grooves ride lush tenor lines to outer space. Their new album, “Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery,” explores the unknown with a colorful sonic palette of vintage sounds and enlightened experimentalism. At Mercury Lounge, on March 18, they’ll look to the past to imagine eternity. ON BROADWAY The playwright Lanford Wilson, who died in 2011, wrote “Burn This” in the throes of an anxiety attack. “I said, ‘Well, at least since this is an anxiety attack and you’re trembling all over and your shoulders feel like concrete, write that down,’ ” he later recalled. Two…

In the spring of 1970, when “Let It Be” was at the top of the charts, Rob Neukirch, a junior at John Jay High School, in upper Westchester County, was approached by a member of the senior class with a proposition. Was Neukirch interested in running for student-body president? Neukirch was from the suburban version of a political dynasty. His father was a Lewisboro town councilman, and many of his six siblings had served on the student council. “I think people saw it as the natural order of things that I’d run,” Neukirch said the other day, by telephone. “But I didn’t know how to run a campaign.” The senior, who was also the acting student-body president, volunteered to be Neukirch’s campaign manager. “He got me to buy a hundred…

When Hayley Allman and her husband bought an Edwardian row house in Kensal Rise, a hip neighborhood in northwest London, Allman knew exactly how she didn’t want it to look. Her previous home, painted with white walls, had come to seem as sterile as an Apple Store; skylights in the kitchen made the brightness almost oppressive. “It felt like you were in a greenhouse,” Allman recalled. “I was like a vampire, trying to get away from the sun.” Allman, who used to work in fashion and is now a perinatal-mental-health worker, wanted to step across her threshold and feel as if she were entering a candlelit set from a BBC period drama. Allman browsed Pinterest for expressive, richly hued rooms, and messaged strangers on Instagram: Where did that lovely sage-green…

I heard them and I still hear themabove the threatening shrieks of police sirensabove the honking horns of morning traffic,above the home-crowd cheers of Yankee Stadiumabove the school bells and laughterlighting up the afternoonabove the clamoring trudge of the 1 trainand the 2 and 4, 5, 6, the B and the Dabove the ice-cream trucks’ warm jingleabove the stampede of childrenplaying in the street,above the rush of a popped fire hydrantabove the racket of eviction noticesabove the whisper of moss and mold moving inabove the High Bridge and the 145th Street Bridgeabove mothers calling those childrento come in for dinner, to come inbefore it gets dark, to get your ass insideabove them calling a child who may never come homeabove the creaking plunge of nightfalland darkness settling in the deepest…

I am as true to that bell as to my God.—Henry Martin (July 4, 1826-October 5, 1915) I was given a name, it came out of a book—I don’t know which. I’ve been told the Great Mancould recite every title in order on its shelf.Well, I was born, and that’s a good thing,although I arrived on the day of his passing, a day on which our country fell into mourning.This I heard over and over, from professorsto farmers, even duel-scarred students;sometimes, in grand company, remarked uponin third person—a pretty way of saying more than two men in a room means the thirdcan be ignored, as I was when they spokeof my birth and Mr. Jefferson’s deathin one breath, voices dusted with wonderment,faint sunlight quivering on a hidden breeze. I listen…

The Collected Schizophrenias, by Esmé Weijun Wang (Graywolf). This essay collection explores schizophrenia, “the archetypal disorder of lunacy,” as a sociopolitical, medical, and personal phenomenon. Wang was given a diagnosis of schizo-affective disorder nearly a decade after her first incidence of psychosis, at Yale. Drawing on scientific literature, pop culture, and her own experience, she discusses a range of conditions affecting some five per cent of Americans; her account of Cotard delusion, a belief that one is dead, is especially moving. Wang indicts the medical establishment for its shortcomings in treating mental illness and describes living with an unfixed reality. Fragmented by design, the book’s structure heightens the immediacy of its testimony but often occludes its inquiry into wider issues. Muhammad, by Michael Muhammad Knight (Soft Skull). Describing himself…

Three episodes into “Shrill,” on Hulu, there’s a sequence that’s like a mission statement for the show. Annie Easton (Aidy Bryant), a blogger at an alt weekly in Seattle, finds herself doing what she often does: apologizing—in this instance, it seems, to a car. “I’m sorry, no, you can go,” she mutters, stepping on and off the sidewalk, as the driver shoots her a confused, annoyed look. Behind her, another woman appears. She’s a stranger, a fat woman, like Annie—but, unlike Annie, she’s serene, smiling, wearing a hip red pants suit and a skinny pink belt. Knowing that she has the right of way, the woman crosses the street. Annie, mesmerized, follows her to a flower shop, then watches as she buys a bouquet. Afterward, on the sidewalk, when Annie…