Innholdsfortegnelse for March 25, 2019 i The New Yorker

Before Miriam Toews can sit down to write, she needs to walk. Something about the body in motion limbers up the mind and suggests that it should get moving, too. When she is working on a book, she exists in a state of heightened suggestibility, as if everything she sees and hears were hers for the taking. In her twenties, when she went to journalism school to learn how to make radio documentaries, she loved spending hours with audiotape, a razor blade, and chalk, seamlessly stitching together the voices she had gathered, trying to keep her own voice out of the mix. But she found that she wished she could embellish, add thunder and lightning where there had been only a gentle rain, and that is why she writes fiction.…

As the sun came up in London on June 24, 2016, Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore were walking through Westminster, the political district of London, smoking cigarettes and drinking champagne from the bottle. The shocking result of the referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union had just been announced: Leave had won. Banks, an entrepreneur whose fortune comes primarily from owning insurance companies, had financed and directed the most aggressive wing of the Leave campaign, Leave.EU, and he had given or loaned a total of thirteen million dollars to various anti-E.U. causes. In Britain, where campaign-spending laws have historically been stringent, and donations modest by American standards, Banks’s contributions are thought to constitute the largest sum ever donated by an individual to a political campaign. Banks, who is fifty-two,…

That Henry James, when he got old, rewrote his early work was my excuse for revisiting, at ninety, a story I had written in my twenties. I was ten years old when I had to leave Austria, so the day with my father in the Alps must have taken place on our last family holiday, the previous August. I wished Mutti were coming, but she had woken with one of her migraines. I stood outside the hotel, in the grass, getting my shoes wet with dew, waiting and wanting for nothing. “Light tinkled among the trees,” and the “grasses gleamed sword-like,” says my story. Curious how our language asks for similes. What is something “like”? The sky was “like liquid light,” I wrote. “Liquid” is close, but it’s not quite…

In October, 2011, the literary scholar and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant published “Cruel Optimism,” a meditation on our attachment to dreams that we know are destined to be dashed. Berlant had taught in the English Department at the University of Chicago since 1984. She had established herself as a skilled interpreter of film and literature, starting out with a series of influential, interlinked books that she called her “national sentimentality trilogy.” A sense of national identity, these books argued, wasn’t so much a set of conscious decisions that we make as it was a set of compulsions—attachments and identifications—that we feel. In “Cruel Optimism,” Berlant moved from theorizing about genres of fiction to theorizing about “genres for life.” We like to imagine that our life follows some kind of trajectory,…

ROGER STONE’S TRICKS I read with great interest Tyler Foggatt’s reporting on Roger Stone’s teen-age electioneering days in Westchester County (The Talk of the Town, March 18th). I knew Roger in school—when he was the president of the student council at John Jay High School, I was the president of the student council at the middle school. In 1971, a year after Stone graduated, I started examining a Westchester County legislature race for a social-studies project, and discovered that Stone appeared to be organizing churches as part of a smear campaign against the incumbent, R. Bradlee Boal, a potential violation of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits nonprofit organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates. (Stone later told the Washington Post that his candidate, a Republican named John Hicks-Beach, was…

I am beginning to experience what I would call disturbing digital coincidences. Call me crazy, but on Wednesday I asked my Amazon Echo Dot, “Alexa, what time is it?” On Thursday, I got an e-mail from Wayfair suggesting that I might like to order a thirty-inch farmhouse-style wall clock that lends any room a touch of charm. Coincidence? While chatting with a colleague via Skype, I cleared my throat and coughed twice. Hours later, my Facebook feed displayed an ad for Mucinex. On Sunday night, I watched a YouTube video of ICE agents hassling immigrants. On Monday morning, the first song in my Spotify “Discover Weekly” playlist was “Cold as Ice” by Foreigner. On a phone call using my landline, I told my parents that Janice and I were thinking…

A painting by Peter Sacks looks one way from a distance and another up close. From twenty paces, “Amnesty,” a large triptych hanging in his Tribeca studio, seems to depict three figures in procession, writhing in pain or rapture. From ten, details of its surface emerge—ridges, crenellations, ribbons of paint—and it resembles an aerial photograph of farmland, cities, rivers. From five, the variety of the work’s materials becomes visible: the river is a strip of West African cloth, dyed indigo; the farmland is corrugated cardboard; the city is a patch of lace, charred at its edges. Lean in and the waves of the sea resolve into the typed testimony of an inmate at Sednaya prison, in Syria. The words—“They stripped us and dragged us to a cell and made me…

1. Lost for a subject, and missing a turnamong flaking billboards, unemptied bins,pickings for a light touch, legerdemain,there’s an angel’s wing flexed at my back—this artist’s quick impersonal tap,his opportune grace to feel and liftthe obscure object, sweep and scarper,to dance for a living, no one the wiser, and I—unaware of my loss, or luck,a skimming finger at my zipped backpack,my almost biblically lightened load—notice too late the exchange of gifts:a stranger’s touch, a poem to start,and the deal’s struck: art for art. 2. Or think another: I walk in a dreampast double-parked lots, boarded-up shops,a drab street market hustling its cheap stuff,and chase the ghost of a child that has runout of time forever—memory’s vagrant,aberrant self—and so miss the touchof a loss left freely at my back,an absent given,…

How to Hide an Empire, by Daniel Immerwahr (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This history makes a compelling case that the United States has maintained an unacknowledged empire for nearly as long as it has had a navy. Immerwahr shows how America amassed a network of overseas outposts and territories that, at its height, in 1941, accounted for some thirteen per cent of the U.S. population. Most illuminating are the book’s portraits of the inhabitants of annexed lands—Puerto Rico, the Philippines, the Virgin Islands. Many never won either independence or full statehood and voting rights. As a newspaper noted in 1848, America wanted “all the territory of value that we can get without taking the people.” In the Dark Room, by Brian Dillon (Fitzcarraldo). “What knowledge can an object preserve?”…

Although I have seen the theatre treasure Kelli O’Hara on Broadway only a handful of times—including in her Tony Award-winning performance as Anna, in the 2015 revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I”—I always feel as though I’d just watched her in one thing or another, or read something about her, or maybe even glimpsed her on the street. This sensation is due, in large part, to the familiarity she projects onstage and engenders in her audience, regardless of the role she’s playing. Lovely and light in her approach to her characters’ motivations and actions, O’Hara expresses herself through a very particular prism: she makes us feel that, no matter what conflicts tear at the seams of the story being told, it somehow relates to all of us.…

In 1938, George Balanchine choreographed dances for Vera Zorina in the Rodgers and Hart musical “I Married an Angel,” and married her onstage. So it’s a cute bit of historical rhyming that Joshua Bergasse, the director and choreographer of the City Center Encores! production of the show (March 20-24), recently married its star, Sara Mearns (above). One of the boldest ballerinas at New York City Ballet, which Balanchine founded at City Center, in 1948, Mearns is making her début in a speaking role. Angelic dancing shouldn’t give her any trouble. ART “Epic Abstraction” Metropolitan Museum A desire to shake up received art history is more than admirable today—it’s urgent for a future of pluralist values. But this wishfully canon-expanding show of painting and sculpture from the past eight decades…

Brexiteers may worry that the European Union is turning the Continent into one big homogeneous Euroland, but in France the artist John Hamon remains a distinctly domestic phenomenon. It was well past midnight on a freezing Friday by the time Hamon parked his car under a no-parking sign near the Place de la Bourse, in Paris. In the back were an extendable pole, cans of industrial-strength adhesive, and a half-dozen posters printed on plastic, each featuring a blown-up French passport photo of a goofy-looking teen-ager with wire-rimmed glasses, wavy hair, and what can only be described as a shit-eating grin. At the bottom of the image, in capital letters, were two words: JOHN HAMON. It took five minutes for Hamon to extract a poster of himself, slather it with glue,…

When I was a child, the grownup books in my house were arranged according to two principles. One of these, which governed the downstairs books, was instituted by my mother, and involved achieving a remarkable harmony—one that anyone who has ever tried to organize a home library would envy—among thematic, alphabetic, and aesthetic demands. The other, which governed the upstairs books, was instituted by my father, and was based on the conviction that it is very nice to have everything you’ve recently read near at hand, in case you get the urge to consult any of it again; and also that it is a pain in the neck to put those books away, especially when the shelves on which they belong are so exquisitely organized that returning one to its…

We had our heads downbaiting hooks—three wild salmonalready turned back that morningfor the in-season hatchery silversnow out there somewherecounting their luck—whenunder our small boat the seagave a roll like a giant turning over in sleep, lifting us so high I thoughtan ocean liner or freighter hadslipped up on us, the sudden heftof its bow-wave, our matchstick tossto depth we’d takenfor granted in order to venture thereat all. But when I looked up expectingcollision, the quash of water from their blowholes pushed to air in unison,a pair of gray whales not two hundredyards away: “Look up!” I shouted so you didn’t miss the fear-banishingof their passage that madenothing of us. Not even death could touchany mind of us. It was all beauty andmystery, the kind that picks you up effortlessly and…

Many of today’s most prominent d.j.s and producers have found fame as jesters on the festival circuit. Think of Steve Aoki, the electro-house hype man, pumping up the masses at this summer’s Electroland, at Disneyland Paris. Or of Marshmello, the twenty-six-year-old d.j. who wears an enormous emoji-esque mask, and who will, this year and next, provide the soundtrack for the debauchery at the new club Kaos, in Las Vegas, for a rumored sixty million dollars. Mike Lévy, a thirty-one-year-old Frenchman who records as Gesaffelstein, has taken a more ascetic tack. Lévy, one of electronic music’s rising stars, has an ear for dance-music history and an affinity for brutalism, as well as a committed disregard for the appetites of the Everyman. His first album, “Aleph,” from 2013, was a master class…

Glamorous, gladiatorial, faintly disreputable, the concerto is an essential feature of modern concert life. Few symphony orchestras venture far into a season without summoning a soloist to execute the majestic opening arpeggios of Beethoven’s “Emperor,” the throat-clearing double-stops of the Dvořák Cello Concerto, or some other familiar bold gesture. Orchestral economics would presumably collapse without a supply of celebrity soloists playing celebrity works. The disreputability of the genre has to do with its slightly seedy showmanship, its carnival trappings. The virtuoso violinist is a devilish hypnotist, descended from Paganini. The pianist is a Lisztian magician, conjuring wonders from a long black box. Contemporary composers who produce concertos—there is a steady demand for them, always threatening to become a glut—must contend with the genre’s history of hoary theatrics. In the disillusioned…