Innholdsfortegnelse for April 8, 2019 i The New Yorker

TAKE ME TO THE RIVER Elizabeth Kolbert, in her article about rising sea levels, ascribes much of Louisiana’s disappearing coastline to the levee system (“Under Water,” April 1st). The levees are indeed a significant cause of the problem, but they aren’t the only one. Scientists employed by oil and gas companies have conceded that their industry is responsible for at least thirty-six per cent of the land loss. River dams are also a problem: on the Missouri, which empties into the Mississippi, just six dams retain roughly a hundred million tons of sediment—a quarter of the entire sediment load that the Mississippi once carried to the Gulf. At the mouth of the Mississippi, two-mile-long shipping-channel jetties divert a substantial amount of sediment into deep water, where it can’t contribute…

Food magazines typically celebrate Thanksgiving in mid-July, bronzing turkeys and crimping piecrust four months in advance. By that time last year, Marina Vance, an environmental engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder, had already prepared two full Thanksgiving dinners for more than a dozen people. Vance studies air quality, and, last June, she was one of two scientists in charge of Homechem, a four-week orgy of cooking, cleaning, and emissions measurement, which brought sixty scientists and four and a half million dollars’ worth of high-tech instrumentation to a ranch house on the engineering campus of the University of Texas at Austin. The two Thanksgiving dinners were the climax of the project and represented what Vance called a “worst-case scenario.” She suspected that the Pilgrims’ harvest celebration, as it is observed…

No one ever grabbed my ass on the stairs down tothe D. But on the stairs up to the El, it happenedall the time. I guess it was anatomically more natural,like reaching for an apple, but the first time,I wasn’t sure how to feel. I think I felt warm,which wasn’t an emotion. It felt like a rite of passage,though I’d never heard of rites of passage.Disgusting is what I said when I told my friends.A grown man. I was twelve then. It felt like flattery. From the El, I could look into other people’s windows,but if I saw them at all, what they were doing mostlywere the same kinds of nothings we did in our ownapartment. What I usually saw were their curtainsblowing in and out, ’cause their windows were…

You were my second lover.You had dark eyes and hair,like a painting of a man.We lay on our stomachs reading books in your bed.I e-mailed my professor. I will be absentfrom French Novel due to sickness. You put onsome piano music. Even thoughit was winter, we had to keepthe window open day and night, the room was so hot, the air so dryit made our noses bleed.With boots we trekked through slush for a bottle of red winewe weren’t allowed to buy, our shirts unbuttonedunder our winter coats.The French language distinguishesbetween the secondof two and the secondof many. Of coursewe’d have other lovers. Snow fell in our hair.You were my second lover.Another way of saying this:you were the other,not another.…

There are many ways of hiding knowledge from ourselves that are not really hiding at all. Not too far from the beginning of Susan Choi’s new novel, “Trust Exercise” (Henry Holt), there is a party after a high-school production of “Guys and Dolls.” The high school is a performing-arts academy, and so it follows that the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds at the party are dramatic beyond even ordinary adolescents. Greg Veltin, the star of last year’s production of “Anything Goes,” and the sort of guy who causes girls to agree to share him, leads three of them off to sit cross-legged with him in a gazebo. “I want you to know that I love you,” he begins, squeezing the girls’ hands with “a surfeit of feeling,” and then he breaks the…

My Young Life, by Frederic Tuten (Simon & Schuster). This absorbing portrait of the writer as a young man chronicles his experiences growing up in the Bronx in the nineteen-forties and fifties while dreaming of moving to Paris to become a painter and a novelist. Paris doesn’t happen, thanks to poverty, rebelliousness, and obsessions with girls—his masturbation habits are recounted with Portnovian zest—but mid-century New York provides its own inspiration. Tuten conjures a city of small bookstores, vibrant cafés, seedy bars, and crummy apartments, and the artists and intellectuals who populated them. Their wisdom is presented with an urgency that affirms the timeless nature of the artist’s struggle. Sounds Like Titanic, by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman (Norton). As a cash-strapped student at Columbia University, the author of this sardonic, moving…

When the new arts space the Shed opens, on April 5, it’ll be heralded by “Soundtrack of America.” The five-day concert series highlights a broad spectrum of black music, calling on such acts as the soulful folk band Victory, the punk musician Tamar-kali, the vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Braxton Cook, the R. & B. and jazz-fusion outfit Phony Ppl, and the Afrofuturist duo Oshun (all pictured above). Lovingly curated with an eye toward innovation, this progressive bill is filled with artists as galvanizing as they are virtuosic. ART “Joan Miró” Museum of Modern Art This enchanting show draws on the museum’s immense holdings of Miró’s work, along with a few loans. Its star attraction is “The Birth of the World,” painted in 1925, while the artist was under the spell…

One April morning in 2014, a sixteen-year-old sophomore at Franklin Regional Senior High, in Murrysville, Pennsylvania, stole two butcher knives from his parents’ kitchen, hid them in his backpack, and took them to school. He was wearing all black and, according to witnesses, had a “blank expression.” Just before first period, in the hall of the science wing, he stabbed several classmates. Then he pulled the fire alarm. As the corridor filled with people, the boy moved down the hallway, a knife in each hand, stabbing more students. He turned and raced back up the hall—an administrator remembered him “flailing the knives like he was swimming the backstroke.” One girl later testified, “I could feel that my lip wasn’t attached to my face anymore.” A boy, stabbed in the belly,…

Laura Delano recognized that she was “excellent at everything, but it didn’t mean anything,” her doctor wrote. She grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest communities in the country. Her father is related to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and her mother was introduced to society at a débutante ball at the Waldorf-Astoria. In eighth grade, in 1996, Laura was the class president—she ran on a platform of planting daffodils on the school’s grounds—and among the best squash players in the country. She was one of those rare proportional adolescents with a thriving social life. But she doubted whether she had a “real self underneath.” The oldest of three sisters, Laura felt as if she were living two separate lives, one onstage and the other in the audience, reacting to…

The hour of our birth had been carefully forecast, a winter’s day Cesarean timed to coincide with Dr. Feng’s lunch break. The doctor pulled me out first, indignant and squalling, like a hotel guest roused and tossed before checkout. Lulu came next, and was so perfectly quiet that at first they thought she wasn’t breathing at all. Then they thwacked her on the back and her cries joined mine and they laid us side by side, boy and girl, two underwater creatures suddenly forced to fill our lungs with cold dry air. Dr. Feng had operated on our mother as a favor to our uncle, his old classmate. Otherwise we would have been born in the hospital down the street, where a woman had bled to death after a botched…

Not so long ago, the Civil War was taken to be this country’s central moral drama. Now we think that the aftermath—the confrontation not of blue and gray but of white and black, and the reimposition of apartheid through terror—is what has left the deepest mark on American history. Instead of arguing about whether the war could have turned out any other way, we argue about whether the postwar could have turned out any other way. Was there ever a fighting chance for full black citizenship, equality before the law, agrarian reform? Or did the combination of hostility and indifference among white Americans make the disaster inevitable? Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his new book, “Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow” (Penguin Press), rightly…

The subject of Christopher Phillips’s “Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball” (Princeton) is baseball, but it’s worth reading for more than just the baseball. The book is an effort to help us understand one of the oldest problems in modern societies, which is how to evaluate human beings. Do we scout or do we score? The “scouting” in Phillips’s title refers to the traditional baseball scout. He’s the guy who sizes up the young prospect playing high-school or college ball, gets to know him away from the diamond, and draws on many years of experience hanging out with professional ballplayers to decide what the chances are that this one will make it to the bigs—and therefore what his price point should be for the club…

David Baker is a poet of American anti-pastoral. His mind operates against the vividly rendered landscape of small-town Ohio, where he has lived for more than thirty years. Baker’s poems depend on long acquaintance with a small place, where year-over-year comparison makes even the arrival of a feeding monarch or a nagging blue jay a standout event. His work evinces the moral courage of keeping still in the landscape: in our era of climate change, poetry’s mandate to measure the rhythms of the year has become a valuable form of witness. Baker’s reports from the interior leave in all the encroachments that threaten it. He is heir to such writers as Henry David Thoreau, who marked the loss of Sudbury River shad after a dam was built upstream, and Robert…