Innholdsfortegnelse for April 22, 2019 i The New Yorker

On March 16th, the play “Hillary and Clinton” had its first preview, at the Golden Theatre, on West Forty-fifth Street. Its author, Lucas Hnath, knew the Golden well, because his work “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” a bold and witty sequel to the Ibsen drama, had played there less than two years earlier, and he had attended more than a dozen of the performances. Nevertheless, he wasn’t sure where to sit at the “Hillary” performance. “I still haven’t found a spot I like in that theatre,” he had complained to me, in an e-mail that day. “I’ll get there early and scope out a few options.” Hnath, whose surname is pronounced “Nayth,” was excited to witness an audience responding to the actors, the actors to the audience, and both to…

THE GUARD In 2004, Steve Wood was deployed to Guantánamo Bay, as a member of the Oregon National Guard. He and his comrades were told that many of the detainees were responsible for 9/11 and, given the opportunity, would strike again. “I just remember being super excited, because I thought, I’m going to be doing something important,” Wood told me. For two weeks, he worked as a guard in the cellblocks, monitoring men who had been captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Then a sergeant major pulled him aside for a brief interview, and assigned him to work the night shift in Echo Special, a secret, single-occupancy unit that had been built to house the United States military’s highest-value detainee. The International Committee of the Red Cross—which has access to…

Summery over the last few years, sparrows castingQuarter and eighth notes on the mulberry leaves,Someone in an empire waist Sunday cottonStrawberry pastel, shoeless, tulips, slate dustOn the pads of her feet, oatmeal cooling, caking,Honey colored kitchen, buttons fallingFrom my sleeves, everything is writing Feathers through the pillow linings, puffed up lungs,Voyager passing through our stellar cloud, robotSleepwalkers/rock combers, sea-blue sky,Sky-blue sea, tide up, hand held technologiesComing soon to change us, rain counts upFrom one to twenty million pixels filling inThe film we’re in, maybe I’m rewriting the whole Thing right as I watch it, time won’t releaseThe sequel till it’s ready, centripetal marketingKeeps the blips from passing through the firewallOf the future, birds in the storm drain wearingOur interiors out, hot in pettiness, sweeping imageAfter image across the table, trees…

At the start of “Crossing” (Pantheon), Pajtim Statovci’s second novel, a twenty-two-year-old man, dressed in denim shorts and a padded bra—“a man who cannot be a woman but who can sometimes look like a woman”—throws himself in front of traffic on a street in Rome in 1998. We later learn that his name is Bujar, that he is Albanian, and that his desire to die stems not from anxiety about his gender identity—the novel subjects the very idea of identity to caustic interrogation—but from the isolation and humiliations that he has faced as a refugee from the turmoil in the Balkans. As he searches for a stretch of road where cars pick up speed, he meditates on the waste of his youthful promise, and on a sense of shame…

HOW TO GET BETTER Rachel Aviv’s piece about Laura Delano, a woman who decided to stop taking psychiatric drugs after years of treatment, is more honest about the challenges of prolonged mental illness than many other accounts (“Bitter Pill,” April 8th). It’s true that prescription cascades like the one Delano experienced are common and often misguided, and it’s wonderful that Delano was able to find health and happiness after going off her many medications. In using her story as a case study, however, the article implies that we’re all, in the end, better off without the drugs. This is precisely the sort of dangerous, reductive thinking that encourages people to discontinue their medications, often to disastrous effect. I have watched a relative struggle with bipolar II for eleven years,…

It was Bunny Nicole’s special evening at the New York City Playboy Club: a fund-raiser for her dog-rescue charity and also a chance for her to sing some standards with a jazz band. Bunny Nicole has a nice voice; she studied at Juilliard. She really cares about dogs, too. And, for a cold Wednesday night, she managed to generate a good turnout. But wait. You didn’t know New York has a Playboy Club? It opened to mild fanfare last fall, on far-west Forty-second Street, across the street from the Ornamental Ironworkers Local 580. It’s the first Playboy Club in town since 1986. This new one is a licensee deal. You can buy a membership—starting at five thousand dollars a year and going up to a hundred thousand—but you can also…

STELLA’S RIBBON Searching for an outdoor-dining option that makes you feel as though you’ve been buried alive? This Upper West Side staple features café tables nestled under construction scaffolding that’s been in place for so long that it’s protected by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Don’t miss the sweet-and-savory chicken and waffles, best enjoyed while nineteen people wait in a cluster next to your seat and loudly comment on how close they think you are to being finished. Be warned: if you order dessert, that mom with three hungry kids will punch you in the face. ATLANTIC AVENUE PUB Care to indulge in a nice pint of Guinness at one of New York’s finest dumpster-adjacent tables? Then this Brooklyn tavern’s the spot for you! Atlantic Avenue Pub boasts a bustling back…

In his dishevelled garden my neighborHas fourteen varieties of apples,Fourteen trees his wife put in as seedlingsBecause, being sick, she wanted somethingDifferent to do (different from being sick). In winter she ordered catalogues, poredOver subtleties of mouthfeel and touch:Tart and sweet and crisp; waxy, smooth,And rough. Spring planted an orchard,Spring projected summers Of green and yellow-streaked, orange, red,Rusty, round, wormholed, lopsided;Nothing supermarket flawless, nothing imperishable.Gardens grow backward and forwardIn the mind; in the driest season, flowers. Of the original fourteen, five treesGrow streetside, outside the hedge.To their branches my neighbor, a retiredStatistician, has clothes-peggedSlips of paper, white pocket handkerchiefs Embroidered with the words:The apples are not ripe, please don’t pick them.Kids had an apple fight last week.In September, when the apples ripen,Neighbors are welcome to pick them, even Those rare…

The Five, by Hallie Rubenhold (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). The five London women murdered by Jack the Ripper, in 1888, were long assumed to be prostitutes. This history shows otherwise, presenting deeply researched portraits of the victims as they lived: they were all poor, some to the point of homelessness; they were all apparently killed while asleep; and, with one exception, they were known by family and acquaintances not to be prostitutes. Each had a distinct story that has never been fully or truthfully told. Why Victorians preferred to embrace the myth is one question that guides the book; why we continue to do so is another. “Our culture’s obsession with the mythology,” Rubenhold writes, “serves only to normalize its particular brand of misogyny.” The Beneficiary, by Janny Scott (Riverhead).…

The Film Forum series “Trilogies” (April 19-May 16) offers such cinematic landmarks as Fritz Lang’s films about the criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse (made in 1922, 1933, and 1960); Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, which follows its protagonist from his impoverished childhood to his struggles as a father; and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s trio of dramas about women facing corruption in postwar West Germany, including the flamboyantly colorful “Lola,” starring Barbara Sukowa (above) as a singer and sex worker who gets entangled in city government. CLASSICAL MUSIC “In Visible Roads” 1 Rivington Street The last few concerts in this co-presentation by the Blueprints Piano Series and the composer-and-performer collective Metropolis Ensemble bring an intriguing array of mostly contemporary, mostly piano works to the Bowery. The jazz pianist Aaron Diehl will improvise and,…

Recently, the Georgia congresswoman Dar’shun Kendrick drafted a “testicular bill of rights,” which would restrict men’s access to erectile-dysfunction pills, sex toys, and pornography, in some cases making men wait twenty-four hours—and receive spousal approval—to obtain them. Kendrick, a Democrat, who has acknowledged that the legislation was tongue in cheek, later said, “If you’re going to regulate women’s bodies, why not do the same type of regulation on men’s bodies?” Her bill was a response to the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, which Georgia’s Republican-controlled state legislature passed in late March, adding Georgia to a growing list of states that are attempting to tighten restrictions on abortion. If signed by the governor, the LIFE Act will effectively ban the procedure after six weeks, when a fetal heartbeat can…

There’s no good way to say it—Peggy woke up most mornings oddly sore, sore in the general region of her asshole. She felt an acute burn when she used the toilet, and found traces of blood in the crotch of her pajamas. Later—clots. This may be unpleasant to consider, may even be a bad place to begin, but if there were a nicer way to tell this story it wouldn’t be this story. “There’s this cut—I don’t know where it came from,” she told her husband one morning after several weeks of pain, “this tear—between my legs, on the, maybe on the… I can’t remember what it’s called.” Peggy’s inability to make a direct statement about the wound had less to do with shame over its location than with the…

Charlie Friend is thirty-two. A former electronics whiz kid, he has squandered his youth on dilettantish studies in physics and anthropology, followed by a series of botched get-rich-quick schemes. His parents are dead, his friends (if they exist) go unmentioned, and his employment consists of forex trading on an old laptop in his two-room apartment. He seems to leave home only to buy chocolate at a local newsstand or, once, after noticing a pain in his foot, to have an ingrown toenail removed, an apt literalization of his enervating self-involvement. Perhaps out of some desire for correction, Charlie sells his mother’s house to finance the purchase of Adam, one of twenty-five cutting-edge androids built to serve as an “intellectual sparring partner, friend and factotum.” The impulsive slacker is all too…

There is something awesomely confounding about the music of Tyshawn Sorey, the thirty-eight-year-old Newark-born composer, percussionist, pianist, and trombonist. As a critic, I feel obliged to describe what I hear, and description usually begins with categorization. Sorey’s work eludes the pinging radar of genre and style. Is it jazz? New classical music? Composition? Improvisation? Tonal? Atonal? Minimal? Maximal? Each term captures a part of what Sorey does, but far from all of it. At the same time, he is not one of those crossover artists who indiscriminately mash genres together. Even as his music shifts shape, it retains an obdurate purity of voice. T. S. Eliot’s advice seems apt: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’/Let us go and make our visit.” Last month, Miller Theatre, at Columbia University, featured…