Innholdsfortegnelse for May 6, 2019 i The New Yorker

It takes some time for Michael Cohen to work his way to a table at the grillroom of the Loews Regency Hotel, on Park Avenue. He’s been a regular at the hotel’s famous power breakfasts for more than two decades, and on several recent visits staff members reached out to him for handshakes and bro hugs. These days, the restaurant, with its twenty-seven-dollar pancakes and sumptuously upholstered banquettes, represents a welcome refuge for the erstwhile “Personal Attorney to the President,” as Cohen used to describe himself. Outside the friendly cocoon of the hotel, he has attracted a bipartisan coalition of adversaries—Democrats who remember his years of service as Donald Trump’s fierce and profane fixer, and Republicans who abhor Cohen’s transformation into a vocal Trump critic. Robert Mueller, the special…

“Two people, two baths,” the boy behind the countersaid, as he checked us out of our budget room.The hotel, which overlooked Notre-Dame,was cheap, but charged, it seemed, for everything,including a key to the bath. I corrected, “Two people, one bath.” Less to pay. The boy,maybe eighteen, blushed to the tips of his ears,smirked, then looked away. Hired for the summer,I guessed. We paused. I couldn’t not recallme and you at either end of the large, claw-footed, cast-iron tubdown the hall from our room. We’d sat, cramped,but laughing; between us, the drowned pockets of our night’spleasure and the dripping, hard-edged tap.That blush remains—more vivid than our night, more vivid, even, than the view across the Seinefor which we paid another, extra charge.Opening the clanking shutters, we’d foundthe scene: our own Western…

L.E.L., by Lucasta Miller (Knopf). Few figures of the Romantic era are as enigmatic as the poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon, who published her poems under her initials. Dismissed after her untimely death, in 1838, as a writer of frivolous sentimentalities, she was once as celebrated as Byron and Shelley. This intrepid biography examines her eclipse in light of the scandal that surrounded her: a relationship with her editor, a married man twenty years her senior, produced three children who were secretly given away at birth. Miller documents the literary establishment’s effort to conceal this, and argues that L.E.L.’s verse is filled with veiled implication, encoded language, and subversion. Miller’s subtle readings of a poet whom she calls “proto-postmodern” restore a lost reputation. Sleeping with Strangers, by David Thomson (Knopf).…

TRUMP OF THE TROPICS? Jon Lee Anderson struck the right note in his piece about Jair Bolsonaro, the new President of Brazil (“Southern Strategy,” April 1st). Like Donald Trump, Bolsonaro is a racist, misogynistic, homophobic liar. He is also an idiot. But it’s important not to push the Trump-Bolsonaro analogy too far. Although there are similarities in rhetoric and policy between the two men, the damage that Bolsonaro inflicts on Brazil will be more severe and longer-lasting than Trump’s assault on democratic norms in the U.S. Brazil has been a democracy for only three decades, and its political institutions are weak. Bolsonaro’s Presidency threatens to exacerbate these vulnerabilities, and to menace liberal democracy in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. Cesar RochaWoods Hole, Mass. As Anderson explains, the network…

four years agoon Martin Luther King Dayin the afternoonthe little stripsaid it was time,so we did it twicelaughing throughthat grim comicaldespair familiarto all modernconceivers,it was magicalonly that it workedbut now I knowit was thenmy life began,we made somany planscircumstancesalready waitedto obviate,suddenly he was born,a room full of bloodand shouting,he stayed calmsleeping on my chesta long time whilethey sewed you up,he and Iin a room aloneunder a soft white light,one nurse cameto say it was all right,you were notbut you were there,I talked to him,whatever I saidI don’t remember,then came the proudsleepless happysorrow monthsthen slow realizingplayground dread,the yearof diagnosis whenour life keptbeing a placefor worsening fearsin enviable comfortto occur as wegraciously receivedthe humiliationof being the onesgratefully not to be,those many hoursin the bedroom screamingthen lurching outfor exhausted walks,trying with nosuccess to…

Eddie Prior, age twenty-one, with his black hair slick and his blue, blue eyes, enters this story with a great clatter. He is about to go down the Pavilion’s long, curving staircase to the dance floor when the leather heels of his dancing shoes meet the polished parquet and he stumbles forward … but, instead of plummeting down the stairs, he finds his balance, commandeers the momentum of his downward plunge, and—upright, smiling, his heels clacking—he creates a kind of musical descent, tapping out the tone of each new step as he makes his entrance. He comes to a stop, as he intended, between two striking girls, one blond and one brunette, both named Millie. They are intrigued but embarrassed to be the center of attention. Eddie realizes that the…

In June, 1967, Abbie Hoffman, the antic gadfly of the Vietnam years, wed his second wife, Anita, in a hippie happening on Central Park’s Great Lawn. That August, he rained dollar bills onto perplexed—and then madly grasping—traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Two months later, he participated in a wishful attempt to levitate the Pentagon, and the following year, with Jerry Rubin, he led the prankish Youth International Party (the Yippies) toward the bloody fray outside the Democratic National Convention. At the subsequent trial of the Chicago Seven, he was convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot. Hoffman was still appealing the verdict in 1971, when he and Anita became the parents of a son. Jonah Raskin quotes the new father in “For the…

“Ink” (at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre) and “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus” (at the Booth) are both exciting plays, or, more specifically, plays that should excite something in the audience, if only a greater understanding of how certain genres work, or don’t. Of the two, the ninety-minute “Gary” is the more engaging spectacle; it takes a “what if” situation and explodes it. “Ink” is your fairly standard slice-of-life drama, but one that’s been tricked out to feel more contemporary than it really is. How the playwright, James Graham, and the director, Rupert Goold, achieved this effect accounts for what’s interesting about the nearly three-hour drama—and for why it fails. The time is 1969 to 1970; the place, London. A young publisher from Australia named…

Pop and country music’s synergy lives on through Maren Morris. On “Girl,” her second album, the pliable singer-songwriter navigates womanhood in lush ballads and powerhouse anthems that paint her, in turns, as a down-home girl-with-guitar and an elegant dynamo diva. But she’s not here to just shut up and sing. In her music, the bliss of romance mingles with calls for equality and claims to independence, themes that bolster a grander artistic statement—that Morris, who performs at Terminal 5 on May 4, isn’t interested in being anyone but herself. ART “The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey” Metropolitan Museum Some hundred and twenty daguerreotypes seem to float in this dramatic, beautifully designed exhibition. They represent just a fraction of the output of Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, a nineteenth-century French architectural…

“Where are you from?” For most people, this is a casual social question. For me, it’s an exceptionally loaded one, and demands either a lie or my glossing over facts, because the real answer goes something like this: “I grew up on compounds in Kansas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Martha’s Vineyard, often travelling in five-vehicle caravans across the country from one location to the next. My reality included LSD, government cheese, and a repurposed school bus with the words ‘Venus or Bust’ painted on both sides.” And that, while completely factual, is hard to believe, and sounds like a cry for attention. So I usually just say, “Upstate New York.” Let me elaborate. I was born into a family of a hundred adults and sixty children…

“I and Thou,” a short treatise by the Jewish theologian Martin Buber, was published in German in 1923; by the time it appeared in English, fourteen years later, the translator could already call it “one of the epoch-making books of our generation.” When Buber died, in 1965, his Times obituary focussed mainly on this one book, crediting it with making Buber “a pioneer bridge builder between Judaism and Christianity.” Buber’s philosophy of dialogue had been enthusiastically embraced by such Protestant thinkers as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Even today, “I and Thou” remains a staple of religion courses and bookstore spirituality sections, and inspirational quotes from it—“An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language”—circulate endlessly on social media. Yet “I and Thou,” which uses a generalized, ecumenical…

“Acts of Infidelity” (Other Press), the new novel by the Swedish writer Lena Andersson, begins with a plaintive act of devotion. A woman calls a flower shop and asks that a single gerbera daisy be delivered to an actor at Stockholm’s Scala Theatre, along with a note signed with a false name. She’s so anxious that her request be carried out to the letter that she phones the florist back several times. “Quite a handful,” the florist tells her husband, and readers who are familiar with Andersson will agree. The woman’s real name is Ester Nilsson; she first appeared as the protagonist of Andersson’s cerebral cat’s cradle of a novel, “Willful Disregard,” published in Sweden in 2013 and in the United States three years later. At the start of that…