Innholdsfortegnelse for June 10-17, 2019 i The New Yorker

Fifty years ago this month, a police raid on a Greenwich Village watering hole jump-started the gay-liberation movement, when the “forces of faggotry,” as the Village Voice called the denizens of the Stonewall Inn and their neighbors, fought back with bricks, bottles, and spontaneous kick lines. (Out on Christopher Street, witnesses recalled, rioters sang their own version of “Ta-ra-ra Boomde-ay”: “We are the Stonewall girls/We wear our hair in curls/We wear no underwear/We show our pubic hair.”) Among the flurry of city activities planned for the anniversary are an L.G.B.T.Q.-plus film festival, a human-rights conference, a cosplay event on Pier 40, an “immersive culinary experience” benefitting God’s Love We Deliver, and what should be one hell of a Pride March. Plus, an opera: “Stonewall,” by Iain Bell and Mark…

I departed Virginia with few effects to my name and no real farewells, on a hot summer Monday morning, four months after I had run from Lockless, the plantation of my birth, the plantation of my father. And, though I knew that I would be, somehow, called back there, it was for now behind me—along with the crimes of my father, the slave-catchers known as Ryland’s Hounds, and the spectre of my dancing mother, whom I could barely remember, a void in me that I knew was somehow tied to her sale. I walked most of that day and spent the night in the small farmhouse of an old widower sympathetic to the cause. Then, on Tuesday, I set out for the town of Clarksburg, where the first leg of…

Hard to credit that the figure in front of him is a woman. The silhouette is huge and partly obscured by the screen door. He, on the other hand, is in plain sun, right in the middle of the gravel path—hesitant to go any closer—all of the New Mexico sky on top of him. Finally the figure opens its mouth, but he still can’t tell what the voice conveys. Yes? I’m looking for the famous lady, he says. No famous lady here. I’m looking for the famous lady painter, he says. I’m a painter, the figure replies. What’s your business with me? You’re the lady painter? If it’s the painter you’re looking for, I’m the only one, the figure says, and then steps out, and there is no diminishment in…

For many immigrants, the best-case scenario is that their children will never really understand them. Think of a woman from Vietnam, the daughter of a farm girl and a nameless G.I., who moves from a refugee camp in the Philippines to public housing in Connecticut. There she raises a son, who was born on a rice farm but grows up in the back rooms of Hartford nail salons, and becomes not just the first person in the family to attend school past the sixth grade but a poet who wins prizes and is hailed in major magazines. The mother cannot speak English, or read any language; the more complex and ambitious the son’s work becomes, the greater the gulf between his writing in English and her basic Vietnamese—and the more…

CONSIDERING THE AFTERLIFE Reading James Wood’s review of “This Life,” by Martin Hägglund, I was mystified by his argument that the main consideration in defining personal morality is whether one views existence as finite or eternal (Books, May 20th). As a lifelong atheist, I’ve never considered the principal difference between my value system and that of religious people to be my belief that existence ends with death. The critical distinction, rather, is that, whereas the believer submits to a moral framework received from a supposedly divine source, the atheist constructs his or her own. Contrary to Wood’s argument, time is not all that we atheists have if there is no God. We have one another, and that fact should be the cornerstone on which we build our moral foundation.…

One day last month, Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national-security correspondent, found himself in a heated debate about whether governments should censor social-media organizations during an emergency. “Now they’re basically self-policing, right?” he said. “Twitter and Facebook are doing it themselves, where they have an explicit financial incentive not to censor.” “It’s kind of the devil you know, though,” one of his interlocutors, deadly serious in a blue blazer, countered. “You have governments—like in Uganda, like in Zimbabwe—where they just indiscriminately suppress media rights.” A third debater nodded his head sagely. “The chaos in times of crisis,” he said. Through a window came the wild shouts of recess. The debaters were sitting in a fourth-floor room at Regis High School, an all-boys Jesuit institution on the Upper East Side. Sciutto…

My mother’s death was for me the closing of a door that had moved almost imperceptibly but inevitably for thirteen years, ever since she was struck down by an illness from which she never recovered. The door shut at last, softly, a few days before Christmas last year. At her burial, in a cemetery called Gate of Heaven, the fresh rectangle of grass laid on her grave was the shape and size of a door, its edges still visible. My mother was comforted, right to the very last moment, by her conviction that another world awaited her. For some people, this kingdom has its own version of walls, borders, and passports, an exclusivity that resembles our world’s, in the way that God resembles us. But, if this hereafter exists, for…

Woken again by nothing, with this linealready in my wake, I thought of youat twenty, as you are—which passed somehowwhile I was staring—thought how yesterdayyou said you wanted to be young again,which left me with this nothing left to saythat’s woken me. You are, you are—what elsedoes father wail to child—though wailing ithe’s woken with six-sevenths of the nightto go—you are—look I will set to workthis very moment slowing time myself,feet to the stone and shoulder to the darkto gain you ground—if just one ledge of lightyou flutter to, right now, rereading that.…

People, Power, and Profits, by Joseph E. Stiglitz (Norton). This urgent work, by the foremost champion of “progressive capitalism,” starts from the premise that Donald Trump’s Presidency reflects a deeper malaise—rising inequality caused by mismanaged globalization, financial liberalization, and destabilizing technological change. Unless these structural issues are addressed, Stiglitz argues, nostrum-peddling demagoguery will find a receptive audience. Although the book jacket displays a clenched fist, Stiglitz’s vision is a paean to moderation: “Properly designed, well-regulated markets, working together with governments and a broad array of civil society institutions.” In 2019, this kind of levelheaded pragmatism feels downright radical. The Dictionary Wars, by Peter Martin (Princeton). In 1782, Noah Webster published a spelling book that aimed to do away with British “corruption and tyranny.” Declaring himself the “prophet of language…

There’s a man in a woman’s apartment, and he’s decided, after one date and a roll around the sack, that he’d rather not leave. The man and the woman are co-workers—she’s a waitress at a diner; he’s a cook whose comely wrists have attracted her attention—but, in important ways, they’re strangers. Neither knows the other’s age; neither is much inclined, on that score, to tell the truth. But the man insists not only on staying the night but on falling, instantaneously, more by an act of will than by an accident of the heart, in love. He jokes and wheedles and begs and tells stories and pledges his troth. She deflects and keeps hinting at the door. The sex was good—we open on a chaos of frantic sound and acrobatic…

In 1978, Maurice Sendak began to design a new production of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” which débuted in Houston two years later. (A diorama of a scene in the second act is pictured above.) A dozen Sendak-designed operas and ballets followed. He often turned to the archives of the Morgan Library for inspiration and later returned the favor, bequeathing nine hundred of his preparatory works to the museum. The exhibition “Maurice Sendak: Drawing the Curtain” opens on June 14. HIP-HOP South Florida has reëmerged as a hotbed of hip-hop in recent years, with several purveyors of the dark and boisterous SoundCloud-rap phenomenon coming from Dade and Broward Counties. Miami’s Denzel Curry has been there from the beginning—he was still in high school when he joined the iconoclastic collective Raider Klan…

A few hours before showtime at the Café Carlyle, the comedic actor Megan Mullally, whose band Nancy and Beth was nearing the conclusion of a two-week residency, relaxed on a couch in her fifteenth-floor suite at the Carlyle Hotel. She wore Gucci interlocking-G track pants, a neckerchief, a puffy gold jacket, and a Tupac Shakur T-shirt. “It’s a poignant shirt,” she said. Her husband, the comedic actor Nick Offerman, sat at a genteel desk nearby, in a T-shirt that said “HUEVOS.” He was “furiously writing songs,” he said, for his own upcoming tour. Soon, the couple was headed to Australia. In Nancy and Beth, Mullally and the actor-singer Stephanie Hunt perform numbers ranging from Lambert, Hendricks & Ross’s “Moanin’” to Gucci Mane’s “I Don’t Love Her,” dancing in tight…

The adventure of the lost heirs begins when Shay and her friend Giustinia run into Harena at the Fleur des Îles café. This happens in the early two-thousands, at the same time that a criminal at large on Anjavavy Island is cutting off people’s heads. The mysterious beheadings are not connected to the events recounted here, except to establish the lawlessness that is always present behind the dazzling Anjavavy panorama of sugar-white beaches and cobalt sea. The crimes begin to surface one hot January morning, as a French hotel manager is taking his predawn constitutional along Rokely Bay and spies through a mist of sand flies something just above the tide line that looks like an unhusked coconut. It turns out to be a human head, one that was last…

To such a request, the world is obliging. Just in the past week, a rotund porcupine,who seemed equally startled by me. The man who swallowed a tiny microphoneto record the sounds of his body,not considering beforehand how he might remove it. A cabbage and mustard sandwich on marbled bread. How easily the large spiders were caught under a clear plastic cup surprised even them. I don’t know why I was surprised every time love started or ended.Or why each time a new fossil, Earth-like planet, or war.Or that no one kept being there when the doorknob had clearly. What should not have been so surprising:my error after error, recognized when appearing on the faces of others. What did not surprise enough:my daily expectation that anything would continue,and then that so…

On my first day in Ethiopia, my aunt Aster asked me not to leave the house. “Stay home,” she said. “Don’t go outside alone.” Her father, my grandfather, had built the house forty years earlier, shortly after his eighth and final child was born. I had lived there for the first two years of my life, before my mother, my sister, and I left to join my father, who had migrated to America in 1978, in the wake of Ethiopia’s Communist revolution. It had been twentyfive years since I or anyone in my immediate family had been back to Ethiopia. My aunt, whom I met for the first time when I landed in Addis Ababa, told me that in the years since we had left practically nothing had changed in…

In 1990, using the name Smog, the singer and songwriter Bill Callahan released his début album, “Sewn to the Sky.” It’s a discordant, inscrutable, and periodically frustrating collection of mostly instrumental, low-fidelity noise, and contains few hints of the lucid and tender folk music that he would be making almost thirty years later. In 1991, Callahan signed with Drag City, a Chicagobased independent record label that specializes in oddball rock and roll. He began collaborating with the producers Jim O’Rourke, who was later a member of Sonic Youth, and John McEntire, of the band Tortoise. His music became progressively more melodic, though it never stopped being deeply idiosyncratic. Callahan just turned fifty-three. His new double album, “Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest,” is a powerful meditation on home and its comforts,…