Innholdsfortegnelse for July 8-15, 2019 i The New Yorker

The piping on the red snowsuit was yellow, and on the green snowsuit it was blue: fire-engine red, sunflower yellow, summer-grass green, deep-ocean blue, the palette of preschool, the colors in a set of finger paints. I loved everything about those mail-order snowsuits—the snap-off hoods, the ribbed cuffs—but I especially loved the piping, which ran, as thick as a pipe cleaner, across the yoke of each jacket and down each leg of the pants, like the stripes of a military uniform. Just what I’d have done if I’d sewn them myself. It made the boys look like soldiers from different regiments. The red-and-yellow brigade of the two-year-olds, the green-and-blue brigade of the four-year-olds. I still dream about them—the snowsuits, the little boys. I sewed my first son his first snowsuit…

In today’s political culture, people running for President may announce their candidacy on the steps of their home-town city hall or on “The View,” but the full introduction comes with their book. Some candidates’ memoirs tell stories of humble beginnings and of obstacles overcome; some describe searches for identity; some earnestly set out detailed policy agendas. Nearly all are relentlessly bland. In 2017, Joe Biden, a longtime senator from Delaware, Barack Obama’s Vice-President for eight years, and now a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, published an unusually raw memoir about the death, two years earlier, of his forty-six-year-old son, Beau, describing how it had threatened to undo him but ultimately brought his family closer. Beau, his father writes, was “Joe Biden 2.0,” a war veteran, a prosecutor, and a…

A week ago Thursday, my uncle Jim called. When I picked up the phone and said, “Hello,” he said, “Hello.” The voice was familiar and yet I didn’t recognize it. “Who is this?” I said. “Jim,” he told me. “Uncle Jim.” “What?” I was very surprised, because I thought Uncle Jim was dead. “Who is this?” I wanted to know. I really wanted to know. “I just told you. Jim. I’m here with Hank. Is your mom home?” “No,” I said. I thought Uncle Jim had been dead for years. “Where is she?” Now, the Hank he’d just referred to was probably his older brother, and my mom was their sister, Margie, and the thing of it was, the bewildering thing of it was that I thought they were all…

Rudyard Kipling used to be a household name. Born in 1865 in Bombay, where his father taught at an arts school, and then exiled as a boy to England, he returned to India as a teenager, and quickly established himself as the great chronicler of the Anglo-Indian experience. He was Britain’s first Nobel laureate in literature, and probably the most widely read writer since Tennyson. People knew his poems by heart, read his stories to their children. The Queen wanted to knight him. But in recent years Kipling’s reputation has taken such a beating that it’s a wonder any sensible critic would want to go near him now. Kipling has been variously his labelled a colonialist, a jingoist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a right-wing imperialist warmonger; and—though some…

Around Christmas in 1894, the actress Sarah Bernhardt called Maurice de Brunhoff, the manager of Lemercier, a publishing company in Paris that produced her promotional posters. Bernhardt was one of the most famous entertainers in Europe, in part because of her talent for self-promotion. She needed a poster for her play “Gismonda,” which was reopening in a few days. Most of the Lemercier illustrators were on vacation, so the task fell to Alphonse Mucha, a Czech émigré. Mucha designed a long and narrow poster, filled with soft pastels and gold accents, avoiding the bold colors that were typical of the era. Bernhardt, dressed in the style of Byzantine nobility, was flanked by white spaces, as though she had stepped out of the ether. Her surname arced above her head, like…

BRINGING UP BABY Lizzie Widdicombe, in her entertaining exploration of Emily Oster’s data-driven approach to raising children, cites several influences on the modern parent’s psyche, from Kourtney Kardashian to mommy bloggers and nosy friends (“Don’t Worry, Baby,” June 3rd). But, in her vivid portrayal of the frantic and sometimes futile efforts to find the right answers, Widdicombe does not give enough credit to perhaps the most reassuring figure of all: the pediatrician. Here’s a real expert, who has completed a medical degree and a residency in pediatrics and can properly interpret aggregated data after evaluating your child in person. In my wife’s and my experience, the most important step we took in preparing for our child’s birth was to choose a trustworthy pediatrician, who acts as an impartial, knowledgeable…

Mitski, the indie musician, was eighteen when she wrote her first song. That may not seem particularly precocious in an era when adolescent pop phenoms release entire albums that were recorded in their parents’ house. But Mitski Miyawaki, who is now twenty-eight, had not envisaged a future as a musician, or much of a future at all. Mitski grew up all over the world. Her mother, whose last name she uses, is Japanese; her father is American and worked for the State Department, in capacities that she does not discuss. By the time Mitski was eighteen, she had lived in Japan, the Czech Republic, Malaysia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Turkey, Alabama, and Virginia. Changing schools almost yearly, she was always the new kid, always the foreigner, trying on…

My citizenship is most acutelyfelt at night when I entrust myself into the dark and sulfury confusionof the belly of it, having already submitted to a long lick of the justbarely visible mucus of its laws, whose warm coat protects me fromthe perilous storm, the numerous nocturnal forms, and much anxietyregarding same, which would otherwise do enormous harm were it not forthe double capsule that seals me off from it, from other, from self, and inthe good night’s sleep that leaves me waking sticky with indebtednessbut prepared to join the workforce.…

Ghosts of Gold Mountain, by Gordon H. Chang (HMH). Ninety per cent of the construction laborers of the Central Pacific Railroad Company were Chinese, recruited in the eighteen-sixties to extend the railway from the Sierra Nevada to the deserts of Utah. This account draws on payroll records, archeological reports, letters, and memoirs to tell their story. Toiling in heat and snow, often at high elevations, they worked longer each day than their white counterparts did, and at lower pay, and were frequent targets of racist aggression. Explosions, fights, and avalanches claimed hundreds of lives. Recovering this neglected history, Chang shows us the workers in their camps, cooking with Chinese groceries and herbs, celebrating festivals, and burying their dead. Don’t Read Poetry, by Stephanie Burt (Basic). The author, a poet…

“Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story,” at the Guggenheim, is “B a small but timely and often surprising powerhouse of a historical show pegged to a not very good scrap of painting by a star-dusted name. The exhibition includes photographs, documents, and art works relating to the death, on September 28, 1983, of Michael Stewart, a twenty-five-year-old art student at Pratt and a frequenter of the time’s impoverished but raucous, creatively booming East Village and Lower East Side bohemia, from injuries incurred while in police custody. At some point later that year, Jean-Michel Basquiat used marker and acrylics to dash off a sketch of two fiendish cops beating an armless, legless figure, rendered in black silhouette. Lettered above the image is the legend “¿DEFACEMENT©?,” with the second “E” crossed out. (The…

During the summer months of the mid-twentieth century, the epicenter of the New York School shifted from the Cedar Tavern, in Greenwich Village, to the South Fork of Long Island. In the exhibition “Painters of the East End,” the Kasmin gallery focusses on eleven women from that community. (“Seed No. 10,” a 1969 gouache by Lee Krasner, is pictured here.) Some of the artists are well established (Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell); others deserve heightened attention (Betty Parsons, better known as a gallerist). Opens July 11. NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Dr. Lonnie Smith Jazz Standard Don’t question Dr. Lonnie Smith’s trademark turban or ask him to produce a diploma—just trust in this eminently funky organist’s ability…

Twelve hours before he locked himself in his bedroom and took his own life, Alan García, Peru’s two-time former President, gave an interview to the national radio-and-television station RPP, from a local university where he taught. It was a Tuesday evening in mid-April, during Holy Week, and the city was swirling with rumors about García’s imminent arrest. He had been implicated in a dizzyingly complex transnational corruption scandal that had already enveloped much of the Peruvian political class. Now, after months of silence in the face of mounting pressure from prosecutors and the press, he’d decided that it was time to talk. Jenny Alvaro, a producer of the interview, was meeting García for the first time, but she thought she knew what to expect: the bombastic, theatrical, larger-than-life politician who…

The in-law apartment in Flagstaff was atopthe proper house, on a hill, and when the landlords boarded their Winnebago, our summerjob was to read P. G. Wodehouse to the figurines, with feeling. Otherwise, we were forbiddento hang around the owner’s abode, though one afternoon, fevered, I sought their cooler roomsout and found, in a darkened den, a chintz throw on a sofa, and below, a load of Smith & Wessons.I took riflery in school, and Marriage 101, so I know what chintz looks like, and what the endof the road resembles, and seeing those guns I also saw myself that time I was two-timing in the heart-land and hid in the cab of a blue pickup, under a tartan rug, at the video store, wheremy clandestine love was checking out…

The crime was striking a match. Never mind that the match broke before it caught, or that the fire was already burning; sixty-three-year-old Louisine Havemeyer was still hauled into court, one of thirty-nine suffragists who were arrested in front of the White House on February 10, 1919. For more than two years, hundreds of women had been protesting there six days a week. They were known as the Silent Sentinels, because they held their tongues while they held their banners. But starting that January they had taken to burning Woodrow Wilson’s speeches in tiny urns around Lafayette Park, and a few weeks into that new phase of pyrotechnics they decided to burn him, too. Havemeyer did not actually throw the effigy of the twenty-eighth President into the fire, but she…

The poet James Tate, who died in 2015, lived and wrote for decades in a house in the Pelham hills, a few miles up the road from Emily Dickinson’s home, in Amherst, Massachusetts. The two poets were born more than a hundred years apart, yet it is tempting to imagine them as secret-sharers. Boastful about their modesty, constantly daring the world to underestimate them, Tate and Dickinson both wrote major poetry in intentionally minor modes and forms. Tate, who was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1943, chose, early on, a tactically frivolous, essentially defensive manner, full of homespun jokes and antic swerves. It sometimes appeared that he could not be bothered to follow his own line of thought. His first book, “The Lost Pilot,” was published when he was…

“That one is cursed,” a salesman remarks, breezily, as he finalizes “T the sale of a stone-framed mirror topped by a brooding gargoyle. “I’m just letting you know, because some people don’t like that.” His customer, the magnificently fey Andrés (Julio Torres)—an orphan who was abandoned at a convent, then adopted by wealthy chocolatiers, and who wears an air of moody entitlement so aggressive that it might make a Romanov insecure—seems unconcerned. Andrés is, after all, a proud member of Los Espookys, the entrepreneurial “horror group” at the heart of the silly and satisfying new HBO show of the same name, created by and starring Fred Armisen, the comedian Ana Fabrega, and Torres, a “Saturday Night Live” writer. As far as the group is concerned, a curse may be value…