Innholdsfortegnelse for August 5-12, 2019 i The New Yorker

A lot of up-and-coming rappers drive A rented Maseratis, or live in Mc-Mansions with underwater mortgages, or borrow jewelry to wear on Instagram. Marlon Craft, who is twenty-six, lives with his parents and his sister in Manhattan Plaza, the Section 8 apartment complex in Hell’s Kitchen. On a recent Thursday, wearing a T-shirt and slippers, he gave a tour—his desktop recording studio, his folded-up Murphy bed—before settling in the living room, where there were several hand drums, a vibraphone, and framed photos of Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. “Pops is a jazz drummer,” Craft explained. “That’s why the new album is full of live instrumentation—my little homage to him. That, and we couldn’t afford to clear too many samples.” He was referring to his début album, “Funhouse Mirror,” which would…

The Warsaw Book Fair takes place each May in the National Stadium, a basketlike structure flecked with the red and white of the Polish flag. On a bright Saturday morning, hundreds of orange balloons given out by an audiobook company bobbed from children’s hands, and crowds of readers browsed the booths of publishers from across Europe. The National Fryderyk Chopin Institute had a grand piano at its booth, and a young woman played “Bohemian Rhapsody.” At a pop-up bookstore, a clerk with long brown hair and hipster glasses obligingly showed a customer a copy of “Forever Butt,” a queer-magazine anthology (“pocketsized, pink and super gay”). A long line of people snaked out of the booth of the venerable publishing house Wydawnictwo Literackie and around several of the other displays. They…

“A lie is a lie is a lie,” Whoopi Goldberg said. It was May 2nd, and she was on the set of “The View,” the daytime talk show that she co-hosts. The subject was Attorney General William Barr, who had argued that the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was not as alarming as it seemed—endorsing Donald Trump’s claim that there had been “no collusion, no obstruction” in the Russia case. Goldberg was incredulous. “Our parents taught us, if you lie, there are consequences,” she said. “When are consequences coming back?” Her guest, the attorney Alan Dershowitz, offered an answer that combined legal analysis and political handicapping. “They come back in November of 2020, when we all go to the polls and we vote against people that we think lied,” he…

It’s been a long time since my body.Unbearable, I put it downon the earth the way my old manrolled dice. It’s been a long time sincetime. But I had weight back there. Had substance& sinew, damage you could seeby looking between your hands & hearingblood. It was called reading, they told me,too late. But too late. I red. I made a killingin language & was surroundedby ghosts. I used my arsenalof defunct verbs & brokeinto a library of second chances,the E.R. Where they bandagedmy head, even as the black wordskept seeping through,like this. Back there, I couldn’tget the boys to look at meeven in my best jean jacket.It was 2006 or 1865 or .327.What a time to be alive! they said,this time louder, more assault rifles.Did I tell you? I…

The Guarded Gate, by Daniel Okrent (Scribner). America’s most successful anti-migrant campaign used laws instead of walls. This sweeping history outlines how, in 1924, the Immigration Restriction League won passage of legislation that targeted Italians, Jews, and other “tainted aliens.” Okrent delves into the eugenics movement, which brought together misguided scientists and master-race theorists and offered the country’s most powerful men a way to launder their bigotry with faux objectivity. Credulous outlets, including the Times and Scribner’s, promoted eugenicist ideas, and helped convince the public that “unfit” races were poisoning white America’s genetic pool. Calvin Coolidge, stumping for the bill, provided a rallying cry that today sounds unnervingly familiar: “America must be kept American.” Lotharingia, by Simon Winder (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Interlacing history and travelogue, this prose journey from…

It can feel almost cruel to watch Chekhov’s great late plays from the smug vantage point of the present: we can see, all too clearly, the future that awaits his bewildered Russian gentlefolk. In 2016, I saw the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg perform “The Cherry Orchard” at BAM. When the ambitious serf’s son Lopakhin announced that he had bought the aristocrat Lyubov Ranevskaya’s estate out from under her, the director, Lev Dodin, had him croon “My Way,” a startling anachronism that perfectly transformed the boorishly triumphant upstart into a vainglorious karaoke hero. Lopakhin represents the overthrow of the Russian landowning class by capital and those who wield it—though things didn’t quite work out that way. Dodin ended his production with the cast members lined up as if before…

PAYING FOR TREATMENT Nathan Heller, in his piece about how families are crowdfunding to cover medical costs, astutely observes that the exploitative storytelling culture underpinning GoFundMe “looks past all the interlocking motions of society in favor of the personal, the private, the atomized view” (“Tell Us What You Need,” July 1st). The crowdfunding system requires people, such as the parents of gravely ill children, to strategically craft a digital presence from their suffering. This is a serious moral concern: the practice of packaging experiences often dehumanizes storytellers by reducing them to the problems they face. Heller describes a project that funds therapy for black women and girls without requiring them to recount painful memories to benefactors. Such a campaign is a refreshing alternative in a culture where collecting and sharing…

I dreamed you into existence, carefulto make you less perfect than I knew youwould be, choosing your grandmother’s weakknees, your grandfather’s cruel streak,an aunt’s meatless calves, my own callousvanity. Before you were born I dreamedof chicken bones, knives and coins, clouds shaped likesheep, and shamrocks, and buntings. I burned incense,gathered feathers, pinched countless dough babiesfrom flour and salt. Always there was fear, alwaysthere was longing, always this bargainingwith nameless gods, gods who cared if the next carwould be blue, if a dog would bark before I reacheda thousand. An old woman knocked, brightof eye, kind of countenance, offering mushrooms andfigs, or dishes of cream, and I shut the door, evenin my dream. That’s fairy-tale stuff; none of that, my love.When the dark bird flew against the glass as dawnsoftened the…

The brief but rich Drive East festival, at A.R.T./New York Theatres, Aug. 5-11, presents a packed program of Indian dance and music by accomplished performers from India and the U.S. One highlight is a solo evening by the Odissi dancer Bijayini Satpathy (above), whose technique is extraordinarily vivid—a powerful expression of the classical Indian ideal of storytelling through movement. Other participants include the Princeton-based sitar virtuoso Hidayat Khan and the bharata-natyam dancer Vidhya Subramanian, from Cupertino. ART Fred W. McDarrah Museum of the City of New York McDarrah, who died in 2007, was the first staff photographer of the Village Voice. His beat was Manhattan, and his photographs showed a maze of streets and ideas snaking their way down to the Hudson and the East River, streets filled with so…

The last time handwriting enthusiasts had this much fun was probably back in 2010, when Lindsay Lohan’s unexpectedly tidy courtroom notes went viral. So far, this past year has brought Donald Trump scrawling “nice” on a map that showed the Golan Heights as part of Israel; an Ohio law encouraging the return of cursive; and the Duchess of Sussex doing calligraphy at a nursing home. (She used to work in a stationery shop and once told Esquire that she would wear a tube sock over her hand to avoid getting oils on her correspondence.) In London, the British Library is putting on an exhibition called “Writing: Making Your Mark.” There is plenty of handwriting (a papal indulgence from 1455, Joyce’s color-coded “Ulysses” drafts), but the show also covers printing, typing,…

When the Venetian merchant Marco Polo got to China, in the latter part of the thirteenth century, he saw many wonders—gunpowder and coal and eyeglasses and porcelain. One of the things that astonished him most, however, was a new invention, implemented by Kublai Khan, a grandson of the great conqueror Genghis. It was paper money, introduced by Kublai in 1260. Polo could hardly believe his eyes when he saw what the Khan was doing: He makes his money after this fashion. He makes them take of the bark of a certain tree, in fact of the mulberry tree, the leaves of which are the food of the silkworms, these trees being so numerous that whole districts are full of them. What they take is a certain fine white bast or…

They were late. Olive Kitteridge hated people who were late. A little after lunchtime, they had said, and Olive had the lunch things out, peanut butter and jelly for the two oldest kids, and tuna-fish sandwiches for her son, Christopher, and his wife, Ann. For the little ones, she had no idea. The baby was only six weeks old and wouldn’t be eating anything solid yet; Little Henry was over two, but what did two-year-olds eat? Olive couldn’t remember what Christopher had eaten when he was that age. The phone rang, and Olive quickly answered it. Christopher said, “O.K., Mom, we’re just leaving Portland. We had to stop for lunch.” “Lunch?” Olive said. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Through the window, the late-April sun was milky over the…

In 1698, five ships set sail from Scotland, carrying a cargo of fine trade goods, including wigs, woollen socks and blankets, mother-of-pearl combs, Bibles, and twenty-five thousand pairs of leather shoes. There was even a printing press, with which the twelve hundred colonists aboard planned to manage a future busy with contracts and treaties. To make space for the luxuries, the usual rations for food and farming were reduced by half. But farming wasn’t the point. The ships’ destination was the Darien region of Panama, where the Company of Scotland hoped to create a trading hub that would bridge the isthmus and unite the world’s great oceans, while raising the economic prospects of a stubbornly independent kingdom that had just struggled through years of famine. The scheme was wildly popular…

The Woodstock Music & Art Fair is best known for one of its final performances, Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” From the ragged chaos of “Stepping Stone,” Hendrix began slashing at the anthem’s opening notes, stretching them out until the familiar melody sounded wobbly and shrill. His version is drenched in feedback and distortion, a call-and-response between the notes on the page and Hendrix’s extratextual flourishes. It’s a funkier version of what so many of the blues rockers of the previous three days had attempted, somehow more succinct yet more expansive. It feels like a prophetic vision of a future that never quite arrived. It’s estimated that around four hundred thousand people attended Woodstock—enough to have made Max Yasgur’s three-hundred-acre alfalfa field, in Bethel, the third most populous…