Innholdsfortegnelse for August 26, 2019 i The New Yorker

The painter Amy Sherald, who has described herself as “an American realist, painting American people doing American things,” made headlines last year, when her official portrait of the former First Lady Michelle Obama was unveiled. The Hauser & Wirth gallery exhibits her latest luminous, color-washed figures. (Opens Sept. 10.) The Met Breuer surveys the fifty-year career of another American realist, the Latvian-born, New York-based painter Vija Celmins, whose crystalline renderings of night skies, seascapes, and spiderwebs convey the unfathomable mystery of the so-called known world. (Opens Sept. 24.) The comic genius Rube Goldberg once wrote, “The younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions, but don’t believe that I ever existed as a person.” The Queens Museum reintroduces visitors to the Pulitzer…

One morning in Manhattan: downtown, a sneaker pop-up selling ninety-nine-cent AriZona Iced Tea-branded Adidas turned into a riot, with a bottle hurled and police summoned. Seventy blocks uptown: Sotheby’s hosted a hushed display of a hundred pairs of what the auction house called the “rarest sneakers ever produced.” Among the people in the gallery was Miles S. Nadal, the Canadian-born executive chairman of the Peerage Capital Group. He was dressed like any other sixty-one-year-old businessman, in a dark suit and a striped tie, but on his feet he wore a spotless pair of “varsity blue/varsity red” Sacai x Nike LDWaffle trainers, which featured double Swooshes, two tongues, and midsoles that jutted out the back like little cliffs. He had bought them the day before, for seven hundred and fifty dollars,…

W. E. B. Du Bois, the twentieth century’s leading black intellectual, once lived at 3059 Villa Avenue, in the Bronx. He moved to a small rented house there with his wife, Nina Gomer Du Bois, and their daughter, Yolande, in about 1912. When I’m walking in that borough I sometimes stop by the site. It’s just off Jerome Avenue, not far from the Bedford Park subway station. The anchor business at that intersection seems to be the Osvaldo #5 Barber Shop, which flies pennants advertising services for sending money to Africa and to Bangladesh. All kinds of people pass by. You hear Spanish and Chinese and maybe Hausa spoken on the street. The first time I went to Du Bois’s old address, I wondered if I might find a plaque,…

In the winter of 2016, Donald Trump was roaring through the primaries, and Mike Pompeo was determined to stop him. Pompeo, a little-known congressman from Wichita, helped persuade Marco Rubio to make a late stand in Kansas. Like many Republicans in Congress, Pompeo believed that Rubio had the national-security knowledge and the judgment to be President, and Trump did not. Urged on by Pompeo, Rubio’s team pulled money out of other states to gamble on winning the Kansas caucus. It was one of the few remaining contests in which Rubio still hoped to beat Trump, who, he said, was a “con artist” about to “take over the Republican Party.” On March 5th, Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, arrived in Wichita for the caucus. Rubio left his closing argument…

Divorced, fired from adjunct teaching after a botched attempt to unionize, and her only child lost to college, Bev had, for the first time in decades, more freedom than she knew what to do with. The empty house, hers alone, disgusted her: she sold it, against her daughter’s wishes, and moved to a two-bedroom apartment in a new building downtown. Between the house money and the monthly support payments from her ex—he was fucking his assistant and had signed these things away with the heedless joy of a rabbit sprung from a trap—she’d been given the opportunity to think carefully about what to do with the rest of her life. This quickly came to seem like torture. So she volunteered for Movin’ On Up. This was the charity she’d donated…

Not that long ago, Margaret Mead was one of the most widely known intellectuals in America. Her first book, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” published in 1928, when she was twenty-six, was a best-seller, and for the next fifty years she was a progressive voice in national debates about everything from sex and gender to nuclear policy, the environment, and the legalization of marijuana. (She was in favor—and this was in 1969.) She had a monthly column in Redbook that ran for sixteen years and was read by millions. She advised government agencies, testified before Congress, and lectured on all kinds of subjects to all kinds of audiences. She was Johnny Carson’s guest on the “Tonight Show.” Time called her “Mother to the World.” In 1979, the year after she…

Who doesn’t have a problem with Pierre-Auguste Renoir? A tremendously engaging show that centers on the painter’s prodigious output of female nudes, “Renoir: The Body, the Senses,” at the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, sparks a sense of crisis. The reputation of the once exalted, still unshakably canonical, Impressionist has fallen on difficult days. Never mind the affront to latter-day educated tastes of a painting style so sugary that it imperils your mind’s incisors; there’s a more burning issue. The art historian Martha Lucy, writing in the show’s gorgeous catalogue, notes that, “in contemporary discourse,” the name Renoir has “come to stand for ‘sexist male artist.’” Renoir took such presumptuous, slavering joy in looking at naked women—who in his paintings were always creamy or biscuit white, often with strawberry…

BY ANY OTHER NAME During my nine years as the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, D.C., Justice John Paul Stevens was a regular visitor (The Talk of the Town, August 5th & 12th). Every year, he would bring his clerks to see books in our collection that may have belonged to Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. As Tyler Foggatt describes, Justice Stevens believed de Vere to be the author of Shakespeare’s works. We at the Folger revered Justice Stevens for his independent-mindedness. But his denial of Shakespeare’s authorship is founded on a conspiracy theory that no reputable Shakespeare scholar countenances. The historical evidence of Shakespeare’s career as an actor and a playwright—including praise of his greatness by his contemporaries—is clear and undeniable. Those interested in…

I want to give more of my timeto others the less I have of it,give it away in a will and testament,give it to the girls’ club, give itto the friends of the urban trees. Your life is not your own andnever was. It came to you in a boxmarked fragile. It came from thecomplaint department like amendson an order you did not place withthem. Who gave me this chill life. It came with no card. It camewithout instruction. It said thisend up though I do not trust thosemarkings. I have worn it upsidedowns. I have washed it withoutseparating and it did not shrink.Take from it what you will. I will…

There are gestures that have been lost.One was picking up a desk phoneUsing a couple of fingersTo snag it under the little shelf where the receiverRested when it was not in use;You’d carry the phone with you if you needed to pace,Perhaps with a studied restlessness that felt good:You were removing a solid object from its positionAnd that had meaning. You gestured with it in hand,Or held it against your hip. Something both possessive and devil-may-care in it. The disruption of a ring, the caller unknown,Was one of the day’s small dramas. We lived for them.There were hours unaccounted for, pages turned.Ticking of the heart between rings … A feminine variant was to wear the curling receiver cordSashed across your waist, over the elbow, up the armSo the curls were…

Travelers, by Helon Habila (Norton). The narrator of this novel is a Nigerian graduate student who moves from Virginia to Berlin with his wife, when she is awarded a fellowship to paint portraits of migrants. His literary perspective on migration is challenged by encounters with people from around the world who now live precariously, and far from their European dream. “Even in Berlin I miss Berlin,” one of them observes. When the narrator loses his documents, after picking up the wrong bag on a train, he finds himself in deportation proceedings, among those whose lives he previously contemplated from a seemingly secure position. The book’s elaborate depiction of a range of personal sacrifices brings into focus the human tragedies obscured by statistics and discussions of public policy. Screen Tests, by…

When the Afropunk Festival débuted, in 2005, it was intended as a safe haven for black punks. As its popularity grew, so, too, did its embrace of the broader culture, and the marginalized soon found their space invaded by the mainstream. Nonetheless, the festival remains renowned for both its striking lineups and the equally remarkable fashion of its attendees. Included on this year’s staggering bill, running Aug. 24-25 in Brooklyn’s Commodore Barry Park, is Rico Nasty, whose raging punk-rap embodies the event’s original counterculture spirit. ART “Culture and the People” Museo del Barrio In 1969, when the artist-educator Raphael Montañez Ortiz was asked to develop a curriculum on Puerto Rican history and culture, his answer was to open a community museum, El Museo del Barrio, in a Harlem public-school classroom.…

The New York Film Festival, at Lincoln Center (Sept. 27-Oct. 13), is the city’s main movie event, and this year’s edition includes a trio of films from Netflix. The festival’s opening-night offering is Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” starring Robert De Niro as a hit man whose exploits connect with politics—in particular, the real-life disappearance, in 1975, of the union leader Jimmy Hoffa (played by Al Pacino). Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, and Anna Paquin co-star. Noah Baumbach’s romantic drama “Marriage Story,” the festival’s centerpiece, stars Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver as an actress and a playwright going through a bitter divorce; Laura Dern, Alan Alda, and Ray Liotta co-star. Among the festival’s main slate of films will be the French actress and director Mati Diop’s first feature, “Atlantics,” a drama set…

There are two kinds of people: those who know nothing about Esalen and those who purport to know everything about it. To find out which kind of person you’re talking to, simply utter the three syllables (stress on the first, slant-rhyme with “mescaline”) and wait. In response, you’ll get either an uncomprehending stare or an effusion of tall tales. Have you heard the one about the poet and the astrophysicist who met in the Esalen hot springs and eloped the next week? How about the accountant who visited for the weekend, cured his depression with a single dose of ketamine, and became a Zen monk? The secret full-moon dance parties? The billionaire-C.E.O. sightings? “This isn’t a place,” a staffer told me while rolling a joint on a piece of rough-hewn…

Do you have rights at work? Franklin Delano Roosevelt thought you did. In 1936, while trying to haul America’s economy out of the bog that the free market had driven it into, Roosevelt argued that workers needed to have a say, declaring it unjust that a small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For too many of us throughout the land, life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness. For Roosevelt, a system in which bosses could unilaterally decide “the hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor” amounted to “dictatorship.” He hoped that the New Deal…

A very long novel—like Edoardo Albinati’s “The Catholic School” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)—complicates our sense of what a novel is. A thousand-plus pages, in the range of a million words: such a novel makes “Ulysses” and “The Golden Notebook” and “Gravity’s Rainbow” seem sleek. It resists our efforts to read it on the bus or in bed, to get lost in it, to finish it, as we were taught to do in school; even on an e-reader, it tries our twenty-first-century patience. Very long nonfiction books are typically justified by their subject matter. Not so the very long novel: impractical, gratuitous, it has to justify itself as it goes. The very long novel is even more gratuitous in Italian than it is in English. Jhumpa Lahiri, introducing a new book…