Innholdsfortegnelse for September 23, 2019 i The New Yorker

One afternoon last February, Donald Trump stood at a lectern at Florida International University, in Miami, and before a cheering crowd of a thousand called President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela a “dictator” and a “Cuban puppet.” Trump was flanked by two enormous flags, Venezuelan and American, and the word Democracia flashed on a screen behind him. Chants in Spanish alternated between thanking Trump (“We’re with you!”) and taunting Maduro (“He’s already fallen!”). “It was like a rock concert,” Rafael Fernandez, who left Venezuela nearly two decades ago, told me. The Trump Administration had recently instituted sanctions against Venezuela’s state oil company, which supplies the overwhelming majority of the government’s budget, and more than fifty countries, including the U.S., now recognized the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as the country’s legitimate…

I understands how you might feelthat where she parked the carreveals a kind of disregardbordering on disrespect. You didn’t say or have to sayas much—it was the wayyour eyelids fluttered near eachother in caress, as if to arm your consciousness againstexpressing exasperationat the continual arrivalof unpredictable events that come along with I.Much like the worlddestabilized by risingtemperatures and seas, I can approachcatastrophe, a carnivalwhack-a-molerun amok. I is sorry.…

One of Edward J. Snowden’s earliest memories is of sneaking around the house and turning back the time on all the clocks in the hope of tricking his parents into letting him stay up late to watch more TV. Another is of the day his father brought home a Commodore 64 and how exciting it was, that very first time, to hold a joystick. Snowden’s new autobiography, “Permanent Record” (Metropolitan), is the autobiography of a gamer, pale and bleary-eyed and glued to his screen, longing for invincibility. Some people write memoirs; other people craft legends. Snowden, who once aspired to be a model and is in some quarters regarded as a modern messiah, is the second kind. As a kid, he read about King Arthur, and his family name comes…

MY SHOT Nick Paumgarten, in his piece about the recent measles outbreak in New York State, quotes Dr. Howard Zucker, the state’s health commissioner, as saying that “we need to study vaccine hesitancy as a disease” (“The Message of Measles,” September 2nd). This statement reflects what I believe to be a profound truth that might be helpful in combatting the anti-vaccine movement. Like Dr. Zucker, I am surprised by how many highly educated people are anti-vaxxers. As a medical-school student and later as a primary-care physician, I encountered medical professionals who expressed hesitancy about vaccine use. I have since wondered how many more are among our ranks. It scares me that those who provide primary-care medicine might be, at best, tacitly supporting patients who are not vaccinating their children, or,…

Hello, I am a woman on a blue-and-green sphere that has dollops and doinks of mountains all over it. Some of the mountains on my cosmic sphere splooge out thick liquid fire spurts that run downhill and cool and turn into vacation destinations after a few thousand years. I am a woman living on a planet that has noodle-shaped guys squiggling silently in the soil and four-legged mammal kings with hammer feet, or horns on their heads, or coats covered in spots and stripes. My planet also has live, feathered, beaky skeletons flying through the environment, and big, heavy creatures that are tusked and trunked and have sad, long memories and wash their bodies in cold mud puddles and know who their babies are. There are large, deadly cats watching…

I imagine there is a place of deep rest—not in the resting but after,when the body has forgotten the weight of fatigue or of its many betrayals—how unfair that once I thought it clever to blame my bodyfor the wounds in me: the ankle bulbous and aching, the heaviness in the thigh, and the fat, the encroachment of flesh. It is hard to believethat there are those who do not know that it is possible to let things go, to then see the expansion of flesh—it is so easy, and that knowingis a pathology. What is unknown to me is the clear day of rest— I carry a brain of crushed paper, everything unfolds as if by magic,every spot of understanding is a miracle, I cannot take any credit for…

The small-bore politics that I’ve been caught up in for the past thirty years has provided, beyond the usual attractions of graft and corruption, a vivid lesson in regional geography, as I’ve had to make sure my constituents would keep showing up to vote. Still, it had been a very long time since I’d last visited Prairiedale. Back then, the town was known as Wide Spot; it wouldn’t have had a name at all if it weren’t for the filling station there, and, had anyone thought about it, would have been called something more dignified, like Fort Lauderdale. In the old days, the Indians led their cattle to the freight yards many miles away on horseback; their wives awaited them in Model T Fords, pulled their saddles off the horses,…

Last Witnesses, by Svetlana Alexievich, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Random House). In this sweeping oral history of life during the Second World War, interviews with men and women who were children at the time coalesce into a haunting picture of how life is mutilated by war. First published in 1985, in the Soviet Union, and appearing now in English for the first time, the book documents the terrible swiftness with which modest pleasures—going to the cinema, relishing a lilac’s bloom—were swept aside by brutality. Children often witnessed horror without comprehending it: a seven-year-old boy hears human bones cracking “like ripe pumpkins,” and a girl in a German camp, remembering a friend who died while they were there together, thinks, “I wanted to tell…

The subjects of Amy Sherald’s eight strong oil portraits at Hauser & Wirth impress with their looks, in both senses: striking elegance, riveting gazes. In six of the pictures, the subjects stand singly against bright monochrome grounds. (The other two works are more complicated.) They are young or youngish, attractive, stylishly dressed, and likely well-to-do—presentable people, presented. All are African-American. Should this matter? It does in light of the artist’s drive to, in her words, seek “versions of myself in art history and in the world.” Sherald, who is forty-six and lives in New Jersey, revitalizes a long-languishing genre in painting by giving portraits worldly work to do and distinctive pleasures to impart. Her style is a simplified realism, worked from photographs that she stages and takes of individuals who…

No character embodies the split genre of George Gershwin’s jazz-tinged opera “Porgy and Bess” better than Sportin’ Life. The other denizens of Catfish Row sing their hearts out with larger-than-life lyricism, but the silver-tongued dope peddler—a role shaped by such song-and-dance men as Cab Calloway—slithers about the triplets and tritones of “It Ain’t Necessarily So” like a snake in the grass. The American tenor Frederick Ballentine (above) slips into Sportin’ Life’s duds for the Metropolitan Opera’s season-opening production, on Sept. 23. ART “Apollo’s Muse” Metropolitan Museum This absorbing exhibition celebrates, largely through photographs, the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11’s moon landing. Chronologically organized, it begins before the advent of photography, when Galileo’s seventeenth-century drawings (based on his observations through a homemade telescope) shattered the Western world’s image of the moon…

For two weekends a year, a flotilla of flappers in ropes of pearls and men in bow ties storm Governors Island for the Jazz Age Lawn Party. As Aperol spritzes flow, they dance the Charleston and party like it’s 1929. —Rachel Syme “For me, it’s about the fashion. If someone put so much effort into dressing like that, they must have been happy.” —Aicha Metivier, consignment-store manager “Flappers were punk rockers. They were the ones saying, ‘No, I’m going to do what I want, I’m going to cut my hair, I’m not going to wear a bra or a corset, I’m just going to enjoy my life and drink until my husband or boyfriend goes to war.’ ” —Analucia McGorty, costume designer “This is a Stetson. Everybody thinks Stetson is…

The street corners of downtown Rapid City, South Dakota, the gateway to the Black Hills and the self-proclaimed “most patriotic city in America,” are populated by bronze statues of all the former Presidents of the United States, each just eerily shy of life-size. On the corner of Mount Rushmore Road and Main Street, a diminutive Andrew Jackson scowls and crosses his arms; on Ninth and Main, a shoulder-high Teddy Roosevelt strikes an impressive pose, holding a petite sword. As one drives farther into the Black Hills—a region considered sacred by its original residents, who were displaced by settlers, loggers, and gold miners—the roadside attractions offer a vision of American history that grows only more uncanny. Western expansion and settler colonialism join in a jolly, jumbled fantasia: visitors can tour a…

The mid-July sun at Waialua, on the north shore of Oahu, was already so unforgiving at 9 a.m. that the ice in a cooler of LaCroix near the foot of Constance Wu’s chair had all but melted; an assistant heaped up the few remaining cubes around the cans. It was the first day of principal photography on the movie “I Was a Simple Man,” an intergenerational family drama set partly in nineteen-fifties Hawaii, and Wu was being readied for continuity photos of her character, Grace, an ethnically Chinese woman whose family has lived in Hawaii for generations. Wu wore a floral dress with swirls of turquoise, and a waxy white orchid was about to be pinned behind her ear. When the stylist, a genial man whose beard and burly physique…

Two volumes of Susan Sontag’s diaries, edited by her son, David Rieff, have been published, and a third is forth-coming. In the preface to the first volume, published in 2008, under the title “Reborn,” Rieff confesses his uncertainty about the project. He reports that at the time of her death, in 2004, Sontag had given no instructions about the dozens of notebooks that she had been filling with her private thoughts since adolescence and which she kept in a closet in her bedroom. “Left to my own devices,” he writes, “I would have waited a long time before publishing them, or perhaps never published them at all.” But because Sontag had sold her papers to the University of California at Los Angeles, and access to them was largely unrestricted, “either…

In the summer of 1954, Roy DeCarava, a thirty-four-year-old photographer from Harlem, paid a visit to the fifty-two-year-old Langston Hughes. The two men didn’t know each other well, but it was not unusual for younger artists to seek out the famous author. In the more than two decades since Hughes—who was originally from Joplin, Missouri—had decided to make his home in Harlem, he had opened his doors to fledgling writers, painters, performers, and the like, who came looking for his genial counsel about their work and their lives. Enormously productive, Hughes was, at the time, one of very few artists of color who supported themselves with their art alone. So far, DeCarava hadn’t managed to do that himself. The only child of a hardworking single Jamaican mother, he had learned…

A few episodes into “Our Boys,” Simon, an agent for the Shabak, Israel’s internal security service, talks with two policemen about a case that they are struggling to solve: the death by burning of a sixteen-year-old Palestinian boy. He was abducted in the aftermath of another horrific crime, Hamas’s kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teen-agers—students whose disappearance united Israelis, first in the hope that they would be rescued, and then, once their bodies were discovered, in grief and rage. Revenge seems to be the likely and logical motive, but the cops reject it. “Jews would never do this,” one of them says, making a dismissive gesture. “You sure?” Simon asks. “Yes,” the cop says. “So is my mother,” Simon says, showing him a text message: “Thank God Jews didn’t…