Innholdsfortegnelse for September 5, 2016 i The New Yorker

One day in the mid-nineteen-eighties, Liz Smith was in a car with her friend Arnold Scaasi, the fashion designer. “He said, ‘Have you met the Donald Trumps?’ ” Smith recalled the other day, in a Manhattan town house. “And I said, ‘What are the Donald Trumps?’ ” At the time, Smith, who worked at the Daily News, was the city’s reigning gossip columnist. Trump and his wife, Ivana, were wealthy arrivistes on the New York social scene. Smith followed up on Scaasi’s tip, and it was in part through her column that Trump became known for something more than the shiny building on Fifth Avenue that bore his name. (In 1986 and 1987, Spy magazine’s Liz Smith Tote Board tallied between four and six Trump mentions a month.) Smith is…

Few companies are as unpopular as insurance companies, and no tears were shed for the insurance giant Aetna when, a couple of weeks ago, it announced that it had lost more than four hundred million dollars on Obamacare policies since the Obamacare exchanges were set up, in 2014, and was going to pull out of most of them. The news, which followed similar announcements by United Healthcare and Humana, was greeted with talk of “whining” insurers who “put profits before patients’ health” and are “willing to deny care to make a few extra dollars.” But the recriminations are misplaced. Aetna’s decision reflects an awkward reality: the jerry-rigged, politically compromised nature of Obamacare has made the program unstable, and unable to live up to its lofty promises. It’s not that Obamacare…

What is one to think of the clothes the twenty-nineyear-old pianist Yuja Wang wears when she performs—extremely short and tight dresses that ride up as she plays, so that she has to tug at them when she has a free hand, or clinging backless gowns that give an impression of near-nakedness (accompanied in all cases by four-inch-high stiletto heels)? In 2011, Mark Swed, the music critic of the L.A. Times, referring to the short and tight orange dress Yuja wore when she played Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl, wrote that “had there been any less of it, the Bowl might have been forced to restrict admission to any music lover under 18 not accompanied by an adult.” Two years later, the New Criterion critic Jay Nordlinger characterized…

HAUNTED BY GUANTÁNAMO I had just returned from Guantánamo Bay when I read Connie Bruck’s searing account, “Why Obama Has Failed to Close Guantánamo” (August 1st). As the Obama Administration has floundered through the challenges and failures identified by Bruck, a new generation has grown up in a world in which Guantánamo has always existed. The ongoing detention and torture at the prison—which turns fifteen in January— as well as the ongoing fight to close it, occurs largely outside mainstream media coverage or public consciousness. But the prison’s continued existence poses a threat to the rule of law and to human rights. Guantánamo was once called the “battle lab” for a reason—it has served as a testing site for future abuses. Without public engagement and pressure, an offshore prison…

In the New York of yore, amazing performers like the B-52s, RuPaul, and Lady Bunny came out of the American South with lots to say about fun and about the splendor to be found in being tacky, and more than a little political dialogue about what it meant to be different in a conservative Christian milieu. Like the above-mentioned great band and future brand, Lady Bunny first got her act together in Georgia, at a time when Atlanta was a hothouse for drag of all kinds. (The B-52 is Southern slang for a torpedo-shaped hairdo.) Bunny was raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she was often the only boy taking tap and jazz-dance classes. When she moved to Atlanta, in 1982, Bunny became part of the scene that revolved around Larry…

On a Harlem street corner, a black-shirted Rhadamanthus stands in front of a wooden façade, arms crossed, unfazed by the summer heat. Anyone who tries to enter the door behind him is greeted with a stern “excuse me” and a full patdown. Inside, the atmosphere is loose and loud, augmented by an array of Southern-themed cocktails and a rolling soundtrack of Biggie and Usher. Harlem Nights is a monument to music and to easy living—the frame of a Weber grand piano has been nailed to an exposed-brick wall. What to drink? “The Weed Skirt is really good,” a server yells over the music. “It’s really, really strong.” It arrives, tooth-hurtingly sweet, with cachaça and rum, in a petite Mason jar with a neon straw. For those who’d rather have something…

“At first, I didn’t massively enjoy it,” Danny Cipriani, a bearded British rugby fly-back who was spending his summer in Malibu, said the other morning, over espresso mixed with the oils of coconut and red palm. He meant the ice bath that his hosts—the big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton and the retired volleyball star Gabrielle Reece—prescribe as part of a radical underwater weight-training routine that they lead for friends at their house three times a week. The secret to ice, Cipriani said, is to endure past hurt to numb (two minutes for him) before fully submerging for twenty seconds. “Then you have that euphoric rise, and you’re happy like a thunderbird.” Outside, a dozen figures, muscled and inked, were arrayed as if on an amphora at the deep end of a…

I thought that I had reached an age at which I could opt out of embarrassing myself in public, but last year, of my own free will, I did something mortifying. I took a series of eight improvisational-comedy classes with the Upright Citizens Brigade, which has, in the past two decades, developed into an empire with a cultural reach rivalling that of Deepak Chopra, say, or Kanye West. One Sunday morning, dressed to aerobicize (“You should be prepared to move around, lay on the ground and stretch in various positions,” an e-mail from U.C.B. advised), I arrived at an office building on Eighth Avenue and Thirtyseventh Street, and psyched myself up to learn how to amuse strangers. On the ninth floor, I navigated a warren of hallways, the walls lined…

One afternoon in 1999, when the designer Shayne Oliver was in the sixth grade, he came across a magazine ad for Dirty Denim, a line of “pre-soiled” jeans by Diesel. The ad featured a collage of faux paparazzi photographs documenting the meltdown of a fictional rock star. Oliver was struck by the campaign’s tagline: “The Luxury of Dirt.” “That blew my mind,” he told me recently. “Spending money on something that looks dirty? I was, like, ‘This is genius.’ ” He informed his mother, a schoolteacher from Trinidad named Anne-Marie, that he needed a pair immediately. Oliver’s father had abandoned Anne-Marie before Shayne was born, and she had struggled to raise him on her own. They lived in a tiny apartment on Halsey Street, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Oliver, who attended some…

He’d recognized Keith Stolarsky, but not before thinking, How could they let that bum in here? Casual Western dress wasn’t frowned on in Singapore, so long as that meant appalling tourist pastels, striped Lacoste polo shirts, and rack-fresh sports or hip-hop gear, Juicy Couture, and so forth. And that was what you saw. Not this. The American, who had a posture like a question mark, was dressed in layers of baggy, unwashed black polyester, too tight on his paunch, and a Windbreaker over black jeans and running shoes—a costume exhumed from some Dungeons & Dragons basement. His hair, greasy over his ears, had been combed back from an unhealthy scalp; his shave looked five days old. Of course, the fact that Bruno found this arresting was perhaps a sign that…

Four years ago, we heard Frank Ocean fretting in the back of a taxi, begging the driver to lend an ear. “Taxidriver / Be my shrink for the hour / Leave the meter running,” he sang, on “Bad Religion,” from “channel ORANGE.” “It’s rush hour, so take the streets if you wanna / Just outrun the demons, could you?” Now Ocean has turned to flashier vehicles to help him outrun those demons. During the week that he released his new project, after years of delays, he was filmed street-racing sports cars in Los Angeles with the rappers A$AP Rocky and Tyler, the Creator. His long-standing fascination with cars is a focal point of Ocean’s ambitiously subdued new work, which has three parts: a forty-five-minute blackand-white video, titled “Endless,” in which…

The Commander, by Laila Parsons (Hill & Wang). In the nineteen-thirties, Fawzi al-Qawuqji, who had led insurgencies against the French in Syria and the British in Palestine, became known in the West as a new Saladin, waging a holy war. According to this diligently researched biography, the reality was not as sensational. Although he achieved only meagre success on the battlefield, his Arab-nationalist rhetoric made him a populist icon. But Parsons is too ready to exculpate Qawuqji, whose men looted and extorted their fellow-Arabs, and punished entire villages that they deemed traitorous. She perceptively notes, however, that his writings “contain a trace of bitterness toward the very people that he was in Palestine to fight for.” Coyote America, by Dan Flores (Basic). “Close encounters with coyotes have now become…

Wandelweiser is the name of an informal network of twenty or so experimental-minded composers who share an interest in slow music, quiet music, spare music, fragile music. The word might be translated as “signpost of change” or “sage of change.” It brings to mind a vaguely Romantic image of solitary figures meandering along circuitous paths. The composers live in Switzerland, Germany, New York, and California, among other places, and are seldom all seen together. Most of them take inspiration from John Cage; they understand his legendary work “4'33'',” in which the performer remains silent, not as a conceptual conundrum but as a practical point of departure. Eva-Maria Houben, a mainstay of the group, has written, “Music may exist ‘between’: between appearance and disappearance, between sound and silence, as something ‘nearly…

AUGUST 31 – SEPTEMBER 6, 2016 “Say, man, there’s a woman who can sing some rock and roll!” Jerry Lee Lewis once said of Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, Tharpe toured the revival circuit with her mother before becoming the first gospel recording star. (Her mean guitar licks inspired the likes of Elvis Presley.) “Marie and Rosetta,” a new play with music by George Brant (in previews, at the Atlantic Theatre Company), finds Tharpe (Kecia Lewis, right) rehearsing with her protégée, Marie Knight (Rebecca Naomi Jones). MOVIES OPENING The Light Between Oceans Derek Cianfrance directed this drama, about a First World War veteran (Michael Fassbender) and his wife (Alicia Vikander), lighthouse keepers off the coast of Australia, who adopt a foundling. Opening Sept. 2. (In wide…

West Indian Day Carnival Carnival returns to Crown Heights, a Labor Day tradition that’s capped summers in Brooklyn for decades. Rooted in the masquerade balls of Versailles, transported to the Caribbean via French colonialism, and disseminated through the African diaspora, the parade remains a highlight of the city’s cultural calendar. Revellers march down the four lanes of Eastern Parkway, in central Brooklyn, wearing extravagant, hand-stitched costumes, as floats carry booming speakers and performers of several Caribbean-grown sounds, including soca, calypso, and dancehall. (Parade starts at Eastern Parkway and Utica Ave., and continues through Grand Army Plaza. wiadcacarnival.org. Sept. 5.) Great North River Tugboat Race At this historic Hudson River tugboat race, now in its twenty-fourth year, viewers can get an up-close view of the action from the Circle Line…

Kirsten Johnson’s camera swings toward gusto. As Johnson stood on an East River ferry on a steamy afternoon, talking about her new documentary, “Cameraperson,” her Canon video camera kept twitching, tugged by her peripheral vision toward a woman in a white tank top. “I want to film her, because it’s just so great,” Johnson said, bending to her viewfinder. The woman was roaming the far rail, snapping the skyline with a chic white camera. “She’s got this bleached white hair, and it’s sort of streaming, and she’s looking very pleased with the wind.” Johnson panned slowly, balanced against the chop like a gimbal. The massed tourists gazed back curiously; the cinematographer, chummy and nearly six feet two, is a very visible observer. “Cameraperson” consists of resonant outtakes that she shot…

I never put much stock in that image of the earth resting on the backs of four elephants who are standing on the back of a sea turtle, who is in turn supported by an infinite regression of turtles disappearing into a bottomless forever. I mean how could you get them all to stay still? Now that we are on the subject, my substitute picture would have the earth with its entire population of people and things resting on the head of Keith Richards, who is holding a Marlboro in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other. As long as Keith keeps talking about the influence of the blues on the Rolling Stones, the earth will continue to spin merrily and revolve in a timely manner…

When Sergii Leshchenko was at university, in Ukraine, he dreamed of working in television news. He is the son of two Soviet-trained engineers, and grew up in Kiev, where he studied journalism. He aspired to become an on-air correspondent, but his speech was mumbly and imprecise. After an unsuccessful summer internship at a local news channel, in 2000, he heard that a new online publication, Ukrayinska Pravda, was desperately looking for reporters; in recent weeks, nearly all the staff had quit, fed up with low pay and worn down by pressure from authorities. His interview took place in a cramped and sparsely furnished three-room apartment, where he was met by the site’s founder and editor-in-chief, Georgiy Gongadze, a thirty-one-year-old reporter. Gongadze regularly received threats from Ukrainian officials because of his…

Things seem strong. Houses, trees, trucks—a chair, even. A table. You don’t expect one to break. No, it takes a hammer to break one, a war, a saw, an earthquake. Troy after Troy after Troy seemed strong to those living around and in them. Nine Troys were strong, each trembling under the other. When the ground floods and the fire ants leave their strong city, they link legs and form a raft, and float, and live, and begin again elsewhere. Strong, your life’s wish to continue linking arms with life’s eye blink, life’s tear well, life’s hammering of copper sheets and planing of Port Orford cedar, life’s joke of the knock-knock. Knock, knock. Who’s there? I am. I am who? That first and last question. Who once dressed in footed…

We like to think of ourselves as living in an age of unprecedented disruption. Just look at all the commonplace features of our world that didn’t exist a century ago—jet travel, television, space flight, the Internet. If you could transport someone from the year 1916 to the present, we ask a little proudly, wouldn’t that person be stupefied by the changes? And, of course, he would be, at least for a few days, until he figured out how everything worked. But one thing would be very familiar to such a time traveller: the pride, and the anxiety, we feel about being so modern. For people in the early twentieth century were as acutely aware of their modernity as we are of ours, and with just as good reason. After all,…