Innholdsfortegnelse for August 29, 2016 i The New Yorker

Vinson Cunningham (“A Darker Presence,” p. 34) recently joined The New Yorker as a staff writer. His work has appeared in the Times Magazine and McSweeney’s. Jelani Cobb (Comment, p. 25) teaches in the journalism program at Columbia. “The Substance of Hope” is his latest book. Paul Rudnick (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 40) is the author of “It’s All Your Fault,” which was published earlier this year. Ed Caesar (“The Moscow Laundromat,” p. 42) is a British journalist. “Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon” is his first book. Julie Bruck (Poem, p. 48) won the Governor General’s Award in 2012 for her poetry collection “Monkey Ranch.” J. J. Sempé (Cover) is a longtime contributor of covers and art works to the magazine. “Sempé: A Little Bit…

Fall Preview THE MOST ANTICIPATED show of the season is the Met Breuer’s retrospective of the American figurative painter Kerry James Marshall. Marshall, now sixty and based in Chicago, was born in Jim Crow-era Alabama and moved, with his family, to the Watts neighborhood of L.A. in 1963. Early exposure to the civil-rights movement had a profound effect on the artist, whose paintings reboot classical genres to redress the exclusion of black subjects from history. The show’s title, “Mastry,” is lifted from Marshall’s ongoing series of comic-book-inspired works, with superheroes based on the Yoruba pantheon (opens Oct. 25). Two champions of pared-down abstraction are also in the spotlight. The painter Carmen Herrera, who turned a hundred and one in May, was born in Havana and honed her vivid, hardedged geometries…

Fall Preview THE NEWS ABOUT newspapers is pretty bleak these days, so what better time to revisit the hardboiled, ink-stained, pre-clickbait era of yore? Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur were Chicago reporters before they wrote the smash hit “The Front Page,” which débuted on Broadway in 1928. The play, set in the bustling press room of a Windy City courthouse, has spawned multiple TV adaptations, films (including “His Girl Friday,” which gender-swapped one of the main characters, adding spice to the rat-a-tat repartee), and Broadway revivals. The latest, directed by Jack O’Brien, arrives at the Broadhurst Sept. 20, starring Nathan Lane, John Slattery, John Goodman, Jefferson Mays, and Sherie Rene Scott. That’s one of several high-wattage ensembles to choose from this fall. Diane Lane, Joel Grey, Tavi Gevinson, and Chuck…

IN MAY, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder invited several cast members from the HBO series “The Wire” to Washington, D.C., to help promote a Justice Department initiative called the Drug Endangered Children’s Task Force. “The Wire,” which aired for five seasons and was acclaimed for its nuanced portrayal of the war on drugs, was a favorite of both Holder and President Obama. Holder jokingly ordered the show’s creators, David Simon and Ed Burns, to produce a sixth season. “I have a lot of power,” he said. “The Attorney General’s kind remarks are noted and appreciated,” Simon told a reporter. “We are prepared to go to work on Season 6 of ’The Wire’ if the Department of Justice is equally ready to reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided,…

DEAR DIARY: It didn’t work. Maybe I should have plagiarized all of Michelle Obama’s Convention speech, or maybe I should have just repeated the words “I love Hillary” over and over again, but now I’m feeling doomed. I wish I were back in Slovenia, modelling polyester cardigans and telling our goat, “Someday, I will sail to America and marry a rich, handsome man.” I should have listened when the cow, who was eavesdropping, said, “Bloomberg.” Life is strange. For so many years, I assumed that when Donald would tell me that he wanted to be President he was just dreaming, like when he said that he wanted to be a real boy. But he kept saying it, even after Ivanka swatted him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. As…

THE FIRST TIME Jeffrey Merrihue came across the name Damon Baehrel, he was amazed that he hadn’t heard of him. “I didn’t understand how the secret had been kept,” Merrihue said recently. “The people I go around with, it’s hard for us to find something that is genuinely unique and new.” The people Merrihue goes around with are gastronomes, the trophy hunters of haute cuisine, the kind who travel the world to dine at famous, or famously obscure, restaurants. After a trip to Cape Town this spring, to a restaurant called the Test Kitchen, Merrihue, who lives in London and produces promotional videos for restaurants, became, he says, the second person to have eaten at every restaurant on the so-called World’s 50 Best list. He’s also been to eighty of…

Fall Preview In a photograph taken on September 16, 1966, just before the world premiere of Barberšfs ill-fated šgAntony and Cleopatrašh.the Metropolitan Operašfs first performance in its new auditorium. the conductor, Thomas Schippers, looks out from the pit with a thousand-yard stare. The image, which the Met has placed on the inside flap of its new season calendar, could be a metaphor for the companyšfs current condition: proud of its past, yet fearful of the future. But skeptics should remember that the company, despite its financial and administrative challenges, still manages to deliver world-class performances, week after week. The Metšfs fiftiethanniversary season at Lincoln Center is inaugurated by two of its biggest stars, the soprano Nina Stemme and the conductor Simon Rattle, in Wagneršfs šgTristan und Isoldešh (Sept. 26-Oct. 27);…

Fall Preview On “Sweater,” the emo auteur Felix Walworth, who sings and drums in Told Slant, dreads unboxing last year’s outerwear. “You got a new sweater, but I didn’t know till I saw it in a picture,” Walworth sings with a crackle, before swearing off a bomber jacket and a navy peacoat. This fall, at Silent Barn (Oct. 15), Told Slant thumps out its perfected brand of slow-rolling, heart-folding lo-fi from the June statement record “Going By,” one of many wistful autumn gigs. Will Toledo, who heads up Car Seat Headrest, lets his guitar meander for long stretches before songs take shape: hear his minute-plus intro on this year’s “Vincent,” after which he scoffs at summer tourists who descend on his college town of Williamsburg, Virginia, disturbing his own vacation.…

401 Sixth Ave. (212-633-8900) IN MANHATTAN, THERE are two broad varieties of Chinese restaurant: the assimilated uptown slickster, in which leg room and decipherable menus come at the cost of culturally confused cuisine, and their no-frills downtown kinsmen, who dole out hearty, oleaginous fare in riotous surroundings that could use a pump of Febreze. Consequently, the authentic, atmospheric pan-Chinese eatery might seem like a unicorn, the stuff of fantasy and forlorn foodie dreams. But now comes Hao Noodles and Tea by Madame Zhu’s Kitchen, a new arrival in the West Village, which offers Cantonese, Shanghainese, and Sichuanese staples and reinventions. Zhu Rong, a Chongqing native with a successful chain of restaurants in four Chinese cities, grew up watching her father cook but initially didn’t see herself taking up the wok.…

I’m trying to tell you the story of my strange life,” the artist Michael Heizer said to me. “I’m not sure how much I want everyone to know, but it’s all going to come out.” It was March in New York, a cold, long-shadowed afternoon, and Heizer, who has spent much of the past half century on a remote ranch in Nevada, working on “City,” a mile-and-a-halflong sculpture that almost no one has seen, had finished an omelette and a tarte tatin at Balthazar. With his dealer, Kara Vander Weg, of the Gagosian gallery, he shuffled down Spring Street toward Greene, where he’d been renting a loft since the fall. He is seventy-one, and walking pains him. At a crosswalk, Heizer—ravaged, needy, fierce, suspicious, witty, loyal, sly, and pure—leaned against…

PRISONS ARE THE bad conscience of the liberal imagination, a truth that tends to be most obvious to their most interested observers. Once, I got a letter from a death-row inmate in Texas, complaining that, in writing about incarceration, I had been insufficiently attentive to the French historian and theorist Michel Foucault. My correspondent seemed intimately familiar with Foucault’s argument that prisons are where the liberal state’s claim to superior humanity is at its most vulnerable. The eighteenth century’s pretensions to Enlightenment ended at the Tyburn scaffold, where wretches were publicly hanged for stealing a purse. The twentieth century’s pretensions to humanity end in mass incarceration and solitary confinement, where men are kept alive for years and subjected to procedural niceties while the state waits for the morning when it…

Fall Preview American ballet is finally waking up to the glaring shortage of new works by female choreographers. This fall, both of the big New York companies will feature new pieces by women— Lauren Lovette and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, at New York City Ballet (at the Koch, Sept. 20-Oct. 16), and Jessica Lang, at American Ballet Theatre (at the Koch, Oct. 19-30). A.B.T.’s fall season is promising in other ways, too. The company is bringing back Frederick Ashton’s “Symphonic Variations,” a work of pristine beauty and Apollonian calm, created just after the Second World War. It has also imported Benjamin Millepied’s “Daphnis and Chloe,” first performed by the Paris Opera two years ago. This deft setting of Ravel’s lush score exposes a more openhearted side of Millepied, and the ballet…

Fall Preview Clint Eastwood’s interviews may tend to go off the rails, but his movies keep tightly on track. His new film, “Sully” (Sept. 9), stars Tom Hanks as Chesley Sullenberger, the airline captain who, in 2009, safely landed a passenger jet in the Hudson River. Laura Linney plays his wife; Jamey Sheridan plays the federal investigator who interrogates him. Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars in Oliver Stone’s “Snowden” (Sept. 16), as the N.S.A. whistle-blower who leaked classified information and, facing prosecution, fled to Russia. Melissa Leo costars, as the filmmaker Laura Poitras. Nate Parker directs and stars in “The Birth of a Nation” (Oct. 7), about Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia. In “Certain Women” (Oct. 14), Kelly Reichardt adapts short stories by Maile Meloy for…

A few years ago, Rex Ellis, the associate director of curatorial affairs for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which will open in September on the Mall in Washington, D.C., made a phone call. Ellis is a natural storyteller, with a voice that mixes congestion and control in a manner reminiscent of Jesse Jackson’s. He’d clearly told the story of the call before, but when I spoke with him this past spring, in his office on an upper floor of the glassy Capital Gallery Building, on Maryland Avenue, he repeated it for me with all the shock and wonder that it warranted. “A phone call,” he began. “To a young lady by the name of Wendy Porter.” She had e-mailed him, saying that she had Nat Turner’s…

TO MAKE A documentary about the Internet requires nerve. To do so when you can hardly be bothered with a cell phone, however, takes both innocence and bravado, plus a pinch of madness. All of which means that Werner Herzog, now aged seventy-three, is right for the job, and the result is “Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World.” The movie is divided into ten parts, none of which could be mistaken for a commandment; Herzog’s documentaries have always been fired more by marvelling, and by an explorer’s ache to learn, than by any pedagogic urge to tell. If he were struck color-blind tomorrow, he would instantly embark on a film about Matisse. The first section, entitled “The Early Days,” lures us to the birthplace of the Internet, in…