Innholdsfortegnelse for September 19, 2016 i The New Yorker

Jill Lepore (“The State of Debate,” p. 38), a professor of history at Harvard, is writing a history of the United States. Amy Davidson (Comment, p. 31), a staff writer, contributes regularly to Comment and to newyorker.com. Lauren Collins (The Talk of the Town, p. 32) is the author of “When in French: Love in a Second Language,” which has just been published. She reports from Paris for the magazine. Calvin Trillin (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 45) is a longtime New Yorker writer. His book “No Fair! No Fair!: And Other Jolly Poems of Childhood,” with illustrations by Roz Chast, comes out later this month. James Surowiecki (The Financial Page, p. 36), the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds,” writes about economics, business, and finance for the magazine. Malika…

A few weekends ago at King Tai, a short and stout bar in Crown Heights, some one-hit wonders from the early eighties played as people who weren’t alive then considered what to drink. Above the bar, next to some metal elephant heads, was a chalkboard listing King Tai’s five cocktails, named #1 through #5. “We can’t all get a #3,” an organizationally minded customer objected. “If you get a #1, I’ll get a #3, and he’ll get a #5.” The cocktails, which are ten dollars apiece, make up for their minimalist names with particularly elaborate flavors that achieve mostly high highs, marred by only one low low. The #5 (Barr Hill gin, Cocchi Americano, Dimmi, grapefruit bitters) is a caustic confusion, but the #1 (Yaguara Cachaça Branca, apricot, Licor 43,…

Aedes albopictus is an early riser. Of the fifty-one mosquito species in New York, albopictus—a close cousin of Aedes aegypti, the species responsible for spreading Zika—prefers to restrict its activity to power breakfasts, in the mornings, and to teatime, in the late afternoons. (The common house mosquito is active in the evenings.) On a recent afternoon, Mario Merlino, the assistant commissioner for New York City’s Bureau of Veterinary and Pest Control Services, and Zahir Shah, the director of the city’s Medical Entomology Laboratory, jumped a small fence inside Bellevue South Park, in Kips Bay, and wandered into the shrubbery. Shah pointed to what appeared to be a black collapsible laundry hamper, hidden behind a bush. “There it is,” he said. “Our pride and joy.” Aegypti is not prevalent in New…

This election’s first Presidential debate will be held on September 26th, the anniversary of the first televised Presidential debate, between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy, in 1960. Nixon and Kennedy met in a bare CBS studio in Chicago, without an audience; the event was broadcast, live, by CBS, NBC, and ABC. Each candidate made an eight-minute opening statement and a three-minute closing statement. The rules were the result of strenuous negotiating. The very scheduling required Congress to temporarily suspend an F.C.C. regulation granting equal time to all Presidential candidates (there were at least fourteen). Much of the negotiation involved seemingly little things. Nixon wanted no reaction shots; he wanted viewers to see only the guy who was talking. But Kennedy wanted them, and prevailed, with the concession that…

Recently I’ve been thinking about the color of the Statue of Liberty. That elusive, flickering, familiar, sea-polished shade of copper-green got into my head last year when I was standing on the roof of an apartment building in the Bronx. Edwin Velasquez, a young man who works for Bronx Pro Group, a developer of affordable housing, was showing me a roof painting he had superintended. The job was a minor triumph of his. A designer had given him a plan on paper and he had successfully transposed it to the fifteenthousand-square-foot roof. Now the heat-reflecting paint would help cool the building in summer, and the design’s images stood out in satellite photos of the city seen from above. We strolled around on the painting, examining it. The next phase would…

I love restaurants. I’m a serial eaterout, prowling New York for an uncommonly delicious dinner, at a decent price, cooked by someone else. And never mind if the meal turns out to be disappointing. There is always the promise of the next meal, the next new place, and, besides, the pleasures of eating privately in public tend to compensate for most culinary catastrophes that do not involve a trip to the emergency room after the latest hole-in-the-wall around the corner serves me last week’s clams. My husband says that I never learn; if there’s a new restaurant in our neighborhood, I try it. Given that Paul Freedman’s new book, “Ten Restaurants That Changed America” (Liveright), is largely a history of eating out in this country, it’s worth noting that the…

When Louis C.K.’s warped antisitcom, “Louie,” débuted, in 2010, it kicked the door open to a new style of TV comedy, one that looked and felt more like an independent film. Two years later, Lena Dunham’s “Girls” took a similar not-everyone-needs-to-like-it approach. Copycats popped up everywhere. Some of these auteurish dramedies were watery or sour—hipper music and longer pauses don’t make everything profound. But the best of them possessed “Louie” ’s stubborn specificity: these shows didn’t try to speak to or for everyone. Donald Glover’s “Atlanta,” on FX, is the most interesting of this fall’s wave of hyper-personal half hours. (Several are premièring one after another, including Tig Notaro’s “One Mississippi,” Pamela Adlon’s “Better Things,” Issa Rae’s “Insecure,” and Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher’s “Take My Wife”—a promising batch.) “Atlanta”…

FALSE IDOLS Having been a friend of and a collaborator with the architect Luis Barragán for more than thirty years, I was appalled at what I learned from Alice Gregory’s article on Jill Magid’s project to reclaim the Barragán archive for Mexico (“Body of Work,” August 1st). Barragán was a most reserved man, who avoided publicity. (To understand Barragán, one has only to read his acceptance speech upon receiving the Pritzker Architecture Prize.) The fact that a portion of his ashes has been turned into a diamond engagement ring is not only vulgar but offensive to the reputation of the artist. It shows a stunning lack of comprehension of Luis Barragán and encapsulates everything that he was not. Adriana Williams San Francisco, Calif. WARMER WATERS As a supporter of…

Naomi Yasuda is a thirty-two-yearold nail artist whose colorful, extravagant, often three-dimensional work was featured in a show at the Cooper Hewitt Museum this year. One afternoon at her apartment downtown, as she prepared to give a manicure to a hairdresser friend, she dunked her own fingers, with nails painted periwinkle blue, into a bowl of tepid water. Yasuda does not have a favorite nail color—“The mood determines,” she said—but her apartment is swathed in a spectrum of grays, and her dark hair has been dyed a tint that recalls an iceberg. “I call it ‘Naomi Gray,’ ”Kelly O’Connell, the hairdresser, said. When Yasuda lifted her hand out of the bowl, her fingernails were periwinkle slashed with vivid pink stripes. She explained that the polish she used changes color according…

A sparkler too charred to give back to England. Larded with visions of hills, the waves the heat makes, the subtle mirages we feel even when we don’t look at their faces, which are the faces of grief and elation and so on unpacking luggage beyond some trip in a story, probably a night sea journey or something, in other words heat of the first or second order, something Yeats might worship, and Mill might turn away. In short, a fantasy in which they all were players, maybe a morality play on a stage that protrudes from a tent, a cylindrical tent, kind of like a sleeping bag in which the whole family lives and spends its time rehearsing for the play, always saying Father, always saying Mother.…

Several years ago, Gucci, which started in Florence in the nineteentwenties as a small leather-goods concern, moved its design headquarters to Rome, where it occupies a grand Renaissance building called the Palazzo Alberini-Cicciaporci. The palazzo was completed around 1520, following a plan ascribed to Raphael, and many art historians discern his touch in the elegantly geometric façade. Other aspects of the building have been attributed to his chief assistant, Giulio Romano, who worked in Raphael’s studio for years before going on to forge the new style of Mannerism. The palazzo’s former chapel—a lightfilled chamber with a coffered ceiling that is edged by newly restored frescoes— is now the office of Gucci’s creative director. Since January, 2015, this position has been held by Alessandro Michele, a forty-three-year-old native of Rome, who…

She threw him in the fire. Myth wavers where it isn’t wanted. Back arched against the table, I am twenty-three, heels stirruped, getting an I.U.D. You’re going to feel a little pinch. Blood bites back like ambrosia under my tongue. She didn’t want an infant. Deep breath. Blunt passed. She was known to dance. His skin tightened white beneath the flames. Black boy in diapers. Plastic hook through my cervix. She tossed him into fire, wanted to forget the meaning of the word “mother.” Ghost kick. Hair singe. She learned to spit curses back at whoever questioned. In some versions, the boy does not burn. Please rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10. I hope, she said, you come to suckle Sorrow’s asshole. And meant it. Uterine…

On a February day in 1867, three months before her tenth birthday, Sarah Jacob took to her bed complaining of terrible stomach pain and bloody froth filling her mouth. The third of seven children born to Evan Jacob, a tenant farmer in Wales’s Carmarthenshire county, and his wife, Hannah, Sarah had always been a healthy, energetic girl, known in her parish for her intelligence and good moral sense. Now she lost consciousness and suffered convulsive fits. Her parents moistened her lips with beer, but she couldn’t swallow food or drink. Her body grew skeletal. A doctor diagnosed her with inflammation of the brain. In May, Sarah woke up. She called out for milk. Hunger after a long illness is always a heartening sign, but the miracle of Sarah’s recovered health…

Amid the chic horde descending on New York for Fashion Week, Adele Meyer stands out. On Sept. 16, the Jewish Museum opens a show centered on John Singer Sargent’s exquisite 1896 portrait “Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children,” on loan from the Tate to the U.S. for the first time in more than ten years. The British beauty was married to a wealthy banker, but don’t mistake her for a Gilded Age real housewife— Meyer was a patron of the arts and a passionate crusader for the suffragist movement. THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS All the Ways to Say I Love You In Neil LaBute’s latest play, directed by Leigh Silverman for MCC Theatre, Judith Light plays a high-school teacher who reveals her marital secrets to a former student.…

ON NOVEMBER 10, 1898, a coup d’état took place on United States soil. It was perpetrated by a gang of whitesupremacist Democrats in Wilmington, North Carolina, who were intent on reclaiming power from the recently elected, biracial Republican government, even if, as one of the leaders vowed, “we have to choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses.” They had a Colt machine gun capable of firing four hundred and twenty .23-calibre bullets a minute. They had the local élite and the press on their side. By the end of the day, they had killed somewhere between fourteen and sixty black men and banished twenty more, meanwhile forcing the mayor, the police chief, and the members of the board of aldermen to resign. The new government remained in control, of both…

On August 26th, Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand for the national anthem, as a protest against police brutality. Since then, he’s been attacked by just about everyone—politicians, coaches, players, talk-radio hosts, veterans’ groups. But the harshest criticism has come from Bay Area police unions. The head of the San Francisco police association lambasted his “naïveté” and “total lack of sensitivity,” and called on the 49ers to “denounce” the gesture. The Santa Clara police union said that its members, many of whom provide security at 49ers games, might refuse to go to work if no action was taken against Kaepernick. A work stoppage to punish a player for expressing his opinion may seem extreme. But in the world of police unions it’s business as…

Fashion sets, like French beaches, are not typically bastions of modesty; you don’t go into modelling if you’re shy of deshabille. Yet on a torrid Saturday in August, while mayors in the South of France were busy enforcing a burkini ban that has since been ruled illegal, Nailah Lymus and Jaharrah Ali, both hijabis (women who cover, in the Muslim tradition), were modelling at a photo shoot. Lymus, a thirty-two-year-old designer from Brooklyn, is the owner of Underwraps, a modelling agency that she founded, three years ago, in part to dispel the received idea that glamour and Islam are incompatible. Underwraps had the support of Lymus’s imam, and of her family. The name Nailah, in Arabic, suggests attainment, and, she told me, “my mother is proud that I live up…

Consider Hayley, our hire of two months, a relative endurance run. Hayley is twenty-four years old, and she is earning $8.35 an hour. Every morning, she comes in with a large coffee from a retailer whose name I will not mention, usually with “skim latte” indelibled on the cup. A latte of that size, from that retailer, costs $4.25. Which is roughly thirty-one minutes of labor for Hayley. Pre-tax. This chronic decision of Hayley’s will translate into an annual expenditure of approximately eleven hundred dollars. On an expected income of sixteen thousand five hundred dollars. All of which is fine. Someone may choose to spend that proportion of her income that way; you never know what coffee, or anything, means to another person. In a very nondirective manner, I remarked…

You Must Change Your Life, by Rachel Corbett (Norton). The author, an editor at Modern Painters, tells the story of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s fractious friendship with the man he called his “Master,” the much older sculptor Auguste Rodin. The book, which covers the lives of both men, illuminates their central—if not always enthusiastic—roles as the Belle Époque gave way to the avant-garde. The true subject, though, is Rilke’s desolate but fascinating inner life and the effect it had on his poetry: as Corbett writes, he “believed that art was its own kind of death because it consumed the artist.” This empathetic and imaginative biography, deeply researched, is anchored by the friendship between two of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. Tong Wars, by Scott D. Seligman (Viking). This…