Innholdsfortegnelse for September 26, 2016 i The New Yorker

Evan Osnos (“President Trump,” p. 38) writes about politics and foreign affairs for The New Yorker. He is the author of “Age of Ambition,” which won the 2014 National Book Award for nonfiction. Michael Schulman (The Talk of the Town, p. 24; “Model Citizen,” p. 26) is the thea tre editor of Goings On About Town. His book, “Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep,” was published earlier this year. Rivka Galchen (“Keeping It Off,” p. 32) has published three books, including “Little Labors,” which came out in May. Simon Rich (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 31) is the creator and showrunner of “Man Seeking Woman,” on FXX. His collection of humor stories, “Spoiled Brats,” is available in paperback. Mark Ulriksen (Cover) has contributed to the magazine since 1994. An exhibition of…

The new retrospective of Walter Robinson’s bright, brushy realist paintings is a blessed event for fans of the storied bohemian artist, art journalist, and man-about-downtown. The subjects include such infectious banalities as pulp-fiction paperback covers, cheeseburgers, kittens, tawdry erotica, liquor bottles, over-thecounter drugs, folded shirts, the artist’s family and friends, and models from mail-order catalogues—there are even a few spin-art paintings. The show almost didn’t come to New York. It opened, last year, at Illinois State University, Normal, curated by Barry Blinderman, who is the director of the school’s gallery and who, like Robinson, is a veteran of the Lower East Side art scene of the nineteen-eighties. But no venue in the city was interested. Then Jeffrey Deitch decided to reopen the SoHo space he closed in 2010 for a…

Michael Mandiberg, an artist whose preoccupations merge digital information with visual representation, has a lot going on. This was also the case eight years ago, when he lived in Brooklyn (Prospect Heights, still does) and was a senior fellow at Eyebeam, a nonprofit that supports artists immersed in technology and playful technologists. “I was noticing that people were giving away books, streeting them, leaving them on stoops,” he said the other day in a fifteenth-floor office suite turned exhibition space on Rector Street, where his new show, “FDIC Insured,” would soon open. “I was seeing them all over the place. They no longer had any exchange value, but they still had some kind of a sentimental value. I started accumulating and bringing them to Eyebeam.” He also began collecting, with…

The drawers at the Making and Knowing Lab, at Columbia University, have labels rarely seen outside a Harry Potter novel: “Ox Gall,” “Spiderwebs,” “Powder for Hourglasses,” “Dragon’s Blood.” The denizens of the lab re-create old recipes from alchemy-era texts—primarily of the sixteenth century— and this brings them into contact with some unusual ingredients. On a recent Monday morning, Joel Klein, a redheaded history-of-science postdoc who studies Isaac Newton’s alchemical work, sniffed a bag of flakes labelled “Rabbit-Skin Glue.” “It smells like skin,” he said. Another sniff. “Although I’m not sure what a sommelier would say.” The Making and Knowing Lab is run by Columbia’s Center for Science and Society. Its recipe re-creations take place in an old chemistry lab and are supported by $436,000 from the National Science Foundation. The…

“Half my life has been about trying to lose weight,” Henry Roberts said. He was telling me about his decision to have a surgery that would reduce the size of his stomach by seventy-five per cent. Roberts (a pseudonym) is five feet six, and when we met he weighed two hundred and seventy pounds, giving him a bodymass index of forty-four; a B.M.I. between eighteen and a half and twenty-five is considered healthy. “I tried every diet, every regimen. I even had urine from a pregnant woman injected into me—that was a fad once. Have you ever tried a Weight Watchers cannoli? Weight Watchers didn’t work for me, either, and I found the meetings humiliating.” Roberts, who is sixty-eight and retired from his job as a public-school guidance counsellor, lives…

Why do you feel “most vulnerable.” Where,In Damascus, were you born. To whom do youPray. What does it mean to have wingedBrows. Have you ever spoken throughA mesh. Was it dark speech that you made.Is it hot inside your burqa. WhoWas Frank Sinatra. Why was our warCalled “Civil” and who won.Can you keep a bright gaze. How tallWas Allah. What once was Palestine.What most displaces you. Have you visitedSomalia. Have you ever crossed a borderIn a boat, by night, to another land.Sir, in all how many died.Is your wife considered meek.Point to Mecca from right here.Why is our court Supreme.What does “The Sound and the Fury”Mean to you. Who was Huckleberry Finn.Has your husband ever travelled to Afghanistan.In Sharia, when a woman’s hair is loose,Is she a prostitute or slave.Do…

I got to talk to Jane Jacobs once, toward the end of her life, an interview that is mentioned, in its properly Lilliputian proportion, in Robert Kanigel’s new biography, “Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs” (Knopf). She was one of three people I have met in a lifetime of meeting people who had an aura of sainthood about them, the others being Iona Opie, the British folklorist who collected children’s rhymes, and I. F. Stone, the independent American journalist. What they had in common was a sort of radiant self-reliance. They could say an obvious thing—that children are citizens of another country, that all governments lie—with the conviction that comes from having really found it out. They spoke for many, because they thought for themselves. Iona Opie…

BEFORE ZIKA The U.S. government’s rapid response to the spread of the Zika virus and the microcephaly associated with it, as chronicled by Siddhartha Mukherjee, is frustrating, given that similar birth defects in the U.S. have been ignored for decades (“The Chase,” August 22nd). Thirty-six years ago, a C.D.C. pilot study suggested a strong correlation between aerial spraying of phenoxy herbicide, which is frequently conducted by the logging industry in Oregon, and a substantial increase in birth defects in the central nervous system, including spina bifida and anencephaly, in which a baby is born with little or no brain. The response of state and federal authorities was to refuse to fund an expanded study. Despite community attempts to ban the chemicals, they continue to be used. Hazards to humans,…

There are plenty of corners of the Internet best left unexplored, but, should you find yourself, for some reason, investigating that not insignificant part of the Web devoted to New York City bar bathrooms, you might encounter passionate opinions about Welcome to the Johnsons, a grungy Lower East Side dive notorious for its kitsch clutter, plastic-covered sofas, and epically grimy, graffitied lavatories. The Johnson’s, its younger sibling, in Bushwick, is an altogether different story. Brooklyn Magazine’s “regional potty critic” sniped, of its latrines, “I was thoroughly unimpressed by the decor.” But the Johnson’s restroom aesthetic—clean, spacious, serviceable, a tad blah—is in keeping with the rest of the bar. Out front, there’s an Astroturf yard with plenty of chill lounging spots, for dogs and for humans, including hanging wicker egg-chairs. The…

Whether you’re a Nate Silver devotee who’s wholeheartedly with Her or you just poll your buddies while on vigilante border patrol, in the homestretch of this surreal election it’s hard not to compulsively check the latest projections of who will win. So you might be interested to learn that on Newtown Lane, in East Hampton, Long Island, there’s a Presidential predictor with a perfect track record. Every election year since 2004, the Monogram Shop—a narrow, packed purveyor of personalized baby sweaters ($75) and beach-towel baskets ($195)— has kept a careful tally of its sales of three-dollar reusable plastic cups emblazoned with the candidates’ names and logos. (Similar cups that say “Roadie” and “Forced Family Fun” are not counted.) For the past three elections, whichever candidate’s cup has sold best has…

A few days before graduating from Columbia University, in May, 2015, the actress and model Hari Nef showed up at a Flatiron office building to meet Ivan Bart, the president of IMG, the agency that represents supermodels such as Kate Moss and Gigi Hadid. She had walked a few runways at a recent New York Fashion Week, but after a spate of rejections from other modelling agencies her expectations were low. “No one even would meet with me,” Nef, who has dark eyes, pouty lips, and punkish brown bangs, told me. “The verdict each time was ‘Hey, we think you’ve got a great personality, and you’ve got a really unique look. We just don’t understand how we could make money off of you.’ ” For the IMG meeting, Nef wore…

He was always a bit of an odd fish, Zaka the Zulu, but he was the last boy any of us expected to be accused of murder. Not a wit, a sportsman, or a clown, he was not a popular boy at our school, where he wore his school uniform every day of the week, even on Sundays. Of course, we could have admired him for his brains. In the high-achieving hothouse that was the College of Loyola, which won the Secretary’s Bell Award fifteen years in a row, we admired any boy we labelled a razor. Zaka, though, made such a song and dance about his sharpness that you’d have thought he was the only razor in the school. He became even less popular when he was made head…

All at Sea, by Decca Aitkenhead (Nan A. Talese). The author and her partner, Tony Wilkinson, were, she admits early in this unsentimental memoir, “the most implausible couple I have ever known.” She was a journalist—skeptical, married, and with a “posh voice.” He was a happy-go-lucky, dreadlocked drug dealer, with a wife and child of his own. They fell in love—transgressing unspoken rules of race and class, which Aitkenhead articulates with cool intelligence—and had two sons. In 2014, in Jamaica, Wilkinson drowned after rescuing their elder son from an undertow. Aitkenhead narrates the tragedy’s aftermath with poise and even humor, but really the book is a full-throated tribute to a person most readers will yearn to have met. Paper, by Mark Kurlansky (Norton). The author, whose previous books, such…

George St. Geegland and Gil Faizon, who bear a curious resemblance to the comedians John Mulaney and Nick Kroll, are two Upper West Side alter kakers partial to turtlenecks, bra-sniffing, and the oeuvre of Alan Alda. For a time, they hosted a prank series called “Too Much Tuna” on Comedy Central’s “Kroll Show.” Now they’re bringing their skeezy-nebbish antics to Broadway, in “Oh, Hello” (starting previews Sept. 23, at the Lyceum), directed by Alex Timbers. “It’s a victory lap for us,” George said recently. NIGHT LIFE ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Adele Adele Adkins has set aside six nights in New York to perform songs from her latest record-breaking album, “25.” Whether twenty million albums…

Little Red Lighthouse Festival On the shore of the Hudson River sits Jeffrey’s Hook Light, known locally as the Little Red Lighthouse, a shining beacon of Washington Heights. Little Red began its life as a candlelit pole that hung over the Hudson to guide boat traffic, and changed locations several times before finding a home in what became Fort Washington Park. In 1942, the lighthouse was immortalized in the children’s book “The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge,” by Hildegard Swift, with imaginative illustrations by Lynd Ward. This week, Urban Park Rangers will give free tours of Little Red, Manhattan’s only remaining lighthouse, and families can enjoy fishing clinics, live music, food venders, and readings of Swift’s classic story. (Fort Washington Park, W. 181st St. at Plaza…

Overlooked amid the Melania Trump plagiarism scandal at this summer’s Republican National Convention was an even stranger mystery. In the same speech in which she cribbed lines from Michelle Obama, Trump said of her husband, “He will never, ever give up. And, most importantly, he will never, ever let you down.” For a certain segment of the population, those words triggered a Pavlovian synth beat. Was it possible that Trump was sampling the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”? “Maybe,” Astley said recently, in a booth in the balcony of the Box, on Chrystie Street. “I didn’t think so at first, because it wasn’t that blatant. If she’d said, ‘He’s never gonna run around and desert you,’ then I would have been in.” But the song has…

Now, there was a righteous Hebrew in the land of Uz named Job. And no one had more faith in God than he did. And God would often boast about this man, who worshipped Him with all his heart. But Satan said unto the Lord, “Job praises you only because his life is blessed.” So God made a wager with Satan: “Destroy all that Job has, and you will see that he still believes.” So Satan rained horror upon Job, killing his livestock and marring his flesh with boils. And behold: the righteous Hebrew still praised God. In the course of the next four thousand years, the Hebrews became less religious. They ceased making burnt offerings to God. They still had bar mitzvahs, but these were mainly just excuses to…

In the spring of 2005, Anna Lyndsey was looking at her computer screen at the Department for Work and Pensions, a British government ministry, when her face began to burn. It felt, she has written, like someone was attacking her with a flamethrower. The pain continued for several days. She bought a desk fan and attempted to ignore her discomfort. Lyndsey, who was thirty-three, thought that she had no time to be sick: she generated policy for government ministers, and there was an upcoming general election, making her workload particularly heavy. Lyndsey had risen quickly through the civil service, and worked in the ministry’s main office building, in Central London. One day, she was summoned to a meeting in a conference room, and her face began roasting again. Since the…

If you watch pornography, it’s likely that you do so on the Internet. The days when consuming pornography meant buying or borrowing a pinup magazine or watching a film loop in a peepshow booth are long gone, as are those of tracking down adult-video stores in faraway neighborhoods. Most porn is viewed on easily accessible “tube sites,” such as YouPorn, RedTube, XVideos, and Pornhub. These work on the same model as YouTube: they are free, and steer users to amateur videos, snippets uploaded by commercial producers, and pirated material. Watching pornography no longer requires leaving the privacy of your home, though that doesn’t mean you necessarily do it there: according to a recent CNBC report, seventy per cent of American online-porn access occurs during the nine-to-five workday. Pornography has changed…