Innholdsfortegnelse for October 3, 2016 i The New Yorker

Jeffrey Toobin (“In the Balance,” p. 28) has written two books about the Supreme Court: “The Nine” and “The Oath.” His latest book, “American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst,” came out in August. Steve Coll (Comment, p. 23) is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia. Akash Kapur (A Critic at Large, p. 66), the author of “India Becoming,” is writing a book set in the intentional community of Auroville, in India, where he grew up. Nyla Matuk (Poem, p. 65) will publish “Stranger,” her second book of poems, in the fall. Etgar Keret (Fiction, p. 62) is an Israeli writer. “The Seven Good Years” is his most recent book. Paul Rudnick (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 35) is…

One nice thing about the drab crypt of Penn Station is the lack of pretension within the subterranean sprawl. There’s none in the dingy Amtrak concourse, nor further below, in the long fluorescent hallway flanked with bright shops, at the end of which sits an oyster bar marked by the word “TRACKS,” in glowing indigo. Inside, exuberance unfurls like a hallucination in black-and-white tiles, mahogany, and twinkling fairy lights. The space is fiercely dedicated to its theme: there’s a map of the Long Island Rail Road painted on the ceiling, laminated photographs of subway depots and Northeastern engines serve as placemats, and the plates are painted with train tracks. The bar bustles with cheerful regulars in dark suits, on their way home to Long Island or New Jersey; it also…

A luxury of peace and prosperity: Last year, editors at the Oxford English Dictionary, in the midst of a long march toward a third edition, set out to add an entry on “tandem surfing.” (“The practice of two people riding a single surfboard at the same time.”) They were seeking an earlier citation; the best they had was from 1961, in the Los Angeles Times. A researcher contacted a surf museum in San Clemente, California, and eventually wound up in touch with an autodidact in Seattle named Matt Warshaw. Warshaw is the world’s leading surfing scholar, the Linnaeus of the lineup. Over the years, he has assembled a research library, in his home, of hundreds of books, thousands of periodicals, and some three hundred and fifty movies, and created a…

History, as a rule, unfolds slowly at the Supreme Court. The Justices serve for decades. The cases take years. The Court’s languorous work schedule includes three months of downtime every summer. But the death of Antonin Scalia, earlier this year, jolted the institution and affirmed, once again, a venerable truism, attributed to the late Justice Byron White: “When you change one Justice, you change the whole Court.” For the first time in two generations, the Court’s liberals were ascendant. After many years of liberal Justices struggling to win big cases, suddenly they couldn’t lose them. But this, too, might represent only a brief interregnum. The future of the Supreme Court always depends principally on the outcome of Presidential elections; this year’s race will have a nearly immediate impact on the…

One afternoon last spring, President Obama sat on a stage at La Cervecería, a high-ceilinged beer hall on Havana Harbor, where he had been invited to preside over a gathering billed as “an entrepreneurship and opportunity event.” Just a few hundred feet down the harbor wall was the spot where, in 1960, a French cargo ship full of munitions exploded, in a lethal blast for which Fidel Castro blamed the C.I.A. But no one at La Cervecería was in the mood to dwell on history. Obama’s visit was the culmination of fifteen months of diplomatic engagement, which began when the U.S. and Cuba restored relations, on December 17, 2014, bringing an end to the United States’ longest-lasting hostile standoff with another nation: fifty-six years of bad blood and broken ties.…

I celebrate the kid’s birthday the day after. Always the day after or the day before, never on the actual date. Always the same shit. Why? Because his honor the judge decided that the kid has to be with his mommy on his birthday, even if she’s a bitch and a liar who fucks every jerk who smiles at her at work. Daddy is less important. Lidor and I go to the mall together, not for a present; the last time I was in a duty-free shop, I bought him a remote-control multicopter drone. Eighty-nine dollars—eighty-nine!— and they didn’t even put batteries for the remote in the box. So we’re going to the mall to pick up some batteries, but I tell Lidor that it’s to have fun. What can…

Battle for Bed-Stuy, by Michael Woodsworth (Harvard). In the nineteen-sixties, federal policy experts descended on Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn, to investigate the “root causes” of urban decay. As Woodsworth’s history shows, the neighborhood’s block associations and community councils made it seem a perfect laboratory for President Johnson’s War on Poverty, whose aim was to marry grassroots organizing with Great Society bureaucracy. There were notable successes, such as the Women’s Talent Corps, but more frequently the initiative exposed tensions within the black community and stoked anger at funding delays and confusing regulations. Gradually, Bed-Stuy became a lesson in the limits of political action, and by 1977 Mayor Edward Koch was campaigning to rid the city of “poverty pimps.” American Revolutions, by Alan Taylor (Norton). This history, by a two-time Pulitzer winner,…

Singing in falsetto is, by definition, a kind of false projection into the world. About a decade ago, when Justin Vernon, the principal member of Bon Iver, was recording the songs that became the band’s début album, “For Emma, Forever Ago,” he realized that ranging just above his usual register made it easier to sing about memories that were otherwise too painful to recount. Vernon’s falsetto caused an obvious strain on his voice, making it sound weary and brittle. His recordings gave the impression of someone forcing himself to venture far outside his comfort zone; they communicated a sense of solitude and drift, even if, as was often the case, you couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying. “For Emma,” which was released in 2007, became the type of…

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD Kathryn Schulz’s article on the exaggerated importance of the Underground Railroad to the abolition movement is misguided (“Derailed,” August 22nd). Schulz argues that both blacks and whites have laid claim to heroic tales of the Railroad as a way to avoid the shame of either enslavement or complicity. But, for most participants, the Railroad was a dangerous enterprise, and its history is full of stories of setbacks, as slaveholders deployed the entire repressive machinery of the state to foil escape attempts. Nor was the steady stream of runaways to the North insignificant. The numbers may not have been as great as we like to think, but they fed into a burgeoning abolitionist movement. Schulz writes that “slavery was institutional” and the Railroad merely the “personal” acts…

Lit Crawl These pub readings have aimed to bring “literature to the streets” of the Lower East Side, the East Village, and Williamsburg since 2008. Literary debauchery may be a worthy pursuit, bringing to mind Hemingway’s brooding, boozy prose and Haight-Ashbury’s flighty scribblings. Thankfully, the organizers of Lit Crawl have less anarchic ambitions: events like Literary Pictionary and Nerd Jeopardy welcome regulars to flex their bookish chops; Tarot readings, flash portraiture, and mobile photo booths extend an arm toward casual readers. (Various locations. pen.org. Oct. 1.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES Mid-priced contemporary art and photographs are the week’s themes. Sotheby’s holds one of its “Contemporary Curated” sales, in which a tastemaker (usually someone in fashion, finance, or pop culture) puts his or her seal of approval on the selected lots…

Rachel Weisz and Deborah Lipstadt’s friendship turns on the question of who speaks for whom. In the new film “Denial,” Weisz plays Lipstadt, the Emory University professor who was sued for libel by the British historian David Irving after she called him a Holocaust denier. The trial, which took place in London, in 2000, struck Lipstadt as another form of denial, because her lawyers would not allow her and survivors of the concentration camps to testify, and because it seemed to let a bewigged British judge determine whether the Holocaust was real. The two women met for breakfast recently at Café Mogador, in the East Village. Lipstadt, a sixty-nine-year-old redhead, wore a flowery silk scarf that she’d loaned to Weisz for the film. She said, “The first thing Rachel said…

In the cold, clear winter air of Andalusia, I walked a trail up through pig grass toward a distant abandoned farmhouse. No one could live here, I said aloud, the land is baked clay, the long summers are withering. Yet someone did. The one wall left intact bore the handprint of a child, the fingers splayed out to form half a message in the lost language of childhood. It said, “You won’t find me!” Then the wind woke from its nesting in the weeds and the tall grass to blow the childish words away. Almost noon, the distant sun rode straight above us like a god aware of everything and like a god utterly silent. What could ever grow from this ground to feed anyone? And who bore the mysterious…

I believe the moai walked to their resting places. Neither a zigzag nor a bellwether beeline in their history. All face, some fell en route, the machinery of government getting by on the flat-foot plan. Now disappeared, the largest palm trees on earth lived like revolutionaries but only until the seventeenth century. So much for strong silent types. Today in the street, winds swept two wheeled garbage bins halfway across, a frightening noon-hour stunt. Returned from the chalklands and wearing my feather headdress, I apprehended the pair, pushing them out of harm’s way before they reached that legendary dinette the National, full of salty toffee, pâtes de fruits, candied tumbleweed. There was something so sweet about that vehicular effrontery, as if their obsidian eyes could issue an endgame between irony…

All crime novels are social novels. They can’t help it; without a society to define, condemn, and punish it, crime itself wouldn’t exist. Even the detective fiction that seems most untethered from real-world concerns— those British country-house puzzles in which ladies in drop-waisted frocks and gentlemen in evening dress gather in the drawing room to hear a sleuth dissect the murderer’s devious plot— murmurs of class and history: the wealth necessary to staff such a house, the far-off lands where Colonel Mustard earned his insignia. Fictional detectives make handy protagonists because they have license to explore milieus that are off limits to other characters. This is part of the genre’s allure: the windows it opens onto the street life of Victorian London, the sordid fringes of postwar Hollywood, the doldrums…

The American artist Spencer Finch is an eco-conceptualist, distilling the essence of landscape (light, water, air) into eye-catching ruminations on memory and the passage of time. In “Lost Man Creek,” his new piece for the Public Art Fund, Finch turns his attention to trees. Starting Oct. 1, four thousand saplings will grow in the MetroTech Commons, in downtown Brooklyn, in a 1:100-scale re-creation of seven hundred and ninety acres of California’s Redwood National Park, giving old growth a fresh start. ART MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Museum of Modern Art “Kai Althoff: and then leave me to the common swifts (und dann überlasst mich den Mauerseglern)” This mid-career retrospective of the fifty-year-old German artist, best known for his ephebic strain of expressionism, transforms part of the museum’s sixth floor into a…

Scott LoBaido, an artist who paints American flags, is perhaps the most famous living Staten Islander. His flag paintings can be found in outdoor spaces all over Staten Island and in each of the fifty states. Most of the paintings are big; some are gigantic. A flag he painted for a gasket company in Houston, Texas, to welcome returning soldiers as their planes approach the airport, covers three and a half acres of factory roof. LoBaido is a slim, compact man of fifty-one who drinks Martinis, smokes Marlboro Lights, and is often spattered with paint—“My second skin,” he says. He appears occasionally in the news for his acts of public disruption, such as throwing horse manure at the Brooklyn Museum when it displayed a painting of the Virgin Mary stained…

It’s been twenty years since Michael Kinsley, the former editor of The New Republic, undertook a novel adventure: the creation of a magazine, underwritten by Microsoft, that was to exist primarily in what was then known as “cyberspace.” “There will be efforts to update it, perhaps on a daily basis,” the Times noted, in a report that appeared below the fold on page D1 of its issue of Monday, April 29, 1996, two months before the launch of Slate. Recently, Kinsley, who was the editor-in-chief of Slate from 1996 until 2002, and his three successors—Jacob Weisberg, David Plotz, and Julia Turner—gathered in Washington, D.C., to record a podcast: a five-way conversation with Josh Levin, the magazine’s executive editor. It was a nostalgic and forgivably self-regarding celebration of what Turner characterized…

It is not unusual for a female comedian to talk about her body. It is a little less conventional for her to talk about what comes out of it. Her breast milk, for instance. “Local, organic, free-range, farm-to-mouth milk,” Ali Wong recently told an audience at the Comedy Store in West Hollywood. “Squirting out of my titties,” she continued, circling her index fingers in front of her breasts. “Squirting out of like fifteen holes in each titty. Like a Bellagio fountain.” Or her mucus. “I’m addicted to picking my nose,” she declared later that night, at a second gig. “In a world of red tape and bureaucracy, where it takes forever to buy a house or get a cell-phone plan going, it’s so instant to just stick your finger up…

You can tell well in advance when Frauke Petry, the leader of Alternative fur Deutschland, a burgeoning new right-wing party, is going to give a speech. AfD members put up posters all over a town’s main streets declaring, “Frauke Petry Is Coming.” As the appointed hour approaches, police assemble, and usually demonstrators, too, protesting against a woman known to her enemies as “Adolfina” and “die Fuhrerin.” At bigger events, hundreds show up bearing placards with slogans like “Voting AfD is so 1933,” pelting Party leaders with cake. Occasionally, a few of them sneak into Petry’s talks. Petry, who is forty-one, with a pixie haircut and a trim, athletic build, frequently arrives late. She travels continually, often without any immediate electoral aim—the next federal elections won’t be till the second half…

F ive hundred years ago, a man who condoned torture, religious persecution, and burning at the stake wrote a book about the perfect world. In “On the Best Kind of a Republic and About the New Island of Utopia” (the book’s full title, translated from Latin), Sir Thomas More envisaged a paradise where men and women could choose their religion, without fear of violence or coercion. In practice, as Lord Chancellor of England, More oversaw the burning of at least six Protestants and the jailing of some forty. One merchant was tortured in More’s own home, and tied so tightly to a tree that blood reportedly flowed from his eyes. More referred to it as “the Tree of Truth.” Contradiction and hypocrisy have always hovered over the utopian project, shadowing…

“Jerusalem, 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven,” at the Metropolitan Museum, is a captivating show of some two hundred objects from the era of the Crusades. There are manuscripts, maps, paintings, sculptures, architectural fragments, reliquaries, ceramics, glass, fabrics, astrolabes, jewelry, weapons, and, especially, books—in nine alphabets and twelve languages. The works, from sixty lenders in more than a dozen countries, express the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian cultures of the time, the three great Abrahamic faiths sharing a city holy to them all, when they weren’t bloodily contesting it. The installation is lovely: rooms in gray and blue are filled with a cumulative haze of spotlights, designed not for drama but for ease of attention; the show, though immense, won’t exhaust you. There are mural-like video projections of the city today and…