Innholdsfortegnelse for October 10, 2016 i The New Yorker

Larissa MacFarquhar (“Trumptown,” p. 56) is the author of “Strangers Drowning,” which is just out in paperback. Jelani Cobb (Comment, p. 33) teaches in the journalism program at Columbia University. Sheelah Kolhatkar (The Talk of the Town, p. 38; “The Anti-Uber,” p. 40) is a staff writer. Nathan Heller (“Cashing Out,” p. 48) has been writing for the magazine since 2011. Douglas McGrath (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 47) is a filmmaker and a playwright. Tom McCarthy (“Model Behavior,” p. 72) has written four novels, including “Satin Island.” Alison Bechdel (“The Fellowship,” p. 82) is the author of two memoirs, “Fun Home” and “Are You My Mother?” Tad Friend (“Adding a Zero,” p. 68) has been a staff writer since 1998. Louis Menand (A Critic at Large, p. 90) was…

FROZEN On the day of the first Presidential debate, on Long Island, another lurid political spectacle was under way thirty miles due west: the Bridgegate trial, in the Newark, New Jersey, federal courthouse. An aide to Governor Chris Christie and an appointee at the Port Authority stand accused of closing lanes on the George Washington Bridge, for four days in September of 2013, to orchestrate a massive traffic jam as a form of political reprisal. The government’s key witness, David Wildstein, took the stand last week. Wildstein, a former high-school classmate of Christie (whose nickname back then was Buttocks), was Bridgegate’s mastermind and Christie’s “enforcer” inside the Port Authority. Defense lawyers have portrayed him as both a villain (“vicious guy,” “bully,” “miserable prick”) and a stooge. Michael Baldassare, a defense…

The Hidden Cost of Race “Race still determines too much,” Hillary Clinton said, in last week’s debate with Donald Trump. It “often determines where people live, determines what kind of education in their public schools they can get, and, yes, it determines how they’re treated in the criminal-justice system.” She could have added that it has a profound effect on how much money Americans have. Our racial wealth divide, as it’s often called, is enormous, and, fifty years after the civil-rights movement, the gap is growing. Everyone knows that wealth is unequally distributed. The work of Thomas Piketty has made this a mainstream concern. But the magnitude of the gap between white and black Americans is on a different scale. According to a recent report from two progressive think tanks,…

A fantastic heist (we like our crimes as smart and magical as dreams) took place some years back, when a stolen helicopter landed on the roof of a cash depot in Stockholm and three masked men smashed a skylight to climb inside. It was September 23, 2009. The depot was freshly stocked in expectation of a coming Swedish payday. Armed with a Kalashnikov, the invaders held employees at bay while their accomplices outside positioned road spikes to keep cop cars from swarming the building. Fake bombs had been set among the police helicopters to delay an aerial chase. The thieves loaded bag after bag of bills into their aircraft, then departed. Seven men were later caught and sentenced, but nearly all of the stolen cash—reportedly some $6.5 million—still has not…

I was not a tall girl. At sixteen, I was barely five feet three inches. That did not work in my favor at the Baskin-Robbins in Park Forest, Illinois. In order to get the smooth, hard ice cream out of the tubs in the freezer, I had to open the glass display case and lean down inside. Once my head was in, I used one arm to brace myself on the edge of the freezer while, with the other arm, I gathered enough strength to violently jam the metal scoop into the vat of ice cream. The violent jamming was important. If I didn’t do it just right, go at it with enough force, I could find myself skimming right over the ice cream’s surface. That was always an issue.…

As a kid in the eighties, I didn’t need much disposable income. I went to Catholic school—white shirt, plaid skirt—so fashion choices were limited. But youth finds a way. For me and my schoolmates, neon argyle socks were a crucial barometer of coolness. Hair ribbons, too, and they didn’t come cheap. Boxers needed to peek out just below our skirts, which were rolled up several inches at the waistband, so that we looked as though we were packing contraband anacondas. And of course there were the coveted weekend wine coolers; I was thirty before I stopped staring into my Chardonnay and snarling, “Where’s the fruit?” To procure such items, I held many, many jobs. I am a great believer in jobs for teens. They teach important life lessons, build character,…

She saw him often in the morning and often again around dusk as he walked out by the river. She called him the riverman. She had seen him only in the distance and had not properly distinguished his features. She was almost eighteen and determined to have a fuck before it, but she lived remotely and the summer was almost over. He was tall and thin and did not have a pronouncedly masculine walk—he could not be taken for a farmer. His step was carefully picked out and it had a hesitancy to it—it brought to her mind the heron. She needed to get closer to him quickly. The morning was bright, with a breeze that moved the light’s sharp points on the lanes, and the hedges were opulent with…

For many contemporary writers of fiction, The Novel looms balefully, a rigid school from which we should all be desperate to play hooky. That impulse is not especially new. For at least a century, in recurrent spasms of correction, The Novel has been blamed for ossified convention: the codified palaver of plot, character, dialogue, conflict, development, epiphany, closure; the deluded transparency of realism. This need to blow up convention, widely shared among serious writers, has resulted in brilliant and energetic work that would be hard to categorize as postmodern or post-postmodern— work by Teju Cole, Lydia Davis, Geoff Dyer, Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner, and Jenny Offill, among others. Our age appears to have a strong reality hunger (to borrow from David Shields’s anti-novel rant), and a certain…

WHY MOTIVE MATTERS In Jeffrey Toobin’s Profile of Bryan Stevenson, a remarkable lawyer and social-justice activist, the Alabama state senator Dick Brewbaker says, “Why is racially motivated violence worse than any other kind of violence? I don’t give a damn what the motive of the offender was if an act of violence was committed” (“Justice Delayed,” August 22nd). But the motive for an act carries with it the key to its prevention. Although society cannot prevent violence that results from jealousy or personal animus, violence stemming from racism is not personal. It is a learned behavior, and part of the legacy of slavery in this country, and for that reason it is preventable in ways that other types of violence may not be. Stevenson and others in the criminal-justice…

Doug Martsch catches up to his farreaching influence. In the twenty-four years since Doug Martsch founded Built to Spill, indie rock’s market share has waned and peaked, and waned again, shored up by sub-scenes in its low moments and heaved around by executives at its heights. It’s hard to tell where the sound stands now: indie venues and campus stations are densely programmed, and loyal fans are rabidly invested, but it’s been a long decade since Martsch said, genuinely, “I love Modest Mouse, and I’m glad they’re doing well.” Today, Built to Spill is echoed in the tones and lyrics of a dozen upstart groups, who were reared on the band’s 1997 opus, “Perfect from Now On,” and its follow-up, “Keep It Like a Secret”—the scuzzy young punks in Jank…

The Last Word 31-30 Ditmars Blvd., Queens (718-440-3378) Much is made of New York City’s “hidden gems,” but few are hidden as well or as intentionally as the Last Word, a recently opened speakeasy that doubles as a provocative emblem of change in Astoria. Its elaborate façade looks like a hardware store—a near-exact replica of the storefront of Square Hardware, a neighborhood fixture several blocks southeast from 1955 to 2015. The new iteration—cattycorner from Taverna Kyclades, Astoria’s shining Greek jewel—offers ambitious cocktails in a louche ambience. But first a would-be patron must ring the doorbell, then weave through a corridor lined with saws, Scotch tape, and screwdrivers sealed behind Plexiglas like museum relics. Through a red curtain, plush armchairs and clustered couches create an air of cultivated intimacy, though the…

TALKING HEADS AFTER LAST WEEK’S debate, Donald Trump was awarded the following three “grades”—two by actual political pundits and one by a fictional pundit, the invention of two comedy writers from Brooklyn. Carter Eskew: “Trump wasn’t prepared.” (C-minus) Mike Edelman: “Trump’s sniffing tic was a distraction.” (D) Carl Diggler: Manners (F), Lip-Pursing (B-minus), Avoiding Racial Slurs (A-plus). Diggler, the parody pundit (official title: Chief Insider Beltway Hack at Cafe.com), provides commentary that is more ridiculous than the real thing, but not by much. “Carl is reactive, pompous, and makes everything about himself,” Virgil Texas, one of Diggler’s co-creators, said last Tuesday. “He loves the horse race, not the substance,” Felix Biederman, the other co-creator, said. “He loves false equivalences and centrist discourse.” The previous night, Texas and Biederman, both in…

The LaGuardia Plaza Hotel is a four-minute drive from LaGuardia Airport, in Queens, and on a recent August afternoon nearly every car parked in the hotel’s lot was black. One after the other, men in shirtsleeves pulled up in Chevy Suburbans and GMC Yukon XLs and gleaming Lexus RS 300s with leather-trimmed seats, got out, then made their way across the marble lobby and up a flight of stairs. A brightly smiling woman approached them as they congregated around a registration desk. “How are you?” she asked each one. “What’s your first name?” She jotted the letters onto a yellow sticky note and worked her way down the line. “Do you have an appointment? Awesome!” The men were black-car drivers, currently working for the ride-summoning companies Uber or Lyft, or…

The Hillary-for-prison sign outside Mine Lifeline on Main Street was so enormous that it attracted attention, even though its message was so ordinary in Logan County, West Virginia, that the sign seemed festive rather than threatening. People driving by often stopped and took selfies in front of its photograph of a peeved-looking Clinton behind bars. Rick Abraham, who founded the mine-safety company, and had put up the sign, was delighted by the response. He thought he might construct a threedimensional prison with Hillary in it, if he could find the time. He would put it on the roof of his building, which would be nicely theatrical, although bad for selfies. “The Clinton Foundation pay for play—it’s obvious!” he said. “She’s a criminal, she should be in jail! If I had…

One balmy May evening, thirty of Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs gathered in a private room at the Berlinetta Lounge, in San Francisco. Paul Graham considered the founders of Instacart, DoorDash, Docker, and Stripe, in their hoodies and black jeans, and said, “This is Silicon Valley, right here.” All the founders were graduates of Y Combinator, the startup “accelerator” that Graham co-founded: a three-month boot camp, run twice a year, in how to become a “unicorn”—Valleyspeak for a billiondollar company. Thirteen thousand fledgling software companies applied to Y Combinator this year, and two hundred and forty were accepted, making it more than twice as hard to get into as Stanford University. After graduating thirteen hundred startups, YC now boasts the power—and the peculiarities— of an island nation. At the noisy end…

Bashing its head against the kitchen window, its sentience is a quasar, it has lived Twenty fly years trying to understand transparency, while for me, only half a day has passed Since it blew in the back door as I was getting the mail. But I hear the cosmos howling fiercely inside Its minuscule cranium. Time is compressed in its soul like neutrons in plasma. When I walk Across the kitchen, I am continental drift, I move My arms like a spiral galaxy. No wonder It is frantic as I open the pane. How long must it take for the air to cool and the sun to sink into Its consciousness, how long for the speed of light to change?…

By now, my mother has been pulled to the top of many small waves, carried in the curve that curls over, onto itself, and unknots, again, into the liquid plain, as her ions had been gathered from appearances and concepts. And her dividend, her irreducible, like violet down, thrown to the seals, starfish, wolf spiders on the edge-of-Pacific floor, I like to follow her from matter into matter, my little quester, as if she went to sea in a pea-green boat. Every separate bit, every crystal shard, seems to be here—her nature unknowable, dense, dispersed, her atomization a miracle, the earth without her a miracle as if I had arrived on my own with nothing to owe, nothing to grieve, nothing to fear, it would happen with me as it…

Strangers in Their Own Land, by Arlie Russell Hochschild (New Press). In this study of grassroots opinion on the American right, a sociologist befriends Tea Party and Trump supporters in Louisiana’s bayou country, determined to scale the “empathy wall” and understand views opposed to her own. Asking about pollution—Louisiana is a leading hazardous-waste producer—she finds that environmental degradation has caused her interviewees huge suffering, yet they oppose regulation and doubt climate-change science. There are many such paradoxes: hatred of “big government,” despite Louisiana’s dependence on federal assistance; mockery of identity politics, despite a sense of victimhood rooted in white ethnic pride. Hochschild, although writing for readers unlikely to sympathize with such views, engages her subjects in good faith, seeing them as kind and intelligent. Neither Snow Nor Rain,…

Amy Schumer is on tour just now, and if you’ve loved her on TV, as I have, I suggest you see her perform live. The show isn’t disappointing, but it isn’t great, either, and it took me more than a minute to figure out why. At first, I thought my feeling of letdown had something to do with the context in which I saw her—at the Verizon Center, in Washington, D.C. (She’ll be at Madison Square Garden, in New York, on October 18th.) It was the night before the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened its doors to the public, a few blocks away. Pussy jokes could fall flat in juxtaposition with such a grand occasion, but in this multicultural world we’re able to think about many…

“You don’t know that rock music exists in this age unless someone shows you,” Jacob Faber told Rolling Stone in January. Consider this your tip. As Sunflower Bean, Faber, Nick Kivlen, and Julia Cumming propose a contemporary take on lo-fi psychedelia, wearing shrewd influences on stylish sleeves. They play their latest album, “Human Ceremony,” at Music Hall of Williamsburg on Oct. 7, with its classic-rock chops, slick titles (“2013”), and New Wave aesthetics (“Easier Said”), delivered under Cumming’s runway-ready voice. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera As in his 2015 staging of “Iolanta,” Mariusz Treliński’s season-opening production of “Tristan und Isolde” turns late-Romantic romance into post-Hitchcockian psychodrama. The result is risky but effective. Wagner’s opera, set mostly on a modern-day warship, now has a “Marnie”-like backstory: Tristan’s yearning for oblivion…

New York Comic Con This culture convention has grown from a geek refuge to an all but mandatory celebration of the best in upcoming television, film, and publishing— well, it’s still a geek refuge, but there are a lot more geeks. Fans and enthusiasts will enjoy unprecedented access to stars from series such as “Game of Thrones” and “Stranger Things”; panels and workshops with the directors, producers, and industry insiders who keep the entertainment machine churning; and appearances by Matt Damon, Carrie Fisher, Kate Beckinsale, Ali Larter, Lucy Liu, Neil deGrasse Tyson, John Bernthal, and many others. The annual display of inventive costumes promises to be more outlandish than ever with the return of the NYCC Eastern Championships of Cosplay, where elaborate props and inventive concepts reign and trademarks…

ALGORITHM BLUES “I’m a really boring person,” Cathy O’Neil said one recent Sunday evening. “I do all of my thinking at home.” O’Neil is a former hedge-fund quant (a mathematician who creates algorithms to help traders make money) who left Wall Street and wrote a book: “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.” It details how the lives of ordinary people are being undermined by the widespread use of algorithms, and has just been nominated for a National Book Award. During the four years that O’Neil spent writing it, in her Morningside Heights apartment, she came to rely on the regular jam sessions she holds at home with her bluegrass band, the Tomtown Ramblers. The band’s eight members had gathered in the living room. Beer…

Governor Mike Pence was having a romantic dinner with the love of his life, Mrs. Mike Pence, at the Red Lobster in Times Square. The Governor knew that as Vice-President he would have to attend foreign banquets, so he and Mrs. Pence were trying to broaden their palates. Luckily, they had already found a couple of dishes at the Red Lobster which they liked. Governor Pence was saying a blessing over their chicken wings and mozzarella cheese sticks when the first three notes of “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” chimed on his phone, signalling a text. As he read it, Mrs. Pence popped a sizzling cheese stick into her mouth and blew out little puffs of steam. “Look at me!” she said gaily. “I’m a steamboat!” But the Governor…

I placed an ad on a popular classifieds Web site under the title “Jack of All Trades, Master of None.” The ad offered to clean, go to the laundromat, organize your bullshit, walk your dog. This was in the personals section, specifically for men seeking men. I was twenty-five but easily passed for younger—my scrawny frame underdeveloped, my cheeks still hairless—so I advertised nineteen. I remember it was autumn, and I remember feeling plagued by an unbearable need for both intimacy and estrangement, for the queerness of touch. Mostly, I placed that ad because I was broke and had been for just about every day of my adult life. I got a lot of responses, enough to waste the afternoon, idly mesmerized by my cascading in-box. Most simply demanded pics,…

In 1991, fresh out of college and determined to become a writer, I was a recipient of a Government Enterprise Allowance Scheme grant. The scheme was a scam, dreamed up in the Thatcher Administration’s dying days, to manipulate unemployment figures by redesignating swaths of jobless people as “small businesses.” The amount you received was more or less the same as what you got on the dole, but you didn’t have to show up at a job center and sign for it, and, vitally, you were no longer classified as unemployed but, rather, as a fledgling enterprise marketing X or Y or Z: gardening or odd-jobbing, hairdressing or massage. Basically, whatever you already did while jobless. To qualify, all you had to do was draw up a “business plan,” whose execution…

criticism, Buchheit said, was that, with a hundred and twenty-seven companies in the batch, “YC feels too big. I think a lot of us feel that way, too. Founders aren’t schoolchildren or farm animals that we herd around. They’re the next Mark Zuckerbergs, they’re peers, and it’s critical to our success that they love us.” He concluded, “I have a goal of the next batch being a hundred companies.” Afterward, Altman told me that it was a mistake to focus entirely on founders. “When I took over,” he said, “we measured our companies’ happiness with YC, but that was the wrong metric. To make sure we’re getting and keeping the best investors, we now also measure partner happiness”—currently 4.38 out of five—“versus whether a company that wasn’t going to make…

On or about February 24, 1848, a twenty-three-page pamphlet was published in London. Modern industry, it proclaimed, had revolutionized the world. It surpassed, in its accomplishments, all the great civilizations of the past—the Egyptian pyramids, the Roman aqueducts, the Gothic cathedrals. Its innovations—the railroad, the steamship, the telegraph—had unleashed fantastic productive forces. In the name of free trade, it had knocked down national boundaries, lowered prices, made the planet interdependent and cosmopolitan. Goods and ideas now circulated everywhere. Just as important, it swept away all the old hierarchies and mystifications. People no longer believed that ancestry or religion determined their status in life. Everyone was the same as everyone else. For the first time in history, men and women could see, without illusions, where they stood in their relations with…

In the summer of 1831, Nat Turner’s slave insurrection ripped through Southampton County, Virginia, leaving scores of white men, women, and children dead. The rebels were captured and tried in Jerusalem, a few miles from where the rebellion was put down. Eighteen were publicly executed for their crimes; more than a hundred other slaves were killed in reprisal. Nat Turner, the last to feel the rope, was hanged on November 11th. His corpse was likely dismembered or sold for dissection. But the county’s slaveholding citizens were still afraid. How many of their own slaves were hatching similar plans? Why had Turner carried out so awful an operation? And what could the community do to forestall a reoccurrence? Amid this atmosphere of panic, a Virginia attorney named Thomas R. Gray published…