Innholdsfortegnelse for October 17, 2016 i The New Yorker

Ryan Lizza (“Taming Trump,” p. 30), a Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, is also a political commentator for CNN. Dexter Filkins (“The Thirty-Year Coup,” p. 60) is a staff writer and the author of “The Forever War,” which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Sheila Marikar (The Talk of the Town, p. 24) is a writer living in Los Angeles. She is currently working on a book about modern-day communes. Jack Handey (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 37) has written several humor books, including, most recently, “Squeaky Poems: Rhymes About My Rat.” Julie Phillips (“Out of Bounds,” p. 38) is working on a book on writing and mothering, and is researching a biography of Ursula K. Le Guin. R. Kikuo Johnson (Cover), an illustrator and cartoonist, teaches cartooning…

Mystery Woman Rachel Weisz returns to the stage. Toward the end of Peter Brook’s inspiring 1968 book, “The Empty Space,” the esteemed director says that an actor “must bring into being an unconscious state of which he is completely in charge.” In a way, what we look for in the best performers is not only a face and a body that distill emotions we may or may not have been aware of but also a person who reflects something of the times. While we sometimes associate the lush, forty-six-year-old British-born consummate actress Rachel Weisz’s romantic countenance and mindfulness with epochs other than her own—in certain roles, she brings to mind the pluck, imagination, and melancholy of a star from the nineteen-thirties—she is completely modern in her depiction of women who…

The Depression era had Eleanor Roosevelt, the MTV generation had Rock the Vote. Our current age has apps. In August, Amit Kumar, an entrepreneur in Menlo Park, California, distressed by the popularity of Donald Trump, released a mobile app called #NeverTrump, which allows users— there are now more than a thousand of them—to win points for prodding friends in swing states to vote. The app matches a user’s contacts with publicly available data, figures out whom the user knows in battleground states, then offers to send those people automated reminders to vote and, especially, to not vote for Trump. “On Facebook, a lot of people post, ‘I want to do something, but I’m in California, I feel powerless,’ ” Kumar said the other day, at an Asianfusion restaurant in Sunnyvale.…

The revelation that Donald Trump’s business losses in the mid-nineties may have enabled him to avoid paying federal income tax for nearly two decades may be the biggest “October surprise” of any recent Presidential campaign. But the substance of it was no surprise at all. When, in the first debate, Hillary Clinton challenged him about years in which he may not have paid federal taxes, he boasted, “That makes me smart.” And his real-estate empire, such as it is, was built on exploiting just about every government tax abatement, credit, and subsidy available. Still, whatever tax savings Trump has finagled over the years are dwarfed by the huge tax break he plans to give wealthy Americans if he wins. According to the Tax Foundation, Trump’s tax plan would boost the…

Politics has been obsessing a lot of people lately, and Ursula K. Le Guin is far from immune to bouts of political anger. In an e-mail to me last winter, she wrote that she felt “eaten up” with frustration at the ongoing occupation of an eastern Oregon wildlife refuge by an armed band of antigovernment agitators led by the brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy. She was distressed by the damage they had done to scientific programs and to historical artifacts belonging to the local Paiute tribe, and critical of the F.B.I. for being so slow to remove these “hairy gunslinging fake cowboys” from public property. She had been mildly cheered up, she added, by following a Twitter feed with the hashtag #BundyEroticFanFic. The high desert of eastern Oregon is one…

They take the linens every day, the bloody linens worn through by sweat and sleeplessness. Simple bleach at the end of it, huge washers, soap swirling itself gray-green, the sound of planes landing. Not just surgeries. It’s mainly ordinary seepage, the drip down tubes into arms, drains in secret to abdomen and lung. Always sheets bearing up their cool finish as if nothing will happen, then caught in that lie. The life behind fabric—cotton, flax in the weave—is a seed broken, getting ahead of itself by tiny increments unwatchable because we have no patience with the slower inscrutables. A woman drives this morning, takes the linens out one door, to the street, and into another. Huge plastic bags encloud her. Bedazzlement keeps staining, the dry brush-by of so many wings.…

The revived Hogarth Press, in London, with ambition and audacity and what must also be a very large fund for advances, has commissioned a series of novels by famous novelists that retell tales from Shakespeare. The novelists include Howard Jacobson, who has done “The Merchant of Venice” (as “Shylock Is My Name”); Anne Tyler, who’s done “The Taming of the Shrew” (as “Vinegar Girl”); and now Margaret Atwood, doing “The Tempest” (as “Hag-Seed”). Retelling Shakespeare’s stories, albeit in honor of the four-hundredth anniversary of his death, seems an odd enterprise at first, given that Shakespeare grabbed his stories more or less at random from Holinshed’s history of Britain and Plutarch and old collections of Italian ribald tales. As the “ordinary poet” of a working company of players, he sought plots…

My father is a lamp, a boy, is two fathers: his own and a wolf father. Me, other kids, camp around his flame; night dissolves like snow on his skin. A whole life lives in each fist of my father the way a burning city lives in a firefly’s gut. It’s there, a faint light cradling a chicken egg, clutching an axe, raising a newborn’s almost see-through body. There is an animal looking back and leaping forward inside him. My father carries a shadow speckled with the soot of dawn, and drags a darker one. There is a boy there building everything, and he is free, and when he is lost he burns down a mountain or sings like a crow. But he is never lost.…

Contrary to popular belief, “Tristan und Isolde” does not end with a Liebestod, or “love-death.” In the final minutes of the opera, Isolde indeed collapses, lifeless, after singing an aria of serene ecstasy over Tristan’s body. But Wagner called that monologue Isolde’s “Transfiguration.” He applied the word “Liebestod” to the music of groping longing that appears in the Prelude and recurs in Act I, as the lovers partake of the potion that they mistakenly believe to be poison. It was Franz Liszt who, in an 1867 piano paraphrase, dubbed the ending “Isolden’s Liebes-Tod.” In its original context, Liebestod indicates a death that turns into love. The later usage implies the opposite, a love that turns into death. The misnomer is particularly ironic because the dying Isolde never mentions death:…

A MUSEUM’S UNSUNG HERO Vinson Cunningham’s piece on the Smithsonian Institution’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture describes the museum’s long period of gestation, the obstacles it faced, and its many champions, but neglects to mention one of its major contributors, the late African-American architect J. Max Bond, Jr. (“Making a Home for Black History,” August 29th). The idea of a national museum dedicated to the African-American experience was first discussed in 1915. In 1991, while working on the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute with the congressman John Lewis, Bond joined the effort. In 2006, he and another noted architect, Phil Freelon, received the commission to define the project’s objectives and to choose its site on the Mall. The early work of Bond and Freelon, who joined…

Ear Inn 326 Spring St. (212-226-9060) On a recent evening at Ear Inn, a bartender cheekily mimicked a customer asking about the draftbeer selection. “He sounds like a Russian spy,” the bartender joked, then inquired where the man was from—Milan. On a less recent evening, in 1817, James Brown, an African-American who fought under George Washington in the Revolutionary War and later became a tobacconist, supervised the finishing touches on his house, then just a few steps from the Hudson. He sold it in the eighteen-thirties, and since then the exquisite Federal-style building has been home to a number of taverns of varying legality. Ear Inn was born there in 1977, when the building was bought by its current owners, Rip Hayman and Martin Sheridan. The duo have covered the…

“I’ve never even been to Bed-Stuy before,” Bonnie Raitt said. She was at the deep end of Bar LunÀtico, which is owned by her friend Richard Julian, a singer and songwriter. A few years ago, Julian, amid the ongoing struggle of trying to make a living in the music busi- ness, decided to diversify, so he bought a building in Brooklyn, moved in upstairs with his wife and child, and turned the ground floor into a bar, with a stage crammed in one corner. Raitt was here to hang out, not to perform. She favors bigger venues, and has been successful and sensible enough in her affairs to have the luxury of forgoing diversification. It was early evening, and there weren’t many people around. She had on black boots, black…

In late September, when Donald Trump spoke in Chester Township, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, he wasn’t the only star at the event. Kellyanne Conway, his new campaign manager, who grew up nearby, and who has become ubiquitous on television, was greeted as a celebrity. “Did you see the people asking me to sign their posters and hats?” she asked me in a text while Trump was speaking. “So weird.” In August, Conway, who is forty-nine, and a longtime Republican pollster, became Trump’s third campaign manager. Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart, a right-wing news site that has championed Trump’s candidacy, was named C.E.O. Conway, who is the first woman to run a Republican Presidential campaign, told me that she was proud of the milestone but not hung up on it.…

When Leonard Cohen was twenty-five, he was living in London, sitting in cold rooms writing sad poems. He got by on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. This was 1960, long before he played the festival at the Isle of Wight in front of six hundred thousand people. In those days, he was a Jamesian Jew, the provincial abroad, a refugee from the Montreal literary scene. Cohen, whose family was both prominent and cultivated, had an ironical view of himself. He was a bohemian with a cushion whose first purchases in London were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue raincoat at Burberry. Even before he had much of an audience, he had a distinct idea of the audience he wanted. In a letter to his publisher,…

He swings the fish from the water, a wild stripe flicking and flashing into the boat, and grabs the line, twisting the hook out, holding the fish down in the footrests. It gasps, thrashes. Drums. Something rapid and primal, ceremonial, in the shallow of the open boat. Flecks of blood and scales loosen, as if turning to rainbows in his hands, as he picks up the fish and breaks its neck, feels the minute rim of teeth inside its jaw on the pad of his forefinger, puts his thumb behind the head and snaps. The jaw splits and the gills splay, like an opening flower. He was sure he would catch fish. He left just a simple note: “Pick salad x.” Briefly, he looks toward the inland cliffs, hoping the…

Here’s how not to be taken seriously as a woman writer: Use demons and ghosts and other gothic paraphernalia in your fiction. Describe yourself publicly as “a practicing amateur witch” and boast about the hexes you have placed on prominent publishers. Contribute comic essays to women’s magazines about your hectic life as a housewife and mother. Shirley Jackson did all of these things, and, during her lifetime, was largely dismissed as a talented purveyor of hightoned horror stories—“Virginia Werewoolf,” as one critic put it. For most of the fifty-one years since her death, that reputation has stuck. Today, “The Lottery,” her story of ritual human sacrifice in a New England village (first published in this magazine, in 1948), has become a staple of eighth-grade reading lists, and her novel “The…

 The Mothers, by Brit Bennett (Riverhead). In this compelling début novel, set in a black community in Southern California, two seventeen-year-old girls form a bond. Both have lost their mothers—one chose husband over daughter, the other killed herself—and both love the same broken man. In the next two decades, as their lives develop, the pair are watched over by the female congregation of Upper Room Chapel (the Mothers of the title), who contribute choruslike sections of narration. Sharing secrets and bringing food to the bereaved, the Mothers are an all-knowing entity, at once witness and impetus. They anchor Bennett’s theme of female community: the two motherless women, overseen by the Mothers, struggle with the choice of whether to become mothers themselves. On Jupiter Place, by Nicholas Christopher (Counterpoint). Memory…

ART MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES Museum of Modern Art “Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter” No word but “disgrace” can describe our passivity in the face of the current displacement of more than sixty-five million people. This grave, accusatory exhibition evokes the transit, and the intermittent protection, of refugees through photographs, artists’ projects, water-purification tablets, and a steel-frame tent from the United Nations Refugee Agency: temporary shelter that, for too many people, has now become permanent housing. Photographs appropriated by Xaviera Simmons consider the near-daily deaths in the Mediterranean, and are accompanied by a list of the drowned. Refugee camps from Lebanon to Kenya are among the world’s fastest growing; while this show fails to acknowledge the experiences of people trapped in Lesbos or Calais, it complements Bouchra Khalili’s videos, recently…

City of Science An exhibition of immersive demonstrations arrives at the Park Slope Armory, the fourth stop on the World Science Festival’s borough-wide tour. Aimed at budding experimenters of all ages, City of Science will feature activities and presentations based on physics, chemistry, technology, and engineering, including principles of giant waves, a pool that allows for walking on water, and a game of tug-of-war on wheels. The festival is open to the public; tickets, which are free, are recommended but not required. (361 15th St., Brooklyn. 212-348-1400. Oct. 16.) Open House New York Historic residential and commercial buildings will be opened to the public during this annual architecture-tour-and-talk series. Attendees will enjoy unparalleled access to more than two hundred and seventy-five sites across the city, along with informative lectures…

Norm Macdonald, the comedian and former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, who lives in Los Angeles, recently visited New York. One morning, he was drinking coffee at a table in Bryant Park, wearing a red polo shirt from the Shadow Creek golf course, in Las Vegas. He had just made an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” where he talked about his new and largely fictional memoir, “Based on a True Story,” and about the breakup of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. He then walked through Times Square, reflecting on his anxiety that, having now read half of the first volume of “In Search of Lost Time,” he might have chosen the wrong translation. A section of Forty-second Street was closed, because of a bomb scare, and the atmosphere in Champs…

At nine o’clock on the night of July 15th, General Hulusi Akar, the chief of the Turkish Army’s general staff, heard a knock on his office door in Ankara, the nation’s capital. It was one of his subordinates, General Mehmet Dişli, and he was there to report that a military coup had begun. “We will get everybody,” Dişli said. “Battalions and brigades are on their way. You will soon see.” Akar was aghast. “What the hell are you saying?” he asked. In other cities, officers involved in the coup had ordered their units to detain senior military leaders, block major roads, and seize crucial institutions like Istanbul Ataturk Airport. Two dozen F-16 fighters took to the air. According to statements from some of the officers involved, the plotters asked Akar…

Few places are less conducive to erotic optimism than the packed waiting room of a public health clinic in Brooklyn. Sitting on a hard plastic chair under a fluorescent buzz as an employee lectures on proper condom use—a catechism you know by heart yet sometimes fail to heed—you may conclude, as Emily Witt did, that the time has come to change your life. It was March of 2012. Just before Valentine’s Day, Witt had slept with a friend. She was single; he was not. A few weeks later, he called to report that he might have chlamydia. He was overcome with guilt. His girlfriend was enraged. Witt didn’t feel too great, either. She was thirty, and depressed after a recent breakup. Though she had spent the ensuing months hooking up…

One night in the spring of 1955, the actress Elaine Dundy was leaving a party in New York when a sharpnosed, floppy-haired young man came toward her and, without context or introduction, asked, “Do you know Henry Green?” Dundy replied that she did. The young man told her his name— she instantly forgot it. Dundy told him to contact her, but he didn’t call. Instead, he started appearing in the lobby of the Buckingham Hotel, in the West Fifties, where Dundy was staying. On one occasion, he had been waiting around so long that, by the time Dundy showed up, the tulips he was holding had gone droopy. Dundy apologized: could they speak another time? The young man returned the next day, and so did the tulips. But Dundy was…

Long before he tried opium, Thomas De Quincey, the English essayist, was addicted to books. The cycles of “remorse and deadly anxiety” that he suffered in his adult life began when he was seven, after a kindly bookseller lent him three guineas. This, according to Frances Wilson’s new biography, “Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), was De Quincey’s “earliest trespass”: a “mysterious (and indeed guilty) current of debt” that he feared would carry him away. Among the books De Quincey acquired, there was a history of Britain, expected to grow in time to “sixty or eighty parts.” But he craved something vaster and more dangerous, so he purchased “a general history of navigation, supported by a vast body of voyages”: a work that…

Here is an introduction to “The Girl on the Train.” Listen carefully, and answer the questions that follow. Rachel (Emily Blunt) used to be married to Tom (Justin Theroux), but Tom had an affair with Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), who is now his wife. He and Anna have a baby, whose nanny is named Megan (Haley Bennett). Megan looks a bit like Anna. She— Megan, not Anna—lives with Scott (Luke Evans), who is creepy and possessive, although Tom also looks a bit clenched. Not as clenched as Kamal (Edgar Ramírez), however, who is Megan’s superhot shrink. Rachel will later enroll as a patient of Kamal’s. Stay with me here. It so happens that Rachel, who is obsessed with her ex, takes a twice-daily train ride that passes the house where Tom…