Innholdsfortegnelse for October 24, 2016 i The New Yorker

Evan Osnos (“Kaine Country,” p. 40) writes about politics and foreign affairs for the magazine. His book “Age of Ambition” won the 2014 National Book Award for nonfiction. Margaret Talbot (Comment, p. 19), a staff writer, is the author of “The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century.” Stephanie Clifford (“A Shot to the Heart,” p. 26) was a Times reporter for eight years. “Everybody Rise,” her début novel, came out in 2015. She is now working on her second. John Lahr (“Walking Tall,” p. 34) has written for The New Yorker since 1992. His book “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh” won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Annelyse Gelman (Poem, p. 47) is the author of the poetry collection “Everyone I Love Is a Stranger…

“Doomocracy” The arts organization Creative Time decorates the haunted house with all-new horrors this fall. Swap out the chilling breath on the back of your neck for ever-present surveillance culture, trade gobs of fake blood for a miasma of air and land pollution, and you begin to get the idea behind “Doomocracy,” an immersive installation by Pedro Reyes. The free exhibit conflates the terrors of Halloween and the Presidential election in a witty, witching participatory experience. Brave attendees navigate a maze of rooms that contain symbols and stagings of our political anxieties: gun violence, abortion, police brutality, economic disparities, G.M.O.s, and more. Tickets must be reserved in advance. (Brooklyn Army Terminal, 140 58th St., Brooklyn. creativetime.org. Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays through Nov. 6.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES Baseball is the…

The other day, Iris Zalun, a twentyseven-year-old Filipino-American, who is the voting-rights organizer at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, was standing with a couple of other Asian-Americans in a corridor of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse. They were waiting for a naturalization ceremony to con- clude, at which point they would try to register newly minted citizens to vote. Zalun has been registering voters and conducting exit polls around Chinatown for the past nine months, and the courthouse was a potential jackpot: some hundred and fifty immigrants from dozens of countries take their naturalization oaths there every Friday. “Most people wait a long while to become American,” Zalun said. “We want to make sure to sign them up while they are still excited.” Earlier in the week,…

Sang into your mouth but there was no slug inside. The brain begins to feel claustrophobic, fossilized. It takes exactly one lifetime to adjust to the darkness. Sea smooths glass but rips a body open like a paper bag. Some people, born inside out, are prone to unravelling. Among our vestigial traits: coccyx, wisdom tooth, death. Every day, piecemeal evolution. Soon I will be pure wonder. You step into the river of your history, wrinkle, step out. Fruit is the fruit of the tree; rot is the fruit of the fruit. I will not leap from this bridge. This bridge is too ugly. A wound may be seen as an attempt to form gills. Having no blood, a ship can survive at sea for years.…

They met one summer day through the high chain-link fence between their back yards. His yard was just plain brown dirt. Hers was full of dusty bags of fertilizer and tools, haphazardly scattered where she’d started planting flowers in the tough soil. The man had seen neighbors come and go over the many years he’d lived there, in the dark corner of the cul-desac. “Through seven Presidents,” he told the girl, laughing nervously and swatting his neck as if to catch mosquitoes. He was only sixty but looked far older. Vitiligo had stripped his brittle hair of its color, made his face seem riddled with fat freckles. The girl was pretty, sturdy, in her early thirties. She had been living next door to the man for two months already. He…

A distrust of high theory used to be a mainstay of conservatism. Edmund Burke, scrutinizing support for the French Revolution, had seen connections with sinister “literary caballers, and intriguing philosophers, with political theologians and theological politicians.” Even in the middle of the past century, when American intellectuals on the right were publishing the books that buttressed a movement— Peter Viereck’s “Conservatism Revisited” (1949), Whittaker Chambers’s “Witness” (1952), and Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind” (1953)—a shared aversion to grand philosophizing was palpable. What was needed, Viereck wrote, was a “revolt against ideology” and a defense of what Kirk called “permanent things,” to offset, if possible, drastic changes, whether wrought in the blood of the Russian Revolution or, as Chambers wrote of the New Deal, in “a revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking.”…

WHAT TRUMP WOULD DO After I read of the horrors that Evan Osnos foresees in a hypothetical Trump Administration, it seemed perverse to wish he had said more, but I did (“President Trump’s First Term,” September 26th). Understandably, Osnos doesn’t focus on Trump’s impact on environmental law and regulation—Trump hasn’t talked about those issues much. But, as with his other policies, there is enough information to predict the outcome, and to know that, by any measure, it would be devastating. On Twitter, Trump has decried climate change as a “hoax” and a “con job,” as “mythical,” “nonexistent,” and “bullshit.” While the Republican Party leadership might, as Osnos points out, act as a buffer against the candidate’s loopier positions on many issues, they are behind their man on climate change…

Déjeuner sur l’Herbe Bhima dines on Dussasana’s viscera, in a Kathakali show. Ancient epics are full of grisly deeds. In “Beowulf,” the hero yanks Grendel’s arm off and hangs it, dripping, from the rafters of the mead hall. In the Iliad, Achilles, after killing Hector, attaches that noble man’s body to the back of his chariot and drags it through the dirt in front of Troy’s walls. But even these events are outdone by the Sanskrit Mahabharata. There Draupadi, wife of the five Pandava brothers— famed warriors all—has been disgraced by an enemy prince, Dussasana, who dragged her into court by her hair. For justice, she turns to Krishna, the great god, swearing that she will never again braid her hair until she can anoint it first with the blood…

When the news broke that Donald Trump had been caught on video in 2005 boasting that, as a celebrity, he feels free to “grab” women “by the pussy,” Harry Hurt III experienced a sense of vindication. In 1993, Hurt published “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump,” an unauthorized biography that has long been out of print. The day the tape surfaced, he was hitting golf balls at a driving range in Sagaponack, New York, when a text message arrived from a friend: “Donald is done!” After Hurt watched the tape, he said, “I thought, Finally, this behavior is coming out.” But he doubted that the revelation would do any real damage to Trump’s campaign. Researching his book, in the early nineties, Hurt discovered and documented more serious…

American presidents traditionally choose to be buried in their home towns, often in sight of a library built in their honor. If Donald J. Trump were to win the election, that might change. Although five of his relatives are interred in the Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery, in Middle Village, Queens, Trump has been making plans to spend eternity behind the first tee of one of the courses at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. “Wouldn’t you want to be buried here?” he told the Wall Street Journal, in 2015. It is likely that Trump has no idea that the landscape architect of the club, whose members reportedly pay an initiation fee of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, was a real-life version of Chance, the gardener—a twenty-four-year-old…

Some actresses prefer to meet a journalist for the first time with a press agent in tow; some opt for the neutrality of a restaurant; some suggest the distracting hubbub of the sound stage. The British actress Janet McTeer’s place of choice for an initial get-together was in kayaks. Onstage and off, McTeer, who is reprising her recent West End triumph in Christopher Hampton’s “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” on Broadway this fall, has an appetite for adventure. “I’m gung ho,” she said. “I’d rather lose large than win slightly. I think life is an oil painting, not a watercolor.” It was in that spirit that she upped sticks from London seven years ago to move to Maine, the home state of her husband, Joseph Coleman. McTeer and Coleman, a poet and…

DID I EVER imagine, during my anxious, closeted childhood, that I’d live long enough to see a movie like “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins’s brilliant, achingly alive new work about black queerness? Did any gay man who came of age, as I did, in the era of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and AIDS, think he’d survive to see a version of his life told onscreen with such knowledge, unpredictability, and grace? Based on a story by the gay black playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney—Jenkins himself is not gay—the film is virtuosic in part because of Jenkins’s eye and in part because of the tale it tells, which begins in nineteen-eighties Miami. Four white Miami-Dade police officers have beaten a young black man to death and been acquitted of manslaughter, setting off riots in…

The Nix, by Nathan Hill (Knopf). Unfolding across four decades via dozens of characters, this satirical novel takes aim at several targets. When, in 2012, Faye Andreson-Anderson pelts a right-wing Wyoming governor with rocks, in the lead-up to his Presidential bid, she achieves “meme status.” She also becomes newly present for her son, Samuel, who tries to leverage the assault into a best-selling memoir. His research leads him deep into his mother’s childhood and his own. Hill astutely skewers the media for the way it packages experience—Samuel’s publisher claims to be an “interest maker” specializing in “multimodal cross-platform synergy.” But the book’s true theme is our need for connection, from protesters linking arms at the 1968 Democratic Convention to modern students glued to their cell phones. The Lesser Bohemians,…

CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera When it isn’t trafficking in grotesque caricatures of hairy Turks and pot-bellied eunuchs, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s otherwise attractive 1973 production of “L’Italiana in Algeri” celebrates the profound goofiness and contagious energy of an opera that uses spaghetti as a critical plot device. The Italians in the cast, Marianna Pizzolato (a vocally plain Isabella) and Nicola Alaimo (Taddeo), bring sly humor to their roles, while Rene Barbera (an affable Lindoro), Ildar Abdrazakov (a scene-chewing Mustafa), and Ying Fang (a soaring Elvira) offer sonic lustre. In the pit, the conductor James Levine hits a winning stride with Rossini’s fun and fizzy score. (Oct. 20 at 7:30 and Oct. 22 at 8.) • Also playing: A revival of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” features fine singing from Simon Keenlyside (seductive and…

OPENING American Pastoral Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening Oct. 21. (In limited release.) • Fire at Sea A documentary by Gianfranco Rosi, about the arrival of migrants on the island of Lampedusa. Opening Oct. 21. (In limited release.) • The Handmaiden Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening Oct. 21. (In limited release.) • Moonlight Barry Jenkins directed this drama, about a young man in Miami who is grappling with his homosexual desires. Starring Ashton Sanders, Janelle Monáe, Mahershala Ali, and Naomie Harris. Opening Oct. 21. (In limited release.) NOW PLAYING The Accountant This thrill-free thriller, written by Bill Dubuque and directed by Gavin O’Connor, piles up plotlines like an overbuilt house of cards that comes crashing down at the first well-earned guffaw of ridicule. The disaster-by-numbers is…

Studio 735 Bar & Lounge 735 St. Nicholas Ave. (917-326-1138) Recently, a new species of commuter has been observed around 145th Street, in Harlem: the confused European brownstone vacationer. Often equipped with a map, professional-grade camera equipment, and children, it can be heard emitting a distinctive chirp, which sounds a lot like “Empire State Building?” or “Freedom Tower?” At night, appurtenances (and kids) stowed, it flocks to local night spots. The species has been observed keenly frequenting Studio 735, which, despite the white sofas and long wooden bar, feels a little like a stylish basement apartment available for shortterm rental, and is just as brightly lit. The other night, there were a few such tourists amidst the locals. A bunch of serious-faced young folks, mouthing the words to “It’s Going…

In retrospect, it makes sense that 2016 was the year clowns stopped being funny. Things were simpler last year, when an orange-hued man first appeared on the political scene, bran dishing raw steaks at press conferences and handing out goofy nicknames like Lyin’ Ted and Pocahontas. It seemed like a circus act. Then, in August, South Carolina residents began spotting menacing-looking clowns in the woods. By the first Presidential debate, in late September, the country was in the grips of “creepy clown” hysteria. Clowns were seen loitering by a laundry room in Florida and chasing people down the street in Idaho. In October, Donald Trump’s groping video leaked, making him creepy even to Republicans. Senator Mark Kirk, of Illinois, urged him to drop out of the race, calling him “a…

A couple of times a year, Peter Forcelli, a former New York Police Department detective who now works as a federal investigator in Florida, returns to the city to testify in court cases. The night before his appearances, he often heads to El Rio Grande, a midtown Tex-Mex restaurant, where he and former N.Y.P.D. colleagues trade stories about their days on the force. Forcelli, who is fifty-one, worked in the Bronx during some of the most violent years of the nineteen-nineties, before he left for a job with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. As a federal agent, Forcelli has found himself developing an unusual specialty: reinvestigating cases that were considered solved and uncovering evidence to free people imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. His view of this…

It must have been their first time—first shared bed, A hotel off 42nd Street, so sleazy It had seen stuff that made cockroaches queasy And even the rats had learned to give head. But these two were so young, so innocent, They thought the footsteps that came and went All night in the corridor, with whispers, meant Someone was sick, or dead; and so they hid Their guilty fears by doing what they did, Three times, then fell asleep. That’s when I fed. Not the kind of place you lie around And wait for room service in the morning, Rich on coffee smells. As day was dawning They scratched their itch again; untangled, found They were soon scratching at a different one And this time the scratching was no fun—…

It seems unlikely that anyone will ever write a rap musical about the foundation of the European Union, but until “Hamilton” it seemed unlikely that anyone would write one about the fiscal infrastructure of the nascent United States. If anyone does try to bust some rhymes about the creation of the E.U., he could find a protagonist in Jean Monnet, a Frenchman who had one of those extraordinary twentieth-century lives, not as an artist or a warrior or a leader or a mystic but as that less celebrated but equally distinctive human type the fixer. Monnet, who was born in 1888, spent his whole life in behind-thescenes advocacy and deal-making, mainly in the sphere of international coöperation. Just after the First World War, he was appointed deputy secretary-general of the…

“This story line will make Hieronymus Bosch look like he was doodling kittens,” Lee Sizemore brags. He’s the head of the “narrative department” at Westworld, a frontier-themed vacation park where customers act out their darkest fantasies. “I have vivisection! Self-cannibalism! A special little something I call the ourobouros.” Self-cannibalism and the snake that eats its own tail: that’s a fair description of “Westworld,” a come-hither drama that introduces itself as a science-fiction thriller about cyborgs who become self-aware, then reveals its true identity as what happens when an HBO drama struggles to do the same. Created by the husband and-wife team of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, “Westworld” is explicitly, and often wittily, an exploitation series about exploitation, full of naked bodies that are meant to make us think about…