Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2, 2020 i The New Yorker

There were nearly seventeen hundred murders in New York City in 1987. One of the first occurred about ten minutes after the ball dropped in Times Square, when a group of young people mugged a seventy-one-year-old French tourist named Jean Casse, on West Fifty-second Street, outside Ben Benson’s Steak House. One young man punched the victim, and one or more rifled through his pockets. Casse fell, hitting his head on the sidewalk. He died ten hours later, at a hospital. The New York City Police Department quickly set up a hotline and announced that it “desperately” needed “witnesses of the incident to come forward.” Officers were instructed to ask anyone arrested for robbery if he had information about the murder. On the afternoon of January 2nd, the police caught four…

In mountain towns, an early-autumn snowstorm is a nuisance and a lure. It runs some people out of the high country but draws others in. During the first week of October, 2017, a foot or more of snow fell in the peaks south of Bozeman, Montana. Before dawn on the fifth, a group set off from a parking lot in Hyalite Canyon, a popular outdoor playground, just outside town. The man at the head of the group was spooked by the new snow. To minimize exposure to avalanches, he made sure that everyone ascended with caution, keeping to the ridgelines and bare patches, away from the loaded gullies. This was Conrad Anker, the famous American alpinist. It is often said that there are old climbers and there are bold climbers,…

SHITTY LITTLE TEVYE, BIG BROTHER, 1980 I liked dinner with my parents and their friends in the dining room. The chairs were large and hard to move. Whenever I had to go to the bathroom, I would crawl my way under the table to get there. Some of the adults, as I brushed against their legs, made surprised sounds and said jokey things. “Is there a dog in here? I didn’t know you had a dog!” “This house must be haunted. A ghost touched my leg!” I knew they knew I knew they were pretending. We were all in on the joke together, people. Once, we people were in the middle of the joke, and my father said, “Honey,” to my mom in his hard voice. He didn’t like that…

Brother & Sister, by Diane Keaton (Knopf). “Revisiting Randy’s past feels like an investigation composed of hundreds of clues, often leading nowhere,” Keaton writes in this memoir about her younger brother, whose lifelong psychological issues have defied easy diagnosis. As a child, Randy saw ghosts; the sound of planes overhead would make him hide under their parents’ bed. As an adult, he wrote poetry and became increasingly isolated: he drank, lived in squalor, and was tormented by sadistic fantasies. Keaton asks if she was guilty of failing her brother—“Or rather, how guilty was I?” There are no answers here, but this is a powerful account of one family’s struggle with mental illness. Particularly poignant is Keaton’s depiction of their mother—a “once-in-a-lifetime compassionate listener.” Driving While Black, by Gretchen Sorin (Liveright).…

On the video-sharing platform Tik-Tok, there are nearly seventy-four million posts hashtagged #promqueen. Hundreds of thousands of these are set to a track of the same name, from 2018, by a young indie-rock band from Chicago called Beach Bunny. TikTok, which encourages users to post short, surrealist interpretations of memes and dance moves, has become an incubator of musical talent, or at least of persona and digital acumen. Earlier this year, it helped send the rapper Roddy Ricch’s song “The Box”—which features a curious squeaking sound, perfect for TikTok—to the top of the Billboard charts. But, unlike the idiosyncratic hip-hop that typically takes hold on the platform, “Prom Queen” is a doleful ballad. The song dramatizes teen-age self-doubt and has the inverse effect of a pep talk. “Shut up, count…

FIFTY SHADES OF GAY Masha Gessen, in an explanation of why some say that Pete Buttigieg is “not gay enough,” mirrors the regressive positions Gessen usually rails against (“The Queer Opposition to Pete Buttigieg, Explained,” newyorker.com/gessen-on-buttigieg, February 12th). As a temperamentally conservative white Christian man, Buttigieg is as palatable as gay people get—a fact that makes this moment in queer history anticlimactic for the nonwhite, non-cisgender, non-male individuals who don’t relate to the queerness that America is most comfortable with. But the milquetoast quality of Buttigieg’s gay identity, and the way he emphasizes his blandness in exchange for political acceptance, shouldn’t make him a target of accusations that he’s not gay in the way that people would like him to be. Gessen blames him for projecting an image that panders…

Jake Berman, a midtown lawyer, was recently examining the M.T.A. subway map on a wall of the West Fourth Street station, when an elderly tourist asked him how to get to Chelsea. Berman began to relay precise directions; then he stopped. “Funny story,” he said. “I designed a subway map—a competitor that the M.T.A. wants to get rid of. So you’re asking the right dude.” The funny story begins twelve years ago. Berman, a transplant from San Francisco, was at N.Y.U. Law School. One weekend, he had a date in Brooklyn. After consulting the subway map, he decided to take the B train from West Fourth. “Here I am, waiting like an idiot for half an hour, and there’s no B,” he recalled. “They didn’t have countdown clocks. They didn’t…

One afternoon in November, a half-dozen government officials sat at a conference table in the White House, waiting for the arrival of Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to Donald Trump. Miller had summoned officials from the Departments of Homeland Security, State, and Justice to discuss a new Administration policy initiative: a series of agreements with the governments of Central America that would force asylum seekers to apply for protection in that region instead of in the United States. Miller, who had helped make the deals, wanted to know when their provisions could go into effect. Typically, everyone rises when top White House officials enter a room. But when Miller walked in, wearing a dark suit and an expression of wry resolve, everyone remained seated, their eyes cast down. “You go…

What I started opposes what I shattered.Marigolds I planted grow underground in silence.Your arms hold me tighter. I love you back with echoes of alternative languages. Flutter-bees of temporary insanity, cousin of generalities.My soul in clementine, looking for the gravitydark matter imposes. A place of conversations, so spirit-drunk it feels ecclesiastical. Up the street, a blue jay and a robin in a treequiet me with their full-throated tightrope-walkingargumentative vitality. I walk like a beautiful petrified shell of a woman. Inside the fabric of my feelingsI am reeling. Disarranged, I long to fix myselfin million-year starlight beyond soil, latitude, season. To what end are endings, to what end do we? Below the dogwood’s pinwheelwhite blossoms, face up with oxygen petals,twigs, grass, yarn lie disassembled. Bunches of a nest. A tiny bird,…

Some novels about city life are poems of alienation, interior portraits of the existentially isolate, but James Mc-Bride’s vision of New York is one of overwhelming human profusion. His new novel, “Deacon King Kong” (Riverhead), set in what appears to be a fictionalized version of the Brooklyn housing project where McBride grew up, is crowded with characters whose backstories are crowded with more characters, all of their fates connected, in ways they know about and in ways they don’t. It’s a world where isolation seems like vanity; where one’s intimate business is usually, somehow, everyone else’s business, too; where even the attempted murder that begins the novel takes place in front of sixteen witnesses, many of whom know both shooter and victim personally. “Deacon King Kong” is a nickname…

Rouge can be a color of love, boldness, and vibrance; for Yuna, who dropped an album named for the rosy hue in July, it seems to embody all of those things and then some. Where the singer’s earlier releases tended toward chillier sonic shades, her latest—a collaborative collection of R. & B.-infused pop as polished as it is bright—feels warm and more confident than ever, an apt progression for the Malaysian star. This week, her “Rouge” finds a perfect contrast at Blue Note in six acoustic shows, running Feb. 27-29. ART “Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment” New Museum The timeliest as well as the rudest painting show of this winter happens to be the first-ever New York museum survey of this American aesthetic rapscallion. Recognition so delayed bemuses almost as…

Last month, the Trump Administration drafted an executive order decreeing that new federal buildings be designed in the neoclassical style shared by beloved landmarks ranging from the White House and the Lincoln Memorial to Graceland. Given how the President always demands ideological consistency between his public and private lives—his refusal to hire undocumented workers at Trump Organization properties; his insistence that all Trump-branded products be made in America and never in China or Bangladesh; his devotion to the Christian morals espoused by his evangelical base—we will surely see his most prized business properties get their own makeovers very soon.…

I was in Paris, waiting to undergo what promised to be a pretty disgusting medical procedure, when I got word that my father was dying. The hospital I was in had opened in 2000, but it seemed newer. From our vantage point in the second-floor radiology department, Hugh and I could see the cafés situated side by side in the modern, sun-filled concourse below. “It’s like an airline terminal,” he observed. “Yes,” I said. “Terminal Illness.” Under different circumstances, I might have described the place as cheerful. It was the wrong word to use, though, when I’d just had a CT scan and, in a few hours’ time, a doctor was scheduled to snake a multipurpose device up the hole in my penis. It was a sort of wire that…

My grandmother cored themwith a serrated knife with her hands that had comethrough the slaughter— So many hours I stared at the blotchmarks on her knuckles, her strong fingers around thelong green gourd— In a glass bowl the stuffing was setting—chopped lamb, tomato pulp, raw rice, lemon juice, a sand brew of spices—from the riverbank of her birth— Can holding on to this imagehelp me make sense of time? the temporal waves,waves smashing and lipping the pulverized stone; a bird dissolvinginto a cloud bank in late day; the happy and sad steps we walked along the plaster walls and steel bridges,the glass façades, highways of glistening money the objects we caress in dreamsfrom which we wake to find the hallway dark, the small light at the bottom of the stairs,the…