Innholdsfortegnelse for November 21, 2016 i The New Yorker

Toni Morrison (“Aftermath,” p. 54) is the author of twelve novels, from “The Bluest Eye” to “God Help the Child.” In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in New York. Adrian Chen (“The Tough Guy,” p. 66) became a staff writer in 2016. Peter Hessler (“Aftermath,” p. 52) is a staff writer living in Ridgway, Colorado. He is writing a book about the five years he spent reporting from Egypt. Jill Lepore (“Esmé in Neverland,” p. 34; “Aftermath,” p. 59), a professor of history at Harvard, is writing a history of the United States. George Packer (“Aftermath,” p. 48) is a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, and at New America. “The Unwinding” is his…

ONE OF THE many received notions shattered by last week’s election was the belief, among supporters of Hillary Clinton, that women of all creeds and colors would band together to elect the first female President. That didn’t happen. Fifty-three per cent of white women voters took a pass on Clinton and threw their support behind the self-proclaimed groper. (A few went further, coming to Trump rallies in T-shirts that said things like “Hillary Couldn’t Satisfy Her Husband / Can’t Satisfy Us.”) Last Thursday night, as protesters marched on Fifth Avenue, seven young feminists gathered in a midtown theatre to reflect on what had happened. They had a unique perspective: all were of Middle Eastern heritage, and some were recent immigrants. They’d got to know one another in a creative-writing workshop…

ON A RECENT Saturday morning, about two dozen small children and their parents gathered in the Park Slope branch of the Brooklyn Public Library for a new reading series. There were pregnant women with tattoos, breast-feeding moms, and a little girl in pink ballerina gear climbing on the laps of her two dads. Many of the kids, who ranged in age from newborn to five years old, wore tiny T-shirts showcasing their parents’ favorite bands (Nirvana, David Bowie) or political views (one read, “The Future Is Female”). The event was hosted by Michelle Tea, a writer from Los Angeles, who started attending library story hours after becoming a mom. “Story time rises or falls on the charisma of the storyteller,” she said. “Some seemed to have a personality disorder…

IF YOU’RE ATTENDING a bookstore reading, interviewing an author, or writing a book review, it’s a matter of tact and literary sophistication not to conflate the author with her fictional characters or the events of the novel with the events of the author’s life. A scene might draw closely on lived experience, but a reader can’t presume and the author doesn’t have to tell. The designation “fiction” offers a cover of privacy to any author who cares to make use of it. Most writers seem to, which is why it was startling to hear how the novelist and essayist Chris Kraus introduced her novel “I Love Dick,” at a talk at Scripps College, in Claremont, California, last February. “It all happened,” she said. “There would be no book if…

THE DAY BEFORE Election Day, the weather in New York was more like May than November. In hot sun, gloved ice-skaters, obedient to the calendar, meandered across the rink in Bryant Park, which showed itself ready for winter with displays of snowflakes and stars. It was a great afternoon to be an alien, ticket in your pocket, checked in already at J.F.K., and leaving the country before it could elect Donald Trump. Breakfast television had begged viewers to call the number onscreen to vote on whether Mrs. Clinton should be prosecuted as a criminal. Press 1 for yes, 2 for no. “Should Hillary get special treatment?” the voiceover asked. There was no option for jailing Trump. During his campaign, Trump threatened unspecified punishments for women who tried to abort a…

DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL primaries, Donald Trump mocked his Republican rivals as “puppets” for flocking to a secretive fund-raising session sponsored by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire co-owners of the energy conglomerate Koch Industries. Affronted, the Koch brothers, whose political spending has made their name a shorthand for special-interest clout, withheld their financial support from Trump. But on Tuesday night David Koch was reportedly among the revellers at Trump’s victory party in a Hilton Hotel in New York. Trump campaigned by attacking the big donors, corporate lobbyists, and political-action committees as “very corrupt.” In a tweet on October 18th, he promised, “I will Make Our Government Honest Again—believe me. But first I’m going to have to #Drain-TheSwamp.” His DrainTheSwamp hashtag became a rallying cry for supporters intent on ridding Washington…

AT THE RISK of sounding like a total candy-ass, I swear I have developed P.T.S.D. from the venom of this election. O.K., even before voting season began, I was wobbly enough to be seeing a shrink. But when I confessed to her, a month ago, that I was sleeping less and checking news outlets compulsively, like a rat pushing a bar down for a pellet, she said, “So are a hundred per cent of my patients.” Then she added, “So am I.” A friend’s cardiologist told her that patients had been flooding into his office or calling from emergency rooms with false reports of tachycardia. Those of us who experienced trauma as children, often at the hands of bullies, felt old wounds open up just hearing Trump’s fierce idiom of…

IN THE CAMPAIGN’S final days, even as members of Donald Trump’s inner circle had begun to acknowledge privately that he faced almost certain defeat, one of his advisers had the good sense to deprive him of his cell phone. The first, fatefully ill-advised letter from F.B.I. Director James Comey had dropped a week earlier, palpably complicating Hillary Clinton’s otherwise inevitable-seeming triumph. If, for once, Trump could be restrained from further Twitter self-immolation, who knew? The day after Clinton’s concession speech, the President-elect had his phone back. Thursday morning, he met with President Obama at the White House and afterward described the experience in language that, uncharacteristically, approached humility. It didn’t last. Around dinnertime, he tweeted a familiar whine: “Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters,…

It is Halloween; she’d almost forgotten. At the corner, a man is putting sand and tea-light candles into white paper bags. He will later return with a lighter, filling the dark neighborhood with a glowing grid for the trick-or-treaters. She wonders if it’s not hazardous to allow small uncoördinated people with polyester hems near so many flames. All day today and yesterday she has been reading the early naturalist William Bartram, who travelled through Florida in 1774; because of him, she forgot Halloween. She’s most definitely in love with that dead Quaker. This is not to say that she is no longer in love with her husband; she is, but after sixteen years together perhaps they have blurred at the edges of each other’s vision. She says to her dog,…

It has been half a century since Shmuel Yosef Agnon won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet he is one of those laureates for whom the prize has not translated into universal fame. Like Claude Simon (France) or Camilo José Cela (Spain), Agnon remains largely the possession of his original audience. In his case, however, defining that original audience is a difficult matter. Agnon wrote in Hebrew—he is the only Hebrew writer to win the Nobel—and he lived in Israel, in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot, where his house now stands as a museum. But although Israeli readers can read Agnon in the original, today even they may have a hard time with his books. According to Jeffrey Saks—a rabbi and the editor of a new series of editions of…

THE RESISTANCE Sam Altman, the tech wunderkind profiled by Tad Friend, is quoted as saying, “Democracy only works in a growing economy. Without a return to economic growth, the democratic experiment will fail” (“Adding a Zero,” October 10th). Doomsday prediction aside, democracy is a tool that people use to make decisions together. You can find democracy at your local PTA, at community meetings and block parties—wherever people are free to decide among themselves what happens next. To suggest that democracy relies on economic growth to exist is to forget that social change is created not by big companies backed by venture capitalists but by actual human beings. Andrew Seeder Somerville, Mass. Altman seems almost like the leader of a Nietzschean doomsday cult— or, at the very least, a villain…

Voice of the Viola A young composer gets the chance of a lifetime with the Philharmonic. WHEN NEW YORK Philharmonic audiences hear the first performances of Julia Adolphe’s viola concerto “Unearth, Release” (Nov. 17-19), they may not realize the amount of labor that goes into creating an orchestral piece from scratch: the concerto lasts approximately nineteen minutes and took about a year to compose. Adolphe, who is twenty-eight years old and is completing a doctorate at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, received the commission in late 2014, after winning a competition at the American Composers Orchestra. She met with Cynthia Phelps, the Philharmonic’s principal violist, who will be the soloist in the première, and studied her sound. Adolphe began sketching, on paper and on the…

Kettle of Fish 59 Christopher St. (212-414-2278) At around 1 A.M. on an April night in 1958, Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso entered Kettle of Fish after a few drinks elsewhere in the Village. In the no-longer-happy-hour haze, an insult was made, or perceived, and Kerouac was surrounded outside and viciously beaten. Corso carried the bloodied writer to the door of Joyce Johnson, a novelist who was dating Kerouac, and she brought him to the hospital. Johnson recounts this story in her memoir, “Minor Characters”; on the book’s cover, a healthier looking Kerouac stands by the Kettle’s sign with Johnson, slightly blurry, behind him. The bar today is a different Kettle of Fish: it’s relocated twice since the fifties, and is now known for its association with another movement with…

IN 1910, THE National Guard clearcut a mountaintop in Rockland County for the purpose of establishing the “Finest Rifle Range in World,” as a Times headline put it. Soldiers would soon be refining their skills amid “ravishing scenery,” overlooking the Hudson. By 1911, significant problems were apparent. Overlooking the Hudson meant shooting east, into the rising sun. The shooters, having first exhausted themselves scaling the mountain, often missed their targets, sending stray bullets over a ridge, below which were houses, in the villages of Grand View and South Nyack. A new Times headline read, “Rifle Range is a Menace to Life.” By 1913, the range was shuttered. It was later converted into a Christian women’s camp, and then a homeless shelter for men kicked out of Bowery flophouses. Gradually, forest…

IN THE WOODS, someone had built a labyrinth, a maze edged with stones. It began where a spoked handwheel, rusted red, had been pressed into the dirt as if it were a sundial, a clock, stopped. The path was overgrown with ferns. It twisted and turned and snaked around in a coil until it ended at a murky well fed from a spring where a person, quiet of heart, is meant to meditate. That person is not me. Nearby, a stone Buddha the size of a small girl watched from the crooked stump of a fallen birch. I saw the place one summer, an eighteenth- century farmhouse in Vermont on a hillside that was once a farm but had become a forest. Ruins were everywhere The overgrown labyrinth; stone…

IF THE LEADER of a government issues an order that men and women below him cannot, in good conscience, enact, what are they to do? In July, 2008, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, of California, who had stunned the political establishment by leveraging his celebrity and outsider status to reach disaffected voters, was in an embarrassing political predicament. The Governor had brandished a broom at rallies, promising to “sweep out the bureaucracy” and defeat “girlie men” lawmakers who stood in his way. Now the Democratic-led legislature was unable to agree on a budget. So Schwarzenegger adopted a radical tactic: he ordered the state to reduce the pay of nearly two hundred thousand state employees to the federal minimum wage, of $6.55 an hour, until the legislature met his demands. The order reached…

THE BEGINNING OF an end is hard to see: the moment when a marriage started to fall apart, the half-sentence of heartless scorn, an unmendable cut; the hour when the first symptoms of a fatal illness set in, dizziness, a subtle blurring of vision, a certain hoarseness; the season when a species of sparrow, trying to fly north, falls, weakened by the heat; and the day when the people of a nation began to lose faith in their form of government. The election of Donald Trump, like all elections, is an ending, the ending of one Presidency and the beginning of another. But, unlike most elections, Trump’s election is something different: it ends an era of American idealism, a high-mindedness of rhetoric, if not always of action, which has characterized…

“WE ARE ABOUT to begin our descent into Los Angeles” is the opening line of “The Graduate.” It is heard in the background, as the camera lingers on the face of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), lost in uncomfortable reflection. The line sets the tone for the lurid tale that is about to unspool. I thought of this foreshadowing sixteen months ago, on the day that Donald J. Trump announced his bid for the Presidency. The sight of him riding a gold escalator down into the belly of Trump Tower to announce his good news made one thing clear to me: he was ready to begin his descent to the Presidency. For a long time, it seemed like a joke. How could this six-time-bankrupt billionaire-slash-reality-TV star expect to be taken seriously?…

QUERIDA Q.: I hope that you are feeling, if not precisely better, then at least not so demoralized. On Wednesday, after he won, you reached out to me, seeking advice, solidarity. You wrote, My two little sisters called me weeping this morning. I had nothing to give them. I felt bereft. What now? Keep telling the truth from an ever-shrinking corner? Give up? I answered immediately, because you are my hermana, because it hurt me to hear you in such distress. I offered some consoling words, but the truth was I didn’t know what to say. To you, to my godchildren, who all year had been having nightmares that their parents would be deported, to myself. I thought about your e-mail all day, Q., and I thought about you during…

In town, they say my daddy been possessed by the spirit of King Saul—the simmering rage that makes him cuff me over Christian radio, curse me for his cirrhotic gut. He plays the game of uproar. Writes midnight checks to televangelists, smashes the homosexual television, buys my mama a gold necklace & then rips it from her neck. The controlling spirit. The use you up & throw you away ghost. With a spear, he pins our household to the wall. My mama stops telling what the neighbors done when he raises his fist, calls her those terrible names. She believes him & I should talk back but I never talk back. I am his fortune-teller, a cautious gnostic with a serpent’s tongue, to praise & to spit on. Smart daughter…

Moscow Nights, by Nigel Cliff (Harper). This biography of the Texan pianist Van Cliburn is also a cultural history of the event that made his name: his win at the Tchaikovsky Competition, in Moscow, in 1958, after the launch of the first Sputnik set off the space race. Cliff portrays Cliburn as a musical savant, full of contradictions—gay, staunchly religious, a lifelong Republican and Russophile. He was adored both in Russia and in the U.S., where his following rivalled Elvis Presley’s. Being a cultural emblem ultimately took a toll: audiences wanted endless rehashes of the pieces he was famous for, and he lacked the opportunity and the curiosity to take on new challenges. Cliff tracks this artistic decline sympathetically, and successfully evokes Cliburn’s intuitive musicianship. Trying to Float, by…

Classical music’s chamber wing has become a small home for big experiments in cross-genre fertilization. The Le Boeuf Brothers (Pascal on piano, Remy on saxophone), prodigious twins from Santa Cruz, are clearing their own path, mixing the solid swing of the jazz tradition with hip-hop, indie rock, and the complex techniques of classical modernism. With their sidemen, they join the ever-ready JACK Quartet in a concert at National Sawdust on Nov. 16 that celebrates the release of their new album, “imaginist.” Dorrance Dance Michelle Dorrance, the MacArthur-awardwinning tap choreographer, brings her tightly constructed, spirit-lifting 2013 show “The Blues Project” back to the Joyce. Driven by the raucous live music of Toshi Reagon and her band, BIGLovely, Dorrance’s crew of affable, expert hoofers—including the virtuosic co-choreographers Derick K. Grant and…

Cranksgiving As the holiday season draws near, tradition nudges us to consider all the things for which we’re grateful, and to turn our gaze toward the less fortunate. Still, not everyone is stirred by a can drive, a pledge campaign, or a soup-kitchen sign-up sheet—some people want adventure with their altruism. Cranksgiving bills itself as “part bike ride, part food drive, part scavenger hunt,” calling on city residents to whiz between markets, snatching up items to be donated to the Bowery Mission. It’s a fun concept for a noble cause, and it has fed hundreds of families each Thanksgiving since its inception, in 1999. (The ride starts at Hudson Yards, at Eleventh Ave. and 34th St. cranksgiving.org. Nov. 19 at 1.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES In this, the busiest week…

THE TABLE WAS set for an old-fashioned Irish dinner party: white linen, cut-glass vases containing celery stalks and air-dried raisins. The meal, in a small tasting room in the West Village, was a rehearsal for an immersive re-creation of the holiday feast in James Joyce’s story “The Dead.” Beginning later this month, forty-two audience members a night will eat and drink along with the twelve cast members of “The Dead, 1904” as they take over the American Irish Historical Society, a nineteenth-century mansion overlooking Central Park, to stage one of the most famous parties in literature. “The audience will be part of the play, but not in an intrusive, modern-theatre kind of way,” said Jean Hanff Korelitz, a novelist, who adapted the story with her husband, the poet Paul Muldoon.…

HOW DEPENDENT ARE our fundamental values—values such as decency, reason, and compassion—on the fellow we’ve elected President? Maybe less than we imagine. To be sure, the country voted for a leader who lives by the opposite code—it will be a long and dark winter—but the signs are that voters were not rejecting these values. They were rejecting élites, out of fear and fury that, when it came to them, these values had been abandoned. Nearly seventy per cent of workingage Americans lack a bachelor’s degree. Many of them saw an establishment of politicians, professors, and corporations that has failed to offer, or even to seem very interested in, a vision of the modern world that provides them with a meaningful place of respect and worth. I grew up in…

THIS IS A serious project. All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color. Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are “people of color” everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening. In…

THE SUPREME COURT operates in counterpoint to the rest of the government. The Justices do not initiate; they respond. Every major political issue of the day eventually winds up in their courtroom, and they either embrace or resist what’s happening in the rest of the world. When Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed the New Deal through Congress, the conservatives on the Court, for a time, fought him to a standstill. When the civilrights movement gathered steam, the Justices gave first a hesitant and then a fuller endorsement of the cause. But resistance from the Justices never lasts too long. The truism that the Supreme Court follows the election returns happens to be true. Elections have consequences. For the past eight years, the Court has been called upon to respond to President…

I’M TWENTY-SEVEN, AND in some ways my life has been consonant with the experience of women throughout history. The first time someone tried to grab me by the pussy, I was in middle school, and the next half-dozen times it likewise wasn’t by choice. But in most respects I have luxuriated in unprecedented choice and freedom. I was the child of immigrants in a conservative Southern state, yet I had birth control and a credit card and an uncontested right to education. Ambition and carelessness both came naturally to me. Even as a girl, I knew that I was uncommonly lucky, which is what encouraged me, when I was eleven, to write off pussygrabbing as a pathetic, confusing cultural vestige. It would die out eventually, I thought, because women would…

IN MAY, RODRIGO DUTERTE, the provincial mayor who had just been elected President of the Philippines after promising to rid the country of crime and drugs by killing thousands of criminals, vowed to stop swearing. He told reporters, “Don’t fuck with me.” He called political figures “gay.” When a reporter asked about his health, he replied, “How is your wife’s vagina? Is it smelly? Or not smelly? Give me a report.” In an overwhelmingly Catholic country, he swore at the Pope. At first, he defended his language as a gesture of radical populism. “I am testing the élite in this country,” he said. “Because we are fundamentally a feudal country.” But, the day after the election, he appeared with a popular televangelist and said, “I need to control my mouth.”…

The Jamaican-born poet Ishion Hutchinson’s second book, “House of Lords and Commons,” is a study of place and memory rendered in what used to be called “the grand style”: the timeless, high- literary idiom that nearly anyone who has ever learned the language would identify as “poetry,” based on its sound alone, and that nonplussed readers of contemporary poetry sometimes say they miss. Of course, the irony is that timelessness itself can seem dated; modernism emerged in part to change the acoustics within which lines of poetry were heard. Our ears changed, and fewer and fewer poets of note wanted to make those old sounds. There are analogues in nearly every art: modes and vocabularies that we accept in the work of the past but which seem, in new work,…