Innholdsfortegnelse for October 31, 2016 i The New Yorker

George Packer (“The Unconnected,” p. 48) is a 2016-17 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, and at New America. “The Unwinding” is his latest book. Andrew Marantz (“Trolls for Trump,” p. 42) has been contributing to the magazine since 2011. Maria Nazos (Poem, p. 38) is the author of “A Hymn That Meanders,” a book of poems, and, most recently, “Still Life,” a chapbook. Ian Frazier (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 41) published “Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces” in June, and is working on a book about the Bronx. Kelefa Sanneh (Books, p. 84), a staff writer, previously wrote about the politics of immigration in 2012. Barry Blitt (Cover) is working on a retrospective book of his work, to be published…

Rise of the Jack-o’-Lanterns Jack-o’-lanterns are taken seriously at this yearly showcase: more than five thousand elaborate pumpkin carvings are on display, which artists spend up to fifteen hours illustrating, gutting, and whittling down to breathtaking detail. Stroll through a scenic path and take in haunting tunes and giant specimens that weigh more than a hundred pounds, along with elaborate multi-gourd structures that are stacked and illuminated to depict dinosaurs, dragons, and pop-culture staples. Artists will set up at live-carving stations, where audiences can watch them turn around hundreds of jacks throughout the weekend. (Meadowlands Exposition Center, 355 Plaza Dr., Secaucus, N.J. therise.org. Oct. 27-30.) The State of the Union Songbook Live This year, the Obie-winning composer Michael Friedman (“Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson”) has performed several original works on…

I live in what my wife and I like to think of as a safe neighborhood. Recently, however, at a house just up the street, I have noticed disturbing evidence of possible criminal activity, or, at the very least, a violation of local zoning laws. What stopped me short one morning as I was walking our dog was the sight of a “human” corpse smashed up against the front of this house. I put the word in quotation marks because I’m not quite sure to what category the poor dead creature belongs. It was as flat as a pancake and had evidently hit the house at a high rate of speed. To me, it appeared to be a witch. Among the seasonal decorations at the house—a plastic pumpkin, a sheaf…

She collected men the way a light left on collected bugs. It was an old story—money, gravity, the right amount of cleavage. And yet the most successful root never stops fleeing the seed where it began. The cars of two drunks decide to kiss, the lit match gives in to the windy field. Here’s a lesson: When people heard there was an albino deer in the woods behind our house, they set out the apples and corn. That was twenty years ago. The shotgun pellets stuck in our tree continue their slow ascent.…

A hundred and seventy-four refugees from Syria arrived in Indiana, during the past fiscal year, as part of President Obama’s stated goal of admitting ten thousand Syrians who had been displaced by civil war. There were organizations in Indiana ready to help them, including a nonprofit statesupported group called Exodus. But the state itself was less hospitable: the governor publicly declared the refugees a security risk, and announced that Indiana would refuse to reimburse Exodus for any costs incurred on the Syrians’ behalf. Exodus sued, and the case was argued before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals last month, by which point it had acquired additional political significance: the defendant, Governor Mike Pence, was also the Republican nominee for Vice-President. During oral arguments, the state’s lawyer was subjected to withering…

THE TRUTH ABOUT TRIPPING Ariel Levy’s piece on ayahuasca presents two theories explaining how Amazonians might have discovered the plant combination that created the hallucinogen ayahuasca: “the spirit of the plants led indigenous people to brew the two together” or “one day someone happened to drop a chacruna leaf into his B. caapi tea” (“The Secret Life of Plants,” September 12th). It’s also possible that the combination arose through the concerted efforts of experienced herbalists. One of the consequences of European conquest has been the dismissal of indigenous botany and agriculture. Colonizers often depended upon indigenous people for food, but, in order to justify their occupation, they portrayed native peoples as poor custodians of the land. When people sentimentalize pre-contact Indians as passive recipients of nature’s bounty, they perpetuate…

Ideologues will tell you that the personal is political, but a novelist will tell you that the political is personal. Politics does transfiguring and terrible things to the people who practice it, enough to provide any fiction writer with a career. In my own novels, I often rendered those practitioners from the viewpoints of lesser figures— not Joe McCarthy but a young Senate staffer—until I went “inside” Richard Nixon for a novel about the Watergate years. I discovered that I had never felt more comfortable in a character’s skin. This no doubt says plenty about me, but it also says something about him: Nixon was entirely palpable. One could hop in and drive him like a big-finned fifties car, as his self-hatred ran a race with his contempt for others,…

In late August, Hillary Clinton announced that she would soon give a speech, in Reno, Nevada, linking Donald J. Trump to what has become known as the alt-right—a loose online affiliation of white nationalists, neo-monarchists, masculinists, conspiracists, belligerent nihilists, and social-media trolls. The alt-right has no consistent ideology; it is a label, like “snob” or “hipster,” that is often disavowed by people who exemplify it. The term typically applies to conservatives and reactionaries who are active on the Internet and too antiestablishment to feel at home in the Republican Party. Bizarrely, this category includes the Republican nominee for President. It also includes extremist commentators, long belittled or ignored by the media, whom mainstream pundits are now starting to take seriously. The afternoon before Clinton’s speech, Mike Cernovich, a thick-chested white…

ABIGAIL JACKSON, 18, student, Des Moines, Iowa HILLARY CLINTON “As the election’s getting closer, it’s like having two of the exact same shirts, but one is a different color. Hillary Clinton, she’s not a racist or anything, like Donald Trump, but it seems like she’s just in it to win, because the amount of times I’ve heard the word ‘Trump’ in a Hillary commercial is more than I’ve heard ‘Hillary’ in a Hillary commercial. I haven’t seen a real good ad telling me what she will do. I feel like they’re choosing which voices they want to hear. So Hillary’s choosing to hear the voice of women, and Donald Trump is choosing to hear the voice of white Americans. They’re not listening to the voice of the lower class. They’re…

Blood and Sand, by Alex Von Tunzelmann (Harper). In October, 1956, Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt; the Red Army stomped into Hungary; and President Eisenhower entered the home stretch of his “Man of Peace” reëlection campaign. Shimon Peres called it “one of the craziest months in history”: nuclear threats were uttered; revolutionaries and strongmen alike beseeched America for help; allies proved perfidious. This thrilling ticktock brings the emotional core of geopolitical maneuvering into dramatic focus, with portraits of leaders variously honorable, pigheaded, irresolute, pusillanimous, and susceptible to mood swings. They fret over oil dependency and conspire to knock off foreign leaders using “malign doctors, exploding razors, or poisoned chocolates.” Meanwhile, other people, “ordinary and diverse,” take to the streets, risking life for liberty. The Pigeon Tunnel, by John…

Halloween is a feline feast, which BAM Cinématek celebrates in the series “13 Cats” (Oct. 21-Nov. 3), offering classic and modern masterworks of horror and fantasy. It features “The Black Cat,” Edgar G. Ulmer’s Nazi-era allegory, from 1934, starring Béla Lugosi and Boris Karloff; Jacques Tourneur’s “Cat People,” from 1942, with Simone Simon as a Serbian woman fearing an ancient curse, and Paul Schrader’s 1982 remake, starring Nastassja Kinski; and two films by Hayao Miyazaki, “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Kiki’s Delivery Service.” CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera In the nineteen-nineties and aughts, Karita Mattila was one of the Met’s leading prima donnas, racking up a staggering string of successes in some of the most challenging repertory for sopranos, including the title role of Janáček’s searing drama “Jenůfa.” Now she…

Hollywood isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Astoria. But Kaufman Astoria Studios, a massive complex in Queens with all the gray charm of a penitentiary, has been producing films for nearly a century, beginning with silent pictures, in the nineteen-twenties, and continuing into the streaming age—“Orange Is the New Black” is filmed there today. A door on the west side of the building opens to a marble staircase that Groucho Marx, Rudolph Valentino, and Gloria Swanson once descended to dine in the studio commissary, a space that, in 2014, was refurbished into a speakeasy. But the atmosphere is far from clandestine—the Astor Room has become a popular watering hole for gregarious locals. On a recent Saturday night, one such woman pulled out a stool…

Tonight you’re loaning Billy your car, a brand-new seal-gray Volkswagen Passat with four doors, though last week at 3 A.M., he stole your canoe, and sank it in the autumn sea, then swam ashore. Tonight you’re lending Billy your car—it’s brand-new— and he’s a well-meaning, blue-eyed Byronic drinking man who last week, at 3 A.M., stole your beached canoe, and when it sank he blamed it on a dolphin. A well-meaning, blue-eyed, Byronic, hard-drinking man whose phone calls you take, no matter the hour, who sank your canoe and blamed it on a dolphin, and the young man with him, whom the sea sadly devoured, so you’ll always take Billy’s call, no matter the hour. Because, you sigh, his mother’s dying, too, and he’s drinking again. He’s no longer a…

The basement of a hotel on Capitol Hill. A meeting room with beige walls and headachy light, cavernous enough to accommodate three hundred occupants but empty, except for Hillary Clinton. She sat at a small round table with a cloth draped to the carpet. Her eyes were narrower than usual—fatigue—and she wore a knee-length dress jacket of steel-blue leather, buttoned to the lapels; its metallic shine gave an impression of armor, as if she’d just descended from the battlefield to take a breather in this underground hideout. Politics, at times so thrilling, is generally a dismal business, and Clinton’s acceptance of this is key to her power. She’s the officer who keeps on marching in mud. I sat down across from her. With only a few weeks left until the…

GARLAND Because she has a broken heart and then her mother dies, D and F take her with them on a weekend getaway. The getaway place is a honeycomb. Bees stream through the streets and the night. Bees huddling, zooming, gleaming and anxious, bees rolling along like sailors, bees licking the barley out of one another’s beards. D and F are bees, too, and go ahead to guide her on the stream. The stream is drunk. They stumble to their rented house. I’ll be fine, she thinks. Next day they rent bikes. D and F swoop off down the bike path. She pumps hard, grinds to a halt on a dune, bruises her leg, starts again. This happens forty-five times. I haven’t ridden a bike since I was ten, she…

As the book of Genesis tells it, God had no sooner made a covenant with the survivors of the Flood, agreeing that He would never again try to drown humankind, than they did something new to annoy Him. Settling on a Mesopotamian plain, they made bricks and mortar, and began building a tower whose top, as they planned it, would reach to Heaven—that is, to where God lived. God did not fail to notice what they were doing: And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to…

In the nineteen-seventies, when the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho was studying at the Sibelius Academy, in Helsinki, she had spells of paralyzing insecurity. Her teacher, Paavo Heininen, told her to stand before a mirror ten times a day and say, “I can do it.” Indeed, she could. Saariaho, who is now sixty-four, has been a major force in contemporary music for decades, and by the end of the fall season in New York her work will have been as ubiquitous as Beethoven’s. The New York Philharmonic recently presented a Saariaho evening at the Park Avenue Armory. On November 19th and 20th, the International Contemporary Ensemble and students from the Mannes School of Music will perform “La Passion de Simone,” her oratorio in honor of Simone Weil. Axiom, the Juilliard new-music…