Innholdsfortegnelse for May 9, 2016 i The New Yorker

Jeffrey Toobin (“The Showman,” p. 36) is a staff writer. His new book, “American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst,” will be published in August. Emily Nussbaum (On Television, p. 72), who has been the magazine’s television critic since 2011, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Amy Davidson (Comment, p. 17) writes regularly for Comment and also for newyorker.com. Lauren Collins (“The Model American,” p. 22) is a staff writer. Dexter Filkins (“Dangerous Fictions,” p. 28) joined the staff of The New Yorker in 2011. His book “The Forever War” won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Peter Gizzi (Poem, p. 42), the author of “In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems,” has a new collection, “Archeophonics,” coming out in September. Kathryn…

ON A RECENT Friday, John Kerry, the Secretary of State, rode in a motorcade from the Palace Hotel, on Madison Avenue, to the U.N. It was Earth Day, and representatives from more than a hundred countries were gathering to sign the Paris Climate Agreement—a symbolic event but, by the Sisyphean standards of environmental diplomacy, a big deal. Kerry had flown in from Riyadh to attend. He entered the U.N. through a V.I.P. door and speed-walked up an escalator, with about a dozen staffers jogging behind. Some wore green ties, in observance of Earth Day; one wore a purple tie, in honor of Prince. Kerry’s face bore a puckish grin, as if he were heading toward an ice-cream social rather than a chamber full of tiny microphones. Last month, when a…

THE TWO WOMEN in conservative blue bathing suits the other evening at the Russian & Turkish Baths, at 268 East Tenth Street, were the singer Rachael Price and the bassist Bridget Kearney, of the band Lake Street Dive. Lake Street Dive formed in Boston, in 2004, when its members, including the guitarist Mike (McDuck) Olson and the drummer Mike Calabrese, were students at the New England Conservatory of Music. At first, Lake Street Dive was a jazz band, but its repertoire now also has elements of pop and rhythm and blues. Its arrangements are succinct and refined, and its sound is both spare, since there are only three instrumentalists, and lavish, since they all sing various parts. Price and Kearney, who live in Ditmas Park, decided to visit the baths…

ONE RECENT AFTERNOON, the writer Mohammed Hanif climbed out of his car at the Benazir Bhutto Martyr Park, in Karachi. Hanif, who is fifty, has a square jaw that juts from a square head, and he walks with the easy stride of a fighter pilot, which he once was. He was wearing a pair of knockoff Ray-Bans, which cost about fifty cents at a local stand, and smoking a Dunhill cigarette. The park—built to honor the former Prime Minister, who was killed by a suicide bomber in 2007—is a kind of urban oasis. Karachi is a sprawling, chaotic city of some twenty-two million people, riven by ethnic strife and gang wars; its main crime-fighting force, the Pakistan Rangers, patrols the streets in pickups mounted with heavy machine guns. Hanif has…

REUBEN BEDFORD WALKER III, the jockey in C. E. Morgan’s new novel, “The Sport of Kings” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is five feet three inches tall, a hundred and eighteen pounds, and three-per-cent body fat—diminutive even by the standards of his profession, but in all other ways wildly outsized. Lord of the wire and emperor of the shedrow, he is black and gay and talks like a man who takes three elocution classes a day, one each from Christopher Marlowe, Uncle Tom, and Ahab. On the track and off, he is unstoppable, unkillable, outrageous. At the Laurel Futurity, he takes a flying horseshoe on the bridge of his nose at forty miles an hour and goes on to win. Afterward, cribbing from a long-dead Union prisoner, he raises a toast…

OUT OF SIGHT Gay Talese’s article about Gerald Foos, a motel owner who secretly spied on his customers for decades, devotes only a few lines to the culpability of Talese himself during their thirty-year correspondence (“The Voyeur’s Motel,” April 11th). He writes, “Had I become complicit in his strange and distasteful project?” Talese doesn’t appear to have struggled much with the decision to stay mum, and the piece is a missed opportunity to attempt to understand the perspectives of those who stayed in the motel, and to look at the role of misogyny in this homegrown “research.” Talese seems more interested in the slapstick moment when his tie dangles through the observation vent over a couple having oral sex than in exploring the moral implications of gazing at them,…

The other evening, Samuel Hargress, Jr., disfawdled himself from his perch outside this uptown jazz dive to greet a pair of newcomers. Hargress, who is eighty and has a penchant for immaculately tailored three-piece suits, opened the bar in 1969. Business, he says, is getting better every day. Inside, John Cooksey, the drummer that night, interrupted a Motown and blues set to mourn Prince’s passing. In a balloon-decorated nook to the band’s right, a group of Dutch tourists in moody T-shirts sampled the nightly free spread of chicken and rice. Nearby, a couple, feet curlicued beneath a satin-covered table, struck up a conversation about the oneness of God, and sipped Harlem Sugar Hill Golden Ale, whose label exhorts its drinkers to “taste the music.” In his speech, Cooksey also paid…

“SORRY I’M LATE—NOT VERY German,” Tom Tykwer said, after rushing into the lobby of the Bowery Hotel. “I just arrived.” Hearing how he sounded—Just popped over from Berlin to première my new film—the director grinned and confessed, “Actually, my wife and I took a stop on the way in at the new Whitney. Stunning! There was a later self-portrait by Cindy Sherman, where she explores her aging by photographing herself as a celebrity who’s trying to represent what she used to— only you can see in her eyes she knows it’s gone.” Taking a seat in the lounge, Tykwer, who’s fifty and fit, raked a hand through his tufty black hair, then ordered an iced latte to resuscitate and resituate himself. In “A Hologram for the King,” which Tykwer adapted…

IN JULY OF 2002, two years before Donald Trump became engaged to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss, he visited her native country for three hours. The couple had been in London. At around 8 P.M. on a Monday night, they landed at Ljubljana’s Brnik airport in Trump’s Boeing 727. Viktor and Amalija Knavs—the former Melanija’s parents; she’d long ago changed her name— awaited them. The party, which included Trump’s longtime executive assistant Norma Foerderer, proceeded directly to a pair of black Mercedeses. After a thirty-minute drive, they arrived at the Grand Hotel Toplice, a luxury property on Lake Bled. Entering the hotel’s restaurant through a side door, they were shown to a table with a view. Trump and Knauss sat on one side; the Knavses and Foerderer on the other,…

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I. THE SPY Beverly and I were second graders at New Carew Street School and we both hated recess. She hated recess and she cried the whole time and nobody knew why, so everybody made fun of her. I hated recess because it wasn’t really school and we weren’t learning anything. It was a waste of time. I knew Beverly only by name and by what I could tell from spying on her. Her last name was LaPlante, which was strange and therefore wrong, and she was known for being a crybaby. She was not even pretty. Her crying all the time frightened me, so I never spoke to her. Besides, I didn’t want anybody to think I was her friend. She didn’t belong. And, secretly, I feared that I…

Nothing Ever Dies, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Harvard). The winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction here examines the cultural memory of the Vietnam War, both in the U.S. and in Asia. In thematically arranged chapters—on remembrance, forgetting, and spectacle—he produces close readings of the novels, films, monuments, and prisons that form “the identity of war” in Vietnam, “a face with carefully drawn features, familiar at a glance to the nation’s people.” Nguyen draws insights from Levinas, Ricoeur, and other philosophers, and his approach has affinities with that of hybridists such as W. G. Sebald and Maggie Nelson. The book is also notable for its inclusivity, addressing Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, and Korean experiences and the competition for narrative dominance in bookstores and box offices. How to Be a…

Here we go again, back to that terrible summer house in New England, which is yet another depressed character in Eugene O’Neill’s unsurpassable “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (now in a Roundabout Theatre Company revival, at the American Airlines). Much is made of the house’s poor, cramped furnishings and its shabby location by Mary Tyrone (Jessica Lange), who longs for a real home, if only she knew what that was. For most of her adult life, Mary has lived in hotels with her husband, James Tyrone (Gabriel Byrne), an actor who tours year-round— which is why he thinks of their summer abode near the Long Island Sound as a stable resting place, one that he and Mary can share with their sons, thirty-threeyear-old Jamie (Michael Shannon) and twenty-three-year-old Edmund (John…

The scraping, hazy chamber goth of the singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe sounds a bit like Lana Del Rey brooding through Silent Hill. The Roosevelt, California, native plays folk by definition: her confessional, demure vocals on “Winter” sway crisply over barroom guitar. But it’s the layers of dissonant, cold embellishments, like the acidic bass line on “After the Fall,” from her 2015 album, “Abyss,” that have prickly experimentalists and jet-black metal fans flocking to her sets. She returns to the Music Hall of Williamsburg on May 8. CLASSICAL MUSIC OPERA Metropolitan Opera Following the announcement that he will retire from his post as music director at the end of this season, James Levine conducts a lyrically expansive, if occasionally unpolished, performance of Mozart’s “Die Entführung aus dem Serail,” an “escape” opera…

America’s Cup This most venerable of boat races is named not after the country but after the New York Yacht Club schooner that first outraced a British ship, in 1851, setting off a century of victories for the port city and establishing an era of dominance in the New World. This year, the race returns to New York for the first time since 1920, one of six international locations for the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series. Spectators will gather at the Brookfield Place Waterfront Plaza to watch the top sailors on the globe race through the lower Hudson River off the Battery Park City Esplanade, in pursuit of what’s widely known as the oldest trophy in international sport. (230 Vesey St. acws-newyork. americascup.com. May 7-8.) AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES…

The artist Nicole Eisenman once mentioned to her friend Matt Wolf, the filmmaker, that she thought it might be fun to talk like Marina Abramović. So last year, for Eisenman’s fiftieth birthday, Wolf and a dozen friends went in together on an unusual gift: an accent lesson with the voice coach Louis Colaianni, the author of “The Joy of Phonetics and Accents.” The other day, Eisenman swung by Colaianni’s speech studio, a fourth-floor walkup on West Twentieth Street, for her session. Having become worried that an Eastern European accent like Abramović’s might be too difficult, she’d decided on a tutorial in Cockney instead. “I was thinking, like, Eliza Doolittle,” Eisenman told Colaianni, whose studio resembles a George Bernard Shaw set (crystal decanters, faux gas lamps, creaky chairs). “Like a bottom-rung…

As the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara runs one of the largest and most respected offices of federal prosecutors in the country. Under his leadership, the office has charged dozens of Wall Street figures with insider trading, and has upended the politics of New York State, by convicting the leaders of both houses of the state legislature. Last week, Bharara announced charges against a hundred and twenty alleged street-gang members in the Bronx, in what was said to be the largest gang takedown in New York history. The turning point in Bharara’s own career, though, took place not when he triumphed in a courtroom but when he masterminded a dramatic congressional hearing. Bharara, who is now forty-seven, graduated from Columbia Law School in…

“PAUL SIMON TRIES REALLY hard with the word ‘motherfucker.’ But he has trouble with it.” This was the verdict of the critic Rob Sheffield, writing in the Village Voice in 1997. It was a tricky time for anyone who loved Paul Simon, and surely not an easy time for Simon himself. He had just released an album of songs from “The Capeman,” his ill-fated Broadway musical, which had become about as notorious as the teen-age killer who inspired it. The album wasn’t a cast recording, because Simon did almost all of the singing, delivering even the saltiest exchanges with a delicate precision that some found unduly quaint. It had been more than a decade since “Graceland,” and more than three decades since “The Sound of Silence,” and it seemed possible…

ON THE SECOND episode of “Full Frontal,” TBS’s new late-night show, Samantha Bee, the host, took shots at the Presidential debates. At one point, she flashed a Photoshopped image of Hillary Clinton at the lectern, her forearms scribbled with crib notes. The left arm read, “Don’t be c*nty”; the right, “shrill = bad.” “Oh, my God, what a coincidence,” Bee cooed. “TBS just gave me that very same note.” Even as television brims with funny women—from the stoners of “Broad City” to the comedy POTUS Julia Louis-Dreyfus— late night has remained a men’s club. God, that is a boring sentence to write each year. In 2015, Vanity Fair did a photo shoot celebrating the new landscape of late-night shows, after Letterman and Leno, Jon Stewart and Craig Ferguson stepped down.…