Innholdsfortegnelse for January 8, 2018 i The New Yorker

Dana Goodyear (“Exposure,” p. 20), a staff writer, is the author of “Honey and Junk” and “Anything That Moves.” Jorge Colombo (Cover), an illustrator, photographer, and graphic designer, has contributed covers to the magazine since 2009. J. Hope Stein (Poem, p. 63) is the author of the book of poems “Occasionally, I Remove Your Brain Through Your Nose.” Davide Monteleone (Portfolio, p. 46), an artist and visual journalist, is a threetime winner of the World Press Photo prize. Jiayang Fan (Portfolio, p. 46) became a staff writer in 2016. Her reporting on China, American politics, and culture has appeared in the magazine and on newyorker.com since 2010. Traci Brimhall (Poem, p. 33), an assistant professor of creative writing at Kansas State University, most recently published the poetry collection “Saudade.”…

465 Seneca Ave., Queens It often feels like the city is boiling over with aspiring talents. Every night, much of that excess spills into outer-borough spots like the Footlight, a new dive in Ridgewood. Early-career artists sometimes need a liquid leg up, and patrons and performers alike are encouraged to carry their pints of beer and cider from the bar, through swinging double doors, into the venue space, where rows of stackable chairs and a stage await them. A well-attended event showcasing women and gender-nonconforming artists called “Am I Write, Ladies?” featured Cerebral Pussy, who has cerebral palsy and who undressed for her “Tiny Tim” burlesque act. She received especially supportive applause from Sky Cubacub, a gender-nonconforming fashion designer who had recently dressed Pussy for a show at the Whitney.…

One recent afternoon, Walter Minton, the ninety-four-year-old former president of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, sat in the study of his house in Saddle River, New Jersey, and reminisced about the controversial novels he championed in his youth and the trials of getting them into print. Minton was dressed in slacks and a cardigan, with a thinning head of white hair; he still wears the trim, boxy beard that he adopted mid-career. He was thirty-one when he took over Putnam’s, in 1955, and the shelves of his living room offer a higgledy-piggledy tour of his route through twentieth-century publishing, from John le Carré to Mario Puzo to Scott Turow. Of all his writers, Minton said, the most difficult was Norman Mailer. “Mailer was a quite ordinary writer type, until he got…

“I’m calling it the Purge,” a friend who works in Hollywood told me, a few days into the post-Weinstein era. Off the top of his head, he listed half a dozen men in the entertainment business whose behavior, he hoped, would no longer be condoned. In the weeks to come, they started toppling, joined by others, in a seemingly never-ending cascade, the world’s longest domino trick. The morning-news anchor, the worldly talk-show host, the animation genius with the awful shirts, “feminist” men, liberals, tortured artists, moguls, icons, “bad boys,” funny guys, even the folksy curmudgeon from public radio: they are being fired; stepping down; awkwardly apologizing, engendering ridicule and pique; or defending themselves and inviting rage. Then, like a backward rapture, they disappear, with the tacit or expressed acknowledgment that…

I love you like ladybugs love windowsills, love youlike sperm whales love squid. There’s no depthI wouldn’t follow you through. I love you likethe pawns in chess love aristocratic horses.I’ll throw myself in front of a bishop or a queenfor you. Even a sentient castle. My love is crazylike that. I like that sweet little hothouse mouthyou have. I like to kiss you with tongue, with gusto,with socks still on. I love you like a vulture lovesthe careless deer at the roadside. I want to getall up in you. I love you like Isis loved Osiris,but her devotion came up a few inches short.I’d train my breath and learn to read sonar untilI retrieved every lost blood vessel of you. I swearthis love is ungodly, not an ounce of suffering…

In Connecticut, Hassan shared a desk with a woman—a girl, really. Later, this would be what he remembered most about the job, long after the inconvenience of his morning commute, the banality of his days spent making spreadsheets, and the mediocrity of the cafeteria had faded from memory. He would remember Hina the way he saw her on her first day. The crunched, focussed expression on her small, sharp face as she claimed her half of the desk, a purse over one arm and a duffelbag over the other, a light sheen of perspiration on her upper lip, a dark-gray head scarf wound tightly around her head and fixed above her right ear with a long, silver pin. Hina nodded at Hassan in greeting and then took a brass-colored nameplate…

Almost fifty years ago, on March 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson stunned everyone by announcing that he would not run for a second term as President. Johnson had gone on television at nine o’clock that evening to address the nation on the war in Vietnam. It was not going well. In the past three years, the United States had dropped more tons of bombs on Vietnam than were dropped by all the belligerents combined in the Second World War. Twenty thousand Americans had died there, four thousand in the previous two months, following a surprise attack, known as the Tet Offensive, by North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces. Enemy losses were much higher, but that only made the war seem more horrific and out of control. I was at home, sitting in…

Late in November, Lil Xan made his New York début, at the downtown club S.O.B.’s. The level of excitement was unusually high, even for the much anticipated rap shows that the club tends to book. “Xanarchy! Xanarchy! Xanarchy!” the crowd chanted as the diminutive twenty -one-year-old rapper, with shaggy brown hair and the face of a blissed-out toddler, took the stage. Some audience members sported fake face tattoos. (Lil Xan, whose real name is Diego Leanos, has “Zzz” tattooed under one eye, “Candy” under the other, and “Xanarchy” above one eyebrow.) Multiple cameramen and videographers joined him onstage. Halfway through his brief set, he brought out Cole Bennett—a twenty-one-yearold music- video director with wholesome, Zack Morris-esque looks—and the crowd shrieked with the delight of recognition typically reserved for those who…

BEYOND SNOOPING Of the many troubling aspects of Sheelah Kolhatkar’s recent newyorker.com article about our lawsuit, with the co-plaintiff Chaz Reetz- Laiolo, against Emma Cline for hacking our online accounts, we were particularly disappointed by the dismissal of violations of our privacy as Cline “snooping on . . . two of the former couple’s female friends” (“How the Lawyer David Boies Turned a Young Novelist’s Sexual Past Against Her,” December 1st). The screenshot evidence, collected by the spyware that Cline used to break into our online accounts— examples of which are excerpted in our complaint—shows her opening and reading our personal e-mails over a period of years. It is hypocritical to dismiss this as mere “snooping” in an article purportedly about threats to Cline’s privacy. Further, in not addressing…

Three Kings Day Parade For many New Yorkers, the holiday season doesn’t end with the calendar year. El Día de los Reyes, which celebrates the adoration of Jesus by the Three Wise Men, gives children one last chance for gifts, on the twelfth day of Christmas. For the fortieth annual Three Kings Day Parade, in East Harlem, families are invited to join a morning procession through the neighborhood, starting on the corner of 106th Street at Lexington Avenue and ending at 115th Street at Park Avenue. Attractions include camels, puppets, musical performances from local bands, and traditional Puerto Rican food. El Museo del Barrio, which hosts the parade, offers free admission throughout the day. (1230 Fifth Ave. elmuseo.org. Jan. 5 at 11 A.M.) Grand Central Holiday Train Show At…

Natalie Wilder was sitting on a couch in a greenroom, using her iPhone to apply for a part in a film. Back in June, she starred in a one-woman play, “Fresh Hell: The Life and Loves of Dorothy Parker,” at the Oldcastle Theatre Company, in Bennington, Vermont. In an hour, she was going to reprise a different solo role, one of dozens she’s performed multiple times in recent years. “Today, I have lower-back pain,” she said, as she scrolled through her calendar. Wilder has shoulder-length brown hair and was wearing jeans and a turtleneck sweater. That afternoon, she was working as a so-called standardized patient, or S.P.—someone who has been trained to portray specific symptoms or illnesses, so that medical students can practice on a living person without ac cidentally…

When the Chinese action movie “Wolf Warrior II” arrived in theatres, in July, it looked like a standard shoot-’em-up, with a lonesome hero and frequent explosions. Within two weeks, however, “Wolf Warrior II” had become the highest- grossing Chinese movie of all time. Some crowds gave it standing ovations; others sang the national anthem. In October, China selected it as its official entry in the foreign-language category of the Academy Awards. The hero, Leng Feng, played by the action star Wu Jing (who also directed the film), is a veteran of the “wolf warriors,” special forces of the People’s Liberation Army. In retirement, he works as a guard in a fictional African country, on the frontier of China’s ventures abroad. A rebel army, backed by Western mercenaries, attempts to seize…

We are a sucking people . . . we look toeach other for nourishment . . . Afraid of whatwill happen to us if we feed in public . . . wehide in broom-closets and restrooms . . .take cover here in the Central Maze of theForking Paths . . . to snack freely . . . lull withmoss and mushroom and the nine-bandedarmadillo . . . with caterpillar and butterfly andbutterfly bush . . . amid the odor of wildthyme which, to deter predators, has evolvedto become more pungent . . . . . . among sow and puppy and piglet . . . amongwhatever milk-producing mammal survivedthe Era of Cancers and Guns and held on . . .each of us is alive only by the teat of the…

Shortfall, by Alice Echols (The New Press). In 1932, Walter Davis, Echols’s grandfather and the owner of the largest buildingand- loan association in central Colorado, disappeared, leaving behind $1.25 million in debt (some twenty-two million in today’s dollars). Abetted by the burgeoning credit market, building- and-loan financiers had been enticing depositors with the promise of homeownership while siphoning off money for themselves, a scheme that eventually failed, along with the stock and real-estate markets. The nascent F.B.I. and Scotland Yard led the search for Davis’s stolen assets. Using family documents and her mother’s memories, Echols depicts a man whose financial malfeasance foreshadowed the savings-and-loan debacle of the eighties and the stock-market crash of 2008. Troublemakers, by Leslie Berlin (Simon & Schuster). From the late nineteen-sixties to the early eighties,…

All pop stars are constructs, but that’s especially true of Shasta Geaux Pop, a glamazon hip-hop icon who exists, like Tinkerbell, only to the extent that you believe in her and clap your hands. Invented by the performer Ayesha Jordan and the director Charlotte Brathwaite, who met while working in the Netherlands in 2001, she’s part of this year’s “Under the Radar” festival ( Jan. 4-15), the Public Theatre’s showcase of the avant-garde, where she’ll be hosting get-down parties on select nights in the Public’s lobby. MOVIES NOW PLAYING All the Money in the World The director Ridley Scott reduces the story of the 1973 kidnapping, in Rome, of the sixteen-year-old Paul Getty, a grandson of the tycoon J. Paul Getty, then the world’s richest person, to a mere…

Paparazzi had staked out the entrance to the Bowery Hotel on a recent Monday evening, waiting for a bankable boldface name to emerge. But when Diplo came out to wait for the car that would take him to Rincon Criollo, a Cuban joint in Queens, the paps showed no interest. This placed the d.j., E.D.M. producer, and Major Lazer front man in a situation not unlike the kind regularly faced by the title character of the TV show “What Would Diplo Do?” In the show, which airs on Viceland TV, Diplo, played by James Van Der Beek, deals with the daily humiliations of being an E.D.M. superstar who is actually a talentless poseur. “I hate it,” Diplo said, of watching himself. He doesn’t mind that it makes fun of him…

Some spy stories will be forever confined to memory, locked safes, and invisible ink. But for others there’s a quarterly journal called Studies in Intelligence, published by the Central Intelligence Agency. “Every profession has its own literature,” Andres Vaart, the publication’s editor, said the other day. Since 1955, when it began, intelligence officers have filled its pages with analyses of old spy operations, book reviews, and tales of derring-do. “We have some great writers here,” Vaart said. “Studies is where they get to speak their minds.” Vaart, who typically works off-site, in northern Virginia, was at the C.I.A.’s headquarters, in Langley, to discuss the journal’s latest issue with his boss, Peter Usowski, the director of the C.I.A.’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. They were seated at a wooden table…

The call came at three in the morning. My mother, in New Delhi, was in tears. My father, she said, had fallen again, and he was speaking nonsense. She turned the handset toward him. He was muttering a slow, meaningless string of words in an unrecognizable high-pitched nasal tone. He kept repeating his nickname, Shibu, and the name of his childhood village, Dehergoti. He sounded as if he were reading his own last rites. “Take him to the hospital,” I urged her, from New York. “I’ll catch the next flight home.” “No, no, just wait,” my mother said. “He might get better on his own.” In her day, buying an international ticket on short notice was an unforgivable act of extravagance, reserved for transcontinental gangsters and film stars. No one…