Innholdsfortegnelse for September 3, 2018 i The New Yorker

Ian Parker (“The Bane of Their Resistance,” p. 34) contributed his first piece to the magazine in 1994 and became a staff writer in 2000. Emily Nussbaum (On Television, p. 70), The New Yorker’s television critic, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Simon Schama (“Blue as Can Be,” p. 28), a University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia, has written for the magazine since 1994. His most recent book is “The Story of the Jews, Volume Two: Belonging, 1492-1900.” Tyler Foggatt (The Talk of the Town, p. 16) joined the magazine’s editorial staff last year. Barry Blitt (Cover) is a cartoonist and an illustrator. His latest book, “Blitt,” is a collection of his illustrations for The New Yorker, the Times, Vanity Fair, and other publications. Maya…

“Race in America’s Courts” 92nd Street Y Catherine (Kitty) Payne, the subject of “Chariot on the Mountain,” the legal journalist Jack Ford’s new work of historical fiction, was a freed slave who was abducted along with her four children, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and returned to the South by slave catchers, in 1845. Astonishingly, she filed a court case and won back both her and her family’s freedom a year later. (Her kidnappers were jailed.) In a talk subtitled “Peering Through the Murky Present into a Dark Past,” Ford and Jami Floyd, a host of WNYC’s “All Things Considered,” use the Payne case as a jumping-off point for an examination of racial justice then and now.—K. Leander Williams (Aug. 30 at 7.) Deborah Baker Greenlight Bookstore In “The Last Englishmen:…

On a damp Monday morning at nine o’clock, as Governor Andrew Cuomo and Cynthia Nixon barnstormed New York City before the Democratic primaries, a small group of volunteers entered the veterans’ unit on Rikers Island, representing another campaign. Inside, about a dozen men sat at metal tables in a dayroom. Anthony Posada, a slight thirty-three-year-old attorney with the Legal Aid Society, addressed the room. “How many people here know that if you’re on Rikers Island, you can vote?” he asked. The inmates had been in the middle of a reëntry-program meeting (one man had written his goals in a notebook: “1) no ass kissing 2) no passing gas 3) no ass grabbing”). Posada continued: did the group know that many of the people controlling their cases—the judges and the District…

When you drink out of a drinking fountain, is there any way to avoid getting your shirt all wet? Yes, there is, and it’s in my book. Have you ever wondered why people always seem to be talking when you want to talk? My book teaches you how to shut them up. How do you tell a kid that there’s no God? My book explains. When you see a frog in a pond, and a few days later you see another frog, is it the same frog? My book helps you figure it out. Have you ever wondered why the sky is blue? Me neither. My book tells you how to avoid questions like that. Chapter 7 explains what to do if you’re accidentally shot by hunters. (Hint: it involves…

Open up your hives, o bees, cyphers on the fringesof childhood, honeyed inheritance of selfamong others.My grandfather and godfather carvedtheir pockets of solitudeby donning white suits. Meticulous, industrious natures, each quietly worshipped a queen, each quietly stoked my inheritance. How could Ihave known the vastnessbeing stored up for me, how it would remainlong after the bees had flown.The moment I was handed the combdripping, the stickiness, the waxin my teeth, the overwhelming sweetness. It’s over now. The bees, long gone, belongto barefoot gardens, deserted.Summer no longer sleepsone foot swollen in her ice bucket. Jars ofhoney no longer arrivefrom Lyon, broken in the mail.…

When I was fifteen, my younger sister died. It happened very suddenly. She was twelve then, in her first year of junior high. She had been born with a congenital heart problem, but since her last surgeries, in the upper grades of elementary school, she hadn’t shown any more symptoms, and our family had felt reassured, holding on to the faint hope that her life would go on without incident. But, in May of that year, her heartbeat became more irregular. It was especially bad when she lay down, and she suffered many sleepless nights. She underwent tests at the university hospital, but no matter how detailed the tests the doctors couldn’t pinpoint any changes in her physical condition. The basic issue had ostensibly been resolved by the operations, and…

In February, 1989, Francis Fukuyama gave a talk on international relations at the University of Chicago. Fukuyama was thirty-six years old, and on his way from a job at the Rand Corporation, in Santa Monica, where he had worked as an expert on Soviet foreign policy, to a post as the deputy director of policy planning at the State Department, in Washington. It was a good moment for talking about international relations, and a good moment for Soviet experts especially, because, two months earlier, on December 7, 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev had announced, in a speech at the United Nations, that the Soviet Union would no longer intervene in the affairs of its Eastern European satellite states. Those nations could now become democratic. It was the beginning of the end of…

HOMEWARD BOUND I was moved by Rebecca Mead’s essay on her decision to move back to her birthplace, England, after spending decades in the United States and having become a citizen (“The Return of the Native,” August 20th). Her story echoes mine. As both a Swiss and an American citizen, I can identify with her feelings of no longer being able to go “home,” yet I, too, want to go back. It’s clear that this was a difficult decision for Mead, and she doesn’t overlook the privilege of being able to return to her native country (nor do I). Like Mead, I have been given incredible opportunities in the United States that my home country could never have offered me. What, then, makes us want to leave a country…

Last week, “an adviser close to” Michael Cohen told the Washington Post that Cohen’s guilty plea (to eight counts of campaign-finance violations, tax evasion, and bank fraud) represented a chance to rewrite his legacy. Cohen would morph, in the eyes of history, from bit player best known for statements like “What I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting” to saviour of the republic. One imagines future tourists signing up for a tour of Michael Cohen’s New York, as they do for other city legends, like Biggie Smalls and Alexander Hamilton. The other day, a test run was attempted. First stop: the town of Lawrence, near J.F.K. Airport, where Cohen grew up, the son of a nurse and a surgeon who had emigrated from Poland after…

Thomas Lupo’s office—on the second floor of a former stable on Grand Street in Brooklyn—was once used in a commercial for Post Raisin Bran. “They said it was because it’s one of the few that still look like an old-time office,” Lupo said recently. He himself is sixty-five. There’s a computer on his desk, but the desk is plenty old, and the venetian blinds on the window next to it look as though they could have been made by Venetians. Standing on the floor near the desk, between a draftsman’s table and a wood-panelled wall, is a large framed drawing, which sunlight has bleached to near-invisibility. “That’s the set designer’s sketch for Vito Corleone’s grave, in ‘The Godfather,’ ” Lupo said. “And the note on it says, ‘Marble finishes as…

How blue can it get? How deep can it be? Some years ago, at the Guggenheim Bilbao, I thought I’d hit on the ultimate blue, displayed on the gallery floor. Yves Klein, who died at thirty-four, was obsessed with purging color of any external associations. Gestural abstraction, he felt, was clotted with sentimental extraneousness. But, in search of chromatic purity, Klein realized that even the purest pigments’ intensity dulled when combined with a binder such as oil, egg, or acrylic. In 1960, he commissioned a synthetic binder that would resist the absorption of light waves, delivering maximum reflectiveness. Until that day in Bilbao, I’d thought Klein a bit of a monomaniacal bore, but Klein International Blue, as he named the pigment—rolled out flat or pimpled, with saturated sponges embedded in…

Last May, Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, flew to Malta for a week to learn Maltese. He had a hefty grammar book in his backpack, but he didn’t plan to open it unless he had to. “We’ll do this as I would in the Amazon,” he told me, referring to his fieldwork as a linguist. Our plan was for me to observe how he went about learning a new language, starting with “hello” and “thank you.” Rojas-Berscia is a twenty-seven-year-old Peruvian with a baby face and spiky dark hair. A friend had given him a new pair of earrings, which he wore on Malta with funky tank tops and a chain necklace. He looked like any…

Toward the end of the first season of HBO’s “Succession,” some corporate schemers plot a takeover strategy called a bear hug. It’s an offer that’s too much, too soon—a bid for a company’s stock that’s so high the board can’t legally turn it down. Smother your targets with largesse and you own them. That’s the essence of family love in “Succession,” a satisfyingly nasty series that might be described as an explainer on the inner life of Jared Kushner. Created by the British comedy writer Jesse Armstrong, it’s a story about rich kids clawing for control of their dad’s company, a Fox-y media conglomerate. Among the series’ many pleasures is how well it functions as a blind item about the Murdochs, the Mercers, the Redstones—families that double as brands, which…

NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. G. Calvin Weston The Stone at the New School Adventure has been coursing through the blood of Weston, a drummer of relentless invention, ever since his sojourn with Ornette Coleman when Weston was still a teen-ager. This residency unites him with, among others, the keyboardist John Medeski and his fellow-drummer Billy Martin.—Steve Futterman (Aug. 28-31.) Joe Lovano Village Vanguard Too young at age sixty-five to be considered an elder statesman, but with enough experience and wisdom to have secured a position in the jazz firmament, Lovano can safely be called a master, a saxophonist and bandleader of rare inspiration. For this engagement, he steers an intergenerational quartet that includes Marc Johnson…

NoHo Amid the grays and browns of a lively stretch of Bleecker Street near the Bowery, a lacy curtain glows red. Ghost Donkey, a mezcalería from the collective behind Saxon + Parole, has served the swanky downtown masses a dizzying array of potent drinks for the past year and a half; on Saturdays, lines snake around the block. Red Christmas lights hang from the wood-slatted ceiling, like a festive, agreeable rain of blood. A throb of Mexican music plays steadily, though there is no room to swing your hips because the place is so crowded with young fashionistas taking selfies against the red brick walls. In case the effort of edgy self-regard makes you thirsty, cocktails abound; the El Diablo Swizzle (Altos Blanco, crème de cassis, ginger beer) is a…

Tony Liu and Lindsey Schuyler, the fashion fanatics behind the Instagram account Diet Prada, are both loved and feared for their cheeky takedowns of designers who rip off other people’s concepts. In a recent post, they placed an image of a winged Lacoste windbreaker next to a similar piece by Jean Paul Gaultier. “Not only is @lacoste super boring, they’re super lazy lmao,” they wrote to their seven hundred thousand followers. Diet Prada has a mission: to re-stigmatize stealing for an audience benumbed by streetwear “remixes” and fast-fashion knockoffs. “People are, like, ‘Well, that’s their business model!’ ” Schuyler, who is thirty, said the other day. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right.” She said that young people seem especially indifferent to idea theft. “I don’t think they appreciate it, or…

Like a man in the first draft of a limerick, Tennys Sandgren is a tennis player from Tennessee. Last winter, after scraping his way onto the list of the top hundred professional players, he secured a spot at the Australian Open. He advanced to the quarterfinals. At a press conference, he responded happily to questions about his unexpected achievement. Then someone asked him about his Twitter feed. Sandgren had tweeted, retweeted, or “liked” disparaging remarks about Muslims and gays; he had highlighted an article suggesting that recent migration into Europe could be described as “Operation European Population Replacement”; he had called Marx’s ideas worse than Hitler’s. He had also promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which accuses Hillary Clinton of human trafficking. Sandgren told reporters that, though he didn’t support the…

I was born inside a mourning dove.There is wind in all of us. Here I amin a century that has its eyes shut tight—don’t I know exactlywhy I’m here: in the end the sun varnishes us allin amber. Undress for that light. There is flightin all of us. Find me in the pasture sewingbluebonnets into each bend of our laughter. I was borninside the decayed mourning dove you found shadedin lavender. Call me maggot. When you die, don’t worry.I will rise up from you opaque as the angeladmiring your rotted waist. I, too, will die—amdying—though I am a maggot, though I covetfragrance from your breathless flowering. I am bornfrom grieving. I am as afraid as you.…

The Third Hotel, by Laura van den Berg (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this uncanny novel, a woman in her late thirties travels to Havana shortly after her husband’s death for a film festival they were to attend together. There she spots the dead man roaming the city’s esplanades and trails him across the island. “You are dead,” she thinks. “How could you have forgotten?” This is no Hitchcockian tale of a double life but an insightful portrait of grief’s power to create “a dislocation of reality.” Mischievous details and winningly bizarre characters—including a professor who teaches a course on “quantum physics and the afterlife,” clad in only a bra and a tweed skirt—help the book avoid melodrama and memorably capture the “thundering mystery” of marriage and heartbreak. The…