Innholdsfortegnelse for October 29, 2018 i The New Yorker

Nicholas Lemann (“Another Country,” p. 34), a staff writer, is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Janet Malcolm (“Six Glimpses of the Past,” p. 18) is a longtime staff writer. Her latest book is “Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers.” John Seabrook (The Talk of the Town, p. 17) has published four books, including, most recently, “The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.” Bianca Stone (Poem, p. 38) is a poet and a visual artist. Her most recent book is “The Möbius Strip Club of Grief.” Paul Rudnick (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 27) is at work on the book for the upcoming Broadway musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada.” Alexandra Schwartz (The Theatre, p. 76) is contributing theatre reviews to the magazine while…

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s President from 2005 to 2013, oversaw a ban on social media in his country, but last year, perhaps following the example of America’s President, he started tweeting on a new account. On Twitter, the populist hard-liner goes by the handle @Ahmadinejad1956 (a reference to his birth year), and identifies himself as a “Husband, Dad, Grandfather, University Professor, President, Mayor, Proud Iranian.” For the most part, his tweets veer between New Agey aphorisms (“Let’s all love each other”) and political commentary (“the Zionists are always causing problems for the #AmericanPeople … #ZionistPlot”). Last month, however, Ahmadinejad decided to address one of Donald Trump’s favorite topics: the controversy surrounding the former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. He tweeted, “The #NFL season will start this week, unfortunately once again @Kaepernick7 is…

“The Storm Won’t Come,” the first track from Richard Thompson’s new album, “13 Rivers,” also happened to be the weather forecast for New York Harbor. Another East Coast storm would stay well south that day, making for a misty morning in the city and a low, gray sky that cast a flat light over the water. In short, it was a good day to ride the Staten Island Ferry. Larking about in the city has not been an option for Thompson until recently. He lived in Los Angeles for three decades, before moving to Montclair, New Jersey, earlier this year. At sixty-nine, he has the aquiline features and facial hair of an aging knight of King Arthur’s court. Thompson underscored his West-to-East transition by driving cross-country in five days this…

Until Larry Krasner entered the race for District Attorney of Philadelphia last year, he had never prosecuted a case. He began his career as a public defender, and spent three decades as a defense attorney. In the legal world, there is an image, however cartoonish, of prosecutors as conservative and unsparing, and of defense attorneys as righteous and perpetually outraged. Krasner, who had a long ponytail until he was forty, seemed to fit the mold. As he and his colleagues engaged in daily combat with the D.A.’s office, they routinely complained about prosecutors who, they believed, withheld evidence that they were legally required to give to the defense; about police who lied under oath on the witness stand; and about the D.A. Lynne Abraham, a Democrat whose successful prosecutions, over…

DEMENTIA AND THE TRUTH I live in a long-term-care facility not unlike the ones Larissa MacFarquhar describes in her piece on dementia care (“The Memory House,” October 8th). The article caused me to remember my grandparents. My mother’s father often escaped from his caregivers, because he was convinced that his farm was just over the hill. In their declining years, both Grandpa and Grandma believed that people on TV were hiding in their bedroom closet. Reading MacFarquhar’s article, I tried to picture how the family might have treated them differently. I am now of an age to worry about developing dementia, and I hope that, if I do, those caring for me won’t try to snow me with fantasy. I might be just lucid enough to know when I’m…

It has been estimated that it costs five dollars an hour to be alive in New York City. The rate might go up once you enter this orange-hued parlor for devotees of sophisticated spirits, where a playlist of old, tinny jazz, Frank Sinatra, and bossa nova conjures a cloud of prerevolutionary Cuba. On a recent evening, a young woman wearing owlish glasses strode through curls of smoke produced by the cigar of a man in a blue-and-white polo lounging on the bar’s veranda. Inside, she took a seat at the counter and opened the leather-bound menu, a volume that is rivalled in thickness only by the tome at the Cheesecake Factory, and which lists several cigars, an awe-inspiring variety of cognacs, Armagnacs, and Calvados, and more than one half-century-old single-malt…

When he’s at work, at the Tower of London, Yeoman Warder Christopher Skaife typically wears a uniform featuring a royal-blue tabard with scarlet ornamentation, a brass-buckled belt, and a bonnet. (Formal-wear involves stockings and a ruff.) Skaife lives at the Tower, too, with his wife, in a house with forty-foot walls and arrow slits for windows. Skaife is the Tower’s Ravenmaster—his new book, “The Ravenmaster,” just came out—and in that role he cares for its most famous current residents, Merlin (a.k.a. Merlina), Erin, Rocky, Jubilee II, Gripp II, Harris, and Poppy, and gives tours to some of the Tower’s three million annual visitors. Recently, while vacationing in Manhattan, Skaife, who is Beefeater-shaped, with a bristly beard, was incognito, dressed in a zippered jacket and cargo shorts. He has tattoos on…

I. ROSES AND PEONIES I am looking at two pictures. One is a color reproduction of Ingres’s great 1832 portrait of Louis-François Bertin, a powerfully bulky man in his sixties, dressed in black, who sits with both hands assertively planted on his thighs, and engages the viewer with a look of determination touched with irony. The other is a black-and-white snapshot of a two- or three-year-old girl taken by an anonymous photographer sometime in the nineteen-thirties. She’s sitting on a stone step, dressed in a polka-dotted sunsuit and matching sun hat—her eyes squinting against the sun, her mouth set in a near-smile—and she has assumed Bertin’s pose, as if she had seen the portrait and were mimicking it. Of course, what she has done, and what Bertin himself did, was…

During the two weeks leading up to Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, nearly everyone seemed to have a strong opinion about Christine Blasey Ford, who, on September 27th, testifying nervously but sincerely before the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were both high-school students, and about Kavanaugh, who furiously insisted that he had never done such a thing, to her or to any woman. Was there any remotely politically attuned American for whom that astonishing day, followed by the six-day F.B.I. investigation and the down-to-the-wire Senate vote, was not at the top of her mind? Yes. That person—to judge from her public pronouncements—was Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, who is running for a third term this fall in a state that…

Poke lived in a one-bedroom with five boys and a window. The complex sat on Montrose, just across from St. Thomas. They rented it from a woman who couldn’t be bothered with a lease, or regular maintenance, or even a deposit; Rod had talked her down so that she wouldn’t raise the charges on them. Rod was the one who spent the least time fucking around. He was always out tricking. Most of them were. But, on the rare mornings Poke awoke on the fading carpet of the room, he could watch crowds from the chapel drifting up the block. The apartment was next to the Chevron on Richmond and the pharmacy on Yoakum, with the diner in between, and Poke would hover by the window, humming at the sink,…

Daniel Seeger was twenty-one when he wrote to his local draft board to say, “I have concluded that war, from the practical standpoint, is futile and self-defeating, and from the more important moral standpoint, it is unethical.” Some time later, he received the United States Selective Service System’s Form 150, asking him to detail his objections to military service. It took him a few days to reply, because he had no answer for the form’s first question: “Do you believe in a Supreme Being?” Unsatisfied with the two available options—“Yes” and “No”—Seeger finally decided to draw and check a third box: “See attached pages.” There were eight of those pages, and in them he described reading Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza, all of whom “evolved comprehensive ethical systems of intellectual and…

The ostensible subject of “The Lifespan of a Fact” (directed by Leigh Silverman, at Studio 54) is the truth—what constitutes it and who gets to decide. Actually, the play is about the prerogatives demanded by an unyielding ego, here of the defensive-male variety. The script, which is credited to a trio of playwrights—Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, and Gordon Farrell—is based on a curious book of the same name, from 2012, which grew out of an antagonistic e-mail correspondence between the writer John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, an intern at the magazine The Believer, who had been assigned to factcheck a piece D’Agata had written about Levi Presley, a teen-ager who committed suicide by leaping from the top of a Las Vegas hotel. What began as a string of simple factual…

The last time Raúl Esparza (above) teamed up with the director John Doyle was in 2006, when Esparza played the love-starved hero of Doyle’s diamond-sharp revival of “Company.” Esparza’s yearning intensity will have a darker outlet in “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” (starting previews on Oct. 30, at Classic Stage Company). In Bertolt Brecht’s allegory of Hitler’s ascent, written in 1941 and first performed in 1958, Esparza plays a nineteen-thirties Chicago gangster who wrests control of the cauliflower trade. CLASSICAL MUSIC Pianists at Carnegie Hall Zankel Hall Olivier Messiaen wrote the rapt, soaring two-piano work “Visions de l’Amen” in 1943, to perform with Yvonne Loriod, his pupil and future wife. On Thursday at Zankel Hall, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who studied with Loriod, performs it with Tamara Stefanovich (his partner…

There’s something eerie about an empty frame. A vibrant segment of the stock-photo industry would cease to exist were it not for our fear of the void. During the Second World War, many of the Louvre’s paintings were evacuated to the countryside, leaving rooms full of empty rectangles. Germain Bazin, an influential curator at the time, turned his attention to frames, taking advantage of the absence of canvases to devise better ways of framing paintings and even using a portion of the museum’s heating budget—it was closed, after all—to acquire new ones. “Buy frames!” he wrote to Christiane Aulanier, a colleague, in June of 1944. “Tomorrow the Americans will make a clean sweep of the few that will have been left by the Germans!” Today, the Louvre possesses one of…

• I promise never to say anything bad about you to anyone, ever, although I can’t promise not to roll my eyes, make finger-down-my-throat motions, or mime choking myself to death. • I agree never to reveal anything about your finances, except for all the money you owe me for movie tickets I purchased online for both of us, which you somehow forgot all about reimbursing me for, or brushed off by insisting, “I’ll get them next time.” • I swear that I will never repeat statements made to me in confidence, unless they’re so juicy I just can’t resist or your ex needs to hear them for the purpose of healing through hating you even more. • I will refuse to add devil horns, a disfiguring mustache, or a…

Maybe humans are the failed A.I. of Nature.Maybe Nature made something it thought would tend the garden.Maybe Nature made something sexy, to watchclean the pools with long butterfly netsand a sunburn—the retainers of Nature.Now, mirror of mercury and Hell, that hot-red bombin your mouth, that sweet battleground on your tongue—it is the catastrophe of your mission.The wealthy, with their outstanding educationsand custom shoes, and empty apartmentsfloating above like Glinda; the ballad of media,the intellectuals, almost shepherdingevolution, falling asleep in their haunted paintingsand unattainable poetry—all the dimensionsof each person’s being, punk, restless in a loop. Sometimes I want to be taken into nothingness.I want to be burned with the gypsy moths and bindweed.Run to exhaustion with the wildebeest.I don’t want this phone, I want to kill God.Maybe humans are the complex…

The wind turns grass into italics,saying See? Do you see?Even mountains fall gracefullylike a red bucket emptiedof rain. This morning in Chilea million sardines washed up dead.They appeared thankless, without jobs.The waves crashed through the nightto get there: arms open, grabbingthe sand. Do you see? The TV saysthis is mating season and—sorry, I switched channels.Like a poem begins and endsbefore learning to crawl on its own.Maybe the ocean is nothingexcept the sound of being born.You must remember, don’t you?The cold air hitting your skin?The hands you fell into?…

All You Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung (Catapult). Growing up in small-town Oregon as a Korean-American adopted by white parents was a lonely experience, according to the author of this memoir. She didn’t try to find her birth parents until she was married and pregnant, with concerns about how her family medical history might affect her child. What she learns when she makes contact is shocking and upsetting. But it also brings unexpected joy. Chung’s memoir is more than a thoughtful consideration of race and heritage in America. It is the story of sisters finding each other, overcoming bureaucracy, abuse, separation, and time. Hiking with Nietzsche, by John Kaag (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this engagingly unacademic meditation, a professor of philosophy interweaves Friedrich Nietzsche’s biography with accounts…

The centerpiece of the artist and musician Lonnie Holley’s new album, “Mith,” is a brutal and dissonant song called “I Woke Up in a Fucked-Up America.” The title could refer to the nation right now, or to Holley’s childhood in the pre-civil-rights-era South. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1950, the seventh of twenty-seven children, and brought up by an itinerant burlesque dancer who may have stolen him from his biological mother. At the age of four, he says, he was traded for a bottle of whiskey. Later, after he fled the home of an abusive foster parent, he was hit by a car and declared braindead. At eleven, he was sent to the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, an infamous juvenile facility in Montgomery County, where he…