Innholdsfortegnelse for November 12, 2018 i The New Yorker

In the run-up to Oscar season, Joel and Ethan Coen have condensed their unrealized plans for a limited TV series into a six-part anthology of short Western films, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” (Nov. 16). The segments—featuring a strong cast that includes Tim Blake Nelson, in the title role, along with Tyne Daly, Zoe Kazan, James Franco, Liam Neeson, and Tom Waits—vary widely in tone, from boisterous comedy to melodrama to ghostly macabre, but they’re unified by one strong, myth-dispelling theme: the relentless violence and cruelty that prevailed in the casually governed Wild West. Olivia Colman plays Queen Anne in “The Favourite” (Nov. 23), directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, a historical drama set in the early eighteenth century and centered on the political and intimate rivalry of the Duchess of Marlborough…

In Philip Roth’s novel “The Plot Against America,” it is 1940; the famed pilot Charles Lindbergh becomes President and secretly launches a pogrom against Jews. A foreign power, Nazi Germany, interferes in a U.S. election. Journalists are targeted with violence. The Roth family, of Newark, agonizes over the nation’s escalating anti-Semitism. As Hitler decimates Europe, Lindbergh pursues an “America First” policy of nonintervention. Roth said that “Plot,” which was published in 2004, was an “exercise in historical imagination”: he wondered if what happened in Europe could happen here. Earlier this year, Bernard Schwartz, the director of the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, contacted Roth and proposed staging a reading of “Plot.” Schwartz would invite nine actors to perform the novel, each delivering an abridged chapter. Roth, a skillful reader…

On a recent drizzly Tuesday morning, a small group of ink enthusiasts—already rain-slicked, under umbrellas and ponchos—stood on Gapstow Bridge, in Central Park, admiring a brilliant-pink pokeweed bush. The Park was the first stop on a five-hour foraging trip that would take them up to Hudson Heights, to collect foliage and trash, which they would cook, to make ink. Their guide, Jason Logan, the founder of the Toronto Ink Company, was in town for the launch of his book, “Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking.” At a reading in the West Village, he had asked the audience if anyone wanted to go foraging. The city offers some attractive ingredients: acorns, wild grapevines, beer caps, feathers, subway soot. Logan, who is forty-six, became interested in ink about twenty years…

In the late evening of August 29, 1968, a balding fifty-seven-year-old wearing a black suit and a black tie took the stage at the International Amphitheatre, in Chicago, to accept his party’s nomination for the Presidency of the United States. Framed by a gray backdrop, Hubert Humphrey promised America a bright new day: “It is the special genius of the Democratic Party that it welcomes change, not as an enemy but as an ally; not as a force to be suppressed but as an instrument of progress to be encouraged.” When he was first elected to the U.S. Senate, some two decades earlier, Humphrey was hailed as a liberal hero for his outspoken support of civil rights. When he served as Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vice-President, he continued to champion progressive…

On a sunny afternoon in May, 2015, I joined a dozen other surgeons at a downtown Boston office building to begin sixteen hours of mandatory computer training. We sat in three rows, each of us parked behind a desktop computer. In one month, our daily routines would come to depend upon mastery of Epic, the new medical software system on the screens in front of us. The upgrade from our home-built software would cost the hospital system where we worked, Partners HealthCare, a staggering $1.6 billion, but it aimed to keep us technologically up to date. More than ninety per cent of American hospitals have been computerized during the past decade, and more than half of Americans have their health information in the Epic system. Seventy thousand employees of Partners…

Hilary Spurling’s new biography, “Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time” (Knopf), is a fond portrayal of the man sometimes called “the English Proust.” The comparison is both flattering and misleading. You couldn’t be more English than Powell, who kept Burke’s Landed Gentry at his bedside, but his Proustian credentials mostly consist in writing an immensely long, multivolume novel with the word “time” in the title. Called “A Dance to the Music of Time,” after a Poussin painting of the same name, it came out in twelve book-length installments between 1951 and 1975. At one point, Powell’s book actually intersects with Proust’s: toward the end of the Second World War, its narrator, a writer named Nicholas Jenkins, realizes with a start that he’s been staying in the same town…

When I hit play on Netflix’s adaptation of “The Haunting of Hill House,” I didn’t expect to end up rooting for the house. The opening episodes of this interpretation of Shirley Jackson’s classic gothic-horror story were promisingly eerie, all shadows and inky blacks, and I crossed my fingers for something satisfying—a stylishly directed Halloween binge-watch, with a few decent jump scares. And, now and then, it delivers. But there’s something existentially soul-dead to the over-all enterprise; it has corn syrup in its veins instead of blood. Jackson’s funny-nasty psychological thriller is about a very bad house, which is described in fabulously hyperbolic terms: Hill House is “arrogant and hating,” full of “sickening, degraded cold.” In the novel, we’re trapped not merely inside this malevolent architecture but in the mind of…

TRUE COLORS Margaret Talbot’s article on polychromy in classical Greek and Roman sculpture reveals that the figures we are used to seeing as white were, in fact, fully colored (“Color Blind,” October 29th). It also shows that the techniques used to identify the applications of those pigments are clearly in their infancy. Nothing Talbot writes credibly explains how these ancient sculptors—driven by a naturalistic aesthetic so intense that they labored in marble in order to replicate muscles beneath the surface of human skin and to painstakingly re-create delicate drapery—would allow painters to effectively obliterate the subtlety of their hard effort with daubs of color, at least in the way that pigment is unconvincingly applied to modern replicas. Scott Davis JonesValley Village, Calif. Talbot’s article brought to mind the video…

The other evening at Primo’s, a customer flashed her zinc supply to a sick man. “It’s preventative,” she said. During cold season, it’s healthy to have warm company, and at this new Tribeca bar there’s much to be had—it’s busy even on a Thursday night in a neighborhood that’s usually dead by 9 P.M. With sumptuous wood grain, plush velvet seating, and the floor tiling of a dated, smoke-filled European café, the space radiates a nostalgic Art Deco luxury. “Have you seen the Luca Guadagnino house?” the zinc carrier asked. “It’s basically this.” Of course, things are a bit more modest here: one doesn’t have to befriend a celebrated director to get into Primo’s, and it abuts Chambers Street rather than Lake Como. As good as the bar looks, at…

When the Tate Modern opened, in 2000, in what used to be a power station on the south bank of the Thames, in London, the former turbine hall, which encompasses more than thirty-five thousand square feet and is as high as a five-story building, became one of the most coveted and challenging spaces for an artist to fill. In 2005, Rachel Whiteread installed “Embankment,” which consisted of fourteen thousand stacked translucent plastic boxes, resembling sugar-cube ziggurats; in 2010, Ai Weiwei made “Sunflower Seeds,” in which he spread millions of porcelain replicas of sunflower seeds across the floor, like a crunchy carpet. Last month, the space was turned over to Tania Bruguera, the Cuban artist and activist. At first sight, Bruguera’s intervention appears to be subtler: a large patch of the…

In 2011, Hany Farid, a photo-forensics expert, received an e-mail from a bereaved father. Three years earlier, the man’s son had found himself on the side of the road with a car that wouldn’t start. When some strangers offered him a lift, he accepted. A few minutes later, for unknown reasons, they shot him. A surveillance camera had captured him as he walked toward their car, but the video was of such low quality that key details, such as faces, were impossible to make out. The other car’s license plate was visible only as an indecipherable jumble of pixels. The father could see the evidence that pointed to his son’s killers—just not clearly enough. Farid had pioneered the forensic analysis of digital photographs in the late nineteen-nineties, and gained a…

Ryan Costello came to Washington the old-fashioned way. Growing up in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in a family of educators, he imagined government service to be like the Norman Rockwell painting of a farmer standing up at a town-hall meeting: a noble calling. By the time Costello turned twenty-one, in 1997, he wanted to be a congressman. He was elected the township supervisor of West Chester, Pennsylvania, while he was at Villanova law school; then he became the Chester County recorder of deeds, then a county commissioner, and then a commission chairman. This was the kind of solid ladder that an ambitious young Republican, in the tidy suburbs west of Philadelphia, climbed in order to reach for bigger things. In 2014, after the Republican incumbent in Pennsylvania’s Sixth Congressional District announced…

(1898-1956) 1 In this country, I hear, the word “convince”Has been replaced by the word “sell.” Of the young motherWho holds the newborn to her breast, they say:She sells him the milk. The localWho shows the snow-topped mountains to the strangerSells him, so to speak, the landscape. The mission of the PresidentAccording to the newspapers, was to sell to the peopleThe war against the aggressor states. The battle cry“Down with the crimes of the market!”Is something, my friends tell me, that I shall have toSell to the exploited. 2 The decisive thing in this country, I hear, is success.The mere intention of butchering my brotherIs not sufficient. Only when I succeed in eating himDo I have the right to be admired. 3 In this country, I hear, there are happy…

Then They Came for Me, by Matthew D. Hockenos (Basic). This clear-eyed biography reconsiders the life of Martin Niemöller, the German Lutheran pastor who defied the Nazis, was imprisoned in Dachau, and emerged as a liberal hero in the postwar era. His journey to this role was anything but straightforward. A former U-boat commander who hated the Weimar Republic and longed for a moral, Christian Germany, Niemöller initially supported Hitler, voting for him twice. His eventual resistance was spurred not by the regime’s attacks on Jews and others but by its interference in Church affairs. Hockenos’s portrait sheds valuable light on a man and a society willing to overlook the sins of a leader whose interests initially seemed to dovetail with their own. The Poison Squad, by Deborah Blum…

In 1978, Harvey Fierstein’s one-act play “International Stud”—the first part of what eventually became “Torch Song Trilogy”—premièred at La MaMa. In the opening scene, Arnold Beckoff (Fierstein), a drag queen with a voice like a sultry cement mixer and an accent that recalled Old Brooklyn, sat at a vanity, preparing to go onstage, and tawked to the audience, in a vernacular as effortful as his maquillage. “For those of yis what ain’t yet guessed, I am an entertainer,” he said. “Or what’s left of one. I go by the name Virginia Ham. Ain’t that a kick in the rubber parts?” Virginia Ham had plenty of admirers, but Arnold wanted to be loved as himself—“the part that’s not so well protected.” So, one suspected, did Fierstein. The trilogy was a showcase…

Terence Nance has been at the forefront of American filmmaking since the release of his first feature, “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,” in 2012. It’s part of a retrospective of his work at BAM, Nov. 12-15, as is his new six-part HBO series, “Random Acts of Flyness,” a furiously imaginative, pain-filled yet jubilant vision of black people’s social and inner lives amid American racial and gender prejudices. The series also includes short films by Nance and his collaborators Nuotama Frances Bodomo and Mariama Diallo. MOVIES The Girl in the Spider’s Web OPENING Claire Foy stars as Lisbeth Salander in this action sequel, about a computer hacker who takes revenge on men who harm women. Directed by Fede Álvarez; co-starring Sverrir Gudnason and Lakeith Stanfield. (In wide release.) Overlord OPENING…

In the Book of Genesis, God said, “Let there be light.” Historically, Polynesian cosmology inverted the formula: the first light, atea, conceived the gods, from which all human chiefs descended. Artisans from Fiji to Hawaii honored their ancestral deities with ritual objects (figures carved from wood and whale bone) and regalia (vibrant capes made of feathers). Thirty examples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are on view in “Atea: Nature and Divinity in Polynesia,” at the Met. (Opens Nov. 19.) Kevin Beasley, an astute young American artist working at the intersection of sculpture and sound, installs a one-ton relic of the Jim Crow-era South on the eighth floor of the Whitney: an electric motor that operated a cotton gin near Selma, Alabama, from 1940 to 1973. At the museum, it will…

Shortly before the midterms, the theatre director Oliver Butler met with other anxious, liberal-leaning New Yorkers at the café outside the Signature Theatre, on Forty-second street, for a master class in textavism. He had just attended a preview of his show “Thom Pain (based on nothing),” by the playwright Will Eno, and was jotting notes on a legal pad, with a laptop and a smartphone at his elbow. He wore a blue MAGA-style cap, which he and Eno had designed, and which bore the word “FACTS.” Part of the proceeds benefits the Committee to Protect Journalists, he said, adding, “In the right area people will be, like, ‘He won, get over it!’” In the past year, text activism, or textavism, has consumed nearly all of Butler’s limited spare time (in…

Before rain hits the ground,it’s water. It has no smell.After it hits the ground, it’smemories: my mother,on crutches, moving toward me,in rain, that last dry summer with her,or a man, who later became myhusband, in a tent with me, in thepetrichor air, our bodies becomingchangelings, becoming a new household,becoming new gods, withtheir own new myths. I was taughtthat before the priest raises the hostand wine and says, “This is my body;this is my blood,” and before the altargirl rings the bells, the host is bread,the wine is wine. After the words,the host is God’s body; the wine isGod’s blood. Transubstantiation: meafter him, a baby sucking my nipple,rain ribboning windows. Nowmy six-year-old grandson, in the earlyAugust rainy morning, piano-practices“The Merry Widow Waltz.” BeforeI was a widow, that song wasonly a practice…

I was seven years old and puffed up with pride; I was my father’s little cattle herder. Every morning, when my father left the big hut, I woke with a start, reproaching myself bitterly for sleeping so soundly when I should have been up before him, like my older brothers, to tend to the cows in the kraal. I was convinced that my father never slept, that he was always on the alert. He would never let himself be caught out by cattle rustlers. Stealing cows was a serious sport in Rwanda. People feared these bandits and also admired them. They were very cunning. They had medicines that would put all the inhabitants of a kraal to sleep. The rustlers would make an opening in the fence, and the cows,…

In 2016, the singer-songwriters Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridgers, who were all in their early twenties, were living parallel lives. They’d proved themselves to be careful and accomplished writers and performers, and had begun to attract attention from critics and labels alike. Each artist had crafted a distinct sound: Baker, a recovered opioid addict from Memphis, whose musical upbringing was in the Christian church, makes spare and swelling music that draws from the melodies and the ritualized melancholy of the emo world. Bridgers, a Los Angeles native who worshipped Elliott Smith and starred in an Apple commercial at the age of twenty-one, makes folksy, acoustic rock songs whose wispiness cleverly masks their morbid and searing lyrics. (One of her best songs, “Funeral,” details the experience of singing at…