Innholdsfortegnelse for January 28, 2019 i The New Yorker

Robert A. Caro (“Turn Every Page,” p. 34) has won two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, and three National Book Critics Circle Awards. His new book, “Working,” will be published in April. Jill Lepore (“Hard News,” p. 18) is a professor of history at Harvard. Her latest book, “These Truths: A History of the United States,” came out in September. Haruki Murakami (Fiction, p. 60) published his fifteenth novel in English, “Killing Commendatore,” in October. Charles Bethea (The Talk of the Town, p. 16), a staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 2008. Lisa Russ Spaar (Poem, p. 54) directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia. Her latest poetry collection is “Orexia.” John Cuneo (Cover) has contributed drawings to the magazine since 1994.…

Two Fridays ago, Puerto Rico, like New York before it, had a serious case of “Hamilton” fever. A touring production of the hip-hop musical was about to open at the Centro de Bellas Artes Luis A. Ferré, San Juan’s main performing-arts complex, with the show’s author, Lin-Manuel Miranda, back in the title role. It was Alexander Hamilton’s birthday, and Miranda, whose father grew up in Puerto Rico, was using the seventeen-day engagement to bring funds and attention to the island, sixteen months after it was pummelled by Hurricane Maria. Jimmy Fallon was coming down to film a live episode. Hours before opening night, workers at Bellas Artes were installing plants and ironing carpets outside the theatre. Down the street, the actor Rick Negron found some shade outside the Plaza del…

The wood-panelled tailgate of the 1972 Oldsmobile station wagon dangled open like a broken jaw, making a wobbly bench on which four kids could sit, eight legs swinging. Every Sunday morning, long before dawn, we’d get yanked out of bed to stuff the car’s wayback with stacks of twine-tied newspapers, clamber onto the tailgate, cut the twine with my mother’s sewing scissors, and ride around town, bouncing along on that bench, while my father shouted out orders from the driver’s seat. “Watch out for the dog!” he’d holler between draws on his pipe. “Inside the screen door!” “Mailbox!” As the car crept along, never stopping, we’d each grab a paper and dash in the dark across icy driveways or dew-drunk grass, crashing, seasonally, useful, into unexpected snowmen. “Back porch!” “Money…

So I’m telling a younger friend of mine about a strange incident that took place back when I was eighteen. I don’t recall exactly why I brought it up. It just happened to come up as we were talking. I mean, it was something that happened long ago. Ancient history. On top of which, I was never able to reach any conclusion about it. “I’d already graduated from high school then, but wasn’t in college yet,” I explained. “I was what’s called an academic ronin, a student who fails the university entrance exam and is waiting to try again. Things felt kind of up in the air,” I went on, “but that didn’t bother me much. I knew that I could get into a halfway decent private college if…

HELL IS A PLACE ON EARTH Vinson Cunningham, in his exploration of the concept of Hell, draws an interesting connection between Hell and imprisonment, noting that prison abolitionism might be considered “a kind of secular universalism” (Books, January 21st). But getting rid of prisons is also a non-secular cause. I’m the founder of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons, an organization that believes the closure of prisons is a promise of the Christian faith. In the Book of Luke, Jesus proclaims that all prisoners will be set free in the Kingdom of God. Furthermore, if Jesus already bore punishment for our sins—and, therefore, for all our crimes—then we no longer need a justice system to dole out additional retribution. There’s a strong Biblical case to be made for replacing…

On a recent chilly Saturday, Jon Leland, a director at Kickstarter, sat in a SoHo coffee shop writing a guided meditation for an upcoming sound festival. “It’s about being a cicada emerging from seventeen years underground,” he explained. Closing his laptop, he took a break to discuss another passion: “scaring people about climate change.” Leland has had this preoccupation since 2011, when he attended a U.N. Security Council meeting and heard a former President of Nauru speak about losing his island country to rising seas. “It was heartbreaking,” Leland said. And yet he watched “the machinery of international politics do everything it could to not change.” Last summer, he set about formulating the “simple, stark messaging” that he believes the climate-change movement needs. Using six thousand dollars, raised mostly on…

Have you been watching TV Show? Oh, my God, yes, so have we, and we are completely addicted! Wait, Sarah, you’re kidding—you haven’t? You’d love it. Mike, how far in are you and Julie? Are you guys caught up? I’m dying to hear what you thought of Recent Episode, when Main Character and Secondary Character Who Knows Main Character’s Secret finally have it out. Sorry, Sarah, you don’t know what we’re talking about. But you really would love this show. I, like, kind of want to send you home to watch it right now. Haha. Actually, you know what? Let’s check out the pilot. I’d totally watch it again. Peter, can you put it on? Thanks, babe. Here, Sarah, I want you to have a good view. This chair is…

As a dishwasherin a restaurantI lasted only three hours.It was a dubious role at best.The dirty dishes kept comingfaster than I could produce clean ones.But I could play the pianofor hours and hours,snake across the flooron my bellyall afternoon and into the night.As HerculesI lifted Antaeus from the earth,robbing him of his strength.Always happy,I could walk around the blockon my hands.In a fanciful costume,I played the joker.With a thirty-pound sack of riceon my head, all day I dancedon a stone balustradewithout falling off.From sunup to sundown,week after week,I was a whole amusement parkunto myself.I was on top of contingencies.I defended victims of foolishnessand porous people.I campaigned for weeksagainst the greedy.I deconstructed ancestral suffering.I gave comfort to the feebleand the needy.I made marionettes dance for kids.I played marbles with the bestand…

Painting today may be ever so good, as in a magnificent show of new work by Dana Schutz, at the Petzel gallery, and still have you wondering what it’s good for. Can it make a significant difference in our culture? A Schutz painting in last year’s Whitney Biennial would seem to have done so, but haplessly. Her naïvely well-meant “Open Casket,” which presented a semi-abstract image of the murdered Emmett Till, jostled a hornet’s nest of prevalent racial hurts and angers. Protesters declared black suffering off limits for white artists. Defenders of Schutz invoked freedom of expression. The arguments sailed past each other, with one exception. After Schutz was accused of exploiting a sensitive subject for money, she swore that she would never sell the picture. Missing was a discussion…

North of Dawn, by Nuruddin Farah (Riverhead). This novel by a noted Somali probes the costs of migration through one family’s experience. A secular, cosmopolitan couple, who arrived in Norway before Somalia’s 1991 civil war, are horrified when their Norwegian-born son joins Al-Shabaab. After he dies in a suicide attack, his wife, Waliya, and two stepchildren move to Oslo. The children thrive, but hyper-conservative Waliya resists integration, causing turmoil as the family grapples with her hatred of the West—and both countries’ faults. Farah exempts no one from criticism, yet he denies no one sympathy; exile and opportunity, rage and love, delusion and faith are inextricable. Your Duck Is My Duck, by Deborah Eisenberg (Ecco). “So, you’re born, and then what?,” a character asks in this collection of disarmingly astute…

The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989, at the age of forty-two, cast a classicizing eye on subjects both conventional (calla lilies) and controversial (the underground S & M scene). As his muse and friend Patti Smith has written, “He will be condemned and adored. His excesses damned or romanticized. In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist.” On Jan. 25, the Guggenheim opens its yearlong two-part exhibition “Implicit Tensions: Robert Mapplethorpe Now.” NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Vijay Iyer Jazz Standard With a Whitmanesque musical presence, the pianist, composer, bandleader, and 2013 MacArthur Fellow Vijay Iyer contains multitudes: his of-the-moment playing and writing can be strikingly…

The best place to watch the Tappan Zee Bridge blow up, this past Tuesday, seemed to be slightly north of Lyndhurst, the old Jay Gould estate, in Tarrytown. Andy Aaron, an I.B.M. Research employee who commutes from Nyack to Yorktown Heights over the bridge’s new four-billion-dollar replacement, spent several days scouting viewing locations along the Hudson River, and eventually found a steep trail leading from the estate grounds down toward train tracks on the Hudson Line. A fallen tree had knocked out a section of chain-link fence, enabling passage onto railroad property. Aaron brought a folding chair and wore “every damn item of winter clothing I own,” he said. He had an unobstructed view of the defunct bridge and could see, perched on the easternmost of the two remaining trusses,…

FOR RENT: 380 sq. ft. studio apt. w/circus trapeze. High ceilings. Two small sleeping lofts & fireman’s pole. Exposed brick. New kitchen & bath. Former storefront. Faces E. 14th St. sidewalk—perfect for people-watching! On a trapeze hoop suspended from the ceiling of her East Village living room, Phoenix Feeley, aerialist, knife-catcher, activist, and fire-eater, struck the Mermaid pose, appearing to float horizontally six feet off the ground. The apartment, which she has shared with her daughter for much of the past decade, is about the size of two and a half parking spaces. Its curtained picture window provides a view of passing N.Y.U. students and a twenty-four-hour IHOP. Lately, though, it had begun to feel “like a birdcage,” Feeley said. For security, the windows have metal bars, “and then I…

On a beautiful morning last May, Diana Feldmann sat in her apartment in a suburb of Mainz, a prosperous city in western Germany, waiting for her fourteen-year-old daughter, Susanna, to return from a sleepover. When her phone finally lit up with a WhatsApp message, her heart leaped. “I’m in Frankfurt, taking a walk with my boyfriend Armando,” it said. “I’ll be back sometime later.” Feldmann immediately grew suspicious. The message did not match her daughter’s usual writing style. Susanna had never mentioned somebody by the name of Armando. Nor, it soon became clear, had any of her friends heard of him. All of Feldmann’s attempts to reach her daughter were unsuccessful. That night, Susanna did not return. More than twenty-four hours after her daughter had disappeared, Feldmann finally received a…

Fifteen years ago, when Marlon James was working on his first novel, he requested an exorcism. He was in his early thirties, living in Kingston, Jamaica, working as a graphic designer and occasionally producing photo shoots for music magazines. He had attended Sunday school as a child, with his brothers, in the nearby town of Portmore, where his family lived in a neighborhood populated by doctors and civil servants. His parents worked in the police force. His mother, a sweet and stubborn woman, rose to the rank of inspector; his father, a brash but melancholy man, left the force and became a lawyer. Both were readers: his father favored Shakespeare, and his mother loved O. Henry. When James was five, other kids started calling him a sissy, and he retreated…

It is a brave critic who gives a bad review to Muhammad’s meters, a daring one who sniffs at Moses’ prose or returns Paul’s letters. When we enter into sacred texts as readers, rather than as worshippers—treating them, the way we might the Odyssey or “Beowulf,” as ancient vessels of meaning crafted by people who, like all writers, had their good moments and their misses—we gain much, but we lose much, too. We gain the freedom to read and roam for pleasure. But we forget at our peril that, through most of their history, these have been not books, to be appreciated, but truths, to be obeyed. The peril is double: there’s actual peril for those who do imaginative reading in the wrong place and time, and there’s also intellectual…

The electric-car executive Elon Musk has been described as “erratic, unstable, reckless, operatic.” After the 2018 election, President Donald Trump is said to have delivered an “operatic performance of grievances and pugilism.” The most recent World Cup reportedly outclassed all others in producing “operatic drama.” In the popular imagination, opera is an art of histrionics and excess, veering toward insanity. At the same time, to paraphrase Walter Pater, opera is a condition toward which all pop culture aspires: there are soap operas, rock operas, space operas, horse operas. The word is at once suggestively specific and vague to the point of Midnight.” It is, after all, derived from the Latin for “work.” Contemporary composers define opera nearly as loosely as everyone else does. In early January in New York, two…