Home//The New Yorker/July 22, 2019/In This Issue
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019ContributorsDana Goodyear (“First Person,” p. 36) is a staff writer based in California.Lizzie Presser (“The Dispossessed,” p. 28), a reporter at ProPublica, previously wrote for The California Sunday Magazine. This piece is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica.Christoph Niemann (Cover) is the author of several books, including “Sunday Sketching,” “Souvenir,” and “Hopes and Dreams.”Anna Russell (The Talk of the Town, p. 16), previously a member of the magazine’s editorial staff, became a contributing writer this year.Myra Shapiro (Poem, p. 42) has published two books of poems and a memoir, “Four Sublets.” She teaches poetry workshops for the International Women’s Writing Guild.Adam Gopnik (Books, p. 67) is a staff writer. His latest book is “A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.”Siddhartha Mukherjee (“New Blood,” p. 48) is…2 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Tables for Two: HanonIn some respects, it’s easy to understand why udon, the Japanese white-flour noodle, has never approached the popularity or the ubiquity of ramen, or even of soba. It’s thick and dense; it can be gummy, rubbery; it does not seem especially healthy. In the past few years, a small flurry of house-made-udon shops have opened in New York, among them TsuruTonTan, a sprawling, noisy brasserie that also specializes in sushi, and Raku, a more discreet parlor with two outposts downtown. Much of what distinguishes Hanon, a new udon restaurant steps from the L and G trains in central Williamsburg, has to do with the noodles themselves, which are made thinner than usual, with sharper edges and a consistently springy, al-dente finish.Staff from Hanon’s other location, in Kamakura, Japan, have come…3 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Paraphernalia Dept.: Objets d’ArtIn the writer-director Lynn Shelton’s new movie, “Sword of Trust”—her eighth feature—Marc Maron, the charmingly prickly comedian, podcaster, and actor, plays Mel, a charmingly prickly pawnshop owner and would-be musician. Shelton’s method, in “Sword” and three other films, makes use of improvised dialogue, and Maron, an incisive listener and an audacious conversationalist, is a natural improviser. “It doesn’t have to be an amazing guitar for somebody to have a great relationship with it,” he tells a hopeful seller, after rattling off a respectful but withering assessment of the man’s vintage Silvertone. (Maron contributes original music to the film.) Mel’s pawnshop, in Birmingham, Alabama, is full of items whose monetary and sentimental value are in close competition. Last week, before the New York première of “Sword of Trust,” Maron and Shelton…4 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Onward and Upward with the Arts: The VoiceShortly after Jakub Józef Orliński, a young Polish countertenor, made his début at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, in a 2017 production of Cavalli’s “Erismena,” he was celebrating with several other singers when he got a phone call from one of the event’s organizers. An ensemble scheduled to appear the next day on a live broadcast of “Carrefour de Lodéon,” a French radio program, had dropped out. Would Orliński jump in and perform? Orliński, who was twenty-six at the time, was in high spirits, having played the role of Orimeno with goofy, irrepressible energy. He’d made his first entrance by leaping onto a chair, launching into a jaunty aria, and then—exhibiting a skill singular among opera singers—throwing himself into a sequence of break-dancing power moves. Orliński said into the phone, “Of course…28 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Profiles: First PersonOne day in early June, Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California, tapped the glass of the bakery case at a Blue Bottle coffee shop on a non-iconic block in Beverly Hills. No one seemed to know who she was—another polished professional woman, grabbing an afternoon coffee—which was fine by her. She had chosen the spot, presumably for the anonymity. A few minutes later, her body woman delivered her a cookie: caramel chocolate chip, covered in a light snowfall of flaky salt. As Harris broke off small pieces and popped them in her mouth, we talked about her early life, rummaging through the layers for identifying details. The child of immigrant academics who divorced when she was young—her mother, a cancer researcher, came from India, and her father, an economist,…46 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Fiction: She Said He SaidSushila was walking in the park when she saw Mateo and his male assistant sitting on a bench. As she approached them, she noticed that Mateo was dishevelled in his black suit; in fact, he was very drunk, which was unusual for him at that time of day, late afternoon. She greeted him, kissing him on both cheeks, and he asked if she would sleep with him. Why hadn’t they slept together? he went on. They could do it right now, at his place, if she had time. He had always found her sexy but had been too nervous to mention it.They had known each other for at least eighteen years, but he had never spoken to her in this way. She was surprised and tried to seem amused. She…9 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Books: Briefly NotedThe Impeachers, by Brenda Wineapple (Random House). In 1868, Andrew Johnson, an avowedly racist Southerner, became the first President to be impeached. This absorbing account focusses on his Republican critics, led by the Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Their main charge was Johnson’s attempt to “violate a law made by the Congress,” but his real transgressions, they argued, were his opposition to granting political rights to black people and his increasingly erratic conduct. Wineapple ponders impeachment’s legal, political, and constitutional aspects, and also its essential meaning. Then, as now, she writes, the possibility of impeachment “implies that we make mistakes, grave ones, in electing or appointing officials, and that these elected men and women might be not great but small.”Leaving the Witness, by Amber Scorah (Viking). Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness…2 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019The Current Cinema: Join InWhen a movie starts with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, what next? The first thing we saw in Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” (1952) was an X-ray of a man’s stomach, with a tumor clearly visible, and Lulu Wang’s new film, “The Farewell,” sets off with similar starkness. An aged woman undergoes a CT scan, and we learn that she has Stage IV lung cancer and three months to live. But here’s the difference. Kurosawa’s hero, a meek civil servant, took stock of his mortality and decided to waste not a drop of the time that remained. Wang’s elderly lady, by contrast, is a merry old soul, already skilled at being alive, and requiring no further encouragement. So nobody tells her that she’s going to die.She is known as Nai Nai (Zhao…8 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019The MailPAR FOR THE COURSENick Paumgarten superbly describes the cultlike underbelly of Augusta National—the prudish, humorless attitudes of its leaders and the self-satisfaction of its patrons (“Unlike Any Other,” June 24th). But, year after year, the Masters golf tournament has been a stage for human drama and remarkable achievements under pressure. In my view, the artifice, exclusivity, and privilege that exist behind the scenes do not spoil the captivating power of one of the greatest sporting events in the world.Don GreifNew York CityI am a golfer now in my seventh decade. Augusta National has always seemed to me an unattainable fantasy, the Mecca of the golfing universe. Reading Paumgarten’s chronicle of its excesses, I was troubled to realize that I have chosen to ignore its many defects, much as I have…3 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Comment: The Health-Care DefenseOne of the central questions of the 2020 Presidential campaign was posed last week before the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, to a lawyer for the Trump Administration, who didn’t even pretend to have an answer. A three-judge panel was hearing the appeal of a ruling by Reed O’Connor, a Texas district-court judge, that the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was unconstitutional in its entirety—an opinion that the Administration has endorsed. O’Connor had ordered that the government cease implementing or enforcing all aspects of the A.C.A., including its protections for people with preëxisting conditions, its ban on lifetime caps, its expansion of Medicaid and coverage for young adults on their parents’ plan, and its support for the treatment of addiction. The order could cost tens…5 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Pop-Up Dept.: Non-JunkThe chef Roy Choi posted up at the counter of Abby’s Diner in Los Angeles recently. Several times a week, the place morphs from a traditional greasy spoon—booths, tiled floor, B.L.T.s—to a greasy spoon that serves vegan renditions of such drive-through classics as the McDonald’s McRib.“I like to re-create a lot of stuff from fast food so people feel comfortable,” Jose Mejia said. He is a founder of the Vegan Hooligans, which began popping up last February. (The name is a nod to his love of punk rock and soccer.) He wore overalls and a brown beanie. “I wanted to create a brand that didn’t just capture the eyes of, like, vegans,” he added.Eleven years ago, Choi co-founded Kogi BBQ, a fleet of Korean-taco trucks that fuelled a food-truck renaissance…4 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Poem: These Are the PearlsIt’s “Besame Mucho” coming throughrevolving doors. It’s 2018, the futurefar from songs we danced toleft inside me. A waiter standsto take my order. O waiter,bring me fresh plums on a plate.He’d refuse to eat. Patiently,his caretaker urged, “We want youto be well; if you won’t eat, she’ll kill me.”He smiled, “Then we’ll have to go to your funeral.”He could do that—Southern charmerto the end.To find him open the kitchen cabinet:Coca-Cola, a bag of Cheetos,the salt inside the shaker he would fill;a half jar of Skippy peanut butterstill intact. I don’t want it.It’s more than I can fathom!—the whole of the kitchen. The futurefilled with “Besame Mucho” and blintzeshe stored in the freezer.Thaw little pancakes …Flicker flicker …I am speaking of his flashlights in the drawer.…1 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Poem: SentenceIt’s as if you’d woken in a locked cell and foundin your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentencein a language you don’t know.And you’d be sure this sentence was the key to yourlife. Also to this cell.And you’d spend years trying to decipher the sentence,until finally you’d understand it. But after a whileyou’d realize you got it wrong, and the sentence meantsomething else entirely. And so you’d have two sentences.Then three, and four, and ten, until you’d created a new language.And in that language you’d write the novel of your life.And once you’d reached old age you’d notice the door of the cellwas open. You’d go out into the world. You’d walk the length and breadth of it,until in the shade of a massive tree…1 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Books: Brevity, Soul, Wit“Almost all books of aphorisms, which have ever acquired a reputation, have retained it,” John Stuart Mill wrote in 1837, aphoristically—that is to say, with a neat if slightly dubious finality. (“How wofully the reverse is the case with systems of philosophy,” he added.) We prefer collections of aphorisms over big books of philosophy, Mill thought, not just because the contents are always short and usually funny but because the aphorism is, in its algebraic abbreviation, a micro-model of empirical inquiry. Mill noted that “to be unsystematic is of the essence of all truths which rest on specific experiment,” and that there is, in a good aphorism, “generally truth, or a bold approach to some truth.” So when La Rochefoucauld writes, “In the misfortune of even our best friends, there…11 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Goings On About Town: This WeekRoberto Burle Marx (1909-94) was a Brazilian polymath whose highest calling was designing landscapes, most famously the mosaic path that swirls along two miles of Copacabana Beach, in Rio de Janeiro. “Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx,” at the New York Botanical Garden, includes paintings, drawings, and textiles, but its fragrant centerpiece is an immersive tropical oasis (pictured), designed in homage to Burle Marx by his American protégé, Raymond Jungles. On view through Sept. 29.THE THEATREDragon Spring Phoenix RiseThe ShedCooked up by the director Chen Shi-Zheng and the “Kung Fu Panda” franchise screenwriters, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, this martial-arts musical concerns itself with a harebrained tale of competing Queens clans fighting over … it’s unclear what. The production certainly looks as if it cost a pretty…27 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Sewing Circle: Dissent by DoilyLast month, two days after Donald Trump tweeted that NASA should be focussing on “Mars (of which the Moon is a part),” Macy Weymar, a sophom*ore at McGill University, embroidered his words onto a linen napkin with blue thread. That afternoon, Macy’s mother, the textile artist Diana Weymar, was on a ladder at Lingua Franca, a boutique in downtown Manhattan, pinning hundreds of other handstitched Trump quotations to the wall for the first New York exhibition of the Tiny Pricks Project. She held up her fingers, which were bandaged from pinpricks. “It’s like I’m putting the finishing touches on the hem of a giant dress,” she said.Weymar, who is petite and scholarly, with blond hair and large brown eyes, founded the Tiny Pricks Project last year. Her first piece was…4 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Protégé Dept.: Body DoublesWhen the choreographer Troy Powell was a student at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s school, more than forty years ago, he was struck, he remembered recently, by “these men that looked like me, these men that danced!” The other night, when he again found himself moved by a young man who looked like him, he was less surprised: Powell had handpicked the boy for the resemblance.The occasion for the body double was Powell’s newest work, “Testimony,” choreographed for the Ailey School’s fiftieth-anniversary gala, at Lincoln Center. It tells Powell’s story in five parts, with five dancers of ascending age. He was at the school’s midtown studios, rehearsing his youngest doppelgänger, a twelve-year-old named Jayson. “You can still fight through adversity, and make it, if you just stay focussed,” Powell…3 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019American Chronicles: The DispossessedIn the spring of 2011, the brothers Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels were the talk of Carteret County, on the central coast of North Carolina. Some people said that the brothers were righteous; others thought that they had lost their minds. That March, Melvin and Licurtis stood in court and refused to leave the land that they had lived on all their lives, a portion of which had, without their knowledge or consent, been sold to developers years before. The brothers were among dozens of Reels family members who considered the land theirs, but Melvin and Licurtis had a particular stake in it. Melvin, who was sixty-four, with loose black curls combed into a ponytail, ran a club there and lived in an apartment above it. He’d established a career…34 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Annals of Medicine: New BloodIt matters that the first patients were identical twins. Nancy and Barbara Lowry were six years old, dark-eyed and dark-haired, with eyebrow-skimming bangs. Sometime in the spring of 1960, Nancy fell ill. Her blood counts began to fall; her pediatricians noted that she was anemic. A biopsy revealed that she had a condition called aplastic anemia, a form of bone-marrow failure.The marrow produces blood cells, which need regular replenishing, and Nancy’s was rapidly shutting down. The origins of this illness are often mysterious, but in its typical form the spaces where young blood cells are supposed to be formed gradually fill up with globules of white fat. Barbara, just as mysteriously, was completely healthy.The Lowrys lived in Tacoma, a leafy, rain-slicked city near Seattle. At Seattle’s University of Washington hospital,…36 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019Books: Painted LoveIn 1946, not long after she fell in love with Pablo Picasso, Françoise Gilot made a painting called “Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple.” Two flat, angular figures sit at a table. The woman placidly clasps her hands in front of her as the man—bald, blocky, with one dark, piercing eye shown in profile—thrusts the fruit into her mouth. Temptation, knowledge, punishment, exile: these are things, in Gilot’s version of Genesis, that come from man, even if it is woman who will be blamed. The same year, Gilot moved in with Picasso. A friend warned that she was headed for catastrophe. “I told her she was probably right, but I felt it was the kind of catastrophe I didn’t want to avoid,” Gilot recalls in her remarkable 1964 memoir,…17 min
The New Yorker|July 22, 2019The Art World: WizardThe most bizarre exhibition in town this summer bears on the prevalence, lately, of “curating” as an honorific for the organizing of practically anything by just about anyone. “Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us,” at the Swiss Institute, re-creates a show that the revolutionary, for good and ill, Swiss curator-as-auteur Harald Szeemann (1933-2005) mounted at his home, in Bern, in 1974. About twelve hundred objects, cunningly arrayed, document the life and work of Szeemann’s paternal grandfather, Étienne, who was a hairdresser with a peripatetic career in Europe. Most of the items—furniture, family photographs, a lethal-looking early permanent-wave apparatus, advertisem*nts, religious kitsch, wigs, tools, mannequin heads, letters, no end of tchotchkes—belong to the Getty Research Institute, in Los Angeles, where a Szeemann archive and his personal library occupy more than half a…7 min
