The New Yorker: Everything

Comma Queen: Syntactical Fission, or Splitting the Infinitive

Mary Norris — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 14:00:00 +0000

If I had a hammer, I’d split an infinitive, I’d split an infinitive All over this mag! I’d chisel out space between the word “to” and the verb, I’d hammer out a space to split The infinite infinitives All over this ma-a-a-ag, ma-a-a-ag, Ma-a-a-gazine.

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Genetically Engineered Fish and the Strangeness of American Salmon

Paul Greenberg — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 13:01:58 +0000

Sometime in the next few years, an entirely new fish will appear on American plates. After several decades of biotech research and a final upstream push past the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month, the AquaBounty AquAdvantage salmon, a genetically engineered species of fish, will go into commercial production. While modified plants like corn and soy abound in the American diet, this will mark the first time in history that an engineered animal has been approved for human consumption. The new fish’s genetic code is comprised of components from three fish: base DNA from an Atlantic salmon; a growth gene from a Pacific Chinook salmon; and a promoter, a kind of “on” switch for genes, from a knobby-headed eel-shaped creature called an ocean pout.

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The Romney Dreamers of the G.O.P.

Jeffrey Frank — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 05:00:57 +0000

When you consider what the nation will face eleven months from now—when it’s time to choose a new President, and there’s no way out—it’s easy to be drawn to improbable alternatives. For Republicans, one such notion is that Mitt Romney might become a candidate after all. The idea bubbles up even though Romney has said that he won’t do it and that he just doesn’t want to put himself through all that again.

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Clouds Underwater

The New Yorker — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 01:00:31 +0000

The cover of Joanna Newsom’s latest album, “Divers,” shows a hazy landscape that evokes, simultaneously, the bottom of the sea and the peak of a mountain. Craggy plants, with flowers in reds and whites, give way to dense clouds and a blue sky shining through. Like Newsom’s music, the image is disorienting, otherworldly, and enchanting in its mysteriousness. It is a photograph by the New York-based artist Kim Keever, who is known for crafting elaborate dioramas in an aquarium, then releasing pigments into the tank and taking pictures of the resulting underwater scenes. In October, Newsom told Vogue that when she first saw the image she had a fidgety feeling, as if from “drinking four cups of coffee.” “It’s like a storm that blew through,” she said. “It’s in the record now.” (Keever’s work is also featured in the music video for the album’s title song, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.)

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Haute Ticket: Jacqueline de Ribes at the Met

Judith Thurman — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 23:17:45 +0000

More than sixty years ago, the young Viscountess de Ribes, née Jacqueline Bonnin de La Bonninière de Beaumont, stood on the balcony of a friend’s Venetian palazzo. She was twenty-two, and only a few years out of her convent boarding school. The social life of a married woman was still a bit daunting. There was a cool formality to her new husband’s world, and she was intimidated by its sophistication. She was growing into her role as a châtelaine, but running a house wasn’t quite enough for her. So she had started to design her own clothes.

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Before Laquan McDonald, a Chicago Police Shooting with No Video

Alex Kotlowitz — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 22:15:19 +0000

There was something sadly familiar about the video released last week of a police officer in Chicago shooting a seventeen-year-old, Laquan McDonald, sixteen times. After the city’s lawyers viewed the video, earlier this year, they offered McDonald’s family five million dollars, before the family had even filed a lawsuit. In the past ten years, the city has paid five hundred and twenty-one million dollars in alleged police-misconduct cases, according to a study by the Better Government Association, a local non-profit watchdog group. For many, these settlements are the only acknowledgement that officers might have acted unprofessionally, or, worse yet, outside of the law. After the video emerged, last week, I spoke with one of the many families who have received settlements from the city. I met Dana Cross while researching a book on the city’s street violence. “They paid us off,” she told me. “I just want those police officers off the street. If they did it to my baby, they’ll do it again.”

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Stalking the Wild Madras Wearers of the Ivy League

W. David Marx — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 22:00:19 +0000

In May of 2008, the style blogger Michael Williams posted a few dozen scans of an obscure 1965 Japanese photo collection called “Take Ivy” to his Web site, “A Continuous Lean.” The images documented a golden age of Ivy League campus life—young American men strolling across the quad, eating hot dogs in dining halls, and studying for finals in libraries. Most importantly, the students dressed in the pinnacle of classic Ivy League style: madras cotton blazers, oxford-cloth button-down shirts, khaki Bermuda shorts, and patinaed penny loafers.

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COP21: A Potluck Dinner in Paris

John Cassidy — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 20:31:29 +0000

Now that the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference is under way in Paris, two main issues arise: Will an agreement to reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere be reached? And, if so, will it do any good? The answer to the first question is: almost certainly. The answer to the second question is: some, but not enough.

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After Kobe Bryant’s “Dear Basketball,” Other Celebrities’ Poetic Announcements

Tyler Gillespie — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 20:04:34 +0000

Kobe Bryant recently published a poem, “Dear Basketball,” to announce that he will be retiring following the 2015-2016 N.B.A. season, his twentieth in the league. Other high-profile people, inspired by the future Hall-of-Famer’s ode, have since begun to update their fans on their lives via various styles of verse.

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Posters from the War on AIDS

The New Yorker — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 19:50:52 +0000

The illness that came to be known as AIDS made its first appearance in the medical literature on June 5, 1981, in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a publication of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Five young men, all gay, had come down with a rare form of pneumonia. Two had died. Within thirteen years, AIDS became the leading cause of death among Americans between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four, surpassing suicide and homicide, cancer and heart disease. It took another decade, until 2004, for the epidemic to reach its global peak. That year, more than two million people died with the disease.

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Making Sense of Robert Dear

Eyal Press — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 19:27:34 +0000

A recluse, a drifter, a malcontent who lived in a trailer and once allegedly shot at a neighbor’s dog with a pellet gun, whose former wife reported that he’d locked her out of their home and then pushed her to the ground from a window when she tried to get in: these are among the few things we’ve heard so far about Robert Lewis Dear, Jr., the fifty-seven-year-old alleged gunman who opened fire at a Planned Parenthood health center in Colorado Springs on the day after Thanksgiving. The attack, which left three people dead and injured nine others, stunned many people in Colorado Springs, including shoppers in the commercial plaza adjoining the Planned Parenthood center where the shooting erupted. It came as less of a surprise to Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation, which has seen a surge of threats against the doctors and clinics in its network since the release, earlier this year, of a series of deceptively edited videos that falsely suggested Planned Parenthood sells fetal organs for profit.

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Coming of Age with Video Games

Simon Parkin — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 17:39:08 +0000

One of the most profound effects that a novel can have on the young mind is to reveal a harrowing truth: your life is not the axis on which the world spins. In the pages of a book, you meet people who, incredibly, do not think, act, or live like you, and who, in contrast to those around you in real life, are not there to meet your every need. A video game’s effect is quite the opposite: it offers a world built entirely around the whims of its player. Suddenly and irresistibly, you are able to choose what kind of car you’d like to drive, how to spend your money, what clothes to wear, and whose head you’d like to stomp upon. In video games, children are allowed an element of practical agency that is otherwise unknown within the usual sensible and stifling parameters of childhood.

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Pets Allowed

The New Yorker — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 16:00:20 +0000

Last year, Patricia Marx chronicled the proliferation of therapist-certified emotional-support animals in establishments that had previously enforced strict human-only policies. Now, Marc Philippe Eskenazi has followed up the investigation with the help of a stealthy film crew and some hairy, scaly, and feathered friends.

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Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, December 1st

Benjamin Schwartz — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 15:34:19 +0000

Buy New Yorker Cartoons»

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New York City Food Carts, Seventeen-Hundreds to Present Day

Julia Wertz — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 13:00:34 +0000

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Can an English Teacher Learn to Code?

Betsy Morais — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 23:53:49 +0000

In September, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a ten-year deadline to offer computer science to every New York City public-school student at every grade level. One of the major obstacles to achieving “Computer Science for All,” as the undertaking is called, is the fact that most teachers in the school system don’t have computer-science backgrounds. “We’re not training every teacher,” Michael Preston, who runs the city’s Foundation for Computer Science Education, told me a few weeks later. The plan sets aside eighty million dollars; in addition to public money, the city is raising private funds for some five thousand teachers to go through computer-science programs. “Kids make decisions about who they’re going to be in the future by middle school,” Preston said. “We’re going to make sure they get the foundations.”

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Standing Up for Bernie Sanders

Ian F. Blair — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 22:08:43 +0000

On a recent fall evening, a crowd of about two hundred filed into the Bell House, a nineteen-twenties former warehouse with a rough brick exterior, in Gowanus, Brooklyn, to raise money for Bernie Sanders’s Presidential campaign, and to laugh. The concert and special-events venue sits on a wide block of stumpy converted spaces, across from an Apple support store. Inside, the atmosphere was warm, vibrant.

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Japan’s Cute Army

Matt Alt — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 21:03:04 +0000

Surrounded on all sides by ocean, postwar Japan has long been able to rely upon the United States military for strategic protection. But tense territorial disputes with neighboring countries, the capture and beheading of two Japanese journalists by ISIS in February, and the horror of the terror attacks in Paris have all served to remind the Japanese of the limits of physical isolation and dependence upon others. This, in turn, has fed an ongoing debate over the mission of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. Is their role truly one of self-defense, pure and simple? Or does the Japanese constitution allow for preëmptive strikes outside of domestic borders, in the manner of a traditional military? The question won’t be settled anytime soon. But it’s fascinating to watch how Japan’s armed forces have endeared themselves to the Japanese public. The militaries of many nations harness mass media and pop culture for promotional purposes: the United States coöperates with Hollywood; Russia ostentatiously unveils a three-tiered “war center” seemingly modelled on a Bond villain’s lair. Japan is no different. But what makes their military unusual is that the image being projected isn’t one of might or machismo but of cuteness.

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“Carol” Up Close

Richard Brody — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 20:30:19 +0000

It makes a big difference where you sit. I first saw Todd Haynes’s “Carol” from the back of a big hall (at its New York Film Festival première) and was struck by the expressive power of its colors, the sensual flair of its visual compositions. But the images didn’t so much arouse emotions as signify them. The romantic drama of two women who meet in New York in 1952—Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), a somewhat distracted, inexperienced nineteen-year-old who has never had a lesbian relationship, and Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), a wealthy, married suburbanite who has lesbian affairs—appeared, from afar, to be more of an idea and even an ideal than an experience.

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My New Claire Danes Tribute Twitter Account

Seth Reiss — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 20:00:52 +0000

Hello. I am an adult person. I can reproduce. I am capable of reason. I have free will. And last month I created a Twitter account devoted to tweeting all of the latest Claire Danes news. I enjoy Claire Danes’s acting as well as her off-screen persona, likely to an unhealthy extent. That is why I will now spend my time finding and tweeting links to news stories, photos, and anecdotes pertaining to Claire Danes.

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Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio Punish Each Other for the Best Things They’ve Done

Ryan Lizza — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 19:31:49 +0000

On June 2, 2015, Congress did something that it rarely does: it passed a law. The U.S.A. Freedom Act, which had passed the House in May, cleared the Senate, and President Obama signed it the same day. Though few considered it perfect, the bill was a rare example of how Congress should work. In 2013, Edward Snowden had revealed that the N.S.A. was collecting the phone records of nearly all Americans and assembling the information into a massive database, in which the calling patterns of suspected terrorists could theoretically be uncovered. Civil libertarians—and at least one federal court—argued that the program was illegal and probably unconstitutional. Public concerns about the program forced Obama to modify the way it was run and triggered hearings in Congress, which drafted a reform bill.

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Tyson Fury: The Heavyweight Champion We’ve Been Waiting For

Kelefa Sanneh — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 19:13:02 +0000

A few weeks ago, The Mail on Sunday published an article beneath a headline that asked a seemingly simple question: Is Tyson Fury fit to fight Wladimir Klitschko for the world heavyweight title? Variations of this question are frequently posed in the weeks that precede big boxing matches. In the case of Klitschko, who was the generally recognized heavyweight champion of the world, and Fury, who fought him in Düsseldorf, Germany, on Saturday night, the competitiveness question seemed easy to answer. Klitschko, from Ukraine, had won his previous twenty-two fights, a streak that stretched over a decade; against Fury, an Englishman, he was a five-to-one favorite. But while Fury was neither a great athlete nor a great technician, he is big—six feet nine, which is three inches taller than Klitschko, with longer arms—and he was undefeated, with a record that included a few respectable wins. In that sense, Fury seemed fit, or fit enough.

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Daily Cartoon: Monday, November 30th

Benjamin Schwartz — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 15:30:52 +0000

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Fiorina: I Will Not Be Bullied Into Telling Truth

Andy Borowitz — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 14:48:12 +0000

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Calling criticism of her misrepresentations about Planned Parenthood “typical left-wing tactics,” the Presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said, on Sunday, “I will not be bullied into telling the truth.”

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Comment from the December 7, 2015, Issue

The New Yorker — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 11:58:06 +0000

In “Unsafe Climates,” Elizabeth Kolbert writes about this week’s summit, where world leaders must confront the destabilizing consequences of global warming.

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This Week in Fiction: Martin Amis on Europe’s Crises

Deborah Treisman — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 05:01:13 +0000

Much of “Oktober,” your story in this week’s issue, is based on your own experiences during a recent book tour in Europe. What made you decide to turn those into a story, rather than an essay or a diary piece? And, having done so, why use so much that is factual from your own life?

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Cover Story: Moving Images

Chris Ware — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 05:00:30 +0000

(This video is best enjoyed in full-screen mode.)

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Cartoons from the December 7, 2015, Issue

The New Yorker — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 05:00:14 +0000

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The Refugee Dilemma

Rachel Aviv — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

Nelson Kargbo was eleven years old when rebel soldiers attacked his village, Kamalo, in northern Sierra Leone. He was playing soccer on a dirt field at the edge of the village. When he saw houses on fire, he and his best friend, Foday, ran toward the jungle, following Foday’s mother and dozens of other people. They walked until late at night, when they came across a cluster of abandoned mud houses. Foday’s mother, who used to cook for the boys after their soccer games, told them to sleep under a grove of mango trees. “Tomorrow, we’ll keep walking,” she said. “We’ll make it to the city.”

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American Untouchable

Emily Nussbaum — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

Racial diversity on television is in a state of rapid acceleration. In 2012, when “Scandal” débuted, starring Kerry Washington as a Capitol Hill fixer, it was the first network drama to feature a black female lead in thirty-eight years—a shameful milestone. The same fall, “The Mindy Project,” on Fox, made a brown girl the madcap heroine of a sitcom, not her best friend. Just three years later, “Scandal” faces off with “Empire”; “Black-ish” and “Fresh Off the Boat” have helped rebrand ABC as “the diversity network”; Aziz Ansari’s “Master of None” struts on Netflix; the Latina-centric “Jane the Virgin” lights up the CW; and Priyanka Chopra plays the lead on “Quantico.” There has been an especially remarkable migration of black actresses from movies to TV, among them Taraji P. Henson, Viola Davis, Angela Bassett, Gabourey Sidibe, Lorraine Toussaint, and Gabrielle Union. There is also a deluge of new talent on shows like Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black,” one of several series that have opened the floodgates for performers who were long denied rich, complex central roles.

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Oktober

Martin Amis — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

I sat drinking black tea in the foyer of the hotel. (This was in Munich.) A lady wearing a lustrous purple trouser suit was seated at the keys of the baby grand in the far corner, her rendition of “Hungarian Rhapsody” (with many adornments and curlicues) for now unable to drown out the inarticulate howling and baying from the bar beyond the lifts. It was the time of Oktoberfest, and the city was playing host to six million visitors, thereby quintupling its population—visitors from all over Bavaria, and from all over Germany, and from all over the world. Other visitors, a far smaller contingent, were also expected, visitors who hoped to stay, and to stay indefinitely; they were coming from what was once known as the Fertile Crescent.

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Toil and Trouble

Anthony Lane — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

A famous essay of 1933, by the critic L. C. Knights, bears a provoking title: “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” Within the essay, Knights never bothers to answer the question, because his purpose is to mock it. In his eyes, it stands for all the dumb and fruitless inquiries that are set in train by Shakespearean scholars who see the plays as, in essence, studies of character—a hopelessly dry and reductive view, for Knights, who reads each play as one long dramatic poem, welling over with tides of symbolic language. He’s right, to a degree, but here’s the thing: the question is a good one. After all, “Macbeth” has much to say about patrilineage, and the handing down of power; there’s no point in grabbing a crown, however brutally, if it gets plucked away within a generation. We know that Lady Macbeth had at least one child (“I have given suck,” she says), so where is it now?

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The Mail

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

Rousey’s Strength

The other night, I sat alone in my dorm room streaming the Ultimate Fighting Championship and watched Holly Holm best Ronda Rousey, which Kelefa Sanneh wrote about for the Web site (“Ronda Rousey, Routed”). Unlike most eighteen-year-old girls, I have been in martial arts since the age of four. After nearly eleven years of Tae Kwon Do, five years of kickboxing, and the occasional jujitsu and Muay Thai lesson, I knew who Rousey was long before Beyoncé ever sampled her at a concert. I was devastated when I saw her out cold on the floor. Despite her trash talking, despite the tiff at the weigh-in, despite her not having touched Holm’s gloves, despite the fact that my fighting style is more similar to Holm’s, I was crushed. Holm, a world boxing champ many times over, seems to be great, wholesome, and humble; she exudes sportsmanship and on paper is an ideal athletic role model. But I did not want her to win. Why? She didn’t make the breakthroughs that Rousey had. I wanted Rousey to keep going, to keep proving why female athletes deserve the spotlight. I was never celebrated for achieving the same athletic feats as my male counterparts in school. I felt I couldn’t be as feminine as I wanted to be because people knew I could knock them out. Now Rousey is a sex symbol, and so much more. I was finally able to sleep, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, because although Rousey won’t retire undefeated, no one will be able to take back all that she has done for me and others who relate.

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Teach Yourself Italian

Jhumpa Lahiri — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

Exile

My relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation.

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The Shadow

Alex Ross — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

The most popular Orson Welles video on YouTube, edging out the trailer for “Citizen Kane” and “The War of the Worlds” broadcast of 1938, is called “Orson Welles Drunk Outtake.” It shows him slurring his way through one of those ads in which he intoned, “Paul Masson will sell no wine before its time.” Whether he was drunk, experiencing the effects of medication (he suffered from diabetes and other ailments), or simply very tired is immaterial. What’s striking about the video is its popularity. This is largely how today’s culture has chosen to remember Welles: as a pompous wreck, a man who peaked early and then devolved into hackwork and bloated fiascos.

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Bronx Dreams

Ian Frazier — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

Alizah Olivo is eight years old and lives in the South Bronx. Her father, Nelson, works as the maintenance supervisor at a homeless shelter, and her mother, Carmen, registers admittances in an emergency room. Alizah has three brothers and one sister; she is the second youngest. The family’s apartment is on the fourth floor of a recently constructed apartment building on Washington Avenue, in the Morrisania section. On the building’s first and basement levels is the DreamYard Project, the largest arts organization in the Bronx.

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How to Live an Alternative-Comedy Life Style

Mike O’Brien — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

At some point, you may have thought, I wish I was funnier. But not in a lame, mainstream Hollywood way. Not funny like the guys in sitcoms who make sarcastic quips. I wish I was weird-funny. I wish people told stories about me. Did you hear about the hilarious thing that Mike did yesterday? He rode a cow through Central Park. He went to a Trump rally as a joke. He got “NSync” tattooed on his back.

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On Ice

Lizzie Widdicombe — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

Uzo Aduba stepped out onto the ice. It was dusk in Prospect Park. The skating rink at the LeFrak Center was hosting an event called Monster Skate. Witches and bumblebees orbited to “The Addams Family” theme song. Aduba, who wore black (blazer, Valentino shades), took a few warmup strokes, her center of gravity low over rental skates. Then she pivoted and, in a fluid motion, spun around and began skating backward. “It’s like flying!” she said. She offered pointers to a wobbler: “You have to let go of the fear. Stand in your body. Own it. If you think you’re going to fall, you will.”

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Visitation of the Dove

Clive James — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

To be supplied as if life fits a planWhere needs are catered to. One need is not:I do not wish to leave yet. If I canI will stay onAnd see another autumn, having gotThis far with all my strength not yet quite gone.

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The Scream

Rebecca Mead — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

In the past two decades, Marlis Petersen, the German soprano, has starred in ten different productions of “Lulu,” Alban Berg’s dark, atonal opera about a young woman who, having been despoiled—raised on the streets, she is taken as a much older man’s mistress at the age of twelve—despoils back, ravaging husbands and lovers before meeting a gruesome end. After more than ninety performances in the role, Petersen is retiring it: her current Lulu, in William Kentridge’s acclaimed production at the Met, will be her last. “It matures,” she said backstage the other evening. “In the beginning, you start like a virgin in the approach to this role. Then, after you have done it two or three times, you suddenly get a revelation: maybe she does this because of this. It is never the same. It always stays new. I always come like a white canvas, and the directors, they write stories on me.”

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Briefly Noted

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

The Only Street in Paris, by Elaine Sciolino (Norton). After recent events, it’s easy to feel that the “real” Paris lies beyond the streets that foreigners love. Yet, as a genre, the American-in-Paris memoir has proved hardy in weathering the vicissitudes of history, as this new entry demonstrates. Sciolino, a former Times Paris bureau chief, focusses on the lively Rue des Martyrs, on the Right Bank. The narrative takes the form of a ramble through shops, courtyards, cabarets, and time, revealing a street somewhat unique but also representative, in the polite but exacting attitudes and customs of its inhabitants. Sciolino’s sharply observed account serves as a testament to the persistence of old Paris—the city of light, of literature, of life itself.

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Money to Burn

James Surowiecki — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

These are tough times for the coal industry. Coal-burning plants generate less than forty per cent of the electricity in the U.S., down from more than half just a few years ago. At least twenty-six coal companies have gone bankrupt since 2008. The Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan requires power companies to cut carbon emissions, which almost certainly means using less coal. And if this week’s climate-change summit in Paris succeeds in establishing firm goals for cutting emissions coal will undoubtedly be the biggest loser. So it’s no surprise that congressional Republicans, who cast a symbolic vote last week to scuttle the Clean Power Plan, complain of a “war on coal.” But if there really is a war the U.S. government doesn’t seem to know what side it’s on.

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Bacteria on the Brain

Emily Eakin — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

As the chairman of the neurosurgery department at the University of California at Davis, Paul Muizelaar saw patients on Wednesdays, at a clinic housed in a former cannery in East Sacramento. Among the people waiting to see him on the afternoon of November 10, 2010, was Terri Bradley, a fifty-six-year-old woman on whom he had operated the previous May, to remove a malignant brain tumor the size of a lime. Sitting in his office, Muizelaar reviewed Bradley’s file. He read a letter from her oncologist, asserting that Bradley was doing well: a brain scan had found no evidence of the tumor. “I think, This sounds great,” Muizelaar, a sixty-eight-year-old Dutchman, recalled. “So I go to her exam room with a big smile on my face, and there she is with her daughter, crying, not able to speak.”

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Resettled

Ian Parker — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

In the office of a refugee-resettlement nonprofit in New Haven, Connecticut, last week, a volunteer showed a colleague her wedding photographs, on a laptop. A Syrian man, in his early forties, wearing a leather jacket and a mustache, joined them; the volunteer laughed, and switched to Arabic. The man, who used to own a takeout grilled-meat shop in a now ruined and emptied neighborhood of Homs, smiled at a photograph of Central Park in driving rain.

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The Planned Parenthood Shooting and the Republican Candidates’ Responses

Amy Davidson — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 00:41:09 +0000

There are so many mass shootings in this country—in a school or a church, a movie theatre or a mall—and so little is expected of American politicians in regard to them that, in the two days since Robert Dear began firing his gun at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, the Republican Presidential contenders have largely been able to hide from the tragedy. At midday on Friday, Dear initiated a gun battle that lasted five hours and took the lives of three people, including a police officer, and wounded nine others. Dear’s motives, and his mental state, are not yet fully known. But, of all the places he could have walked into, he chose a Planned Parenthood clinic, and, of all the fragments of deranged rhetoric he could have repeated, he chose, according to the Times and other press reports, to say something about “no more baby parts.” This is a reference to the false charge that Planned Parenthood has illegally trafficked in the sale of fetal organs—and that is the mildest way of framing the allegations that anyone listening to a Republican debate or rally would likely have heard. The loudness of the slurs against the organization is in telling contrast to the cautious silence that descended when it became a target of gun violence.

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Painting the Gentrification of Prospect Heights

Andy Friedman — Sun, 29 Nov 2015 15:00:40 +0000

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Mississippi History

Richard Ford — Sun, 29 Nov 2015 14:01:39 +0000

Portraits always make me feel agitated, which I suppose is part of the point of them. When I gaze at a human being or a face that’s become the subject of a photograph, my first impulse is to greet the image the way I greet my own image in the mirror, or my Uncle Harry’s, standing beside me in his wedding suit—to greet them gratefully, as if someone recognizable were there. This impulse, however, is simultaneously (or nearly) made to share space in my brain with the learned impulse to take the image in as a made thing, an assemblage of visual, technical, aesthetic, and intentional formalities and effects that I can savor and respond to impersonally or abstractly—a response, admittedly often pleasurable, but at the root of which Uncle Harry and I are only two more “elements.”

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Unsafe Climates

Elizabeth Kolbert — Sun, 29 Nov 2015 04:00:00 +0000

In Syria, the rainy season begins in November and ends in April. Only a third of the country’s farms have irrigation systems; the rest depend on what the season supplies them with, which, even in good years, isn’t all that much. The northeasternmost province of Al Hasakah, where much of Syria’s wheat is grown, receives an average of about eleven inches of rain a year, which is what New York is likely to get between Labor Day and Thanksgiving.

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Possible Titles for My Memoir About Being a Hapless Twentysomething

Dana Schwartz — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 17:00:47 +0000

“The Iced-Coffee Diaries”

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Thirty Seasons of “The Real World”

Amanda Ann Klein — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 15:00:15 +0000

Much has been written about the landmark MTV reality series, “The Real World,” since its première, in 1992. The praise and critique often focus on what appears to be the show’s primary contribution to the world: the popularization of first-person confessional reality TV and the now-established millennial culture of self-discovery and self-disclosure. Whether you see this development as good or bad is very much tied to when you were born. Either way, with thirty seasons under its belt (and Season Thirty-One currently filming in Las Vegas), “The Real World” remains important as perhaps the longest-running human experiment captured by television cameras.

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